So, now that it’s over and the recipient has received all their
things, I can talk about the most recent yarn/knitting/crafting swap I
got myself into on Ravelry.
There’s a group called the Odd Duck Swaps of Ravelry,
and they organize thematic swaps every single month of the year. The
way it works is you generally have about a month to sign up, two months
to actually craft/shop/mail the swap package, and then you post a thank
you when you’ve received your package and the swap is completed. After
hearing about how much fun people were having doing this, I decided to
scope out the group. On my first visit there, I found out they were just
starting sign-ups for a video game swap.
Now, (without getting
into the whole ri-fuckin-diculous gamergate situation) I’m not the sort
of person who has ever considered myself a “gamer”. I mean, I usually
(but not always) enjoy games when I play them, but I didn’t grow up with
video games and I don’t keep up with the latest releases and I don’t
have a steam account or any of that. It’s just that it so happens that
my first “real” fandom, and the fandom that just won’t quit and I never
want to, is for a series of video games. So I’m basically SUPER into one
video game and have played a few more and have a general knowledge of
even more than that. But still, I thought the swap would be fun and I
felt like I was comfortable enough with video games to be able to
participate. So I signed up. And it was fun. And I will do more of them
in the future, because it turns out I really like making things for
someone else and the excitement of seeing their virtual excitement over
receiving the items I crafted them.
This post is going to be the
first of a two-parter on two of the new(ish) undertakings I began with
this swap package. I included more than these things (I knitted this Zelda Triforce Scarf
that was easy enough to make, but still deserves mention, for one
thing), but these are the two things that really stretched into the
crafting me of the future, if you will (and I will . . . sorry, that’s a
reflexive inside joke that zero of you reading this will understand.)
Without further ado . . . yarn dyeing!
My
recipient mentioned that their favourite game was Baten Kaitos, which
is a Dreamcast (I think) game that I had never heard of, but my far more
knowledgeable gamer husband and his college roommate had spent time
playing. Because this game is old and I think it has a pretty small
fanbase, there isn’t any merchandise out there for it AT ALL. This is
okay, since my recipient also mentioned that they like Zelda and
Skylanders and all sorts of things that have way more popularity than
Baten Kaitos, but as a person who’s only into video games that have
next-to-no crafting fanbase (as in, there aren’t indie dyed yarns or
fabrics or patterns or any of that) I sort of knew how excited the
recipient would be if something from a fandom you don’t expect to see
anything from showed up in the package. So, since I’m newly immersed in a
commitment to yarn dyeing, I decided to make my first real yarn dyeing
adventure something inspired by my recipient’s favourite charater in
Baten Kaitos, Kalas.
So,
going off the photos I could find online, it seems like the character
wears a light blue and darker blue armour set offset with brown leather
strappings, so I decided that my yarn was going to be the dark blue
transitioning into brighter blue and then the leathery brown. The bare
yarn I selected to dye was a fingering weight 75% superwash wool, 25%
nylon yarn. I had three 50g skeins, but this was my first time dyeing
and I didn’t want to screw up three skeins of yarn in the event that
everything went horribly wrong, so I only dyed one of them. I knew this
would mean that I was giving the recipient barely enough yarn to do
anything with and really it would be better if I could dye two skeins at
once and at least give 100g, but I was really afraid of messing it up.
Turns out I had no need, because this yarn is one of the best I’ve made
to date. That could be because I’m a sucker for the blue/brown
variegation, but all reports from those who’ve seen it in person are
that it’s pretty badass.
I dyed the whole thing with Wilton’s
Icing Gels using a plain stainless steel kitchen pot. Minimal mess, no
harsh chemicals, beautiful colour. I highly recommend this method for
anyone who might be thinking about dyeing some yarn, but doesn’t have a
large kitchen or space for extra equipment or is even just a little
nervous about the harsh chemicals in a working kitchen like I was. I’ve
since dyed 20 more skeins of yarn in various colourways using this
methodology, and the only thing I haven’t been able to get right so far
is grey. Not a bad track record, and I hope you’ll all follow along with
me on my yarn dyeing journey as I grow into this and figure it out and
post all the pictures of my progress here for you to see. If you follow me on Instagram,
you'll probably get a quicker peek at what I'm working on, but I'll
make sure that everything eventually gets posted here as well!
To
start . . . here’s a few photos of the special edition Baten Kaitos –
Kalas yarn I did for this swap. Not bad for a first start, if I may say
so myself!
Stay tuned for part 2 of the swap, where I give you a detailed tutorial on how I made a project bag!
Hi again readers.
I was doing so well on keeping on top of
updating you and then I sort of fell off the wagon again. Maybe third
(fortieth???) time’s the charm? We shall see.
Today’s post
is all about some confessions. Namely . . . I have too much yarn, but
tangentially, I have too much stuff overall. It has come to my attention
that if all goes according to plan, I will need to move from my current
not-all-that-large 2 bedroom flat into a likely even smaller 2-bedroom
(I hope) flat within the next year. Since my current flat, I have come
to realise, is at (maybe slightly beyond, depending on your definition
system) capacity, this means that I absolutely need to have a “no net
gain” of possessions, and ideally will have a net loss of possessions
before May-June of next year. In an attempt to get organised for this
thing, (prompted by the fact that I bought 4 skeins of yarn and then had
to basically cram them in the drawers to get them stashed), and because
I’d been thinking about my stash recently and how near it was to
capacity, and because it’s been bothering me that all my yarn didn’t
have accurate weights/lengths and photos catalogued on Ravelry, I took
the better part of a day about a month ago and went through my stash.
All of it. The bitter truth. And I had SO help me so he could see the
actual impact of the amount of yarn I owned and could stop being a
terrible enabler at the LYS.
Now, I realise that compared to many,
I have next to no stash at all. However, this isn’t about a contest or a
comparison. It’s about me feeling like I have acquired at too great a
rate and needed to put things into perspective. I remember the
early(ish) days of Knitmore Girls Podcast when Jasmin and her friend Tika made an agreement they called “The Social Pressure Experiment”.
It was basically about re-evaluating their stash purchasing and
becoming smarter consumers. Really thinking about what you were buying
and knowing that you had to give up the equivalent amount of that thing
puts your purchasing habits into perspective, and I loved listening to
how Jasmin’s purchasing philosophy evolved during the 8ish months of the
challenge and how they became sort of permanently ingrained afterward.
I’ve recently been trying to apply that philosophy to everything in my
life . . . do not consume a thing unless you absolutely NEED to have it.
If you do consume it, please identify an equivalent thing that can get
re-homed. It’s going well so far, but it’s only been a month.
On to the yarn stash. And accountability. This will get long.
Because
I don’t have a big enough room and because I don’t have a good place to
take a photo of things even if I did have a big enough room, I don’t
have one photo of all the yarn together. Instead I have photos of each
grouping of yarn I split things into. Doing it this way also REALLY
helped me identify problem areas in my stash, which was very helpful.
Plus . . . now everything is in Ravelry and is searchable and sortable
and I can make plans about knitting. I already have my knitting booked
until at least mid-December, I’m pretty sure. I also identified some
things that I listed for destash
(some of which, if actually requested, will be pretty hard for me to
part with because I’m sentimentally attached to them). It’s likely no
one will want most of them, as it’s a lot of acrylic, but I have plans
to either use it or donate it if I get to its position in the new
chronological knitting plan and no one has claimed it yet.
We started with all my fingering weight yarn.
I didn’t expect there to be as much of it as there was, because I don’t
knit socks or shawls or many of the things that require fingering
weight yarn, but gosh was I wrong. Admittedly, much of it is yarn that I
acquired from Knit Picks during their annual sale when I got the
brilliant idea to use Palette and the Imagination Yarn to make all the Song of Ice and Fire things on Etsy.
I still think that was a good idea, although no one has actually
purchased one yet, so perhaps I’m being more than a bit naïve. After
weighing out the partial skeins and sorting everything, I ended up
having ~20,551 yards (18,791 meters) among the 74 skeins of fingering
weight yarn in my stash. It surprised me, too.
Here it all is!
Next was all my sport weight yarn.
Only 12 different kinds of yarn this kind, so this is a bit of a “stash
deficiency” as it were. If I really do need to knit something in a
sport weight and I cannot make one of these 12 yarns work, I do have
permission to acquire what I need. In fact, I already did that to get
another skein of Knit Picks Brava to make some hats. It’s not in my
stash yet, but SO made it an allowable purchase because he is benefitting from it
I will be knitting it right away in a project that’s on a deadline. In
total, this ends up being ~ 5205 yards (4760 meters) of yarn among the
20 skeins of sport weight yarn in my stash. (this number is off from the
actual stash management day numbers because I’m currently knitting with
some of the sport weight so I’m at 2 skeins less than I was then).
Manageable and not too shabby, since really this is just 12 different
kinds of yarn and at least 5 of the skeins should be out of my stash by
the end of the year. Still shouldn’t acquire unless needed, but far less
dire than some.
Here’s the sport weight.
We move on to DK weight,
which is definitely the yarn I have the least of. I don’t know if it’s
that DK weight yarn is just rare or if I just happen to never knit with
it or never be drawn to it or some combination of all those things, but
if a major project came up that needed DK weight yarn, I’m not sure I’d
be able to swing it without a purchase. Which is good. That’s where I
want to be, mostly. Not that I’m against having a stash, I just like the
idea that most of the yarn in my stash is dedicated to a project and
has a clear, foreseeable future. I only have 6 “projects” worth of DK
weight, and much of that is remnants from other projects and/or is
designated for destash. It ends up being ~2350 yards (2148 meters) in 13
skeins (6 of which are designated for destash). This is manageable and
somewhat realistic, although if for some reason I start making more
projects that call for DK weight, I’ll probably need to think about
bulking up this part of the stash. For now, I’ll just keep doing what
I’m doing and if one comes up, I’ll figure that out.
Here’s the DK weight. It and the sport weight are sharing a drawer right now.
Aaaannnnd now we come to the “problem area” also known as my worsted weight yarn stash.
Specifically the acrylic bits of my worsted weight yarn stash, but
really all of it is problematic. I actually split it into acrylic vs
non-acrylic just to make it more manageable. Also, because in most cases
involving my stash the distinction between worsted and Aran weight is
thin at best, I have combined “worsted” and “aran” into one category.
Truly some of what is labeled aran in Ravelry is actually aran weight,
but most of it can all be classified the same, imo. So, I think it’s no
secret that I like knitting sweaters, which generally means that I buy
sweater quantities of worsted weight yarn. In the past, it meant I
bought sweater quantities of worsted weight acrylic yarn because I still
hadn’t figured out that acrylic sweaters mostly just make you sweat a
lot. And also because I got a lot of the worsted weight acrylic I have
for free when I was doing some charity knitting and people foisted off
their acrylic yarn on me. To be fair, I also rather like a lot of the
worsted weight acrylic I have. I’m not trashing on it in the least, I
just know better than to think of it as the default anymore.
First . . . non-acrylic 10-ply (worsted or Aran weight).
I have ~13, 153 yards (12,027 meters) in my stash, spread among 59
skeins of 30 different yarns. Which isn’t all that bad, actually, when I
compare it with the fingering weight. At least I *knew* I had a lot of
worsted weight yarn. Much of it is remnant WoTA from Fourth Doctor
scarves, really.
Then we move to . . . acrylic 10-ply (worsted or Aran weight).
The numbers are less exact here than they are elsewhere because I have
lost ball bands or things are committed in projects that will be frogged
and reknit and I haven’t figured all the yardage yet, but it’s
close(ish). It ends up being ~1902 yards (1739 meters) among 19 skeins
of 14 different yarns. I mean, in the grand scheme of my yarn stash
that’s not a ton, but it’s a ton considering it’s a lot of sweaters or
large projects worth of acrylic. I’ll use it for things, but it’s
something I need to think about. I mean, I haven’t purchased acrylic
yarn (save the purchasing of Knit Picks Brava for specific projects or
the yarn for my WTNV bag) since June of 2013, so I feel reformed. I also
feel weirdly compelled to finish making the sweaters I got this acrylic
for. Reality is, some of it will probably end up as hats or bags or
some other accessory. I’m not really purchasing this anymore, but I
still feel guilty about having it in the first place for some reason.
It’s because I use it in inappropriate ways and the reason I still have
all of this is because (as previously alluded to on this blog) I try to
make garments with acrylic yarn and then they don’t work out and I’m
unhappy and frog them. No. More. Acrylic. Sweaters. Not for moral
reasons, just because I’ve come to realise they are almost always a bad
idea.
In
total, all my worsted weight yarn adds up to 15,055 yards (13,766
meters) among 72 skeins of 44 different yarns. Because worsted skeins
take up more space than fingering weight skeins, this has become A
PROBLEM and will subsequently stop.
Finally . . . bulky and superbulky.
It honestly amazed me that I had *any* of this yarn in my stash, as I
never use it, but then I remembered I made some bad decisions at a
Michael’s sale a few times. It turns out, though, that I actually have
identified uses for much of this, despite it all being in destash. Maybe
someday I’ll get to it. This is another yarn family that I need to just
buy on an as-needed basis. The odds of me needing some around in case
something comes up are so very low, at this point. I’ll use, sell, or
donate what I have and only purchase if I absolutely see a need. Right
now I have ~1449 yards (1325 meters) in 19 skeins of 6 different yarns,
most of them in destash.
In total,
I end up with ~53477 yards (48899 meters) in 202 skeins of 101
different kinds of yarn in my stash. Again, that might not sound like
terribly a lot to you, but I’m currently finishing off my most
productive knitting year by far (which included THREE Fourth Doctor
scarves) and it’s looking like I’m going to hit a knitting total of
around 15,500 yards (14, 242 meters) so even if I do manage to sustain
this mad knitting pace (which I likely will not), it would take me 3.5
years to knit through all this stash. That’s a lot, and I need to scale
back. The great yarn un-purchasing of 2014 starts . . . now. (well . . .
actually, it started on August 30, 2014, but I’m telling all of you
now. Keep me accountable.
Happy smart stashing!
