WIP(again): High Tea Cuffs

As anticipated, even after blocking the High Tea Cuffs by Andrea Jurgrau that I recently finished are FAR too small, even for my delicate little wrists, which means they 100% will not fit an adult human being, so I am re-knitting them.

I'm still using the Knit Picks Imagination Hand Painted yarn in the Ruby Slippers colourway and still using the 3.25mm DPNs, I just decided to cast on more stitches. The pattern repeat is 18 stitches and the last time I'd cast on 36. This time, I decided to cast on 54 stitches, although I worry this will make them too big this time around. My swap partner has gotten back to me with their wrist size (which is bigger than mine, but not a LOT bigger than mine), so I 'm going to just knit one of these (they go fast) and see how big it ends up. If it's more than 3cm too big for me then I'm either going to have to scrap the idea of making the matching cuffs and scarf set or I'm going to have to hope that if I knit this on a 2.75mm needle, I can just make up the difference in row gauge by adding rows to the ribbing and that it will still work out okay.

The cuff on the left is the original one I knit with 2 pattern repeats and the one on the right is the new one, just for comparison.

I'm hoping to have these done by the end of the weekend, so here's hoping you'll get a good FO post by next week. Unless it's all too large and has to be re-done yet again and then I finally decide to scrap the project.

Stash Confessional: Birthday money!

Hi again. I’ve got another stash confessional, though a smaller one this time. My wonderful mother, being the amazing, thoughtful, kind, caring person she is, bought me the perfect birthday gift of a gift card to my LYS with the instructions that I was to “Use this to make yourself something beautiful”. So, I took that as a license to buy some really nice yarn that I’ve always wanted and never purchased for myself.

I initially brought it in while the LYS was having a 20% off sale on all the things on the wall and tried to buy myself some Quince & Co. for a sweater, but the amounts and the colours and all the factors weren’t working out. Besides, I have one sweater quantity of Quince & Co. wound up and ready to be a sweater whenever I get to it and one sweater quantity of Quince & Co. on infinite backorder, so I figured maybe this was the yarn gods telling me this wasn’t the correct use of my free $50US. I left with nothing (proud of myself…not too often I can say that during 20% off everything on the wall day. Nearly the whole store is stocked on the walls…at least most of the practical yarn. It’s hard not to buy *something*), and decided that when I came back for my regular knitting night on Thursday I would buy myself something nice. Maybe finally buy some Madeline Tosh despite my opinions about Madeline Tosh or some Malabrigo.

Come back I did, and although I stood staring at the Madeline Tosh and Malabrigo wall for a good half an hour, thinking about hats and cowls and all manner of things I could make, nothing seemed special enough. Nothing seemed right. Then finally, I found it. A yarn store exclusive that oneof the local dyers created for a recent Shop Hop. Colourways inspired by the local Zoological Gardens. All the teal/blue/brown variegation I always wanted and never bought because what was I going to do with all that fingering weight sock yarn? Only now I’m a sock knitter! So I bought it. It’s not lush. It’s not luxurious. But it is the exact colours I love. And it is locally created and locally inspired. And it’s called “More Otter than Sea”. All these things were a win.

 

Now, of course, this didn’t take up all my money (close though…it wasn’t inexpensive sock yarn), so I had to think of what else I could manage to get 1 skein of and still be able to make something. The answer to that, it turns out, was Leading Men Fiber Arts. I’ve been hearing about their yarn (and meaning to listen to their podcast) for a while now, so I was excited to see it in the store a few weeks ago. The colours were beautiful and vibrant and, really, the big problem here was deciding what colour I wanted. I could only get 1 skein of sport weight, so I figure this will turn into a hat or a small cowl or maybe mittens, so it needed to match with my coats and still serve a purpose. Problem is, my coats are brown or blue. And the colours I picked up were either beautiful oranges (still regret not being able to buy that one) or grey or dark green. So, I was forced to use the tiebreaker method and buy on colourway name. Which means the grey won out just because they decided to name it London Fog. Now I need to knit myself just the right thing to take me back to a grey London day where you need the softest cowl to snuggle down into against the damp mist that chills you to the bone and everything will be perfect.

 

So…added some meters to the stash (720.5 m/ 200g), but it’s for a good cause and I'm still grossly ahead of schedule thanks to my destash.Besides, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one or both of these is used up before the year is out.

New Year: A Look Backward and A Plan for the Future

Hi there. First of all, wherever you are in the world, happy 2015. I wish you and yours a safe, happy, healthy year.

Now...down to business. First, a little look back at 2104.

I know I've been pretty bad about blogging regularly, and there were a lot of things I wanted to share with you that I simply didn't make the time for. I hope to get better at that in the future (see the plan for the future section), but for now, let's do a little recap of the year and then talk about what I have planned for crafting and blogging in 2015.

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!