Wet Weekending

If there was one word to describe this past weekend, it would be soggy. We had some pretty epic rains on Friday, including a thunderstorm that hit just after Ruthie and I came in from our morning walk (so no run for me that day) and another that came through as we had dinner that left what I called "temporary water features" in our backyard. There were flash flood warnings in the area, but because our street sits above a deep ravine, they thankfully weren't an issue for us. There was more rain on Saturday and overnight into Sunday, and with all that moisture and some hot weather, it was generally very steamy. Let's just say there were extra showers taken every day. The week ahead is supposed to be warm (though not beastly hot) and there's a chance for rain most days, so I think I'll just have to get used to it!

When I wasn't melting outside, I got a fair amount of crafting done inside. For one thing, I finished my handspun scarf -- and didn't run out of yarn!

It turns out that it was not as close a game of yarn chicken as I thought; when I finished, I still had 7 g of yarn left (from 110 g total to start). I had weighed my yarn as I approached the halfway point, but it was when we were in the car last Sunday and the numbers kept changing because we were moving, so I didn't entirely trust them. Still, it's a win that I'll take. I still need to block it, which I think will help with some wonkiness here and there, but I'm quite happy with it.

I also started plying my current skein of handspun, which may actually be complete by the time you read this (I'm writing on Sunday afternoon and have plans to do more plying on Sunday evening):

In order to have something fairly mindless on the needles for Ruthie Nap Time Knitting, I pulled out some very old mini skeins (like as old as Molly old!) from a long-ago yarn club that was associated with a lot of drama. They'd been stashed away because I was a bit busy with a newborn at the time, and I didn't even remember I had them until Molly and I did the stash reorganization recently. There's no information at all about the yarns, but they all appeared to be fingering weight, so I put them in a gradient of sorts and am making a charity hat.

Finally, I spent time this weekend getting everything ready to publish my new hat pattern this morning. It's the first one using my new tech editor, who has been fabulous to work with, and she's already got my next pattern to work on. This is the hat you've seen twice before, now called Mandlen. It's up on Payhip already and will be published on Ravelry not long after this post goes up (look for it in my store).

I'm hoping for a regular week ahead, including my usual Wednesday update. Here's hoping it's a good one for all of us.

Totally Overwhelmed

Last week I mentioned that I was going to do a little digging in the stash to find some yarn for a sweater. In fact, I had a pattern and some handspun in mind. So Friday evening, I went into the stash room/guest room, opened up the doors to the closet, and started pulling out bins and bags.

Readers, I could not find the yarn.

Why couldn't I find the yarn? Well, let's just say that at one point, when Molly was moving out of this room and into the third-floor room where the stash used to live, the stash was organized. But that was several years ago, and the stash room has become a sort of catch-all for anything that doesn't have a place but needs to be out of the way. And often things are tossed into the closest willy-nilly. I have only myself to blame. This photo doesn't really give the full picture of the situation, but at least you can get a sense of the scale:

The bottom line is that I'm feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed by the amount of yarn I have. I know there are likely people who have much more and I am not in the least judging, but right now I feel like I don't even have a good sense of what I have, nor can I apparently get my hands on something that I know is in there, and that makes me anxious. I've been focusing on using yarn I already have for the past couple of years, but clearly that has not been enough.

So. Now it's time to get serious. Part of the solution to this problem is organization. If things are stored in a logical way, it'll be easier to find what I'm looking for as well as sort out what I may no longer want. That's a big project that requires space to spread things out, and I may not be able to do that until the next time the Mister is on a work trip and I can use half of the bedroom. In the meantime, the fastest way to relieve some of the anxiety of having too much is to use some of it us, so that's what I'm going to do.

I've joined a couple of charity-related groups on Ravelry that are seeking warm items made from wool (machine washability not required), and my plan is to prioritize making items for them. Thinner yarns can get doubled or even tripled. I can crochet more (it tends to grow a little faster). And I'll also encourage Molly to use up whatever she likes as well (she's a much better and faster crocheter than I, and she's made some really cute hats in the past, not to mention that she's been on a blanket kick lately).

All of this is to say that while I'll still be making gifts for family members and also probably sweaters for myself, you can expect to see a lot of the same thing over and over in the months ahead, and I hope it won't get too boring! Also, I may have some yarn I'm willing to offload on crafting friends, if that might interest any of you. But mainly I'm putting all this here for accountability and hoping for some moral support!

I have to say I already feel a bit better having written all that, and I hope I haven't made anyone else anxious about their stash. I will be back on Wednesday with a project and reading update -- assuming I haven't melted into a puddle of warm goo by then, of course.

The State of the Spinning Stash, April 2022 Edition

This is a post I'd intended to write a week ago, but obvious it became impossible when I did not get home Sunday evening as planned. The timing is pretty irrelevant, though, which will become clear in a moment. The point of this post to mainly to take a look at how I've been doing in spinning down my fiber stash, specifically from my stash Southern Cross Fibre club shipments. You may remember that doing so was a goal of mine last year, and you might even remember that I took a photo of all my SCF fiber and was tracking which bags I'd spun during the year. That's what I'm doing again this year.

While I didn't spin all of my SCF stash last year, I did make a pretty good dent -- by my count, at least 18 bags of fiber. Some of that was in the stash when I posted that photo and some came into the stash over the course of the year. And of course that's continued to happen this year. Thought I've been making an effort not to go out and buy more yarn and fiber this year, I've continued my membership in the fiber club because it's a small pleasure I can give myself every month, and I think we can all use a little something to look forward to. So here's where things stand at the moment:

These are arranged, left to right and top to bottom, from oldest and newest. The oldest shipment is in the top left-hand corner and is from December 2015. The newest just came in March and is the February 2022 shipment. One more shipment is currently somewhere between Australia and the United States. These are all monthly club shipments with the exception of the two bags at the far right in the top row, which were prizes for spinalongs from years past.

There's a lot of fiber here -- approximately 2,310 g or 81.5 oz./5+ lbs. But the thing about collecting fiber from one dyer is that their color sense comes through even when they're creating new colorways, and I see a lot of groupings that would work for combo spins or even just combining skeins. Like look at this group in the red/purple/brown family:

Or these in the green/blue/purple range:

Or even these colorways that seem to have a lot of colors in common:

I am really excited about all the possibilities for blending and combining, and I'm eager to get back to my wheel. As I did last year, I've made a list of all the shipments in chronological order, and I'm going to be tracking what I spin throughout the rest of the year. I think I'd like to start with some of the older stash because it's been waiting its turn to get on the wheel for a long time -- in part because (at least in the case of the oldest shipment) I felt like I needed to be a better spinner to be worthy of the fiber. I am a better spinner now, I think, but I've also changed my attitude toward using the "good stuff" since then and believe that if we save things for someday, we'll never actually believe we're good enough for them.

I still have some neutral/undyed fiber to finish spinning, but expect to see some of this fiber on the wheel soon -- and be sure to hold me to account!

Do It Twice

If there was a theme for my most recent spinning project, it was "do it twice." Of course, I'd anticipated some of that because I started out with two bags of the same fiber, New Zealand Merino from Southern Cross Fibre in the colorway Yesterday's Love. What I didn't anticipate was that, in addition to spinning the two bobbins of singles to start, I'd also end up plying the yarn twice.

I wanted to have just one skein of yarn after I plied, and so in order to accommodate that much yarn (I'd started with at least 220 g/close to 8 oz. of fiber), I needed to use my Hansen miniSpinner to ply because its bobbins have the largest capacity of any of my wheels. In the past, my miniSpinner was my go-to wheel, but I hadn't used it in some time and was clearly out of practice. Unlike with a treadle wheel, where you have a sense of how much twist is being put into yarn because you're physically adding it by moving the wheel through your treadling, with an espinner you have to rely on how the yarn looks. And looks can be deceiving when it comes to ply twist, because not only do you lose a little bit as the yarn gets wound onto the bobbin, but washing the finished yarn reawakens the twist put into the singles (which is in in the opposite direction of the ply twist) and counteracts the ply twist. That's a long-winded and somewhat technical way of saying that I wasn't getting a good idea of how much ply twist I was putting into the yarn and it wound up being too little for my taste, though I didn't know that for sure until after I'd skeined and washed the yarn. Here is what it looked like at that point (apologies for the glare -- there wasn't good lighting to be had when I took this photo):

Notice how the yarn looks like of scraggly? That means there isn't enough ply twist, at least in my opinion. Fortunately, it's an easy enough problem to solve, provided you're willing to invest a bit more time. Once the yarn was dry, I put it on my swift and wound it into a center-pull ball. Then I ran it back through the miniSpinner to add more ply twist (which is much faster the second time around, and with an espinner means just sitting and holding the ball of yarn) and skeined and washed it again. Much better!

Can you see how the yarn looks like a cohesive unit now, rather than just some strands lying side by side? I'm much happier with it now. Here is a look at the entire skein:

After plying the second time, the finished yarn is sport weight and approximately 580-ish yards/530-ish meters. It was also my last official project for Stash Dash, which I was really only doing on my own (the KnitGirllls moved all the discussion for the event from Ravelry to Discord, and though I signed up there, I didn't really have the mental energy to keep up with the discussion). I tracked my meters through an Excel spreadsheet I kept on my desktop and updated as I finished a project. Handspun meters for this event are counted based on the number of times the yarn goes through your hands, so you get credit for the length of the singles and well as the plying. Because this is a four-ply (sort of) yarn, that means I got to calculate the Stash Dash total for this skein by multiplying the final length times five -- and that means that this skein alone contributed 2,647.5 meters to my total. When Stash Dash officially ended on August 31, my final total for the entire event was close to 18,050 meters. Not bad at all!

Let's take a look at where things stand on my effort to spin down my SCF club stash. Here's the photo I took at the beginning of the year of what I had (and note that this does not include club fiber that has come in since, though I've already spun much of that), along with what I have already spun checked off:

I've made a dent, but there's still a lot to be spun, and I still have another bag coming in each month. I so enjoyed my Shifty sweater spin that I'm contemplating spinning up another sweater's quantity in club fiber, though this time I think I'd do another combo spin. I pulled out several bags that are all predominantly green, with some hints of yellow, blue, and brown, that I thing would go well together:

I think what I'd do with these is split them up into little bits and mix them up to spin the singles, similar with what I did for the yarn I used in my Ramona Cardigan. There's less variation in color in these fiber selections, though, so I think if I mixed them up well, I'd end up with yarn that reads green overall. I was thinking that such a yarn, assuming I could spin enough, would be great for my planned Garland (Ravelry link) sweater for use as the main color, and I could use a contrasting color or even an undyed yarn for the colorwork. Looking at the photo of all the club shipments, I also see quite a few in the red/pink family that look like they'd work well together, so perhaps I could spin those for Rainbow's Little Garland? I'm excited about the possibility of using up a lot of fiber in one spinning project, but I won't be getting started just yet -- my first priority is finally finishing my swatch for my Shifty so that I verify my needle size and get going on that sweater. One handspun sweater at a time!

Spinning Joy

The sun seems to be shining a little brighter here today! I don't know about you, but over the past 24 hours, I've felt a ton of tension leave my body. I'm so relieved that the election is now behind us, and I'm feeling more hopeful for the future!

I did a fair amount of spinning this week amidst all the anxiety, and I have a freshly plied skein of handspun to show for it. Showing you these photos is a bit like showing you a finished lace shawl before it's been blocked; it's soaking in a warm bath right now and will likely change a bit, so keep that in mind. This skein was spun from 4 oz. of mini batts containing merino, bamboo, silk, and sparkle. Usually multicolored fiber gets more homogenized when you spin it, but this managed to keep all the lovely pops of so many colors -- it was a bit like spinning a rainbow.

I especially love that hot pink!

I spun the batts semi-worsted, meaning I used a short forward draw in combination with a carded (woolen) prep. So the yarn isn't terribly consistent, but that's not what I was really going for anyway. I wanted some of the texture in there that the batts had, so I really only pulled things out when they were really obviously inconsistent.

I spun all the singles for this skein onto one bobbin, then wound them off on my ball winder so I could ply from both ends of a center-pull ball and use up every bit. The finished yarn is a two ply, and straight off the bobbin it looks like a heavy lace weight/light fingering weight, but it might pouf up a bit from washing.

The batts had just the right amount of sparkle in them for my taste, and combined with the shine of the silk and bamboo content, the effect is quite luminous. I'm really pleased with this skein!

Up next, I'm going deep into the stash for one of my early Southern Cross Fibre club shipments -- this is from September 2015.

I thought briefly about playing with the colors here, but I just decided not to make things any more complicated than they need to be, so I'm just going to spin the strip of fiber from end to end and chain-ply the singles. Easy peasy. This colorway is called Land Under Wave, and I really love it. I suspect that's why I hadn't spun it; when I first got into the club, every shipment seemed so precious that I didn't want to risk ruining it somehow. But 2020 is all about enjoying the precious stash -- we need to find all the joy we can!

Anything But a Nightmare

My pile of pandemic-spun skeins has grown bigger in the last few days. After spending a few days spinning up all the singles, on Friday morning I plied them all. I let the yarn rest on the bobbin overnight and then skeined and washed it yesterday. I wish the lighting were better to show you how stunning this yarn is -- these photos just don't do it justice (thank you, rain that will be here all day!).

This yarn was spun from a set of batts that I bought at SSK when I attended back in July 2017. One of the classes I took at the retreat was on spinning batts with the extremely talented (and delightful) Jillian Moreno, so it seemed appropriate to pick up some batts at the marketplace from Liz at Hobbledehoy, who is not only a talented fiber artist but also an extremely nice human being who I became friends with at the retreat. She called this set of batts "Nightmare batts" for some reason known only to her. They contained a blend of organic Polwarth wool, bamboo, yak, silk, and a touch of sparkle. Does anything in that list sound like a nightmare to you? Me, either!

There were three batts in the set, so I spun each onto its own bobbin. The singles were spun long draw, to match the woolen preparation of the fiber, and then plied into a traditional three ply. Fresh off the wheel, the yarn appeared to be in the area of heavy fingering to sport, but then it had a bath and the magic happened: One of the signature characteristics of Polwarth fiber is that it often poofs up when washed, and that's exactly what happened to this skein -- it bloomed into a super squishy DK/worsted.

I love how the fiber prep combined with the method of spinning results in a more rustic yarn that's a little more inconsistent -- I think it adds great character to the yarn. I have about 265 yards, so enough for a smallish project, and I'm fairly certain that a purple-loving 10-year-old is going to claim it for something for her.

I've already lined up the next spinning project, again dug from stash from a couple of years ago. I'm not 100% certain what it is, though I know it was a HipStrings club shipment and I think it's the August 2018 shipment that contained a blend of BFL and Shetland in natural colors. It came in the form of four bundles of fiber, and as you can see, I've split each shade into three portions.

My plan is to spin another traditional three ply and do it as a natural gradient, so each ply will use one bundle of each of the four shades. My splitting and spinning are just inconsistent enough that the transition between the shades is likely to be in a slightly different spot in each strand, which should result in more subtle transitions. I haven't weighed the fiber yet, but I think I have 2 oz. of each shade, so I should end up with a pretty sizeable skein when I'm done (I'll have to break out the long-ignored miniSpinner to ply it all!). I think it'll make a fantastic and cozy shawl -- but first things first. I'm planning to start on the spinning later today, and though I've been on somewhat of a tear through my fiber stash, I think this might take a little longer to get through than recent skeins.

Quick and Moody

I think I may have set a new record for myself in spinning up a new skein of yarn. I started on Tuesday, had three bobbins of singles on Wednesday, and had a plied skein on Thursday. It's dark and moody and I surprised myself by loving it, because I wasn't hugely in love with the fiber.

This was December's shipment from the Southern Cross Fibre club, a colorway called Midnight Garden on Falkland. For reference, this was the original fiber:

I split the fiber into thirds by folding it into three more-or-less equal pieces and pulling it apart at the folds. Then I tried to maximize the color mixing by using those tear points to determine the order of spinning of each segment. In other words, if I tore the fiber apart at a red section, I made sure that one piece of the fiber started with that red and the other piece ended at the red. I think I was pretty successful; there's a lot of spots in the finished skein where each ply is a different color.

The finished yarn is in the DK/worsted range and approximately 158 yards. That's of course lower yardage than you'd expect for the amount of fiber compared to a commercial yarn, but that's because I spun it worsted, thereby condensing the fiber a lot. That makes it harder wearing, but also means that the fiber doesn't go as far. Still, I'm very pleased with this skein because it is more consistent, so it seems I am getting better at spinning thicker yarns.

For my next spin, I decided to go with something completely different. I pulled out these beautiful batts that I bought from Liz of Hobbledehoy at SSK in 2017. They're a lovely, soft blend of organic Polwarth, bamboo, yak, silk, and some sparkle. Liz labeled them "Nightmare" batts, but really they're anything but.

There were three batts in the package, so it seemed the most sense to spin up each onto its own bobbin and make a three ply. Because batts are a carded prep and have lots of air in them, it made the most sense to spin them woolen, so I'm using a supported long draw.

If you're not a spinner, the easy way of explaining this is that in a woolen prep, the fibers are going every which way, and when you spin them woolen, you preserve that fluffiness. You can probably see a difference between this and my usual bobbin shots. The singles are much more matte and fuzzy in appearance. But they're also a heck of a lot faster to spin, so I'm hoping this project will progress rather quickly. When I do finish it, I have a strong suspicion that a certain 10-year-old will want to steal it for herself.

The weekend has been a fairly good one, though as usual it's gone much too quickly. This evening we're meeting our neighbors for our weekly toast and checking in on everyone (we usually do it Friday but postponed it this weekend due to rain). Then Rainbow and I are going to use one of the frozen pie crusts in our freezer to make an apple galette for dessert tonight, and this evening I'm planning on curling up with my granny square blanket and my knitting to watch Call the Midwife. I went for a 4.1-mile run this morning and I'm pooped! I hope you're all well and that your weekend brought some relaxation and a good rest from the normal stress of the week.

Cross Another Off the List

The sudden change in our daily lives is meaning a lot of time at home, which isn't all that unusual for a homebody like me, but usually over the weekend we get out a bit. Obviously any plans we had before have been canceled, so now I have the perfect excuse to stay in with my knitting. Over this past weekend, that meant the perfect opportunity to finish up a project and cross another item off my 20 in 2020 list.

Pattern: Brackthaw by Faye Kennington, size medium
Yarn: Quince & Co. Finch (100% American wool) in Sage, less than one skein, and handspun Georgia "rustic wool"/silk/nylon
Needles: US 1 (2.25 mm) Addi Sock Rockets, magic loop
Started/Completed: February 13/March 14

These mittens have been on my want-to-knit list for a while, and I decided that the Woolly Thistle's annual mitten KAL was the perfect opportunity to finally do it. I'd already decided that I was going to use these two yarns for the mittens, both of which were in my FibreShare package a year ago. It felt good to use stash yarn for a pattern already in my library.

So let's talk details.

This pattern was a bit of a challenge not because it was hard but because of the level of detail. It's worked at a dense gauge -- 9 stitches per inch -- and, as you can see, has a very delicate design. Faye's pattern is very well written and easy to follow, but the charts might be a challenge if your vision isn't great. My sight is generally good, but I had to be very deliberate about keeping my place in the chart. Once I got to the second mitten, however, I found that the patterning was a little more intuitive to me, and the knitting definitely got faster as a result.

I made one modification and one error (that I could easily identify) in the knitting. As I was doing the decreases at the top of the second hand, I notice -- several rounds later -- that I'd done a decrease stitch in the wrong color. I wasn't about to rip back at that point, so I just used one of my yarn tails after I finished to duplicate stitch over the offending stitch as part of weaving that end in. I felt a little smug about it, actually, and though I know exactly where it is, I'm guessing that you can't see it, even if you enlarge the photo. The modification is likewise one that's not easy to spot: I did two additional decreases at the top of each mitten, a centered double decrease on each side (the palm and the back of the hand are separated on each side by three stitches -- white/green/white -- so I just decreased each set to one stitch). This meant that each mitten ended with a small number of stitches all in green, and that was aesthetically pleasing to me.

I generally don't block colorwork too aggressively, but these were a little lumpy because the handspun was a bit inconsistent and overall just a tad thicker than the Finch. I discovered that the top of my Knit Picks sock blockers were the perfect size and shape to stick into the hand, so after the mittens got a good soak, I stuck the blockers into them while they dried. The fabric is still not as even as it could be, but I have a feeling that as these get worn and rewashed, they will even out a bit more.

I'm completely delighted with how these turned out and now have an urge to knit more colorwork mittens -- and perhaps even design a new pair myself!

How are the rest of you coping with the new reality? It's been a long time since I had a knitting group to go to, but I'm finding that it would be really great to have one right now. Would anyone be up for a virtual knitting get-together sometime soon? I'm sure I could figure out Google Hangouts or something similar, and it would be great to be able to talk to some of you in real time while knitting. Let me know!

Cute (but Not Especially Little)

'Tis done! In plenty of time, no less!

Pattern: Little Boxy by Joji Locatelli, size 8
Yarn: Fibernymph Dye Works Bounce (80% superwash merino/20% nylon) in Peacock Blue, 2.21 skeins (another 808 m for Stash Dash!)
Needles: US 2.5 (3.0 mm) and US 4 (3.5 mm)
Started/Completed: April 28/June 22
Mods: None

This was such a fun knit. Yes, it's true that the body was a bit of a slog, but in reality the hardest part about this adorable sweater was dealing with two skeins of yarn (I alternated every round on the body and every other row on the parts that were worked flat) and having all those extra ends to weave in -- and those have nothing to do with the pattern itself but rather with my decision to use hand-dyed yarn, which meant alternating to avoid pooling or clear lines where I switched from one skein to another. It really wasn't that much extra work, and I think it was more than worth it. The only place I did not alternate was on the sleeves, where I used the remains of the two skeins I started with in order to leave the third skein more or less intact for use in another project.

I was originally going to knit the next size up, thinking that Rainbow will be 10 later this year and I wanted this to fit her for more than the next few months, but I did some measurements and she's such a skinny little thing that the 8 was more than big enough. I did have a brief moment of panic when I went to pick up the stitches for the first sleeve that the arm openings were too small, but then I pulled out one of her pajama tops for comparison and my fears were laid to rest.

As you can see, the circumference of the sweater is nearly twice that of her body (this top has minimal positive ease on her), meaning that the sleeves are going to hit in the middle of her arm to begin with, and on top of that, the armhole opening on the sweater is the same circumference of the armhole opening on the top -- so that even if the sweater armhole did hit at the biggest part of her arm, she'd still be fine.

I'm thrilled, and more importantly I think she'll be thrilled, and I'm happy to have finished it up in plenty of time. I even blocked it over the weekend so that it's all tidy and ready for her to wear, should she so choose (and should the weather cooperate) when she gets back on Friday. And I'm fighting an urge to cast on a new one for me!

Now that this is done, I'm focusing on a sweater for me, specifically my Soldotna Crop. I think that if I give it the same amount of attention I gave Rainbow's sweater last week, I can make quite a dent in it! I'm about halfway through the yoke chart at this point, and the number of stitches is now big enough that I've been able to spread out the fabric on the entire length of my circular needle instead of magic looping.

Today I'm attending a diversity retreat at work all day, and I'm taking my sock project with me (I finished the first one on Saturday). I think there will be enough attendees that I can blend in and knit without disturbing someone, though of course I'll put it away if someone takes issue. But just think of how much sock I can get done if I'm able to work on it more or less all day!

A Hop on the Bandwagon

I'm typically pretty good at sticking to my WIPs and not getting distracted by the new and shiny, but now I have to fess up to doing just that: I've just cast on a new project, a sweater for me, and as a result I'm now neglecting the projects that were already on the needles. And yet I don't feel too bad about it! Let me explain.

For a while now, it seems like everybody has been knitting the Soldtotna Crop sweater. I thought it was cute but wasn't too tempted -- until I realized that I had four skeins of DK that would work for it in my stash already (Yarn Hollow Tango, a Polwarth/silk blend, if you're wondering). And then I couldn't get the idea out of my head. So I gave in, dug the skeins out, and swatched. And on Sunday evening, I cast on.

I haven't gotten very far yet, and that's mainly because I ripped back a couple of times last night, first because I realized I'd used the wrong color for C3 (that's the mauve-y purple) and then because I just mixed up my colors in the pattern. I'm only eight or nine rounds into the colorwork, and I've already changed the pattern. The color I'm supposed to be using for C3 is actually a deep purple, but it's so close in tone to the dark blue I'm using for C1 that it would be impossible to tell them apart. So I'm substituting the lighter purple for most of the areas where the pattern would have had me knit in the dark purple in order to have the stranded pattern actually show up. I have plenty of yarn, so that's not an issue, and even though the contrast between the light purple and the light blue isn't very strong, it's certainly better than it would be if I were using the dark purple here.

I'm sure that a cropped sweater in DK yarn won't take too long, so I don't really view it as cheating on my other WIPs -- and I am using up stash yarn! I'm still plugging away at the other two projects on the needles, the largest of which is Rainbow's Little Boxy.

After working on it diligently most evenings last week, I'm now about an inch and a half away from splitting the body for the front and back yoke. I'll give it some additional attention tonight (I meant to knit on it some last night but got pulled in by the colorwork), and with any luck I'll get to the splitting point. Rainbow leaves this coming Sunday for two weeks at overnight camp, and I've gotten this crazy idea in my head to try to get the sweater done by the time she returns. I'd say that's an ambitious goal but not unrealistic, provided I can stay focused.

The other WIP is very close to being done and should be wrapped by tomorrow.

These are the toe-up shortie socks I started for Rainbow last week using the yarn leftover from my slouchy hat. The first sock was finished on Saturday, and the second is now about half an inch away from being ready for the heel. I'm fairly certain I'll have enough yarn to finish, as I think I had 42 g to start and the first sock used up 20 g. It will be close, though, so keep your fingers crossed that I don't have to play another round of yarn chicken!

It Begins with One Small Step

I've made a conscious decision to pare down my stash, but it's not going to happen overnight. In reality, it will take a while -- as they say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step. My first step has now been taken with the completion of these socks:

Pattern: cuff-down stockinette with true afterthought heels
Yarn: Fibernymph Dye Works Ridgetop Fingering (80% Romney, 20% Falkland) in Inspiration, 75 g/300 yds used
Needles: US 0 (2.0 mm) 40 in. Addi Sock Rockets, magic loop
Started/Completed: April 13/April 24

This yarn is the perfect example of yarn I didn't really need but bought on a whim. The colorway was one of two special colorways that Lisa created to celebrate her eighth anniversary of being in business, and when I saw it, I just had to have it. It was the perfect excuse to try out this new yarn base.

I really loved working with this yarn. It's very different from most sock yarns in that it's a more rustic blend and not superwash. Some might find it rough or scratchy, but my feet are not that particular, and it reminded me in some ways of some of the yarn I've spun from coarser fibers. I think it will wear well in the long run.

I don't normally do afterthought heels, but the striping sequence in this yarn is so long that it seemed like the right thing to do to preserve it. (That length of the sequence is also why I didn't bother trying to get the two socks to match each other but instead started each sock in the same spot in the general pattern, if that makes sense.) I did true afterthought heels, inserting my needles on either side of the row where the heel would be and then snipping the yarn right in the middle. I caught the yarn tails/wove them in as I knit the first round of the heel, and it feels a little tight around that round at the moment, but I think it will loosen up when I wash and wear the socks. Overall, I am pleased with these and think they'll be in regular rotation once it's sock season again.

With the leftovers, I've started crocheting a little bowl/basket that I'm going to try to felt to see how the yarn does with that. I figure it'll be a little thing I can keep on my nightstand to hold random stitch markers and such.

I'm also reducing the size of my stash a bit more dramatically by clearing out a sweater's quantity. Several years ago, I won these skeins of a Madelinetosh merino/alpaca DK. I still think they're beautiful, but as I haven't used them, I'm fine with letting them go.

These will be a prize for someone in the Mad May event in the Madelinetosh Lovers group on Ravelry. I hope they'll go to a new home where they'll be used!

The Stash: A Reckoning

I hope you all had a restful holiday weekend, whatever you were celebrating! We had two very big Passover dinners, and thanks to taking yesterday off, I got pretty well caught up on my sleep. This morning did feel a bit crazy -- the Mister was up early to leave for a quick work trip, so I had to get Rainbow to school and then run off to an orthodontist appointment, which then made me run to get to work as quickly as I could -- but it also feels good to get back to the normal routine. I didn't get as much physical activity as I would like over the weekend, too, so my daily walks to and from work have been missed.

I am still working on two active WIPs, a shawl design sample and my afterthought heel socks; the socks are far enough along now that I might even finish them tonight if I can get enough knitting time in.

What I want to talk about today, though, is the state of my stash. Last weekend, I found myself going through just about every bin and bag of yarn and fiber in my stash in search of a skein of yarn I'd spun last summer and put in such a safe place that I'd been unable to locate it again for many months. I did eventually find that skein, but in the process I realized that I've acquired way more yarn and fiber than I really need or could reasonably use. I say this without judgment of the size of anyone else's stash; mine has just gotten to the point where it's causing me anxiety. So I'm taking some steps to help ease that:

1. Starting today, I am not buying yarn just for the sake of buying it. I won't say I am not buying yarn at all, because sometimes there is a necessity (such as needing an extra skein for a project that's a gift, for instance), but I am not in need of yarn for any planned projects right now and have enough yarn purchased specifically for planned projects that I am not going to buy yarn and cast on for something entirely new on a whim.*
2. At some point in the near future, I'm going to take some time to go through the entire stash and sort it. Things that do not spark joy will be destashed, either by giving them to Rainbow or a friend or putting them up for sale.
3. For the foreseeable future, I'll be working exclusively from stash. That means upping my game with charity knitting (a perfect use for all the partial skeins that are making up a large portion of the stash) and working on gift knits, such as items for my nephew.

My long-term goal here is to see more yarn and fiber moving out of the stash than moving into it, at least for the rest of the year. I'm hesitant to go through and catalog everything I have, if only because of the amount of time it would take, but I'm going to keep track of what comes in and what goes out. I will monitor that on a regular basis, and if things don't improve, I might have to take more drastic action. Wish me luck, and if you have any good tips, please feel free to share them in the comments!

*NB: There will still be some fiber and yarn coming in, as I'm a member of several clubs, and there may be yarn coming in for design work, but that amount is small in comparison to what's already in the stash.

Hooked, Quite Literally

Last week I mentioned that I was feeling a little bit of a loss of my knitting mojo. I'm still feeling a bit like that, though I did spend some time since then working on my Wonder Woman Wrap, and it's grown a bit since you last saw it. I am nearly finished with the second middle stripe (which involves short rows) and have added quite a few ends that will need to be woven in at some point.

I'm also still making good progress on my "sportsball" socks; the first one got finished today.

Over the weekend, however, when I was not spending time at my wheel, I was doing something rather surprising, if you know me. I was crocheting. Yes, I'm serious! I've long wanted to use up a bunch of worsted weight wool scraps in my stash to make a huge felted tote bag that I can use to toss WIPs in, and this weekend I finally decided to do it. I found a bunch of full or partial skeins of feltable wool in one of my stash bins, pulled out a big hook, and got to it. I'm hooking this from the base up, and I'm totally winging the pattern, so don't ask me what I did to get it to this point.

This dark brown was a lone skein of Ella Rae Classic that my Ravelry stash page tells me I bought back in 2008. I originally had four skeins, though I have no idea what happened to the other three. My plan is to continue with the base until this skein runs out and then stop increasing at the ends when I join in the next color. The other scraps I've pulled are mostly partial skeins of the now-discontinued Patons Classic Wool Merino as well as a lone ball of Jo-Ann Sensations Tesoro leftover from a Baby Surprise Jacket I knit for my cousin when he was born (he's now 10 years old), all of which were purchased a decade ago. I know I still have plenty of wool scraps left in the stash, and I'm sure I'll be digging them out once I get through this little pile.

I am enjoying the crocheting, something I'm not very good at but that goes very quickly, though due to my lack of practice I find that I have to look at what I'm doing, which doesn't make for a good activity when I'm watching TV at the same time and want to see what's happening on the screen. I'm feeling very virtuous for how much yarn I'm using up and removing from the stash as well. I've never been able to throw away leftover yarn when I complete a project if there's a decent amount remaining, so my stash is full of partial balls and scraps, many of them very well suited to a project like this. While I doubt that knitting will ever be replaced as my first love, I can see how I could very easily get addicted to this type of project!