AAARRRRGGGHHHH!

Really, I swear I almost have a finished sweater.  Honest.  The back of the tank top is done, the front is on the needles.........and I am posting late at night because I thought I might have a finished sweater to show you if I just kept knitting........


Dang that pesky need for sleep...

Organizing The Sewing Room

Andy had another idea for storage for the sewing room, so he added a thin piece of plywood to the underside of the new sewing desk

and now it's the perfect place to store long skinny things--yardstick, blocking wires, that long flat pressing thing,

and also seems to provide a LOT of kitty entertainment on rainy days:

Because my back was hurting a bit more (gym, lifting boxes, sitting--image that),  I spent most of Finishing Friday working on the new sweater,

which has now divided for the armholes and I'm working on just the back.  I also finished picking up the button band for the blue sweater, but I want to edit that pattern to add buttons and button holes, which I thought would be best to do while NOT back on pain pills.  

No progress on the green dress yet, but I have actually located a sewing project I can do as soon as the dress is finished.

Same jean-type jacket pattern I keep making, but this one in purple corduroy, so one that would be great for fall.  I have 4 yards of the fabric, so ideally I would be able to locate a shirt or bag pattern and be able to cut it all out at once, but so far I have only located 5 sewing patterns, and they're all ones I've used before.  Still, I think this will make a cute jacket.  When I bought this fabric, it was on clearance and something around $1 a yard, and my intention was to make Andy a shirt, but I've already made him a purple corduroy shirt in a finer wale but in this exact color, so that seems a bit Stepford.  Why that didn't occur to me AT THE TIME I BOUGHT IT has a lot to do with why I have this humungous stash.  There may be people who can pass up $1 a yard in decent fabrics, but I'm obviously not one of them............

Progress!

It took almost all day, but I finally was able to convince myself that there were 3 entire tubs that I probably wouldn't be getting to in the next 12 months,

so the stereo has a place to sit.  Call it the "music for the delusional" project, as it really was hard to admit that there is ANY yarn in my possession that I won't knit this year.  If you'll notice, I couldn't even commit to 3 yarn tubs.  There are 3--I think there are actually 6 or 7--but I struggled with not just saying there is yarn I won't get to for a while, I also have the tubs sorted by weight and didn't want to combine them, but I also don't want to have tubs around that are only partially full. Maybe the less-full ones can be moved to the shelves when they are done?  Or maybe at least I can pretend for a little while longer that the stash is really going to be tamed by those shelves................

Robin and Gaidig had some great ideas for the stash bin, so I've started sorting this year's yarn:

There are projects that I really NEED to do this year (gifts), projects I want to do (sweaters for me), and projects that I would like to do if I get frustrated with everything else.  So, the yarn that is VISIBLE in the bin is yarn from the "need to do" list.  I'm hoping to move it to clear plastic bags, but I'm not sure I have enough of them.  Oh well.  The yarn in bags I can't see through are "reward" projects.  If I'm caught up on the other things, I can pick one of those.  If one can't control one's inner child, one should at least know a few good ways to bribe it.  This will probably be a 2-bin project eventually as I think my current WIPs will go in there as well, but the one empty bin I had is holding general sewing room crap right now.  As is the hallway, our bedroom, the guest room, my closet.....ahem.....

ONE thing from the sewing room has been dealt with.  While looking for scissors I ran across two blue hand towels that I had intended to decorate, so...........

I originally thought I would fill in the space between the two decorative stitching strips as well, but when I got this far, I really liked how it looked like there was a lace-trimmed insert on the towels, so I left them like this.  I am calling these a "decoration" for my list of 12 items as we're keeping them.  They could have qualified as embroidered towels, but I kind of intend that to be 12 towels embroidered as gifts (unless I mess them up--then we keep them), so it made more sense to call them something to decorate the house.  One more thing done!

And in the "really behind on my list" category, I haven't gotten back to the blue sweater yet, but

the spring tank top is moving along quickly.  There's a lot I like about knitting with cotton, but it is a nightmare to splice.  I know it doesn't look as nice and it's a bad thing in the knitting world, but I am leaving knots on the back of this baby, and if it turns out, I will take a needle and thread and stitch them down to the backside so they won't be in the way or visible.  It's ugly, but not nearly as ugly as my mood gets when splicing tweedy cotton...............

Things Learned This Week

*  When trying to sort out the yarn I will be knitting in the next 12 months and the yarn I won't get to in the next year, I have discovered that some part of me really still believes I can knit a 10-year supply of yarn in the next 12 months.

*  If one has big rubber tubs full of yarn, until one has actually emptied out every single tub of yarn and double-checked it, one should not boast that one finally has one's entire stash on Ravelry....unless one wants to be blindsided by 15 unaccounted for skeins lurking in the depths of the stash.

*  Getting the sewing machines and computer all set up on the new sewing table would be even MORE exciting if I knew where my patterns, pin cushions, extra needles, marking pencils, and hem gauges were and could actually start sewing.

*  If one can't find a knitting group that one likes, a clever knitter offers to teach all her friends to knit.

I Have A New Idea

For now, the stereo-sitting-on-a-stack-of-yarn-filled-Rubbermade-tubs scheme is probably going to need to be continued in the sewing room, which means

1.  I can move a few things back into the sewing room and out of the bedroom
2.  This would be an excellent time to decide what I want to knit in the next 12 months so I don't discover that the next project is going to require moving a whole bunch of stuff.

So, what if I had two tubs to hold what I planned to knit in the next 12 months.  Could I stick to it?  And could I actually empty two entire tubs in one year?  Could my rise-to-the-challenge-no-matter-how-insane tendencies override the I-don't-want-to-knit-it-if-it's-planned-ahead stubbornness?  Or am I just saying this so I can play with yarn all day and really feel like I'm "cleaning?"

When The Going Gets Tough....

The tough finish an easy scarf:

and start a new sweater:

This is going to be a cotton tank top, and I would be providing a link to the pattern if I weren't such a nice person.  It's a free pattern, and it's always nice when people decide to share their work for free with the world.  I get that.  And it's a cute tank top, which I also appreciate.  BUT the stated gauge is 5.3 stitches to the inch using the pattern stitch.  5.3 stitches to the inch is insane enough, and generally no one does that, but the pattern has a double decrease separated by the 2 YOs by 5 stitches, which pulls the knitted stitches to a diagonal to form a wavy edge.  So....our gauge is now 5.3 stitches over a wavy pattern, and if one just measures the stitches themselves, they are at an angle and don't accurately represent the width of the stitches.  The solution?  Knit for a while, slide all 180+ stitches onto a piece of yarn and measure to make sure that the darn thing will come reasonably close to fitting some part of my body.  If this were anything but a tank top done in the round AND I weren't already 2 sweaters behind for the year, I wouldn't even attempt this pattern.  So, I'm sure you'll understand why I would attempt a pattern that I'm unwilling to inflict on my friends.

Yesterday we got the machines and chords all tracked down and plugged in (except for one surge protector that is still MIA), and decided that the $30 sewing tables are the perfect opportunity to test design ideas for the future "real" furniture.  Idea number one:

serger thread cone storage under the serger.  Originally I was thinking about having storage drawers on this end, but what do I use when I'm using the serger?  Thread, tweezers, a brush, needles, the tiny wrench for changing needles, and machine oil.  So far, that's it.  On a REALLY rare occasion I change feet, but that's so rare that they don't need to be near the machine.  Everything else could be in a single sleeve, bag, or cup.  So maybe this will work better than a drawer after all.  Andy also has a great idea for a storage slot under the table for long skinny things--my yardstick, my tube of blocking wires, my ironing sleeve.  I think that will be really handy, and since the furniture is just particle board and two by four boards, we can try anything, and if it doesn't work, we just take it off and try something else.  I think it will be about 2 years before we can get to the real furniture, so we'll have lots of time to experiment and take notes.  Why didn't we think of this sooner?

Sewing Furniture!

As a pretty accomplished woodworker, Andy would probably like it known that this is in no way reflects his general building standard, but this weekend he made me a temporary sewing desk:

so we could get our folding table back to use for parties.  It's not pretty, but I am VERY excited, and it's going to be far more stable than the plastic tables I've been using.  He put it together yesterday and today he is assembling it in the sewing room,

 with Theo's help, of course, which is actually FAR more helpful than his "help" with the painting:

I think Theo's pretty happy with the new arrangement--at least far happier than he was about the paw scrubbing he got yesterday,

and now I can start putting part of the sewing room back together while Andy works on the shelving.  Yay!!!!