A Little Yarn On The Side

This weekend hasn't been very conducive to crafting of any sort, but I have manged to use up a little more yarn, bringing me to almost 14,000 yards of yarn--just under 8 miles! It feels good to think about how much progress I've made this year--especially when pesky things like housecleaning keep me from making any actual knitting progress.

I'm in the 9th month of The Year of the Stash, and to date I've used up this much yarn plus 6 skeins of this which I didn't include in the picture because I don't have anything even remotely similar to represent it in the picture. That's a lot of yarn. 13,885 yards and 87 balls/skeins/hanks. Tonight I am choosing to bask in the glory of having used up a really large amount of yarn from the stash, and I'm completely ignoring the knowledge that all that yarn really didn't even make a visible dent in the stash. We with stash issues must cling to what we can.....

Needing a little motivation, I was just skimming the spreadsheet of what projects I've finished for the year and how much fabric & yarn I have used up and I noticed the Fir Cone Shawl still only listed 2 hanks instead of 3. (I'm now actually almost halfway through the 4th). So I got to add 440 yards to my total without even touching knitting yet today! Whoo hoo!!!!

Tonight I have not only finished the back of Andy's sweater, I have figured out how to photograph it to show the pattern! There's no stopping me now! BRING ON THE LACE!!!!!!

So I've finished WIP number 8 in the WIP marathon, which would be quite exciting except for the 19 WIPs left. Not that I actually think I'll make it all the way through to 27 without casting on something new. I mean, if I had that sort of willpower I wouldn't have ended up with 27 Works in Progress now would I? To give myself a little motivation, I've joined a "Knitting for Men" project for September--the idea being I show some traces of project monogamy and actually complete a knitting project for one of the men of our species. Fair enough, one of the WIPs is a sweater for Andy which takes such boring pictures bur is actually much nicer in person. It's "Gridlock" from the fall 2003 issue of Knitter's Magazine , and since they had the sense to do it in red, theirs photographs much better than mine does. Judging from yarn requirements, I've almost used up 436 yards of the 1535 the pattern calls for, which means I've knit 28% of th...

WIP number 9 is for Andy, which works out well as if I get this one done this year, I'll have averaged a sweater a year for him since we got engaged. I don't know what one normally woos a man with, but wool works pretty well--except for the dreaded Boyfriend Sweater Curse. It is a well known fact in the knitting world that the surest way to end a relationship with a man is to knit him a sweater. I don't know what it is about the Boyfriend Sweater, but I only did it once and the only positive thing I can say about the whole episode is that I managed to end up with the sweater and not the boyfriend--a better scenario all the way around. Boys come and go, but good wool is good wool. Knitting for a husband, however, is another story. This is the long-suffering gent who ends up with a dimpled posterior from sitting on knitting needles buried in the couch cushions; who has to pull over on the side of the road in central Mexico so his loving wife can poor their bottled water ...

So I had planned to start on Christmas gifts this weekend, but first I got distracted by some over-exuberant tomato plants and today so far has been taken up by the normal weekend stuff--laundry, cleaning, and getting ready for fall as it's 3:00 in the afternoon and still only 64 degrees. Even the cats were cold this morning. I think I need to do a little knitting this afternoon--it's definitely starting to feel like wool weather!