A Little Yarn On The Side

....and there are bell peppers dehydrating, jalapeno and Anaheim peppers roasted and transferred to the freezer, our breakfast meusli is mixed and chilling in the fridge (I'm having a "channeling Martha" kind of weekend), and now I have: The sleeve a British mystery from the library and Theo, who really finds knitting dull and boring until the washing & blocking process. RobinH is catching up to me in the sleeve category, so it's competitive sleeving time!!! (I'm really not this much of a child--I just play one on the internet) And just so you don't all think I have done nothing at all with my weekend, the Christmas gift bags are done and washed and just waiting for me to find better drawstring material than the gold ribbon. Black ribbon maybe? 2 more fabric yards to the tally!!! (And very good eye RobinH! Those were indeed the Fruity Pebbles socks. Don't they just make you want to get on a sugar high and watch Saturday morning cartoons?)

The sleeve is about half done and feels like it is taking at least twice as long as the other sleeve. To keep myself motivated to keep knitting, I've started sewing the existing pieces together, which always sends me back to the knitting. It might be getting a bit monotonous, but knitting is always better than sewing seams. And on the Good News front, it's knitted sock weather!!!!!!!

......if it's part of a healthy, committed knitting relationship, is yarn lust bad? Part of me is quite proud that I'm just half a sleeve away from WIP number 10 in a row: Another part of me--the one that has a lot of fun ideas but that gets me into the mess of 27 WIPs and owning a 10-year stash--wants to play with yarn. Any yarn--fingering, sport, worsted, lace--so long as it is not part of something already on the needles. One of these or something from here or from the other locations I'm not yet ready to disclose to the general public. This problematic part is most likely my inner child, as my adult side recognizes that with 19 WIPs in progress, I am not exactly lacking for knitting variety. Still, I really, really, REALLY want to cast on something new!!!! How exactly does one give one's inner child a "time out?"

OK, no one was actually fooled by yesterday's post--there was no sleeve action. Yep--totally ignored them. I think I might have moved them off the coffee table, but aside from that...... Tonight, however, sleeve number one was finished and voila! Sleeve number 2 is underway!!!! Newest reason to keep a knitting blog: Once you publicly admit to working on a project, it's a lot harder to move it to the Bin of Banishment......

Or 15,419 yards of yarn--whichever sounds bigger. At this rate, I could use up over 20,000 yards of yarn this year--having only purchased 1400 yards to finish existing projects! (For the sake of bragging we are ignoring that little December episode with the computer & the Visa.....) I'm no longer quite sure of the exact size of the stash--some things not being accounted for and the total still reflecting yarn that has been used--but I believe I probably started the year with somewhere around 120,000 yards of yarn. I know--it's a frightening number even when guessing, HOWEVER, if I have used up 20,000 yards by the end of the year I will have used up 1/6th of the existing stash!!! By the end of next year's yarn ban, I could be down to a 4 year's supply of yarn! THAT could be considered a "reasonable" stash amongst my knitting friends (Note to those with stash issues: hang out with people who have a larger stash than you do. Trust me on this one). I HA...

My ability to ignore projects is second only to my continued inability to estimate how long it actually takes to knit things. 2 sleeves in 3 days......HA!!!!!

Sleeves seem like such small things--you don't cast on many stitches, and only add more stitches gradually, so occasionally an unwary knitter is foolishly sucked into believing that she could finish a sleeve in one day. That, however, is not really the case. Today I have spent WAY more time than I care to admit working on the first sleeve, and I'm not even at the half-way mark. All that knitting completely wore Theo out, so I was able to get some cat-free shots of the Fir Cone shawl now that it is blocked. It's not quite square, and no matter how I pinned it, the edging doesn't lay completely flat--it would probably have been good to skip a few stitches on each side. But, it's still a lovely shawl that will look fine when it's worn. A few close-ups for detail: And now I'm going to go do something--anything--as long as it doesn't involve sleeves!