A Little Yarn On The Side

I did the math, which is NEVER a good idea when talking about one's stash.  I have 114 miles of yarn in my stash   I think I need to lay down now...................

I had debated about this, and had originally planned to place one yarn order before climbing back on, but that STILL adds yarn to my sewing room, so instead I have just decided that for the next SIX MONTHS, I'm not buying anything.  Yarn, fabric, patterns--nothing.   I decided on 6 months because on my Joann's excursion on the 5th, I only bought 5 yards of muslin because it seemed quite different than what I'd been getting before, and I wasn't sure it was good enough to use for much.  I'm trying it out on the table runners, and I'm very unimpressed, so I'll need to find something different by then.  UNTIL THEN, time to use what I have! I used up all of the Patons Metallic yarn on two keyhole scarves, and ended up having to make one shorter than the other.  It will be fine once blocked, and I hated this yarn so much that I was not ABOUT to go buy more of it.  It's lovely and soft, but snags on everything--even dry skin, which is sort of hard to avoid...

There have been a LOT of table runners on this blog in the last year, but if you think that means I have this great stockpile of gifts all set and ready to go, you would be wrong. A lot of them have already been given away and only a few--if any--will still be around when Christmas 2015 rolls around.  And while there are 5 red and white runners in progress, they aren't exactly whipping right along.  Three have all the sashing, and I have stippled my first project.  I used white thread, so I haven't been able to get a good picture of it, but you can take my word for it.  I had a few tension issues, I had to rip out a bit because I got the backing muslin folded over on itself at one point, and I can only hope a real quilter never sees the thing, but I'm good with all of that.  Free-motion quilting has been on my list to try for some time, and I finally got the courage up to do it!!!!!  There's still the binding and the other 4, but I tried free-motion qu...

So I finally got all the blocks put together, and it turns out that I am making FIVE table runners.  This is fine, as I do need quite a few gifts this year, but it would have been easier had I guessed this before trying to lay them out and running out of flat surfaces.  They're pretty random, which I'm proud of myself for doing.  One of the prints is just slightly the wrong color in certain light but works in others, so I'm hoping stippling will help with that, though with FIVE table runners there might be some experimentation with decorative stitch "ties" as well.  Five is more than I had anticipated. The next step is a white sashing around the runners, and at this point I realized that I'd used all my heavier white cotton on kimono ornaments.  I have a lighter one, but the seams would show through.  Steeling myself, I went to Joanns after lunch, and the store was almost empty!  There wasn't even a line at the cutting counter IN SPITE of their b...

Yesterday I received an email from Nancy's Notions touting 7 ways to get my sewing room organized in 2015.  Unless she was actually advocating large donations to charities, I don't think any 7 things would make a bit of difference in my sewing room--but I do admire her optimism...................

Last night I went to bed excited in the knowledge that I was 200+ stitches in to the final row before the armhole on the marathon sweater.  This morning, with a whole lot LESS excitement I am undoing those 200+ stitches because the instructions include the horrible phrase: Do not knit the final row of the gusset, which I am sure I read at some point but since I started this monster in September of 2012, I am obviously a bit fuzzy on the details--like why I thought this was a brilliant idea in the first place.  At least it didn't say "at the same time."  I have lost a lot of my knitterly goodwill to that phrase over the years--especially because the place one is most likely to find those words on any written knitting pattern is after a great deal of text explaining the previous step and most often on the next page to catch unwary knitters who have not learned to read ahead, which I believe is about 99% of us at one point or another.  It's moments like this that ...

Wow!  A 4.9 earthquake hit Challis, Idaho this morning, and I actually felt it in my sewing room.  It was my first earthquake ever, and as I was upstairs it was a pretty big jolt, but it didn't even occur to me that it was an earthquake.  Challis had a smaller one two weeks ago, but the last big quake was in 1983 and measured 6.9.  My hometown did feel the tremors of that one, but we were in a car on the way to school and missed it--it wasn't until we pulled up to the school and found the entire school in buses parked on the football field that we knew anything had happened.  An earthquake!!!!!!!!! It shouldn't be all that surprising in geological terms--Idaho is very close to Yellowstone which is a monster volcano, and we have natural hot springs everywhere, and we even have Craters of the Moon and even further north where I grew up, there is so much lava rock that there's one large chunk of land on the ranch dubbed "the Rock Pasture."  And the presence...