How are you?
Thank you for being here again and thank you for all the messages xx.
We are deep in January, actually January is almost behind us and spring is taking leaps in the amount of light we are gaining every single week. The weather has been mild, good for outdoors and walking. And! There has been knitting again after a few weeks of hiatus. I have finished two projects, socks and a blanket, Anthology throw by Helen Stewart.
I saw these Anthology throws knitted as advent projects last year in December. I thought about joining but I did not feel like knitting much and so I did not. Then one night after the New Year while watching tv I felt the urge to have needles in my hands again and in a whim bought the pattern, looked at my stash and picked one little skein of yarn and cast on. (Maybe I picked red since we were so close to Christmas.)In December people were knitting with advent yarns, either with 20 gram or 10 gram balls in the order they were unwrapping their calendars. I have never bougth myself those small advent skeins so I decided to take my huge red yarn basket (at the moment my stash is organized by colors) and weigh all the little balls and everything over 20 grams needed to be wound into smaller balls so that I would never knit with more than 20 gram ball. I used few yarns more than once.
I am not sure why this way of looking at the stash made all the difference. I have used odd balls a lot, but wrapping little balls was interesting and enjoyable. I did not make exactly the same size, did not feel like weighing ever so often.
Also I did stick to the same color family, with a few exceptions, to have little bit of unity in the final result. (I am looking at my blue basket and am thinking of knitting my next scrap yarn project in the same manner. I have not decided on the project yet. Maybe another blanket.)
I would love to say out loud (write down) that this will be the year of stash and year of scraps and orphan skeins or 52 weeks of scrap yarn! But… if I go and declare something like that, I will just do the opposite. I will start to hanker new yarn and will keep adding to my stash every turn possible. Knowing all that, I won’t say it or won’t write it down here. But I wish, how I wish I could have the discipline to do just that.Would love to eye the patterns and figure out how to make them with small left-over balls I have accumulated over the past almost 55 years. (Before that I used my Mom’s stash.) There is lots of various fingering weights and they are so easy to pair with another or with mohair or alpaca or some lace yarn. Just think about that…Every single hat or pair of mittens or socks I have ever knit, has added to the left-over pile (ok, not every!!). And then there are the lonely skeins, I overestimated how much yarn I would need for a sweater and after the final stitch was done, there was one skein plus some left over. Let’s not forget the purchases, when I just needed to buy this one beautiful skein of yarn.
The stash has been in good use for the past almost 5 years, most eaters were the four blankets I crocheted, but still there is plenty. I have knitted Stephen West shawls with odd skeins, his shawl designs are usually huge and eat lots of yarn. Thus the state of my stash is not as bad as it could be, but still there is plenty - maybe it is 500 grams lighter now (am counting the socks too!).
Fingers crossed it will not be 5000 grams heavier next December… That could so easily happen. So very easily…
Wool with you,
Lene