Adventures in Stash Knitting, or, Another Lesson in "You Should Know Better By Now"

So, the whole point of knitting from stash is, you know, using up stash yarn. I mean, I have yarn. Not as much as some folks, but enough that I'm not going to run out any time soon. And as I've got all this yarn, I want to knit it up. I haven't gone cold sheep (it's like going "cold turkey," but, well, knitters) or anything, but I am making a point of being mindful about what I'm buying.

Anyway, some time ago, a couple of my friends were doing a little destashing, and  I acquired a whole lot of Cascade Eco Wool. A few skeins in cream from my friend Holly, a few skeins in chocolate from my friend Tonya, and a couple random skeins of each from my friends Colleen and Jan added up to something like 6000 yards of bulky-weight yarn. That's more than 3 miles of yarn taking up a whole lot of space in my stash.

The first project I made from this stash was the Walnut Snood from the awesome Japanese knitting magazine Amirisu. I ended up using a little more than a skein for this cabled infinity scarf. Looking over my project notes, it looks like it took me less than a week to complete it, and I've worn the hell out of it since then. It's my go-to scarf, and I love its versatility: on the occasions when I've neglected to wear a hat, it's come in really handy as a sort of hood and even as a balaclava. I can't say enough good things about it.

The next project was Streymoy from the Winter 2013 Knitty. I think I documented the sweater pretty well here, so you know all the trouble I had with it. But, really, the whole reason I chose that pattern was because I thought I'd be able to use up all this yarn. It used up quite a bit, but sadly, not all of it. I had to think about what I was going to do next.

I didn't have anything specific in mind, just using up this yarn! I did a Ravelry search based on the gauge I was knitting, the yardage I had, and the necessity for colorwork since I had two colors of this yarn. After looking through what felt like a million patterns, I settled on the Northern Lights poncho from a Vogue Knitting book. It had been published 10 years ago, so I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to find it, but it turned out that my local library had a copy. It was a quick, fun knit. That, again, didn't use up all the yarn.

Ugh! Seriously, I was getting pretty sick of knitting so many brown and white projects (including the projects I made with some really cool locally-grown Shetland wool), but I was determined to use up this yarn. Since I didn't want to make another poncho, I got going on another Ravelry search, this time deciding I had just the right amount of yarn to knit Boreal by Kate Davies, and knit it in time to wear it for Christmas. Yeah, I don't know what the hell I was thinking, either.

Based on the amount of yarn I had in each color, I really should have done the sweater with the light color on the bottom, but I decided that for my body type, it would look best with dark on the bottom half. So with a little trepidation, I cast on. The knitting went quickly since there was so much stockinette. Once I made my way through the bottom half, I started getting a little nervous that I was going to run out of dark yarn for the top half. I had a bad feeling about it that only got worse the further along I got. On December 18th I ran out of the chocolate yarn. A week before Christmas! What was I going to do? There are only a couple yarn shops in the area that carry Eco Wool, so I was really sweating it. It wasn't necessary to have a new sweater in time for the holiday, but I really wanted one.

So one night after work, I braved the crazy traffic by the malls to go to the shop that I thought was my best chance of finding the yarn. I had a 20 minute window to get off the bus, cross something like 10 lanes of traffic, walk to the shop way at the far side of the parking lot, find the yarn, pay for it, and catch the bus to get home. The shop had exactly one skein of the yarn I needed. It wasn't the same dye lot, but I was pretty sure it wasn't going to matter with the color work, so I snatched it up and hurried to the checkout where there was a woman ahead of me who had a million little individually-priced stems of fake wreath-making stuff and nearly as many coupons. All I had was the one skein, but I was 30 seconds too late getting to the cashier. After roundly cursing her out (in my mind, though, not out loud), I took a breath and hoped I'd be able to make my bus. It was a Christmas miracle! I paid for my precious, ran for the bus stop, and thanks to the ridiculous traffic, I had time to spare before the bus arrived.

Once I got going again on the sweater, I was able to finish it in practically no time at all. From beginning to end, the whole thing took 10 days. And I had yarn left over, which kind of bothers me, but I just can't bear the thought of yet another Eco Wool sweater. I only ended up using about 100 yards out of the new skein of yarn, so I still have a healthy 400 yards left, in addition to nearly a full skein of the cream. I'd really like to use it up, but I think I'm going to give it a year or so. It'll keep.

Well, that's all I've got for tonight. Thanks for sticking with me over my long holiday break, Friends. Until next time.

WIP it good.

All my WIPs continue apace. I seem to be a little all over the place lately with my projects, but somehow, bit by bit, they're progressing.

This week I managed to get to the halfway point in the Hanami stole. I'm really happy with how it's coming along. I like that the beads have given it some heft (as hefty as seed beads can be on an alpaca/silk lace stole) and I think it's going to drape beautifully once it's finished. I hope I have some occasion to wear it. Maybe I'll get invited to a wedding. Or maybe we'll go to the ballet. Or something. Of course, I'm not sure I have anything to wear with it, so I'll have to get on that.

Knitting. Tasty, tasty, knitting.

I've also made progress on my Rafters cardigan. Just this morning I completed the front shaping and now I'm ready to get everything all joined up for some progress on the body. It looks a little small right now, but I think that's because so many of the sweaters I've made for myself have turned out too big. Even if it's a bit small now, I'm pretty sure that blocking will relax some of the tightness in the cables. So long as I get gauge on the sweater as a whole, I'll have about an inch of ease.

Since my last couple posts I've frogged the blue socks for my friend, Dan, and started a new pair for him. I'm doing the Scylla pattern again, this time with a skein of Mountain Colors Crazyfoot I've had in my stash for awhile. In the skein, the yarn looked a lot more brown than it's knitting up. In the socks, I'm seeing more jewel tones, but I think it's still masculine. I hope he'll be cool with it. This is my commuting-and-waiting-in-line knitting and it's moving right along. I've probably got another two weeks with it before it's finished.

Of course, with three projects on the needles (four, if you count my unfinished Halloween costume), it looks like I'm not going to be doing any Christmas knitting. There just won't be any time. I have a feeling I'm still going to be baking up a storm, but it's already too late to be in time for Christmas. I will, however, be scouring my house for just the right contribution to our family's Dirty Santa exchange.

On that note, I'll sign off for now. Until next time, Friends.

Santa's little sweatshop is closed for the season!

I finally finished all the owls! Like, half an hour ago. All of them now have eyes and beaks, though none of them have pupils - I'm not a masochist, after all. So now I can get to the enjoyable part of Christmas by spending time with family, sharing good food and drink, and exchanging gifts!

Merry Christmas, Friends!

Joy to the World!

I have my laptop back and can post regularly again, instead of shivering in a cold corner of the basement, trying to make do on my husband's desktop. It seems like ages since I've posted, and I've missed it. Every so often, I would think, "I should post that on the blog." But I didn't.

Anyway, I've been knitting Christmas owls like crazy since I was last here. Fourteen total. Fifteen, if you count the one my mom admired so much that I let her take it home with her after Thanksgiving. Six of them have eyes and beaks, which means I have to make 8 more sets in the next few days. This is achievable. At least I think so now. I'm not sure if I'll be singing the same song come Monday evening. Cross your fingers for me.

I also managed to finish my father in-law's socks (just yesterday!) and I'm really pleased at how well they came out. This is the first time I've ever knit socks on size 0 needles, and I think I might want to do more. That size needle is perfect for Cascade Heritage, and my husband is actually kind of coveting those socks, so I think he'll get a pair too. I can't believe I'm committing to making more stuff on tinier needles. I may just start getting manicures so I can get my hands massaged after all that fine-gauge knitting. I wonder if that would qualify for my health savings account. I'll have to check that the next time I'm in the office.

Now that the socks are done, I've cast on a project on big(ger) needles: Cabled Hat by Yuko Nakamura. This will be a belated gift for my trainer at the gym, whose favorite color is purple. The only purple yarn I had in my stash was one lonely skein of Nashua Isabella (now discontinued) in amethyst that I bought before the Knit Nook closed. Since that yarn only has 109 yards to the skein, I had to have a good look through the Ravelry pattern database before I found a hat pattern I could make with so little yarn. I'm really hoping I have enough! This will be a nice project to work on while visiting with all our family at Christmas, especially since it's on size 7 needles. I have one skein of the Isabella in topaz as well, which will come in handy if I finish this hat before the holiday is over.

One other crafty thing I've been working on is getting some art prints I've had for awhile framed and matted. Sometime last year, I bought this set of prints from my friends at Madpixel and have wanted them on the wall ever since. Finally, last weekend, I went to the art supply store, bought some mat board and got busy! I also managed to buy some frames and spent the weekend getting each print in a frame. I hung all the prints this afternoon and was so happy about how good they looked that I staged a little bourbon tableau and took the photo you see below. Of course, now that I've taken another look around their website, there are plenty more prints I need to have.

Well, that's all I have for now. Merry Christmas, Friends.

So much for turning those heels three weeks ago.

Okay. So I intended to keep flying along with my progress on the Salted Caramel socks. Then I signed up for 3-day-a-week Boot Camp classes at my gym. Which is just as tiring as it sounds. I also had a couple sick days in there. And then my mother came for a week's visit over Thanksgiving. And while all these things might sound like excuses, I prefer to call them mitigating factors as to why I only got the heels of these socks turned yesterday.

Yep. It took me until yesterday to get those heels turned. And it's not like the knitting was difficult. It was two heel flaps, two little rounded heels, and two gussets to pick up. Nothing to it. Ah, well. Now they're turned and I can work on the gusset decreases for awhile. I still expect to have them finished well before Christmas, but now I might be defining "well before" as "just enough time to wash, block & wrap them before I get to Christmas" instead of "oh, cool! I have time to cast on for something mindless to knit on while I'm there." I just hope it doesn't turn into "maybe he won't notice me weaving in the ends before I give them to him unblocked."

In other news, I have completed a few more owls, if you consider "completed" as being stuffed and closed up, but not yet having eyes and a beak. After about the fourth owl, I decided I would just get as many knitted as I could and do the eyes and beaks later. Like maybe in the car on the way to Christmas. I don't think it will really be that bad, but I'm definitely starting to get a little nervous about there only being 25 days until the Big Day.

My yarn estimates for these guys have been coming out just about right: 15 grams of wool yarn is plenty. The cotton ones are taking a little more like 18 grams. And then the faux Fair Isle yarn one took a whole lot more because it turns out that yarn is probably a little more like sport or dk-weight than fingering weight. I wasn't sure at the beginning of that one how I'd like, but the more I look at it, the more I like it. I think once it has its eyes and beak and I hit it with a little steam, I'll like it a whole lot. I'll be sure to post new photos once they all have all their bits. I just hope for my sake it's before Christmas.

So, Friends, thanks for your patience between posts. Until next time.

Sometimes, the knitting is like magic.

Really. Sometimes I'm just mystified by the stuff I knit. Take these Scylla socks, for example. I am so amazed at how the heel flap on these toe-up socks looks just like the heel flap on most of the cuff-down socks I've ever made. See, on cuff-down socks, you knit the heel flap back and forth, then you pick up the selvedge stitches to make the gussets. For this sock, I increased along the sole and for the flap I did decreases every row, which produced the appearance of picked-up stitches. I'm sure it's a matter of how the decreases were stacked that made it look like a straight line rather than a slant, but I'm really impressed. I'm so glad there are people who have worked this out for me!

 Anyway, despite my amazement at my own work, I've managed to turn the heel on these socks and am in the home stretch on these socks. The knitting should move pretty quickly since the front and the back of the leg have the same stitch pattern. I hope to be binding off the cuff by this time next week.

As for the Christmas owls, I've completed three of them so far, but two of them need their eyes done. I seem to have found my groove on these guys. Of course now I'm worried that I'm going to run out of sock yarn leftovers before I run out of owls to make. It's taking about 15g of yarn for each owl and I have enough 15g leftovers for about 10 more owls. If I'm lucky, I will finish the FrankenScylla socks with enough yarn for one owl. I might even have enough of another color (in two balls) to get one more. That would get me 15 owls, which should be enough for my middle school-age and younger nieces and nephews. I'm not sure yet what we're going to do for the big kids. I'll have to ruminate on that for awhile. I'm not sure I'll have time to knit for them.

Well, that's all I have for tonight. See you next time, Friends.

So, I started a pair of socks.

Like that's a surprise to anyone. After finishing my mother-in-law's Veil of Rosebuds, I was looking for another good commuting project. Since I didn't have the yarn to make Salted Caramels for my father-in-law, I decided to start some socks for my husband. He's been getting a lot of wear out of the Milo socks I made for him almost two years ago (!), so I thought it was high time he got another.

When we were looking through my stash for yarn for his dad's socks, he remarked that he liked the skein of Miss Babs' Windsor Sock yarn that I'd bought last year at Sock Summit. It's a good thing I bought that with him in mind! The colorway is called "Frankensock," which has a lot of lovely greens and blues and black. It's definitely a high-contrast hand-dyed yarn, so I was pretty careful about which pattern I was going to use with it.

After considering lots of patterns, I ended up deciding on Scylla by Fiona Lucas. It's a nice slipped-stitch pattern, with a little bit of texture thrown in to keep it interesting. It's knitting up pretty quickly, which will come in handy as it starts getting closer to Christmas and the panic knitting starts. The slipped stitches are a nice contrast to how the yarn is striping, and I love that I'm getting to do some toe-up socks for the first time in a long while. I'm hoping to finish them pretty quickly, so husbeast can wear them soon, and so I can get started on his dad's socks.

Well, Friends, that's all I have for tonight. Maybe next time I'll have an update on the Columbine needlepoint.

Where has the time gone?

I can't believe it's nearly the end of December - I have no earthly idea where the last two weeks have gone. My husband's birthday was less than a week before Christmas, so we did stuff to celebrate it. Then there was Christmas itself, with all its attendant baking and gifting and socializing. For a minute there, I think I had something to do on 5 consecutive evenings. Oof.

I have done a little knitting since the last time I posted. I've made some progress on the Vilai socks, having turned the heel and nearly finished the gusset decreases. I have also made a mistake on these socks - I didn't read the pattern correctly and left out a chart repeat on the leg. By the time I realized why the leg looked a little short, I'd already gotten halfway through the heel flap and there was no way in hell I was going to rip back and potentially make a mess of all those yarnovers and twisted stitches in the leg. Nope. It would stay as it was. And I have short legs, anyway. Custom fit. That's me.

By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I'd done all I could do and was ready for some relaxing time with both our families. As we got on the road to make the 4-hour drive to my hometown, it was nearly dark, so there was no knitting in the car. But once we got settled in at Mom's house, I decided it would be fun to start an Ishbel with the gorgeous silk yarn I bought while I was on vacation last summer. The yarn is Lake Effect, a 100% tussah silk single-ply yarn in the Leelanau Sunset colorway. My understanding is that it is only available at the Thistledown Shoppe in Suttons Bay, Michigan, and was dyed by a local dyer. I'd been looking for an appropriate pattern to highlight the beautiful colors and finally decided that Ishbel was the way to go since it had a nice stockinette section and a fairly simple lace pattern that would not be too busy with the color changes in the yarn.

On Christmas Day, we had breakfast with Mom, then set out to meet my husband's family in Brown County, Indiana, a three-ish hour drive from Fort Wayne. I'm not quite sure where all the time went, but I can recall chilling out around the fireplace with some of my sisters-in-law and some of the nieces, watching the younger kids open their stockings (the mice were a big hit and there were requests for more!) and participating in the grown-ups' white elephant gift exchange. We scored a Sopranos trivia game and cookbook (that I think we forgot to bring home with us), and were able to give away a 3-foot tall ceramic piggy bank (a pig dressed as a firefighter who came to be called Firepig). A couple nephews contemplated what might happen if they tossed it into the fire. A couple nieces explored the possibility of turning it into some kind of garden statuary/fountain/scarecrow. Whatever they do, it's alright by me. More than one person found it to be a little creepy. I'm just glad my husband didn't steal it back and bring it home.

The day after Christmas was nice and relaxing and it seemed like all I did was hang out and knit. By the time I was ready to call it a day, I only had something like 6 rows to do and the Ishbel would be finished. I have no idea how I did so much so fast. The next morning, on the way back home to Louisville, I finished up the last bit, and completed the bind-off less than 5 minutes before we got home. It was pretty exciting to have a finished project so quickly. I even got it blocked the same evening and it was ready for me when I got home from work tonight! I think it came out well.

Next time, I think I'll show off the pretty little crocheted things that one of my Japanese aunts made for me when I was a baby, and have a little end of year recap. Until then, Friends.