My big goal for this year is to learn to love my stash.  I decided that I need to work towards having only yarns in my stash that I like and will use.  Right now it’s really a jumble of things I love and “what on earth was I thinking” yarns.  Last year, I was pleased with the yarn purchases I made, because I did really love all of them.

I made my first step towards this goal recently with one of those “what was I thinking” yarns.  It was a yarn I got forever ago, when I was first learning to knit.  It’s a super bulky, 2.25 st/inch, loosely spun thick-and-thin single. Not a yarn that fits with the profile of what I usually knit.

In the spirt of my goal, I decided to try swatching with the yarn, to see how it knit up. While swatching, I noticed that was so loosely spun that the simple act of knitting removed twist to the point that it fell apart.  After swatching up a skein (it’s only 33 yards), I really didn’t like the finsihed fabric.  Since I didn’t love the yarn, and I wasn’t sure what I could get for it if I tried to destash it, I decided to try something crazy.

First, I ran it through the spinning wheel counterclockwise to remove all of the existing twist.  Then, I sat down with the result and spun it as if it were a thin roving.  I drafted and spun for several days.  When all of the singles were spun, I decided to ply it into a two-ply yarn.  Here is the finished result.

I’m so pleased with how it turned out.  I’m thinking about casting on with it soon for something like the Shetland Triangle shawl.

It’s been a long, hard November. Lots of work = less knitting.

The phyllo-yoked pullover has been progressing slowly. Large pieces of stockinette is fairly boring knitting. My work schedule was really keeping me from knitting, and I started to worry about finishing my sweater in November. However, with four days off over the Thanksgiving weekend, I was sure that I’d be able to make great progress and finish up the sweater in the month of November. I worked on it on Wednesday night and Thursday, sewing the seams of the pieces so I could join it in the round to knit the yoke. Everything was going so well. I sat down on Friday, joined the body and the sleeves, and started knitting. About a round and a half into knitting, disaster happened. My needle snapped just before it joined the cable.

It’d felt tight, but I didn’t think there was that much tension in the process. With the needle free, the cable pulled back and stitches fell everywhere.

I knew from swatching that this was the only needle I had that would meet gauge. It wasn’t even like it would be quick to replace, it’s part of my Denise set. I assumed the project was doomed – there was no way it would be finished in November.

Undeterred by the disaster, I knew that needed to knit to calm my nerves. I pulled out the Mad Color Weave sock, grafted the toe on the first sock, and cast on for sock number two. As can be seen in the photo, I’m most of the way through the leg; only 1.5 more repeats of the pattern until I start the heel.

Luckily, as the weekend progressed, I remembered that Jennifer also has a Denise set. Since we work together, I asked on Monday to borrow one of her size 5 needles, if she wasn’t using them. Luckily, they weren’t in use, and she brought me the needle on Tuesday.

Last night I picked up the fallen stitches and went back to knitting the yoke. The sweater did not seem nearly as tight on the needle as I’d remembered. I still have no idea how I broke the needle. I managed to get a few rows into the yoke before heading to bed last night.

I still think that it will be a real challenge to finish knitting the sweater in November, but I may only go over by a few days. Participating in NaKniSweMo has taught me that knitting a sweater doesn’t have to take a long time. If it wasn’t for this month’s hectic work schedule, I’d have easily finished this project in three to four weeks. Perhaps this will inspire me to knit more sweaters in my future.

Mom has asked for this Drops sweater (Ravelry) for her birthday, December 20th. I’ve considered taking on the challenge, but she hasn’t sent me her measurements yet. I’m not sure I could do it in the worsted weight version, but the bulky version might just be finishable in that timeline.

I’m not sure what it has been lately, but I’ve been feeling so uninspired to knit. I’ve actually been feeling this way for quite some time, but the knitalong for Bayerische and the overdue baby sweater gave me projects that I didn’t need to seek inspiration for. The following story summarizes my last two weeks of knitting.

The only project that I’ve really been working on is a pair of socks that I’m designing. It progressed like this. Produce chart on paper to match design vision. Cast on and knit 4-6 inches of leg. Examine sock, maybe even try it on. Hate everything about the pattern or fabric or the way the color pooled. Frog the project. Let the project stew for a few days. Modify the chart and start over again. I’d been through this cycle about six times, but I just couldn’t produce something I liked. (The good news is that for all of this knitting and ripping, the yarn still looks good.)

Convinced that it was just my lack of pattern design originality that was causing this non-knitting mood, I decided to cast on a pattern from a book. I started knitting Spey Valley from Nancy Bush’s Knitting on the Road, but gave up on it after I finished the ribbed cuff. I ripped out the knitting and put the book back on the shelf.

I still felt that there had to be something out there for me, so I went seeking inspiration. I decided to see what others were working on. I searched around the knitting blog ring for so long that I’ve seen many blogs more than once (and sent so many broken/not found sites to the admins that I’m sure they’re annoyed). I spent time on Ravelry. I still felt at a loss for project ideas.

Since starting with a pattern was not getting me anywhere, I decided to try and finish photographing all of my stash for Ravelry. Perhaps if I could sit and look at photos of it all at once, I’d feel a bit more inspiration. I dug the stash out of the cedar trunk on Monday night, just in time for my husband to walk in and see it scattered everywhere. I managed to progress to the point that only about 1/3 of my stash that is in Ravelry is without a photo, but there’s still more stash not in Ravelry yet. By this point, my patience for finding sources of inspiration was wearing thin. Touching and photographing the stash wasn’t working. There had to be another way.

My next idea was to “give back” to the community. I’ve been a volunteer editor at Ravelry, but I decided that instead of waiting for people to put patterns from those back issues of Interweave in for me to edit, I’d start entering the patterns. First, I went and checked my editing queue, and cleaned up the three or four patterns that needed approval. Then, I started entering patterns. Between the cleanup and additions, I quickly grew tired of my pattern work (although people have already added some of these patterns to their queue).

Somehow, it finally dawned on me, the reason I couldn’t seem to focus on a knit project was related my uncertainty about how to approach my stash. I was torn between casting on for a single, large lace project (large yardage, small mass) and a smaller project with larger needles (less yardage, larger mass). Which was more important, mass or yardage?

I think this may have been triggered by my recent trip to Oregon, and lots of talk of moving. For right now, I feel that I need to make an effort to reduce the mass, and not be as concerned with yardage in the stash. If a cross-country move is to take place next year, I must be prepared to deal with all my yarn.

So, with that realization, I spent this morning (very early, before dawn) surfing through my books on Ravelry. I stumbled upon this, the Phyllo Yoked Pullover from Knitting Nature.

I posted about this sweater back when I got the book in June, but somehow I’d forgotten about it. Since I was already on Ravelry, I hopped over to my stash page. Turns out that there may just be some stash yarn that will knit to gauge, with adequate yardage. Swatching commences soon. Look out knitting, here I come.

Little progress is being made in my house on knitting projects.  The sock that I’m working on has been sitting in a bag, untouched, for about two weeks now.  My other project, the baby sweater, just gets neglected.

I have managed to finish both sleeves on the sweater.  I decided to knit them in the round to eliminate additional finishing steps on this project.  In order to knit them in the round, I had to put the rest of the sweater on waste yarn (the blue seen in the photo below) because I have only the one size US4 needle.

I’m hoping to have some knitting time over the next week that will allow me to finish the baby sweater, and possibly cast on for an additional project.  I’m headed out on a trip, and with the airport wait times and flights, I think that the baby sweater should be done before I return.  As proof of my insane confidence, I leave you with this.  I dug through the stash and found this.  It is now in a nice, center-pull ball on my table, waiting to be packed in luggage.  I’m thinking a Nancy Bush Knitting on the Road pattern might be appropriate for this trip.  I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

So, Ravelry posted a way to check your place on the waiting list.  I’ve got less than 1,000 people in front of me.  Based upon the Ravelry blog’s previously stated statisitics about the number of invites they are sending per week, I’m thinking that I should get in this week.  While I heard about the site early on, I wasn’t really interested in joining.  It wasn’t until Ravelry posted screenshots of the features that I really became interested.  I have the advantage that I already keep a fairly extensive spreadsheet of my yarn inventory and some projects I want to make. 

As I was surfing around the net today, I stumbled upon a site of knitting and felted bag patterns that I’d never been to before, Noni Designs.  I’ve never seen their patterns, but I love this bag, the Large Patterned Prism Bag.  I even love it in the chocolate and aqua colors shown.  I haven’t done any felting in more than a year, but this bag might just be a reason to jump in.  The site also has a nice tutorial on how to line square bags and triangle shaped bags.

There has been no knitting progress on Bayerische.  I did manage to rip the toe back to the last patterned row, but I did nothing from there.  The knitting time I had this weekend was spent making some Ballband Dishcloths in the cotton that I have.