A few Saturdays ago was the Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene, OR. I took a trip down for my first Oregon fiber festival. I did manage to buy a bit of yarn.

First up was a purchase from A Verb for Keeping Warm. I’d first heard about the company in a Stash & Burn podcast. They use natural dyes, and their booth was filled with beautiful colors. I had a hard time choosing a yarn. I finally ended up with the Superwash Merino Fingering in Kerala, and is lovely shades of brown with some red tones.

Apparently, the next yarn I purchased is from a vendor also in the same Stash & Burn episode, but I don’t remember hearing their name (must go back and re-listen). The yarn is from Toots LeBlanc & Co. It’s 1200 yards of fingering weight yarn in a Jacob wool, alpaca and mohair blend. I’m thinking this would make a great “rustic-style” lace shawl.

I did, of course, make a stop at the Blue Moon Fiber Arts booth. I took a cruise through and didn’t see anything in the regular stock that I needed. However, this skein on the Rare Gems rack caught my eye. For those who don’t know, the Rare gems are the mistakes or over-dyes when colors aren’t quite to the color specification.

I must admit that I’ve been a bit obsessed with chartreuse green lately, so this skein was particularly hard to resist. Plus, with the added depth of some rust and aqua colors (not colors I’d have imagined it paired with), it had to come home with me.

Finally, I purchased some lovely 100% alpaca laceweight from Crown Mountain Farms. It’s their Alpaca Lace Athena in the Stonehenge colorway. It’s 500 yards per two ounce skein, and I purchased two. I’m currently using it to knit Icarus.

I was also lucky enough to win a prize in Black Sheep Bingo, but I haven’t had a chance to photograph it yet. I’ll be sure and post it later.

For Christmas, I was the lucky recipient of three skeins of Socks that Rock Lightweight, including two of the Ravens.  Jim described his color choices as two he liked, and one he thought was hideous - so of course I’d like it.  If the man had his way, I’d only knit with black yarn (and maybe some charcoal gray).

First up is Grawk, one of the Ravens.  It’s a bit of purple and olive-y green mixed with the black (or, as described by Blue Moon - raspberries and pond scum drowned in black).

Next up is Corvid, another Raven.  It is shades of purple and greenish-blue mixed with the black. 

Finally is Sun Stone.  This is one of the shaded solids, and I’m really excited about it.  Jim was right, I love the color.

Of the three, I think that the Corvid is my favorite. Not sure what any of them will become, so they’re all headed into the big sock yarn stash bag for now.  Jim purchased sock yarn for me for all of my major gift events this year, my birthday, our anniversary (which featured 5 unblogged skeins of Socks that Rock), and Christmas.  If he keeps this up in future years, I may never need to purchase sock yarn again!

With the holiday schedule, I have been knitting much faster than I’ve been posting.  I cast-on and finished a Sunflower Tam from Knitting Nature without posting about it, but I’ll give it it’s own finished project post soon.  My current project is the Embossed Leaves Socks.  I’m using the Interweave Knits Winter 2005 issue, but it’s also available in the Favorite Socks book.  I’ve been using the Knit Picks Risata in Cocoa that Jim got me for my birthday.  I flew through the first sock and have started on the second.  The only major modification that I made was that I used a slip-stitch pattern on the heel.  I kept the garter-stitch border, I just didn’t like the plain stockinette heel flap.  I’m not sure if I’ll finish these before heading back to work, but I’m going to try. 

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.

Recently, I’ve been swearing off yarn purchases due to my stash guilt.  There is my post on not going to Stitches Midwest, and I didn’t go to Wisconsin Sheep & Wool for the first time since I started knitting.  This week, I was weak.

I had the opportunity to be in the western suburbs this week with some free time on my hands.  I sat in Panera knitting and having some coffee, when it occurred to me that the next town over had a yarn store.  It wasn’t one I’d been to, but I’d seen them at Stitches before.  Since I hadn’t planned ahead, I pulled out the handy new GPS, went to the shopping tab and entered “F-R-I-N-G-E”.  I guessed that the GPS unit might not know about yarn stores, but the results of my search listed Fringe: A Knitting Salon.  (Side note - knowing the GPS knows yarn stores is a scary and enabling idea)  Since the store was just about 8 miles away, I decided that it would be worth the trip.

It was about 10am, which seemed reasonable as a yarn store opening time, so I hopped in the car and drove to the store.  As I arrived at the parking lot, there was a large sign that said “Yarn” in the window of one of the stores.  The GPS had found the right place.  The door to the store was open, so I went on in.

It’s a nice small shop.  As I walked in the door, there was a bench full of worsted hand-dyed merino, always a nice greeting.  The store had to arranging methods.  Lots of yarn was organized by color, but the baby yarn, lace, and sock yarns all had their own area not mixed with the rest of the colors.  The same was true for the Encore and the Brown sheep yarns (and maybe the Malabrigo?).  I was a little confused by the yarn organization. Being the bargain hunter that I am, I was immediately drawn to the big table in the middle of the room labeled “Sale - Buy 1 get 1 of equal or lesser value free”.  Buy one get one free yarn?  Whee!!!

There was quite a mix of yarn on the sale table, but I was drawn to the handpainted yarns.  The interesting thing about the handpainted yarn was that most of it was unlabeled, nothing to indicate yardage, yarn weight, or price.  Those yarns that did have tags were from Pink Cottage Yarns - Exclusive Hand-Dyed yarn from Fringe.  Now, I happen to know that the owners of Fringe are also the creative force behind Dream in Color yarns.  In fact, they run the Dream in Color dye studio/shipping area out of the back of Fringe.  Could this Pink Cottage Yarn actually be either the predecessor to or test samples for Dream in Color?  I can’t find any proof on the web, but the yardages are the same, and a few of the colors on the table looked very similar to a few I saw on the Dream in Color website.  What’s a knitter to do when presented with this kind of a deal?

I bought yarn.

What did I get?  There were two skeins of a beautiful chartreuse green worsted weight, but I couldn’t justify only purchasing 500 yards.  I didn’t have my list of patterns and yardage with me, but I didn’t think that 500 yards would make me anything substantial, so I left it on the table.   Then, I found some sock yarn on the table.  Sock yarn at buy one get one?  Two 100 gram skeins for less than twenty dollars?  I couldn’t resist; I bought sock yarn.

Both yarns are varying shades of a solid color.  I thought that it would be nice to have some yarn that would work better for some of the textured sock patterns I want to make.  Since I used my green yarn with Bayerische, I don’t have much stash in solid colors sock yarns.  I really liked the gold, it has really rich tonal colors in it.  The blue is much closer to being a solid color.

Please forgive me for my weakness.

This is the big weekend, Stitches Midwest Market is here, and it’s just a short drive away.  Just about everyone from KTog is going, but not me.  I’ve attended the event for the past three years, since I started knitting, and had a lot of fun while I went.  I’ve purchased some wonderful yarn, and found some fabulous deals.

Over the few years that I’ve been knitting, I feel that I’ve become smarter about my yarn shopping.  In the beginning, I used to just buy yarn in whatever quantity I felt like.  This style of shopping lead to a lot of single balls or two balls of a yarn in my stash.  Every time I wanted to make something, I found that my stash of yarn that was not enough to do anything with on its own.  Long before Ravelry came along, I started using a spreadsheet to track my yarn inventory and patterns on my wish list with yarn requirements.  I carry this list with me every time I go shopping.  I try to by yarn that I can associate to a project on my wish list.  While the yarn is not always used for the intended project, at least I know that I’ve purchased enough yarn to complete a project. 

The frightening part of the process of photographing the stash for Ravelry was finding yarn that isn’t in my spreadsheet.  That surprised me.  I thought that I was fairly obsessive about tracking my inventory, but somehow some yarn still slipped through.

While I’ve had the yarn in the spreadsheet, I only look at the spreadsheet when I’m starting a new project or when I’m going yarn shopping.  It’s very easy to not pay attention to the details contained within the file.  Photographing and uploading the stash to Ravelry has forced me to confront my stash (it’s not all there yet).  As I work with it, I realize that I realize that I have a lot of wonderful yarn.  It is more yarn than I can knit in a long, long time.  There is enough yarn to make multiple shawls, multiple sweaters, lots of socks, and some more left over.  The only possible projects I don’t really have yarn for is a baby blanket type gift project, since most of the yarn is not machine washable.  Also, I’ve been dreaming of a fair isle sweater, and that yarn doesn’t exist in the stash either.

In the end, I’ve come to the realization that when I visit my stash, I just don’t feel the need to acquire any more yarn.  There is a tiny twinge of guilt for not using the yarn yet, but it is mostly contentment with the yarn that I own.  I know that if I visit Stitches, I’ll find another deal that just can’t be passed up (like the Rowan Denim at $2/ball from two years ago - still sitting in the stash).  When it comes to a deal on something I know I’ll use, I have very little willpower.  So, I decided that I just won’t go.  I hope everyone has fun this weekend; I’ll be looking for your stash photos and your stories.

I was glad to have received some knitting gifts for my birthday.  I received three books.  Heirloom Knitting by Sharon Miller.  I also received two of the Barbara Walker Treasury books, numbers two and three.

Now that I have these treasury books, I have an urge to participate in the Walker Treasury Project.  If you haven’t heard of it, it is an effort to knit swatches of all the patterns in the Walker Treasury books.  All of the swatches in the project are posted to a blog and categorized by book, stitch type, etc.  It’s a really interesting effort.

In addition to books, I was also the lucky recipient of yarn.  Pictured below is Knit Picks Risata in Cocoa and Memories in Redwood Forest.

Finally, there are two skeins of the Knit Picks Memories in Rocky Mountain Dusk.  Notice the amount of blue in the photo below.  If you check out the color selection on the Knit Picks site, the blue is barely noticeable.  Both the gifter and I were surprised by the color of this yarn.

I also got a new size 0 needle.  My Addi is taking a beating while knitting Bayerische.  It is in a weird arc/bent shape.  Speaking of Bayerische, I’m in the second repeat of chart D on sock number two.  I forgot how long each round of this sock takes.  I hope to finish the second repeat of chart D by the end of the weekend.

Too much work and no knitting leads to a very boring blog.  Hopefully there won’t be another work week like this for quite some time. 

Before life went insane two weeks ago, I teased a large shipment coming to my house.  Yes, I did receive two very large boxes of yarn. 

It wasn’t quite 38 pounds, but it was about 31.5.  You see, I’d organized a KTog group order of yarn from Elmore Pisgah’s online store.  I have to say that I was very please with the ordering process.  I placed my order on June 10th, and the order arrived at my house on June 14th.  There’s not much else to say, so I’ll leave you with photos of the yarn.

Colors below are Teal Blue, Yellow, Daisy Ombre, White, Delft Blue, Cream, Tea Rose, Sea Breeze, and chocolate.

Colors below are Shocking Pink, Yellow, Black, and Pink Lemonade

Colors below are Camel, Burgandy, Raspberry Swirl, Light Grape, Shades of Green, Sour Green Apple, Apple Green, and Bubblegum.

Colors below are Sunburst, Mar-Di-Gras, Fiesta Ombre, Black, White, and Dalmation.

There has been a bit of stash enhancement lately, all sock yarn.  First up is the yarn I purchased in Madison over Memorial Day weekend.  At Lakeside Fibers, I purchased Tofutsies in the color 724, Foot the Bill.  When I compare the size of the ball of Tofutsies with any of my other sock yarns, I find it difficult to believe that it has 425m.  The ball of yarn is very small and dense.  But, the yarn feels super soft, and I can’t wait to work with it.

At ‘Tis the Season, in Middleton, I purchased some Trekking XXL in color 69.  I haven’t decided if this will become socks for me or not.  It’s a little drab compared to most of my sock yarn.  Perhaps it will become socks for my husband.

Finally, this last one doesn’t really count as stash enhancement.  Back at the end of March, KTog had a yarn swap party.  At the party, Donna made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  She offered up some of her custom dyed yarn from her Etsy shop, MySmallWonders, in exchange for some handdyed loopy mohair that I had.  I finally picked the yarn that I wanted, and Donna brought it to KTog on Tuesday.  This is the Dew on the Violets colorway of her fingering weight yarn, with about 383 yards.  It is an 80% Wool, 20% Nylon blend.  I was wonderfully suprised by how soft it is.  I may just need to get more yarn from her.

Now, there have been times in the past that where I’ve tended to buy sock yarn with similar colors, but nothing like this has happened before.  I can’t believe how close in color these two yarns are.  The yarn from MySmallWonders does have a bit more variation in color than the Tofutsies, with some subtle pinks and yellows mixed in.  But, all I see when I look at them is green, turquoise, and purple. 

Last Saturday, Kelly, Melissa and I headed out for some yarn adventures.  Our first stop was at The Fold, in Marengo, IL.   While we were there, I picked up this lovely gray ball of Jade Sapphire Lacey Lamb.  It’s only about 825 yards of a very fine laceweight, and it has no associated project yet.  I’ll have to go diving into the pattern library to see how far I can stretch it.  I also purchased two skeins of sock yarn.  The first is Socks that Rock mediumweight in the Pebble Beach colorway.  The other skein is Trekking XXL in color 180.  I’ve not used the Trekking before, so I’m excited to try it out.

Here are photos of the two skeins I purchased last month while in Denver.  The first is the Merino-Tencel blend that I purchased from Skaska Designs.  The color is hard to capture in a photo.  It’s a beautiful brown/black color, with a lot of shine and highlights. 

When I returned from Denver last month, a local yarn store was having a 50% store closing sale.  When I got there, it turns out she’s decided not to close the shop after all, but was still honoring the sale.  I picked up this lovely Lane Borgosesia Merinos Sei in an olive color.  I also purchased two skeins of Lang JaWoll in a Gray Marl/Tweed.