So back in January, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee blogged about her self-imposed sock club, bundling together yarn from her stash with patterns and setting up 12 grab-and-go bags. I thought it was a nifty idea, and then I forgot about it. After my frog-or-finish decisions, though, I started thinking about it again, because it was time for me to look at my stash and start thinking about what to keep and what to donate/gift/sell. I have a bin for yarnstorming supplies (mostly odds and ends of various yarns, vintage acrylic) and I set up a box of yarns for Mom (kitchen cotton, she likes making dishcloths), and then I stalled.
Well. Would you want to give this up?
At that point, I went through my Ravelry stash (that helped me figure out how long some yarns had been in my stash) and my favorites, and did some pattern suggestion searches. With that, I started a Ravelry queue and have been bagging yarns together with notecards that have the pattern name and hook/needle size written on them. No printed patterns, because 1) I don’t own a printer, and 2) I have been using my Kindle for patterns and really liking it.
This is the first bag, which I now have in my portable project bag. I’ve started the Wham Bam Thank You Lamb cowl by Susan Chang, and it’s at just the right speed for winding down from the holidays – garter stitch and quick progress, resulting in a cowl that is very gift-able (that is to say, Muggles will like it). I’m over halfway through after one car ride, and if I knit during the drive back home tonight (I’m not going to be the one driving!), I’ll be done and ready to cast on for the Cabled Button Toque by Amy Swenson, which I think could coordinate well with the cowl without being too matchy-matchy.
For yarns that I don’t have a project in mind for, it’s time for my trade/sell list on Ravelry. I don’t need any more yarn right now, so it’s all sell (unless you have some marvelous handspun yarn to trade). Because I need to move these yarns out of my stash, I’m asking for 10 – 20% below average retail price for untouched skeins that have been sealed in plastic bags away from light and odors, in a pet-free home. As I continue to sort through my stash, more yarns are likely to be added.
Around October I started thinking that I should frog or finish my WIPs by the end of the year. This week, it got obvious that I wasn’t going to finish everything, so I buckled down and made decisions (and live-tweeted it with the hashtag #frogorfinish).
It quickly became obvious that I like making hats, but I don’t like weaving in ends.
I remembered the dishcloth kick I got onto last year.
I even had a few projects that had been finished and just needed a wash! A few more hats were finished and washed, then dried in the oven (with a timer so I wouldn’t forget – 170F, checked every 10 minutes). I bagged up several finished hats and mailed them off to a dear friend of mine in the Pacific Northwest, to be used/shared/gifted as she chooses.
Now I have two big bags of WIPs that can be finished quickly; my plan is to keep one next to the couch so I can grab projects to work on during my commute or while relaxing at home. I grabbed two dishcloths on my way to the post office yesterday; they just needed the edgings finished and ends woven in. Done!
Last night, I couldn’t fall asleep, so I finished a set of crochet potholders and coordinating dishcloth. Done!
I’ve also gotten started on destashing. More on that later.
Did you know? You can buy fleece, roving, and yarn grown and processed in Hawaii. You can buy directly from the farm at the Hawaiian Homestead Farmers Market on the first Saturday of the month, order online from Maluhia Farm (home of the Hawaiian Homegrown Wool Co.) or buy ready-to-spin roving from YarnStory in Honolulu.
A few weeks ago, I picked up a skein of locally hand-dyed yarn at YarnStory (Nadezdha’s Crayon Box, yarn Ka’a'awa, colorway “Shallow Water” and started swatching with it. Then I thought it would be nice to make a hat and scarf set, bought another skein of the yarn, cast on, and spent most of my spare time for the next two days knitting.
Still no scarf, and this used up most of the yarn.
Ravelry: Slouchy Spiral Hat
I picked up 2 skeins of Nadezdha’s Crayon Box handdyed worsted weight wool yarn at YarnStory and have started swatching for a scarf. This colorway is “Ka’a'awa”, which can be translated as “shallow water” so I was looking for something evocative of that. This is called Harrow Stitch in one of the Mon Tricot stitch dictionaries I have on hand, and I think it’s working out rather nicely.
We have a little tropical yarnstorm going on in Honolulu over at the Kokua Market Natural Foods Cooperative – more details on the Aloha Knitters blog.
A few photos from my weekend stop at YarnStory:
Locally dyed yarn – Nadezhda’s Crayon Box
Zauberball Crazy sock yarns
Malabrigo Cotton
As I put my yarn stash into storage (again), I am reminded that I have plenty of yarn to work with and don’t need to acquire much more. Mom, on the other hand, has been knitting and crocheting much of what I’ve destashed at high speed. Last week I handed her a bag of oddballs of Karabella Aurora 8 that had been sitting in a box since 2007 (because it had turned into two complete balls and a small heap of small balls of only a couple of yards each) and this week she showed me the hat she knit up from the full balls and then topped with a dense, squooshy, carefully hand-snipped pom-pon made out of the small balls.
Well, that kind of productivity ought to be encouraged, especially when it means I can help support YarnStory, a brand-new yarn shop that opened just a few weeks ago in Honolulu. The shop hasn’t had a Grand Opening yet (the owner is waiting on several boxes of yarn), so I’m holding off on a full review, but here’s what I picked up today for Mom:
Brown Sheep Co. Kaleidescope, 80% cotton, 20% wool. Pink/red dominant is color KAL-20 ANAHEIM, Paintlot 0310, and Blue/purple dominant is KAL-10 BELIZE, Paintlot 179.
Yarn spun from recycled silk sari fabric
Although I’m still knitting away at the Matilda & Tillie pattern revision samples, I do have a swatch going. It’s nice to have something I can just pick up and knit away at without thinking too much! The yarn is Berroco Remix, which Mom used for a baby sweater (pattern: Arshile, color: Smoke - kits available through WEBS). I’m swatching for an Ingenue sweater (from Wendy Bernard‘s Custom Knits book). In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I bought the book from the same yarn shop I bought the yarn from (Webs – yarn.com), and while I went into the transaction willing to pay full price, I saved $5.50 off the MSRP because the Webs discount system now includes books! I would have purchased it from a bookstore here, but none had it in stock.
Remix is a worsted/10 ply yarn made of 100% recycled fibers, a mix of nylon, cotton, acrylic, and silk (you can read more about it on Berroco’s info page for Remix). It is soft and pleasantly nubby and I’m enjoying knitting with it.
December 9, 2010
Filed in: yarn
A lot of the yarn I buy is purchased online, which means I can wind up opening a package and discovering that the color on my computer monitor really doesn’t match the actual color of the yarn. Even if I buy the yarn in person, sometimes the lighting, my mood, or other factors result in my purchasing a yarn and then deciding later on that it’s a color or colorway I’m not going to use. In this case, I chose to overdye it with another color.
The skein of yarn I plan to overdye, container of Wilton's gel food coloring in Leaf Green, tea cup for mixing dye. All this is sitting in a Pyrex baking dish. Out of frame: electric kettle I use to boil water and bottle of vinegar I will be adding to the dye.
Using just a little dab of gel food coloring to start, mixing with hot water and a little more vinegar
For this skein, because there was just one and was not concerned with getting results I could replicate, I assembled my supplies and then mixed with dabs and splashes and fiddling around a bit.
Letting the yarn soak up the dye
Ooo, pretty!
Dry, reskeined, and ready!
I live-tweeted this and more photos of the process are on my Flickr page in the Overdye set.
Romi Hill has a nice blog post on how she overdyed a skein of pink yarn with a yellow-gold dye and got gorgeous results: Another good day to dye
