It fits.

There are actually two empty cubes. (Well, one full cube and one half cube.) And in the spirit of honesty, I didn't bring up all the spinning fiber. Since I have two pounds of Shetland roving in its own sizable cardboard box, I'm going to have to get more shelves installed above the existing rack before it can all come upstairs. Still. It's all there. It's all organized. And OMG there's a lot of it.

I have two boxes of yarn to go to my mom, but there's a problem. A few years ago, my mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I asked for enough yarn to knit a sweater. I was hoping for Wool-Ease, since there are no yarn stores on her side of the river. She gave me five huge skeins of blinding white Red Heart Light & Lofty. Think Lion Brand Homespun without the color changes. It's wonderfully soft and white and bulky. I am bulky enough naked; I can't pull off a sweater made in this yarn. I can't really give it back to her. I don't really want to keep it. But I could knit stuff for charity with it. You know, in my copious free time.


Can't stop knitting, muppets will eat me.

The Great 2009 Stash Turnover

I'm on "vacation" until next Thursday, thanks to our corporate "Use it or lose it" leave policy. So since it was too windy yesterday to clean up the front planting beds for the winter, I did this instead:





That's all the non-In Progress yarn, pulled out of the Stash Closet and somewhat organized. I'm taking inventory on Ravelry as I put it back in the Closet. The box next to the desk with the white wooly stuff in top? Going to my mom's for charity knitting & crocheting. The rest...heavenly sheep, that's a lot of knitting to be done. The truly frightening thing is, this doesn't include about two large totes worth of WIPs and three large boxes of spinning fiber that are still in the basement, along with three knitting machines and my sewing machine.

I originally planned to hit Main Street for the knitting store and coffee store while I'm off next week. I think I've changed my mind about the knitting store now. I honestly can't think of anything that I want that isn't already in this room.

For some reason, I have the strong urge to knit faster.

Short skeins and other knitting disasters

I think I should be worried now:



That's the Aeolian Shawl(ette), row 43 of 46. Note the meager pile of yarn. That is not scrap yarn from another project. That is what I have left to knit 3 more rows (at ~525 stitches per row), then bind off with yarn held double.

Yeah. I'm not going to make it. So tomorrow I will buy another skein of Wisdom Yarns Poems Sock, to knit the last two rows and the castoff. Silver lining: I'll have plenty left over for a pair of socks.

Speaking of catastrophes. I haven't posted much about my Mr. Greenjeans sweater, knit in a very, um, hearty tweed cone yarn from Webs. (It was so rough, I actually split the skin on my index finger while knitting with it.) I finished this sweater, hunted down the perfect pewter Celtic button for it, tried it on and looked in the mirror.

Then I took it off and stuck it in the "do something with this" basket of crap in my office.

The sleeves are huge. The neckline would fit a Packers lineman without strangling. The less said about what the ribbing at the bottom did when I buttoned it, the better.



I think I'm going to like the Central Park Hoodie much more. It calls for worsted weight tweed, at 18 stitches to 4 inches. What a coincidence.



Sweater: "Um, isn't that the ball winder? Why is it sitting next to me?"

SpinningPhoenix: "Oh, no reason."

RTFD.

First, a cautionary tale.

Charts are good. Lace charts are great. It's quite helpful to have a visual display of just what is going on when you do that K2tog, k1, yo, k3, yo, ssk. So much better than trying to follow written directions for a 24-stitch repeat over a 300+ row shawl. Finish a row, check it off, move up. Finish one chart section, groove on to the next--

AFTER you check the written directions.

I forgot this on the Aeolian shawl. I went straight from the final Agave chart to the Edge Setup Chart without checking the written directions. The ones that say to use the Right, Left and Center edge charts, and not just make the center Edge Setup Chart work by use of creative decreases and increases. It didn't occur to me that I should be concerned that the number of stitches didn't work out, and that the edges looked wonky from missing yarn-overs. I didn't think to stop and check the directions until I was 23 rows into the chart, with over 270 stitches in each row.



I wasn't feeling well last Saturday, and it didn't help my queasy stomach to sit at Starbucks and rip out four weeks of work. See the picture above (with bonus helper cat)? Everything that's wrapped around the working skein was ripped out, including 50 beads. I managed to get everything back on the needles without sobbing or distributing fistfuls of hair into other people's coffee. I even re-knit the first three rows (correctly!).

It's a good thing that I love this yarn and these beads.

In spinning news:

Still working on the Blue Moon sock yarn. I'm almost finished with the second bobbin of singles. Yeah, trying for the Tour de Fleece was pretty much a waste of time.

In baking news:



That's one loaf of Oatmeal Maple Pecan bread and one loaf of English Granary bread, baked last week and now nearly gone. The Maple Pecan is for my breakfast during the week, and the English Granary bread is for dinners. I substituted honey for the golden syrup called for in the recipe; wonder how much it would cost to get golden syrup imported to the Midwest?

I baked another loaf of Oatmeal Maple Pecan today on my "day off". I'm hoping that as I get into practice, soon it won't take the entire morning. The taste is worth it, though. Dense, nutty and filling; toast a slice, add a spoonful of unsweetened peanut butter, and I'm good until lunch.

A little repair and renovation

That's what I'm doing to this old blog, and what I did to the fingerless gloves I made my husband. He wears these for work in an unheated warehouse. These made it through two winters with a little patching when the finger ribbing wore through or the thumb gusset ripped a bit. Then disaster:


Total thumb blowout. And I'm out of scraps of this yarn to patch it with. I dug through the oddball bag and found something at least slightly similar.



I backstitched around the hole to stabilize the remaining yarn, then I "warped" the hole by threading the yarn back and forth through the backstitches. Finally, I turned the glove 90 degrees and wove the "weft" through the warp yarn and packed it firmly. Result? Good enough to last the rest of the season, and possibly most of next winter.

Lessons learned: This isn't the first pair of fingerless gloves I've made him. The first pair were Dale Norway wool; although they were warm, the Dale just wasn't up to the stress. 100% acrylic yarn in the first patch cut the original yarn like a knife, making an even bigger hole. Also, 75% acrylic 25% wool isn't as durable as you'd think. I'm considering spinning some worsted Jacob wool for the next pair. If it worked for fishermen on the high seas, it should work for a warehouseman in a Midwestern winter.

Strangely enough, there's something satisfying about making these utilitarian gloves and knowing that they're going to be needed and used hard enough to earn honorable patches like this. It beats making another novelty yarn scarf any day.