Stash Separation

In the past few years, I've begun to sense a theme for October, and that theme is crazy. This year, though, it turned out to be extra crazy.  I know I still owe the blog one last Scotland post, and there are a couple more finished objects to share with you before we launch into holiday knitting.  The reason this year has been extra crazy is partially election season, but mostly it's been crazy because Mr. Starryknit and I are moving into a new (larger! with a deck!) apartment.  Plus, the way the timing worked out I'll be going to Mitten School one week before our move.  For those of you playing along at home, that means that we move in about eight days and I'll be spending four of them out of town.  All of our stuff is in boxes, and I'm separated from my stash.  The yarn and fiber are all in large plastic bins with lavender sachets or bags of cedar chips, the pattern books are all in boxes.  The fabric stash is still a  weak underdeveloped thing compared to its yarn and fiber siblings, so it all fit into one small box.  The sewing machine is sitting in its dust cover in the closet.  I managed to have enough foresight to pull out yarn for three new projects in the meantime, in case it takes a long time to get everything settled.  The criteria for these projects were:

1. Variety: Different yarn weights (one sock, one lace, and one aran), different colors, different objects, different difficulty levels. When I'm finished with the current work-in-progress, I wanted to have some choices so hopefully something would be appealing enough to appease the need to stash-dive. 

2. A mix of direction and spontaneity: two of the projects have yarn already matched to patterns, while the third one has only a a vague constraint (it must be fingerless mitts). If I just need something to knit, I can pick up and start the sock right away.  If I want to use a little creativity or I just want an excuse to surf Ravelry, I can take time to search for the perfect mitt pattern.  

3. Portable: These projects need to be easy to carry, and hard to lose in the move.  They definitely need to fit in small project bags.  The mitered square blanket that takes up an entire jumbo-sized tote bag is right out. 

I spent an hour or two picking out these projects, then declared everything else fair game for packing up.  Then, while packing for my flight to Kansas this evening, I realized the my current project probably won't last me through the entire plane trip and grabbed the skein of yarn and realized:


We already packed the ball winder. 

Knitting FO: Darjeeling Socks

A large portion of the sock yarn I own was collected between 2007-2009, or as I'm going to call them, "The Variegated Years".  This was a time when I was fresh out of grad school, dizzy with the prospect of a real honest-to-goodness paycheck coming in every month.  It was during this time period that my stash size exploded, and one very big enabler instigator assistant in this process was The Loopy Ewe.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love Sheri over at Loopy.  She helped me build a very nice sock yarn stash that is a beautiful (if a bit worryingly large) source of inspiration. 

This yarn, Numma Numma Toasty in the colorway "Apple Butter" was no exception.  And plus, it's mostly browns and tans!  They're neutrals, so they'll go with anything, right? Right, except we have to actually KNIT the socks before we can dash around in their delicious golden-hued warmth, pretending we live somewhere the leaves on trees change color in the fall.  I actually went back to my order history and saw that this yarn was purchased in January 2008, which means I've had this yarn sitting around in my stash for more than four years.

I bet if, back in 2002 you'd asked my husband-now-but-boyfriend-at-the-time if this knitting thing would go this far, he would not have ever suspected that I could be the type of person capable of purchasing yarn and then hanging onto it for more than 4 years because it was just too pretty to let go.  What can I say?  Must be the wool fumes.

If I love the yarn so much, how come it's taken this long?  Well, I went off sock knitting for a while, and then just when I started to get back on the wagon, something had shifted subtly in sock knitting.  Before, everyone was looking at color combos and coming up with hilariously funny (and sometimes punny) names for their colorways.  Now, it was all about solids and semi-solids and shaded solids.  Or self-striping, but in the very meticulous way that means you probably just want to knit a plain old pair of stockinette socks and not put any kind of stitch pattern on there to muss up the colors.  It was just that much more difficult to find a pattern that I could really visualize in a variegated yarn.

The Darjeeling Sock from Knitter's Book of Socks though, had all the hallmarks of being a good pattern for a very colorful yarn.  Purl-stitch rows, broken ribbing, and on top of that it has interesting arch shaping in an unexpected place!  I was flipping through the book trying to decide which pattern to knit after finishing my pajama socks, and knew this would be next.  And I was right, it's great for variegated yarn.

I've since finished these socks, and they're very nice.  I've learned to make my socks a tiny bit longer in the feet, since the soles of my socks tend to felt a tiny bit and shrink up after many wearings, and I think this will help them hold up a little better.  I did the surprisingly stretchy bind-off at the top of these socks, which was a new technique for me.  I knit these until I practically ran out of yarn, so they end quite high on my leg and the extra stretch is more than welcome.  I'll probably knit this pattern again, and I think the only thing I'd change is the pattern on the heel flap, which was a little hard to keep track of during knitting.  But other than that, I can't wait to add these beauties into my sock rotation on the next chilly morning! 

Sewing FO: Quilted Coasters

Just a quickie post this time to talk about my new favorite and fast hand-sewn gift: coasters.  About a year ago I signed up for Verb's Pressed Seam fat quarter club, which means that every month I have six delightful new fat quarters of fabric arriving at my door.  I really love the idea behind yarn/fiber/fabric clubs both as a way to steadily support small creative businesses and as a way to grow creatively myself.  Clubs often get me to try things that I would normally not choose for myself; and as long as I'm careful in selecting clubs that are put together by people with whom I share similar tastes in colors/prints, I rarely get something I outright dislike.  More often opening club packages is a happy mixture of "Ooh, beautiful!" and "I would never have picked this out for myself, but it's so INTERESTING!".

With the fabric club, getting a steady influx of fat quarters is a great way to keep the creative juices going.  The first month I managed to use five out of the six fat quarters right away, and the second month I used three.  After that, I started to lag.  Six months in and I was still wowed by every shipment, but had fallen into the habit of washing the fabric, pressing it, and returning it to the plastic fabric bin.  I started to feel a little guilty about how much fabric I was amassing (although we'll have another post later on stash guilt), and started looking around for ways to use up some of those fat quarters.  Along comes the delightful little quilted coaster pattern from Last-Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts (by the same author as Last-Minute Knitted Gifts).

 

I chose several prints and spent two afternoons making about twenty coasters.  About half ended up being a gift for my sister-in-law.  Originally I was a bit worried that the coasters would be too bumpy to be really practical, but they're great!  The only part that really took some practice was cutting out squares of batting and stuffing them in the folded-up coasters, but it got easier after I'd done four or five.  And now that I've done the pattern all the way through several times, I think I could get into a good production-line rhythm with them. Here's the entire set that I selfishly kept for myself, with a large water glass for scale. My favorite one is the butterfly print where the coaster is nearly completely taken up by one giant wing!

I'm in luuurrrve!

With a yarn. It's bad. I haven't been this in love with a yarn in a long time, and certainly not with a commercial yarn of all things. I've been in very deep like with many skeins of my handspun, especially when they ended up in the perfect project. And I've felt gratitude towards yarns for being the way they are. I have a profound platonic friendship with Cascade 220 that will probably never leave me (inexpensive? 270 different colors? What's not to love?).

So how did it happen? How did I find myself in this slightly embarrassing yet delightful situation? Well, it started the day after the stash exchange. I was out at the big local yarn shop with knitter friends, most of whom had been listening to my knitting woes at the stash exchange the day before. Having just cleared out lots of yarn, I went in with three allowable purchases: first, yarn in very specific colors (hello again, Cascade 220!) as requested by a family member for their gift.



Second, a new travel mug with a cute sheep on it; my old one has finally kicked the bucket after nearly four years of daily use.



Third, yarn for my special super secret project. I can't tell you about the project yet, but I will as soon as I can. Lately I've been thinking in tweeds, obsessing over Shelter, knitting things out of rustic yarns or from very old, very familiar stash yarn. So with my guilt alleviated from the recent stash exchange, I was on the lookout for just the right colors, and not too particular about getting something under budget. Also, technically I wasn't buying stash yarn. I've got a deadline, so I knew this yarn would be on and off the needles in a matter of weeks. Since my handspun and spinning fiber stash contains something like 90% variegated colors, I've recently been drawn towards solid or semi-solid colors when buying commercially spun yarn. And I needed solids for this project. Nobody does solids and semi-solids quite like the fabulous colorist behind madelinetosh. I know, because I made this yarn



into this hat



last April. Dark blue is one of those colors I will never escape. It's a staple of my wardrobe. "Thunderstorm" is a breathtaking variation on dark blue, and it's difficult to capture the yarn adequately because the color changes are so subtle. The true color is somewhere between what you see in the yarn and hat photos. One of the funny things about yarn produced in small batches is how much variation can occur across different yarn bases, because different fibers react differently to the same dye formula. What looks just right on a merino yarn might be washed-out on cotton, or deeply saturated on a wool/silk blend. Not that saturated or washed-out are necessarily bad, sometimes that's just what the project calls for. We were wandering around the shop, and I got to comparing one tosh color across the sock, vintage, dk, and lace yarn bases. And then I picked up pashmina, and everything clicked. I won't say that I heard birds singing, or that a ray of sunshine broke through the window to shine on the skein, but it was a close thing.



Fig. Perfect. I mean the color, not my photography skills. A deep, dark chocolate brown with a few hints of milk chocolate. And the yarn feels simply amazing, good enough to wear the unknit skein around your neck. Except... I needed a contrast color. I couldn't start the project without both colors. Aha! I remembered from previous trips to the yarn shop that tosh produces a creamy white (undyed?) colorway called Antler. Reminds me of bone buttons. Again, perfect. Sadly, no Antler was in stock in the Pashmina yarn base, and the Fig colorway did not show up on the sock base in the way that I adored on the Pashmina base, so no substitutions. After searching and some deliberation, I decided that I couldn't pass up the Fig. But I know myself, and I wouldn't be able to rest unless I knew I could go home and immediately order some Antler online. Technology to the rescue! A friend lent me her cell phone portable internet machine so I could verify that Antler was for sale somewhere in the Pashmina base. I found three sources, just in case two of them sold their last skein of Antler Pashmina by the time I could eat lunch and go home (never underestimate the power of paranoia). We made our purchases, and I went off to lunch with the skein of Fig nibbling at the back of my mind.

Once home, I ordered my yarn from Happy Knits. Here comes the really awesome part: their service was amazing. Nearly instantaneous email confirmation of my order, and they must have put that sucker in the mail first thing on Monday morning, because the yarn arrived on Wednesday afternoon.



I desperately wanted to cast on my project on Wednesday night, but held off, knowing I had to photograph this adorable package.



Not only did my package arrive lightning-fast, but they included a thank-you note, a little sample skein of Skacel Urban Silk yarn, and a tiny blank booklet. And best of all, they swiftly silenced all the tiny nagging doubts my brain was building up about how Fig would look next to Antler.



I can't show you photos of the yarn knit up yet as it would spoil the surprise, but the fabric feels absolutely decadent. If you're looking for something to spoil yourself with (but not too much), I cannot recommend this yarn highly enough.

Then again, I'm in lurve, so I'm biased.

That's what friends are for.

They're there to tell you that the things you make are awesome, and give you awesome things in return. Also, they'll tell you your obsessions aren't strange in the slightest, and will never give you looks that suggest you might be a little off in the head for going on and on and on about the perfect shade of green.

It's been a tough semester, having a night class that means I'm missing my regular knitting time every week. This weekend I got to see my knitting friends and have knitting conversations and discuss ideas that had been bouncing around in my head for weeks. The husbeast is very patient with the yarn talk, but it's not his thing.



Every year my knitting group gets together and does a stash exchange, and since we usually do it on a weekend, I was still able to go and hang out with folks that I'm used to seeing once a week. The event is now in its third year, it's started to feel like the holiday season really begins with the stash exchange party. It's also the perfect way to justify buying yarn for gifts I want to knit, and gives me a chance to clear the dead weight out of the stash. In the past, I've mostly cleared out yarn that I bought on a whim and have since let marinate for a few years. This year, I attacked the handspun stash.



I know, sounds scandalous, right? But this was all yarn that I'd spun at least three years ago. In almost every case, I'd been aiming for something very specific and the yarn ended up disappointing. Too chunky, not enough yardage, colors combined in an odd way when plied, that sort of thing. After three years, I don't think I would ever knit it into anything, and I was starting to think it was... bad yarn. But my awesome knitting friends snapped it right up, and the only reason they thought I was crazy was that I was giving it up. They were all the very image of politeness and never once asked how I ended up with so much pink handspun. It's good that they didn't ask, because I don't know the answer myself.

The other great part of the stash exchange is that it always feels like we all won some great fabulous yarn prize. Not only do we all get to go home with some great yarn, we also get to thin out our stashes. Anything that doesn't get picked up, we donate.



I can assure you that the Shibui Sock or Skinny Bugga went to loving homes, though. I took 17 skeins of yarn, plus some bags of leftover sock yarn bits that were never going to get used either. I came home with 6 skeins of yarn and one bump of spinning fiber. That just feels great, especially given what happened on Sunday. There was a trip to a yarn store. I'll tell you the rest later. Right now I have to figure out what to do with that single skein of Shibui Sock (the Bugga got snapped up faster than you can say "indie dyer").

Stash Toss (and some old photos)

After getting through all the post-Tour de Fleece spinning, I realized that my stash had kind of grown in an odd way. I didn't anticipate it, but in retrospect I probably should have seen this coming. The growth necessitated some repotting, splitting what had become one huge plant into several smaller, more organized and easily tendable specimens. But in doing all this gardening-type work, I discovered is that the root structure of my stash is drastically different from what it looked like two years ago, let alone five years ago.

I first started knitting while in college (and thus while perpetually broke). A stash was not a luxury I could afford, and it wasn't until I started making projects that produced leftovers of more than a yard that my stash began. But even so, when I moved out of my college dorm room for the last time, my stash fit into one large wicker basket, along with all my needles and swatches and my drop spindle.

Grad school was a sort of back-and-forth with the stash. I starved it periodically, but thanks to my new teaching assistant income I was able to buy yarn for projects that would not go on the needles immediately. Here's a few pictures summing up my stash as of August '07, at the start of my final semester of grad school:



This is the main stash, and the basket it all lived in (sorry for the blurry picture, this was also my first foray into digital photography). It's still about 85% leftovers, along with these two little stashlets:



The ever-present mitered squares blanket stash. At this stage, I had about half the yarn and maybe a quarter of the squared knit.



And finally, my handspun stash. All four skeins of it, all done on drop spindles. The pink skein was actually also leftovers (I'll never know why I didn't just knit a longer scarf that time).

Having a real (i.e., non-student) income was what finally did it. I had real money to spend, and spend it I certainly did. My stash outgrew the basket, even after I moved all my knitting tools to another part of the apartment. The stash wasn't changing though, not really. It was just budding, sprouting little paper shopping bags with a sweater's worth or a few skeins of sock yarn. But I had begun to buy yarn with no project in mind or even a tentative idea of when I'd get around to knitting it. I managed to snag one of Mrs. B's fabulous Taste of Germany yarn packages. But it was still all yarn, and it mostly ended up in the same little stashlet bags, next to the big basket in the closet. Six months after I took those stash photos, everything changed.



With the arrival of my wheel (and subsequent ability to eat through spinning stash about a kajillion times faster than on my drop spindle), the stash began to evolve. It found a new light source, and started to move its tendril-y bits in the direction of that source. I should have seen it coming, because about a year ago I reorganized the living room so I could have a dedicated spinning corner, surrounded by my books, tools, fiber, and handspun yarn. Last week, I dug everything out for an overhaul and realized that my handspun stash now rivals what I used to think of as the "main" stash, the yarn in the basket. I don't have any pictures because it was a little embarrassing, but you can just about double the stash in the previous photos for the yarn & blanket bags, and then add one basket's worth of handspun as well. I have enough handspun to separate it into categories (dyer, project, leftovers vs. fresh)! I guess this was just another way for the universe to remind me of the law of stash conservation:

Spinning does not use up stash, it merely changes fiber stash into yarn stash.

13 out of my last 15 projects have been of handspun. What I'm curious about is whether I'm thick or if this is normal, the way the stash snuck up on me. Has anyone else (spinners or not) experienced a dramatic shift in their crafting habits, and not noticed until 18 months later? Inquiring minds would love to know.