Knit Your Stash 2015

This year I’m trying to use more yarn from stash rather than purchasing yarn as needed or worse, just because it’s on sale and I’m walking past. I generally have pretty good self-control driven by my shoestring budget, but I do have a tendency to think I still have the stamina of a healthy person and can complete all the projects my head can think of. Thus I tend to purchase yarn for specific projects that don’t get completed.

There is also this trap you can fall into when shopping for yarn. Let’s say you really want a pair of hand-knit socks for yourself. You buy yarn. Time passes and you never got to knit them because you’ve been too busy with everything else in life, chores, knitting gifts, dog walking, writhing in pain, whatever. Then you’re at the store and you see some stunning sock yarn and you really want a pair of hand-knit socks for yourself. So you buy the yarn somehow of the belief that purchasing said yarn will magically give you the time and energy to knit yourself that pair of socks.

Alas, you cannot purchase more hours in the day. But clearly I really want some socks and/or shawls in these colors!

The furthest back yarn is the oldest and the cheapest. I bought it at a little yarn shop way up in the mountains of Colorado during the 2013 Yarn Along the Rockies yarn crawl which I did with my mom. Of 23 yarn shops in 2 days, this was one of the two balls of yarn I purchased. Both were sock yarn incidentally. The middle yarn was purchased on vacation in 2014 in Southern California while visiting with another Chronic Bitch I met on Ravelry. She took me to a cute little yarn shop in the Claremont Village, Colors 91711, and I just loved these colors. None of my local stores carry the brand and I was as intrigued by the blend of fibers as the color. The closest to the front was purchased fall 2014 during a anniversary sale at Table Rock Llamas in Black Forest, Colorado. I knew I had the middle one when I purchased the third, but I’d completely forgotten about the first ball from 2013 until I took it down tonight!

Clearly I really need to take some time to knit myself something with at least one of these gorgeous balls of yarn this year! They’re all in my top 10, and probably top 5, favorite sock yarns from my stash. I keep my sock yarn up high along the ceiling on a long shelf above a sliding glass door. Until I took it all down today to photograph it, I honestly had no idea just how much yarn was crammed up there! I shouldn’t NEED to buy much sock yarn this year!

Here’s the entire sock yarn stash on my bed. This doesn’t include 100% wool or 100% alpaca fingering weight yarns as those are stored elsewhere. This is just yarn that is intended for socks but may well become a shawl instead.

And this is after I used up a few balls of yarn from the shelf of fingering weight sock yarn to make Christmas gifts! I used up two balls of orange on dad’s crazy cat. That orange was purchased for only $1 a ball back in 2010. The blue on the upper right was $3 a ball and is much nicer stuff than the orange. It’s destined for shawls. I may be broke, but at least I know how to shop right!

Handspun BFL to FO

I ended up only spinning about half, or 2 oz, of the BFL from January ‘s spinning study group. I ultimately decided that the BFL we sourced was just too full of VM for my tastes and it wasn’t worth the effort to try to clean, card, and spin it into a lacy yarn. I’d originally planned on spinning 2 bobbins each with 2 oz and plying them for a lace weight 2 ply yarn. Instead, I chain plied my one bobbin which gave me about 200 yards of a light fingering weight yarn with about 16 WPI.

I hate having my handspun yarn just sit around and collect dust, so I started looking for a suitable project immediately. I settled on some fingerless mitts. They’re absolutely lovely. Here’s some photo highlights! They’re so light and airy it’s crazy!

The most important thing I learned about spinning came while knitting the yarn into mitts rather than while spinning the yarn. I’d started with a washed but still not super clean fleece and carded it by the handful into rolags to spin. In randomly grabbing wads of fleece to card, I’d grabbed some cleaner and some dirtier sections of wool. This caused some subtle color variations in the finished yarn that doesn’t wash out because dirt is so tightly spun into the yarn. It is most noticeable in this photograph. See the horizontal line across the finished mitt juat above where the thumb separates off?

Next time I’ll have to run the wool through the cards twice. Once to clean it up and get it untangled from the locks it came in, and once to jumble up bits from rolag to rolag so that I get a more uniform finished yarn color! Even with the color variation, I am really looking forward to taking these with me to my spinning study group meeting for February! I’m in awe of the idea that only a month ago these beautiful, light and lacy fingerless mitts were just a large handful of filthy wool from a sheep named Poppy. It’s magical.