Category: Knitting

I confess to being a little bit quirky about organizational issues.  I like to keep my spices and cds in alphabetical order.  It's all a woman with four children can do to keep control of the world around her — or at least of her house.

But my yarn has been something of a disaster for quite some time.  It was stashed in cubbies in my studio, it was in trash can sized ziploc bags in the closet, there were two hollow tables in our living room that were full of yarn.  Basket stand in my daughter's room?  Check.  Full of yarn.  Sideboard in the dining room?  Bought for the sole purpose of storing yarn.  And then there were the onesies and twosies — bags, a few baskets, even a crystal bowl with yarn decoratively placed.

That all changed when I saw Billie's post on Ravelry.  For those of you who aren't on Ravelry, Billie suggested organizing all of one's stash yarn in one place, creating a local yarn store of your own, in your own home, to shop from when you wanted to take on a new project. 

This was something of an epiphany for me.  My randomly located stash was overwhelming me a little bit.  I decided to try Billie's approach.

It took about a week of working while watching TV with the kids, but I'm done.  My yarn now owns most of the cubbies in the yarn closet in my studio.  And I have a neatly photographed and precisely catalogued stash.  Really.  You can go and see it here.  I am so pleased with it that I like to keep going and looking at it over and over.

I've already had a stash shopping success when I discovered that the yarn that Mary-Heather Cogar's Simple Things Shawlette was written for — Pagewood Sock — existed not one, but two places in my stash.  And I have many other suitable choices.  I've been wanting to knit this pattern — seemed like a good late summer knit to wear in the fall — but hadn't made it to my LYS.  Now, thanks to Billie's in-house yarn store concept, voila!  I have plenty of choices, including this lovely yarn.

Pretty neat, isn't it?  Thanks Billie, for a great idea.  Despite the weekend of obsessive stash organization and cataloging and a little time spent getting everything into Ravelry, or perhaps because of it, I suddenly feel like a highly organized knitter who can accomplish anything!

The Barn Raising Quilt has been my airplane knitting for some time now, and I highly recommend it for that purpose.  It's compact and easily portable, although having one's knitting dangling off of four or five needles does tend to raise eyebrows.

Finishing the most recent square made me decide it was time to pull out all of the squares to date, to see how we were doing.  It's been slow going — limiting it this way.  It's tempting to set aside a few weekends and knit away.  But I'm rather enjoying the pace at which it's emerging.

So it's going to continue to be a slow knit.  This is just eight of the 42 square that are planned.

If you are knitting this pattern too, it's interesting to note just how much these squares grow when blocked.  The square in the bottom left corner is the only one I've blocked so far, and it has at least a couple of inches on the others.  This gives me hope that a quilt that is six squares across and seven squares down will be sufficiently large.

Green square? Check.

Every time I finish a square for this quilt, I wish I could just sit down and knit them one after the other, then put the whole thing together.

But this is a project that calls for patience. Size 2 needles. Lots of finishing in the future. So, patience. Lots of it. I have a feeling this one will be more than worth it.

Reason 109 why I’m glad I knit: unlike other commuters, neither the 2 hour plane delay (bad weather in Chicago), 6:30 departure of the 5:26 train (swelteringly hot), or the long taxi stand line bothered me in the least. The green square is almost done and the Koigu is not far behind.

I'm still knitting on Faraway so Close.

I love this pattern.  It's fun.  Unfortunately, I'm at a stage where it's just about impossible to get a good picture, and what I'm wanting to show you is the drop stitch portion, which is just off the needles, so impossible to get. (It is however, a good chance to show my Mom my new kitchen counters.  Granite — after 23 married years of profoundly crappy formica that was bad when we inherited it from the previous owners).

Maybe you can get a little bit of an idea here.

I would be much further along, had I not engaged in a stupid pattern reading error, which led me to knit 8 repeats of the stockinette pattern, before realizing it was only 1 repeat, this over something like 129 stitches.  I guess it could have been worse.  I tinked out of fear that frogging would get into the drop stitch sections and I would be very sad.

Far Away and then Close.  I know Carina is far too good of a knitter to have had this issue when she wrote the pattern, but it surely is appropriate for my personal knitting style.

I'm doing some destashing — the Judge assures me this is an absolute necessity because the painters will not be willing to work around large piles of art and knitting books on the floor and many baskets of yarn.  If you want to help me out, there's a link in the top right hand corner of the blog to what I've got.  Right now it's mostly books.  I'll add some *sigh* yarn and fabric today.