Knit Fit! 2015

A few weeks have passed since Knit Fit and I finally feel recovered from all of the socializing that attends volunteering and chatting with fellow knitters, vendors, and teachers. This year I spent quite a bit of time in the market compared to other years and purchased items that I had been thinking about over the course of the year. Honestly, the market gets better and better each year and I went a little bonkers this year.

My big purchase this year was one of Dave Yocom's hand-turned wood yarn bowls. Talk about a marriage of beauty and function; all of Dave's yarn bowls are natural wood and showcase the grain of the wood with no added dyes or stains. I chose a medium bowl in sapele mahogany with spalted maple inlays. Also pictured, a skein of Spincycle Dyed in the Wool in Devilish Grin. I have cast on plans for this skein - a Fandangle hat by Andi Satterlund - which I would like to finish by Christmas. 

A new vendor this year was Cedar House Yarns. This is a skein of Sapling Sock in Bark. Jenn and her husband are super nice and they've got a lovely color palette in their yarn line. The yardage is also really great in the sock yarn; 463 yards of superwash merino and nylon. 

Oh, Bumblebirch. Sarah was at Knit Fit last year but I was on a super duper tight budget at the time so I could only daydream about her yarns. This year I knew I wanted to purchase from her and I had such a difficult time choosing since I wanted ALL of her colors. In the end I picked up two different weights to try out. At bottom is heartwood, a fingering weight yarn (463 yds!), in the color Wednesday. At top is forage, a 4-ply worsted weight, in the color Honey. Wednesday is calling my name and is on the docket to be cast on post holiday knitting. 

Tweed yarn never looked so good. Intrepid Otter was missing from the market last year due to an unexpected illness but I was glad to see her back this year with this shiny new tweed sock yarn. I picked this bright, slightly scummy green to knit myself a pair of socks. Chubby Cloud was also back at the market with her awesome print bags. This year, I chose a zipper pouch in a great orange and yellow stockinette print with an olive green geometric floral print on the inside. 

Finally, (told you I went bonkers this year) I spent a good deal of time at the YOTH booth because WOW. Danny and Veronika have gorgeous yarns and introduced new colors to their palette, as well as a new yarn base. 

At bottom is the new 100% American sourced and milled worsted weight yarn, Father, in the Caviar color. This stuff is light and lofty and will make a fantastic hat. The upper two colors are both Big Sister, a dk weight yarn in sw merino, cashmere, and nylon, in rosemary (blue-gray) and mango (yellow). Mango comes from the new Juicy Palette, featuring various shades of yellow, orange, and green.  I also purchased a couple of gifts but I can't share those, sorry!

I love that the Knit Fit! market features so many local independent dyers and businesses. Putting my money back into the local economy makes me feel good about my purchases and that I'm supporting people who love the knitting industry as much as I do. I'll see you at Knit Fit 2016!

FO: Happy Street

 I finally blocked my Happy Street Shawl.

 The garter stitch is squishy and lovely.

 I love the short rows and they're easy peasy to do since you don't have to pick up the wraps.

 

Pattern: Happy Street by Veera Valimaki

Yarn: Hazel Knits Entice in Queen of the Night (purple), Hazel Knits Piquant Lite in Lichen (yellow) and Colorful Yarn Merino Sock Yarn in Steel (gray)

Needles: US #6 (4.0 mm) Hiya Hiya Sharp Interchangeables (42" cable)

Mods: None! I knit this exactly as the pattern specifies and couldn't be happier with the result. All of the yarns came from my stash and I have very little yarn left over - probably enough to make a stripey hat of some sort but not enough to knit extra stripes. I won't lie, the 500+ stitches at the end take quite a while to get through but if you have enough bus commute time (I do) and enough social knitting time (check, check) the garter stitch practically flies off the needles. This thing turned out to be over 6 feet long!

I like big shawls and I cannot lie. 

You other knitters can't deny

That when a girl walks in with a smile on her face

And a big blocked thang (not only in lace)

You get sprung...

I leave it to you to puzzle out the rest of those lyrics!

FO: Imma What? Socks

Pattern: Improvised Vanilla outta my noggin
Yarn: Rainy Days Wooly Dogs Gothsocks Asphodel in Imma Bitch
Needle: US #1 (2.25 mm) Hiya Hiya Sharp
Mods: Well, it's my own pattern out of my brain so there's that. I paid special attention to where my stripes fell when casting on, starting the heel flap, turning the heel, and beginning the gusset. Short row heels don't hug my feet like heel flap and gusset socks so I knew I wanted my usual top-down sock construction. I ended up with: 3 1/2 stripes for ribbing, 12 stripes for the leg, 3 stripes for the heel flap, a chunk of red for the heel (Louis Quatorze heels, no?), 16 stripes for the gusset/foot, and 3-ish stripes for the toe.

 

They're lovely socks.  Yarn hoarding may be something I do when something is too "special" to be used; Gothsocks is notoriously difficult to purchase except in person (and sometimes there's a scrum) so I'm happy to say that the socks are better than saving, *ahem* hoarding, the yarn in my cedar chest.

Stash Revisited

A while ago I posted about my stash reorganization and kinda sorta wanted to revisit the subject. Did things stay sorted? Is all of my stash in Ravelry? Have I been stashing more or whittling it down?

Did things stay sorted?

For the most part, yes. I removed sweater quantities from the cedar chest and placed them in the space bags that live under my bed. Single skeins that I found in the space bags went into the cedar chest. This was more shuffling around than organizing but everything is where it should be according to my Ravelry notes. I've been digging through it a lot lately so it's slightly messy but I can still find things.

Is my stash in Ravelry?

At this point I would say 95% of my stash is listed in Ravelry. I spent 2 or 3 hours Saturday afternoon logging single skeins and odd balls into my stash that for some reason or another hadn't been entered. The key to getting this done was using my ipad to look at my stash on Ravelry and my Yarma app on my iphone to take and upload pictures quickly. I could do all of the entry work while sitting next to my cedar chest and digging through it.

Is the stash bigger or smaller these days?

In general, the stash trend is downward which makes me feel really great. My numbers on Ravelry are higher ( I think) since I've been working hard at logging everything that got missed in previous stash organization sessions. I've been on a yarn diet since October-ish with a few exceptions and that has been a really good thing for the size of my stash and my pocketbook. My yarn diet ends for Stitches West where mayhem of the yarn buying type will surely ensue and then I'll be back on the Coldsheep bandwagon for the remainder of the year.

After exporting my stash into Excel via Ravelry last night I found that my yardage is 66,700. This may shock some of you but I'm pleasantly surprised since I thought my number was in the 75k range. If I knit as much this year as the last couple of years this is probably about 2 or 3 years worth of yarn. Not too shabby.

WIP: Tiny Rocky Coast

Tiny Rocky Coast Cardigan

yarma
Originally uploaded by ErinBirnel

There are a lot of people in my life who are expecting babies this Spring. While baby things are thankfully quite tiny and make quick knits the sheer number in my list is a little overwhelming. I cast on this little cardigan over the weekend. Tiny Rocky Coast cardigan by Hannah Fettig from the Coastal Kids Collection. It's knit in a very nice fingering weight - Dream in Color Smooshy with Cashmere in the color 'Ponder Dusk'. I'm knitting the 12 month size to try and use as much yarn as possible.

Bigger Bites - Continuing the Organization Struggle

I've spent an unholy amount of time in my bathroom this week going through my medicine cabinet and drawers trying to sort through expired and unused items (plus thorough scouring/cleaning..ick). Yesterday afternoon saw the completion of that project and I'm on to bigger things. My yarn stash. I'm a pretty fast knitter and I like to use my stash so I generally have high turnover in there...generally. This last year I got a full-time job and started back at school to finish my degrees so my knitting time almost disappeared. I also was working six or seven days a week until January of this year so my stress level went way up, my knitting time went way down, and I started to accumulate a lot of stash that I just didn't have time to knit. Which led to this:

 The whole shebang. Unsorted. I pulled everything out and I mean everything. My scrap bags, my cedar chest bins, my space bags and random other small bags that I stashed around our apartment.

 The two bins usually live inside my cedar chest so things stay relatively sorted but they are filled to bursting with fingering weight yarn. There are definitely some things that don't belong in there like that skein of Malabrigo Worsted in Whale's Road that I can see peeking over the edge. Eek.

 The sweater stash, sorted this time. To be honest the oldest thing in this photo is that red O-Wool that I frogged from my Minimalist Cardigan (upper right corner). But I do have three dark-brown sweaters' worth of yarn and two are even the same weight yarn. That probably could have been planned better.

Sock yarn staring down DK weight yarn. While the sweater portion of my stash takes up the largest amount of real estate the fingering weight yarn definitely outnumbers it in the skein category. I get really excited about sock yarn even though I don't knit socks very often and I think it's because of the color and the price. You know, a knitting a project all bundled up in one little skein, in pretty colors, with great yardage. I just can't help myself and it shows. 

Before you get started make sure you have adequate time for the volume of stash you own. My stash took about three hours to sort through and put away and I went through it fairly quickly. So this is how I organize my stash:

1. Pull everything out. Everything!!! If you keep telling yourself that the mobile stash in your car doesn't count - it does. I had a huge bag of yarn in my car for over six months and I finally pulled it out, entered it in Ravelry, and integrated it into my stash. Any little hidey-hole of yarn counts, if you pull it out now you won't feel shock when you open that bottom desk drawer and find those impulse skeins of yarn you purchased "as a treat".

2. Decide how you want to sort your yarn. Fiber type. Yarn weight. Color. Autobiographically. It doesn't really matter as long as it makes sense to you since you're the one that will have to dig through your stash to find that skein that you know you have. I prefer sorting by yarn weight/project type. Sweater quantities of yarn live in space bags under my bed and single skeins and fingering weight yarns are sorted by weight and stored in my cedar chest.

3. Cull the herd. While you work through your stash make a pile of the yarn you don't love anymore. It may hurt a little bit since you truly loved that skein of novelty yarn when you bought it years ago but believe me, someone else will love it now. And knit it. And you won't have to store it anymore for that future day when you "might" knit it even though you've grown up as a knitter and don't really dig bright blue fringe yarn anymore. Bag those bad balls up and take them to your knitting group, send them off to charity, or donate them to Goodwill - someone else, somewhere else will want them. If you've loaded your yarn into Ravelry you can even offer it for trade or sale thereby getting new cool yarn (or money!) for something you'll never use.

4. Bag or bin it up. Once you've got your stuff sorted you'll know the size and amount of containers you'll need to store your stash. If you already have bins or bags you can reuse them or if you're just starting out on this venture you may need to purchase storage. I'm lucky enough to have a cedar chest my mom gave me when I was sixteen that I use to store yarn and space bags fit great under my bed once the air has been squished out. I prefer my yarn to be put away from threats of small children, damp weather, and insects. If you're purchasing new stash receptacles make sure that the bins or bags fit in the space they are going to live. Measure your closet, your piece of furniture, under your bed, or wherever you're stashing your stash to make sure that doors close and lids fit. If you're a person that likes everything out where you can see it clear bins are probably ideal since you'll want to see those yarny innards to remind you what you have. Households that don't contain moths, carpet beetles, small children, and/or yarn-eating pets may enjoy having yarn on display. I've dreamed about lovely glass-fronted cabinetry with drawers and bins galore but it's just not going to happen in my house.

5. Extra stash happiness. I try to keep my Ravelry stash updated to show my current at-home stash so I can easily match patterns and yarn. I've also used the stash tool do deter me from spur of the moment purchases since I can check my Rav stash out and see that I already have about 10 skeins of sock yarn in varying shades of blue. An added bonus is that you can put a note on each yarn page listing where in your home (or yarn storage facility) each skein is located. 

Going through my stash regularly allows me to plan projects accordingly. My three dark-brown sweaters of yarn? Yep. Not buying more dark-brown sweater quantities any time soon. If I feel the urge to purchase more sweater yarn I'll try to fill in the color gaps a little better.

Using what I have comes from knowing what I have and when I knit from my stash it makes room for more stash enhancement, what could be better than that? I managed to empty a large space bag and a small space bag in one organizing and condensing go-through. Sure, my bag of partial-skeins got larger but now I don't have those guys wreaking havoc and leaving their yarn trail all over the place. My scrap stashdown project is higher in yardage but the nice and tidy balls of yarn that I put away look much more alluring than the tangled mess that lived in my cedar chest this morning.

How do you organize your stash? Do you have one and if so how much real estate does it take up in your home? If you've recently re-organized, or are in the process of doing so, how do you feel about your stash now?

Whatitsf**k Cowl

I seem to be going through a blue and green phase right now. Yellowy-greens and deep or bright blues are really grabbing my attention and saying, "Knit me! Knit me!" As a result of this color phase I grabbed two skeins out of my stash and went to work. I purchased said skeins at The Plucky Knitter during Sock Summit last year, can you believe that they were in her one-off basket?

Pattern: Improvised from my noggin
Yarn: The Plucky Knitter Primo Worsted in Faded Grandeur (yellow-green) and One Hit Wonder (blue)
Needle: US #8 Hiya Hiya Sharp
Notes: No mods this time since it all came out of my head. I provisionally cast on 80 stitches in Faded Grandeur and knit 4 row stripes alternating with the One Hit wonder until I ran out of the blue. I knit one more set of stripes in the yellowy-green color and then grafted the whole shebang together. This cowl is drapey and soft and has a wonderful heft to it since it's basically a knitted tube. No wrong side either! I really loved working with the Primo Worsted - it's a very round yarn with many plies and feels quite bouncy when knitting. I was surprised in a good way when very very little dye came out in the wash since blues have a way of bleeding like crazy when washed.

Scrap Stashdown: The Bag of Doom

 I had the urge to start something new the other night but I had no idea what. I opened up my cedar chest and pulled out a large bag of dk to aran weight partial balls of yarn. Rather than sift through the whole thing I grabbed something that felt nice, weighed it on my mail scale to figure out the yardage, and ran an advanced pattern search on Ravelry for things that were in my knitting library and yardage limitations. Boom! Done and done. Two preemie size baby hats. What next? Same deal. Rifle through the bag. Pull something out. Do a search. Cast on. This is amazingly satisfying since my yardage is limited and that means the projects are small. It's a project for the summer - to knit down my stash bags of partials (there's another bag with fingering weight yarn!) to make room for the *ahem* large bag of yarn that has been riding around in my car.

Bottom right project:
Pattern: Tubey by Woolly Wormhead
Yarn: Malabrigo Silky Merino in Plum Blossom
Needles: US #6 Hiya Hiya Sharps
Mods: None.



Bottom left project:
Pattern: Welted Fingerless Gloves by Churchmouse Yarn and Tea
Yarn: MadelineTosh DK in Chambray
Needles: US #6 Hiya Hiya Sharps
Mods: None.

Have you ever done a stashdown like this? Were you successful? Lose interest? Wanna play along?

Dipped Infinity Scarf

 Did I tell you about the crazy amount of yarn I purchased at Sock Summit in July? Well, I still think it was a huge addition to my stash but it will be well worth it if all of my projects end up as lovely as this one. This was my first purchase of the weekend and it's totally squee-able. Totally. I can't wait for it to get cool enough to require scarves just so I can show it off.

Pattern: Dipped Infinity Scarf by Laura Chau
Yarn: Dirty Water Dyeworks Merino Tencel
Needles: US #9 Addi Turbo Lace
Mods: None! Bought as a kit and knit just as written.

Sock Summit

A small portion of my...ahem...hoard from Sock Summit. I didn't intend to purchase as much as I did but lots of people had deals on the last day and I'm a sucker for a good deal. Plus, you know, it's pretty. Last SS I ended up with lots of muted colors on the gray and violet end of the spectrum so I went in with a mind to expand my color palette. I think I did a pretty dang good job. Besides shopping I met a lot of podcast listeners and blog readers (hi Sarah!) and hung out with my friends and ate a ton of great food. All in all it was a great weekend with a good mix of relaxation and social stuff going on.

Top to bottom: StrickenSmitten Shimmer Glimmer DK in Blackberry Diamond, Becoming Art Agave Fingering in Perfect Mango, Plucky Knitter 4-ply cashmere in Roasted Pumpkin, Sincere Sheep Agleam in Neblina, Fiber Optic Foot Notes in Ripple.

Angee

A couple of weeks ago I decided to organize my socks. While they looked very pretty all lined up I realized that I had a problem. A green sock problem. At the time I counted four pair but here's number five! Really?! Five? How many green socks does a girl need? Well, five I guess. I dug through my stash today and I have at least one more skein of green sock yarn but for heaven's sake I'll not make it into socks. Hmm...

Pattern: Angee by Cookie A
Yarn: Sundara Sock Yarn in Bronzed Forest
Needle: US 1 (2.25 mm) Addi turbo
No mods!

New Stash

I spent all day Friday at Madrona Fiber Festival soaking in as much information about Fair Isle Yoke Sweaters as humanly possible, for me anyway. After class I headed over to the marketplace and did a small amount of shopping. This year I took cash with me and had no plan except to not go over my cash budget. It worked! I'm happy with my small pile of purchases and plotting what to make with them. My favorite new thing is handspun from Spincycle up in Bellingham. I always look at their stuff but have never purchased any. I picked up a skein of chunky weight Polworth in Rusted Rainbow. I also snagged a skein of worsted weight BFL in Greed that is far more acidly yellow than my camera accounts for and very soft. My friend, Ariel, went to the market on Thursday and picked up a skein (by request) of GothSocks in a red/black colorway called Imma Bitch. Fun! I heard that the booth was swamped on Thursday at market opening and I'm glad I put in a request since she had practically nothing left by Friday afternoon. Last but not least, I won a door prize for a Fly Designs gift certificate and spent it on a skein of Cashmara in Blood Red. Cashmara is a super soft sock weight yarn in a 80 superwash merino/10 cashmere/10 nylon blend. I believe it's going to be the Gambit scarf from One Skein Sock
Yarn Wonders.

Stash Attack

This week I decided to reorganize my stash. I pulled it out. All of it. Every little bag and box and bin got emptied out on my living room floor and with the "help" of the Little One it got sorted and restashed. Little One helped by climbing into an empty bin and reading her books for a while. I, on the other hand, spent a great deal of time figuring out what was actually in Ravelry and trying to catalog what wasn't in Ravelry. Tiring. Miracle of miracles the stash still fits in it's designated space(s) which consists of a cedar chest and a space bag under my bed. The picture is the sock yarn portion of my stash which is also the bulk of my stash. Whoever said that sock yarn doesn't count was lying because it takes up the same dang space as other yarn. My strategy for reorganizing is this: gather it all together, dump it all out, sort by size, detangle, destash, restash. Granted, my stash is smallish for a 5-year knitter and yarn shop pusher but I like it at about this size. Next up on the agenda is the Great Needle Inventory. Eek.

Vespergyle

My startitis continues in the form of mittens. I dug into my stash and came up with some Knit Picks Palette from ages and ages ago and cast on these mittens, er, this mitten. I'm just about ready to start the decreases at the top of the hand. The pattern (Vespergyle Mittens) looks great but takes quite a bit of concentration and I can't seem to hit a rhythm between the pattern reading and the knitting. This is a free pattern and has been languishing in my queue for maybe two years? Since I declared a self-imposed yarn buying hiatus I've been really digging into my stash and my Ravelry queue and working up "old" projects. It makes me feel good about my stash and my awesome taste in patterns! Really! Maybe it just took a few years of honest stash acquirement to have a nice selection to match with my patterns. Maybe. But it really is fun to dig in there and use some of what I have with patterns that got passed up for newer, more exciting projects.