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Well, after a few weeks of knitting whatever the hell I wanted, I’ve decided to take on a couple more Will Work for Yarn trades. I’m also still knitting a sock. The sock, so far, looks like this:
Pretty simple, smooth going. But I’m putting it aside to work on soakers for a swap. The pattern in question is the adorable Turtle Butt soaker. The yarns in questions are a variety:
The mostly-knit one is one that I am finishing (the grafting and the leg cuffs). Then there’s a medium in black and pink and a large one in grey and blue/green. In return, I received a skein of Lorna’s Laces Shepard Worsted in Flames, a skein of my partner (SeptemberSocks)’s hand dye (same colorway as the blue/green above) and two colors (two and three skeins) of Alpaca Cloud (in Smoke and a darker grey). So yeah, I basically win. At least one of the colors of Alpaca cloud will become a giant shawl and we shall just see about the others.
Stay tuned for some swap stuff and the inevitable progress on the soakers. Also, I started a sewing project that I promise to show you at some point before it’s actually done.
I do. I so win at thrift. I went to a thrift store near my house with my grandparents today (they’re in town after my graduation) and I TOTALLY SCORED. SCORED. I found five sweaters total, all for $2 (one was only a dollar):
Two to felt (cashmere! I’m going to make a lovely light blanket when I get enough sweaters)
And three to frog:
From top to bottom: Old Navy cotton/wool, worsted/bulky weight (this is the $1 one), a probably fingering weight nylon/viscose/angora/cashmere blend (probably will be a lightweight sweater for me) and the coup de grace, a worsted weight CASHMERE sweater. I found bulky cashmere! It exists! I’m so excited to work with it. The three froggable sweaters are currently soaking and I’m just going to machine wash the other two.
I also found some cute shoes for $4:
Not sure what kind of socks I’m supposed to wear with these (suppose it doesn’t matter if wear them under pants). Yay, thrift store!
GUYS GUYS GUYS I FINISHED ALL MY EXAMS FOR COLLEGE AND I’M GRADUATING IN A WEEK FROM TOMORROW. More on that later. Just so you know, expect my writing this week to be a little… less than perfect. Generally it’s safe to blame vodka but Thursday is Cinco de Mayo, so you should probably blame Tequila. Cause I’m DONE WITH COLLEGE and that means it is CELEBRATION TIME.
Anyway, In case you were wondering, I have been knitting. A little bit. Working on two pairs of Manly Aran socks in a row burnt me out a little bit, so I haven’t been doing as much knitting as I usually would. What I have been doing though is acquiring yarn at an alarming rate. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Weren’t you just talking about graduating and don’t you not have a job or any money?” That would be correct; however, I already sort of had the yarn. Which is to say I had some sweaters.
As a poor/cheapskate college student, I like cheap things. You know what’s cheap? Thrift store sweaters. You know what thrift store sweaters are made of? YARN. I’ve had the sweaters for a while and have been on an unravelling binge. I haven’t weighed any of them yet, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of yarn here.
What exactly have I unraveled? So nice of you to ask!
There’s this Shetland wool sweater that I got at a Good Will outlet (1.20 a POUND, people). It had tags still on.
It frogged into a lovely laceweight, but Shetland is a very sticky wool, so I had to roll it into balls instead of onto the niddy noddy like I usually do.
There’s a 80/20 wool nylon mix, the perfect shade of white for dyeing:
Five skeins of fingering weight yarn that will probably become socks (though I’ll probably hold it two strands at a time for strength). The little skein is from the collar, which alone yielded 140 yards.
There’s a very shiny linen/cotton mix (60/40) from a large tank top:
About dk. Not sure how much for enough for a tank top and a sun hat, which is the goal. I’ll probably also dye this.
There’s this Talbot’s 100% silk pullover:
Silk, by the way, frogs like a DREAM. It’s super strong so it doesn’t break every couple of yards like the Shetland was wont to. Ton of lace weight yarn here. There’s another skein I can’t find, so pretend there’s three. I want to dye it and make a huge shawl out of some of it.
Finally, there’s the creme de la creme, three wonderful, beautiful, SOFT skeins of 100% cashmere:
Also lace weight but will probably be doubled or tripled for… something.
Sweaters, as you know, have a front, a back, and two sleeves (except for that tank top, which was a cardigan so it had a back and two fronts). But there’s only three skeins of silk and cashmere (well, the cashmere sweater had this weird tie front thing, but it gave four skeins and we’re pretending about the silk). With the second sleeve of the silk and part of a sleeve of the cashmere, I wound up one skein with the blend:
It’s going to be a bitch to wind since the yarns aren’t plied, just held together. But it makes for the loveliest combination of shiny and soft:
I’m probably going to dye most of these skeins before I work with them (maybe I’ll make some white socks). I’m still in frogging mojo, so I’m basically frogging down my entire thrift store sweater stash. I’m currently working on a wonderful Express sweater of lace weight merino/viscose/angora/cashmere. So soft. I’m thinking shawl.
None of these sweaters were over $5 and I’ve got easily over $100 worth of yarn here. The cashmere alone would probably be at least $50, and I paid $3.60 for the sweater. Truly, it makes my cheap thrifty heart sing.
How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised? It seems like an easy to answer question at first, but in fact organisation exists on many levels. Maybe you are truly not organised at all, in which case I am personally daring you to try and photograph your stash in whatever locations you can find the individual skeins. However, if you are organised, blog about an aspect of that organisation process, whether that be a particularly neat and tidy knitting bag, a decorative display of your crochet hooks, your organised stash or your project and stash pages on Ravelry.
Believe it or not, my craft supplies are actually very organized. I can usually find whatever I need without too much trouble, especially my knitting/crochet supplies. I keep my dpns in a needle roll, my fixed circulars in a roll I got in a swap, and my interchangeable set in the pouch they came in from Knit Picks (okay, it’s not the best pouch ever, but it works). My collection of stitch markers are in a box on my craft table and I have a couple in my notions bag, a little zipper pouch I keep in my purse with my current project.
My yarn is actually the thing that is the least organized, but it’s not too bag. I keep it in large plastic bins under my bed:
The bin on the left contains mostly sock yarns, along with sport weight and lace weight. The middle bin is mostly worsted weight (with a couple bulky weight things). The bin on the right is mostly scraps organized in bags by fiber, though it also includes over flow from the other bins (like the oversized cone of green lace weight that won’t fit anywhere).
Also, if you look carefully in the corner, you can see my small stash of acrylic, obtained mostly by a friend from an estate sale:
But the most helpful thing for organizing my yarn and seeing what I have is Ravelry. I finally uploaded my entire stash, pictures and all, to my Ravelry stash page in December. I’m so glad I finally did it: it’s great being able to scroll through all the yarn I have and deciding what to knit next. It also helps my organize my pattern queue–the first page has patterns matched with yarn in the stash.
In short: Bins and Ravelry. Yes.
Don’t worry, dear readers, I have indeed been knitting. I’ve been knitting a lot. It just so happens that I’ve been knitting the same thing over and over and over. I’ve been working on approximately a million pairs of shark mittens. Here’s a pair I finished this morning:
Same yarn I always use, Cascade Eco, and some red Valley Northampton for the mouth. They went pretty quickly and were mostly unremarkable. Fortunately, I only have one more pair to knit and then I can start working on other things. Other swap things. I can’t wait to be knitting for myself again.
A non-shark mittens thing I have been doing is some stashing of yarn. I had to order some more yarn for my boyfriend’s birthday sweater (which is still not done), but Knit Picks is discontinuing the Planetarium colorway of Comfy Bulky (why, I have no idea) but I ordered some comfy sport and some comfy fingering to hold together to finish the sweater, which will hopefully work. Since I was already paying shipping and I like yarn, I also threw in some sock yarn:
Stroll in Shoreline Twist (which is Ravenclaw colors, which will result in bitchin’ Ravenclaw socks)
Stroll Handpainted in Tea Party
I also recently bought a couple wool sweaters at the thrift store to unravel for the yarn. I finished the first one yesterday, resulting in four skeins of a very pretty red worsted yarn:
It’s about 514 yards, most of which will most likely be used for mouth parts of shark mittens. But maybe something else. The sweater was like, four dollars, so I’m thinking this was a pretty good deal. I washed another sweater this afternoon, an undyed beige, and once that dries, I’ll have some more yarn to unravel (and also dye). Yay!
So remember how I went to that craft fair like… a week ago? The delay in posting is due to finals week being next week, so I am currently drowning in both schoolwork and shark mitten orders.
Anyway, I didn’t really take any pictures (I feel weird taking pictures at that sort of thing) and it was kind of small, but I had fun. There were mostly jewelry vendors as these things tend to be, but there were also some people with sewn things, a soap/stuff vendor, and someone selling yarn. I didn’t buy much, but I did buy some honeysuckle scented soap and some yarn:
Pretty pretty sock yarn from Wild Hare Fiber Studio. The colorway is called “Peacock Strut” which is just so right. Pretty. The Wild Hare booth was one of the first booths I saw, and I spotted that yarn and decided it would be mine before I left (though I bought it near the end).
In other news, I have finally started my last pair of adult shark mittens (though I recently got an order for some baby ones). I’m going to relist the mittens on Friday, but I hope there’s at least a bit of a break so I can work on some WWFY stuff.
Okay, so technically it’s late on Tuesday morning. Shhh.
Anyway, what I picked up at the Holiday Fair I went to on Saturday. Some yarn and some fabric and also a skirt (which I don’t have pictures of). Unplanned Peacock was there, and I splurged (really, since it was more expensive than I’ve ever spent on one skein of yarn) on some sock yarn in the delightfully phoenix-y color solar:
I also picked up a lovely skein of sport weight alpaca for five bucks (I KNOW):
And two silk bells weighing about 38g total, even though I’ve never spun silk before:
And finally, at one of the tables selling fabric, there were two bins of free scraps of fabric. Some of them were really large pieces (like a yard), and I scored a couple:
The brocade will probably be a corset (with several muslins). Not sure about the other ones though.
Before I go into today’s subject matter, I just want to note that my shark mittens were featured on the Meet Me at Mike’s blog! And I’m super chuffed about it. : )
Anyway, so I got the yarn yesterday for another WWFY swap that I am super excited about. I’m knitting for Stuffycat, and she sent six skeins of Bugga:
The brown that’s partially balled will be made into Cookie A’s Monkey socks and the other two will be made into Kitty Hawk, a steampunk-errific set of mitts and a hat.
In return, I received the following three skeins of yarn:
And I already know what I’m going to knit with them. The blue will be made into Viper Pilots and the other two are for my own set of Kitty Hawk mitts and hat. Yay!
I have a bunch of other things I have to knit before I can start any of these (including THREE PAIRS of shark mittens I got orders for yesterday), but I can’t wait to be able to knit with the Bugga. It’s super soft and lovely. And now I have three!
So I recently arranged a WWFY (Will Work for Yarn, a swap group on Ravelry) trade to knit a couple of things. : ) I received the yarn yesterday with all the other packages.
Here’s the yarn I was sent to knit with:
JoJoLand Rhythm for an Aviatrix baby hat, Claudia Hand-Painted Merino for a Cloud Bolero, and Cashmerino Aran for some Improvisation mitts.
Here is the yarn I received in payment:
That’s Jaggerspun Zephyr wool/silk dk. I absolutely cannot wait to knit it up–it’s GORGEOUS. Not sure what I’m going to knit with it yet, but whatever it is, it will be gorgeous. Yay.
Tomorrow: A knitting FO, probably. I knit like the wind.
I received four packages in the mail today.
One of them was full of WWFY goodness that I’ll show you tomorrow.
One of them was a couple of skeins of Cascade Eco that I ordered in order to knit more shark mittens on commission.
One of them was some black 12 gauge wire for making knit headbands:
and one of them was an early (by exactly a month) birthday present from my sister:
That’s right; I am now the proud owner of my very own digital yarn scale. It’s the one from Knit Picks that weighs up to 2000 g and down the to half gram. I can now divide my sock yarn exactly in order to knit socks two at a time. Yay! I’m super excited. I may go measure all my yarn scraps so I know how much I have…
Stitch, Brinn, Stitch! 