The Yarn Fairies have been active...

A Happy New Year to all!

I'm happy to report that, lately, I seem to be charmed by the Yarn Fairies...

This would not be the same as the Yarn Sirens, who's sole purpose in life seems to be to lead me astray into the LYS and the Great Holy Trinity (Michaels, AC Moore, and Joann's).

To sum it up, PEOPLE KEEP GIVING ME YARN! I'm not sure, Karma-wise, what I've done to deserve this...

The first incident occurred several weeks ago, when a male friend of ours came up to me at an event and said, "Psst! Do you need yarn?" and led me out to his truck. Come to find out, his sister was giving away some Caron One Pounders she didn't want--it was a whole Hefty garbage bag-full.

Then, over Christmas, my sister gave me a Stop & Shop bag full of Patons Shetland Chunky, that she decided she didn't need. Originally, my plan was to take the yarn off her hands and make a sweater with it for her, but quickly realized she seems to prefer a thinner sweater. No sooner did I think this before a good friend contacted me...she had some Cascade 220 she was looking to get rid of. I offered to pay her, but she insisted she just wanted to make room for more stash. I went over to her place and was presented with TWO HUGE BAGS of tons of different types of yarn. The picture is what she gave me.

At this rate, we're going to need to add an addition onto the house...

Mad Sock Mania!

I seem to have been bitten with a mad, mad, MAD urge…to knit socks. I don’t even particularly need to knit socks that are patterned—I seem to be content just knitting plain old stockinette socks with a 1x1 ribbing at the top for grip, and perhaps another session with the Sweet Tomato Heel. I do confess I loved the fact that once I was done with the Sweet Tomato Heel, that was it—I was DONE. No picking up stitches and endlessly decreasing to get back to the original width of the sock.

I think my sock mania is related to the fact that I just LOVE the actual sock yarn itself. I love the colors—it is the only yarn where I don’t necessarily go for a particular brand…I tend to be drawn by the colorway. In fact, sometimes I can’t even remember the brand because I’ve tossed the ball band way inside the project bag, in my haste to cast on. I also love the fact that you can splurge on a $20 skein of sock yarn and that’s enough for an entire project, versus spending $150+ on wool for a sweater project. I usually can’t wear wool right next to my skin, but I don’t seem to have that issue with sock yarn. I’m not sure if it’s due to the nylon in the yarn or the fact that perhaps sock yarn is just made out of softer, less scratchy wool.

It may be the time of year, but I love the fact that socks are a small project that’s not sitting in your lap on a very hot day, making you swelter.

Also, socks are the best KIP (knit in public) project ever!

Helpful Hint #15: Presents—Ask before executing!

Now a word about presents—specifically, knitted and crocheted presents. Actually, this applies to any craft present upon which you have devoted hours upon hours of your free time—forsaking food, sleep, and bathing in some instances—to get it completed by the appointed due date. For us procrastinators, this would be Christmas Eve, the night before the wedding, as the baby is being born, etc.

Always, ALWAYS, check first to see if the recipient is interested in a handmade item. Over the years, I have heard horror stories about people who suffered terrible disappointments over the reception of their present. One woman I met once told me that she had sweat blood for SIX MONTHS making a shawl for her prospective daughter-in-law. She triumphantly presented the finished item to her at the bridal shower. The bride-to-be’s response? “I’ll never wear anything like that!” Another friend of mine once found a handmade item in the local thrift shop. Yes, you guessed it…she had given the item to someone several months back.

I find the best thing to do is to either wait until someone requests something, or just ask. It is better to find out ahead of time that either the person would LOVE something handcrafted by you; or, frankly, they’d rather have a Playstation.

Then I go into Business Analyst mode. I ask them what they would like for colors, how large or small they want the item (“blanket” usually means “afghan” – check, to make sure they don’t want something large enough to cover the bed), what type of fiber (some people do not want wool in any form, other people would sooner pet a live tarantula rather than touch acrylic), etc. Just ask anything that occurs to you, no matter how trivial. Clarify statements like, “I want the colors mixed in together.” This could mean they want a variegated yarn, or they want big blocks of color or stripes—you just don’t know until you ask.

Then go for it! I’ve had very good results sticking to the above technique, so much so that one person has asked me for more than one thing…LOL!

Helpful Hint #7: Managing your spouse…Get them to buy the yarn

In the years AL (Anno Lana – Year of our Wool), I have come across friends and acquaintances with spouses or significant others. These spouses/significant others are either supportive of their better half’s yarn exploits, lukewarm, or downright anti-craft.

I feel that this sort of thing can be managed if one employs a certain degree of–well, I hesitate to say “manipulation.” Let’s just say…persuasion.

One sure-fire way to enlist the help and goodwill of your spouse is to get them in on the project. Ideal projects are some sort of present that neither one of you wants to buy–your spouse, because he/she doesn’t know the recipient very well, and you because you really would rather knit or crochet a present rather than buy one more fondue set or one more Winnie the Pooh-themed baby shower present. You can start by showing your spouse the pattern you want to make (or at least outline what you’d like to accomplish–if your spouse is a man, goals are very important). Explain that if your spouse buys the yarn, you will be more than happy to SLOG along for a good EIGHT weeks, TOILING away on said project, working your FINGERS TO THE BONE. All they have to do is front the money.

If your spouse is agreeable, you can bring them along to the store to get said yarn. My Sweetums usually likes to do this, and can be quite entertaining.  She once declared, in Wal-Mart, in a very loud voice, that I shouldn't buy the blue and pink variegated baby yarn because, “THE BABY COULD HAVE ISSUES.”

Overall, as they love to say in Corporate America, this is a win-win. You get yarn to play with and your spouse gets to avoid shopping for baby things or bridal registry items.

You know they’d much rather go to Home Depot…

Easy Striped Summer Tee Done!

At long last, I finally have completed a "Summer" WIP in time to wear it during the Summer!

This is from the Plymouth Yarns pattern #1601. It was very easy and all in garter stitch. I used Plymouth Kudo yarn, which is a blend of Silk, Cotton, and Rayon. I used Size 8 circular needles.

Thankfully, it fits me just right.

Helpful Hint #6: Is this yarn a good deal?

…or, they should really teach this sort of thing in Calculus.


Did you, like me, tear your hair out in school over the following:


“Jimmy is traveling by train, going 80 mph, and Suzie is traveling by car, going 55 mph. Jimmy is 100 miles from their motel and Suzie is 50 miles from the same point. How many minutes will it take each to reach…”


And people wonder why our children have no math skills.


Instead, they should be giving our young entrepreneurs of tomorrow word problems like THIS:


Brand Name Yarn is on sale at your LYS for $5.99 a skein. It is also advertised on your favorite on-line site for $6.99 – this is the cheapest you’ve been able to find on-line.


Shipping for the on-line site, if you buy 10 skeins: $5.99


Your LYS is 10 miles away. Your car is currently getting 24 miles to the gallon, thanks to the A/C, and gas is running at $4 a gallon. So, $.17 * 10 = $1.70. Oh, and tax (if your state taxes yarn at 6%) would be roughly $3.60.


LYS total = $65.20 and the On-line Site = $75.89.


Even if you get some sort of on-line deal to waive shipping, you’d still end up paying $69.90 for the on-line option. So, in this particular instance, the LYS wins out, hands-down.


This is the sort of thing I figure out every time I try to decide where to buy my yarn. Sometimes the LYS wins, sometimes an on-line site wins—depending on the price/shipping/gas/tax combination.


Of course, there are a myriad of other variables to consider:
1) The aggravation of driving vs. getting yarn delivered right to the door.
2) The actual driving cost is actually higher, when you figure wear-and-tear to the car.
3) Do you want the instant gratification of getting your yarn RIGHT AWAY?
4) Do you need a particular color that your LYS may or may not carry, which would necessitate a special order and ANOTHER car trip back again to pick it up?


Of course, there is also the most important issue facing us all (yarnsters and non-yarnsters alike)…do you want to support your local business?


And, also, is Jimmy’s girlfriend Marsha aware that Jimmy and Suzie are messing around behind her back?

Necessity (and Yarn): the Mother of Invention

Our mailbox gets clobbered every winter.

The first year I replaced my mailbox I was SO proud of myself. I did it completely on my own, with instructions from the local hardware store (that sold me a boatload of tools, the board for under the mailbox, the screws, the brackets, and of course the mailbox). Several hours and much colorful cursing later, I was done. It was a beautiful sight. It was a lovely dark green mailbox that looked new and sleek next to our neighbor’s mailbox (for some unknown reason, their mailbox is always pristine and unblemished).

Sadly, the following winter the new mailbox got pummeled, as the first one had. The little red flag was knocked off and there was a massive dent in the side. After all that work to put it up, I was heartbroken. The next few winters battered it some more. This winter, as you all know, we’ve had a major “snowpocalypse” up this way in New England with more snow than I’ve seen EVER, ANYWHERE. I went out to the mailbox one day and discovered that the only thing holding it to the post was one rusty nail and the mound of snow piled on top of it.

Sure enough, now that the snow has finally started to melt (the Christmas lawn deer are finally visible), the mailbox was now hanging over to one side. It’s a wonder the mailman was still delivering to it. I’ve been in a quandary over what to do, seeing as there’s still too much snow and it’s too damn cold to be out there replacing the mailbox again.

And then, I thought of it…YARN!

I went out there with some Lion Brand Vanna’s Choice yarn in “Rose Mist,” which I thought would go nicely with the dark green, and tied the mailbox back onto its brackets. It was still tipping, so I took more yarn and tied the yarn around the mailbox to the small tree right by the mailbox (the errant tree is another issue we are probably going to need to address this spring, too, unless we want to eventually have no place for a mailbox at all). I tied some nice bows to make it look pretty.

The neighbors probably think I’m insane, but that’s okay…people with more yarn than insulation in their house probably are…

My niece wants an afghan

My niece wants an afghan for Christmas.

This is exciting news…usually my relatives never request yarn-related items. No, I take that back. My sister requested knee socks a while back, but I haven’t yet found a pattern that’s easy enough. That’s my lame excuse. Actually, I’m putting it off, as I can’t imagine knitting on #1 dpns for a whole calf’s worth of length. I swear I’ll do it someday!

Anyway, in the meantime, my niece has requested a “blanket.” Upon further inquiry, I figured out she meant a standard-sized afghan, but in earth tones. Now, I’m one of those people who is a “Summer” and I look positively dowdy in earth tones, so I generally don’t have them in my stash. Of course, this can only mean one thing…

TO THE STORE!!!

This got me to thinking of all the excuses we come up with to go yarn shopping, when people around us can already see that we have almost enough yarn to insulate the entire house, even if we moved said house to Siberia.

Excuses:

1) Christmas is coming and you have to make presents. Okay, Christmas isn’t coming for another 11 months, and Uncle Fert may not want another scarf, but a person has to be PREPARED!

2) Someone’s birthday, anniversary, wedding, or baby shower is coming up. Especially if it’s a baby shower—if you knit or crochet, it’s the LAW—you have to make something.

3) In fact, you should have a stock of some sort of baby yarn at all times. If you don’t, go out now and get more!

4) There is a sale at your favorite yarn shop or at one of the stores that make up the Holy Trinity – Michaels, Joann Fabrics, or AC Moore. We don’t have a Hobby Lobby up our way, or I’d probably call them the Four Pillars. Yes, I know the Four Pillars of Destiny are something entirely different, but not to rabid crafters.

5) There is a major STORM coming, and you have to be prepared with enough yarn to “weather” through it. Notice I say “enough.” If you already have what everyone else might see as enough yarn for a three month siege of snow, but you still don’t feel you have enough, then it is your prerogative to go get more. After all, people are all out there getting milk, bread, and eggs they probably don’t need—why shouldn’t you be allowed to go get yarn??? Notice we are not specifying the type of storm…

6) You vow to go on a yarn diet, but then the next day you find out that there is a worthy cause asking for knitted or crocheted donations. I mean, really, wouldn’t it be just HEINOUS to refuse??? Says the person who just got her yarn in the mail to knit a scarf for WomenHeart again this year…

7) And, finally, a dear, kind relative, who has never asked you for ANYTHING, wants an afghan. That’s enough of a reason right there to run out and lay in only the best yarn…

The Yarn Sirens strike again...

The Sirens have really gone and done it now...

I've made a chilling discovery. Not only do the yarn sirens sing their clarion call for me to drop everything in life I'm doing to go "to the yarn store...to the yarn store...to the yarn store..." - they appear to be capable of moving, bending, and shaping the cosmos to accommodate their wishes.

Case in point:

To back this up, I joined an online forum through our Intranet at work. The powers that be in our company created this work forum space as a way for employees to network/chat about actual work.

No one is doing that.

Seriously, no one is going to fritter away their hard-earned lunch breaks sharing about insurance, annuities, and interest rates ("Bob, did you hear that they wanted to make the GAAP Reserve rate 6.5%??? HAHAHAH!!!"). Everyone (except for the actuaries) would go to asleep.

Instead, the current topics for the work forums include sports, children, scrap booking, and yes - KNITTING! Someone in the downtown Home Office (I like to call it "The Mother Ship") decided to start a Knitting and Crocheting forum. It's been very lively lately because they've launched a campaign to have us all knit scarves for Special Olympics. Every year, I miss the deadline for Special Olympics, so this year I decided to have at it. If any of you are interested in knitting a scarf for this worthy cause, this is the website: http://www.scarvesforspecialolympics.org/

Needless to say, this required MORE YARN. I didn't happen to have Red Heart Super Saver 886 Blue or 512 Turqua lying around the house. At work today, the sirens began:

"Go to Michaels...go to Michaels...go to Michaels..."

I argued with the sirens. I explained that I had to leave work today promptly at 4:00 to be on time for my personal training appointment, and that I'd need to put off any shopping until tomorrow.

This is where it starts getting freaky...As I was leaving work, I checked my email on my Blackberry. There was an email from - you guessed it - my personal trainer! She said she was feeling ill and had to leave the gym and did I mind canceling for this week? I was, of course, overjoyed! Then it hit me...the Yarn Sirens! They did it! They moved, bended, and shaped things so that I'd go to Michaels instead of the gym! Unreal!

Gosh, I had another thought...does anyone suppose my personal trainer is sick because SHE'S PREGNANT??? I can't seem to get through a month without having to knit baby things for someone.

You know the Sirens are going to send me back to the store for baby yarn...LOL.

The Creep of the Yarn Stash

I know...countless knitting and crocheting aficionados over eons of time have raved about their yarn stash. One must be very careful about telling people one has a “stash.” Tell the wrong person, and you may end up on the wrong side of a police raid. People who are not familiar with the ways of the yarn look extremely taken aback when I talk about my stash, especially when I go on about its size, where it’s hidden, the variety, the quality, etc.

My stash resides in those plastic bins you slide under beds. You’ll notice here I say “beds” – plural. I have some yarn in enough quantities for a project, but a lot of it is in random skeins of ones and twos, which is a little tougher to use, as they tend to all be different textures and thicknesses. I’ve searched through those “one-skein” type books, hunting for suitable projects, but I can’t get excited about making fingerless mitts or tea cozies. I also don’t get the cowls that seem to be all the rage lately. NO...when I put something around my neck in the dead of winter, I want something that I can wind around and around my neck several times and with which I can also cover my chest, because it’s DAMN COLD up in these here parts.

Anyway, I digress... my stash has started to grow again. I’ve been trying to (no pun intended) keep a lid on it by my membership in the Crochetville Forum “Stashbusting” group. This is a group where we make a searching and fearless moral inventory of our weekly yarn usage, and confess our yarn transgressions. For a while there, I was doing pretty well, going through a few skeins a week, or at the very least holding steady. I’m not sure what’s been going on lately. I strongly suspect my skeins are having wild yarn orgies overnight in the bins, because they have started to reproduce – I’m sure of it. All of a sudden, my stash has busted out of the confines of the bed bins and is now residing in random project bags or in plastic bags by the bed.

I also find that I’m frequently a victim of stowaway yarn. I’ll be in Michaels, Wal-Mart, or the LYS, innocently minding my own business. One might say this is like going to the cathouse to hear the piano player, but I convince myself every time that I’m only going there to a) get a pattern book, b) search for the pattern freebies, or c) browse. Sure enough, I’ll go by the skeins and before I know it, they’ve leapt off the shelves and into my cart. You’re going to ask why, if I’m only getting a few things, I have a cart – and you can just hush up right now. This isn’t just limited to the usual haunts, either. I’ve been known to find yarn just about ANYWHERE. I’ve discovered they have yarn at Ocean State Job Lot, of all places (again, it just leapt out at me, before I could defend myself). I’ve even found yarn at True Value stores on Cape Cod.

I feel it’s just only a matter of time until I find yarn at Stop & Shop...

Going for the GOLD!

...yarn, that is.

I’ve done all the heavy lifting for my Pagan sweater. Using Excel, I reduced the cells down to little squares and mapped out the entire yoke design. I’m going with Runes in a circle around the yoke and some decorative stitches around those. I’m aiming for tiny Thor’s hammers and little Goddess symbols, but am not entirely sure how well those are going to come out in “fair isle” type knitting. I’m probably going to do some swatches and experiment before I attempt anything on the actual sweater.

So, that brings me to my current dilemma—the colors for the yoke design. One would think it would be easy to find gold and silver toned (slightly metallic) yarns, to nicely offset the navy blue of the rest of the sweater. Well...one would be wrong. I had last week off, and I spend most of it combing our LYS, Michaels, Wal-Mart, JoAnn Fabrics, and AC Moore, frantically searching for the perfect shades of gold and silver (well, okay, this wasn’t such a hardship...it was yarn shopping, after all).

The good news: as you see from my picture, I finally managed to find the perfect shade of gold at AC Moore. The bad news: it’s only available as EMBROIDERY FLOSS!!! I stood in AC Moore for about 15 minutes staring at the display, trying to decide how many tiny floss skeins I’d have to buy to create my yoke pattern and exactly how many strands I’d need to combine to equal worsted weight yarn. I took a skein and walked up and down the aisles of the store, trying to find THAT exact color, only in actual yarn. No dice. Even Red Heart, that company that has perfected every known color under the sun, including neon traffic cone orange, didn’t have anything.

I bought the tiny skein and performed the same exercise at a ton of different stores, but no match.

Yesterday, I finally decided to just skip attempting to be Monet with the colors and just suck it up, buy some Lion Brand Glitterspun online, and get on with it...

Yeah, you guessed it—Glitterspun has been DISCONTINUED! I found a kind soul on Ravelry who can sell me two gold skeins, but now I’m going to have to find two silver skeins...

Must get on eBay...must not appear too desperate...

Too many pattern books, or…

…the Library of Congress and the Ancient Library of Alexandria—combined—have nothing on me.

A few nights ago, the kind fellow yarn enthusiasts at my SnB group turned me onto a new thing…the “Library” section on Ravelry. Okay, Ravelry has probably had this feature forever–I’m just slow and never noticed it before. They showed me just how easy it is to add in all your books, booklets, pamphlets, magazines, etc. From there, you can search if you’re looking for a particular pattern or type of pattern, without flipping through every book you have by hand (for some of us, this could take years).

Excited, yesterday I embarked on this new endeavor. I began adding books off the top of my head, as I could remember them. I was so excited to see each book pop up on my Ravelry Library page. Soon, it became painfully obvious to me that I was missing a few. After all, I have almost a whole bookcase filled with yarn-related literature…surely there were more books than what I had added so far…

Thank heavens for wireless laptops. I brought my computer into the bedroom and started painstakingly going through my books. I added each one, trying to determine which could be considered “booklets” and which could be considered “books.” Ravelry, for some reason, considers a lot of what I thought were booklets to be actual books. I tried to go through the magazines, but frankly, I need to do what they call in IT-land a “deep-dive” into those to figure out if I want to keep them all–I mean, really, am I ever going to make the baby jacket in Crochet World that calls for some odd, obscure yarn and looks sort of bulky and uncomfortable for the baby??? Even if your kid couldn’t sit up for himself yet, I guarantee he probably could, with no problem, wearing this jacket.

In total, I managed to rack up 75 books, 1 magazine (before I gave up), 17 booklets, and 3 pdf files on my Ravelry Library page. Sound like an impressive number? Sure…and it’s even more impressive (or frightening) if you consider that I only got as far as THE TOP TWO SHELVES of my bookcase! There are three more to go through, plus all the magazines. I also have reams of printed-out patterns that should be documented somewhere and scads of other pdfs.

Not sure, but I think I need some Advil…