Sunday, February 2, 2014

Oh, that was ugly.

The Super Bowl. Yeesh. I enjoy a good football game, but I don't think that bloodbath qualifies.

Anyway, I'm prepping my Ravellenics Games projects. I don't usually participate (deadlines on my hobbies and life's little joys sort of give me hives), but this year I found the only two teams that give me the latitude to work hard or not at all.

So I finally got my yarn out for the third and most interesting of my Ravellenics projects -- a pair of armwarmers I've been designing for ages. Here's the yarn:


To give you a hint of how old this project is, that yarn is discontinued. Not that it takes much, because yarn lines and colors go out of fashion all the time, but it's fairly standard sock yarn in kettle-dyed, mildly variegated colors.

Weep with me.

It's a stranded color work project, too. So what I needed to start this project up is a multi-strand yarn organizer. My local Big Box was remarkably short on that item, so I'm improvising my own in a fairly clever way, if I do say so myself. Wanna se?

First, you take two plastic shopping bags -- I went with fairly small ones for this project. 


Then you wedge your yarn in there and pull the center strand out of each of the skeins (making them all center pull skeins):


Then you thread one strand of each through each of the handle holes:


Hey, presto! Each yarn has its own little handle hole, and all tangling will occur outside the yarn bags.

Yes, it's a bit ghetto, but it'll work. You'll see. Eventually. When I get around to, you know, actually knitting on this thing.