Sunday, August 31, 2008

No more day counts; how will I make up titles now?

I'm not sure, actually. I was crap at title-making-up before, the day count gave me an out. Oh, well, back to the drawing board....

Speaking of drawing boards, I was all giddy this weekend, contemplating the $300 I have coming up with my next paycheck--a $300 which is unspoken for, and which I have given myself permission to spend with wanton abandon. I was thinking of all the yarns, the lace needles, the books, the patterns, all of it. "Giddy" doesn't even begin to express the emotion; my head was swirling in shopper's ecstasy, visions of silken yarns dancing in my head.

Well, not completely, actually. I have a pattern idea that's been chewing on the corner of my processing centers for the past three or four months, and I've figured out which yarns from Knitpicks.com I want to use ($30 for more than one version), and I realized I need more lace needles (considering how many projects I have on needles at any given time, and how many more I want to start up; another $30-40). Then I started to contemplate silks and alpaca and merinos in laceweight for any of the patterns in my lace porn book (which, in true pervert fashion, I tend to keep hidden).

To distract myself, and because it needs to be done, I decided to finish up the baby sweater (I've got the ribbon, I just need to sew it in place) and to do so, I needed my needles which are in the bag with my dragon scales shawl which got shoved in my toy box last week in a spurt of "hide the evidence!" guilt. I take all the junk off the top (no small feat; I've got at least 25 books on there, my cd holder, the Who scarftainer, my pile of lace porn, etc.) to get in the box, and lo. The beauty of my yarns!

I've already got a ton of really nice stuff in there! I just keep forgetting! I've got my yarns for the Knit Spot 'Little Nothings", I've got my new Yarn Pirate in my eye searing fingering weight (which is perfect for victorian lace--they were pretty garish at times, themselves, I hear), I've got my alpaca and the Knitpicks Palette in an incredible array, my Frog Tree alpacas and the lovely teal-blue Cosetta bulky. There's a wide range of colors in kitchen cotton and kitchen cotton spatter colors, and other lovelies just sitting there, waiting patiently for me to remember them and make them up into something.

Ok, ok, ok, you forlorn little yarns. I'm going to have to set myself a schedule and avoid all patternly temptation for a while until I can cut my stash down to a reasonable size. Oh, I'm not going to sell or trade it--good grief, no, whatever gave you that idea? I'm very greedy of my fibers--I'm going to knit it. I'm going to knit it all. It's not something I could do in a year (or probably even two; there is the yarn for the second Who scarf in there, remember?) but I'm going to set myself a list. So far, this is what I've got:

Kidsilk Haze = Woodland Stole
Random sock yarn = Little Nothings Tudor Grace
Knitpicks Felici = Little Nothings Rivolo
Cosetta = Hemlock Ring Blanket
Knitpicks Gossamer (green) = Cheshire Cat Stole
Knitpicks Gossamer (brown)= either Adamas Shawl or Barbara Shawl
Misc. alpacas = self-designed scarf
at least two of my Sugar 'n Cream cotton yarns = Catherine Purse from Knitting Little Luxuries

That's a good...year, year and a half right there, unless I hit the lottery and can quit the day job and get to knit all the live-long day (which sounds just like heaven, if you want to know the truth). But it's a good place to be starting from, I should think. And it's not as if my intention is to completely deplete the stash. I just want to start knitting up the older yarns, making them into the projects I've been lusting after, before I restash. While I restash. I just want to get my queue moving, so to speak, instead of finding new stuff and forgetting the old. I want to keep the stash from getting stale.

Which, I'm sure you'll agree, is an admirable goal.

So *claps hands together, then rubs them in a 'down to business' gesture* here's how this will work: I will have three things on the needles at any one time (minimum; I may go crazy and have up to seven, I'm sure). The Who Scarf currently takes priority as it's been on the needles forever and a year. I'm also banging out two bibs for Baby October (one is more than half done, the other is a garter stitch square, like that will take any time at all), and I've got the scarf and the Dragon Scales shawl. Hopefully the alpaca scarf will not take a very long time (if one repeat is five inches long, and if I managed to finish that one repeat the first time in under one hour--a time that is sure to get shorter and shorter as the repeats progress, and if I want a scarf that's ten feet long, that's....less than 20 hours for the scarf, which, all in all, isn't bad), and then I'll take one project from the list to replace it (probably a Little Nothing, or maybe the lace pron project using the Yarn Pirate), and so on and so forth. I aim to have...three finished projects by the end of this year, not counting the baby junk that needs to be done by Saturday next so I can go to the shower.

I can do this, too, I bet. I mean, I paid off over $3000 in three months and some small change, and, as the song says, looking back, it was easy.

I guess I'll just have to tuck that extra $240 up in my savings account for a rainy day without yarn.

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