Gift in Progress

 Sometimes a project comes along that must be done rather than wants to be done. The kind of project that you see a pattern and know that you will spend the next who knows how long to get it done.

This was the Fellowship of the Ring pattern (Rav Link), which is really just a chart to follow for a rather wide scarf. Once I saw this chart I knew that my coworker needed to have it.

Said coworker loves Lord of the Rings and usually reads through them at least once a year. Shortly before this pattern was released, he'd mentioned that due to a health issue, he'd not been able to read the books that year as he didn't have the focus for reading. 

Seeing this pattern and how it was basically the whole story in a series of images would allow him to 'read' the story by looking at the scarf. I'm anticipating this being more like a scroll hung on a wall or pulled out of a drawer though, as he lives in a rather warm climate.

I decided to double knit this in black and light blue Loops & Threads Impeccable acrylic and I'm quite happy with how it's coming out. My tension isn't perfect as I'm knitting one colour continental and the other English, but it's not glaring, and has been practice for both types of knitting.

There are 9 sections all told in the scarf, and I've completed 6.5, so I'm very much on the home stretch and excited to get it done so I can surprise my coworker.

I'm hoping to have this done by the end of March. Any sooner would be awesome too but as a mother of two very young children I'm being realistic.

A Trove of Treasures

 It's amazing the stuff you can find when you're sorting through a life's worth of stuff.

8 more boxes of books, fabric, patterns and such out the door, along with a dining table that I used to use for my crafting but no longer have room for.

It's hard having to part with things but, at the same time, every box out the door is a weight off of me.

The fun part of going through all these boxes that have been packed up for years is the random stuff I either forgot I had, or have been looking for for ages.

For example:

A black cape made for a friend that got lost in the shuffle. Said friend has allowed me to keep it as she doesn't need two. This is specifically a cape based on the hooded figures found in the dog park from Welcome to Nightvale. I may have my Halloween costume for next year.

A slipper pattern that my mother has been looking for. My Grandmother had scores of these slippers, specifically the bottom right, in her house. In an effort to continue having the slipper tradition, my mother was trying to reverse engineer from a pair she still has. 

Most interesting is 4 skeins of Sami Amano. I am not a knitter who enjoys knitting with cotton. I usually do anything I can to avoid working with it. So I'm trying to scratch my brain to figure out why I have 4 skeins of Peruvian cotton stashed away in a box. I can only guess that I either had a pattern planned or I won the yarn from my local guild. I'm thinking that I have a cotton tank top in my future.

While I've gotten through most of my stash now, I'm intrigued to see what else we'll dig up as we go through the rest of the boxes.

In other news, the absolute frigid weather broke to allow the snow to melt just enough to make an itty bitty snow man with my daughter.

Progress Achieved

 

Step one to getting the craft room set up is figuring out what I have. To do that I need to dig out the dining room which has been our holding area for far too long.

Exhibit A is probably 90% of my fibre stash, the coke can is for scale. The bottom bucket is full of 2 full alpaca fleeces, and a bag of miscellaneos camelids from a conference workshop I did. The top bucket is the wool/silk/mixed fibres that I will hopefully soon get to play with. I still want to catelogue what I have so I can keep track of what I do with the various spins and what I learn.

Exhibit B is 4 of 8 boxes of fabric, patterns, and various odds and sods that I decided were not things I would use and could go find other homes.

I'm being very tough with myself this time, making sure that anything I keep has projects earmarked for it. Not that these are set in stone, but by knowing at least what garment I will make with something and that it's something I will actually wear, then I don't end up with pretty stash that has no purpose.

When I was disposing of my moth ridden stash last year, I came to terms with the fact that, while I had a lot of pretty yarn, I didn't have enough of one type of yarn to make anything with. Lots of single balls, or scraps leftover that ultimately were useless. 

Whatever stash I keep, needs to be useful.