This past weekend I dreamt that Lorna’s Laces no longer did their Helen’s Lace line.  I woke up in a frenzy and immediately logged into Ravelry to make sure that Jaggerspun Zephyr was still in production.  Can you imagine a world without this yarn?  Horrors!

I had this lovely post all written out and then it kinda just poofed.  Basically it blithered on about how I am in a knitting funk due to less than stellar comments about something I knit for the baby.  In almost 40 yrs of knitting I have never before dealt with the ungrateful knit gift recipient issues one hears about so I just ripped it.  I am even considering just throwing out the yarn to get rid of negative connotations which sounds overly dramatic.

Surprisingly, despite the drama bit, it was a learning lesson.  I mean in the past I have been depressed or stressed and not knit because I couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm/energy for doing so.  My fathers long illness followed by my marriage totally falling apart for example.  This is the first time that a knitting snafu threw me into an emotional tailspin.  Which I think is odd given that I have been knitting most of my life.  I turn 47 in a couple of months and I have been knitting, off and on, since I was about 8.  It is one thing that gives me a sense of self.  I am a knitter.  It is also I think I am good at.  Along with cooking, it is an activity which I feel I am able to show my love and appreciation for others as well as express my creativity and get recognition for doing something well.  So not only am I a knitter but my sense of self esteem is also built into knitting.

I once read a book called Women and Self-Esteem that has an exercise in the beginning chapters to illustrate that women, men too I suppose {I don’t remember}, often value the qualities that they do not possess.  So because they undervalue what they are good at and value that which they are not good at they suffer from poor self esteem.  The exercise was to shift the qualities you do have into the valuable range.  There are few things that I consider myself successful at and, not to be immodest, knitting is one of them.  I mean it is such a forgiving craft  not that I am Ze Best Knitter in Ze World.  That may be why I was totally thrown when The Flame criticized my knitting.  He is usually a very enthusiastic and admiring knitting enthusiast.  At first I thought it was him being old fashioned since his criticism was about my color choice.  In his opinion babies wear pastels colors but the garment I was knitting, a BSJ in Lagoon, is obviously not a pastel.  The link is clearly not my jacket since I ripped mine but it is a picture of the same project in the same yarn so a good approximation.  Well I really like his daughter and hope she likes me so I kinda paused.  He knows her better than I do but I finally, after speaking to her about her non existent color preferences and asking if she had something for pastels over say black and grey or brown or strong colors or anything else, finished up my knitting.  THEN she tells me her husband hates green and she doesn’t care for it either.

In other knitting news I was working on a Super Secret Morocco Mole project when I realized I didn’t have enough yarn.  I was avoiding pooling so alternating hanks of yarn, something I don’t normally fiddle with but I wanted to make something extra specially nice for the flame, so didn’t realize I wouldn’t have enough yarn until I was almost finished with the second half.  Curses to Claudia’s hand painted yarns which has significantly less yardage than I am used to working with.  I am also considering pitching that yarn.  Is that too drama llama?  I really just want to put all the ickiness behind me and I am scared if it hangs around, ripped or not, there will be associations.

OH!  Well the whole interesting to me bit about the emotional tailspin is how it affected everything else.  I have been uber funkalicious all month long.  Really I feel like I am battling depression and losing big time.  I am trying to do all I should be doing on a daily basis, and we all have stuff we must do, and struggling to ‘Just Do It!’ but the encouraging bit, my mantra if you will is:

I think it is really important to make an effort, every day, to do stuff, even if we don’t feel like it, because we have expectations to meet.  Sometimes those expectations come from within but other times they come from family and friends.  As a parent and partner the stuff I do is like a huge I care.  Even if I don’t want to care or feel like I am caring it is a way to show my love and work on maintaining a good bond.  I am not the only person that feels this way.  Tho sometimes I just want to snuggle up in bed and care for myself which is when a fresh start matters.  Yes ripping is good.  Totally not staying mired in last month and gonna turn a new page.

A while ago I knit up The Flame some fingerless mittens out of some long discontinued, and much treasured, Classic Elite Maya yarn.  Those Mitts pattern from A Friend to Knit With.  Sorry for all the hyper linkage but for some reason the link on her sidebar, as well as the one or Ravelry, is not working for me so I direct you to her post that describes them instead of the PDF.  Anyways The Flame wore his mitts daily, summer and winter, for a year and half or so until his boss’ boss noticed them and stated they were against dress code.  Stinky boss.  The Flame then brought them home to be washed and last weekend went hunting for them since his hands were cold.  They were not to be found anywhere

Another pair of Those Mitts then.  This time in some Rowan 4-ply botany held doubled and, I really hesitate to say this since he reads my blog, maybe a second ball of Dale yarns Baby Ull.  I say maybe because only one ball had a tag tucked into it {the botany} and I couldn’t tell any difference between feel or color however one seems a wee bit smaller and thinner than the other.  Either way he now has 4 black mitts and unless some hussy is grabbing at his hands nobody will notice the difference.  At least he will have 4 when I manage to locate the other two.

Interesting idea crossed my path while looking for the pattern was found amongst the toast comments~ of losing one and knitting another right quick.  Mismatched toasts and mitts sound like fun.  The Flame, being more conservative than I, just wanted black so the mismatched will be due to yarn texture not color.  Black Mitts:

Dorothy Siemens of Fiddlesticks Knitting gets major kudos for clear, easy to understand patterns.  This is the second design of hers I have worked and the process along with the finished product exceed all expectations.  The pattern itself was a gift from Stitchingirl Toni, whose blog is lost to time, in 2006.  The yarn is Knit Picks Shadow in Vineyard.  The Inky-Dinky Spider Stole combined with a nice strong grape ends up with a drunken spider.  Love!  Particularly nice touches were the working of edging along with shawl.  I really appreciate not having to slog a shawl when I think my knitting is done.  Somehow edgings always seem to take longer than the actual body of stoles.  Especially if you are not going to knit back backwards and have to flip it back and forth to work a few stitches perpendicular to body.

The Shawl incorporates two of my favorite shetland patterns.  Every time I see something with the birds eye pattern I am automatically wowed even tho it is not particularly difficult.  I do realize that different people call patterns by different names but here is what I am talking about:

The next pattern that I really love is what I consider to be spiders webs…. even before doing this stole.  I think of it as totally trip-y and very psychedelic.  My eyes get confused whenever I see it.  I have no idea what it is known as but to my mind it embodies Op Art and I love it.   My next project, okay current project, incorporates  it as well.

These two  patterns make up the bulk of this stole and if you can’t tell I am beyond pleased.  Knitting wise it didn’t take me much time although I started this one quite a while ago.  It has been languishing for months with a mere weeks work left to do!  Actually once I started it a year ago I was kicking myself for not working on it sooner.  I think my main reason for hesitating was fear of running out of yarn.  I ended up with over a full skein leftover so I just need to stop fretting about such things.  My shawl did end up a wee bit smaller than called for but I cannot imagine it at a looser gauge or stretched more tautly.  The extra 3 inches or so in length would mean I couldn’t have blocked it on my bed anyways.  Although yesterday, while I was pinning it out, I started musing if a person could justify buying a king sized bed for blocking purposes.

All in all January was a good knitting month.  I finished the SSK and a pair of socks for the flame and a lovely shawl for me.  I am full of stashdown Win!

yarny days and knitterly evenings plus one more shot, washed out unfortunately, of my shawl to show pattern transition:

Like many knitters I have little pockets of yarn squirreled away here and there.  Lately, with the move to smaller digs, I have been feeling overrun with yarny stuff.  Not yarny goodness but *gasp* clutter.  Not meaning to sound ungrateful or spoiled but I miss having a yarn room.  I haven’t had one since I was living la vida single.  Even then the yarn was too much to be kept in one room.  To take care of this I joined a group on Ravelry called Stashdown and it has been most helpful the past year.  To demonstrate lets share the stats for last year:

yarn in: 3665 yds

yarn out: 43,978 yds

Most of the yarn out, to be sure, were via sales pages here and there.  Plus they only count yarn out when you actually finish a project so some stuff I knit that needs assemblage doesn’t actually count.  This year I am aiming for zero yardage in which is going to be super tough.  Not totally tough since one can officially swap for new yarn with somebody else and as long as you are swapping out as much as or more yarn than you are receiving then you are still in the zero in column.  Only when you buy yarn or swap for more yarn does it count as insies.  Unless I totally misunderstand that rule.  I might check with the mods on that one but that is how it worked last year.

This only matters because of the grandmama business since I am spending much time on Ravelry at the moment looking at cutie patootie baby things and coveting other people’s FOs which I could theoretically duplicate if I get the exact same yarn.  And I am making it a goal to not acquire new yarn.  Quite a conundrum.  Swaps will be my saving grace should they still be acceptable given the rules above.

Spending time on Ravelry or other people’s blogs has been something I avoided like the dickens last year because I do have a covetous heart and know it.  Nothing wrong with that imo after all that is why sample garments and such exist~ooh ahh see how pretty come buy X yarn in Y color and  you too can have this.  Actually that is why magazines and patterns and such exist at all.  With photographs to boot  Not just in the knitting business but any business.  It is called advertising and is successful for a reason.  Doesn’t really matter if you know there is an army of research going on behind it ~ it still works.   Which is why we need our handy dandy coping mechanisms.

Recently somebody emailed me asking for a particular yarn that I had adverted several years ago on a now defunct blog.  I just spent the last week going through bins of yarn organizing them into some semblance of order while looking for said yarn.  I still have more bins to go through but they are in a storage locker…. I did mention the smaller digs and lack of yarn room.  During this exercise I have set aside some yarn pockets, aka baskets in this case, to work my way through as well as several sweater lot of yarns in various weights in under the bed storage and such.  Hopefully this tactic will also help me be full of WIN this year with my stash down goals.

How are you dealing with your yarn organization this year?  Do you have any knitting goals?  I know a lot of people use the queue feature on Ravelry to organize such things and I suppose I should do the same as well.  After I finish rolling around in yarn

yarny days and knitterly evenings, Elka

yarny days and knitterly evenings to you all, ElkaThe Flame appreciates hand knit goods.  He spent quite some time indirectly asking for socks.  You know how it goes:  Oh those look warm and I bet those feel good while looking at my hand knit socks.  So after much time I broke down and knit him some socks.  Your basic 80 sts short rowed heel and star toed numbers and made a couple of socks by that formula since he wears them almost every day.  Which gladdens a knitter’s heart to be sure.  Then I came across some old stash yarn and felt it would suit him much better than me but men’s feet are bigger than girl’s feet, generally speaking and I started worrying about the yarn running out.  Plus the 80 st socks have a tendency to look baggy around the ankles~ most likely because they don’t get washed often.  I turned to the most excellent Nancy Bush and her Folk Socks book, which I might add has been updated recently, and followed her Simple Sock pattern that calls for 64 stitches.  Voila Modified Flame Socks.  Of course I was on tender hooks wondering if they would be too tight or not fit right on the heel and toe so had to give them to him well in advance of his birthdate in March.   In use shots of my beloved’s feet in socks:

yarny days and knitterly evenings to you all, Elka

I forgot to say yarn days and knitterly evenings the other day which probably explains why I haven’t had either