How much yarn is too much?

Warning: all about yarn (no fabric here sorry!)

The week before last I assembled all my yarn in one place.

I didn’t intend for it to be there for long. Things happened (a story for another post) and I was just too exhausted in the evenings to do anything! By the time I updated my  records on Ravelry, it took me most of a week! However, I was able to look at the whole lot realistically and make some decisions about what to keep and what to give away!

To tell the truth, at first I was overwhelmed by the amount of yarn I had. However, the longer it sat in front of me, the more used to it I became and now it doesn’t seem so bad!

So we’ll begin with what I had before the cull!

The synthetic yarns were mostly on the table. Here is the view from the end of the table closest to my knitting chair

 

and here are the synthetics (including baby yarn) again from the side of the table (yes, that is my fruit bowl lost in there!)

 

That's a lot less synthetic than there used to be but still way too much for my liking!

On the floor, under the end of the table were the cottons and bamboos, with the sock yarns to their right

 

I discovered that I could knit a pair of socks each week for a year and not run out of yarn (I had no idea I had so much)!

Finally, in front of the television unit, are the wools, including UFO’s in that white box.

One thing this exercise has reinforced is that my stash is mostly either 8ply (DK) or sock yarn. No wonder I never get around to knitting all those lightweight projects I have queued!

And, because we all need closure, here is my yarn collection now. Now I just need to find a permanent home for those nine 28 litre (7.4 gallons) tubs (left to right, top to bottom: baby yarn, two tubs of sock yarn, yarn for me, cotton and cotton blends, wool in weights other than 8ply/DK, UFOs for me, sock yarn for me, acrylic 5ply/sport-weight). The two large ones, which have a capacity of 80 litres each (21 gallons) live under the spare bed. The bottom one holds my 8ply/DK wool yarn, the other is full of 8ply acrylic!

This collection of tubs does not include my stash in “grab bags”; some of which are seen in this photo. These are housed in a drawer under the spare single/twin bed.

I did not take a photo of the yarn I gave away – that didn’t even occur to me, sorry.

Now that the yarn is sorted, I can get back to some stitching! Of course, there’ll be some music in the background while I sew or some television viewing while I knit.

What do you like to watch (or listen to) while you’re stitching?

Grab Bag Challenge #1

It’s taken much longer than it should have to complete this first challenge!

I started with one solitary 20 gram ball of long-discontinued Panda Double Bubble, a boucle-style 5ply (sport weight) 100% acrylic yarn. I’m not even sure how I know it was sport weight – I must have found it on the internet somewhere because it’s not in Ravelry’s yarn database!

Logic told me to give it away; after all, what can you do with 20g of yarn? But the colour was so pretty – just right for a little girl – so the challenge was to find something useful I could knit with 20g.

I have no idea how much length there is in a 20g ball of sport-weight acrylic yarn. I know that there are between 250 and 300 metres of yarn in 100g of acrylic 8ply (DK), therefore there are about 50 to 60 metres to 20g. This is sport-weight not DK, so I figured I probably had about 70-80 metres to play with.

And here is where Ravelry shines. I opened the pattern search page, ticked the filters for acrylic, sport-weight, 70m or less, free knitting patterns (or those in my library) that had photos. From the 25 patterns shown, I found two hat patterns that I thought would work with this yarn and chose Jeffrey’s Stripey Hat by Heather Wells, simply because I liked the shape better.

Ambitiously, I cast on 120 stitches (the 3-6 months size) on 2.75mm needles (I couldn't find my 3.25mm needles).

The first obstacle came when I realised that working with that boucle yarn on small gauge needles caused a great deal of pain in my left forearm and elbow. I could only knit about 300 stitches then I had to stop! So it took several days before I realised I was running out of yarn faster than I was running out of pattern! ;-)

I ripped it all out and decided to knit the newborn size. I cast on again but my arm ached worse than ever. I wondered if the small gauge was the problem. There was only one way to find out – I needed to locate my 3.25mm needles. (That’s the problem with having guests staying – things get shoved away to make room for extra beds).

With 3.25mm needles in hand, I cast on again. Still some aches but not as bad as before. It must be the combination of the acrylic boucle yarn and the small needles - - I knit socks on 2.25mm needles and have never experienced “knitter’s elbow”!

Taking it slowly so as not to aggravate my arm further, I completed the hat in four days.

the colour in this photo is the most accurate

The hat will go into my stockpile until I hear of a charity needing hats for newborn babies.
I had more yarn leftover than I thought, so I planned to knit a pin-cushion for my own use.

After four attempts at double knitting with a single yarn, I gave up. Three times I dropped stitches and couldn’t find them in the boucle bumps. The last time I had obviously not slipped my stitches correctly because I didn’t end up with a tube I could fill! This has never happened to me before – I assume it was because I’m too tired to concentrate properly (we've had a lifestyle change and I’m now getting up three hours earlier than my natural inclination). my arm is throbbing from four hours of knitting that yarn so I’m going to cut my losses; who knows, I may pick up the yarn again some day but, if not, it will go in the bag of scraps DD uses to needle punch toys for cats at the animal adoption agency!

Time to grab a new bag and find a pattern to use up the yarn it contains!

If you’d like to join me in this challenge, grab some odd balls of yarn or some orphaned quilt blocks or fabrics that work together (you get the idea), put them in a non-see through bag, then label it on the outside with generic labels (eg 2 x 50g balls 8ply wool/nylon blend); one 12” orphaned block; three fat quarters). You want to have a general idea of what's inside, not a specific one. Seal all the bags and place them in a drawer, cupboard, basket, box or tote bag. Grab one bag at random and make something using as much of the contents as you can. No putting one bag back to grab another – the challenge is to use up what's in the bag and therefore use up items that you have had around for a while but don't quite know what to do with!

There’s no linky party for this challenge (I’ll create one if enough people are interested) but there’s a button and ‘grab code’ in my sidebar if you want to add it to your blog. You can leave a comment on this (or any other) post to invite me and others to come and see what you’ve done with the contents of your “grab bag” and I’ll put a link here on my blog which will, hopefully, drive some traffic over to your blog!

Won’t you join me? We all have miscellaneous items we keep avoiding!

knitting "grab bags"

Over the last couple of years, maybe longer, WM has been bringing home yarn as an elderly friend slowly de-clutters her home. Knowing that I have no more storage space in the wardrobe where I store yarn, he has been quietly storing it in the garage.

On Boxing Day (26 December, a holiday here in Australia), I wondered whether there was any dark coloured 8ply (DK) acrylic in the bags to add to my current project (rather than buying more yarn unnecessarily). WM accompanied me to the garage and, to my surprise, began hauling out bags and boxes from all over the place. I had no idea that there were so many!

Just as well my car was out of the garage. The space was quickly filled with two cartons, six large garbage (trash) bags and several smaller bags.

Two of the bags contained fleece (one straight off the sheep's back with bits of vegetation included!); these were obviously intended for DD because I don't spin.

Yesterday, while WM was at work, I hauled those bags and boxes into the living room and started going through them. The first thing I found was a beautifully knitted and obviously much loved blanket that had been repaired over the years but was now beyond repair. The far corner in the photo is just about hanging off! The blanket was in a bag labelled "Mrs Walker's rug". I have no idea who Mrs Walker was but I love the intricately knitted blocks and the colourful ruffled edging makes me smile! I have ear-marked this one for the local animal shelter -- I'm sure the dogs won't mind the holes!

The process of emptying each bag took several hours, deciding what was worth keeping, what could be given to the charity shop (thrift store) and what should just be thrown away (very little as it happens; I am a child of a "Depression" baby and we learnt to recycle, reuse or make do long before it was fashionable. I am also a hoarder, and believe that most things will be useful "one day"!) As I went, I added the yarns I was stashing into my Ravelry account.

During the sorting, I found two partially-made blankets. The "Christmas" one (thus named because of the colours) was crocheted and was already very heavy. I will rip it out and knit the yarn into something else. The second photo is closer to the real colours but the green is even more vibrant!

The one-day-I’ll-be-a-tartan rug I will discuss with my mother-in-law (she has made at least two of these tartan blankets in the past) and I’ll probably finish it. Seems a shame to waste all that hard work, although I could just give it to the animal shelter (it’s acrylic) after I sew all the ends in!

I also found two bags of very small knitted pieces, perhaps they were tension squares (gauge swatches). I think I’ll join these to make a blanket for the animal adoption agency. If I rip them all out, I ‘d only have to re-knit them into something else!

I found the pieces of a baby's cardigan, which I will finish if I can match the yarn to do the button bands.

I found several balls of wool made in Australia that weighed “one ounce”. That may not be too remarkable if you're not an Aussie knitter but the wool industry which, for many years, was the most important primary industry in Australia (we grew up hearing that "Australia rode on the sheep's back") has all but gone -- most commercially available yarn may be grown here but it is processed overseas. Additionally, the Australian wool industry changed over to the metric system in 1971. That makes those balls of yarn at least 42 years old!

The six balls of mohair are showing their age -- hard as steel wool. I'm thinking that a good soak in hair conditioner will restore their softness; if not, off to the charity shop they go! Speaking of mohair, I also found an acrylic/mohair blend that was being reclaimed from a commercially knitted garment, made in Indonesia! It's a pretty coloured yarn so I finished the ripping out (a slow process with mohair).

I found some good quality pre-1971 variegated Paton's Totem yarn. Most of it is knitted up into what would have been, in my opinion, a very ugly garment. I have ripped it all out and will think of another use for it. No, the photo is not out of focus – the yarn is just hard on the eyes! Way too much of that brown!

There were a few kilos, that's several pounds to my non-metric friends, of very brightly-coloured yarn which was too thick and too harsh to knit with. I'm assuming our dear friend had done some rug making in the past! That is all going to the charity shop, along with a bag of odds and ends and several balls of eyelash yarn -- life's too short and I have too much yarn to knit things I really can't stand!

All the 8ply (DK) acrylic (it just keeps coming) has been put in the box I reserve for that yarn. Yarn taht was too good to throw away or give away but which I cant figure out what to do with has been put in one bag labelled “miscellaneous – to be sorted”. I think most of it is wool or wool blends but, since there is only one 50g ball (or less) of each type/colour, I have put it aside for now.

All the other yarn I plan to keep has been packaged up and labelled. I have never done this before but it seems like a good idea! I am going to put all the bags in the drawer under the spare bed (where we used to keep spare clothes for the Grandsons when they lived nearby and visited often). It seems to me that, instead of knitting big projects like blankets (I started another one on Christmas Eve), I should knit lots of smaller projects and use up some of this yarn. It would be more useful keeping someone warm this winter (June to August in Australia) than taking up space in our house!

So, I'm calling these "grab bags"* and I'm going to make it both a game and a challenge for myself. Either WM or I will open the drawer, grab the first bag that comes to hand, and I will knit the contents of that bag into something useful until the yarn is used up. That shouldn't take too long considering the small amounts of most of each type of yarn.Then I will repeat the process until all the "grab bags" are done! If I enjoy the challenge, I will go through the boxes of donated yarn and old UFOs hiding in the bottom of the wardrobe, rip out where necessary, and make some more "grab bags"!

*This idea was partially inspired by Carol over at Fun Threads who makes quilts from challenge bags which I think are provided by her guild. It is also reminiscent of the sock challenge that was popular on the "knitternet" a few years ago where knitters put sock yarn and an appropriate pattern in bags, one for each month of the year, and randomly pulled out a bag each month.

Stay tuned for lots of smaller knitted objects!

Now what should I do with the blanket that’s in progress…?

making progress

I think it must be true that to tidy up properly, first one has to make a greater mess! It’s certainly true in our house; WM is tidying up his study/library and one can hardly move in there! This is what my family room looked like a week ago after we started on my sewing room.

  

Thank you to all who responded to my dilemma about the tub of fabric. Many people said that they would open it and sort the contents; three said they would go one step further and photograph the contents then put them back. That was a really good suggestion; however, there were literally hundreds of pieces of fabric in that tub (ranging from scraps to yardage), squashed down and locked in so tightly they couldn’t have moved if the tub were tipped upside down!

Here’s the tub with just the top of the contents taken out:

n the end, I decided to open the tub and sort the loose pieces of fabric into rough colour groupings: white and off white, black, grey, purple, blue, blue-green, green, yellow and lemon, orange, pink, red, brown and “low volume” beiges! I also ended up with a pile of fabrics that were mostly florals but some abstract prints that couldn’t be grouped by colour. This is what part of my sewing room floor looked like last Wednesday morning.

As some of you would know, I sort all scraps bigger than 1” square into colour groups so the pieces of fabric and the associated bag of coloured scraps have ended up in drawers.

What’s in the tub now? A lot of the fabric in the tub had been sorted into groups packed in individual zip lock bags so I left those and put them back in the tub. I also put any large pieces of fabric (a metre or more) in the tub. When I’m looking for backings that will be the first place I look.

so back to my sewing room…

Here are before and after photos of the wardrobe (closet):

There’s space on the top shelf for storage of completed quilts and knitting projects until the time comes to donate them. The red bag on top of the drawers and the plastic bag on the top shelf hold metres of fleece bought on sale for making warm ponchos for disabled patients and/or bed blankets for the local animal shelter. The tub with the bright yellow lid holds scraps of batting. Two of the three boxes on the right are completely empty – I’m trying to decide whether to fill them with miscellaneous "objects” that I don’t often need or to fit another set of drawers in there! Those drawers are very useful; the ones in the wardrobe hold stash that belongs to the community quilting group, the ones in the corner near my ironing board hold my private stash (yes, it’s small)!

The bag on the floor is one of the two bags of scraps detailed in my last post. The quilt on top of the drawers is my Country Houses quilt which is supposed to be the next UFO in line – when I remember to buy more batting! The cylinder beside it is actually two sheets of Teflon to protect my iron and ironing board when using adhesives for appliqué! The white cord in the left foreground leads to my cordless iron!

Other parts of the room are still untouched but it’s so much fun to be in here now that I don’t want to tidy, I want to sew!

I need to spend some time sorting out the storage of my knitting yarns but I’d rather be quilting!

I wonder if tidying my yarn stash will wake up the desire to knit!

What would you do?

We have had a very mild winter and spring has begun early. Although we are officially still in the coldest month of the year (there was snow on the nearby mountains a couple of days ago), yesterday was warm, clear and bright -- not a cloud in the sky in the morning and only small puffs of white in the afternoon. A perfect day to be outside.

So where did WM and I choose to spend the day?

In my sewing room, where else?

Now, please don’t be shocked. You are going to see something that is quite awful. I’ll admit that I am a hoarder, a procrastinator and a bit lazy. But I’m working on improving in all those areas!

My sewing room was a bit of a mess. I really didn’t feel creative in there at all! Any horizontal surface, like my cutting table, my sewing table and the spare machine table that DD occasionally used, had become cluttered. The cutting table had mostly knitting projects from last weekend or those in progress but there’s also a finished quilt under all that. My sewing table has a pile of pre-washed but not ironed fabric on it plus a few other odds and ends. The old machine table had become the storage place for works in progress and more prewashed but unironed fabric, this time flannelette.

 

To begin the clean up, I moved everything that wasn’t furniture but was on the floor from the sewing room to the family room:

Yes, all those boxes, bags and tubs (and a pile of batting scraps moved from a container because I needed it for something else) were on the floor of my sewing room, making it hard to get at anything else. Don't worry, it's all ordered so I know where it's going! That lounge with the two tubs in front of it is covered in quilting related things and everything there will be going back into the sewing room. The lounge with the two green shopping bags on it has knitting related stuff and everything there will be moved to the wardrobe in the spare bedroom.

The wardrobe in the sewing room had been a repository of all sorts of things. The room had been DD’s bedroom so there were still some clothes of hers plus at least one box of her things. The rest was either quilting related (fabric) or stuff I had packed in boxes for our renovation in 2007 and had not unpacked yet!

 

Encouraged by WM, I threw out some unneeded, long accumulated items. This is very hard for a hoarder who saves everything because I might be needed in the future. I emptied four of the five archive boxes (the other was DD’s) and the large white carton carton and WM re-packed what was left into one carton (to be rehoused at a later date)!

WM visited the local Reject Shop (a discount store) while I, supposedly, moved things back into my sewing room. Unlike others who enjoy this part of the process, I don't -- I find it very hard to work out where I want everything. Especially when we started on the task before I had thought it all through!

WM returned with four storage units -- five plastic drawers in each. Here are three of them:

 

At first we arranged three of them in the wardrobe like this, but then we moved the old ones into the wardrobe and put the new ones on display because they are all charcoal (the only colour they had), and the original two units, now hiding inside the wardrobe, are blue.

I like the uncluttered look that we have achieved so far but the family room now looks like a disaster zone!

There's still a way to go. Lots of ironing and folding of all that pre-washed fabrics to be done too.

However, the thing that is really holding me up concerns a lot of fabric that is not actually mine.

As many of you would know, I belong to an organisation that makes quilts for children in hospital and for palliative care patients. We make these mostly from donated fabric. Because we have minimal storage space in the Council-owned room where we meet, different members are storing the donated fabric at their homes. I am one of those. At the moment, some of the fabric at my place is stored in a large plastic tub which is crammed so full of pieces of fabric that I have no idea what's in the tub and so am not using it to his full potential. That tub, the larger of the two in the photograph below, has been in my home for fifteen months now, and no-one, not even the lady who packed it, has any idea what's in it!

The big question is this: should I leave it all in the tub so that, in the unlikely event of our founder requiring it at a meeting, it will be packed and ready to go? Or should I unpack it and have much greater access to the fabric? If I do the latter, I lose space but gain precious time because I won't have to rummage around the overstuffed tub on the off-chance something inside might be just what I need. I may even become inspired when I see all those new fabrics to play with! ;-)

I'm inclined to unpack it -- but what would you do?

starting the New Year in the right way

How?
By adding to the stash, of course!

Last week, I visited the Big Box Store (not the real name of the store; it’s a crafts and home-wares chain store) to buy some fabric to bind Dotty Bright. While there, I found myself in the yarn department and picked up a couple of bargains that weren’t advertised in the catalogue (they were specials in this store only).

Let me explain: The store had some yarn they wanted to clear so they marked it down to clearance prices. It wasn’t moving quickly enough, so a sign on the table advertised 50% off the clearance prices!

So here are my purchases:

Firstly, sock yarn (as if I needed any more!): I don’t have these two colourways and at $2.50 for 100g I couldn’t resist! This particular yarn, at full price, is $11.99 for 100g.

And no, I’m no trying to brag; I want overseas readers to understand how much we pay for craft materials here. Remember, this is a chain store with discount prices, sock yarn at my local LYS starts at $24.99 a ball!

Secondly, what I consider my bargain of the month – not only was it heavily discounted, but the sale yarn included my favourite colour!

It’s a 90/10 blend of cotton/silk. It was marked down to $3.00 a ball and to clear it out, they were taking another 50% off. Twenty balls (all in the same dye lot) for $30.00 – what a bargain!

On Saturday I returned to the store. This time I had DD with me. It’s a rare treat for her to get out without the boys so she made the most of it. I could say it was all her fault but it wasn’t really; I had already made up my mind what to buy before I got there.

Before I go any further, overseas readers probably need to know that fabric in this chain store normally starts at $12.99 a metre, and in Australian quilt stores, fabric starts at $24.99 a metre. (Just take a moment to absorb that…     Okay, you can resume normal breathing now!)

So you can understand that when I say “bargain”, I mean BARGAIN (sorry for shouting)!

I bought three metres of each of these fabrics for $4.00 a metre (yes you read that correctly!) That amounts to a discount of 67%-75%!

These fabrics were purchased with the intention of using them as backings. I’ve used the top one already! (yes, that means there's quilting in progress but that's another post)

And I bought at least two metres of each of these solids. The normal price of homespun in this store is $6.99 a metre – at $4.89 a metre it seemed like a good time to stock up. (What’s that? How much is homespun in LQS? Oh, $14.99 a metre! Do I need to remind you to breathe again?)

Navy, Natural, Black, Sand, Petunia, Grass Green, Chestnut, White, Fig, Iron, Regatta Blue

 This fabric was bought for sashing and binding.

DD found these two fabrics in the remnant bin and somehow they found their way into my purchases. The one on the left is homespun, more reddish than shown here. The one on the right is flannelette.


And finally I bought this fabric to make a quilted tablecloth for our new glass topped (outdoor) table. There is enough there to make a couple of placemats for when there is only WM and I.


And, it doesn't stop there: I won these eight fat quarters from a give-away late last year on Wish Upon a Star blog.

Thanks Mrs A! I don’t know what I’ll do with them but I’m sure I’ll think of something!

So, I guess I’d better get sewing!

adding to the stash (again)

I’m still on a yarn and stash diet. I haven’t fallen off the wagon. My rule was that I could buy any yarn or fabric as long as it had a specific (short term) purpose. There should be no adding to the stash just because I love something, or because it’s on sale.

I have not broken the rules with my most recent purchases.

Firstly, there was this fabric for my niece’s baby’s play quilt. All except the solid are from The Very Hungry Caterpillar range of fabrics.

The left photo is a glimpse of the top which I have finished and the right is the backing fabric (to be used in conjunction with the spots and solid).

The green in this photo is the backing and sashing fabric I have chosen to go with my Christmas Tree embroideries and the waves fabric is to be the backing for a cushion/pillow which I’m making as a gift.

I won these two sweet Japanese fabrics in a give-away on Val’s blog.

Val also included this little handbag charm – how cute! I didn’t see it until I went to take the photos today so a special thank you, Val, and please forgive me for not mentioning it in my email to you.

Carol, at FunThreads, sent me this little package of fabric for the I Spy quilt I plan to make for my grandsons. Thank you so much, Carol. It was very kind of you.

This is Older Grandson’s favourite fabric square.

I’d better move that I Spy quilt up the “to do” list, I think!

As for the yarn, I have purchased only two 100g skeins.

Yes, I know it’s acrylic and I said I wasn’t buying any more acrylic but I have a bag full of acrylic yarn to use up and a great idea in mind, so I purchased these two because they were on sale and because they were colours I didn’t already have in my collection.

I didn't buy this yarn but it is now in my stash. It is 100g of Crazy Zauberball – a yarn for making matching socks becasue two strands of yarn are placed alongside each other and dyed together -- giving a perfect match!

This was the prize for the most popular item in the One Skein Challenge at our knitters’ guild meeting last month. Thanks to all the members who voted for my Extended Swallowtail Shawl.

Time to get back to those WIPs  that I mentioned in my last post! One is now finished so there should be a celebratory post soon!