Reunited

You may have gleaned from my last post that I am no longer in Arizona. The snow was probably a give away. Last month I got a job in Utah, and moved back to Salt Lake City in a hurry. I am working as an SEO Content Writer which I am really enjoying. I can make grammar jokes at work and people laugh which is mind blowing. It’s also helping me get my comma splicing habits under control. It’s good being in the company of fellow nerds.

 A couple of my excellent friends let Piña and I stay with them for a while. Piña mostly terrorized their dog while we were there. If you can imagine the scene in The Princess Bride where Wesley takes down Andre the Giant with quick moves and mosquito-like persistence, it looked an awful lot like that every day. 

Poor Odin was ready to have his lazy lifestyle back, so we found a house to live in. We tricked our good friend Emma (who I’m pretty sure reads this blog yaaaasssss kween) into living with us again. With our combined addictions, this duplex could turn into a craft studio in a hurry. Which I am obviously pumped about. 

Maybe the most exciting part of renting a new house is that there is more room for all the yarn. Piña and I took a road trip to CO to pick up our things at my man friend’s folks’ place and we’ve been reunited with our treasures. But the light here is terrible, sorry for the picture quality. 

My sweater collection

A hand embroidered pillow I bought in Guatemala

Piña thinking this rug is for her. It’s not.

A naturally dyed hand woven rug I bought in Chiapas, Mexico

The start of my Beekeeper’s Quilt.

So. Much. Yarn.

Turns out you can quash the impulse to buy more yarn when you’re reunited with your stash and everything seems new again. If you need me, I’ll be knitting hexipuffs until my fingers fall off. 

Issues

Once upon a time I was a naive little knitter who couldn’t wrap her head around what a yarn stash was and why any knitter would have one. I read the Yarn Harlot’s Knitting Rules and laughed at her description of yarn stash levels. The most extreme stage of yarn hoarding she coined as SABLE–Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy (It’s on Urban Dictionary so you know it’s legit). I sat on my high horse knitting away on ONE PROJECT at a time using ONLY the yarn I bought for that specific project. Well. Those days are gone.

They say the first step of recovery is admitting you have a problem. I have a stash. I said it. A yarn stash. A small one by comparison to many, but still, a stash. And this is just the yarn that I thought was totally necessary to bring to my parents house. I have more yarn in storage with Aaron in CO. I flew here. I brought really minimal amounts of stuff here. But I still somehow managed to cram all this yarn into 2 suitcases along with all my clothing?! Yikes.

I didn’t actually bring all of it here, about half I brought and half I…acquired…since I’ve been home. This sure does look like a lot of yarn BUT, I am a knitter on a pretty tight budget and I still try to adhere to my early knitter rules of only buying yarn with a plan. So let my break down this table of crazy for you.

This first column of knits and yarn are WIPs (works in progress). From the top: My Hue Shift Afghan,  the green is a Dijon Top for Shannon’s Tops, Tees, and Tanks KAL, and the wine colored pile is my very irritating Grace Cardigan. I’ve been working on the Afghan off and on since last summer. It’s super fun but is quite a time investment. There’s 100 squares and a border. Each square takes me about 45 minutes to an hour and I’ve done 48 so far. This column gets knitting action on a pretty regular basis. The next column…

Not so much. I call this one Sad and Forgotten Hats. The top is a design I was working on that ended up a perfect hat for the Hulk (assuming he likes pom poms). The second is a color dipped hat that I have started over so many times I can’t even count. I traded my only size one circular for a pair of hand knit socks with a woman selling knits in Mexico. I don’t regret it at all, but I keep trying to make this hat happen with too big of a needle and I just need to suck it up and buy a new needle. The third one is a hat for my dad inspired by my naughty mittens. I have knit and re-knit this one quite a bit and it is almost good to go but needs a block and a tassel attached. The bottom is a scarf I made for my grandma and it is finished but I am not that happy with it and I am really considering ripping it out and making her a different one.

This next column is Yarn With a Plan. The blue and marled black and white have been destined for a sweater since my sister brought it back from Chile for me two years ago. I tried to start it in Guatemala but just got too damn hot to knit it. The teal and cream cotton are for dishcloths, the grey for socks, and the bottom neutrals I got this past weekend for an experiment.

These are leftovers of the very best kind. Yarn leftovers. Their brothers and sisters were made into sweaters, shawls, socks and mittens. They don’t have a plan anymore but I would love to use them in some sort of scrappy project. I was thinking a Stephen West design? I’ve never knit anything of his but they are so fun and he is literally my favorite person to follow on Instagram. Even more than the Camping with Cats account. That’s really saying something.

I call this last one Moments of Weakness. Yarn without a plan. I almost added a skein of Cormo from a farm last weekend but I stuck to my quasi-steely will. It’s a pretty small pile so I don’t feel too badly about it but this pile has got to stay pretty small.

There you have it. My stash revealed. Time to get knitting.