Knit up my yarn stash

Well, I knit the pink yarn from my frogged sweater into another sweater, which didn’t fit me (my curse as a knitter, I suppose), but I gave it to my dearest friend, instead of frogging again…this led me to pulling all of the purple yarn (from the same sweater) out of the balls and onto skeins (I made…yes, created…a niddy noddy in order to do this) and then soaked and straightened it (because it’s true! The kinks in the yarn cause it to knit up strangely after frogging), and have begun to knit it into two fingerless gloves of my own patterning (I’ve finished the first and am…perhaps 1/4 of the way through the second, and they’re actually quite cool-looking). I also took the black yarn I spun, and some red wool from a hat I knit my grannie, along with some brown mohair I had from a doll-making project, and I knit them into a very art-deco scarf for my grannie (which I gave to her today, and she loved it!). I still have some left, but I’m turning it over to the gods of needle-felting, seeing as it’s not enough to actually make anything knitted out of. I still have a ways to go…and I have few ideas of what to do with the rest of this yarn, but it will get done, I swear to God.

So, I had a lot of yarn for a hat I planned to knit my sister, and the hat is done. And…I still have a lot of yarn left from the hat I knit my sister. I think I’ll eventually knit her some sort of very open knit with it…perhaps a drop stitch thing, if I can figure it out. This goal is going to take a long long time.

Well, luckily I seem to have less yarn to knit than many other knitters, but at the same time, I think I’ve probably got about half as much time, too. Hmm, college is a hard place to carve out time to knit, and I’m a perfectionist, so I tend to frog things when I don’t like how they turn out, so it’s going to take me a while. Luckily, this whole “knit up my stash” thing is really good for my wallet…because I can’t buy any new yarn.

Well, I spent a good part of today frogging my first sweater that I ever knit. I’m not sure whether I’m happy about this, or sad…after all, it was my first sweater, but at the same time, first sweaters are perhaps nothing to be proud of, especially considering I didn’t do a guage, and it didn’t fit me at all. Hopefully, though, I won’t keep knitting a sweater, and deciding it’s all wrong, and then frogging and re-knitting it. One can only deal with the same yarn so many times. And I think that two is probably the limit.

I have finished most of the hat on fours (I didn’t cast on enough stitches, but luckily it wasn’t knit in the round, but in the flat, and so I’m going to knit another 1/4 of the same yarn, and just sew it in), haven’t really even though about Le Petit Chou, but I did do some on my other sweater the other day while waiting for glue/paint to dry.

Doesn’t my life seem so exciting when I put it down in letters?

Well, I finished a scarf for my mother (the three balls of yarn for which were sitting in my stash for two months, because I bought them knowing I wanted to use them for something for my mother, but not sure exactly what) for christmas…I have about a foot of remnant, but I don’t think that still counts as part of my stash. Only a sweater to knit, La Petit Chou (knitty) underwear to finish, a scarf to finish, a hat to finish (on fours…why?) and some other random stuff to go.

This could have been so much worse, I’ve only been knitting for about 9 months. And for three of those I was knitting one sweater (the one I plan to frog…didn’t turn out quite right). I managed to accumulate all of these projects over three months in rural Iowa without a yarn store for miles…how?