Knit up my yarn stash

http://www.squidoo.com/african-knit-dolls

Yeah, I do. I have trouble resisting the call of the LYS. I keep finding more and more patterns and types of yarns I want to use and buy the supplies. Meanwhile I’ve got enough supplies at home for several projects that could easily fill up my time. I need to focus on what I’ve got. New is always exciting, but I need to focus on FOs! At least until the stash is smaller, cause there’s no more room in my storage spot.

Seems like no matter what yarn it is, I have just enough for a scarf. Finished a nice purple one in a mock ribbing for my daughter today.

Some is from projects I’ve finished with a bit left over. A small amount is from projects I worked on but didn’t finish, because my children grew faster than I can knit. But the vast majority of my stash is “donated” by people who tried to take up knitting but didn’t stay with it. And so most of the yarn is the kind of stuff beginner knitters get (acrylic and novelty).

I’m going to try finding some way to use it all, without making my children wear anything ugly! But I also need to be honest, if it’s not going to be a joy to create with, it’s going to have to go.

Right now, I’m working on dishcloths just to use up all the cotton I’ve got stashed.

If I just give yarn away? I came into loads of sock or lace weight yarn that I just would never get around to. I don’t have that kind of patience. I am, however, using all my odd skeins for hats for my children. I’m not even close to being done. :( And then I feel guilty when I buy more yarn lol, but I suppose that doesn’t really matter to me, does it?

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.

I. . . bought more yarn.

I’m going to knitter hell. (But it was Manos! That shouldn’t count, right? Manos is, like, transcendent yarn! It’s outside the realm of yarn!)

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.

Currently I have five shelves of yarn and then some. The goal is to reduce it to two shelves of yarn that isn’t being used in a WIP. But before I finish that, I’ve got to finish up:
-The icky swirly scarf
-Justin’s ruddy hat
-Bart’s cigar case
-Camela’s other hat
-The Damn Doily Thing
-Humongo afghan
-The scarfy thing that may or may not have a hoody thing
Of course, the tricky bit is that to use up all of this yarn I’ll have to buy more in order to have enough for a complete project. Drat diddity drat drat drat.