In January I celebrated yet another birthday. Mercifully, no one gave me yarn. However, as I get older and slower, I realize that I have to do something about my stash before I son sells it all off for $1 per skein so he can make a mortgage payment after I kick the bucket.
See, here's the thing. Getting older is a privilege, a joy because there's lots of knitting and spinning to look forward to, and other than social security and a retirement home in the country (suburbs) I can't get much happier than that. Being 'fake retired' (real retirement doesn't happen until July), I've been purging my house of all the things I don't want to spend the rest of my life with. Some of it went to the trash bin, three bags full of clothes no one wants, but managed to make it's way to the laundry every week, ended up in the donation bin, and some of it given away to friends who want it more than me. None of it was yarn or fiber.
Having cleared out a closet of the stuff I don't want and making room for stuff I do want brought me face-to-face with my stash. My wonderful, adorable, sweet smelling and beautiful stash. There might be two or five skein in there that I don't love, but the rest of it is near and dear to my heart. Still, there is too much of it and love like that is demanding, consuming and has psychic weight - something must be done about it, so I'm committed to knitting it down.
Now, if you've ever gone stash diving looking for a particular skein and the same scraps keep popping up, well, that's a sign that it needs to get knit up. Such was the case when I found these:
I know the top skein is Jojoland Melody, the other two are mystery white sock yarn. None of these big scrap balls are enough to make a pair of socks on their own, so I mixed them up and came up with the Flower Patch Fair Isle Socks. It's a paid for pattern on Ravelry, and if you look at the original pattern, you'll know that these socks are busy as heck, so I toned them down a bit.
I eliminated the picot cuff, the corrugated rib, the drive-me-crazy heel turn pattern and I added stripes where there were none. Yay me. That makes sock pair number three for the year, and I only used (most of) the Jojoland Melody and all of one skein of white. Maybe the second skein will stay in the bin once I stuff it back in there.
Right now I'm working with some Regia Pairfect in denim, pair number four. It's a skein of yarn that claims to give you two perfectly matching socks as long as you follow the instructions on the inside of the label. Well, I read the label and this is what I got:
Not so matchy-matchy, eh? I'm gonna love them anyway. The pattern is Socks on a Plane, but knit top down since I'm not so good at toe up sock knitting. These are replacement socks since the old pair had some sort of run in with something that totally destroyed one sock - and I'm pretty sure it wasn't the washing machine. I'm not naming names, but ... (Miss Kitty)
Regia is a sturdy yarn, hard wearing and will look just as good a year from now no matter how much I wash them, and more likely to be covered with Miss Kitty's hair than pills.
A few months ago, I pulled out twelve braids of fiber to be spun. They have to go because they are eight years old, at least, and every time I open the fiber cabinet door something falls out. Who is more blessed than me to have such a hoard? I refuse to get a bigger cabinet so these braids that fall out have got to be dealt with.
So, I took some Abstract Fiber in the hopworks colorway, 100% BFL which is my favorite fiber to spin. This is braid number four of 12 and it spun up like a dream:
I ended up with 151 yards of this lovely Navajo plied yarn in a worsted weight:
And because I was so in love with it, I made the Bankhead hat with it:
Sure, there was yarn leftover, but not enough to do anything with and I can live with that.
So now I'm going downstairs to spin the Frabjous Fiber on my wheel that is the colors of Valentine's Day, and after that I'll finish my sock.
I bid you adieu for now. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram as BronxKnitter, and on Ravelry as BronxKnitter1. You can also find me on YouTube. Until we meet again.
Happy knitting to you.
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