Spring cleaning, unfinished patterns
By Megan Goodacre
It's that time of year for knitters (and for everyone I guess) when you do a lot of spring cleaning. The sun is shining a little more, bouncing off the cobwebs and dust bunnies, and you are struck by the sudden need to de-clutter. All the yarn came out last night. I used to sort yarn by colour, it looks so tasty that way. But now I sort by weight. I find it more productive when I'm looking for something. Yarn sorted by colour looks really fabulous, but I can't see most of my stash anyways because I store it in bins and bags in a big cabinet. When Kaffe Fassett gave a talk in Ottawa, 2013 it must have been, he showed slides of his studio, where the yarn is sorted by colour and heaped into large, specially-built drawers. Ready at any moment for inspiration. You can just imagine how many colours he must have access to. My clever friend Nicole raised her hand and asked the question that many of us were thinking but didn't quite have the balls to say to Kaffe Himself, Have you ever had any problems with moths?" And he replied, "Yes and we won't ever speak of it."
So displaying your yarn in the open is beautiful, but is sort of like filling a table with an all-you-can-eat-brunch-buffet for a group of hungover stag-party revellers and then putting a tiny card on the table that says, "Please, don't eat the food." We all know how that story ends.
We can talk about moths another time, but suffice it to say that I experienced them once and became more knowledgeable than I ever wanted to be on the topic. Moths in your stash is, as someone said (probably almost definitely the Yarn Harlot), is like talking about herpes. You want to know the symptoms, but you really shouldn't talk about it at the dinner table.
In my spring cleaning, I found some unfinished projects.
Also, I found three finished projects for which I never got around to publishing the patterns. Very silly. Here are two of them. On the left is a lovely wide scarf in SweetGeorgia CashLuxe Fine. On the right is a sport weight hat with a chevron colour motif. It's lovely in person, lots of baby alpaca. It's mostly Americo Original Baby Suri, another favourite that I keep coming back to.
Here's another shot of the scarf. It has a very simple vertical eyelet motif, broken up by garter stitch ridges. I like the way the eyelet motif puts a bend in the row, and shows off the variation in the yarn colours.
"
So displaying your yarn in the open is beautiful, but is sort of like filling a table with an all-you-can-eat-brunch-buffet for a group of hungover stag-party revellers and then putting a tiny card on the table that says, "Please, don't eat the food." We all know how that story ends.
We can talk about moths another time, but suffice it to say that I experienced them once and became more knowledgeable than I ever wanted to be on the topic. Moths in your stash is, as someone said (probably almost definitely the Yarn Harlot), is like talking about herpes. You want to know the symptoms, but you really shouldn't talk about it at the dinner table.
In my spring cleaning, I found some unfinished projects.
- One mitten.
- A sweater with .3 of one sleeve.
- Another sweater with .99 of a body and 0 sleeves.
- Another sweater with .5 of a body and no notes.
Also, I found three finished projects for which I never got around to publishing the patterns. Very silly. Here are two of them. On the left is a lovely wide scarf in SweetGeorgia CashLuxe Fine. On the right is a sport weight hat with a chevron colour motif. It's lovely in person, lots of baby alpaca. It's mostly Americo Original Baby Suri, another favourite that I keep coming back to.
Here's another shot of the scarf. It has a very simple vertical eyelet motif, broken up by garter stitch ridges. I like the way the eyelet motif puts a bend in the row, and shows off the variation in the yarn colours.
"