Making a move...

Perhaps not in a physical sense, but rather in an online sense. I've found myself growing tired of blogger and have decided to move blogs. Come find me at Brittany Knits! It's still a WIP but you get the idea! ;)

Rethinking stashing

I love yarn. I guess that should be fairly obvious to anyone who knows me, but I love yarn. And I like my stash. I like the yarns in my stash. But lately I've been thinking that I need to rethink this whole stashing thing. And as I was brushing my teeth just now, I started to wonder why I felt this way. And I guess there have been a few things that have led me to the point I'm at now.

Living overseas for the past year certainly helped me curb the stashing habit. Not that yarn isn't available in China. It's just that I haven't met any yarn there yet that I crush on the same way that I crush on and covet Cherry Tree Hill Supersock, for example. And I'm reluctant to have things mailed to China (a package full of lovelies that disappeared would break my heart I fear), so the yarny stash in China remained fairly constant.

Then I came back home for my summer vacation. And I came face-to-face with my stash again. And I flipped through everything and I sorted through stuff. And I got sad. Because I have all of this (mostly) lovely yarn. And I love it. But I never touch it because there's simply too much. It truly makes me feel guilty because the alpaca in that corner is wonderful and deserves to be knit up, but so does the Jaggerspun Zephyr in that box, and the merino in the other.

And this got me thinking about everything else in my life. Because of a bad breakup, when I got back to Vancouver, I had boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff in my grandmother's front room. I'm pretty sure she nearly fainted when it all came in. I certainly got an 'oh my god how did you end up accumulating so many things'. So I shrugged and told her that I didn't know. But I do know. I'm a stasher. I look at squirrels and think, "You, buddy, and I have more in common than the fact that we're mammals. We're stashers."

I've cleaned out a little bit, but I still have 7 boxes of books, a box and a bit of CDs and 3 boxes of DVDs. There was a tonne of old clothes, most of which I have finally gotten rid of. And other miscellaneous junk, most of which I have also gotten rid of. And then there was the yarn. And the fibre.

I don't know that I regret my book collection. Or my CD collection. Or my DVD collection. (There were definitely titles in there that I have had to weed out though; I decided that they just weren't worth the space that they were taking up.) Perhaps because it's easier to consume them quickly, and then go back and do it again. But I do regret having the yarn stash. I love it all, but I just don't knit that quickly. And there are things that I will tend to knit more than others. I knit socks and I knit lace, but I simply don't have the motivation to do sweaters as quickly (but I sure envy people like Stefani and Rain, who apparently do). It just makes me sad to see all these things that I had dreams and hopes for and to realise that those hopes and dreams aren't going to come into fruition anytime soon simply because I've got too many of them on my plate.

And so I've made a new resolution. I'm going to be one of those people. One of them that I could never understand before. I'm going to try and buy only for what I'm going to be able to cast on now. I'm going to resist the temptation of a sale, though that is going to be tough; I've always been a sucker for a bargain. And I'm not going to flip out and overdose on something when I hear it's about to be discontinued. Because something WILL come and replace it. There WILL be something just as good out there (though I'm still trying to convince myself that there may be now or in the future a worthy equal to the wonder that is Jaggerspun Zephyr). I'm going to be someone who only buys yarn for the project they're knitting sort of person. Because I think that my yarn deserves to be knit up.

(An update on WIPs when I'm not feeling so philosophical.)

x
Brittany

I'm a flake

I admit it. I've always been a bit of a procrastinator. Hanging out with flaky musical types in my younger years obviously didn't help. The summer's gone so quickly and it's now only a week until I leave to go back to Beijing for another year. Hopefully, by the time I get back to Beijing, they'll have taken blogger and flickr off the block list.

But I did promise pictures and I will deliver. I got a brand new camera the other day so pictures in the next little while are likely to be bad. You've gotta give me a little time to figure out how to use my new Olympus digital SLR.

Without further ado, I present to you the newest bit of handspun off the bobbin.

It's mill-ends hand-dyed by myself. The roving looked awful. The yarn looks much better than I had anticipated. I had expected the worst, and while the yarn isn't really to my taste (it's very pastel, pinks and purples), I think it's pretty. Even better, my sister thinks it's pretty. I'm not sure of the yardage as I'm a few thousand kilometres away from my niddy noddy, but I'm sure there's enough for a scarf, and hopefully enough for some mittens.

I've got other things I'm working on, but the biggest thing I'm working on right now is reducing the size of the mess in my room, in preparation for leaving Vancouver next Friday. Wish me luck.

It's been a long time...

I'm back in Vancouver for the summer and I'm happy that I'm finally able to access blogger and blogspot blogs, as well as flickr. I've been flickr-less for so long and let me tell you, no flickr means less Internet fun. But now I'm back for a little while and hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things. Watch this space...

Stick a fork in it...

They're done!

Pattern: Anastasia socks
Yarn: Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in Country Garden
Needles: 1.75mm Inox DPNs

I got this yarn from an awesome SP and I love it. I think I've already waxed poetical on it, but I honestly cannot get enough. The yarn was amazing; it was a delight to work with and the colours worked up beautifully. As much as I appreciate pooling because of it being the nature of the beast, this was so much easier to deal with because I wasn't stressed out about colours stacking on top of each other.

The pattern was also great. Simple, easy to remember and worked well with the yarn. I did adjust my short-row heel in that I did it over about 60% of the stitches. I also adjusted the total number of stitches on the foot and leg, to adjust for my own foot size and the fact that I like a tight fit in a sock.

The real triumph in this is the fact that it was finished despite this:

After the screams subsided, I trimmed my nails and wrapped a bit of tape around the tear.

Much better.

As an aside, China's gone and blocked blogger blogs again. Boo.