I think I have been asking the wrong questions regarding my hobbies. This whole time I have been concerned with which ones I enjoy most, and trying to carve out time for those from the rest of my schedule. That question really has no answer. I think I need to start asking what I want to accomplish with them, not individually but as a whole. What do I want to do with myself?

My hobbies are all things that make me less dependent on others, except fencing. Knitting, sewing, baking, and gardening are all activities that produce (or can produce) necessary objects: clothing and food. Writing is a bit trickier, but it does provide me with entertainment. Fencing dose give me focus when it comes to fitness, which I cannot manage on my own. Exercise for the sake of exercise is not really my thing.

Looking at my hobbies in that light, I am not doing too badly. This last month has demanded a lot of work in the "garden", so I have had less time to spend on writing, knitting, and sewing. Things in the garden are about to slow down now that most everything is planted, so I will have more time to focus on writing for the rest of the month. All we have is time, and as long as I am using mine in at least one way that I enjoy, I will try not to feel too frustrated (why no, my script is not going very well!).

This is also going to have to change how I look at sewing plans, come to think of it. Last week, I actually had to purchase a pair of pants because I put off making them for too long and had a pair die on me. I needed a pair for work more quickly than I would be able to make them, so off to the mall I went. In the future, I need to look at sewing the way I do baking: plan ahead and make time, and make sure the ingredients are on-hand early. Er, materials. Whatever. Meaning, I need to go buy some black pant fabric sooner rather than later, so i can replace my black pin-stripe pants before they fall apart.

Working this out has made me feel better about the whole situation. Hurray for early-morning epiphanies before tea!

Also, garden pictures!


This is what is out so far. I have my pepper plant still inside for at least another two weeks, depending on weather, and the basil is too tiny to think about going outside yet.

When did I become such a busy person? Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons (when I'm not working) are fencing practice, Wednesdays are write-ins, and there is usually a movie night sometime during the week. Last night was the Script Frenzy kick-off, and we have another write-in for that on Saturday afternoon/evening now. In about half an hour, we're going to get haircuts, then it is off to the mall or grocery store, haven't decided which yet. This Sunday I'm apparently attending a bar-b-que hosted by one of Husband's friends/coworkers, and next Saturday is given over entirely to our once-monthly D&D game. In between all that, I have been trying to write, bake, garden, knit, sew, and spin.

I hate to say it, but I think I am going to have to start giving up on hobbies. Spinning is the one I am least infatuated with (I like it, don't get me wrong, but it won't ever be an all-consuming passion), so I think after I finish the fiber I am spinning now, that one is done. Sewing is on hold for a bit. I need clothing a bit more quickly than I am able to make it, so I am actually going to buy some this weekend. Just a pair of pants, but I had a pair die this week and it is leaving a gaping hole in my wardrobe. My closet is not particularly full, so when something dies it needs to be replaced.

Baking at the moment is largely limited to quick breads and muffins, anyway. Experiments will wait until after April (and the Script). I think do I need to defrost that pumpkin puree this week for breakfast muffins and something to take to the gaming group.

I am only knitting on one thing right now. Shocking, I know, but I only have two things on the needles at all, and one is the Sock Yarn Blanket, a v-e-r-y long-term project. The other is a pair of socks for the Husband, which might as well be called a long-term project. I am about halfway through the foot on the second sock (toe-up, so I have the heel and cuff yet to go). After that, I think I will start on my mother's birthday/Christmas present (depends on when it gets done, her birthday is early November). I have to find the right kind of lace weight for it, though.

That is what is going on, and that is probably enough of a ramble for a Saturday morning. The script is going relatively well; I have not really done anything yet today but I am caught up for yesterday. Today will be mostly outlines and character notes, which will actually end up in the final game. I think that means I can count it for my page count.

Yes, happy Spring. We got an inch and a half of snow and ice yesterday. Most of it didn't stick to the roads, but because of work I was in and out of the mess all day long. About halfway through the day, I developed a tiny, sad cough, which has developed into a rather yucky cold over night.

So, while I'm sitting around the house, drinking plenty of fluids and having chicken soup, I have been working on some spinning!


The fiber is 2.5 oz. of merino from Th'Red Head Designs, acquired last year at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival. It was a gift from my friend whose wedding dress I made, purchased when we were doing the rest of her bridal shopping. Incidentally, even though things at Renn Faires can be kind of pricey, we still got away for way less than it would have cost to buy a comparable amount of stuff at GiantBridalStore. Not to mention that it was of higher quality, and more fun.

The spindle is one I made several years ago out of a twelve-inch dowel and a wooden wheel with a cup hook stuck on top. So far they have served me well, but I would like to purchase one that was professionally balanced and all that at some point.

Now, a note on spinning: I do not feel the need to purchase a wheel, personally. I enjoy spinning occasionally, and I like knowing how to spin. It makes me feel like I could still clothe myself in the event of a zombie apocalypse. However, I do not like it enough to justify either the cost of a wheel or the space it would take up. Aside from that, I do not agree that one "graduates" from a spindle to a wheel. Generally, I agree with Abby Franquemont, author of Respect the Spindle.

Anyway, I am about halfway through one half of the fiber. I took the roving and pulled it apart down the middle. I plan to Navajo-ply it to keep the color changes together, so I should end up with two mostly-matching skeins of kind-of self-striping yarn, approximately DK to worsted-weight. Once I have the finished yarn, I want to make a pair of wrist warmers similar to Verdigris from Knitty.com, but that pattern calls for approximately sock-weight, and mine won't be fine enough for that.

The plan is to finish the spinning by the end of the month, but I'm not sure I am going to make it.

Last year I posted a picture of my entire stash in a pile on the kitchen table.


Remember? I thought I would repeat the experiment this year as well. This is more for my own records and benefit than yours, but anyway, here is the stash as of ten minutes ago (because I am used to getting up at 5 a.m. now, even though my job just ended, and what else am I going to do this early on a Saturday but take pictures of yarn?):


There has been some change-over, as you can see. All of the Harry Potter Scarf yarn has been used (thank goodness), as has all of the sock yarn that I had at the time. Actually, all the sock yarn has been used, period, except for the scraps that are going into the blanket. I did not realize that until just now. I am out of sock yarn. Huh.

As to what has been added, well. As you can see, I have a new bundle of fiber. That was acquired in September, and has not been touched yet. I am planning some sport-weight three-ply, but have not gotten around to it. You can also see two skeins of un-dyed, sport-weight alpaca there on top, and off to the right is a cake of angora/merino/silk left-over from a set of gloves I made for the Husband for Christmas. The other thing that makes the pile look a similar size to the one from last year is that I have added all the yarn left from the Lozengy Blanket back into the stash. The blanket itself has been turned into a cat bed.

I know it does not look like the stash is much smaller than it was, but I promise it is. Everything fits back in the Yarn Crate now, which is good. This year my goal is to clean out more left-overs, largely by knitting blanket squares for charity and wash cloths for myself. No need for promises to not buy yarn at all, because I really did not purchase very much last year. Maybe $120 over the course of the year. Maybe. Likely, much less. I can distinctly remember buying about $40 of sweater yarn, $20 of sock yarn, and $25 of that glove yarn. If there were other purchases, they were less than $10 each.

As for the sock yarn blanket, I know I have not talked about it much lately. I really did not do much knitting in the last half of the year, and most of it was on other projects. I am done with three entire rows (not much I know), and it is in that awkward stage where you want to take a picture, but it just looks ridiculous. So, instead, I give you a picture of me working on it!


Chai, the cat, has decided that she has to be on my lap whenever I am sitting in the bean bag. Usually, this is when I am knitting or reading. Reading is not much of a problem, as long as it isn't a large book, but she usually ends up under a pile of knitting. She doesn't seem to have much of a problem with that, usually, but she still does get evicted if she starts trying to chew on the yarn.

See On Stashes, Part I for my thoughts on my Fabric Stash.

This post, however, is about the Yarn and Fiber stash.

It has changed a bit since the last post on the subject. My yarn stash has, to my mind, gotten a bit out of hand lately. Combine that with some major mental changes (which are still on the first rise and might or might not make decent bread when they are done), and I am spending a lot of time thinking about the stash.

Before we get started, though, I want to say that I am not trying to be preachy here, and I know that many people have different ideas about stash than this. Feel free to discuss it in the comments (and I know there are people reading who don't comment, my blog stats tell me so). This is how I feel about my yarn, not how I feel about your yarn, or how I think you should feel about your yarn. Variety is a wonderful thing, no?


That, ladies and gentlemen, is the sum total of all the yarn in the apartment that is not currently being used in a project, all in one pile on my table.

Now, I realize that, as stashes go, it is not a very big pile of yarn. Most of it is left-overs, in fact. All of the whole skeins are on top. I have enough yarn for three new project from new skeins of yarn. The rest is left-overs or handspun.

The handspun is the smallest portion of the stash by far, mostly because I do not spin very much. Of what is there, most of it is either so bad as to not really be usable, or is sample skeins I have been spinning out of some needle-felting fiber I picked up at Hobby Lobby. The only thing I have produced that is worth using is the Firefly yarn, and I still need to buy at least one skein of commercial yarn to make a project out of it. Or, I suppose, I could spin some black roving up, but I don't have any. I also have no fiber stash anymore; I have spun up everything that I had purchased.

Now, the leftovers are far and away the largest part of the stash. I save leftovers mainly because I grew up in a fairly frugal household. We did not throw away anything that was still useful. Of course, this has given me some pack-rat tendencies, but it has also saved me a lot of money. Some of the yarn I have is really yarn from some of my mother's projects when I was little.

I do have projects in mind for some of the scrap, don't get me wrong. I have some bright-red Caron Simply Soft that is going to be used in an amigurumi GIR, as soon as I get the bright green I need for the dog suit. Of course, then I'll have some bright green leftovers, too. I am about to start a scrapghan to clear out the leftovers that I just do not use for other things. I plan to make some catnip mice for the cat, and I want to make a pair of felted slippers out of my feltable scraps. I have the sock yarn blanket for that set of scraps. I want to use them, but for a long while now most of them have been sitting in my crate, taking up space and keeping me from buying more yarn.

The new yarn in my stash, the untouched, waiting-for-a-project yarn, really makes up a very small part of the stash. I have

• Noro Kureyon Sock, for a Swallowtail Shawl
  
• Two skeins of Simply Soft, one of which is destined for the Lozengy Blanket but is yet un-used
  
• Four skeins of Cascade 220 for the second HP Ravenclaw scarf
  
• One skein of purple Frog Tree Alpaca, because I over-estimated how much I needed for a pair of fingerless gloves. The answer, for anyone who wants to know, is only one fifty-gram skein, if they aren't going to be too long.
  

Really. That's it. I have one skein of Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that arrived late last week (that I immediately used to cast on a pair of Monkeys), and that is the first yarn I have purchased since probably October, which was the Frog Tree.

There are a couple of reasons that I have so little yarn. One major one is storage concerns. I do not have much room to store yarn. I try to limit myself to just the milk crate in my closet, because I am sharing the approximately 500-square-foot apartment (if that) with my husband, who deserves to have some space, too. I just do not have the space to hoard a bunch of yarn right now.

The second concern is that I do not want to have more than I will actually use. I do not buy yarn just to buy yarn; all of it has a plan when it is purchased. Now, it may not eventually end up in that thing that was planned for it, but usually it does. Plans are something I like, as is the full knowledge of what I have. For those things to both happen I need to keep the stash small. There are people with huge stashes that have a plan, too, and I totally grok that, but I am not one of them. Too much stash and I will forget what I have and what it was for, as has happened with my fabric stash.

Reason the third why my stash is small is that I feel guilty spending money on new yarn when I have untouched yarn at home that I have yet to get to. This is not a bad thing. Buying yarn just because it is pretty, or to say that I have X brand of yarn, or whatever, which is what I would be doing if I went on a yarn binge, does not line up with my belief system. There will always be more yarn available, and so I have no real reason to go on a buying spree. Maybe I might miss out on something really awesome, but really? There will always be awesome things out there, and I have to pick and choose which ones I really, really want. There is, you note, enough yarn in my stash for me to start three projects at any time. That is enough. I have enough yarn, and I think that is wonderful.

So, it's 2009 now. I have put up a 2009 projects page, and we'll see how regularly it gets updated.

The three things that are carry-over projects that I actually worked on any at all in 2008 are knitting projects. The Tudor Monstrosity, though ongoing, has not really seen any work in quite some time, and I am officially putting it on hold. I have nowhere to wear it, since my SCA activities are essentially at zero right now.

Right, knitting. Well, of course, we have the lozengy blanket.

Cat included for scale. Cat is about 12 lbs.

Significant progress has been made since the last time I posted a picture. It is just shy of halfway done at this point. The shiny thing on one of the black squares is the giant safety pin I am using to mark when I started the latest skein of black, so I can see how many squares I get from a single skein. Then I can go ahead and buy the rest of the yarn I need for the blanket. I have also instituted a few rules for this project, to make sure that it gets done in 2009.

1. I must knit at least 7 squares per week, since I have 319 left. That will give me some extra time at the end of the year for weaving in the last few ends and finishing up the crochet border.

2. Extra squares *do not* roll over to the next week's quota of squares, unless I know of something that is going to keep me from knitting on it the next week.

Yesterday I knit 8 squares, so I am caught up for the first week of 2009.

Project number two is the psychotic sock yarn blanket, which has shown no significant growth since the last post. I have added maybe five squares since that picture, in no new colors.

The third project is my Baudelaire socks!


I am probably about 2/3 of the way done with them. The first one is done to four inches up the cuff, and then I cast on the second sock since the Mountain Colors yarn is a bit light on the yardage at 350 yards per 400 grams. On the second sock, I am just about to start the heel gusset. I only really want six-inch cuffs on these anyway, so I don't think I'll run out.

I am still desperately in love with these socks. I spent most of my holidays with my family, first showing off the yarn, and how it isn't *just* purple, and then I spent at least one evening showing everyone who would sit still long enough that look! They have cables now!

The chart on this one is pretty quick to learn, especially if you can read your knitting well. I might change the ribbing at the top to a twisted rib rather than a plain rib, but we'll see.

For later in 2009, I have plans for a Swallowtail Shawl out of my Noro Kureyon Sock yarn, and a second Ravenclaw Harry Potter scarf. I think I might also knit the Simple Yet Effective Shawl out of my Firefly handspun and some black Cascade 220, since the handspun on its own is not really enough for a full shawl. That is all I have plans for immediately, and it is also the only things for which I have at least part of the yarn.

Trivia: According to Ravelry, I have about 1,900 yards of yarn in full skeins in my stash right now. My leftovers probably double that number, or near enough.

Upon looking for a picture of the firefly to show you, it occurs to me than I never posted one in the first place, as far as I can tell.


That is about the best I've got. The spinning on that is all done now, and I ended up with just over 200 yards of it, approximately worsted-weight. I'll try to take a better photo tomorrow while the sun is up.

Wow. I think that this post is quite long enough. Happy New Year (again)!

Happy New Year! Another year is gone. Most of what has gone on this year has been knitting, despite my hands falling apart in July. The 2008 Project Inventory is mostly up-to-date, if anyone wants to see what has been done this year.

The last of this year's projects are the finished(!) Ravenclaw Harry Potter Prisoner of Azkaban scarf, which was my husband's Christmas present:


I knit a washcloth for my mother, to go with the bath set that was the rest of her Christmas present but did not get a picture before I left it with her in Texas.

The last item was a knitted doll, mostly made from this pattern, but scaled down by half, except for the legs, which prove that I should not do math at 11:00 at night, since they are too big. I would post a picture, but she has no clothing yet and that might be a bit indecent.

Also, according to some more 11:00 pm math, I have figured out that I knit around 4,000 yards of yarn in 2008 that ended up in finished projects. Just so you know. For trivia's sake.

I have learned that I need to take better care of myself next year. I have learned that nicer yarns really are worth the expense, for the most part (I know, duh, but I have not ever had much of a yarn budget to work with). I also learned that I can have too much yarn if I am not careful. I learned that I like not having eight million projects going at one time. I also learned that what is an amusing and useful hobby is not always the best choice for a job.

I finally have started to write again, after a several-year-long hiatus. My novel from this year's NaNoWriMo is not good, but it is finished, and there is definitely something to be said for that. I am making attempts to keep up with writing now that I have started again, as well.

Tomorrow I will be posting about what I have planned for 2009, and posting an update on the projects that have spilled over into another year.

The lovely Lime & Violet have a finish-a-long going for the first six months of the year. I'm moving past knitting projects for this, and so here is the list of unfinished projects I have going right now. It took so long for this list to go up because I wanted to make sure I actually listed everything.

Sewing - 7 projects

• Purple blouse, lacks buttons
  
• Pinstripe vest
  
• Black & blue messenger bag
  
• Black & blue wallet
  
• Red and tan quilted pillow covers
  
• Tudor Monstrosity underdress
  
• Rice-filled hot-packs (from this pattern)
  

Embroidery - 3 projects

• Blackwork cedar sachet
  
• Blackwork basket cover
  
• Covers for the hot-packs
  

Knitting - 5 projects

• Vintage lace doily from Lace from the Attic (because I'm apparently an old woman) - Done!
  
• Afghan (which will never be over)
  
• Jaywalker socks in a discontinued Regia colorway (currently frogged for being too small)
  
• Coronet in Louet Gems Amethyst, either in Peony or Sweet William, because the band doesn't say what the colorway is and I can't tell from the pictures online what exactly it is.
  
• A crochet bath pouf, mentioned in this section because I don't crochet enough to give a section all its own
  

Spinning - 2 projects

• Firefly glow-in-the-dark roving from Merlin the Cat Yarns, 3/4 bats spun
  
• Midnight roving, about 2/3 spun
  

Total: 17 projects

This list is going to be posted in a page linked in the side bar, and will be updated with links to the "Look! It's finished!" entry for each item.

I finished spinning another spindle-full of the Midnight yarn. It is not plied yet, but I have skeined it off and am letting it sit over the weekend. It will probably be plied on Monday or Tuesday.

I estimate that I have a bit less than one-third of this fiber left. It is going to be on the back burner for a while, though, because I just ordered about five ounces of glow in the dark fiber from Merlin the Cat Yarns! I am excited to be able to play with this stuff as soon as it arrives, which is why I worked to get my spindle cleared off this past week.

Also, classes and work start back up this week. There may well be some radio-silence as things swing back into full gear. I am (hopefully) graduating this December, so this semester will be busy!

I forgot to mention something. After hearing the chatter about Ravelry for months now, I caved and signed up.

I am #22885 on the list, with 14922 people ahead of me, and, as of this post, 12 behind.

Baaaaaa!

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