KTS: well that sucks

This morning I found four of the crocheted flowers I need for the Doris Daymat Mark II, plus the yarn with which to make some more. This is reassuring, because I only remembered two flowers, and it means that I'm a little bit further ahead than I thought I was.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I also discovered one more project to go on the KTS list: a fractal jacket I started about four years ago whilst standing in queues at the Toronto International Film Festival. The previous year I had knitted most of a Sunrise Circle jacket in the queues (people would check nervously on my progress, realising it was a tangible way to see just how long you wind up standing in those queues with your pre-ordered ticket).

So the year after the Sunrise Circle I decided to make a fractal jacket with random stripes using the snakeskin rule from Debbie New. Because, you know, nothing makes standing in line at a film festival more fun than carting around 600g of knitting yarn and constantly searching for flat surfaces on which to roll a six-sided die (to determine the row height of the next stripe). Any time I got a weird look from someone, I'd explain that I finished nearly an entire jacket in line the previous year, so I needed a bigger challenge. Usually they'd come around and say something encouraging. Usually.

Tonight I got some more done on the double knitted jacket, but also had some more depressing thoughts about it. More on that tomorrow.

KTS: strategy development

The first day of KTS had a lot of opportunities for reaching goals. It also had some conclusions that were, well, shitty.

After a good discussion with the ever-practical J-A last night, I did a rough sort of the projects into two categories: "easy to knit in public/socially" and "headbreakingly difficult".

Easy to knit in public/socially means:

• small enough to carry around comfortably
• able to talk to other people and knit without screwing up the pattern
• not so weird-looking that strangers on the subway will keep asking what the hell it is

Headbreakingly difficult means:

• the project and/or amount of yarn needed to be on hand is too large to carry around comfortably in a garbage bag
• the knitter is slave to the pattern, needing to check the instructions several times per round/row
• the project has previously encouraged strangers on the subway to ask what the hell it is

The current strategy is to keep one project in the "easy" category in a small bag and take it out in public/socially. The first project up for this are the "hearts and harps" socks, whose proper pattern name is "Kristi":

Since this photo was taken on the weekend, I've got one more motif repeat done. One more repeat after that and some toe shaping, and I should have a finished sock to blog about. Which means... I'll be at the 50% mark with that particular project.

I picked the double knitted jacket as the difficult project. It really is freaking difficult, and tedious, and heavy, and impossible to work on when there are other people around. I've tried in the past, and I always wind up ripping out what I did. On 420 stitches, that is no fun. Each row of that thing takes over half an hour.

On the other hand, unlike some of the other stuff on this list, I'm looking forward to wearing this one.

This isn't going to be a series of daily "ta-da" moments. This is going to be more like watching a marathon or the Tour de France. Except, you know, knitting. Stay tuned...

and so it begins

When the film Julie & Julia came out, some of my friends were very insistent that I see it.

"It'll be inspiring," they said.

"It'll give you confidence you can be published," they said.

Instead I sat through a film that was all about getting published thanks to an almost always-supportive husband (which I don't have), and thanks to a blog written in 2002 (which I didn't have, and it's not 2002 anymore). Although I thought Julie Powell's Project was super-cool, it was pretty depressing as far as "inspiring" films go.

But since Nora Ephron passed away recently, it reminded me that I always wanted to give the Julie and Julia book a go, so I read it this past weekend.

And it was still depressing, for much the same reasons.

But, because I finished these socks during the same weekend, it gave me an idea for a Project of my own. So I went around the apartment, gathered all the stuff I already had on the needles (or hook), and made a blog page, and a title.

I called it Knit That Shit (and Crochet, Too!). The goal is to get all the stuff in the photos done before 1 January 2013. So I have almost exactly six months to finish the fourteen projects I already have on the go. I also have beading and sewing stuff to do, but those will be kind of... bonus things.

Usually I keep my posts pretty G-rated (but not always), but it was the only catchy thing I could think of that had the appropriate attitude. Besides, it goes with the whole Julie & Julia aesthetic.

If I'm going to make this work, I'm going to have to check in once a week day and whenever I finish something. I doubt very much this will lead to a book deal, but it will definitely lead to a tidier apartment, and I'm all for that.

Stay tuned.

milestone socks

They are done.

These are one of the three pairs of socks I was working on when my back went out just over a year ago, thanks to a drunk driver rear-ending me two years prior to that (actually, he rear-ended the car behind me — he hit three cars in total that night). For a while, I couldn't knit at all, although I did find I could crochet whilst lying down. If you scan back through my blog posts, you'll see that I have been making a certain amount of stuff since I've gone into spinal maintenance mode. There were a lot of things lying around half-done though, these socks included.

I know they're just socks, but it feels so good to have this pair off the needles. For one thing, the needles I was using for them were my favourite set — the grandmother who taught me how to knit gave them to me when I was in high school, and I use them for almost every pair of socks I make. For another, the pattern is a lace-and-cables super-complex thing from Cookie A's Sock Innovations book. I love Cookie A's designs, but I have the earlier edition of the book that only has everything in small sizes, so I had to do some extra work to make a version that would actually fit me.

Finishing these socks made me more aware of just how much stuff is lying around on the needles in my apartment. Some of it I started but set aside because it was wool and the Toronto summer squelched down on us like a sponge soaked in boiling water. Some of it got put away before I had friends over and then wasn't dug out again after they left. Some of it isn't very portable, or needs a lot of attention paid to a pattern chart. Some of it got set aside while I made a gift for someone, and then I never found my way back to it.

So I'm going to start a Project, with a capital P. Yesterday was the first day of the second half of 2012. My goal is to have all the stuff I'm going to list finished by New Year's Eve.

As I wrote those last two sentences, I thought of two more things I need to photograph and add to the list. Julie Powell ain't got nothing on me in the nutty deadline department.

faux twinset

I made this faux twinset cardigan from a knit.1 pattern:

It's knit from the top down, and since I had already bought both the purple yarn and the buttons for a different project, it even counts as stash reduction.

Modifications: the original pattern instructed the knitter to work the cardigan in intarsia after the collar was completed. No thanks — I made the olive green part first, then worked the blackberry stitch fronts. I'm okay with intarsia when it's the right technique to use, but managing five full balls of yarn just to avoid four perfectly straight seams is silly.

I also got rid of the strip of contrast-colour blackberry stitch that was supposed to go in the back. The whole reason I wanted to make this is because it looks like you're wearing a cardigan under another cardigan. Having a stripe down the back would ruin the effect.

The third major modification was to change the straight neck to a deep crew neck. The original pattern didn't have the collar dip down like that. I noticed that the photo in the magazine showed the model wearing the top few buttons undone to create a neckline, and decided to knit that in. It makes for a more comfortable neck, and it sits better.

The one thing I wish I had done was make the collar deeper as well. It needs it with the more-rounded neckline, but that wasn't obvious to me when I was working it top-down. Live and learn.

creative leftovers

Over ten years ago I bought a pair of classic Roots boots with some gift certificates I'd won at work. It was definitely not about fashion — I was just sick of having to worry about falling down on Toronto's icy sidewalks every winter.

To my great surprise, the boots have held up, although they're no longer as waterproof as they used to be. Usually at the most I get two seasons out of a pair of winter boots.

The one thing that does keep wearing out on these are the bootlaces. For years I would buy replacement laces, but this was a bigger deal than it sounds because for some reason it's hard to find replacement laces for boots (shoes are easy, but not boots).

I finally remembered reading about I-cord laces in an old copy of Interweave Knits, grabbed my Inox I-cord maker, and cranked off some of my own.

Turns out I-cord makes great laces for hiking-style boots. If you leave the tails on the ends of the I-cord, it's easy to pull the laces through the grommits, and if you use leftover variegated sock yarn like I did, you can get a nice funky look going:

Just make sure to take into account that the laces will stretch a little once you use them a few times. I couldn't get the laces comfortably into the top grommits when I first made the laces, but now they not only fit, but they're plenty left over for tying them up.

a way east easter

I have two nieces. On Easter the eldest one was two and a half years old, and the youngest one was three weeks. So neither of them are into chocolate much yet.

I got told to buy them picture-books, which was perfectly cool by me, but picture-books look so lonely in a gift bag. The stupid bag keeps collapsing.

Then I remembered this Chinese zodiac amigurumi set of patterns that knit.1 magazine published a while back. It's now a free pattern to download (that's where the link goes to). I took the Year of the Rabbit pattern and Eastered it up into two dolls, one for each niece. The only mods necessary were to embroider the faces instead of using the recommended buttons, and to add the neck ribbon/flower to make them look more seasonal. The flower petals are tacked down so that little fingers can't pull them off.

I used dishcloth cotton for the bodies and neck decoration, and the faces are embroidered with cotton floss. I wanted something that wouldn't taste/feel yucky if a little one decided to teethe on an ear or an arm, and to make them more washable.

They were quick and unfussy to make, good TV crocheting, and I got a kick out of using a Japanese crochet aesthetic to appropriate a Chinese zodiac symbol for a European holiday.

insanity

One of the things I had planned to make over my winter holiday was a new pair of plain black mittens. When I make plain mittens, I use the same Patons leaflet pattern I have been using since I was twelve years old — I think it's called "Two Needle Mitts for the Family" or something like that. I almost have the whole thing memorised, and can do a mitten in about one round trip on the streetcar between the Beach and downtown.

Instead, I wound up making these:

They took a bit longer than a couple of streetcar rides.

The mitten and gauntlet pattern are from different examples in Anna Zilboorg's Magnificent Mittens, and the only saving grace of the whole thing (besides that I can keep my hands warm to about -25C with ease now) is that I used up a nice chunk of stash yarn. I deliberately chose the patterns to maximise the stashbusting — I had more red than black left, and that dictated which patterns I knit.

I wasn't paying attention to row counts when I picked the gauntlet pattern. I just cared about the proportions of the background and foreground. Most of the gauntlets in the book go a few inches past one's wrist — enough to go over a coat cuff nicely and block out the wind. These gauntlets go almost all the way to my elbow, and I have long arms! I feel like a superhero with some kind of DIY angle to their identity when I'm wearing them. They sag a little when I'm walking with my arms hanging down naturally, but they still stay over my coat cuffs, so that's fine.

The second time I wore them, I got the best compliment a DIYer can get from a stranger. A lady came up to me and asked me where she could buy a pair. I gave her the book title, but she doesn't know any knitters who could tackle mittens in two colours. Pity.

Actually, if you're a knitter who would like to try out two-colour knitting for the first time, I'd recommend mittens. They're small and it's easy to find patterns that can be committed to memory easily. The Zilboorg book has clear instructions and lots of variety, and is as good a place to start as any.

it's august. fuck.

Today is the first day of the second half of summer for people in the Northern Hemisphere. It's all shorter days and end of the growing season from here, folks.

[ducks as rotten fruit and verbal abuse get thrown]

Still here? Don't blame me — get angry at the Earth's orbit or move to New Zealand or something. I'm just pointing out the obvious.

The obvious, if you're a knitter, is that all those lovely sweater-weather sweaters you want to wear this fall aren't going to make themselves. So if you want at least one new jacket to wear this fall, you're going to have to find some air conditioning and get started on it now.

That's precisely what I did this morning. I agonised a little (and still am, a little) over finishing some stuff that's been on the needles for an embarrassing amount of time, but in the end I decided to grab some stash and start Sway by Fiona Ellis (it's in her Inspired Fair Isle Knits book). The original is in a lilac grey with pink trim; me being me, I'm making mine in brick red with black trim, and have decided to make some modifications. If I ever get the thing done, I'll be posting photos here. Wish me luck.

The other "September is less than five weeks away" crisis I'm going through is that I started cleaning out my bedroom closet this weekend, and I discovered that moths had eaten five pairs of my hand-knit socks, plus three skeins of sock yarn that I was keeping in the same closet. That explains why, as of Friday night, I had three new pairs of socks on the go and plans for several more. I'm all for tossing stuff I don't want anymore, but I'd like it to be me that decides what goes, not a bunch of stupid fibre-eating insects.

(By the bye, in case you are smugly patting yourself on the back because you only buy cotton and synthetics, I have some bad news for you: I have had moths eat 100% acrylic gloves with plastic palm grips. They are evil vermin right up there with raccoons.)

Two of the socks on the needles are from Cookie A.'s Sock Innovation book. The last one is a free download from Knitty, but by the same designer. I like how this woman thinks. Her suggestions for resizing the patterns are reasonable and treat the reader like a grown-up.

I find my knitting goes through phases. I don't just mean in terms of colour, technique, and output, although that happens too. Right now I'm in high production gear because I need the clothes. I like to wear jacket-y cardigans to work because actual jackets are too uncomfortable when I'm going to be sitting in a cubicle all day. Last winter, though, I wore the left elbow out on no fewer than three cardigans, leaving me with just one that I could wear (I have a bad habit of propping my head up on my left hand when I'm reading, in case you're wondering how I managed that). So it's time for more jackets, even though I also need to get the first draft of my novel done. I have enough stash for [glances around the living room] three more plain coloured ones, plus one or two that are already on the needles. There is one that I bought the pattern for and would like to make in a colour I don't have in stash. Maybe that can be this fall's yarn purchase. Yeah, I know. But hey, it's mostly stash-busting!

And, thanks to the moths, it's also time for more socks, and that can definitely be 100% stash-busting. To be honest, a lot of those socks were near to worn-out anyhow, so the critters just sped up the process a little. Not that I'll be forgiving them any time soon.

finally

Sometimes you tell the yarn what to be, and sometimes the yarn tells you what it wants to be.

Once upon a time, the ever-cool Gina came to visit TO from Alberta. Being the ever-cool person that she is, she brought hostess gifts with her, and I put a picture of mine on this blog, like so:

Check out that gorgeous blue-green yarn. That colour combo has since become the main colour scheme for the entire on-line part of The Eyrea. I don't know if it came directly from the yarn — more likely, it came from something Gina said that I can never quite remember — but this is definitely the first instance of it showing up in tangible form.

The reason why the yarn came in one big skein of green-blue with two smaller skeins of blue-green is because you're supposed to make socks from it. It's a fine worsted weight, though, and I'm not big on thick socks for all the usual reasons — they don't fit in boots, they look chunky, blah blah blah. At first, I thought I'd make mittens with contrast cuffs or in a colour pattern. The yarn is mercerised wool (very strong stuff, but still soft to touch), so it would make a nice pair of hard-wearing mittens. I even started a cuff, but somehow they never got done.

Then, over the summer, moths ate the first pair of handmade slippers I'd knitted for myself in years. This time, I decided to try the slipper pattern in the most recent Interweave Holiday issue, since it still had that ballerina slipper shape I like and, most importantly, had instructions for my size.

They were a quick and easy knit, but I found the top edge was a little too big to get them to stay on my feet (this may be a quirk of my feet, my knitting, or the pattern — not sure). So I headed over to Mokuba, picked up some grosgrain ribbon that happened to come in the exact same colours as are in the yarn, and threaded it around the edge so I could adjust the opening:

With the addition of the ribbon, the slippers are dead comfy. I've worn them enough that there should be some "fuzzing" on the soles, but the mercerised wool is holding up very well and shows no signs of wear. It went flat on the sole, but doesn't look like it's fuzzing or pilling anywhere.

Of course, since the original amount of yarn was intended for socks, I have a lot left over. The next time I feel like knitting up some of these slippers, I'm thinking of making one with green-blue yarn and blue-green trim, and the other in the reverse colour scheme — sort of a medieval thing. It'll look fun, and they only get worn at home or in the homes of friends and family, after all.

creative challenge-type stuff

I've been going through another period where there's lots of things I would like to start, but even more things I would like to finish. One of the things I would like to finish is de-cluttering my apartment, and if I'm going to do that, I have to be able to put away most of my beading trays.

The finishing of the necklace in the photograph to the right marks the clearing of yet another tray. As an added bonus, the only non-stash elements in it are the two large silver beads and the clasp.

There were two challenges with this piece: first of all, most of the beads are shades of pink. I hate pink. I hate pink so much that I was considering just tossing the beads (they'd been acquired through gifts anyhow), but then the ever-stylish J-A pointed out she liked pink, and if I wanted to experiment she'd be willing to receive the results.

The other problem was that the pink beads were all around a size 6, but not ever evenly produced. Almost all of my beading is done with size 11s, with some faceted beads and drops thrown in. J-A likes chunky styles in necklaces, but these beads weren't chunky enough.

I really do hate pink, but I am currently knitting a jacket with lots of pink in it. It's Kaffe Fassett's Red Diamonds pattern, and the trick with that particular stash reduction attempt is to choose yarns that sort of talk around red. I have pinks, plums, roses, maroons, and all sorts of colours that are close to a true red without actually getting there. I have lots of reds and scarlets and crimsons too, but the point is that because they're all thrown in together, all of a sudden pink has a place in the spectrum. If it wasn't there, the colours in the jacket would be too strong and strident.

Fassett has a much more elegant way of putting it, but I call this the principle of "sucky colours working if you put enough of them together." I tried the same thing with the beads, making the peyote-stitch tube that forms the centre part of the necklace first. I just worked it until I ran out of the anthracite beads. The tube has relatively little flex in it — the curve you see in the photo is about the maximum. Fortunately, its own weight encourages it to curve to the maximum when it is worn.

Then I worked the two herringbone bands out of what was left of the pink beads. They're just this side of being tubular — four beads around. The herringbone tubes are very flexible, which I tried to show in the photo.

After that it was just a case of attaching everything. I didn't find any large-size bead caps I liked, so I got the big silver beads instead and just gathered the ends of the beaded tubes as tightly as I could. It works. I did put some small bead caps on the tops of the herringbone tubes to help centre and attach the clasp.

Overall I think it works. This is the first piece I've done entirely on my own, from scratch, without a pattern or photo to give me an idea. Beaders tend to come up with cutesy names for their work — beading magazines even seem to encourage it — so I'm coming up with a name for this one. I'm calling it "Ethnically Confused." It has elements that can be found in the beading traditions of Africa, Eastern Europe, Central America, and Asia, yet the colours are straight out of a North American shopping mall. If I'd done it in turquoise and coral, or ebony and tiger-eye, I'm sure J-A would have had people who don't know any better asking about where it was from every time she wore it. Instead, she gets to have something that does not scream hand-made either from the "a friend of mine made this for me" standpoint, or the "some women making appalling low wages in a faraway country made this" standpoint. I'm not even sure it's not ugly, but people can make of it what they will.

As for stash-busting, you can see from what's left in the tray that I still have lots of pink beads, although not nearly as many as I started with. A lot of what's left are odd sizes or don't have properly reamed holes, so I think I'm going to only keep the cherry-red ones and the petrol ones (lower left corner on the inside and outside dish groups, respectively). The rest can go in the garbage. I made my creative challenge and I'm happy with it — time to move on to other things.

the slipper experiment

A few days ago I hauled up the last of the yarn from my locker to my apartment. As I suspected, most of the nice stuff had wound up in the locker (in sealed plastic bags, in a suitcase, thank goodness). Now that it's all in my living space, I'm starting to appreciate what a gargantuan task reducing the stash will be. The idea is to have it all fit in my cedar-lined chest. That means I need to decrease the volume to about 20% of what I have now. That's okay: part of knowing how to solve the problem is knowing the size of it.

I count any unfinished knitting as stash, even though it's really living in that strange twilight-land between stash and knitting. The truth is, I have so many ideas that sometimes things that are on their way to being finished wind up being unraveled and turned into stash again. I hate that silly debate between "process" and "project" knitting (reminds me too much of left-brain vs. right-brain, and all the other stupid binaries we impose on ourselves), but it's true I like to experiment at least as much as I like to get things done.

The past couple of weeks have been good for finishing things and experimenting at the same time. I finally finished the Lana Grossa socks I first blogged about last May, and started the second Noro sock of the pair I was working on at the same time. It had been so long, I had to look up my old blog post to find out what size needles I had used for the Noro, because all I could remember was that it was smaller-than-usual. (I knew there was a reason why I kept this blog!)

I also just finished a new pair of slippers for myself, because my old ones were ruined when I painted my bedroom. My old slippers were Isotoners, but this time I decided to knit my own.

I have a friend who saw a lot of my sweaters before she saw my apartment, and when she finally came over, the first thing she said was, "Where's all the knitted household stuff?" The truth is, I'm not that big on afghans, knitted pillows, tea cosies, or (gack!) wall hangings, much less door-knob cosies, toilet paper roll covers, or other ways people have found over the years to use up leftovers. That includes household slippers. When I was little, my grandmother used to knit my brothers and I slippers. We used their natural slippiness to our advantage, and would "surf" down the cushion-floored hallway after a running start. We would have our new slippers completely worn out in about a week, maybe two if they were made from Phentex instead of the usual leftover Eaton's Lady Fair Sayelle acrylic. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Oma taught me that slipper pattern as soon as I was past the scarf stage.

There's a nice pair of slippers in Melanie Falick's Handknit Holidays, though, and the idea of reducing some stash and replacing my slippers for "free" appealed. Also, this pattern calls for fingering-weight yarn, so I felt confident substituting some sock yarn. It takes me a couple of years to wear out a pair of hand-knit socks.

Here's the finished version:

Besides the yarn substitution, the major changes I made to the original pattern were:

• Altering the size to something that would fit my feet. The pattern instructions are, as is typical for women's socks and slippers patterns, too small for me, even at the largest size. I take a North American size 10 shoe (that's a European 41, or a UK size 8), so I had to do some math to size it up myself. It wasn't that hard once I had compared the instructions to the schematics a few times, but it would be nice if someone remembered that not all women are five feet four with a size six shoe when they're publishing these things. There's a reason why I could design my own sweaters by the time I was sixteen, and it's not because I'm a fashion genius, unfortunately.
  
• Ditching the long laces that were supposed to cross and tie halfway up the calf and replacing them with short laces that hold up the sides but don't require any tying, because they're sewn onto the slipper at both ends. (They can't be eliminated entirely because they're what's keeping the sides of the slipper from curling and falling off the foot.) The laces are still threaded through the centre-foot points to allow for the slipper to stretch and flex correctly as I wear it.
  
• Removing the yarn-overs the pattern called for and replacing them with make-one increases instead. I don't have anything against lace patterns; I just thought this would look better. I also eliminated the yarn-over at the back of the heel since there wasn't going to be any lace to run through it.

I'd like to get some leather partial soles for them (the kind with the separate toe and heel pieces that come with the tough linen thread to sew them on with), but haven't seen these for sale in a long time. If you have a lead, please let me know.

The slippers fit and stay on a lot better than you would be led to believe when you're making them (the uppers curl something awful until they're on your feet), and the minimal upper means that your feet stay warm, but not too warm when you're wearing them. The final effect is that of a dancing slipper — pretty and elegant.

Time of Reckoning

I'm moving in about a month, and all I can think about is: where am I going to put my stash in the new place? It's an issue, because the new place is only about two-thirds the size of the old place (but with a washer/dryer and dishwasher, so very much worth it). This, of course, leads to the usual question of "How do I turn all this stash into useful stuff, like clothes and gifts?"

And that, dear reader, led to a very useful review of What's In the Stash.

Disclaimer: I started my DIY life with virtually no stash. My grandmother gave me just enough of her stash that if I wanted to try out a new stitch pattern (or, in the case of crochet, a whole new craft), I could do it, but not have much more of any given colour than was enough for a few inches of fabric. That was fine — it encouraged me to experiment without going for the grand plunge of a whole new project to work on.

Then I inherited my grandmother's stash, plus the stash of a friend of the family who gave up knitting due to her arthritis. I also started earning a reasonable income. The consequence is that I have a crazy amount of odd balls of yarn, mostly in acrylic, and absolutely no compunction to give them up. When I mention it, people always tell me to give it to charity. They don't get that I don't want to give it to charity. I will buy new yarn and give it to charity, no problem. But this is my inherited stash, and what I'm really interested in is in turning it into cool-looking clothing that doesn't look like I made it from stash.

Not everything is in odd balls. Some yarn I have enough of to make a solid-colour sweater. Other yarn I have enough of to be a main colour with contrast colours either gathered from the stash or bought new to supplement. I love Sally Melville's adage that, "It takes a little cash to use up a whole lot of stash!".

To that end, I'm currently crocheting a wool cardigan from Teva Durham's Loop-d-loop Crochet book (the one I'm making is the one with the Irish crochet medallions on the front). The main colour is stash; I bought the contrasting colours. It's all in Mission Falls wool, so it all goes together nicely. I'll post photos here when enough of it is done.

It's also a good time to recycle ideas I had for things that didn't work out in previous stash-reduction exercises. A couple of years ago I tried making a woven-look tailored jacket out of the Golden Hands/Creative Hands set I have from the early 1970s, and while the fabric looked great, it became rather obvious I was going to run out of yarn. Now I've discovered other yarn, in a different colour and in greater quantity, and I'm thinking it's time to resurrect that idea.

Plus, the opportunity to try the really "grand" projects that would be prohibitively expensive to buy as a single project, like those wonderful knee-length Kaffe Fassett coats. Sure, you're supposed to make them out of luxurious Rowan and other yarns, but even acrylic starts to look nice when you combine enough colours.

As scary as the yarn packing is going to be, this could be a lot of fun. If only I had time to both knit and pack....

Stash reduction

Last Saturday I gave a Rubbermaid chest-of-drawers to a friend. It was stuck in one of my closets; I didn't need it.

Yarn doesn't work that way with me. Nor does thread, buttons, beads, canvas, or anything else you can make something out of. The Oma who taught me how to knit always told me never to give yarn away, and I find that, except on rare occasions, I really can't. Make something and then give it away, sure, but not the raw product, not unless it's going to stay in the family.

So it works like this: if you know me, you know that I always have a perfectly silly amount of projects on the go. I've decided to knock them off in short-term plans. The main goal is to reduce stash.

Here, for instance, are the short-term knitting plans:

• scribble lace jacket from the Debbie New Unexpected Knitting book: 100% stash. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much yarn.


• birthday presents for a friend of mine (already late, but just wait on the photos for when they're done!). I still have the crazy idea I can do these this week and then post them to her on Saturday.


• crocheted plastic shopping bags from Canadian Living -- despite carrying around a reusable shopping bag everywhere, I still have tons of plastic bags.

The name of the game is to avoid reverse stash reduction. That's when you start something to reduce stash, and think to yourself, "That's great! I just need to buy ------- to finish it, and I'll use up all this stuff!" Then you wind up buying more than you use up.


This happened recently to me with a necklace and earrings set I made (sorry about the crappy photo -- the colours are much better in real life). I love how they turned out, but I wound up two vials of seed beads and assorted 4mm beads up in stash when it was supposed to be going down. I'm going to make a bracelet to match and another necklace of a different pattern, just to use up some more beads. It helps that I like jewelry, but hopefully you see the forces at work here.

The big questions are: how do we DIY without turning into the consumers we were at least partly hoping to not be? DIY is supposed to be about getting it your own way and (hopefully) saving some money by making something better than you can afford ready-made -- how did it get to be about buying more stuff?