Sunday, March 22, 2009

Operation Stashbuster

Last week, I collected all the yarn hiding inside my closet and put them all in a 3 large plastic bags. They're more like those lawn bags, so it is pretty substantial. I already gave a few away through Freecycle last year, but this time, I took one look at all that yarn and said, "I need to start knitting again - even though I'm going to be using some Lion Brand Homespun or something."

Yarn is yarn. And thank goodness, I'm not a yarn snob. Otherwise, sure, these yarns would be all gone to new owners.

So today I started on one project. Since I can't knit for long periods of time due to my elbow (I have all the symptoms of tennis elbow, or lateral epicondylitis - it sucks), I found that I can knit small pieces. Not the MIL afghan I have sitting beside me right now. All those yarn overs kill my elbow and I can only knit three rows max.

I found that if I used smaller needles, and pick a small pattern, it doesn't hurt as much because there's not a lot of 'throwing' that I would normally do if I were working on a bulky afghan (I knit English). So I dug into my stash and picked out 2 balls of Moonlight Mohair in Safari colorway. This yarn can be itchy as heck but to some people, it doesn't bother them as much.

I began with a Moebius cast on ala Cat Bordhi and found that I had cast on way too many stitches. It was actually a scarf mobius although on the circular needles it looked like a bunched up cowl. After four rows of a million tiny stitches on such a small work area, I frogged it and decided to just knit a simple lace cowl. It's based on a lace stitch from Barbara Walker's "A Treasury of Knitting Patterns" and it seems like an easy knit.


So far I've only worked about 7 rows, so it's slow going. If I were to sell these things, I'd probably end up working for, like, 20 cents an hour or something. Yup, I'm that slow a knitter.

Oh, and as far as my cool Necchi sewing machine - I finally threaded it correctly and tested the straight stitch (awesome!) and the zigzag stitch (tres awesome!) and it is one fine well-cared for machine and I am so happy its first owner took great care of her. This baby's a treasure, for sure!

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