The Emergency Fiver…
Last week, I sold some knitting stash I didn’t need (i.e. a few balls of yarn) to a friend from my weekly knitting circle. Not having enough cash on her at the time, my friend (C.) asked her mum (J.) to make up the shortfall. J. did, giving me a crisp new £5 note. We joked about that, because usually £5 notes are scraggy and very well-used. I promised that I would only use it in an emergency.
So, yesterday when I again saw C. and J., I told them that I had, indeed, used the crisp new £5 note in an emergency. I had, I told them with a grave face, used it to buy myself a strawberry daiquiri at TGI Friday’s on Friday night. The emergency was, of course, simple.
My strawberry daiquiri glass was empty.
*grins*
Sorting out the Stash…
I have been having a lot of fun recently — my right hand appears to have a piece of glass within it (from an encounter with a window almost four years ago), which is now making itself known. As such, I’m now on pain meds and have to wear a padded dressing and bandage to protect the part of the palm where the glass is located, until I get a date for an operation to remove the glass. This has meant that knitting and cross stitch have not been easy. :(
Thus, I decided the other night that if I couldn’t knit or cross stitch easily at the moment, I would damn well do something with my crafts. And so, I began to sort through all my knitting stash. Now, granted, it was slow going as my dominant hand currently looks like this:
Not to be deterred, I made as much progress as I could — and in the end I worked until gone 4am! But even so, it was worth it. Here’s where I was up to after I’d pulled everything out of the storage area under the stairs, and segregated it all into piles. If you like, you can click on this image for a larger version:
That’s a lot of stash, but not as much as I expected to be honest, so it’s not that bad. Of course, Andrew was amused when he saw it (though what he was thinking when even more arrived in the mail today, I don’t know… LOL!). He gently suggested that perhaps I should get through as much of this as possible before buying yet more, and at that point I wondered if I should explain to him about pattern books and the concept of yarn fetish, and decided to give that up as a bad job. So I just continued sorting through it all, and by the end of it I had everything neatly catalogued and organised, and then stored back under the stairs in a much more stable and trouble-free manner! I even managed to get a sheet together detailing how much of which yarns I had, their colours/dyelots, tensions, quantity, and whether I had allocated them to a particular pattern/gift recipient. Whoo!
After that, though, came the patterns… And oi, I didn’t know I had so many patterns. By the time I was done, I had filled four lever-arch files (again nicely organised into categories, and alphabetised within those!). Hoewever, I did find some gems — such as a pattern book I almost bought that day (but thankfully didn’t) and several patterns which have been moved up the “next projects” list accordingly.
So yea, that wasn’t a bad waste of a few hours. Just got to do the same with all the cross stitch stash at some point… :p
I can haz stash!
It’s always great when your favourite local yarn store is holding a sale on yarn. Today I got enough yarn to make a pretty strappy top and matching wrap for less than £15.
Now all I have to do is find the time to knit it! :p
Crafty Thoughts…
I remembered that somewhere I had a box of cross stitch kits — some part-complete, others unopened. I used to really enjoy cross stitch and can’t really recall why I stopped stitching; in any case, I had a hunt around the other day and initially found a few kits.
So, I’m currently working on Autumn (which is one of a set of four seasonal pieces; I don’t have the others). I’m also doing a free “quick stitch” kit from the front of The World of Cross Stitch magazine; it’s a delightfully dinky Yuletide Lickle Ted design.
This morning, I found the really big box of kits, threads and aida. One of the things that has really pissed me off is that, when I came to examine the box’s contents, I found that two kits have gone MIA. They’re both kits that I’d almost completed a while back, and I knew they were around somewhere. The idea was to finish them at some point, but I can’t find them. One is Charlie Is Born, the first in the Charlie Dragon series (and yes, I have the other three, unopened; the idea was to stitch them all, frame and hang around the house).
The other missing kit is The Sorceress, which I was also going to frame. There’s a place waiting for it above my altar. I think I was going to modify the chart for that one, though, and give her red hair :p
I’m miffed that I can’t find them, but I suppose they’ll turn up at some point. However, I did find another partially-finished kit, entitled Giants of the Sea. I last looked at this particular kit in 2003 so it’ll be a good one to return to once I’ve finished those I’m currently stitching.