Another Yarn-Related Photo Dump

It was a month ago now, but I recently had a birthday.

For those of you who are new here, a birthday Chez Nous means a wicked yarn crawl.  What happens when you combine snow days, yarn crawls, startitis, and power outages?







You get a mess on the dining room table, because that is where we dump our stuff.

I love a good mess on the dining room table.  I should leave it like that all the time, but Mr. D will insist on using the table for work, even though there's a perfectly good desk for him down in the dungeon  basement.  (Check out the guest over there in the bottom right-hand corner.  Not who you'd usually expect to see in the background of a Bunny!photo, is it?)

Somewhere in that pile is the Porpoise cardi:

It's plugging along.  I could conceivably have it finished this month, just in time for warm weather.

Startitis is a hell of a disease.  When you combine startitis with weird compulsions about leftover yarn, you end up with lots of small sweaters, minisocks, and hats.    Up there we have three projects.  I once had a black chunky-weight cardigan that had major gauge issues and has long since been in the garbage.  The only thing left to remind me that it ever existed is a sack full of left over yarn.  Maybe once I get rid of the old yarn, I can forget about that fucked-up cardi.  Anyway, it is becoming a sweater of some sort (I can't remember what I cast on for, but it's written down somewhere) and a pair of mittens.  

Cardi in progress.

Mittens in progress, along with socks for Mr. D.

Finished mittens.  You know what's great about hand-made mittens?  You can get them exactly the way you want.  I hate it when my coat sleeves ride up and my wrists get exposed, so I make my mittens with extra-long cuffs.  Also--chunky-weight mittens knit at a tight gauge=v warm.

Also in this photo is leftover yarn from the Froggie Cardigan that I don't wear because I blocked it too energetically and ended up felting it.  Because I felted it, I can't rip it up and reknit the yarn and there isn't nearly enough left to start over, so it is also becoming a small sweater of some sort.

I loved the pattern for the Froggie cardi and it really hurt to ditch the sweater, so I've decided to make another one:

I haven't found the right gauge yet, but that's not a bad thing because I really hope to finish the Porpoise cardi someday and it's so boring that I'll never work on it if I have Froggie II on the needles.

I made a few tiny sane decisions in the middle of all my excess.  I bought lots of purple yarn for a Victoria cardigan, but I decided not to start it until fall.

Remember this?  By the way, you should give a try sometime to plowing through old photos looking at evidence of past failures.  It's quite rewarding.  Anyway, I had four fuzzy, itchy skeins of that stuff leftover, and then I went and bought two more in gold with the idea that I could make scarves in the colors of the local throwball team, the Potomac Drainage Basin Indigenous Persons.  (Also?  Could be Gryffindor.  I'm giving them away so what do I care?)  And then I put it all in a bin and let it feed on my soul for (counts on fingers) 26 months.  Until now.

Ugh.  I hate gold.

 Somehow, I thought this would use up more yarn than it did.

And....the first one is finished and I probably have enough for two more.  At least.  And it is painfully obvious to me that my splices are pretty sloppy.  Ugh.  Back in the bin with you, Itches, while I work on something else from the Bin of Shame.

This is an elongated stitch scarf from a novelty yarn called "Dune."  I liked it better in the store.  Once Dune is done, I can go back to Itches.

One last yarn photo:

More yarn crawl purchases.  Sock yarn and three skeins of fingering weight for--gulp--Latvian mittens.