For the last two days I have been untangling a huge mess of yarn that has been around for years. I was trying to see if there was some yarn for a poncho and decided to sort the whole thing--it originally filled a large garbage bag.
This shows less than half of the original tangle
Yhis is a closup of the mess
Most of it was short pieces or remains of skeins. I was surprised that I had so many ends left from the weaving projects I had done in the early 70's!!--pearl cotton, warp thread, and the fingering yarn from Bridget's baby blanket. I had recently pulled out enough long pieces of the turquoise fingering yarn to make a Barbie sweater,
The sweater is from Knits for Barbie
Closeup of sweater; the little shorts were made using the small amount of brown yarn left from the afghan
but now all that's left is many pieces measuring only 2 to 6 inches. Now all that yarn is "sorted" into the pearl cotton ends, the string-ish ends, the fingering yarn ends, cotton rug yarn bits, needlepoint yarn, < 50-inch pieces (to be tied onto others in a ball for a future scrap afghan), > 50-inch to c. 60-inch pieces (to be made into "flower" centers for a future scrap afghan). Anything longer was rolled into balls and put into the boxes I have with yarn sorted by colors. The "bag" is now much smaller and neater, not trailing bits of yarn that fall out.
In looking for poncho yarn, I also decided that I'd better check that any yarn I found wasn't already "committed" to another project. So, I looked in my "partially done" box and pulled out the part of a "Turkish Afghan"
(from a Family Circle Great Ideas Fashions and Crafts, July, 1986) I had last worked on in 1997 (!), before The Fire. Sure enough, one of the colors I was thinking of using was one especially bought for that afghan. I then dug through everything again and pulled out all the yarn I had for it; only two colors could not be found, and they were small amounts that I can substitute without a problem. Another project to work on!
There is an additional on-going project I've started. This summer, I knit an all-white afghan--made up of triangles, mostly done on our trip to Seattle--that was supposed to have flowers embroidered on it. Fair time came, and I ran out of time, so no embroidery got done and I entered it "plain" (and still got a 3rd). The original design was too heavy for what I had (I had used larger needles and acrylic yarn instead of wool), so I started to look for duplicate stitch patterns. I've found some that might work, but I'm still testing and learning the technique.
Michaels has a sale on embroidery floss this week, so I did pick up the remaining skeins I need for the "Autumn Sampler"--a lovely array of Fall colors when seen together. These seasonal samplers are very small--around 3" x 5"--and done on 18-count aida; the original design calls for 36-count linen but I couldn't find any and I had enough of the 18-count for all 4 seasons.
I recently finished Donna Andrews" Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon, the next Meg Lansdowne mystery--a fun look at murder in a computer game development office. I also just finished Ellis Peters' The Knocker on Death's Door, an Inspector Felse mystery written in 1970. It was good, but dated, and the murderer was kind of obvious. I like this series, though, even if only a few volumes are in print.
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