Snowdrift minnens!

My stashbusting quest continues and when my very warm hat used less Peruvian Alpaca than I expected, I had to find another project for the still remaining yarn. So here are my snowdrift mittens (or minnens as my Jubilee Bubilee calls them) posing with my 31 week old baby belly for Krista;0)

I had printed out the free pattern for these "Snowdrift Mittens" months ago, but noticed that there seems to be a problem with the file and my computer won't let me download it from the site. You might try contacting the owner of the site ... but if you would like the pattern and can't get your hands on it, send me an email and I may be able to hook you up ;0)

Sadly, these still didn't use up all my Peruvian Alpaca stash! Seriously, the yardage on that stuff is unbelievable. I used less than 2 balls of the teal and 1 ball of celery.

Oh, and the celery tip on the second thumb? It makes me want to cry! Not because I came so close to finishing with the teal yarn I had, but because they remind me of the mitts my grandmother lovingly knit for us...it was not unusual for them to have different coloured thumbs, or tops! My grandmother was a very practical person and well she did knit hundreds of pairs of mittens and socks for her 24 children's children and grand-children. She was an amazing woman ;0)


Now what to do with the 2 balls of celery and 2 balls of gray I am STILL stashing !?!!

Cheers!

My sleepy lads

Julian still sleeps in our bed. It was just going to be for a few weeks initially...until he could sleep through the night. Right! When he started sleep crawling we were really going to start putting him down in his own room...but we just weren't ready. Part of the reason is that we all love to sleep together and our bed is big enough that we don't get in each other's way. But mostly, it's because moments like this one happen nightly ;0)

This is how I found my boys several nights ago. I watched them sleep blissfully for a couple of hours while I knit away beside them...until I couldn't resist the cuteness any longer and willed myself out of bed in the cold world to find the camera and capture the moment forever ;0)

Of course, now we really have to get Julian to sleep in his own big boy bed since there's only 8-10 weeks until our little lemon drop is due and he'll need his mommy close to nurse throughout the night. I don't think Julian will have a hard time with the transition. He loves his new toddler room and has no trouble falling asleep and waking up alone in his big boy bed. Fingers crossed!

So here's what I've been working on these past few days...

It's a "very warm hat" from Elizabeth Zimmerman's "Knitting in the round". The idea is to knit one hat, pick up all the cast-on stitches and knit a second hat. The result: a very warm double layered and reversible hat. Cool! And since this is a stashbusting project, I figured it would use up twice as much stash as a less warm single hat!

I actually finished knitting it but forgot to take proper pics while the sun was still shining today so you'll have to wait and see ;0) I was hoping to use up what was left of the Peruvian Alpaca in my stash but alas it only used up 2 balls! So I started working on some fair-isle mitts with the leftovers.

Hopefully that'll be the end of that alpaca! To be continued...

Ninety-nine...

Balls of yarn on the wall,
Ninety-nine balls of yarn,
You take one down,
Pass it around,
Ninety-eight balls of yarn on the wall...

I'm on a roll with my 100 ball destash project: I counted and organised the stash, identified yarn to donate, researched Canadian charities accepting acrylic yarn donations and even made some definite (and other more sketchy) plans for the yarn I'm planning to keep!

And here's what I made out of one lonely ball of leftover Noro Silverthaw: the Inca Snowflake hat from Susan B. Anderson's itty-bitty hats and sweet Korknisse buddies (or kork-ee's as Julian calls them ;0) until the yarn ran out. No really, all that with 1 ball of yarn! Cool, eh? Plus they're all just sooo cute! I love how the hat turned out. I sure hope I have a daughter some day...thye're just so fun to knit for ;0)

So that's 1 ball down, 99 to go!

As for the acrylic! Thanks for all of the suggestions for places to donate. I found a great list of Canadian knitting charities here and selected the Bob Rumball Foundation for the Deaf as the one for me. The little write-up about it totally won me over. Plus they'll accept anything knitting or crochet related for their Yarnie's Group including needles, pattern books, heck even your unfinished or abandoned projects! They have five 'frogging queens' who:

"enthusiastically frog anything we put before them; the sense of satisfaction they feel by contributing the recycled yarn is heart warming to say the least. This is an immense boost to their self worth and esteem since with their diminished abilities (ages 89 to 97) they are no longer able to actually make an item themselves."

So if any of you are looking to de-UFO guilt-free I thought I'd pass along the info ;0)

Stash knitting challenge

We took advantage of dada's time off during the holidays to do some things we've been meaning to do for a while: we rolled up all our change and brought it to the bank, dada made a gazillion trips from the top floor to the basement to move all our books from our former home office to our future finished basement (for now, it serves as a depository for stuff that just doesn't belong anywhere else in the house!), and painted the nursery!

I say we, but really it was all dada. I just set up the unrealistic time frames and said "I'm sorry I can't help you more" and "I wish I could be more helpful" a lot! But dada got it all done and our office is looking more and more ready to be home to my little lemon drop.

I love the cheerful colour in there now. It's by Behr and is called yellow corn. I'm planning a yellow, orange and white colour scheme in there. Truth is, I'm tired of everything blue and green and since this little one will spend a lot of time in Julian's blue and green hand-me-downs, I'm trying hard to bring in some more cheerful hues into our lives ;0)

I felt bad that hubby was giving up his home office and even worse that since we don't have a new one set-up in the basement yet, the computer had to come in our bedroom!!! But it's really not as bad as I thought. We found a nice unobtrusive desk at Ikea that fits in well with our other bedroom furniture and I have to say dada did a good job at hiding all those wires.

So what does this have to do with my stash knitting challenge? Well daddy had to give up his office for the nursery and I have to give up my yarn closet (the brown armoire in the picture above) so lemon has a place for his clothes. Sure he won't have that much clothes for a while so I can totally still use a couple of shelves in there to store the yarn... but I need to seriously reduce the stash first.

So it's all about stash knitting for the next little while. Since we had to move all the yarn to paint the nursery, I took the time to count it. And it was really scary. I don't recommend you do it because it could totally freak you out. To me stash yarn feels like a big to-do list hanging over me and I totally feel the pressure to knit it up...fast! So getting rid of a bunch of it will feel like a load off actually, and it will be a nice treat to buy yarn on a project by project basis going forward (incidentally, I think that was totally my New Year's resolution last year, but I mean it this year ;0)

So here are my numbers:

• 131 balls of enjoyable yarn earmarked for specific (or general) projects
• 21 balls of sock yarn earmarked for, well, socks!
• 54 odd balls of 'before I was a serious knitter' crappy acrylic I have no interest in actually knitting up but feel is my duty to knit up anyway since I spent money on it'
• 31 balls of yarn I am considering destashing in the very near future because it's been in the stash forever and I still haven't found the right project for them

Yikes! That's a total of 238 balls of yarn! And just thinking about it makes me a little queasy to tell you the truth. And it all looked so innocent too...

My challenge then in the next three months before baby arrives is to reduce the stash by 100 balls either by actually knitting it up, selling it or donating it. I think that is totally do-able considering the donate and sell options available before me. But then again we all know I'm seriously deluded when it comes to yarn so who knows ;0)

Time to make those needles fly! Anyone else brave enough to take on the challenge? If so, you have to come clean with how much yarn you are currently hording and declare a number of balls to clear out either by a specific date as I did, or worse, "before you can buy more yarn!"

I should say that this is not really a knit-along though. Think of it more as a come clean about your stash meme! Be sure to let me know if you play along...I'm hoping to find some comfort in knowing that I am not alone!