Thoughts on the Stash and Mental Knitting

This morning, as I was sitting on the bus bench and enjoying the weather, I was thinking about my stash.   Like many knitters, I have a lot of yarn.   Please, please don't make me define 'a lot.'  It is better for everyone if that is amorphous.   Suffice that it hovers at the tipping point of joy into burden.

Yes, I admit it is often easier to buy something for a project than to look for something in the inventory I stock in my own store.  It certainly can be easier than figuring out which of the locations the exact yarn I vaguely remember having is tucked...if I haven't given that yarn away to someone who needed it right away and could not get to a real yarn store.   That is why I now want to make it a project to get the stash down to a more manageable level.   Don't expect me to define that either.

This is also a year when I want to learn new things, stretch my knitting, and have more fun with it.

One of my knitting friends, Mary, does a lot of what she calls theoretical knitting.....she thinks about knitting a lot.   When the theoretical projects appear on her needles, the projects are fun and interesting.   At Tuesday knitting this week, she was wearing a heavily cabled Jared Flood designed hat knit up in a lovely hot pink Malabrigo.  Her work is beautifully executed and it looked wonderful on her.  She was kind enough to let us all fondle the hat...squeezing the yarn and testing the softness...instead of just lusting after it from a safe distance.

Mary's virtual knitting skills are like a virus...I do that now too.   That is how some of my challenges are coming about.   I am noodling on a few ideas while I work through my looooooong list of projects using my pattern stash.  

Now that the hat is behind me, I am moving along.   There is another intarsia challenge in the pipeline that I for which I am mentally gearing up.   Inspired by Mary, I am going to do a heavily cabled hat for another friend.    I am even going to go into the boxes...the many boxes...to pull out yarn for a pair of slippers I want to make.    Watch this site for pictures and progress!