Organization...Chaos/Control

13 months later.

There will be no post 2 of 2.

Oopsie!

In 1976 or 1977 Janis Ian introduced me to the very foreign concept of measuring time in coffee spoons:


Geesh, it would be 10 or more years before I would even grasp what her words mean. What is time to a 9 year old? Everything. Every day is long and short. Every milestone momentous. 37 years later, time is a meandering journey down a gelatinous waterway. My only anchors, my marriage, my knitting, my job. Only my knitting imparts a sense of time.

This spring a random raveller asked if I could spare some yarn from a project I knit in 2011. I found the yarn remants and marvelled at how neatly I had reskeined and stored them. I had forgotten how organized I had kept my craft. It was a stark contrast to the chaos it is in now. My psyche has been overwhelmed for some time, and my knitting, like everything else, has paid a price.

When it comes to my knitting one culprit is my stash. Chaos found me when I ran out of room to store my stash where I want it stored. Another issue is I've spent considerable more time swatching and test knitting than I did five years ago. I haven't taken care to track all the yarn used or the one-off results.


Noro afghan square idea
These issues bug me. So I am definitely on a stash diet. I didn't go to NH Sheep & Wool. That was a bummer, but necessary. I would never resist any one of a kind yarn I saw. It's one of my festival credos, covered under #6 and 7. But at the same time I bought a shit-ton of Cascade 220 during WEBs' annual anniversary sale for next fall's sweaters. So, no contradiction there, right? Yeah. Essentially I was buying clothes, not yarn. Hahahahaha. No.

Even before I knit the last stitch of my Harvest Bowl Afghan in 2013 I was aching to knit another afghan with Noro Kureyon.


Harvest Bowl Afhan
I love this afghan. It is my work afghan and so friggin' warm. Garter stitch afghans are the coziest invention. Fuck snuggies, knit a garter stitch afghan in wool.

It's been 16 months since I finished Harvest Bowl. My afghan pattern queue on ravelry has grown. And well, my stash has grown. Yet indecision, my lifelong bestie, kept the chaos churning. Which is how it usually goes. I think and I think and I rethink and I rethink and then one day I just say fuck it and do it. And I did and it is looking fabulous!


Technicolor Dream
I began the knitting portion of the project on June 8th, so this is about two weeks of knitting. It's the most knitting I've accomplished in two weeks in years.

The pattern is really just a stitch, a garter stitch Entrelac. And I am confident I don't have enough Noro to complete the afghan, but I am making do. I'll bolster whatever I get from the yarn I have with a border of Cascade Eco I stashed when I was working on the Harvest Bowl. And it will be glorious. It already is glorious.