enough is enough

Having been brought up to believe that you shouldn’t start a new project before you finish the previous one, it came as a bit of an epiphany for me about twenty years ago when someone giving a talk on creativity suggested that it was actually good to have more than one project on the go at the same time. Some people might suggest that I have taken this advice too literally and gone a bit far in the opposite direction.

On the whole my creative stash lives in my workroom in the basement, but knitting and crochet are sociable crafts that can be practised sitting on a comfortable chair while watching the telly. This has meant that my yarn craft project bags were beginning to silt up at one end of the sofa. It was getting difficult to find what I wanted and generally stressful. So a large part of today has been devoted to sorting out this horrible space.

In the process I discovered that my main current project was in a bag far too small for it, so extra balls of yarn were lolling around here there and everywhere. That has now been sorted into one large bag.

There's a large bag full of the knitted squares for blanket-making that I blogged about last week. These need to stay at hand or I will forget to do anything with them.
I also found at least three bags of random/leftover/spare yarn; a scarf project started and (probably) abandoned; and a bag with two colours of recycled sari yarn which I have yet to find the right project for.

Then there was the bag that holds my in-between-other-projects/use-up-leftovers project - a crochet sampler blanket that will eventually be sewn together in strips.

This is definitely not abandoned, but needs to be on the back burner at the moment because of other things on the go. That and the random bags have been relegated to the basement depths.

As has this little project bag with the yarn and pattern for Fugue tam and mittens by Kate Davies. I have actually knitted one of the mittens, but it came out too small so I need to start again. I can't risk relegating this one for too long or I will miss the hat and mittens season.

Also begging to be sorted was my needle bag and another tube of needles. When it's organised this bag is incredibly useful as it also contains a ring binder for patterns. While Steve was at the cinema this afternoon I sat on the floor with all the needles and a needle gauge sorting out pairs and batches of double-ended needles. All my printed-from-the-internet patterns are now in plastic sleeves in the ring binder.

Hiding under all sorts of other stuff was a jar of buttons that I didn't know was there and would definitely have been looking for sometime soon.

There were also two sewing projects that had come upstairs for one reason or another and now need to go back below stairs.

All has now been reorganised and restored. To the casual observer it probably doesn't look too different, as there are still two large project bags and a work basket in the corner, but I know what's there and I can lay my hands on it, so this post it brought to you with a smug sense of relief and I can spend the evening knitting!

gothic melodrama

Finally another finished object to blog about.

This shawl was a secret as it was a 50th birthday present for a good friend. I had pursued one idea for a while before realising that I was making something that I wanted rather than what would suit my friend D, so had to do some hasty pattern-trawling on ravelry and hunting for lovely yarn. I reckoned that crochet would make it quicker than knitting, which is probably true, but lace-weight yarn in a complex pattern grows pretty slowly whatever technique you use!

Eventually settled on Annette Petavy’s lovely Arrows pattern and chose 100% silk yarn, Glister, from Skein Queen in colourway "Gothic Melodrama".

I started it mid-July and presented it when we all met up for a birthday lunch in September. D is someone who really appreciates handcrafts and I was pretty confident that the colours I had gone for were "her", but it’s always pretty nerve-wracking handing over something so personal. She would never be so rude as to let me think she didn’t like something I made for her, but I think I got it right!

The photo colours are a bit hit and miss. The picture of the skein of yarn is pretty accurate of how it looks in daylight. If I were to do this pattern again I would use a semi-solid coloured yarn rather than the multi-colours as it would show off the pattern motifs better.

whose grand-daughter would line up her satsuma like this?

Little Miss Low had two satsumas for lunch today. The first one she lined up with the sections all facing the same way. The second one was lined up like this, with the sections arranged around a central point of symmetry. Given that Mr B recently blogged about his obsessive list-making, I think that something genetic could be going on.
She also insisted that all the "ends" be pulled off because "I don't like to eat them".