The Misadventures of GaietyGirl

That lemon, ginger and honey hot drink is epic stuff. I’m feeling a million times better today and almost ready to take on the world.

At some point in my fevered state last night, I had a crazy idea. I can only attribute my decision to turn this into something official to the number of brain cells I’ve sneezed out over the last 48 hours.

I’m going to be competing in the Ravelympics, and Vivian is my project.

Yup, I’ll be casting on at 2am on Sunday for a hair raising 17 days of knitting a hooded, cabled, seed stitchy cardigan.

…..I have no earthly idea if I’ll get the thing finished, but my hope is to get a good chunk of it done anyway. I also have utter faith in Ysolda’s patterns as they tend to be far easier than the end product would suggest. Just in case though, I’ll also be frogging the non-slouchy eco beret and also that colourscape Urchin that I made at some point last year. I put in an extra two wedges for extra flooom value, and it failed miserably. Now the damn thing mocks me on a regular basis, so I’m going to frog it to death, reskein the yarn and then put it aside for reknitting into a new urchin. The two hat-froggings will count as two projects, so if I get frustrated with the cardigan I can take it out on them and still be getting something done!

Today, in earnest, the great yarn-off started in my house.

I began the day by uploading more yummy yarns onto my etsy store (buy my yarn! Help me overcome the urge to hoard it all like some sort of gollum!)

I also started the task of destashing. Now I know I keep saying that I’m destashing and I do try. Before moving from Belfast I gave a bin liner of the stuff away. Things were down to vaguely manageable levels. I’ve been in this house for nearly two years though, and don’t tell me you don’t know how evil “yarn creep” is. It’s a strange phenomonon, where otherwise sane knitters are certain that they’ve only purchased a few skeins here and there and they are, at the same time, knitting through projects and getting stuff done. Somehow though, there seems to be an ever increasing amount of unknitted yarn in the house.

For example, I like sock yarn. A lot. Possibly more than is reasonable or sensible. I even joined a couple of sock clubs last year. Today, however, I managed to open a drawer and find not one, not two but SIX skeins of sock yarn that I’d entirely forgotten I owned. How the hell does someone do that? Granted they were 50g skeins (excuse one) and more than one skein is needed for a pair of socks (excuse the second) but wtf? Even me, with my scary knows-what’s-in-all-the-cupboards-photographic-memory had to have a cup of tea having made the discovery.

With that in mind, I’ve started poking through my stash. If I have enough yarn to make me feel like Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, then I also need to realise that I’m sitting on a lot of gold…er…cash. I can’t afford to have literally miles of yarn that I’m not going to get around to knit before I hit my next milestone birthday. So today has been filled with taking photos. Naturally, the sun didn’t oblige by staying in the same cloud-free spot for more than fifteen seconds, but that’s the way of things.

My trade page on Ravelry has the first offerings on it. Prices are listed in dollars, but that’s just ‘cos most of the traffic on there is from the States.

There’s some Rowan cotton, some megaboots, some copihue….rather a large amount of this indigo dyed cotton and the humourous story that goes with it…

…and there will be more up over the next few days, including  Sublime and some vintage stuff that I’ve picked up. I’m even contemplating parting with a skein of my precious crack Wollmeise. It’s even one of the limited edition, sock club only skeins.

Sometimes I even scare myself a little.