March 03, 2006
Scraping the Bottom of the Knitting Barrel
(Please, God, tell me that some other knitter has done something as ridiculous as this or, preferably, worse… Whoever it is, I will love him or her with an undying love until the end of my days.)
About a month ago, I decided to knit one of the sweaters for Guidepost’s Knit For Kids charity knitting program because they had been so generous to Dulaan. (Remember these children wearing KFK sweaters?) True, this is like taking coals to Newcastle, especially since KFK might simply turn around and donate the sweater to Dulaan, but it was a symbolic gesture I felt compelled to make. Since the single sweater pattern that KFK uses is tres basic—garter stitch, followed by garter stitch, followed by, hey!, more garter stitch—I felt multi-colored stripes would greatly up the entertainment value. However, I didn’t have enough different colors in the same yarn in my stash to make enough of a variety of stripes...
Gulp.
I can do this...
I can make this admission...
Which is why I knit the multi-colored sweater. Not to make something for Dulaan. Not to knit a sweater. Not to knit that particular pattern. Not to use the Quatro. Not to have something to knit in the car. But in order to generate more leftover balls of yarn. To generate more half-used stash. On purpose.
I feel so ashamed.
The only thing I’ve done that even closely matches this inanity was the time I put a ball of yarn, which had fallen into some garden mulch and which I had carefully picked clean, back into the mulch just to get a picture for the blog. Yes, it’s that sort of thing.
By the by, for those of you who are interested in knitting the multi-colored sweater and are planning on stash-diving for the yarn to make it, I made the 12-18 month size and I used about 1/2 to 2/3 each of three balls of Cascade 220—so, don’t quote me on this, but I would say you need about 110 to 145 yards each of three colors of worsted weight yarn to knit the largest size of this pattern. The back of the sweater and one of the front panels are the same color so you will use more of one color than the other two, hence the 2/3rds and the 145 yards vs. the 1/2 and 110 yards.
Quiet weekend planned. Tonight, we’re going to play pool and snack on ‘burgers with friends (although I have to say, these occasional visits to the slightly seamier side of town have lost a lot of their attraction ever since Seattle banned all indoor smoking. When you go to a bar, when you go to a “pool hall,” you expect to walk into, you anticipate walking into a room filled with a gray haze, a place that smells at least a little like underbelly, a little sordid, a little disreputable. That’s half of the fun, half of the pull. But, no, you could eat off the floor of this place, partly because it’s brand spanking new, and partly because of the ban. It’s just not quite the slummin’ we're used to. But at least they make up for it with the best day-um burgers in town.)
The rest of the weekend will be spent picking away at the house and the garden because we will be having Very Special Visitors during the first week in April—Rachael and Lala, the soon-to-be-newlyweds! They will be schlepping down for a few days during their stay in Vancouver, B.C. I suspect all four of us are thinking, “How slightly weird is this? We don’t even know each other!,” but I also suspect Janine, who has bounced back and forth between Seattle and California, has vouched to all of us for all of us. Besides—and I keep forgetting this—by the time they come up here we will know them because we will have been down to California for their first ceremony.
Now, I’m sure Rachael’s thinking—because she has, in fact, said this to me—don’t clean the house on our account but, Dear Rach, if you could see how much moss has grown on the driveway this winter... I refer you to the name of this blog. ‘Nuff said.