FO and yarn totals so far.

Here's Ashes to Ashes, my latest socks that I finished last night:

Pattern: Rudy Got Sole
Yarn: Knit Picks Risata, color Ash
Needles: 2.5 mm
Started August 25, 2012, finished Sept 12, 2012
Grams: 76.4

That brings my 2012 total to 1118.6 grams, and my 2 kg stash-down total to 227.6.

I've also just restarted the argyles again, due to changing what needle size I'm using, and crocheted 2 more squares on the Sunny Ferns blanket. Hopefully now I can get some real progress done on these argyles, and get them done by the end of the month.

Crochet eats yarn.

I've been thinking about projects to use up some of this mountain of yarn I have, and also contemplating the large amount of cotton and cotton blend yarn a friend gave me a couple of years ago. Among the cotton was 20 balls of Patons Grace in a nice medium green called Fern, which is a color now discontinued, but Wasabi is very similar.

Asking around on the #ravelry channel, I got a suggestion of the Sunny Spread. I haven't done crochet in a while, and that looked like a good use of the yarn. Once I got started, I realized that duh, crochet uses about 3 times as much yarn as knitting for the same space. This is good. I can get 5 squares out of one 50g ball of yarn, plus a bit extra which will be used for seaming. I'm currently planning on either a 9 x 11 blanket, or a 10 x 10, depending on if I need the extra yarn from the 100th square for seaming.

I am planning on buying a couple balls of another color for the outer border, however, as I think it'd set off the green better. I have made an exception in my diet that I can get yarn to finish a project that uses stash, as long as there's more stash than new yarn. I'll try not to abuse that too often, though. I already got 400g of Knit Picks yarn for my argyle socks, which I'll talk about in a later post.

I've 6 squares crocheted so far, it's a very easily memorized pattern:

The Dreaded Yarn Diet

Yep, decided on a yarn diet right around my 33rd birthday back in July, just after I'd ordered 1100g of yarn from Knit Picks. I looked around the office/yarn room here, and realized I had no room left in which to put that order.

I have a small closet that's full to the brim, I have to carefully restack things when I go in there now. I've a dresser that's 3 drawers dedicated just to my Knit Picks yarn. I've handspun sitting on top of the boyfriend's bookshelf, and 5 WIPs on my desk.

Then I made the mistake of using the Excel function of Ravelry's stash page to see just how much I had (that was put into Ravelry).

...

...

Just under 30 kg. That's 66 pounds. Once I separated out the Knit Picks yarn (because I knew I had a fair bit), after including the birthday yarn once it arrived, that came to 6.18 kg, or 13.6 pounds. My sock yarn total is 15.9 kg/35 pounds.

So, I decided that instead of picking a set time, like a year, that most people seemed to do, since my main goal is to knit use up some of my prodigious stash, I'd set a weight limit.

One kilogram of Knit Picks yarn, and one kilogram of anything else. We'll see how long that takes me.