Monthly Archives: October 2017

Show Notes: Episode 188

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Show Notes: “Stitching September”

WiPs:
♥ 10 Stitch Blanket
♥ O4 of 12 socks were BINNED. Had a terrible time with those.

Stitcher’s Corner:
StitchBucket “Never Tell Me The Odds”
FoxYouAreSoCrafty “Hola LLama” (I was mistaken about this pattern: it is absolutely available in her shop!)
♥ GERA! “Mushroom Family SamplerAida kit/ Linen kit
– You can find other GERA! patterns for download here.
♥ Supplies/ Things to buy mentioned in this segment: bulk embroidery hoops at Amazon & E6000 craft epoxy.

Sewcial Corner:
100 Acts of Sewing Shirt No. 1 – Creativebug course mentioned

Spinning:
♥ It’s Spinzilla this week! I briefly flashed my fiber, which is Into The Whirled Superwash Merino in the “Death” colorway from the 2015 Discworld MegaSAL.

Episode 188: Stitching September

 

Hi, kittens! Thank you for spending some of your time catching up with me today! Today’s episode has one knitting WIP, a little spinning, a whole lotta cross stitch, some sewing, some Lamby update news, and a few minutes of chatting! Show notes can be found on the blog at SewKnitpicky.net, and please consider joining the Knot A Podcast Ravelry group!

Blog: http://www.SewKnitpicky.net
Ravelry Group: http://www.ravelry.com/groups/knot-a-…
Shop: http://www.lambytoesshop.etsy.com

Pixelland Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Stashdown 2017: Q3

That’s quite a bit better! Yay for donating and destashing??

 

I have to say: I am quite chuffed at how well Quarter 3 went in terms of my Stashdown efforts. Look at those lovely green numbers!

I had not realized I bought zero ounces of fiber for a second quarter in 2017! It’s amazing how much my purchasing attitude has changed since last year. I seem to have finally reached a place where if I’m not spinning much, there’s no reason to be stashing. Most of that number out was spun during Tour de Fleece, but about 1/3 of it was destashed to a spinning friend who was running low on fiber… and I have so much excess. It felt nice to rehome it. I’m rather hoping Q4 can be another Impossible! quarter, and that I will end the year with quite a bit less fiber stash than I had at the beginning. (On a fun side note, this is the first time since Q4 2015 that I’ve had under 500 oz of fiber in my stash. That feels pretty shameful to admit, as 500 oz is  31.25 pounds. I still have a large 2-3 year old child’s worth of fiber waiting to be spun up. It’s ~ 125 braids of fiber, y’all.  Eeeesh. It took a long time to start getting that number heading back in the right direction, but I’m hoping it’s a trend that continues.)

I did very well on the yarn front as well, despite some big numbers in for blanket solids and handspun made during the Tour. Honestly, I would have been in the red had it not been for a large donation I made to The Lemonade Shop and her program to send fibery donations to those who lost their stashes in the hurricanes this fall. I know yarn seems like a silly thing to donate, but it’s something I have plenty of on-hand, and I know that I find keeping my hands busy with craft work therapeutic. (OMG. Am I secretly Cher donating my impractical sporting equipment to those in need??) Not a single yard out came from finishing a project this quarter; it was all donated, gifted as prizes for the podcast, or rage-binned after disastrous projects. So that part doesn’t feel so amazing. And despite all of this, I still managed to eek out a stash loss equivalent of only 2 skeins of sock yarn–which is very little space made in my bins.

Last quarter I discussed what my big goal is with all of my stashing down efforts over the last 7 or 8 years: I want all of my fiber and yarn stash contained in a single storage unit without satellite stashes throughout the house. My time line is slightly different now–we’re moving summer of 2019, not 2018 as hoped–but I’m still not optimistic that at my current pace this can happen in that time frame without some aggressive destashing. We will see what the end of this year and all of 2018 bring. Here’s hoping to an amazing 4th Quarter!

Are you stash tracking, kitten? How has yours been going? Do you have some other resolutions or goals you’re keeping track of that you would like to share?

September 2017: Wrap-Up

Yardage Totals 2017:

 January: 1,065yds
February: 1,075yds
March: 1,659yds
April: 1,453yds
May: 1,595yds
June: 379yds
July: 313yds
August: 646yds
September: 373yds
October:
November:
December:
2017 Totals: 8,558yds or 4.86 miles

So.

To say September didn’t go as-planned would be one of the bigger understatements I’ve made lately, so we’ll just say that, I suppose? After the last yardage tally, I was feeling fairly optimistic that September would be full of knitting–I had a sweater to knit for Rhinebeck, after all!

BUT.

Life has a funny way of liking to change your plans, and almost immediately after my last posting… my knitting mojo abandoned me. POOF! Off it went into the aether, and it has yet to return. I wasn’t too concerned at first; it’s not unusual for my desire to knit to wane or fully disappear for a few days or sometimes up to a week and a half, but this time has been a bit different. It’s been a full month, and I’m still not really *feeling* knitting. The only yardage I racked up in September was thanks to finishing square #3 on my super-scrappy 10-Stitch Blanket and starting square #4. That’s it. No other knitting has been done. No socks. No sweaters. No quick little projects. I have tons of plans but no follow-through at the moment.

It’s bumming me out, but I know it will eventually come back, and I will be obsessively knitting again like nothing happened. So until then, I will work on other crafts. What have you been working on in the last month? Have you been getting lots of crafty projects accomplished? Have you switched into gift knitting mode with the winter holidays fast approaching?

Here’s to a more productive October!