I have far too big a yarn stash. It's not as big as those of some knitters who have entire rooms full of yarn and fiber, but it's big enough that I have enough yarn for many more sweaters and socks than I can reasonably be expected to knit in the next decade. Or, let's admit it, two decades.
So I'm trying not to buy yarn. However, I got into my head that I wanted to make Baby R an Anemone Hat. This hat calls for Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted, a superwash wool I've long been coveting.
I will not, I said to myself, buy yarn. I surely have some form of superwash worsted-weight wool that I can use. And I went into the basement to see what I could come up with.
What I found:
- A box of acrylic baby yarn my mother gave me years ago.
- Some wonderful variegated alpaca I've been planning for the last 5 years to combine with black alpaca for a patterned sweater.
- Cones of mystery yarn my mother once bought for her now-defunct knitting machine, which I just can't bear to throw away because think of the shawls I could make out of them.
- A box of Peaches and Creme cotton I bought this summer when I caught the Peaches and Creme fever on hearing it was being discontinued. I thought I would weave dozens of dishcloths. Haven't even finished the first one, and the cotton is too thick to weave comfortably on my loom. I had vague plans for a bath mat, which I should perhaps take steps to realize.
- Silk my mother gave me that I'm planning to use for Emerald Seas. (A lot of my stash seems to come from my mother, who clearly passed on the stash gene.)
- Several sweater lots of alpaca and Lopi Light and a really wonderful gray wool, many of them purchased at various Smiley's Yarn Sales. I still plan to make those sweaters, too - that would be the Icelandic sweater, the Inishmore, the Fjalar Sweater, and the list goes on.
- Leftovers from a range of baby blankets, socks, and other projects from over the years.
- Assorted individual skeins I bought on impulse to test - like the Blue Sky Alpacas Organic Cotton I bought with the idea of making a sweater for my husband. It was a little too pricey for a simple cotton sweater, but I recently found another use for that cotton:
(NB: there are two hats because the hat I made when I followed the pattern was large enough to fit my 6-year-old niece. Rather than rip it out, I simply made another, smaller, baby-sized one.)
But no worsted weight superwash -- until, among those assorted skeins, I spotted a center-pull ball. I pulled the ball band out of the middle of the ball and found that, yes, it was a single skein of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted superwash wool, exactly what the pattern called for.
I like to think that on some level I remembered it was down there. But I wouldn't swear I did.
[NB: In the three or so months since I wrote this post, I have not yet managed to knit the Anemone Hat.]
