#aots2023

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And that's all of the yarn stash airing! I still need to do the other fiber that waits to be spun, and the fabric, but one step at a time.

Please enjoy this cute young buck, as a palate cleanser.

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And now, The Shame, part 1: Bags of mixed scrap balls I found at the end of the process and didn't want to sort into appropriate categories. Some of it I recognize as sock yarn, including that whole top pic, so all that can be useful as strange stripey socks for me (or adventurous friends). I'll probably sort & test for fiber content & then give away a lot of the acrylic of unknown provenance, and a few others in there that I remember just not liking.

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The handspun! I weighed most of it, by fiber/project, but the grams are just a vague idea of how much I have since none of it's a standard size.

Shetland, fairly uneven, but pretty. Drop spindle. 2 ply.

Icelandic, two fleeces, the grey being softer than the beige. Wheel. 2 ply.

I have the most of this romeldale, spun in multiple ways & with various levels of competency. It's not suuuper nice feeling, but it's also still pretty greasy.

330 g spun on the wheel, a little thicker & less consistent. 167 g drop spindled (I think?), actually pretty nice if I do say so myself. All 3 ply.

And the alpaca! The blue/green should be about 2 oz, iirc that's how much I bought. Wheel spun.

I'm actually pretty proud of that laceweight brown. Drop spindle. 90g. 2 ply.

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Bagged larger quantities in dk/sport/worsted weights

495 or so grams of Debbie Bliss cotton dk. Approx 840m/918yd. A summer top?

260ish g of Cascade 220 Superwash. ~570 yd/520m. Kinda ugly orange. Overdye?

Toned down but still quite pink, Rowan DK. 200g/500m/530yd

Some Peruvian wool, 177g/350m/385yd. The other yarn in this bag turned out to be bulky.

This is probably the rest of some Icelandic wool yarn I bought from a farmer friend back in Illinois, but I didn't label it so that's really a guess.

Little bit of alpaca & alpaca/silk blend. I wrote the weights on the bag, but it's not a ton of either.

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This is all the sport/DK/worsted weight yarn. Are those the same thing? No. Are they interchangeable/combinable in colorwork? Sometimes.

Alpaca and alpaca/llama blend. Surprisingly soft, that, and it's from "the Wooly Women of Michigan" which I can only assume is a lesbian fiber commune. The world could use more of those, really.

Second pic above is "oops I found more alpaca" & wanted to document it all together.

Wool wool wool. I don't even like pink; I believe I had ideas about overdying those with walnut.

There's more fishermen's wool than this actually, a sweater's-worth of the marled color (found in the "shame" section of this documentation).

"Potentially colorwork" category. The Paton's is noticeably scratchier than the Rowan/Knit Picks/Debbie Bliss ones.

Wait no actually here are all the potential color combinations in this weight. The rest of the bagged/larger quantity yarns I'll cover in the next post, but if I want to glance at all the colors I could use, this is that pic.

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The Shame, part 2:

A complexly cabled sweater I said I'd finish for an old lady (my mom's friend's mother-in-law) when she moved to a care home and could no longer knit. I did a big swatch & matched her gauge, & started to work on a sleeve, and then she died. She died before I finished her sweater, y'all, that's how bad my procrastination failed us all.

In my defense, she was 94 to begin with. Her family said they'd like to have the sweater as a keepsake, and she'd done like 70% of it anyway, so I will be finishing it. Now there's no "deadline", though, and I haven't worked on it in a while.

On the left, a sweater I was unravelling for the yarn (Fishermen's Wool) and didn't finish, plus more unidentified scraps & balls.

On the right, an unfinished shawl that I'll probably frog bc it's acrylic anyway & I'd rather have those needles back for something else. Or I could finish it; idk. A fingerless glove that I lost the mate to, years ago, but I liked them so much I still think I might remake it one day. And a bag of very fine, very tangled wool yarn (Haapsalu) that was broken in several places, & I need to finish winding it into little balls.

Left: Bags of hexipuffs I haven't worked on in quite some time. Yes, plural bags; there's a second one behind.

Right: One of several fleeces I need to finish sorting, washing, carding, spinning. One is already mostly clean, in the folded-up drying rack. Another is partially spun. I think there's two still in the closet, untouched.

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It is time for [drumroll]

📯The Airing of the Stash 2023🎉

Whee!

I'm gonna do this in sections, across multiple posts, mostly for my own recordkeeping/organization. First, the laceweights:

Not so much in this category, despite how much I like to knit lace. These first ⬇️ are all wool, or wool blends. Mostly leftovers from previous projects.

The green & darker blue are merino, that I know, and the dark grey is Haapsalu wool (and there's more of it in a scraps bag I found later). The natural color is maybe a blend with alpaca, and the light blue merino/silk is as labelled.

Next alpaca, and a silk/cashmere blend. Ooh la la!

I took a (small) gamble on this, as it feels nice and there's a lot of it, but alas it appears to be cotton (or at least a plant fiber). I'm going to have to start bringing a lighter & scissors to the scrap shop when I go, and awkwardly asking the staff if I can burn test fibers. I can still do something with it, but it's not destined to be the gossamer lace shawl of my dreams.

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Oops I skipped the "weights & fibers I don't use much or particularly care about"

Cotton on the left, including fine stuff I meant to use for a summer shawl (also it was on clearance) and the common stuff that's nice for shopping bags (except I don't need any more of those).

Bulky yarns on the right. Top three are alpaca, & so so soft. Grey in the middle, wool, and that greenish one on the bottom is a wool & camel blend. Camel! Last ball, natural color, probably a blend w/acrylic.

All of those are actually quite nice, and I'd like to find something to do with them, but idk what. The coziest cowl? I do have a couple of garment patterns that need bulky yarn in mind, but would need a larger matching quantity.