Friday 26 October 2012

Knitting again!

I guess you can tell from that title what I've been up to recently :)

Thinking off all the decluttering I've been doing recently, it occurs to me that there's no better way of clearing out your stash than actually using it :)

That thought, and clearing out my ravelry queue got me going. I saw lots of patterns that would go with the yarn I have (probably why I queued some of them in the first place lol).

The first pattern I decided to knit was Esperenza by Gabriela Ordenes. I've been meaning to make this for ages, and I've had the yarn planned for ages - a pure wool dk from Freyalyn's Hand-Dyed Yarns. So now that my head feels a little clearer after all the decluttering (weird, but it really does feel clearer!) I actually managed to cast it on and knit it!

Esperanza Cowl

Esperanza Cowl

Esperanza Cowl

Esperanza Cowl

I'm so happy now that I've made this cowl! I think it's a very pretty pattern :) I made a slight modification - cast on 55sts and added the extra sts to the garter stitch section.

Esperanza Cowl

One of my favourite features of this cowl is how people have folded the garter stitch section over. I had extra yardage than was called for, so I figured i'd be happier with a larger fold and it would use up more of the skein. Less clutter :)

Esperanza Cowl

And I also got to go through my button jar and find a use for these pretty blue square buttons! A win all round!

Thursday 4 October 2012

Hmm, Another Unintentional Hiatus...

This year seems to have been full of them :(

To be honest, I've been having an unintentional hiatus from mostly everything. I organised a charity hafla in August, and this time it was by myself mostly. It was a LOT of social activity getting it all together, talking to and emailing a lot of people a lot of times (I was pretty much glued to hotmail and facebook the whole end of August!), and I'm not the most social of butterflies ;). It really seemed to take a lot out of me, which I didn't realise till after the event when I just pretty much collapsed on my sofa, and stayed there for about a month and a half!

The hafla went really well - it was a great night in the end, and we raised £763 for MSF/Doctors Without Borders! I'm very proud of the amount we raised, and of all the fabulous people who came and danced. So it was totally worth it, but next time I'll definitely be getting help from other people instead of knackering myself!

These past two months or so I have done almost nothing productive! No knitting at all, and only the barest amount of spindle spinning. I've played a few video games, and read a few books and basically just slobbed around recharging my energy. But I think it's nearly back to full now, which is good!

Actually, this past month I have been tidying the house a bit and decluttering my mind and surroundings. I have 5 bags of stuff waiting to go to the charity shops and 4 boxes waiting for people I know to look through them and see what they want. It still doesn't feel quite like I've even made a dent in the amount of stuff collected in this house, but I guess it is a good start. I can see the sofa in the spare room now - it's not covered in stuff!

I've even been declutttering my ravelry queue! I've managed to get down from 8000+ to only 5500(ish) - yay me! At the time it was great having all that choice, and it was kind of a pre-vetted group of patterns that I liked, but it was just weighing me down recently. Not that I felt I had to make all of those patterns, but there was just too much choice. My eventual goal is to get to less than 1000 patterns in my ravelry queue - yes, I can hear you laughing! I might be too much of a hoarder for that to actually happen, but I can aim for it! I think that would be enough choice without being too unwieldy on my poor brain!

So I think I may start knitting again very soon. Looking through my queue has meant that I've re-found some lovely patterns, and I'm quite inspired, which is good! I've even got plans for some of my handspun that I've been making this year - hmm, I should take pictures of that!

My energy is obviously coming back, I can't wait!