A short week means my weekend update is late late late

I spent a good deal of time this weekend working on one of my most geeky knitting projects: the Access database I use to track my yarn, and the photo gallery of my stash. Some might regard those as overkill, but for me, they help me stay organized.

The results of running the report on my database? I own roughly 35,000 yards of yarn in 473 balls. I won't embarrass myself with the associated dollar figure, though I'm happy to report it's actually a great deal less than I'd guessed.

Part of that total actually was new purchases, but they are for specific projects. I've decided I'm allowed to buy for design projects only from now until at least the end of the year, then next year, the goal is to decrease the stash. Especially considering that stash total includes two frogged summer projects (the Ribbon X-back from knitty in Rowan Cotton Tape, and my long since finished and totally unwearable Honeymoon cami, from the era before I understood gauge) that shouldn't present a problem really.

But anyway, the new purchases were all for projects soon on deck. First off, some Jamieson's Double Knitting. This is for a super top secret design project that I came up with after awaking from a nap. I would love to try to get this published, but even if that doesn't work out, I will certainly be putting out the patterns for this. You can probably guess that it's fair isle, but I'm keeping mum on the rest of the details:



Next up, a whole pile of Regia, because I'm taking an argyle sock class at Knitter's Mercantile in November. I think I picked out too many colors probably, but I was indecisive. I'll be able to make lots of socks from these. Lots of wacky socks!



And lastly, I restricted myself to one ball of Karaoke. This stuff is pleasantly soft, and frankly, that's a nice surprise, because I tried one of SWTC's other wool/soy blends, Sophia, and I don't like it all that much. It's got a very crunchy feel that's kind of unpleasant to knit with. But Karaoke is super super soft and nice. I have an idea in my head to blend Karaoke with the Silk Garden I bought a while back to create a tweedy fabric, but I haven't landed on the right stitch pattern yet.



The gals at KM were a bit reticent about my idea to combine two self striping yarns, but I'm still not convinced it's a bad idea. The surprise was finding out that my Silk Garden started out with blue! I thought this colorway was all greys and greens, but I was a bit off. So the swatch is going to have to go for a while longer to figure out quite what it's going to look like on a larger scale. Plus, I need to really get out a stitch dictionary and start trying to figure out what the stitch that's in my head really is.

In other news, I did my first swatch for the TKGA Level 1 Certification tonight. I think I'm happy with it, but when I cast on for the second, which is in 1x1 rib, I determined I need to get some more practice at multiple cast ons, because my old standby didn't give me a good edge to start from. In a way, doing these swatches feels like learning to knit all over again. But that's still kind of fun.