Catch up

Last month my knitting took a little trip.

That would be the view from the apartment I stayed in for a week in mid-March in Cullera, Spain (a small beach town outside Valencia).  I felt like I knit very little on the trip, but knitting-wise, it was a major success.  My needles made it through both security checks in Paris, and I finished Flamboyan.

I said the finished shawl was either going to be awesome or really ugly.  I don't think it ended up as either.  I was rather underwhelmed by the finished product at first.  Even though the yarns are nice individually, together I thought they looked sort of drab.  I was a little bummed that after having made a couple great choices pairing yarns, I was back to my old tricks of bad combinations.  What the shawl has going for it is its nice size, and it feels amazing after blocking. Both yarns are a bamboo/merino blend (Sanguine Gryphon Kypria and Rainy Days & Wooly Dogs Gothling Ricin) with beautiful drape and sheen.  Over the past few days, the shawl has really grown on me. 

It's not take-your-breath-away beautiful, but that's okay. It's finished, it's wearable, and I feel a little better about taking on more intarsia projects.  Since I have yarn waiting in the wings for Chadwick, a little more intarsia confidence is a very good thing.

At the end of 2010, I joined a group challenging knitters to knit 12 projects completely from stash yarn in 2011.  Flamboyan puts me at three.  More importantly, however, it used two skeins of sock yarn.  My own personal challenge to myself this year is to knit down my stash of sock yarn.  I don't have a specific goal in mind; I just want there to be less by the end of the year.  I'm in a sock club that sends one skein every month, so at the very least I have to knit up or destash one skein per month just to break even.  Here's where I stand as of today:

New skeins acquired since Jan 1:  7
Skeins used up:  3
Skeins destashed: 5 (2 sold, 3 gifted)
Current score:  -1

I figure this little challenge is like golf--the lower the score, the better I'm doing.  Not too bad so far, but definitely room for improvement, and with my new spinning obsession taking significant time away from knitting, it could be an uphill battle.