A Target Wave

Neither can the wave that has passed by be recalled,
nor the hour which has passed return again.
-Ovid

It's a great time for mittens around here. Oh, never fear, I'm still making good progress on my big projects, but who wouldn't dally with some stash yarn and great mitten patterns? It is, after all, the Loose Knit project of the month. Target Wave
Pattern: Target Wave Mittens from IK Winter 2006 and Norah Gaughn's Knitting Nature
Yarn: Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride remnants in Lotus Pink and Lemon Drop
Needles: US 6 and 8, per pattern
Notes: At first I took a look around Ravelry, I was worried. Some looked weird. But like much knitting, it's all in the blocking.
Best Thing About This Project: It was just good plain knitting fun.

And coming up soon . . . the Very Cabley Mittens. I thought I had "most" of a skein of Lamb's Pride in this Sun Yellow color, but apparently not quite enough. I'm missing the thumbs.Enter Ravelry. I was able to sort by color and find someone who had a partial skein of the same yarn in the same color, and we arranged a little trade of partial skeins. How handy!

In the meantime, what should I knit while waiting for that yarn to arrive? More mittens, perhaps?

A Crazy Ravelry Queue

Don't agonize, organize.
-Florynce Kennedy

I've been organizing and making lists. Stash. Projects. A completely out-of-control Ravelry queue. Seriously. Seven pages? 185 projects? Is there a prize for being the most delusional knitter out there?

In lieu of casting on more projects (the Denim Aran is rapidly nearing completion, and I have 1 1/2 Christmas stockings you've never seen that WILL be done for Christmas), I've been making big plans for the new year. Big, exciting details coming soon. In the meantime, there are 185 dreams to browse on Ravelry.

Raveling

Reverie is when ideas float in our mind without
reflection or regard of the understanding.
-John Locke

It's Day 2 of November and I'm already seriously questioning the whole
NaBloPoMo. At any rate, I have been planning this post for a while, so perhaps it is a good motivation.

Thoughts on Ravelry:

I love Ravelry. I do. I got all sorts of great tips yesterday for my new February Sweater (one of 370+ posted). Yarns. Needles. Modifications. Things to watch out for. It was fabulous. Until I realized that I myself was not really interested in posting my own project.

Am I just a leech? I use the queue feature, the extensive research functions available, and I did once post some of my stash. But I'm just not inspired to put up all my own projects, even my own stash, or any of that useful stuff. Why not?

For one, I don't usually use Flickr, so that creates an extra step. And then there's that I'm blogging. And if I blog something, I'm not inspired to upload it onto another site. And then there's that I already have a good way of managing my stash (a spreadsheet - we'll discuss how the stash has grown at another time . . .), and my WIPs (a legal pad. Sometimes low-tech is good.).

So is it wrong to get so much out of Ravelry without contributing much of my own? How do you use Ravelry? Any other thoughts?

A Larger Problem

It gives a lovely light.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

I won a contest. Normally this is good news.(Here was the contest.)

But the goods arrived just as I finished updating my yarn inventory spreadsheet for more Ravelry fun.The total? 496.5 skeins and 108,296 yards of yarn. And this doesn't count oddballs I couldn't characterize. The 20,000 yards of laceweight on cones are killing me here, but clearly there's a larger problem. We'll talk more about that later. We'll also talk about the limitations of Flickr (and why most of this still isn't uploaded, but that's a topic for another day.

In the meantime, here's a teaser:
Rowena is all things lovely.