As it turns out, I am one of the folks being laid off.

Now, several weeks ago I was thinking about my stash. Those of you who have been following this blog for a while have a pretty good idea of the sheer hugeness of my stash. (Click on “Yarn” up there at the top for a better idea if you’re new!)

But how much *time* does the stash represent? If I didn’t buy another ball, how long would what I have last me? After some quick math, I concluded that with my current work schedule, it would take me less than 2 years to go through all of it. I’m as shocked as you are!

Anyhow, with the news of my upcoming unemployment, I thought, what if I don’t find another job right away? We’re in a very comfortable financial situation right now, but what about the stash? Without having to stop crocheting long enough to scan books, how long would the stash last then??

My course was clear.

As it would happen, the TTC Knitalong was being held the first weekend after the bad news was announced at work. It was the perfect opportunity to stock up!

Here are the adventures of Team Red:
(Click on a picture to see it in a larger size)

We gathered at Passion Knit

where I met a truly lovely woman who teaches crochet there. I think (hope!) I was able to convince her to join our crochet guild.

This is also where we received our swag bags. Here’s mine:

That Mary Maxim coupon is going to see some really good use! I’m thinking birthday shopping…

Speaking of Mary Maxim, that’s where we went next! It seems I forgot to take a picture while we were there. I was pretty busy, though – more on that later!

Then it was time for lunch! We went to the food court at the Younge-Eglinton Centre and freaked out some muggles:

And here we are on the subway, freaking out some muggles:

Next, it was on to Knitomatic

My favourite part of this stop was how we freaked out *other knitters*. A couple of times someone would open the door, and see this:

and say something like, “uh… I’ll stop in on the way back…”

We were feeling rather under-caffeinated, so we decided to occupy a nearby Starbucks:

Now fortified, we headed to our last yarn shop of the day: Romni!

I was pretty tired by this point. More on that later!

We decided to walk over to the Rivoli, which is where we were meeting up with the rest of the groups to compare notes, win prizes, knit some more, and drink. (It’s ok, it’s not like any of us were driving… we all took the TTC! lol)

Prizes, you say? Well, first of all, Team Red very nearly swept the awards. We had the Youngest Knitter, some award about “Interspecies Relations” (there’s a story there about one of our group making friends with the bird at Knitomatic), the Bought The Least Amount award, and the winner AND runner up for Needs A Sherpa (bought the most yarn). Oh, and one of us won the draw that one of the shops was having, too!

So, what did I buy?

Bernat Satin, of course. This is why I was so busy at Mary Maxim!

Lots of Bernat Satin (of course!).

I had known going in that there was an award for having bought the most yarn, so I had come prepared:

Would you believe that the 60 balls of yarn I bought weren’t enough to win me the prize? I was the runner up! The winner had 62 balls. So close!!

We were an interesting pair, her an I. I was preparing the stash for potential unemployment, and she was gearing up for 3 months off of work due to surgery. On her foot. The lucky duck!

Anyhow, I did get a prize for being runner up:

Pretty sweet!

Oh! And the whole point to this adventure (other than buying lots of yarn) is to knit while riding transit. Of course, I crocheted instead:

Not bad for a day’s work!

Thank you so much to the organizers, donors, and participating yarn shops. I had a blast!

I’m celebrating by trying to be as helpful to crocheters as I can! I’m going to start by making you all feel better about your stashes.

Today I sorted out my novelty yarn stash, and here it is all out on the bed:

There’s well over a hundred balls of yarn in this picture (approximately 87% of which seems to be black-and-red variegated. Yeesh).

What am I going to do with all of this crazy yarn? Well, I have a few plans. I’m hoping to make a few monster bags (like this one), and maybe some Rapunzel scarves (like these), and maybe trim some amigurumi (like, well, all of these), and… and… I don’t know what else. Any ideas?

Look at this awesome printer I got from my parents!

What makes it so awesome? Look inside:

Yeah, baby!

I sorted it all out and found there was 81 balls of Bernat Satin in there! Here it is back in the box for easy carrying home:

(There are two layers of yarn there!)

I also received some Mary Maxim gift cards from Charles’ parents. I spent them well:

(50 more balls of Bernat Satin!)

Here’s the family all together:

I had a hard time getting it all in the frame when taking this picture (I had to stand on a chair!)… also, when I look at this picture on my Flickr stream, it doesn’t even fit on my monitor.

This *should* tide me over until the next time Bernat Satin goes on sale… you know, if I pace myself. ^_-

(Thanks Moms and Dads!)

All is well now, so check out this scarf I made:

This is a Queen Anne’s Lace scarf using Bernat Mosaic yarn (Psychedelic colourway). I believe this pattern is available in many places; I found it as a free download on Ravelry (you need to be a member of Ravelry to get it, I think!)

It looks more complicated than it actually is. This pattern had a bit of a tricky bit, at least it seemed so to me! Whenever it says “work into the first (whatever)” it means to work into the one closest (to the left) of your hook. Clear as mud? ^_^

ETA: I posted this project on Craftster and it was declared one of the “Best of 2010″. Go me!

I’m a Craftster Best of 2010 Winner!

I was born in 1977, but our story begins earlier than that. The details are a little bit fuzzy now, but as best we can figure it, it begins in the early 70’s.

My aunt gave my parents a blanket for their anniversary. It was a granny square blanket, in Christmas colours (I’m not sure if she intended it to be a Christmas blanket, or if she just figured it would go well with their decor; either way, it featured in a lot of our Christmas pictures!).

Mom loved it, and so my aunt taught her how to crochet and gave her the pattern.

Mom made one in those classic 70’s colours: yellow, orange, green, and brown. That blanket had a home on Mom’s rocking chair for as long as I can remember. I loved that blanket; I just thought it was so pretty!

We searched through all of the photo albums, and the packages of non-albumed pictures and couldn’t find a decent picture of it; one that really showed off the handiwork (I know, right?). This is the best we could find:

(Don’t mind the fuzzed-out face of my adorable niece… and that knit blanket on top of it was made by Mom’s Mom. Just to round out this Crafty Family story, Dad’s Mom made beautiful quilts and she made my grade 8 graduation dress)

As luck would have it, after resigning ourselves to this scrap of a picture, Mom thought of a place the blanket could be hiding, and sure enough, we found it in Dad’s workshop!

All I can say is, Mom must have really liked crocheting! I mean, just look at the size of this thing!

Mom also made a baby blanket for one of my brothers, but I’m not sure if she ever made anything else. It may be possible that my brothers and I were a bit of a handful… ^_-

Anyhow, by the time I came along, she seemed to have long stopped crocheting, and by the time I was old enough to wonder how this wonderful blanket was made, she had forgotten how to do it.

After that, I was a woman on a mission, determined to learn how the blanket was made and recreate it. I swore that I’d learn how to crochet so that I could make a granny square blanket.

That was 13 years ago… you may have noticed that the only granny blanket I’ve ever shown here was one big, hole-y square (well, and the Eventually Granny Blanket, but it’s not really the same thing). It’s not that I don’t know how to make a granny blanket; I have, in fact, started many!

But now… now is different, for I have finally found the perfect yarn for it!

(Bernat Satin: Tangerine, Mocha, Fern, and Banana)

I guess the only question now is, what do we do with the old one? You can see from the pictures that it’s falling apart (that thing saw a LOT of love!). I might be able to take off the squares that are ripped and scavenge enough brown yarn off of them to sew the intact pieces back together to make a smaller, but still useable blanket, but I’m not sure where we’d ever use it.

Mom doesn’t have that rocking chair anymore, and the colours don’t go with her decor anymore, but it would be a terrible shame to get rid of it. Any ideas?

Where did the swag bags come from, then? Well!

I’m working from the list of donors on the KAL blog, and doing some educated guess work, so I may not be totally accurate here… if you know better, please tell me, and I’ll fix it! (ETA: fixed the things mentioned in the first comment!)

Let’s start with:

Two balls of my very favouritest yarn, Bernat Satin, from Spinrite!

(My crochet guild is working on arranging a bus trip up to Listowel to see the fine people at Spinrite. I can’t wait! Also, while I’m on the subject, keep your eyes on the top bar of this blog; I’m planning a “yarn” tab)

Next is some superwash merino from Diamond Yarn:

Then there are a couple of sets of knitting needles. The wooden ones are 19mm (!) and are from the Purple Purl, and the 4.5mm needles are from Romni Wools:

A handful of books from Simon and Schuster:

There were also coupons in the bags, from the Purple Purl, Mary Maxim, and Knit-o-Matic

Here is the t-shirt I won:

And the bags it all came in:

(The black one was this year’s bag, the white one was from last year, and it had the t-shirt in it)

Thanks again to the TTC KAL folks, and all of the donors (a full list of which you can see on the TTC KAL blog)

I can not wait until next year! I’ll try to remember to post about it in time for people to sign up and come along (you know, instead of the night before… heh)

Charles: I could really go for a grilled cheese sandwich
Becky: There’s a place two doors down from Lettuce Knit that apparently has great grilled cheese sandwiches
Charles: You know, we really should go to Lettuce Knit!
Becky: Ok, but that’s where I got that skein of $39 yarn…
Charles: I seem to have suddenly developed a cheese allergy…

I was on team Central Purple. We started the day at the Yarn Boutique, near the corner of Bloor and Keele, where I bought this:

As well as some DPN’s. The plan is to make myself a pair of socks… because I’m some kind of crazy person (a crazy person with size 11 feet)! I’m going to try the simplest pattern I can find for my first pair.

Next stop: The Knit Cafe, which sells both yarn AND tasty treats. I had a lovely vegetarian quiche, and bought some lovely malabrigo:

I’m planning to make a hat out of it, but after winding the purple skein into a centre-pull ball, I’ve discovered that I am allergic to it after all. :( The hat will have to be for someone else, I guess. It’s a shame, because it’s just so very soft!

Then we headed to Romni Wools, which, if you look at a map of Toronto, it seems like it’d be easy to travel between the two shops, but due to streetcar re-routing, possibly due to protests, we ended up taking a scenic route down the street!

I found Romni quite overwhelming! It’s huge, and has every natural-fibre yarn you can think of (I assume… I don’t know of very many!). For someone like me, I’d have been better off deciding what I wanted to make and what yarn I’d need for it before heading in.

Still, I bought this:

I’m planning on playing with it to see if it’ll make a nice shawl. If it does, I’m going to go back and get more!

We then took another scenic streetcar ride up to Lettuce Knit where I simply could not resist buying this:

It’s soft, and even more beautiful than this picture would suggest. It is destined to become a scarf, which should be stunning with my black winter coat!

At the end of the shopping spree, most of us headed over to the Rivoli to meet up with the other four teams for merriment and prizes!

I won the “WTF WIP” prize my mitten, which I started when I got on the subway at Kipling Station. This is how much I got done over the course of the day:

Action shot:

The most frequently asked question I got about it all day was: how are you going to do the thumb? I love yarnies!

More in the next post about the amazing free stuff we got! (Look for that post either later today or tomorrow… my blog is being quite flakey today!)

What is it? Well, you sign up, are assigned a group, your group rides the TTC (knitting all the while, or possibly crocheting since I’ll be there ^_-) to four yarn shops, and all of the groups meet up at the end to compare purchases and get prizes. At least, that’s the description I’ve been given; this is my first year participating!

I will, of course, be blogging after the fact, to let you know how it went and show you what I bought! In the mean time, you can watch my Twitter feed (or the box over there on the right side of this page) for updates! I’m going to try to take pictures and tell interesting tidbits of stories throughout the day. You don’t need to sign up for Twitter in order to follow me tomorrow, just go to http://twitter.com/fantasticmio and possibly refresh the page as the day progresses, and you shouldn’t miss a thing!

Things kick off at 11am (Eastern)!

Until then, check out the progress on my “Eventually Granny Square” blanket:

It just needs the border and then I’ll have an actual finished object to show off! This one is special in that I don’t know who it’s going to be for yet. Once I’m finished I’ll do up a pattern for those who want to try it at home. If you’re new-ish to crochet and are going to try this, I suggest you learn how to make a traditional Granny Square first. (I do 2ch in the corners, and no ch stitches anywhere else, but this pattern should work just fine with any pattern that has the Granny Square look to it… in fact, ANY square that has the “granny” border on it would work)

Anyhow, it’s not a hard pattern at all; the only part I had to figure out, really, was the valleys between the squares, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. ^_^

The last time I did something like this, I filled a “bin”, meaning, one of the plastic bins I was using to store my yarn. I figured if I could take the yarn out and put it back in in the shape of a hat or scarf, then I could cart the whole thing off to my parents’ house and I’d have stash-busted not just the yarn, but the bin!

Brilliant plan, except Mom doesn’t seem to want the bins. I got that original bin back and it is now holding Christmas decorations. Mom traded the plastic bin for a cardboard box (left over from our move); I think it’s so that she can just take the stuff over to the charity in the box and leave the whole thing there.

So, this time around I’m going to skip the middle-m… er… middle-container, and put the warm goodies into a cardboard box. The one I got in the mail recently seemed like the best bet, so here it is!

And this is what’s inside so far:

I’m still stash busting, and I’m concentrating on the black yarn. I’ve got two bins full of black! I’m using the odds and ends left over from the last batch of hats for stripes and the like. Also, the hats are bigger this time; they’ve asked me to make bigger hats for older kids, so I’ve gone up a loom size and I’m making the scarves slightly longer. I might throw in some Crochet-On-the-Double sets, too…

(Of *course* that isn’t all of it!)