Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Stashbusting knit alongs

On Monday I spent some time reacquainting myself with the blogsphere and checking out some of the new groups and KALs. I was saddened to discover that I've missed the deadline to sign up for Secret Pal 10. I'd been a part of Secret Pal 5 a number of years ago and had really enjoyed it, but haven't had the time to commit myself to it since. Now that I'm feeling much more centred I think I can handle the responsibility, so I will definitely sign up for Secret Pal 11.

I'm not all that interested in KALs where everyone just knits the same thing, but I found 2 KALs that were unified by a central theme and were right up my alley; they are both focused on a Knit-your-stash-instead-of-buying-new-yarn philosophy, which I can relate to since I have a pretty scary stash. The first one is Stashalong (there's a button on the sidebar) where you can see a picture of said scary stash (scary, but loved!). It works by letting the knitter choose between a time line of no-buying (at least 1 month), fully-disclosing the total size of the stash and then pledging to knit X amount of it before buying anything new, or working on X number of WIPs before buying anything new. To start, I've decided to work through my 4 WIPs (more on these later)

The other is Save Cash! Use Your Stash! (I'll have a button up soon) which operates on a system of calculating the money saved by knitting from your stash instead of buying new. Each member reports how much money the stash yarn cost when originally purchased and that amount is counted towards a running total for the group. She also keeps totals for individual members which are tallied at the end of each month. So between the 2 KALs I should have lots of motivation to knit up the stash.

Of course, like most knitters, I have some yarn that I just don't like. Yarn that was given to me as well-meaning gifts or that I bought in a haze at a yarn sale. I know deep down in my knitter's heart that I will never use this yarn and so I would rather it find a better home. To this end I will eventually join Destash to either sell or swap what I won't use. I say eventually because I can't quite bring myself to the Herculean task of sorting through my stash closet. :)

Until next we knit!

=^_^=

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