#Knit

[kawaiialeisha]

FREAKING WILL WOOD SWEATERS??? THIS IS AWESOME???

Highlights of the sweaters i made in 2024

(I kint these on twitch, same username as here :3)

[mothyandthesquid]

Warm brown and fawn doggie colours, inspired by an adorable French Bulldog resting on a couch. This yarn seeks a good home with lots of love and attention. mothyandthesquid.com

[vampire-connoisseur]

Since 2025 is apparently the year of the no-buy and the stash down, I have a very controversial opinion.

I think "using up your stash" is barely an improvement to just continually buying new yarn. The idea comes from a good place, but when the goal becomes reducing the size of your yarn stash, it just becomes a challenge to use what you have any way possible so you can buy more.

If you don't particularly want a granny square blanket, you probably shouldn't use pristine skeins to make one. Same thing with cabled beanies or what have you. When you start trying to use up your stash, instead of just limiting yourself to knitting with mostly yarn you already own, the goal can become to burn through it as fast as possible chasing the feeling of progress, instead of ending up with useful things that you or people in your life will love. If you knit a hat and then never wear it, it isn't actually any better than not knitting the hat at all, in terms of waste.

I honestly think yarn should not be such a defining feature of the hobby. I think it holds inherent excitement because a new skein could become anything, we automatically feel interest and desire for new skeins, and it has the same dopamine fountain properties as other forms of shopping, but it probably isn't good for most of us. When the most exciting part is buying the skein, and then using it becomes an obligation, the joy of knitting and crochet is reduced to consumerism.

Yarn is beautiful and exciting to me, but I'm really trying to change the way I see it. Instead of an exciting blank slate, I'm trying to teach myself to view yarn as a companion. I don't want yarn to be what excites me, because then the hunger for more of it never goes away. I'm glad when I run out of a beautiful yarn because it means I can buy more. Buying is the reward. New yarn is a treat. I don't want that to be part of my life, though. I'm trying to see yarn as enabling the project, and if anything the pattern as the exciting component. When I knit, I try to focus on the work itself, the properties of the finished object and what it will be for, and the techniques I'm learning or practicing, instead of my progress through the yarn.

It's difficult because often inspiration comes from the yarn, and yarn is something that all knitters and crocheters can share an enjoyment of regardless of experience level, style, or time investment, but I still think it's doing more harm than good.

When I buy yarn, I want to be thinking about all the time I'm going to be spending with it. I'm going to be touching it, carrying it with me, frogging it, measuring it, finding patterns for it, and examining it as I knit it up. I will probably use it for multiple projects, at the very least in scrap form, and it will probably lead me to consider buying more yarn of a similar weight and fiber content to use in conjunction with it. That's what I mean when I say it should be a companion instead of a commodity. It goes with you and you pull projects out of it; you don't transform it into projects and move on.

I don't want to use yarn I thought I would love in patterns that don't make me happy and that no one in my life particularly wants. I want yarn to be a resource, rather than a burden. If there are no projects I want to make with my existing yarn, I should save it for later or find another owner for it. I don't want to choose projects out of obligation to yarn I have so that I can make the space to buy more.

Part of me wonders if the emphasis on yarn has amplified the boom in very plain knitting patterns. I can't speak to crochet, but I know that the most popular patterns on ravelry and among knitting youtubers are very simple stockinette pullovers or plain ribbed beanies or something else that is very quick and easy to make and doesn't challenge your knitting capabilities. It could just be because these are what become wardrobe staples, but I also know that a lot of non-knitters wear complex cabled and lacy sweaters and cardigans on a daily basis, including very fashionable people. These simple patterns emphasize yarn choice and let you process stashed yarn faster, but how many people knitting them would rather have a more complex piece, and just don't feel inclined to dedicate the time to one sweater when it could be used to make three?

Anything that slows down your purchasing will be beneficial to your finances and environmental impact, but I think an even greater change in perspective than what you get from a buy ban is in order. You may learn what yarns you actually enjoy or become more creative or experiment with new techniques, but that doesn't actually address the supposed materialism or consumerism issues regarding how we engage with our hobby.

I honestly don't know if building a stash should be a goal or common practice at all. I know all the defenses; I think it makes sense to want to save yarn if your finances are unpredictable, but I think this is a separate issue not really related to the topic of stashing generally. That is either a sensible behavior in a situation that a lot of people with massive craft hoards are not in, or a maladaptive response to traumatic experiences. Either way, saving yarn when you get your hands on it is different from building a "mindful stash" or knitting to use up what you have as fast as possible.

I know a lot of people reason that if you have what you need to create on hand, you can make things more easily, but there are so many limitations of material, quantity, weight, and color that knitting from stash for many people is just an additional challenge (I know for amigurumi artists this is not really the case) and when you have a large stash, it becomes a question of whether you can use it before your tastes change. I know I have a lot of aran weight yarn I don't really know what to do with.

I don't think we should use shopping for joy or comfort. I suspect we would be happier if we almost exclusively bought yarn we planned on using immediately. I saw a youtuber turn an entire advent calendar into a granny square blanket in the name of "stash busting," and maybe she really treasures that blanket now, but if not, I don't see why it had to be "busted" in the first place.

Maybe our engagement with yarn should take the form of reading up on our material options, building lists of specific things we want to try, or following whatever source of yarn is within our budget-- not to seek out deals or new releases, but to get a sense of what our options will be when we do decide to replenish our supply. Instead of looking at skeins of yarn and indulging or fighting a drive to snap them up before they're taken away from you, we could try to translate the skein from a visual and textural experience in the moment into the entire course of working with the yarn. We should imagine the experience of working with it and the finished objects we can pull from it.

I think making fewer finished objects would be okay, as long as each one was worth more to us. Using less yarn on the same budget would also let us try fancier yarns. And when shopping for deals, it's worth remembering that the qualities of the yarn are not what you are bargaining for, but the enjoyment and utility you get per dollar. Even very expensive yarn that you get for cheap and then rush through using is only worth the fun you got from using it and the pleasure the finished object brings you or others (unless you sell the FO).

Joy from shopping is very temporary and sometimes comes as a loan when the purchase becomes a burden and we miss our money and time. I think shopping for fun, especially online, is an inefficient way to get value for our money at best and a maladaptive behavior at worst. I'm curious how often we buy yarn for the act of searching and buying instead of because we want a new yarn in our lives, and I'm curious how doing so impacts how we engage with our hobby.

TL;DR: I think a lot of people have a shopping problem, not a hoarding problem. I think no-buy time and working from stash will not resolve the underlying issues, and I think different behaviors would make us happier.

My mind could be changed, but these are my thoughts right now.

[whitecablesfan]

[balconyofbones]

Well obviously I have to post my dress update.

Lion Brand Re-Spun, on size 8 needles to meet gauge. Starting to actually look like something! I'll definitely make this pattern again in a more neutral color - it's purple because I'm going to be Judy Funnie for halloween.

It's another round of Show and Tell Saturday! Show off something you've been working on, something you've finished, a trade you've received - what's new in your world this week?

[foxglenstudio]

the northern lights (cowl)

x <- etsy link

[fiberfantasies]

Fiber arts is just Math in sheep's clothing

[knithacker]

Hey Library Kids & Book Lovers, This Knit Vest Pattern Is For You - It's A Borrowing Card! 👉 https://buff.ly/4fTAIOm 📚

[gornwen]

Whelp, I lost. I ended 2024 with 25 projects.

BUT I'm almost done with so many of them, like the Ripple Bralette DK for @shibariphoenix or the single button I need to sew on the Fellowship Cloak.

Somewhere in the past decade, the number of projects I have on my needles mushroomed to an entire ecosystem. My goal for 2023 is to clear the needles, even if not all the way, at least make a reasonable dent.

And, as any seasoned LYS employee, I have an embarrassingly large stash. So in addition to clearing the needles, I'm hoping to have more yarn out than yarn in. For this, yarn out only counts if I use us the entire skein. So if you have a favorite scrappy project, I'm taking notes!

[iknityounot]

(Long post, sorry y'all)

A little more than two years ago now, my grandmother passed away. She and my grandpa had moved down to my home town a few years before so we could take care of them. I brought them groceries once a week, helped them write checks, fixed tvs, and found lost things. I was really close with my grandma.

In addition to her hilarious personality and dry wit, one of my favorite things about her was that she was a painter and a crafter like me! She used to crochet, and I took her to the craft store a couple of times so she could get more yarn and books on crochet. But her arthritis and the shaking in her hands kept getting worse, so she eventually had to stop.

She kept her most recent project, a granny square blanket, safely packed away in a plastic bin. She told all of us she was going to finish it one day.

Her hands never got better, and when she got sick, and we found out it was cancer, she rapidly deteriorated.

After she passed, I went to work helping my mom clean out my grandparents apartment so we could move my grandpa in with her. In our frantic cleaning, I found that bin again:

DOZENS of granny squares, dozens of half used skeins. I asked my mom what she wanted me to do with it, and she said she didn't care. I set it aside and later took it home.

Maybe a month later, that tumblr post about the Loose Ends Project was going around. It felt like a sign--I was never going to learn to crochet in order to finish my grandmother's blanket. But they might be able to help!

So I filled out the interest form. They got back to me SUPER quick. And maybe 2 weeks later, I was paired with volunteer in my state (only 2 hours away!) and the box of yarn, granny squares, and my grandmother's crochet hook were in the mail. That was at the end of January this year.

Over the next couple of months, my "finisher" emailed me regular updates on her progress, and asked me questions on my preferences for how she constructed the final blanket.

At the end of August, the blanket was done!

I had always intended the blanket to be a gift for my mother. So I cleaned it up, put it in the only bag I had big enough to fit it, and drove to my mom's. I gave the blanket to her and she was gobsmacked. I explained to her all about Loose Ends, and how someone volunteered to finish the piece for us. She was speechless. (I was quite pleased with this, because I am not the best at giving gifts, so this was a pretty exciting reaction!)

She said that it was the most thoughtful gift she had ever been given. She said "your grandma would love this". To which I replied, "yeah, I know she really wanted to finish it a couple of years ago". But that was when my mom dropped the bomb of a century on me--she told me that my grandma had started making those granny squares OVER 30 YEARS AGO. She had started the blanket when my grandpa was staying in the hospital, but that was back when my mom was younger than I am now! My grandma had packed them all away, planning on finishing it, when my grandpa was sent home from the hospital. Then it went from house to house, from condo in Chicago to their apartment in my hometown. All that time and my grandma had wanted to finish it, but couldn't. First because she was busy, then because she forgot how to do it, then because of her arthritis, and then because of the cancer. My mom said she had given up on expecting my grandma to finish it. 

She said I brought a piece of her childhood with her mom out of the past.

And really, all of this is to say, if you have seen or heard about the Loose Ends Project and have an uncompleted project or piece from a loved one who has passed away--these are your people. They were so kind and treated my project with such care. That box probably would have been found by my own grandkids one day if I hadn't heard about Loose Ends.

Five stars, absolutely worth it!

(From what I understand, you can sign up to volunteer too! If you have time to share, it might be worth checking out!)

[mothyandthesquid]

We are delighted to announce we are runners up in this year’s Yarn Industry Awards in the Best Indie Yarn Brand category. Thank you so much to everyone who voted for us! We particularly appreciate it as all of the voting options were so awesome and it’s an honour to be amongst them. Congratulations to @fortheloveofyarn for winning and yay Glasgow for being a hub of creative excellence. Mothyandthesquid.com

[anonknitter]

Buttons! My husband made them from some curly maple he had lying around.

Needs buttons and I'm so happy with it EXCEPT I didn't remember one of the skiens I frogged from the old cardigan was noticeably lighter than the rest and because I knit in a cave I didn't see it until I laid it out to dry. So maybe there'll be an adventure in overdying in my future. Or I'll just wear it in the dark from now on.

[noirandchocolate]

Several weeks ago one of my coworkers called me over into her cubicle and gave me a very unexpected gift. Her mother passed away recently, and she'd been packing stuff up at her condo to give to relatives and sell, so the home could be sold. The mother was an avid knitter and crocheter, and when my coworker came upon her stash of equipment, she told me, she "immediately thought of me as someone who might get some use out of it."

So, I have inherited a varied collection of knitting needles and crochet hooks, cable needles, sewing needles, and, best of all, now-out-of-print pattern books, mostly for blankets, because that was what this lady loved to make most. Plus, I also have a bunch of gauge swatches she made, pinned to little bits of card covered in perfect schoolteacher handwriting setting out the patterns they were made to test.

And also...

My coworker brought another bag, full of yarn and...knitted blanket squares. Her mother's last started project, before she got too sick to continue. And she asked if there was anything I could do with it.

It turned out, there are twelve completed squares, and I quickly located the pattern book they are from amid those given to me. It's a book of 60 patterns, meant to be put together however the maker wishes into blankets of 20 squares. I figured out which of the numbered patterns were already made, and selected eight more that I thought might go well with them.

So now! I am working on completing! My coworker's mother's last knitting project!

And I really am feeling very good about doing it.

[389]

The Forest Angel Chart (Knitting) by Melanie Nordberg