Too much yarn!

After spending several hours over the weekend trying to organize and cleanup up my sewing/craft room, I've discovered something. I have too much yarn!

I've sorted out 2 huge bags full and a box of cone yarn that have to go. Some I may keep back for the next swap with my fiber arts group. Others of it will be sold on Ebay or through some of the Yahoo lists. The extra cash will come in handy for purchasing more spinning fiber at the Fiber Event in early April. I've boxed up some acrylic yarn too that hubby says must go. I understand, the bins of acrylic yarn have been sitting in our family room for months. I was going to have a yarn garage sale last fall. That was before both of our moms decided to have major health problems that left me with no time to do much of anything.

I've been forcing myself to work on the Mystery Pi shawl. I even calculated how many more repeats I can get out of the ball of yarn I'm working with. When it's gone, this shawl will be done no matter what size it is. I am so tired of working on it and ready to move on to a new lace project. I'm close to getting it done so I'm trying to hang in there. I only have 2 more pattern repeats to work. That's 24 rows x 576 stitches. Each row takes me about a half hour to knit. Yikes, that means I have about 13,824 stitches to knit plus the bind off row or about 12 more hours of knitting. :-( I don't think I will ever knit a Pi shawl again. All I have to say, is this sucker better be freaking beautiful to be worth all this time!

After working several hours on the never ending shawl, I decided to take a break and do some spinning. I'm spinning up some variegated darker blue merino I found when I cleaned out my craft room. (See, you can find all kinds of goodies you forgot about when you straighten up.) I spun several ounces of it up into a fairly thick single. I'm contemplating a lace project knit from singles. Several of my friends have done this and the results are beautiful. At this point, I'm all for a project that takes less than half the time it usually does. I won't have to spin and ply two singles.

I have been working on the knitting basket pattern. I'd like to knit some small prototypes for a rectangular basket and a round one that the sides flare out like a real basket. I could test knit them in plain old acrylic, but...Joann Fabrics has Patons Classic Wool yarn on sale through March 10 for only $4 bucks a skein. I don't have any of this in my stash and I used up the 3 balls of it I bought last week. Maybe tomorrow...

Today, I delivered the Mystery Stole I knitted last year to Pet Refuge. It will be auctioned off at their annual benefit auction on March 17th. Melanie of Pink Lemon Twist, and designer of the Scheherazade Stole, gave me permission to auction it off. I asked because I didn't want to infringe on any copyrights. I hope the stole will bring lots of $$$ for Pet Refuge and their mission to help pets without homes. I won't be at the auction because I can't afford the $35.00 for an admission ticket to the event. Oh well, I do what I can for them.