A mile? I can knit that!

The January challenge for Stash Knit Down 2008 is to knit one mile (1760 yards) of yarn between January 5th and February 19th. It breaks down to about forty yards a day. I can absolutely do that.

What'll make it more of a challenge is to use a mile of old stuff instead of the pretty new yarn I just bought last week. But I should be able to balance old and new projects and make it work. If not, I'm giving myself credit for knitting up the new yarn because a mile of yarn is a mile of yarn.

And I've been knitting up an awful lot of the old stuff lately. The three skeins for the Buttonhole Bag...the three skeins for the Sasquatch Shawl...the Knitting Needle Knitting Bag... If I keep this up, there isn't going to be much old stuff left. Except for the new stuff that'll have become old stuff while I was knitting the older stuff.

For this particular challenge, I'm counting anything I bought more than a year ago as old.

So far, I've pulled out some Denim Style to finally cast on a hoodie for Heath. The back is done, and I'm almost ready for the neck shaping on the front.

I've resurrected a cotton sweater that I started for Heath when he was the size that Quinn is now. I'm not sure exactly what made me give up on that one. Judging by an old blog post, it was some horror stories about the way cotton wears, or maybe some trouble I was having understanding the slip stitch pattern, or maybe the fact that Heath was obviously going to outgrow it before I finished. Whatever the problem was, I buried two sleeves and the pattern in the deepest corner of my sewing room in an effort to forget it existed. But, through some miracle, I'd written down what size I was making and which needles I'd been using. Now that's done except for the seams.

I've got the library book with the pattern for the intarsia chicken sweater checked out and I figured out where the yarn is. So far, I've had the yarn but not the book or the book but not the yarn. This time, I'm going to knit the thing!