2009 Year End Totals

Things are starting to make more sense now that I've gone back through my blog posts and added up my year end totals for 2009.

There wasn't any knitting.

Over the entire year, I made two dishcloths, a lace scarf from a single skein of Knit Picks Crayon, a pair of worsted weight baby socks, three pairs of booties, a pair of worsted weight adult size socks, and two bulky hats. That's all -- eleven finishes, nothing that took more than a single skein of yarn, compared to the fifty I finished in 2007 and more than sixty in 2008.

All year that lack of knitting bugged me. How does a knitter go from complete obsession to a screeching halt like that?

It was the quilts. I didn't realize that so many of the quilts draped all overy my house happened this year.

I made eighteen quilts from start to finish, finished eight more tops, quilted four tops that were left over from the previous year, not to mention the bagsket and the strippy cat bed which is probably equal to another quilt all by itself.

Start to Finish Quilts

Scrappy Mountain Majesties
Birds in the Air
A's Quilt
One Thrifty Quilt
Scrappy Irish Chain
Red Quilt
Weed Whacker
Simple Pleasures
Leif's Snails
Cheerful Buzz Saws
applique flowers
30's baskets

Start to Finish Baby Quilts

blue disappearing nine patch
girly disappearing nine patch
pink lattice
yellow fun with bricks
white framed nine patch
scrappy hearts

Unquilted Tops

sparklng gems
scrappy irish chain
bento box
blue fun with bricks
ugly nameless baby quilt
chinese coins
my fun with bricks
30's buzz cake

I have a hard time figuring out how to count quilting finishes, mostly because I consider assembled tops as a finish category of their own. So I wound up with several lists of finishes. I guess that works.

Christmas is four days away, I haven't wrapped a single thing, I haven't finished shopping, and I've got two quilts to bind before lunch on Christmas Eve.... the usual holiday season around here!

I did discover something encouraging when I was doing the first mad dash of my Christmas shopping. Fred Meyer (a chain grocery/department store) now has sock yarn and bamboo dpns. Since I started knitting and paying attention to that aisle, their selection hasn't changed much -- now they've got a lot of new yarns I didn't even know about.

There was a 20% off coupon, so I came home with a skein of Lion Brand Hometown USA and made a hat.



It would be Shroom from the new Knitty, but I didn't have enough yarn to make it long enough and wasn't patient enough to wait until I could drive 30 miles and buy a second skein just so I could do another dozen rows. I like the pattern and like the yarn (which I was trying because I might be tempted to buy enough skeins to do a bigger project) even if this little hat isn't quite what it should be.

Maybe Alex will lose it in the chicken coop.

After almost a year of not buying any yarn (not knitting made it very easy to avoid temptation), Grandma called and let me know about an estate sale one of her dealers was running.

I've never seen so much Red Heart Super Saver in one place that wasn't a store. I bought three huge bags of yarn, not counting the dozen skeins of fun fur that Alex snapped up for fifty cents each, and we barely made a dent.

Now I've got to figure out how to best use those single skeins that were too pretty and inexpensive to leave behind.

Among my purchaes were four skeins of Red Heart Strata, which can't quite be described as pretty and has an awful texture, but it's fun to play with. I searched Ravelry to see what others had done with it and found the pattern for Knit Dorm Socks.

They've been adopted by Alex, who doesn't seem to mind that they're a bit crunchy.

I have got to get back to posting more often. If nothing else, it helps me keep track of what I'm doing. And I really need that help, because I sure can't seem to keep track of what I'm working on.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped at the new thrift store in Albany and saw a quilt. It wanted to come home with me. I wanted to take it home with me, at least until I got a look at the price tag.

I don't really collect antique quilts, I just bring home the occasional really cheap one that won't let me leave it behind. If I was serious about collecting old quilts, this one wasn't the kind quilt I like. And I wasn't even sure that it was old.

I apparently didn't get a very good look at it, because when I saw a sample hanging in a quilt shop a week later, I convinced myself that I could make a substitute that had all of the things I loved about the thrift store quilt and the added bonus of jagged edges. I did still have that fat eights of Mamas Cottons that I hadn't started to cut up for my butterfly quilt, and some of them did look a little like the ones that drew me to that other quilt....

That's how I wound up with this --



Please tell me I'll like it better when it's quilted. Because right now I'm thinking I totally wasted my nice fabric.



We went back to the thrift store on Thursday and the quilt was still there. Apparently I didn't get a very good look at it the first time around, because that's the only explanation for why I did what I did with my fabric.

Now that it's cut up and sewn together into something else, I can see what I should have done to make the quilt I wanted. Too bad this isn't knitting, where frogging and starting over is usually an option!

Today, I've been retreating. I started out by cleaning my sewing machine and winding a bunch of bobbins. Then I pulled out a baby quilt that's been sitting there, all pin basted and ready to quilt.

I'm in the mood to meander.



This quilt started out as a pile of 2 1/2" strips that I planned to make into a baby-sized bargello. I kept looking at the prints and being haunted by this niggly little feeling that they were going to look awful if I didn't make a drastic change to my plans. I'm glad I found a better use for these fabrics.