burning yarn

It might have been best not to let my teenage daughter come into the kitchen and find me setting lengths of yarn on sale with the burner of the gas stove. Or it might have been worth it to see her reaction.

I had a good reason for what I was doing. Setting yarn on fire is an easy way to figure out if it's acrylic or wool. (Wool is hard to light and burns to a crumbly ash. Acrylic melts to a hard black knot.) Now I'm disappointed that so much of the yarn I found at the thrift store this week is actually wool and can't be used for the baby hats. Nine times out of ten, unidentified thrift store yarn is going to be acrylic. This week, someone was getting rid of the good stuff.

I'll get over my disappointment. The wool is in great colors and when I'm working on something else, I'll be glad to have it. Right now, though, I'm not in the mood for anything more complex than more baby hats.

I've been wanting to make myself this hat, and I even found a skein of Homepspun in a great shade of green for fifty cents. The printer is dead, but the pattern is simple enough that I could copy it by hand... It might be something good to work on while I'm in this stressed-out limbo of waiting.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 0 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 0 yards
Added this Week: 20 yards
Added Year to Date: 20 yards
Net Used for 2011: -20 yards

Yarn Used this Week: 650 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 650 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 2600 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 2600 yards
Net Used for 2011: -1950 yards

Like I said earlier, I'm guessing at numbers because I'm working with scraps of fabric and partial skeins of yarn. I didn't count the 800 or so yards of yarn I threw out over the weekend because it should've been gone before now.

Now I think I've got a little time to play in the new bag of scraps I found earlier this week and see if there really are twenty yards here or not.