Now that my fingerless mitts are almost done, it’s time to go over what my next knitting steps are. With the Great Move, I have a single pile – 2 bins high – and with a bunch of project bags on top. My short term goal is to knit from this bin and my long term goal is to knit from stash. I want to use what I have and not buy any new stuff. I have great yarn and I want to play with what I’ve got.

Since my last knitting post I buried the ends for one mitt and the other mitt is just waiting for its turn. I know it sounds weird – like just finish burying the ends of the other mitt and be done with it. Well, that’s not how my brain works. I either spend 15 minutes on the project or I do a step and burying ends of one mitt is a step so I completed that step and moved on. Today, I felt like organizing the bag that contained this project and got things ready so that as soon as the last mitt is buried and done, I can put that project bag away and be ready for the next one. It so happens that I didn’t clean out my project bag for the Garden Gate sweater I recently finished. I know I haven’t taken a picture of it yet or posted a finished project but that will come. I promise. Anyway, I went through that bag and cleaned it out. All the tools and paraphernalia went into my new knitting tools section in my craft cabinet. I don’t know if it will stay there but it has a place right now and that’s where I’ll put them until I have the need/urge to put them somewhere else. The remaining yarn got a tag attached to it and they were all placed back in my yarn bins.

The next thing I had an urge to do was go through all my knitting projects that are in the bins. I know there are probably more still out in the living room waiting for me to find. But I’m almost done with my fingerless mitts and I’ll need a new project in 2 days. So I went through what I had already piled up. Or tried to. There are 2 full bins and there were several bags I had put on top of the bins as the bins were full. I went through the loose bags first and was about to go through the bins when I noticed that there was a stitching project bag leaning and kind of on top of the top bins. I knew if I pulled that top bin out, the stitchy project and whatever was leaning next to that would topple over. I decided to leave those alone. In the meantime, here’s what I found on top of the bins. there were 3 kitted up sock projects from years ago when I prepped sock projects for the year and then each month randomly selected a project to work on. I also had 2 project bags with almost finished socks (Pairs of them). One bag had one pair of socks and if I remember correctly, I had finished the pair when Willow, my dog, chewed up the cuff of one of them. So I was in the process of fixing that cuff when it got set aside. The second bag has two pairs of sock tubes with toes and cuffs. Both of them needed heels. So here’s my current Knitting WIP list as I feel right now.

1. finish burying the ends of the last fingerless mitten
2. Take a picture of my GardenGate sweater. It’s not finished until this is done.
3. finish repairing the sock that Willow chewed up
4. Add heels to 2 sock tubes
5. 3 kitted sock projects in whatever order I feel like knitting them in
6. go through the 2 bins of yarn projects. From memory, the yarn is set aside but some may have a pattern name with it, but most probably do not. I doubt any of them have actual patterns with the project unless I bought the project kit as it was.
7. go through my stash. give away what I no longer want to knit and re-stash what I want to keep.

Doing these kinds of lists make me feel really good, like I have a direction or road map as to where I’m going. I hardly ever actually follow these all the way through but I generally get through the first few items listed before I forget about this list or have the urge to do something else. Like start something completely new.

I am on a finishing kick for knitting right now so I’m trying to ride with it while that feeling is with me.

Something to note, we have a new LYS in town. It’s located in the same plaza as our old LYS which is odd but okay. I’m trying to make it out there once a week for knit night like we used to do at our old LYS. But I always feel weird going into a shop and not buying anything so there’s that mental anguish I have to work through: to buy or not to buy…

Happy knitting friends,

Melanie