SSS, Here I Come!

This is the Socks That Rock Sapphire Mediumweight. All I have to do is kitchener that toe shut, and it's on to Second Sock Syndrome.

Actually, there will probably be no SSS for me on this one. This is my plain sock du jour, which I keep on my desk to knit while reading submissions. By my last count, I have just under 50 manuscripts to read at the moment, and I'd like to knock through them in the next week or two. A lot of reading time equals a lot of time for plain knitting equals a second sock which ought to come together fairly quickly.

And even though my pictures must all be unedited until I figure out why in the world my software won't let me save any edits, I have made enough progress with this new computer and software to be able to post photos again. So I thought, you know, this being a knitting blog and all, I might as well post some progress pictures of knitting. Imagine that.

In the blurry bad picture, you don't see all the gradations of color in this yarn. It's very subtle and pretty, bits of teal and turquoise winding through that royal and sapphire blue. Of course, this being Socks That Rock, I don't expect those colors to remain true after the first washing. But they please me during the knitting! So that counts for something.

Of Course There's a Spreadsheet For That

I'm trying to focus on finishing existing projects and cut down the number of projects OTN. I've even started a spreadsheet to track my yarn in and yarn out for the year. Go ahead. Roll your eyes. Yes, a spreadsheet! I do love my spreadsheets and databases.

All I'm doing is marking yarn in grams -- and I'm not bothering myself about leftover bits and dabs of yarn. So the Lorna's Laces self-unknitting Penelope socks count as 100 g out, because that's what you have to buy to make a pair, even though I probably have about 30 g leftover.

And a project has to be finished before it goes in the "yarn out" column. So the several balls I've knit toward Catherine Parr don't count yet, but they will all go in that column when the sweater is finished.

At the moment, because of the recent Malabrigo purchase, I have 126 more grams in the "yarn in" column than in the "yarn out" column. But half the hat and half the scarf are already knit, so this will soon re-balance itself.

My only goal is to hold the yarn in and the yarn out roughly equal over the course of the year. This is because I'm running out of storage options, and I have enough yarn to knit, and I keep forgetting about lovely yarn I've already bought. And if there's one thing I learned in the December work frenzy and the January flu, it's that huge quantities of yarn only make sense if we are doing a lot of knitting. I didn't have to fret about the 100+ skeins I bought at Stitches last year because I knew I'd knit through them pretty rapidly. But slow knitting means slower accumulation, or at least, it should.

This is what I tell myself, anyway, as I open the winter issue of VK and stare longingly for the ten-thousandth time at the cabled turtleneck with the gusset sleeves -- pattern number ten, and it is SO ME -- but I don't have a single lot of sweater yarn in the stash that will work for that pattern. If I want to buy the yarn for this pattern (IF? ha!), I have to finish a sweater's worth of yarn already in progress.

We're into March, by the way, so two full months into the spreadsheet, and the yarn in/yarn out thing is working better for me than anything else I've ever tried. This might just be the winning system.