The Knitting Fiend

This yarn is speaking to me.

It’s stash yarn from what I now refer to as “The Jill Collection”. (I told you Mom’s friend Jill gave me a lot of the yarn! )

The yarn label says “dorothea bis, fils a tricoter”, and it seems to be a variety called “patchwork”. It’s a subtly variegated yarn, and seems to be grey, blue, and pinkish brown all at once. Mauve?

I have four 100 gram balls. Yep — 4 * 124 meters of gorgeous, fluffy, 100% wool.

Let me tell you, I’ve been dreaming about what to knit out of it. Not enough for a whole sweater. Too much for a hat. I don’t really use scarves.

It’s destiny is to be a vest.

But, will it be a long vest, or a short vest? I think I’m going to have to figure that out after I knit the swatch. I can unravel the swatch, find out how much yarn an area of knitting takes, and scale up. (Or, maybe if the swatch weighs enough, I can weigh it at the post office. But, who wants to drive to the post office just to weigh a swatch?)

What a pain. It’s almost, but not quite, enough to make a gal turn to pre-published patterns. Except, published patterns often drastically over estimate yardage– and sometimes under estimate it. So, that wouldn’t really solve the problem.

Now, I just know there has got to be a better way to get a good estimate of yardage needs. A method that doesn’t involve knitting and then unraveling swatches for every durn project!

So, for this New Year, I resolve to revert to science geek, develop a theory and take data. Of course, I have no idea what the theory will be, but my project will involve weighing all my swatches and making a graph to compare the theory and the data.

Orange-puss says his resolution is to guard the yarn. We can be certain he’ll keep his! Will I keep mine?