Cleaning Can Be Dangerous!

So, after spending 2 days last week with the family, I told my dh yesterday that I really needed to spend some time alone up in the yarn room, getting ready for next year's projects. It didn't take long for me to decide that straightening up the yarn room is rather like rearranging deck chairs on the Titannic - completely pointless. I can shift things around, but the bottom line is that there is just too much yarn for the bins I can fit in the room, and the only thing that is going to help is using more of it up. It was just a little discouraging to find that, after a year of stash busting, I am still in this position. It wasn't all bad. I did find one drawer that was almost empty, and some of the bins do have some breathing room in them. But there is still too much yarn in bags on the floor. I seriously am looking at a 10 year plan as far as the stash busting goes.

I did put together patterns and yarn for 4 sweaters for next year, which makes me feel more organized. (I'll talk about which sweaters in another blog post.) However, while I was doing that, I found 2 skeins of Lion Brand Homespun in a plastic bag, with a shawl pattern (Easy Triangle Shawl from Lion Brand) and knitting needles, which I had completely forgotten about. And that's why cleaning is dangerous. Despite my vow to myself to not start any more projects right now and to focus on my WIPs until the new year, I just couldn't stop thinking about that shawl. So of course I started it, around 12:30 this afternoon.
It is about 1/3 of the way done already. I'm not convinced the shawl will take 2 full skeins of the yarn, but if it doesn't, I can always make a chemo cap with the leftover yarn. I think that the attraction of the shawl right now is that most of my other projects are using fingering or lace weight yarn, and so they are growing slowly. A project using bulky yarn will grow so much faster and will just be a nice break from the finer yarns, even if it's no my favorite yarn to work with.