I knit. And I cook, write, take pictures. All for one low price.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

(pssst)

You know how I have to ship my firstborn off to college in about a month? And how my second child will be in middle school, and my husband will also be back to teaching in September?

I'm thinking, the usual September loneliness will hit me especially hard this year. I'll need to keep very very busy. Aside from going to work, which means alternating weeks of 19 and 32 hours, and no freelance knitting job lined up right at the moment...I'll need a major goal of getting some major knitting done.

So I've decided something. I'll tell you in a minute.

I am the administrator of a group I started on ravelry last November, called the great Stash Knit Down of 2008. It's an awesome group, if I may say so myself. Very inspiring and supportive. People have been knitting from stash all year, but we are not on a yarn diet. No guilt allowed if you end up buying more yarn. One person actually completely busted her stash already, and is buying for a few projects at a time only.

I digress. September. I should say that we have monthly goals in that group, and races, and knitting from sock yarn stash only, what have you. It varies from month to month, while some challenges are ongoing, like knitting an afghan by the end of the year.

September. It's after the Olympics (read ravelympics), after summer travel knitting, before high stakes holiday knitting. It's kids go back to school knitting.

September. I'll need to keep busy. I'm going to try and knit up 10,000 yards of yarn.

I've been hauling bins of yarn up from the basement and counting yardages. Every time I hit the final sum button on the calculator, I am stunned. I counted 2 bins yesterday, and they had 7,590 and 8,263 yards in them respectively. Then I stopped counting. It's only 2 bins of yarn out of 18 or so....some of which (2) contain only sock yarn and one of which contains fingering and lace weight...trying not to hyperventilate....I am shocked all over again at my total and complete love of yarn.

10,000 yards. September has 30 days, I would have to knit up 333.33 yards of yarn every day on average. I'll give you a few days to talk amongst yourselves so you can discuss how utterly crazy that notion is.

My ravelry group is already divided into cheerleaders, and fellow racers...and one of them is pleading with me to reconsider, to bring it down to a 5 km race...

Do you think it can be done?

PS: My ravelry ID is KarinMT.

10 comments:

Kristine said...

You're insane, and amazing, and if anyone can do it, you can.

Go go go! :)

magnusmog said...

I have faith in you!

Don't feel too lonely in September though, what I've learned from becoming a step mum to three grown up 'kids' is that they always come home and they never fail to eat all of the cheese:)

Anonymous said...

If anyone can do it, you can. Go, go! Cathy O

Anonymous said...

Hey...when does that leave you time to come to VT then?! :-)

Actually, I think it's a great idea. I've been "contemplating" my stash lately. It's bad when a friend who recently started a yarn shop declares that you have more yarn in your house than they do in their shop. Although to be fair the shop is really, really small. That matters right?

333 yards a day is almost a whole pair of socks in fingering weight, easily a hat or two in worsted at least three or four in bulky, maybe a sleeve or the beginning of a yoke in worsted. I say go for it!

Fairytale Frog said...

I think it is do-able, although I'm not sure that I will be able to do it (even though I have signed up to give it a go). I think there may be some scheduled form of cheating going on here .....

Wibbo said...

That's about three 50g balls of DK *every* day... Well, I couldn't knit that much in a day - could probably crochet that amount, but I'm a slower knitter.
I think it's the 'doing it every day' bit that would worry me the most :D

Toni said...

I'll be cheering for you. Do we need to send chocolate or beer?

Jody said...

Hmmm...let's see...don't stop to cook, or eat, let the phone go to voicemail, someone else can go get the mail, wear a Depends to cut down on THAT waste of time. At the rate I've seen you knit Karin, yeah! You could do it! But hey, you don't need that kind of pressure!

Jody

Vivian said...

300 yards of sock yarn a day is a lot of knitting. Can you double or multiple up to make larger projects? -- if the yardage is the only goal.

I'm trying to knit down my stash too, but so far I'm shopping more than knitting.

Anonymous said...

I say chunky. Definitely not lace, as I spent FOREVER knitting a fir cone shawl for charity this spring. Should have used fingering. Instead of 16 repeats, it was 36. I smacked myself in the forehead a lot.