Yes, you can have too much
I'm working on yet another Pinwheel baby blanket for a friend's first baby. Because Monaneron got rid of a ton of her yarn (everything with wool in it, as half of her family is allergic, as well as a bunch of misc. acrylics and cottons that she didn't really have a purpose for), I've had quite a time trying to figure out what to do with it. I chose a multicolored pastel rainbow variegated acrylic, Lion Brand's Jiffy (which has a bit of mohair-like halo) in Salem. Because I received the yarn in a big black trash bag, I fished out as many as I could find, which at the time was four. Perfectly reasonable for a baby blanket.
Like all circular blankets worked from the inside out, it goes fast for the first two and a half skeins. After that, your rows are getting stupid-long and it begins to just get ridiculous. Pretty soon you can't wait to just finish the damn thing, no matter how big it's supposed to be or how much yarn you have left. In fact, I submit to you that the more yarn you knit up in a big project, the more you tend to hate it. At least, I do. I'm impatient, and I want it to be done RIGHT NOW, especially when there's a deadline. If it's for someone else (which it almost always is), I just want it to be done so I can work on something else. If I work on something else, there's a risk that I'll get distracted and not want to finish the first project. I'm sure you're familiar with this phenomenon. It's annoying. It really screws with your productivity.
At any rate, I've been chugging along on this blanket for a while now. It helps that I'm using new stitch markers, pretty silver ones with shiny pink and clear beads (purple for the start-of-row marker) delineating the sections where I need to yarn over. I found three more balls of yarn in the bag, bringing the grand total to 7. Each ball is supposed to be 105 yards, so that's a substantial amount of yarn. I'm also using my Knitpicks' nickel-plated interchangeable circulars, but the glue holding the flexible plastic cables to the sockets is disintegrating and so I can't pull too hard when I shift the stitches around. The cable is also now jam-packed with stitches, and when I'm finally done with this it's going to be quite a good size.
Sunday, I worked on it as much as I possible could, as I was finally on the last ball of yarn. I had decided to knit a lacy edging in a different, smoother yarn that would complement the palette (which is heavy on the pink and purple) but still show the lace pattern. Not something difficult, just a nice little touch. I picked out an edging from Nicky Epstein's Knitting Beyond the Edge and planned to go through my now enormous stash of acrylic yarn for a suitable edger today. There was a lot of new stuff that I had only pawed through a bit, and needed a lot more scrutiny and perhaps even more organization.
Today, Monday, I pulled out the various bags and boxes of assorted and intermingled yarns, tossing them into piles on the bed, piles that would indicate suitability. I emptied out all the wool, found stashes of cotton I had forgotten about, and all my leftover sock yarn. And then I sorted through the big black trash bag, all the way to the bottom.
And there at the bottom, hiding underneath several partial skeins of Caron Simply Soft Brites, was another goddamn skein of the fucking Lion Brand Jiffy in Salem.
RARGH. SO CLOSE.
Like all circular blankets worked from the inside out, it goes fast for the first two and a half skeins. After that, your rows are getting stupid-long and it begins to just get ridiculous. Pretty soon you can't wait to just finish the damn thing, no matter how big it's supposed to be or how much yarn you have left. In fact, I submit to you that the more yarn you knit up in a big project, the more you tend to hate it. At least, I do. I'm impatient, and I want it to be done RIGHT NOW, especially when there's a deadline. If it's for someone else (which it almost always is), I just want it to be done so I can work on something else. If I work on something else, there's a risk that I'll get distracted and not want to finish the first project. I'm sure you're familiar with this phenomenon. It's annoying. It really screws with your productivity.
At any rate, I've been chugging along on this blanket for a while now. It helps that I'm using new stitch markers, pretty silver ones with shiny pink and clear beads (purple for the start-of-row marker) delineating the sections where I need to yarn over. I found three more balls of yarn in the bag, bringing the grand total to 7. Each ball is supposed to be 105 yards, so that's a substantial amount of yarn. I'm also using my Knitpicks' nickel-plated interchangeable circulars, but the glue holding the flexible plastic cables to the sockets is disintegrating and so I can't pull too hard when I shift the stitches around. The cable is also now jam-packed with stitches, and when I'm finally done with this it's going to be quite a good size.
Sunday, I worked on it as much as I possible could, as I was finally on the last ball of yarn. I had decided to knit a lacy edging in a different, smoother yarn that would complement the palette (which is heavy on the pink and purple) but still show the lace pattern. Not something difficult, just a nice little touch. I picked out an edging from Nicky Epstein's Knitting Beyond the Edge and planned to go through my now enormous stash of acrylic yarn for a suitable edger today. There was a lot of new stuff that I had only pawed through a bit, and needed a lot more scrutiny and perhaps even more organization.
Today, Monday, I pulled out the various bags and boxes of assorted and intermingled yarns, tossing them into piles on the bed, piles that would indicate suitability. I emptied out all the wool, found stashes of cotton I had forgotten about, and all my leftover sock yarn. And then I sorted through the big black trash bag, all the way to the bottom.
And there at the bottom, hiding underneath several partial skeins of Caron Simply Soft Brites, was another goddamn skein of the fucking Lion Brand Jiffy in Salem.
RARGH. SO CLOSE.