A twelve step program for dealing with yarn addiction.

After writing yesterday’s post, I realized that I might be addicted to yarn. Not that there is really anything wrong with that, I mean, yarn isn’t really hazardous to your health. Unless you are allergic to it, and I guess some people can be accidentally strangled by it, but besides that, I can’t think of anything that would be all that adverse about owning yarn. My problem is that I own a small house and large quantities of yarn. I’ve been pretty good about keeping the yarn stored in just a couple of rooms of my house, but I have noticed that the yarn keeps multiplying. Whenever I go stash diving, I find all of this really nice yarn I must have bought last time I had a yarn binge. Anyway, I’ve devised a strategy to handle my growing yarn collection. This would also work for pattern books or almost anything that is taking over the space of your house.

A twelve step program for dealing with yarn addiction.
Step 1: Admit that you are addicted to yarn.

Step 2: Believe that yarn will not take over your life.

Step 3: Make a decision to go on a yarn diet. Set a budget of the number of skeins/balls/hanks of yarn you will buy in the next year.

Step 4: Make an inventory of all of your yarn. Really just sort of count how many balls of yarn you have. Also count the number of projects that are on the needles.

Step 5: Admit to the skeins of yarn that are hidden in strange places around your house and anywhere you have decided to store it.

Step 6: Be willing to go through your stash and either use up some of the yarn that has been sitting there for years, or give it away. Give away anything that you know you will never knit with. You know what I’m talking about, the skein that sends chills down your spine whenever you touch it. The balls of yarn you bought for 25 cents per ball, but soon realized that you paid too much.

Step 7: Humbly ask someone to help you with this process

Step 8: Make a list of all of the projects you want make with your yarn. Match yarn to pattern. Ravelry is a great resource for this.

Step 9: Stop ignoring the partially finished projects that have been on your needles for ages. Either vow to finish them very soon, rip/frog them and make them into something else, or cast off and find a new use for whatever it was. A lot of knitted things are flat, maybe get a bunch of these abandoned projects and sew them all together, making a blanket for those cold winter nights. If you have some sleeves from an unfinished sweater, sew them on your blanket too, you could make one of those blankets with the sleeves like the ones seen on TV. Be Creative! Have fun!

Step 10: Continue to take inventory of your yarn stash. It is probably overwhelming and a little scary, but it can be overcome.

Step 11: Knit a little of something you seriously want to knit. Change takes time, and if you work too hard at all of this too quickly, you might get overwhelmed and disgusted with the whole process.

Step 12: Have a yarn awakening, think about what you like in a yarn and what you don’t like in a yarn. If you know that you absolutely hate knitting with cotton, or silk or wool or acrylic, stop buying it. Even if the yarn is on sale for an awesome price, avoid it, if you know that you won’t ever enjoy using it.

Just remember, there are worse things to be addicted to than yarn.

Might as well face it, you’re addicted to yarn…

Top 10 ways to tell if you are addicted to yarn:

10. Your yarn stash takes up more room in your house than your bed.
9. You go to a yarn shop one weekend, buy sock yarn, then the next weekend, when you are at another yarn shop, you see sock yarn ½ price and have to buy it, even though you have lots of sock yarn at home.
8. Even though your yarn stash takes up a very large amount of space in your home, you still have the need to take any yarn that is offered to you.
7. You have this fantasy that involves owning a yarn shop, or developing a line of yarn.
6. You secretly wish you could move to the country, buy a few acres of land and raise any animals whose fur/wool/hair can be made into yarn. Alpacas, Llamas, and Merino sheep are on the top of my list for this.
5. You wish they would sell yarn in your grocery store, it seems like they sell everything else.
4. Whenever you buy new skeins/hanks/balls of yarn, you have to tell your significant other to sit before you tell him/her how much you spent, or how many new skeins/hanks/balls of yarn he/she is the new owner of, because you share everything, right?
3. You knit a sweater for someone who is much smaller than you, but when you try to give it to them, its almost impossible. Not because you need this sweater, but because you wonder if this person will really understand how amazing this Alpaca yarn is.
2. You take up spinning so that you can make more yarn.
1. You carry yarn around with you at all times. Never know when you will get stranded somewhere and need something to do.

Check out the follow up to this: A twelve step program for dealing with yarn addiction.

Happy birthday to me!

The other night, Patrick took me out to celebrate. Lets just say my birthday is sometime in September. We went to the French Quarter. Our first stop was the French Market. The French Market's Farmer's Market is currently under renovation, which is sort of disappointing. The flea market is open, I'm not really into flea markets, but Patrick likes them, so I tag along. I saw some vendors with handmade things like crochet and carved wooden things and I also saw things like designer knock off sunglasses, jewelry and Mardi Gras masks. Its sort of surprising how many different things can be found in that one place.

We then made our way toward St. Louis Cathedral. We passed Central Grocery, which has my favorite Muffelatas. They were closed, so we kept walking. We passed Café Du Monde, my favorite place for Beignets. As we made our way toward the Cathedral, I remembered why I like New Orleans. It's the history and the wrought iron work and the architecture and the people. I'm shy, so people aren't usually ever my favorite part of anything, but I do like many of the people of New Orleans. There are some people who seriously make me nervous, like the people who want to bet you they can tell you where you got your shoes. Do people in other parts of the country do that? Or is that a New Orleans thing? If anyone ever asks you that, say "On my feet". I guess the first person who thought of the whole "I bet you I can tell you where you got your feet" was sort of clever, but hearing it for so many years, it sort of gets old.

We kept walking and reached The Quarter Stitch. When we walked in, there was the cutest little white dog walking around the shop. He immediately ran up to me and started sniffing. It was clear that he wanted to play and wanted to check out everyone who came into his shop. I think he was either a Maltese or a miniture poodle. Patrick played with him while I looked through all of their yarn. Their selection of yarn is beautiful, and I found lots of yarns that I wanted. I settled on two skeins of Koigu, to make a hat for Patrick's Christmas present.

The shop also carries many needlepoint canvases. All of the canvases are sold as kits, which I'm sure is nice for anyone who does needlepoint. There were some gorgeous canvases, one that I especially like was of a Yorkie, with all of his hair flowing around. I've never been into needlepoint or cross stitch, mostly because I didn't like stabbing myself with the needle's point when I was younger.

Hurricane Katrina didn't cause much direct damage to the French Quarter. There was damage, but the Quarter was mostly spared. The most noticeable damage that Hurricane Katrina left was the lack of interest in visiting New Orleans during Hurricane Season, which is completely understandable. I know I wouldn't want to have to evacuate from my vacation.

After the yarn shop, we walked to K Paul's Restaurant, but it didn't open for dinner until 5:30, we were a bit late and decided we'd rather go there with my parents because they like K Paul's so much. We walked a little farther and decided to go to Dickie Brennan's Palace Cafe. They also open for dinner at 5:30, so we waited at the bar for a bit and I ordered a drink. I think it was called the Pearl Sunset, I could be wrong about that though. The drink was very good, very fruity and sweet. We tried something we hadn't had before, the crabmeat cheesecake, which has a sort of custard consistency, and is very yummy. For dinner, Patrick had a stuffed pork chop and I had pecan crusted Gulf Fish. My dish was sort of like candy, the pecans have a sugary coating and the fish is crispy. For desert, I had the white chocolate bread pudding and Patrick had the Creme Brulee. We shared our desserts and I prefered his sweet crunchy creme brulee to my Bread Pudding. Don't get me wrong, I liked the Bread Pudding, there was just something about the creamy creme brulee that I just loved. Everything was excellet and I had a really great evening.

The Local Yarn Shop (LYS)

There are many places to buy yarn these days, with stores like Wal-Mart, Hobby Lobby, Michael’s, and Joann’s, everywhere, one might wonder why should you seek out a local yarn shop to buy yarn? The local yarn shops typically have higher end yarns, made with more expensive fibers. So, why go out of your way to find a smaller store with more expensive yarns? One reason is for the expertise that the local places have. They usually employ knitters, or at least people who are interested in some kind of fiber arts, like spinning, crochet or needle point.

Local shops are also what I think of when I think of the American Dream. To me, the American Dream is about people doing what they truly love and making a living with it. I really wonder if corporations and chain stores are killing the American Dream. Are they making it so that people can’t own their own businesses? In a lot of instances, yes, they are at the very least, making it harder for individuals. A few years ago, Wal-mart was trying to open a store in New Orleans. There were signs everywhere around the city saying that they didn’t want a “Sprawl-Mart”. At that point in time, I really didn’t understand why Wal-Mart wouldn’t be a good thing for the city. Really, Wal-Mart employs lots of people, they have very low prices and have such a variety of merchandize that saves consumers time. Not having to stop at a grocery store, a pharmacy, a fast food restaurant, a clothing store, a pet store and a toy store seem like a great thing for the consumer, but are they really helping out Americans all that much?

I’ve spent hours of my life in Wal-Mart, and I really do enjoy shopping there. I’ve just come to the realization lately that my house isn’t big enough to keep filling it up with things I don’t need. Also, I tend to spend a lot less money when I buy yarn at a local shop than when I buy it at some place like Wal-Mart. Think about it, when you shop at Wal-Mart, do you ever buy things that you really don’t need, you just bought because the price was right and you really had nothing in mind to use it for? I have. When I shop at a store where yarn is expensive, I take my time and only buy the things I love and know I’ll use to make something that I’ll actually use. When I go to Wal-Mart or any of the places I mentioned earlier, I buy a lot of yarn that I really don’t need and it just sits in my stash for a long time just taking up space. I seem to have the biggest problem with the words Clearance and Sale. These two words should strike fear in the hearts of husbands everywhere. If a Sale or a Clearance has things that I will use, then it’s ok. If it’s a bunch of fuzzy, sort of nasty feeling yarn that I can’t figure out what to do with; yarn that I only bought because it was only twenty-five cents per skein; I need to practice more self restraint.

I did find this very nice merino wool at Michael’s once for only about $2 per skein. It was a very pretty red color and I knew I wanted to make a sweater with a similar yarn anyway, so buying that was a good thing. The most amazing thing about the yarn was that all of the skeins were from the same dye lot. If you’re wondering, a dye lot refers to the batch that the yarn was dyed in. When companies dye yarn, they usually dye it one batch or lot at a time. When they want to dye more yarn than they can fit in one batch/lot, they run another batch through the dyes. The problem with this is that there may be slight variations between batches. Dye lot # 777 might be a slight bit darker than Dye lot # 888. The color may still look the same, but if you compare the two yarns with different dye lots, you may notice a difference. When knitting with two different dye lots, it is very likely that a line where the two different dye lots meet will occur. This line would annoy me, and that is why, when I am buying yarn for a particular project, I make sure all of the yarn has the same dye lot. There are ways to deal with the problem of different dye lots, but I try to avoid them.



In the New Orleans area, there are four Yarn shops. Garden District Needle Works, Bette Bornside Co. , The Quarter Stitch, and Needle Arts Studio.



Garden District Needleworks, is the shop that is most convenient for me. It is a large store, on Magazine Street. The store seems to be an old house, it has two rooms in the front, where they usually have discounted yarn and . The back room is where the rest of the yarn is.



Needle Arts Studio is located in Metairie at 115 Metairie Rd. Their number is (504) 832-3050. I've been to this one a couple of times. I like the fact that they have a good amount of parking. I havn't been here in about a year and couldn't find a website.

I have never been to the Quarter Stitch, which is located in the French Quarter. I don't make it out to the Quarter all that much and havn't made it to this store yet. Bette Bornside is another yarn shop I havn't visited yet.

What is your favorite local yarn shop? I love to visit LYS's when I am on vacation and would love to hear about the ones in your area.

Our Trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee

One of the things I was looking forward to doing while we were in Gatlinburg was visiting a yarn shop located there, called the Smokey Mountain Spinnery.



Due to a lack of planning on my part, Patrick and I walked for what seemed like a mile uphill to the yarn shop. It really didn't look all that far on the map. As we were walking up the hill, we stopped in the shade to look at the misleading map, a really nice lady told us she was a local and asked where were trying to go. We told her and she said she really didn't think the Spinnery was still open. At this point, I felt sort of dumb for not calling the place to make sure it was still in business. Then she said that the shopping center where the Spinnery was suposed to be has free parking. I said, this is silly, we should just turn back, we don't even know if the place will be there when we get there. But Patrick insisted that we keep walking. I kept slathering on the sunblock, and we traveled on. When we finally made it to the shopping center called the Winery, I saw the sign. The Spinnery was just ahead, on the second story of a nearby building.

The store was open! We went up and took a look around. There were lots of different beautiful yarns, and I wanted all of them, but narrowed it down to three skeins. I bought two sock yarns and one yarn that was spun by the owner. I really like the one that she spun; I’d say it’s a worsted weight yarn. I bought the really big hank of it, and I’m sort of wondering how I will put it into balls so I can use it. It’s a really pretty light brown Alpaca yarn.



One thing I really liked about this store is that there are actually two stores. The yarn shop is on one side of the store and the Smoky Mountain angler shop is on the other. This made it easier for me to shop without feeling bad that Patrick was bored. Another feature of the store that I liked were the llama and alpaca dolls around the store holding knitting needles. Selma said that they are made by a friend of hers. They were adorable, and I really wanted to get one, but I decided to buy the yarn instead.
While we were checking out, she told us she was headed to downtown Gatlinburg to demonstrate spinning. She is part of Smoky Mountain Tunes & Tales™, which is a program where musicians, artisans, and storytellers entertain visitors while teaching them something about Gatlinburg’s culture and history.

Comfy Cotton

Cotton is a material that most people who live in warm climates like New Orleans are very farmiliar with. Cotton is much cooler than wool, for the most part cotton is machine washable and dryable, and it seems to get softer the more you wear it. There are disadvantages to this fiber though, it isn't stretchy, which makes it harder to knit with. It shrinks if it isn't preshrunk. Cotton garments can be very heavy, especially when wet.

I found an interesting website all about cotton production and how the fiber goes from plant to fabric. It is the website for the National Cotton Council of America. The Cotton Counts: "Cotton: From Field to Fabric" article tells all about the Cotton Boll and how cotton Seed is used to feed livestock and make oil for salad dressing. Cotton is also used in Astronaut's flight suits and in the American Dollar.

Cotton, when used for knitting, can be Mercerized or not. Mercerizing refers to a process where the fibers are "immersed under tension in a caustic soda solution and then later neutralized. This causes fiber to swell permanently. This gives the fabric a silken sheeen, improves its strength and increases its affinity for dye" (This definition is from cotton.org; field to fabric)

Here is the 100% cotton, it is Cottontots from Bernat, in the Little Boy Blue colorway:

Here is the Mercerized Cotton, it is called Sinfonia, made by Omega, in the black colorway:

Here are the two yarns together:

Have a Comfy Day!

Global Wildlife Center

The Global Wildlife Center is located in Folsom, La.
I went there yesterday with my parents and some of my mom's coworkers, Patrick couldn't make it because of work. It was a lot of fun and I even fed a llama and a Giraffe out of my hands. Having the Giraffe eat out of my hand felt a lot like when I give my dog Dozer, who is a Boxer a treat. They have really soft muzzles and sort of stick their long tongues into my hand to make sure they get everything. The tips of their tongues are a very dark purple, almost black. The tour guide told us the tongues are this color so that they don't get sun burnt. They spend about half of their lives with their tongues sticking out picking leaves from high trees.

I've loved llamas since I saw the movie The Emperor's New Groove. That's the movie I watch when I'm feeling sick. One of my favorite things about llamas is their fur. It is very soft and can be made into yarn.

The scarf in the picture below was made with Baby Llama yarn. It is very soft and warm. I purchased the yarn last year when I was in Natchez, Mississippi for the Balloon Fest. The store where I bought it was really nice and the people were very friendly and helpful. The store is called Natchez Needle Arts. The store sells yarn and things for knitting/crochet on one side and needlepoint/embroidery on the other. Patrick and my dad's favorite part of the shop was the comfy sofa in the front of the store.

Going this time of year was interesting because of all of the baby birds and animals around. The cutest in my opinion were the baby Rhea birds. They were so tiny and they all stayed in a group by their father. Rachael, our tour guide told us that the males mate with many females and when the babies are born, the mothers leave the babies for the fathers to take care of. If, in about a year, the mother comes back and doesn't like the way the father is raising the babies, she pulls his tail feathers out. I'm sure this hurts, but the real problem for him when this happens is that the tail feathers are the way he attracts mates.

The Zebras are the one animal that we were warned about. Our tour guide said "The Zebras are black, white and mean all over". They really didn't look all that mean. They are beautiful, even if they aren't the nicest animals in the world.

There were also many deer, antelope, gazelle, kangaroo and even some camels.