Yardage for 2009

I just totaled my stash yardage. As of today, including Christmas gift yarn and not subtracting yarn used in WIPs*, I have 42,236 yards of yarn. I did adjust the spreadsheet for those skeins of yarn that for some odd reason will not subtract out yarn used on projects. (I have posted about this and I think the threads always get buried because no one ever tracks it or replies. Sigh.) Using the yard to mile calculator, that is 23.997727273 miles. My foal for the year is to get the stash to under 20 miles. I would love to get it down to about 15, but that is probably a little too optimistic.

As I have mentioned before, I am not much of a Knit-a-long person. I did decided to participate in the Stash Knit Down 2009's 52 in 52 projects. It really isn't that you have to complete a project each week, but the goal is to have 52 new finished projects in your project notebook by December 31, 2009. It sounds like a lot, but really, when I started planning it out it went fast.

I am making my own monthly dishcloth club this year. I went through free on-line dishcloth picture patterns and picked one out for each month. This is of course very much like the Monthly Dishcloth Club found on Yahoo groups which I did for awhile, but I think this will work better for me. It is only one pattern a month and although the picture won't be a surprise for me, I know I will like it. (I was never so glad I didn't knit something as I was the month the dishcloth picture was of the 3 crosses. Even though that is my faith I don't like to decorate with religious symbols and using a dishcloth like that would feel sacreligious to me.) The other thing is that I spread the instructions out over 7 days instead of only 5 like the MDC usually did. I need fewer lines of pattern each day for something like that.

I am also going to knit a baby bib a month. At this rate I should really burn through my cotton yarn stash. Also in baby knitting, there are a few sweaters I have my eye on.

I have a number of single skeins of wool or alpaca. I think I will make some more hats. I used to think I had a lot of hats, but the truth is that I don't have nearly as many hats that I like as I thought, and I would like to make a few for charity as well.

Of course I also have my 2009 shawl picked out too. The Large Rectangle in Leaf and Trellis is in my queue with a deadline of Dec. 31, 2009. I hope to knit myself a sweater this year, but I need to finish Mark's sweater before I am allowed to even think about that.

That is where I am at the unofficial beginning of 2009. After all, I do not think I will finish any of my current WIPs prior to Thursday morning.

*This is mostly true. Whole skeins of yarn used for Mark's sweater are being recorded on the project page as they are used, so those are already subtracted out of the totals because I can't keep track of how many balls of yarn I use otherwise. In addition, any partial balls of yarn finished off because I am using them in the log cabin blanket have been subtracted out already.