Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning has started early at the Phaery Godmother household. I'm thinning out my doll collection so I can keep my favorites better organized. As I weed through them, I'm putting them on my Rummage Sale page. Right now I've listed Jakks-Pacific Elle and G.I.R.L. Force dolls as well as an Alex or two.

I need to weed out my personal library, too. One book I'm sort of sorry to part with is Principles of Knitting by June Hiatt, which is going for a pretty penny on eBay these days. Yesterday an auction for Principles of Knitting ended at $300 + $15 shipping. I could really use the money for some home maintenance projects, so I'm going to be brave and put my copy up for sale. I'm offering it at $299, insured shipping within the continental US included. It has slight wear to the dust jacket, and some staining along the top edge which doesn't penetrate to the pages, but the book is otherwise mint. Drop a line to phaery_godmother (at) yahoo.com if you're interested. It will help get your message past my spam filters if you put "phaerydolls" in the subject line, but I'll be checking my Bulk folder carefully just in case.

As part of spring cleaning, I'm sorting and organizing my stash. My goodness, there's enough yarn here to keep a knitter busy for quite a long time.

My stash includes a large amount of ivory wool worsted, plus a huge collection of needlwork yarn leftovers in every possible color. It would be perfect for duplicating a cabled cardigan I saw once, where the diamond patterns were filled in with floral embroidery.

I love these tomato red mohair blends that I bought ages ago at Quelle in Germany. The solid and the flecked were purchased at separate times, so it's sheer serendipity that they happened to match. Now I need to find or design a pattern that shows off the yarns (and my overweight self) to their best advantage. If I can incorporate the red eyelash yarn, so much the better.


I tried to make this fringed shawl with some Trellis yarn. Finished dimensions (without fringe) on Size 15 needles should be 75" wide by 13" deep. So how did I end up with something 100" wide and 30" deep? And that horrid run up the center, besides! How can I do so many complicated projects so well, then mess up on something as utterly simple as a garter stitch triangle?


At this point I haven't decided what to do. I don't want to rip out and start over, because knitting on those jumbo needles isn't all that comfortable. Could I leave off the fringe and call it a scarf? Unravel and use the yarn in a different project? It would probably be really beautiful combined with the camel-colored worsted, but there isn't enough of the camel to complete a sweater. I could buy more yarn that would coordinate with both the Trellis and the camel worsted, but that sort of defeats the purpose of using up my stash, doesn't it? Help!