Oddball compulsion

The Afghans for Afghans vest is drying right now, and I will sew on buttons tomorrow, photograph it on one of my kids and send it off. I was contemplating making another one before the deadline, but I have a new compulsion.

I joined the Stash Busters! group on ravelry, not really because I feel I need to go one a "yarn diet," but because I really have a huge stash and I like to make things out of it. Some of the members of the group have posted about holding out rewards to themselves of only being able to knit with or buy some particularly yummy yarn if they knit all of their stash yarn. I do not exaggerate that it would take me many years to knit up all of my stash yarn, so that's not the point.

But I have been thinking about the many oddballs and onesey-twosey balls I have (not leftovers) and about doing some projects that combine them in creative ways. This is, of necessity, about color, although I'm easing into it by doing the first one with a lot of grey yarns and three balls of colorful, self-striping wool.

(As an aside, when I went through my stash in a fairly major way last year, I was pretty amazed by the sheer quantity of grey yarn I found. That and red.)

So I'm thinking about a jacket, since these are all wools, and one is pretty itchy. The colorful yarn, the boucle and the ribbon will be combined into some sort of slip-stitch pattern (although Tunisian crochet is another possibility) and I'm also thinking of knitting the fronts on the bias, with the diagonal forming the neckline, and the colorful part the neckline border. Then I thought about putting a diamond in the back, and running the back diagonals off of it.

I would still rather work my usual knit-in, set-in sleeves from the top, so a challenge would be establishing the diagonals with short rows, and how to insert the diamond. If I keep the body armhole increases out of the bias section, I'll have some extra room for waist shaping.

And the truth must be told, there is some extra grey yarn in the sale bin at Yarndogs that I'm thinking of buying to add to this (despite the abovementioned superfluity of grey yarn.) But I'd have to get a full 50% off to make it worthwhile.

And while I'm thinking about this new project, I'm knitting away on the ballet t-shirt. I made a lot of progress on my trip this weekend; it should be done in a couple days. And there's still warm weather to wear it in!