When You Cannot Finish the Hat...

"Finishing the hat--how you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world from a window while you finish the hat.
Mapping out a sky . . . what you feel like, planning a sky . . .
What you feel when voice that come through the window go, until they distance and die
Until there's nothing but sky."
-- Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George

Only, I cannot finish the hat. I'm waiting on Stash Dash.

The pile of not-yet-finished things is getting higher over here. It doesn't help that I have abandoned almost everything that I was working on for my Firework shawl. The newest socks that are underway? They've been left at work so I don't need to keep hauling them back and forth. The two other pairs that could use some work before Stash Dash so I could have a comfortable lead? Wasting away in their project bags.

I did manage to work a bit on the shawl that I'm making for Loopy Academy. Only, it was to realize that I will probably want to add an extra 8-16 rows depending on how much yarn I have left, which will mean that rather than 8 rows and a bind off left, which is where I presently should be, I'm back into wondering how far along I'll end up going.  It is likely that time rather than wool is going to determine the final size of the shawl--which will be helped if I stop knitting black stockinette.

I'm also starting to get edgy about the black yarn. I love black, I wear it almost everyday. A pair of black pants and a jewel toned top and you have about 90% of my wardrobe. But it's not unrelieved black knitting...

This is one of the problems with knitting something where you are going to use every single yard of the skein. There won't be leftovers--which is great--but that also means that rather than just knitting up those 300 or so yards needed, you are making the whole 475 yards in each skein. I take pictures of the increasing squishiness of the solid black skein to prove to myself that there has been progress. 

As all this black is simultaneously making all the colored yarns in my stash that much more appealing, I downloaded the current spreadsheet from Ravelry to try and get a sense of just how much wool is taking up space around Chez Hedgehog. The answer, which is fairly accurate (within 5K or so)...is 80 kilometers. 80,000 meters of wool. So when I was ruminating that I might shoot for 7K over the summer for Stash Dash, I was thinking about somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of my stash. Which frankly isn't very much.

And doesn't include the yarn on the way for an upcoming baby present.

Part of me is presently screaming "you need to go Cold Sheep already!" so I can divest myself of some of the yarn. And part of me is eyeing a yarn sale...I wonder if carpenters get a similar sense of guilt.

Anyway, I'm trying to get projects to the edge for Stash Dash 2016. I'd love to have a K or two done in the first week.