The Yarn Diet

[cimorene]

The Yarn Diet lasted from the holiday season last year until the end of January in order to fully cover all three surviving parent birthdays.

The purpose of the Yarn Diet was to minimize distractions due to purchasing new yarn and ensure that all holiday gifts were knitted/crocheted and given to their recipients on time.

Especially the cashmere scarf that Wax was supposed to make for her mom's 2012 birthday, but didn't even start until last fall.

The Yarn Diet has ended!

And there was rejoicing at first, even though

• while the Yarn Diet was in effect, we purchased yarn for at least 3 new projects and impulse-bought some random yarn;

but then I noticed that in fact, not only did Wax not finish her mom's 2012 birthday scarf, she started several unplanned projects in the interim, including some unplanned-for ones and one that has nothing to do with the holiday season, the latter of which she did not finish. And then she stopped knitting all together when she ran out of other things to knit. Now she doesn't knit at all, she just reads hockey news and hockey bulletin boards. (I'm hoping she'll get over it before I get around to investigating divorce proceedings.)

So therefore, not only will there be no yarn-related PURCHASES until the scarf is finished, Wax will also not be allowed to do any knitting except the scarf until it is finished because I want new yarn and I'm unhappy about this sympathetic abstinence.

And unrelatedly she has entered a binding commitment to purchase ice skates and come skating regularly with me in exchange for being allowed to watch a hockey game. (The permission was explicitly for just one hockey game, but she didn't find that adequate so has been treating it as a blanket permission.)

Comments

[james]

Tell her to knit during hockey games! I find that I knit faster (and tighter) while watching hockey. ;-)

[cimorene]

Unfortunately the scarf cannot be knit while watching anything because the pattern requires too much concentration. She says this is why she has taken so long to work on it, because she didn't have any appropriate podcasts.

[james]

This is why I make a lot of stockinette and garter stitch things. ;-)

[cimorene]

She is better than me at cables and has totally knitted a lot of cable things while watching television! But yes, in general it's an argument for some level of simplicity... it's almost unbearable if you can't do anything else at the same time, to me at least. When I run out of television to marathon I hit a snag in knitting until I can find something else to start.

[james]

I actually can't watch sports unless I'm knitting - I LOVE football and hockey, but I get so distracted if my hands aren't busy. But I get tons of knitting done during football season.

[bluesbell]

What kind of yarn did Wax use for the cashmere scarf?

[cimorene]

She's using 2 strands of Yubina lace-weight 100% cashmere held together: http://www.ravelry.com/yarns/library/yubina-laceweight-cashmere

... they also sell thicker cashmeres, which we will eventually get around to trying out, but we haven't sampled them yet.