A little mystery...

So, I have this yarn...

See, usually I'm very organized and I put all of my stash into Ravelry and keep ball bands and all that jazz, but this yarn has a story.

I acquired it sometime before October 11, 2006 when it first appeared in a picture of my sock stash for Socktoberfest.



Then it marinated for a while until I got into Ravelry and put it in my Ravelry stash, strangely using a different Flickr account than my normal one, on June 28, 2007. Apparently I created a second Flickr account in June of 2007, uploaded stash pics over a couple weeks, and completely forgot about it.*

*until tonight when I was going crazy trying to figure out the details of this yarn!

In the fall of 2008, I gave the yarn to my mom to start her second pair of socks and deleted it from my Ravelry stash.

Fast forward to December 2011, when my mom declares that she should knit a second pair of socks and I remind her that I gave her yarn and needles. She can't recall, and goes and finds the barely-started socks in a drawer. (Minus the ball band and any identifying yarn information, of course.)

She declares that she doesn't like the way they look and is going to go buy some other yarn, so I pull the socks-in-progress off the needles - of course she wanted to keep the needles! - and take them home to knit for myself.

This is all well and good, except for the fact that I have absolutely no idea what the yarn is. And, being me, this starts making me crazy when I try to put the project into Ravelry. So I spent several hours last night going through my blog archives and trying to find where I posted about the yarn, since I seem to recall that it was a gift. I never posted. But I did find the stash pic above which gave me a clue about when I got it.

Then while falling asleep I think that I wouldn't have deleted the stash pics from my Flickr. It popped into my head at knitting group, so tonight when I got home I went back through my Flickr archives trying to find the time when I was photographing my stash in the summer of 2007 shortly after getting into Ravelry... but I couldn't find it.

In fact, I came and started this blog post thinking I would beg for the help of the internet in identifying the yarn from that first crummy photo, when I suddenly thought "Hey, didn't I have a different Flickr name once?" and found it.



And those are the lengths I'll go to to solve yarn mysteries... knitting is so relaxing. ;)

Finishing

My knitting group companions Erin and Jessica of the Doubleknit Podcast have decided that 2012 is the year of FFS - the Finish, Frog, and Slog along.

As someone with far too many WIPs, I think this is a splendid idea. So here's my first finish:



I started these plain socks for Halloween, but as you can see it took me a while to get to them. I like wearing plain stockinette socks, and I have a lot of variegated yarn, so I try to keep some going most of the time.

Started: 10/6/11
Finished: 1/19/12
Yarn: Crash Into Ewe in Monster Mash

So, after finishing these plain socks, I started another pair in the yarn I dyed at Stephania's class. It started off like this:



And changed to this:



And is making some interesting striping socks, which I'll show you in a bit!

I've also been putting in some time on some languishing non-sock projects, but more on that later.