basement yarn

I barely have a stash, and for now I'd like to keep it that way. I'm a student living with my parents probably moving away to an exotic foreign land for grad school in the next few years (or so I keep telling myself), and I don't want to drag a large stash with me; nor do I want to leave it behind. I'm trying to buy with specific projects in mind, and I'm trying to avoid yarn sales. Sigh. My stash at the moment has remnants and leftovers, and several skeins of ancient fingering-weight wool from Switzerland that will probably become socks, (not superwash, so very impractical but oh well) or maybe a beret.

My basement has a sizeable stash, however. It is comprised of yarn that my mom has collected over the years, as well as donations from grandparents who no longer want to knit. Lots of weird yarn, and mostly anonymous yarn - it's great fun searching through it. I've always liked household archaeology. Some of it dates back to my infancy, when my parents lived in Germany. Like the eight balls of anonymous charcoal 50% alpaca, 30% new wool, 20% polyacryl marked at 5 Deutsche Marks per ball. It's so fuzzy.

I found this yarn basement stash-diving last summer and originally intended it for my first sweater, but it was the wrong weight (DKish) and I didn't think I'd have enough. But given my obsession with sweatervests, I was bound to come to this conclusion eventually. Summer isn't exactly the best time for making a sweater vest, I guess, but maybe it will encourage me to get out there and find a job in an air-conditioned office. Maybe. I'm sure I'll have too much yarn for this vest, but I'm still not convinced there's enough here for the kind of sweater I'd want to make. My leftovers will go back into the basement yarn abyss to await discovery by hapless explorers in years to come. No big deal.

I think I'll add a touch of waist shaping, if I can figure out how to do that without too much trouble. I have been looking at the Stitch and Bitch Nation sweater customization suggestions and thinking it would really be useful to have some basic mental math skills again. I'll work on it. I'm not sure if such a deep v neck is a good idea either, but I guess I'll find out.