But the Yarn is Discontinued!!

I'm back working on my Gingko Biloba shawl.  I took it with me to visit BrineyDeep and surprisingly made progress. I am still shocked how knitting on a project turns into progress on the knitted object. Uses up yarn and everything.

Baffling.

This yarn has been sitting in my stash for quite a while. Ravelry says I uploaded it October 2009 and the yarn pictures are on the carpet from the La Crosse apartment, so that sounds about right. And in the stash it has sat. A couple of times I considered selling it or sending it on to a new home, but I really do like the color (Tea Party) and it seemed a project would eventually come.

It is not a fast project. Each petal is 30 rows and while none of them are that long, keeping track of short rows requires more brain power than my usual socks and I have to haul around a copy of the pattern.

Each petal is taking about an hour.  It might go faster if I would stop also trying to do other things while knitting but I don't think it would be all that much. This will be 1300 yards, or the equivalent of nearly 4 pair of socks. I'm only knitting on size 4 (3.5mm) needles. And if a pair of socks usually takes me around 20 hours, that puts me at around 80 hours on this project. That math is kind of disheartening. I prefer to think about the fact that last time I reached in the project bag (Stitched by Jessalu --the Hedgehog Tea bag), the center-pull ball was feeling decidedly squishy.

And then I went to update something on Ravelry and clicked over to the DIC Starry page. The yarn is discontinued. For a second my brain froze and then ran through 25 scenarios all of which involved me buying cases of Starry from kindly knitters who had Trade/Sell marked on what was left in their stash.

Fortunately, I exhaled and remembered that I am beyond out of room in the stash, that it's taken me 6 years to come up with a project I wanted to knit this yarn into, and that I have another 60 hours at least on this shawl to spend with the yarn I have. Also, I have one more skein in another colorway.

I think that was very restrained of me, don't you?