The Strontium Rae Zone

Post Title TBD!

I have been pretty busy for the last month and a half with various personal issues. Maybe I will discuss them here someday, maybe not. What I will discuss is the creative projects I have gotten up to.

One project I've been working on is a blanket made out of scrap yarn. My mom also crochets, and after many years of making things for herself, her children, her sisters, her niece, her friends, and her pets, she ended up with a lot of leftover yarn. It wasn't ever enough to make a full other project, and often the people she was making things for had very different tastes. So the yarn sat in a cupboard at my parents' house... when it wasn't getting pulled out by one of the cats and carted around as a special prize to show what a fierce hunter he was. (Garf, I miss you!). As such, it was both annoying for my parents to deal with and also covered in cat hair. Mom nearly threw it all in the trash, until I stopped her and said I'd use it.

The unfortunate thing about a bunch of yarn that has been in a house full of cats and cigarette smoke is that it tends to smell like cats and cigarette smoke. As such, it was hard for me to feel comfortable making things for other people out of some of it. The more cat hair was stuck to it, the more worried I got about setting off someone's allergies without realizing. Meanwhile, I was building up my own collection of yarn for my own project ideas. My mom tends to prefer acrylic yarns due to their ease of care machine washing and drying, wide variety of colors, and affordability. Her favorite project to give as gifts are bedspread sized blankets, which racks up quite the cost even when buying the cheapest of yarn and is also pretty difficult to handwash or hang out to dry. Meanwhile, I started out buying my own acrylic yarns before switching to focusing more on natural fibers due to environmental concerns. Even when I did buy acrylic yarns (a sweater for my girlfriend, a blanket for my niece) it was because I needed a large quantity of a specific color of yarn or I needed to make sure the yarn was safe for babies. (Baby yarn has stricter chemical safety and flamability standards, meaning it is both less likely to set off skin sensitivities and less likely to catch fire. Meanwhile, acrylic is machine washable, meaning the new parents can pop the blanket in the wash if there are any messes). Using up the cat-and-cigarette scented half-skeins was even more difficult than using up my own personally chosen stash (which was already quite the task).

However, a few weeks ago I started trying to condense down my yarn stash as part of a more general attempt at cleaning up my space. I realized a few things all at once:

I did not want to put the cat-and-cigarette scented yarn, which had mostly ended up in a bin full of half-skeins, in the bin of full skeins.
Part of why I did not want to put them together was because I wanted to keep the things for which I'd lost the yarn labels away from the things for which I still had the label.
The other part of why I did not want to put them together was because I did not want to make the nicer yarn that I had in my full skein bin smell like cigarettes and/or cats.
One of my yarn project bins was just taken up by 1 project, a sweater I was making for my girlfriend June. All the pieces (front, back, 2 sleeves, turtleneck) had been completed for years, but I was keeping that yarn separated until I'd actually finished sewing the sweater together. Once I finished that project, the bin could be combined with my large yarn bin.
I had bought far too much yarn for the sweater for June. I think I had misread the original pattern, and then bought extra yarn to be safe. There was a sale going on, and also the blue yarn was sold in the largest skein I have ever seen.
Anything that enters my parents' house, even if it originally did not have cat or dog hair on it or smell like cigarettes, will end up smelling like cats and/or dogs and/or cigarettes within about 2 hours. Being careful about pet hair contamination makes sense for the newborn who entered the home within the last year (due to newborns being delicate), not so much for anything else entering the home.
I need to get rid of this fucking yarn before I go insane. I am very picky about textures and materials, and most of this is not up to my standards.

There were some pretty simple solutions to these problems: finish up the sweater for June, and find a project that used up as much of my scrap yarn as I could so that I could go through whatever remained and either use it or say goodbye and toss it.

I will add pictures of these later, but I have finished June's sweater and started on a blanket. The idea is to make as many squares as I can of a variety of sizes, and then when I feel like I have enough I will stitch them together and give the blanket to my brother so that he can decide either use it himself or give it to his daughters. Right now I am still on the creating squares part of that task. It turns out small bits of scrap yarn leftover from both my and my mom's various acrylic projects don't always create the largest squares before I run out. Add joint problems and focus on other projects to that, and it is going to take me a decent number of weeks (if not months!) to finish this project.

It is nice to have my passion for crocheting come back. Due to various personal issues and what I am begining to suspect is Seasonal Affective Disorder, I lost all joy in creating anything and couldn't come up with any ideas for new projects or passion for my existing WIPs for many many months. It's been nice to be able to do things with my hands again. I'd missed it.

While I was having trouble bringing myself to crochet, I decided to start on a latch hook project. I believe I bought the kit right around the time I was buying yarn for a triangle shawl for myself from Herrschner's. I hadn't seen latch hook projects for sale anywhere in years, and I remembered liking the 1 time I'd tried it as a kid. The box sat in my room for months while I tried to work on crochet projects and other life situations. When I started getting other aspects of my life in order and realized that I was having trouble with creativity I figured that the sort of paint-by-numbers feeling of latch hook was perfect for getting my hands on some yarn again without the fear and pressure that was starting to form around crochet.

My hands are starting to get tired from typing so much, and I don't have enough focus left to add photos of my projects right now (or talk about how cute June was when I finally gave her that sweater. Alas!). I will hopefully have the energy and focus later. If not, too bad for you, you won't get to know what any of this stuff looks like.