What comes first...the chicken or the egg?

#1

Or, in our case, what comes first…the project or the yarn?

See, here’s the deal: I love yarn (ok, who doesn’t, right?) but sometimes I get suckered into a fiber frenzy, especially when they’re on sale. Then I’m stuck with yarn that’s begging to be knitted but I have no immediate pattern for them.

Conversely, I surf the internet for free patterns which I avidly download and save in a binder but don’t have the exact or appropriate yarn for at the moment.

So in the end, I’m left with two pieces of the puzzle that don’t quite fit.

The answer to this dilemma, of course, is just to know my yarn so I can do substitutions, but I wanted to put this question out there to see if anyone can save me: do you find yourself more often than not starting with a pattern then hunting for the yarn? Or do you fall in love with yarn and go trawling for the appropriate pattern?

An addendum to my initial question: if you do stumble on a great yarn sale (Michael’s is having a faboo sale on Moda Dea yarn right now), but don’t have a project in mind, what is the standard amount of yardage you’d invest in? 500? 1000? Or does it depend on the yarn? :thinking:

#2

Yours are questions that plague me also. I wish I had answers, but I linger here in hopes that someone more clueful will help us both!

#3

okay…wow. let’s see the scenarios that run around in my world.

always buying yarn that will tell me later what it wants to be (some of them i have decided are mute)

always buying yarn with specific patterns in mind that later become part of a completely different pattern

always buying yarn with a specific pattern in mind that just sits there waiting for me to get to.

I almost always buy at least two skeins and often three just to make sure i feel like i have enough.

and save for a few things here and there, i am forcing myself to behave these days and not buy any new yarn for a while. i have waaaaaaaaaay too much that is sitting around needing to meet its true purpose in life.

#4

I just bought a bunch of that Moda Dea from Micheal’s last week and have nothing to do with it. :rollseyes: I bought four balls of Ticker Tape, made some weirdo legwarmers, and have two and a half balls left. What I’m going to do with less than 200 yards of the stuff, I don’t know…but I suppose I’ll find SOMEthing, even if it means I have to go buy more.

#5

I’m dying to buy some Dream, Eden and Wild yarns but, like you, I have no immediate use for them; I just like to touch them. Argh! If I follow brendajos’s advice, maybe I should buy 3 skeins of each and see what turns up? At $3 a pop, that shouldn’t break the bank, right? Plus, that packrat in me keeps whispering: “They’re gonna go back up to $6/skein. Buy tons NOW!”

Ah, the voices…the voices! :oo:

#6

I hear the voices, too. :smiley:

I do a bit of everything. If I see a pattern that I MUST MAKE, I buy the yarn immediately–it’s a sickness–even if I know I won’t get to it for months.

If I see a yarn that I can’t resist, or is on wonderful sale, how much I buy depends on the type of yarn. If I think it would make a nice sweater, I buy enough for that, even if I don’t use it for that in the end. Sometimes I see a yarn that I know won’t make a sweater, so I buy a few balls for scarves, or just to have.

I like to do color work, too, so for a while I was buying different colors of the same yarn ‘just in case’ whenever I saw a color I didn’t have yet that was on sale. That is why I have two stuffed laundry bags full of Encore. :rollseyes: It has come in handy when I decide to make a kids sweater with a picture on it.

This is why I have such an enormous stash.

#7

I have a really difficult time buying yarn unless I have a specific project in mind for it. I’m always afraid that I won’t have enough when I figure out what I want to use it for. Last weekend, I bought 20 skeins of yarn that were a great price on sale at my LYS. I know what I want to do with them- I have 2 sweaters in mind- but they will be challenging, and the yarn is thin and the needles will be small. Just knowing that I have that yarn sitting there, not being used, is enough for me- I won’t be able to buy more unless I decide to knit something else. Of course, I may decide that tomorrow, but who knows??! :wink: