Jumping for Joy

The sun was out and so were the burros this afternoon, getting tethered to eat fresh spring grass. They also got dewormed, and I began working my way through giving West Nile Virus vaccines (if you do not know much about this illness, do some research, as it is spread by mosquitoes, over 50% of the equines who contract it die, and the few humans who contract it end up very sick). We were also able to open up the doors and windows for a few hours in the late afternoon and air out the house a bit from the dreary winter doldrums.

As if a sunny day after weeks of wet weather wasn't enough, I also found some time to dig out more items to photo for the Destash Blog, which led to some cleaning and re-arranging in the room that has served as one of the main storage areas since we bought our main house in 1998. At the time we bid on this house, featured in my recent tour, we had to put up for sale the house we had been living in, and move across the road in Forest City to the house my DH had owned first, which was rented out.

Not only did the escrow on the house we sold close more than two months prior to the problematic escrow on the house we were buying, but we had to condense down into a much smaller space, with the frantic help of our college-age sons and two teens living with us and then restore the 150-year old "new" house into liveable condition over a six-month period before staying there, traveling 20 miles between the two several times a week - chaotic to say the least.

There were always things that I couldn't locate, and my FIL had joked about boxes falling off the truck when he moved some items to the newly-purchased house for us. While moving bags of yarn into my studio, I asked my husband if he wanted to move a wooden chest of his into his train room. When he said, "yes, but it's full of your stuff", I was puzzled, and then jumping for joy to open the chest and discover it packed full of missing yarn and knitting (are you sure you know where ALL of your stash is?). There had been two projects in particular that I was always looking for; one was a barn coat for my DH that I had started the summer we were married. The completed pieces and one skein of yarn had been residing in my cedar chest, but the sleeves still needed to be knitted and I couldn't locate the yarn anywhere.


This is a photo of what the jacket will look like; the pattern appeared in Vogue Knitting Winter 1994


This is how much of the jacket pattern I had completed; one shoulder seam is sewn together, one pocket pinned in place, and the other pocket and the knitted collar to which the leather one is sewn is not in the photo.


A close-up of the basketweave pattern


The missing yarn; there are several skeins more and all will spend two weeks in the freezer in case of potential moth infestation.

The other missing item was a jacket I had started for myself in about the spring of 1996. I had wanted to open my own coffee shop in a storefront building we owned on the main street of our historic town, and even though I detest intarsia overall, had decided to make another Vogue Knitting design, a cotton jacket with motifs of a teapot and cups. I made the sleeves in my usual fashion, carrying them around to meetings and other events, and even got most of the way through the back, working on the large teapot on one shoulder. The jacket was now proceeding slowly and got put aside when I changed jobs and returned to college during the 1997-98 school year. During the packing and moving the following summer, the bag containing that piece and all the rest of the yarn disappeared. I stumbled upon the completed pieces a few times and I could even clearly see the bright purple canvas project bag it lived in, but could never locate it until today.


This photo shows the back, with the teapot at the top of the right shoulder about two-thirds completed. Now, I need to re-locate those missing sleeves and get down to finishing this in time for impending spring weather (although there won't be any of that after tomorrow; more rain and snow predicted for the next week!). I do feel like some force in the universe must have shifted to lift the veil that had been hiding those projects from me, and out of gratitude, I will be listing several more items on the Destash Blog, so check out my button to the left, and give a forlorn yarn from someone elses' stash a new lease on life at your house.