Author: Mylene Lacroix

I literally haven’t posted in a year.  Shame on me!

I’ve been traveling.  And I’ve been doing a lot of knitting.  A LOT of knitting.  I post often on Instagram but don’t think to blog.  Does anyone still read blogs?  It’s a bit old-school.  We all watch podcasts on YouTube now.  I never turn on my actual television anymore.  All podcasts, all the time.

I’m not knitting custom orders anymore.  This is exciting because I have so much more time to knit for me.  The only negative to that is that now I have too many hats and shawls and socks.  But is there really such a thing as TOO many knitted items?  Bah.  I’m just happy knitting all these new patterns coming out.  Who’s crushing HARD on all of Caitlin Hunter’s patterns?  And Jennifer Steingass?  I can’t seem to knit anything else right now.

I went to Uganda this past January.  It was the most amazing trip.  I sponsor a little girl in this super-small village called Ogooma.  I got to meet her.  Life-changing!

Being in Uganda made me realize how lucky I am to have been born in a country where the biggest struggles I have are really minimal compared to the daily struggle of the people I met there.  Running water and food are still a thing there.  A tooth ache.  Fees for school.  A clean place to sleep.  Jobs.  And yes, in 2018, there are still people who live in huts that are roughly bigger than one of my bathrooms.

I won’t ramble about that… Only to tell you that I will never again see the world in the same way.

And my yarn stash?  It’s getting used!  I can’t really justify spending money on more yarn when I already have enough to last me for at least 5 years.

Until about a week ago, I had a stash of yarn and fibre so large I felt suffocated by it.  Does that make sense when you LOVE yarn so much you find yourself constantly day-dreaming about what you’ll knit/crochet/spin/weave next?

My stash started to grow when I discovered the Kitchener-Waterloo Knitter’s Fair.   I would have to say that for the first three years at least, I came home each time with a trunk-load of yarn.  When that fair got boring, my friend and I started going to the Woodstock Fleece Festival.  Before I knew it, I had 12 bins of yarn and three Ikea under-bed storage thingies full of fiber.

When you come from a city that has no yarn shop and you’re suddenly exposed to all the goodies at a fair the size of KW’s, you go a little crazy.  I purchased ribbon yarn one year!?  What am I ever going to do with ONE skein of ribbon yarn?  NOTHING.  It sat in my stash for 10 years until someone contacted me on Ravelry to see if I would part with it.  ABSOLUTELY!  Thank you woman-who-knits-ribbon-yarn.

Here are three IMPORTANT things I learned last week:

1)       Store it where you can see it.  I had so much yarn I didn’t know I had.   And if I knew I owned it, I had to root through 12 bins to find it.  I really didn’t love that part – especially so because they were all stacked and crammed into a closet.  A few weeks ago, in preparation, I went to Ikea and splurged on a 25-cube Kallax so I could SEE all the yarn I decided to keep.  So amazing.  Now, every time I walk by my office, I can see all of my stash.  Everything is beautifully exposed.

2)      You don’t have to take everything.  People know I knit a lot.  This means that when people go through their recently deceased grandmother’s house and find some yarn and old straight needles from the 60’s, they save it for me.  How thoughtful.  Or they go to a yard sale and see a giant stash of acrylic and they spend $2 to get it all for you.  How sweet.  SAY NO.  You don’t have to take everything.  Or, if you feel badly saying no, take it and say thank you, then drop it off at the Goodwill.  Someone else will be glad to have it.

3)      Write shit down!  When I started going through my giant bin of handspun (yes, a whole bin of my handspun), I realized that I didn’t know what most of the yarn was.  OMG!  What have I done?  It gets worse: when I started going through the Ikea bins of fiber, I had bags and bags of roving and I have no idea what they are.  DAMMIT!  I found one freezer bag labeled “Really nice stuff from the fleece show.”  Really?  I’m kicking myself HARD for not writing down the type of fibers I purchased.  It’s not difficult to attach a little piece of paper (or a pretty hang-tag from Staples) to a skein you just spent hours spinning and plying.  It’s also not difficult to stick your receipt in the 5 pound bag of beautiful brown roving you just purchased to spin a sweater-quantity of worsted yarn.   DO IT!  Trust me.  You’ll thank me later.

Now that it’s all said and done, keepers in their case and the rest waiting for their new homes, I feel so much better and excited at the organization.  Every time I walk by my “office” I can see all my pretty yarn.

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It was brought to my attention over the weekend that one of the links in an old blog post was broken.  When I went to look, it was on a post from 2009!  Have I had this blog that long?  Sheesh.  I thought I started blogging in 2010.  AND, I used to blog so much – 10 times a month!  I barely post that much in a year now.  I think it’s so odd because I have so much more to talk about now.

When I started looking through my old posts, I saw a post with a picture of my grandmother.  She was still around back then.  I miss her.  We had so much in common.  I think I was too young to really get to know her and who she was.  If only she were still here.

I also used to be funny.  Not really sure what happened.  Hahahahaha.

I’m just home from White Lake, where some of us ladies from our spinning guild rent a few cottages for the weekend and spin, knit, eat, drink wine and laugh.  It’s always so much fun and I look forward to it every year.  I think I’m the youngest by 15 years and I just love spending time with them.  They crack me up.

I also spent a tonne of time with family this past week – especially with my mom.  And my sister was off for a few weeks so I got to see her a whole lot.  Love it.

In April, Jacob and I jumped on a plain and went to Thailand and Cambodia.  What an amazing trip.  He’s been graduated for a long time but it just now finally worked out for both of us at the same time and for me financially.  I took him a the trip of a lifetime.  We hung out with elephants in Thailand and built and delivered water filtration systems to rural villages in Cambodia.  Naturally, we got to tour around too.  I get to check Angkor Wat off my list!  NICE!!!

Most amazing trip – with my kid… who’s getting too old to look like my offspring.  (Our group thought we were a couple at first.  How gross.)

Life is good.  Real good.  (If you’ve seen Nacho Libre as many times as I have, this is funny.)

I’m knitting like a crazy woman.  I put a warp on the loom my girlfriend GAVE me, with the help of my spinning lady friends.  I started dyeing wool and I’m loving that.  And when I started watching all those podcasts (see last post), everyone had these pretty project bags.  So naturally, I had to have some.  I looked up a few tutorials and figured out how to make my own.  Now my friends want some.  So I’m sewing project bags too.  NEVER A DULL MOMENT AT MY HOUSE.

If you want to see what I’ve been up to, check out my Instagram or my Facebook by clicking on the links in the sidebar (which pops out if you click on the little lines at the top left of this page).  😉

I’ll try to post more.  Or maybe I’ll just start my own podcast.  That would be so fun.  I love podcasts.  Go watch some.