New Year's Organizing: WIP Purge

I will preface this post by saying that the photos are pretty lousy--I don't have a lot of daylight to work in during the week. And by "a lot," I mean "any"--the sun is barely up by the time I leave for work, and has already gone to bed by the time I leave the office, let alone get home. I used a bunch of obnoxious Flickr "filters" to make them look marginally more acceptable.

You're welcome.

I'm still busy organizing, inspired by WEBS' new year organization series, and yesterday I tackled my WIPs.

I found 3 baskets full of them.

Oops.

Clearly, I had to take action.

I approached the baskets in a ruthless frame of mind, and wound up with a fair pile of projects to frog:

(Though to be fair, some of these were WIPs I'd already decided to frog, and then had just thrown back in the basket out of laziness.)

This included 2 fairly major frogging decisions.

First, my Girasole blanket:

I adore this blanket.

But can't stand the yarn.

I picked up a bunch of the yarn actually called for in the pattern, Cascade Pastaza, on sale last year, and was excited to work with it because it sounds delightful: 50% wool, 50% llama.

In reality, it's a hairy mess. It sheds like crazy and just isn't fun to work with.

(Although if you want to give it a shot, I'd be happy to sell you the 14 skeins I have!)

I'll definitely be tackling this blanket with another yarn sometime in the (hopefully near) future.


And secondly, my Adhara Shawl.

Sniff.

Unfortunately, the color combo I chose--a red/brown and yellow--just wasn't working out the way I'd hoped.

I thought it would be autumn-y and warm, but instead it's just dull.

I'll be picking a new color combo for this project, probably light and dark shades of a single color, as used in the original, and starting over again at some point.


I also found myself facing 2 projects I couldn't make a decision on. First, this wee sweater:

I started it with a partially used skein, leftover from my Wildflower Cardigan. But in order to finish it, I'll have to start a second new skein, and I'm not sure it's worth it--who is this sweater even for? It's too girlie for the wee Peruanito.

A mystery.

I also dug up the Terry's Pullover I started for my dad. It's actually nearly finished, with one small problem:

I don't know if it's obvious in the photo, but there's a distinct color difference between the first and second skeins of yarn.

It's driving me crazy.

I'm not sure I can live with it.

These two question marks led me to the decision to institute a Two WIP Basket System: one basket for "short term" WIPs, and one for "long term."

Long term WIPs are those I'm not actively working on. They could be for a different season, awaiting an epiphany regarding a mistake I've made so that I can move forward, or, like the last two projects, could be "undecided." I hope to revisit these projects each year to further evaluate.

To make the magical jump to the short term basket, a project must be in active rotation, and must have a project bag!

It currently holds about 5 projects, a reasonable quantity, I think.

Perhaps the best thing about this exercise was the number of needle tips I reclaimed--almost my whole set!

Just waiting to be put to use in even more projects!