June was a busy month for me outside of my crafting life:  I participated in my last commencement ceremony ever, I spent most of the month finishing a full draft of my dissertation, and I got really into watching the Golden State Warriors in the NBA playoffs (bandwagon fan!). Yet somehow I managed to find time to knit 335 g of my stash this month! (Knitting while watching basketball may have helped just a bit.)

My first project this month was a small circular shawl – the Double Double Circular Shawl from the book Circular Knitting Workshop, by Margaret Radcliffe. This is the first project I’ve made from this book, although I’ve used it several times as a reference for circular knitting techniques. The shawl is based on the Pi Shawl concept that was popularized by Elizabeth Zimmermann, which consists of doubling the number of stitches every time the diameter of the shawl doubles. I mostly followed the pattern except I did a standard knit bind off rather than the recommended picot bind off because I was running out of yarn.

The circular shawl is too small for me to wear – about 22″ in diameter – but it might be reasonably sized for a child. If not, I still achieved my main goals of learning the pi shawl technique and using up some lace yarn. It needed 15 g of Lorna’s Laces Helen’s Lace yarn, finishing up the last bit of the skein I used for both my wedding shawl and last month’s shawlette.

My second project was to knit approximately 75% of a poncho from the Irish Knit Poncho pattern by Adele Huey McCall. I chose this project specifically to use up a large amount of white acrylic yarn (Loops & Threads Impeccable). I started with a jumbo skein of 396 g, which looked like this next to a six-month old baby:

Yep, that’s a lot of yarn!

I used 320 g on the poncho, finishing the first piece and half of the second piece. The pattern is varied enough to be enjoyable, combining seed stitch, cables, and a purl-based center pattern, yet easy to remember because it repeats every four rows. Given how much yarn I had to start with, I was surprised to discover that I may not actually have enough to finish. To prevent this from being a waste of time, I might have to break my rule and buy enough yarn to finish the project (cringe). We shall see how much progress I can make with the last 76 g.

Close-up of poncho in progress

After this month’s knitting, I have now used up 25% of my stash – that’s 1250 g! I’m still on pace to finish by the end of September 2016, but I’m optimistic that I can beat that timeline.

YEAR-TO-DATE STATISTICS

• 65 different yarns remaining
• 3750 g remaining (75%)
• 16 projects completed in 2015