Picking up Poppy

Next week my parents are coming to visit us. Visits from my parents are always a great incentive to try to tidy up our place a bit. On Friday The Gambler decided to attack our loft, which functions as our office and also stores many books. It's also where I have a few plastic drawer units that contain yarn. Non sock yarn tends to go up into the office. When I came home (the joy of my new position is having to attend meetings at work that are held on my days off), he pointed out that there was much yarn in the loft which was not in a drawer. There was yarn in bags, yarn in the closet, and yarn in bins in the closet. Sigh. I don't want to count how many sweaters I have the yarn for that are just waiting to be knit up. So I am really really really going to make an effort to curtail the aquisition of new yarn, and start using up what I have. I hung out with Glenna yesterday; we had lunch and then went to The Purple Purl. I mentioned to her that amongst all that yarn up in the study was the bottom panel of a Poppy I started 2 years ago. She pointed out that if I had completed the bottom, that was a huge chunk of the sweater already completed. So last night, I picked up Poppy for the first time since we moved. The body was knit with Cascade 220 and Mission Falls, and the remainder of the sweater is being knit out of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted in Black Purl. Now, there is a bit of a story behind the Shepherd Worsted. Initially I got 2 skeins in exchange in a swap through the knitty board - it was a bit of a screwup, because I sent the other person sock weight yarn not realizing that she was trading worsted weight yarn. I subsequently sent her more yarn to make up for the difference. When I decided to knit Poppy using the Black Purl instead of Silk Garden, I tried to find more Black Purl. That was when the colourway was at the height of it's popularity, so I ended up doing another swap or 2 through the knittyboard, and one person was kind enough to send me several balls that she had leftover from a previous project. Needless to say, the yarns come from many different dye lots. So I am going to be switching between skeins very regularly (sometimes every row), and am going to have to try and balance out the amounts of some of the outlier skeins to keep some degree of homogeneity in this sweater. I guess it could be worse - it could be a solid colour yarn! I did promise some yarn pr0n; this was some yarn that I picked up in Italy at a little yarn shop in a small town called Monte San Savino. 1400 metres of laceweight wool for an astoundingly low price - I think it cost about 5 euros. The colours are great - purples with blue, red, and some bronze and green thrown in as well. I will have to find a nice place in the loft to store it.