Glenesk continues to proceed along at a reasonable pace…

I’m less than a pattern repeat from being done with the torso.  I have a terrible feeling it may be quite a bit too long, but if so I will deal with it later.  After I finish the torso and do the sleeves, I plan to try it on before cutting the central steek.  If I need to shorten it, I think there’s a way I can unravel a bit from the bottom up and then redo the bottom band.  I’ll cross that bridge if and when it’s needed.  But more on that later!

There are a lot of ways to project manage doing a big knit like this one, with a lot of different yarns and a complex-ish pattern to follow.  As it might be of interest to anyone thinking about tackling a similar project, I thought I would share what my method to keep the yarn wrangled and chaos at a minimum.

It all starts with the project bag – for big projects like this, I like something that zippers, because I have cats, and also something water- and claw-proof for the same reason.

For smaller projects the bag doesn’t matter so much, because I do have a few cubby drawers I can keep things in, but big projects won’t fit, so a big, tough bag is a must.

I keep one skein of each of the yarns in the project bag, each in a plastic ziplock with the yarn color written on it so I can keep track of what I’m looking at. Since quite a few of the colors are similar-ish, clear identification is important.  When I am using a yarn, I unzip a corner of the bag and pull the yarn up through it so they don’t get all tangled up in each other and turn into a mess.  This way there are only two active yarn balls in use at any given time, which lessens the complication quite a bit.

The remainder of the project yarn is in the shipping box in bigger ziplocks with the yarn tags on top for clear identification.  I also have a yarn card with a sample of each color on it in there as well, just in case there are any escapee balls that need to be returned to the bags from whence they came.

As far as yarn management schemes go, I suspect this is probably medium-complexity.  There are definitely people much more organized than this, and also people who just throw the whole thing in a shopping bag and go at it.  But this is working out pretty well so far 🙂