Memo to myself

(A) No more patterns. I have enough patterns that I want to make that I will never get them all made even if I were to retire tomorrow and spend 8 hours a day knitting for the next 30 years.

(B) Yarn. Stop buying laceweight and sock yarn and start collecting good-quality dk, sport, and worsted weight yarns in solid colors. Most of what's really nice is either solid color or is color-work. Resist handpaints, no matter how tempting.

(C) Family Circle Easy Knitting is an outstanding knitting magazine. My favorite is Vogue Knitting, but FCEK has extremely wearable, classic patterns for all ages and sizes, along with some hip stuff. Or rather, it was; it's no longer being published. It's possible I may have a complete set, because I know I have the premiere issue and I subscribed for a long time. It's a real shame it no longer exists. At least I won't have to resist the temptation of buying it on the newsstand (not that there's much danger of that--there aren't many places around here that carry much beyond fashion, cars, and computer gaming magazines. Finding a knitting magazine is like finding gold).

(D) Get a scanner and devote about a month to getting all my patterns scanned and stored so when I'm searching for a pattern--the way I've spent the past 2 days looking for a baby cardigan made of bulky yarn--I can find it without going through 257 magazines and 4 books. (And I still haven't found what I'm looking for--I guess I can just find basic measurements and make something up. How big are 18-month-olds?) What else did I get that 250GB external hard drive for if not to store tons of info like this?

(E) Get a fishing line meter so I can measure yardage as I'm winding from skein to ball. (Yarn meters are SOOOooooo expensive.) I have no idea if I have enough of this bulky yarn to make a baby sweater. Usually I keep a record with the yarn as to fibre content, recommended needle size, and yardage, but for some reason I didn't with this yarn. Bulky weight probably wouldn't go through a fishing line meter, but lighter-weight yarn would.