the box and barter socks

A while- maybe 6 months ago- my mother threw out an old wooden box for the trash guys to pick up. The top was broken, some boards were cracked and even though it was in 3 pieces, I recognized it immediately as a box that my dad had made in probably 7th or 8th grade for his mom. She was an amazing knitter and kept her yarn in it, and I was a little bit appalled to see it broken and waiting to become trash. I scooped up the pieces and put them in my car.

At work that day, I was explaining the box (there are some very handy people that hang out in the warehouse) and Jo offered to fix it. Tight for cash, I nervously asked her price. "A pair of socks," she said, "just not pink." We agreed there was no rush- I didn't need the box the next day or anything, and I wasn't going to be able to even start the socks for a while, but the box went home with her. I made the first sock in November (the Farrow rib one that took FOREVER) and started the second one about a week ago. I got my box back on Wednesday and hauled it upstairs and put it to the best possible use I could think of... I filled it with sock yarn.

Once a yarn box, always a yarn box, right? My goal is for this box to one day contain ALL of my stash, which means I've still got a lot of de-stashing to do. I realize that there's a good chance this will never happen, but it would be nice if it held a good chunk of my stash- I'm fine with having a rubbermaid container in a dark corner filled with odd balls that are too nice to throw away.

So here's the box and the socks. There's 2 pictures of the socks, taken to show you exactly how slow they are going. The first picture was taken Thursday morning, and the second was taken this (Friday) morning, after working on them for about 3 hours yesterday. As you can see, there's progress but not much. I'd love to get them done by the time my Pi shawl knit-along starts (rescheduled to Feb 1st) so I can get them to Jo and cross them off my list FOREVER! Muahahahaha!

*the blue bin on top of the box is my never-ending sock yarn blanket, in case you were wondering. That's where all of the oddballs of sock yarn go when they die.

**when moving my sock yarn to the sock yarn box, I did a quick inventory. I have 65 skeins of sock yarn that aren't currently "tied up" in a project which means...my stash is way down. Go me!