Once upon a time I bought 11 skeins of Cascade 220 for two different felted bag projects. Both were intarsia patterns of my own design. One was easy, one was hard.

I knit up the easy intarsia bag. I charted the hard intarsia pattern.

And then I stopped.

Because you know what? I hate felting. And I hate intarsia. And simultaneously inflicting both on myself not just once, but twice? Clearly I’d gone cuckoo in the head.

And so the yarn and non-felted bag sat in my stash for two years. 2420 yards of yarn that I no longer had any use for. Now clearly I’m doing something wrong here, but yarn in my house gets mighty pissy if it isn’t already earmarked for a specific project. I hear it muttering yarny threats at me when I walk by, demanding to be made into something pretty or else it will smother me while I sleep.

Why no, I’m not the least bit neurotic, why do you ask?

Once the yarn has devolved into this mildly-evil state, there is only one solution: knit (or crochet) it up and give it to charity. Infusing the yarn with good karma soothes it and makes it happy again.

Given that I’m dealing with a whopping lot of 100% feltable yarn, I decided to crochet a blanket for the current Afghans 4 Afghans campaign. I cast on (chained on?) last week…

…and see? The yarn is already feeling better.

One word from the radio show kept tickling my brain. AY-what? Some astronomical mumbo-jumbo. AY-ka-something? Magnitude, constellations, blah blah blah, AY-ker-nar? OMG, they’re talking about Achernar!

The star, of course, not the cabled scarf knitting pattern.

Turns out I’ve been mis-pronouncing it in my head all along.

Shedir is named for a star and so naturally I turned to the heavens for inspiration in naming the scarf I designed as a companion to Shedir. The patterning on the scarf seemed to suggest a flowing river, so I hunted around for a river constellation and named the scarf after Achernar, the brightest star in Eridanus.

Sleepy Snake is done, except for the wash-and-dry.

Occasionally he turns into Narcoleptic Ouroboros.

Now I just need to knit him a few victims friends. I plan to make 3-4 of Mischievous Mice, and here are the most mouse-appropriate colors in my stash:

Right now I’m leaning towards blue mice with cream-colored tails (bottom left in the picture). I could also do white mice with cream or tan tails, or maybe just make each mouse a different color combination. Hmmm…