Sunday, July 8, 2007

Lovely, Lovely Yarn

Well, Thursday was fun I must admit. I went into my LYS with 6 hanks of yarn to be rolled (2 for the Cable Trim Pullover...grr 4 for the Irish Yarn...grr...) and wound up buying more hanks of yarn (yea!). So in total I had 9 hanks to roll and needed to use her ball winder and swift (I really need to break down and buy my own). I didn't feel too bad because 5/9 hanks were bought from her and with the Irish yarn, I'm buying everything I need from her to make something with it. Not to mention I did all the winding. It took about an hour and 15 minutes to do so but it was enjoyable none the less. I like sitting in the yarn shop just being there has a calming effect and the product selection could not be finer.

Note to anyone buying me Christmas/Birthday/Wedding/Just Because gifts: Gift Certificates to my LYS will make me worship the ground you walk upon. Just saying. Not to mention you might get something out of it. :)

Anyway, so I bought sock yarn (one I'd been eying for 3 weeks -to be fair), and cotton yarn for a baby blanket I'm making. The sock yarn in 100% merino from Jitterbug color "Velvet Biibery"..uh yeah...deep, dark purples that blend into black. It's beautiful. The cotton is from Inca Cotton -100% Organic Cotton in natural dyes. How cool is that? Here's a picture of of them with a ball (and I use the term lightly) of the Irish Yarn. It weighs 9 oz so I figure I have enough for a beautiful leaf blanket...but more on that thing later.
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It's hard to tell but the cotton has a greenish color to it, the white from the Irish yarn is just so glaring, shade or no shade. It glows. Anyway, after spending 2 hours at the LYS I went home then came back to pick up an extra class so I could start on my Irish Yarn Leaf Blanket. Pretty and as soon as I have something to show you, I will. However, the %$&%*&^ pattern is driving me nuts. It's not complicated but you have to do about an hour and a half to get to the "first row" (there is a foundation row). If you screw up even so much as one stitch, your screwed pattern wise. I got all the way to the 3rd row and noticed I missed ONE yarn forward. Gah. So I ripped out 2 hours worth of work. I re-cast on the 345 stitches and started again only to realize I messed up AGAIN. At this point I started getting a little angry at the thing (ok I was livid at the first frogging) so I've put it down.

Speaking of angry, I need a new knitting bag. Mine likes to ruin my projects the rat fink. I had just finished the ribbing on the front part of my Cable Trim Pullover before class and put it in my bag to take with me. At some point during the 3 minuet car ride (5 with red lights) my bag managed to rip off a 1/3 of the stitches-most of which ran down several rows. That got frogged Tuesday. I haven't picked it up again yet.

I wound up sleeping at 3am on Thursday evening/Friday morning and woke up at 5:30 in the mother effing morning. I am not an early bird. I'm a (pardon the language) a raging bitch if I have to get up before 9:30 am (unless it's yarn induced like the Yarn Lady's Bag Sale was). But to only function on 2 fitful hours of basically catnaps? Scary. Anyway, I knew I wasn't going back to bed so I decided to be useful. I knit a sock.

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Here it is at 6:00 am in the misty morning. It's for Matthew (not that he'll be able to wear it come August) so don't blame me for the boring color choice. He picked 'em. I finished it around 7:00 am and cast on for the next one. I should make a note (just to be truthful) that I had been working on it the night before so it was about 60% done when I got up on Friday. I'm now currently stuck on the heel bit of the second one because (we didn't have a pattern that was written for his foot size) I think we didn't join enough stitches together. I should only have 64 total, but have 32/21/21 when I should have 32/16/16. Gah. I think I'm going to have to rip it back and have a do-over on the heel bit. I think I'll go in and bother my LYS again like I did today.

Which was when I went in to get the heel turned. But I bought more yarn! More sock yarn really. No picture sad to say, but I'll get one before I roll it up on Monday. It's this awesome variegated yarn of different shades of cream, brown, pink and black. It sounds weird but looks awesome. It's Jitterbug again but the colorway escapes me at the moment.

Whew. That was a long one wasn't it? If you stuck it out this long you've got my thanks. Drop me a comment if you'd like (or even if you don't like) and ...erm...leave a comment. :)

And because it looks like a caterpillar running away, one more sock picture for you:
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2 comments:

MissVicki said...

Aw, I love your sock caterpillar! But don't give up on your knitting bag just yet, it is probably not to blame for your lost stitches in transit. Needles just like to do that to nice yarn, well, at least I have never caught me needles doing that to yucky novelty yarns anyhow. Go figure! Let's just say it was a good thing I decided to send you some needle sweater thingys (I don't know their proper name, sorry). I think I should add in some point protectors too! :-)

TheWench said...

OO how exciting! I'm almost done with your bag, I just can't decide how I want to decorate the actual bag. :) If i do give up the bag for knitting, I'll use it as a school bag or overnight bag so it won't be tossed into the back of my closet.