robknits

Color, FOs, and more

One of my great frustrations with pictures of my projects is with how poorly the colors are reproduced.  This was true on my old cell phone, on my digital camera (which also developed other problems) and on my new cell phone.  Are there basic digital cameras that are good with color?  If you know of one let me know.

So, first off, a finished project.  This is Fay, made in Handmaiden's Sea Silk yarn.

Or rather, it is a detail of Fay, still on the block board.  Here's another picture.  I mean, really, does this one look like it was taken outdoors in San Antonio?

Anyway, this yarn is wonderful.  It is mostly silk, with some "sea cell," which as I learned in that spinning class is a rayon with a small amount of sea weed cellulose in it.  I love knitting with this yarn, and it is very wearable in San Antonio.  It is, however, ridiculously expensive.  So when I got an email announcing that the Yarn Barn of San Antonio was having a sale this weekend to celebrate 40 years of being in business, and that they were giving a 40% discount, I ran over there during my lunch hour on Friday.  And while the stock was pretty low, I did find this: a skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk, in Periwinkle.  At 40% off.  A wonderful gift to myself.  And, my decades-long addiction to teal notwithstanding, I have been gravitating toward purples for a while now. 

Excited by having started and finished Fay in a matter of weeks, I immediately jumped into another small knitting project, this time the very popular Wingspan.  Here are some examples.  People have made it with yarn that has long color changes, or have changed the yarn itself for each triangle.  I decided to use some yarn that I had had in the stash for a couple of years.  It is King, by Noro.  This shawl/scarf goes very quickly and is a lot of fun to knit, but I may start over.  The fabric I am producing is very open, which is fine for use here in San Antonio.  The problem is that the shape of the triangle is made with short rows, the author suggests not wrapping the stitch at the turn, and I don't like how the line that forms looks.  See? 

 

Some folks are using yarn that blooms after it is washed, and the holes are not noticeable.  Others are adding yarn overs to make it a lacy line.  Ravelry has lots of comments on how people dealt with this, so I am going to do some investigation today and then decide about starting over.

And oh, while I was at the Yarn Barn sale, I found two more balls of Noro King in another color.  Another little gift for myself at a great price.  Another very dark picture taken outdoors in the morning in San Antonio.  Sigh.

There are lots of great scarf patterns like Fay out there these days.  They start at one end of the scarf/shawl, work across the back increasing on one side to make a crescent or triangle shape, and then decrease back down to the other end of the scarf.  It's a nice way to knit a scarf or shawl.  It means you never have to have the entire edge of the shawl on the needle at once, and it also means that the color variations in the yarn run the short way -- that is, from the neck down, instead of from end to end.  A nice variation.

A final gift to myself was two skeins of Louet's Euroflax linen yarn.  It is a lightweight all linen yarn that I have been looking at for years.  Linen of course is a perfect fabric for south Texas, but knitting with it ... not so great.  It has no elasticity at all, and tends to feel like twine.  Until you wash it.  When you wash it, it softens tremendously.  This stuff is also very expensive, but when I saw it on sale, I decided to buy two skeins, for yet another scarf.  Believe it or not, the true color is a light sea foam green (back to my old color choices!).  And I think I am going to tie the skein in a million places and wash it BEFORE I knit with it, to soften it up.

Again, that picture was taken outdoors on a white background!  If anyone has a camera recommendation, or advice on getting accurate color, let me know.

Here I am again... (with postscript)

having just bought more yarn, even after counting up to a scary number when calculating how many projects worth of yarn I have waiting.  And here I am again, having bought yarn in a color called Tide Pool.  I can't help it.  I have a very hard time walking past teal yarn.  If it were lime green, I would have had no problems.  It was so not my fault.  Why did Yarnivore have it in teal?

On the plus side, this is a new yarn for me.  It is Berroco's Vintage, 50% acrylic, 40% wool, 10% nylon.  Machine washable.  I saw a large sample of it knit up at the shop at 4.5 stitches to the inch.  At that gauge, it was soft and airy.  So it might work very nicely for San Antonio.  It is also very reasonably priced.  And yes, I am justifying like crazy, but it was not completely nuts as a purchase. 

So now I want to cast on with it.  I have made a deal with myself that if I do so I have to take one of the cardigans in progress out of its bag and work a little on that too.  So I have two current choices for the Vintage.  One is Connie Chang Chinchio's Metro cardigan.  (Go on, take a look.)  It has great instructions and an interesting construction.  Pluses: it is knit in one piece, has 3/4 sleeves, has shaping at the waist, and I have enough yarn to make it longer.  Cons: it is one of those contemporary styles meant to NOT meet in front.  It is really pretty, and reviews on Ravelry of the pattern and the resulting sweater are all positive.  I really like her designs, though if I choose this one I think it will be the first of hers I will make.

The other is Every Last Yard.  (Take a look, or how will you know what I am talking about?) Also knit in one piece, with very clever designing and instructions at every point where you can elaborate or save on yarn.  I love the sleeves, the style and the length.  The only negative: it is a raglan, not my best style, though it is a nice crisp looking one. 

Decisions, decisions.  Knowing myself, I might end up using one of the other batches of yarn waiting in the yarn closet and cast on for something entirely different.  Though the timing is right for using the Vintage -- temperatures are dropping into the 50s at night, and even lower at times.

PS. I stopped by the Yarn Barn of San Antonio.  We have two very good yarn stores here in town.  Supposedly I was looking at colors of Paternayan yarn for a tapestry, but I ended up browsing the knitting yarns, of couse.  Two more skeins found their way home to Inspiration Drive:

This is Noro King, a real stew of fibers -- acrylic, silk, mohair, wool and a soupcon of nylon.  Lovely colors, a fingering weight I think, and a good choice for a South Texas scarf.    The colors were hard to photograph -- it is color 8 and I think the best online photo is here.  Or my picture might be best after all.  I am going to choose something very simple to knit with this -- perhaps the one-row lace scarf.

I also fell in love with this.  It is extremely soft, and of course, no surprise about the colors.  This is Cascade's Heritage sock yarn, in color 9848 of their handpainted series.  Temperatures here are going down into the 50s and even the 40s at night, so I am once again considering wearing socks.  The temperature is down, and my knitting mojo is up.

New things

My cousins and I explored the Hill Country last weekend, checking out several yarn shops and tasting wine at several wineries in the area.  It was a lovely day.  The Tinsmith's Wife in Comfort, TX is a gorgeous store that easily tempted one of us off her yarn diet.  I picked up a little kit to make a knitted bracelet.  I think it was at Stonehill Spinning in that I fell for two skeins of Alpaca with a Twist's Baby Twist -- huge hanks of more than 500 yards.  I was going to make a shawl, but I think I will make Chic Knit's Cerisara, the vest version.  Knit from the top down, so I can decide on the length as I go, or as the yarn goes, anyway.  I think an alpaca vest qualifies as a winter coat here in San Antonio, or as a good hedge against the frigid air conditioning in some of our meeting rooms.

My car -- or rather, my mother's car, a 10-year-old Subaru Legacy L sedan that she had started driving onto shoulders, fields, and various other things that left dings on the bumpers -- had been developing signs of age.  Like dragging pieces of itself on the interstate.  When I was told a repair would cost a few thousand dollars, I decided enough was enough.  So now this is on my driveway:

 
I had really missed the kind of cargo space a hatchback or wagon provides, and discovered that the Hyundai Elantra Touring is basically a 4-door hatchback.  SUVs still seem huge to me, even the so-called small ones, and this car just fit.  I was comfortable in it immediately.  I did drive a Kia Soul, attracted by its funny design, but I am afraid Consumer Reports was right in complaining about visibility -- I had HUGE blindspots.  The Hyundai comes with a three-month satellite radio subscription, and I am already hooked.  My mother's car had the bottom-of-the-range radio with a cassette player and terrible speakers, so I was vulnerable to the idea of a good stereo with satellite radio.  Kim immediately sent me the data for the all-Springsteen station.

So what this means is that I will be bringing my coffee and lunch to work for the next few years, and knitting from stash.  That won't be hard to do -- after selling lots of things I was not going to use, I now have visible lovely stash yarns.  I have to decide what to go back to -- Que Sera would be smart, and I could go back to the Moongarden Wrap, though the yarn for that one turns my hands and needles black.  Or I could cast on for something else, couldn't I?  Stay tuned.

Stash diving

 

First, a picture of Que Sera.  Looking good!  I have to decide how to calculate the length.  The instructions say to knit until the body of the sweater is a particular length (17" I think) but this lace pattern expands a whole lot, so I have to decide, I think, by stretching it a bit, when I reach that point. 

I have been thinking a whole lot about knitting, and spending way too much time on Ravelry browsing patterns and other people's projects.  I just downloaded the laceweight addendum to Agatha, and I prefer it in the laceweight.  Here's a picture of the laceweight version.  So of course I started shopping for enough laceweight yarn.  I don't have anything in the quantity that would be needed for a cardigan like this.  So as I was browsing "laceweight yarn not-mohair not-alpaca" on Ravelry, I began noticing the number of weaving yarns that popped up.  So I went and took a look at a cone of yarn I was given when someone in State College was giving away weaving supplies.  This cone has absolutely no information about its yarn -- no label at all.  It is likely that it is cotton, given its origins as a weaving yarn.  At a local knitting group I saw a lovely scarf knitted from a 5/2 weaving yarn, so I decided to swatch this and see what I got in terms of gauge and in terms of knitability.

 

 I certainly have enough of this stuff, huh?

So I swatched using the Agatha laceweight parameters, to see what gauge I would get.  The pattern suggests 30 stitches to 4 inches on a number 3 needle would get a 4" swatch, or a gauge of 7.5 stitches to the inch.  I got 5.5 stitches to the inch.  So I compared the yarn to some fingering, and it is perhaps a light fingering weight, still heavier than lace weight.  In weaving terms, it might be a 3/2.  I can try using the wraps-per-inch method of determining its actual weight, but to tell you the truth I do that really inaccurately.  What you do is wrap the yarn around a ruler for an inch.  Of course, how you wrap it affects your results.  But I will give it a try.

The original Agatha calls for a sport weight yarn.  So I may keep looking for a pattern for this yarn, unless I want to play with the pattern.  I could also try swatching it on a smaller needle.  It feels very cottony, but I suppose it could be a cotton blend, with a synthetic.  As I said, no info on the cone whatsoever.  But I think it would make a great cardigan or top for the San Antonio weather.  It might be interesting to think of making the Myrtle cardigan in this.  That cardigan is also by Snowden Becker, the designer of Agatha. There are some great pictures of Myrtle on Ravelry, for those of you who are members.   Oh, yeah, here is the swatch.  It is pretty loose at this gauge, but I might be able to get a nice fabric at the sport-weight gauge for the original Agatha.

Next weekend I will be in NYC to visit family.  I am hoping to get to a couple of NY yarn Edens:  Habu and School Products especially.  I can't quite believe I have never been to either store.  If I go, I have to keep repeating "roof-patio-roof-patio" to remind myself that I have a bank account to rebuild.  Another thing that might slow me down is the sprained ankle I have.  I turned my ankle a few weeks ago, and had a lot of pain but no swelling.  Yesterday I did it again, in the morning, by stepping into the rut in my yard dug by rain pouring from my gutter-less roof. This time, swelling as well as pain. I don't think it is at all fair that I did this the day after the gutters were installed.  Karma my ass.  I would believe evil spirits.  I think I heard laughter.  Anyway, unless the pain lets up a lot before Friday, I may not be shopping New York this weekend.  In fact, I always navigate New York on foot, so I will have to figure out how to get around.  Sheesh, I will have to figure out how to get out of Penn Station without walking a mile or two underground.  On the other hand, I think Habu and School Products are in the same part of town -- one cab ride might get me to both stores.  Patio-roof-patio-roof...  but if I have to stay off that foot for a while, I will obviously have time to knit.

 

I never start a project just once.  I frogged the beginning of Que Sera and started over, and things are going pretty well now.  Well, there are those two missing stitches, but I'll find 'em tonight.

In the meantime, enthralled with my new discover of cotton blend yarns I am comfortable knitting, I bought some more of this same yarn, in a cream color. Hey, it was on sale. And then the same place had a light cotton blend ribbon yarn for sale, so, um, I bought some of that too.

So no more yarn buying, just lots of knitting.  I have been finding lots of interesting cardi patterns, all faved now on Ravelry, so there is a lot to keep me busy.

Thanksgiving yarn

 I now live a long way from family.  Visiting over Thanksgiving also gives me a chance to visit with Kim, who comes in to New Jersey from central PA for a family Thanksgiving of her own.  We now meet up on the Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend in beautiful Princeton.  We had gorgeous sunny weather, a charming town to walk though, lunch... and yarn shopping.  We went to Pins and Needles there in the center of Princeton and both fell in love with a stole knit in a gazillion shades of Koigu in a drop stitch pattern, with a ruffle on one side.  The stole in the store in 90 inches long.  Kim and I average 61" tall.  Hmmm.  So we decided we would make a 60" long stole, using 8 skeins of Koigu.  While I love color selection, and am usually pretty confident, I was overwhelmed by the Koigu and watched in amazement as Kim put together skein after skein.  You can see her choices on her blog: here are the ones she helped me put together.  We are going to do a little knit-along to make our shawls.

In the meantime, I took the Best Friends sock with me, determined to get a version that fits.  I decided to try the Fleegle heel after a discussion on Ravelry.  I had given up on short row heels, and had stuck to reverse flap-and-gusset heels. 

I was wrong.  I can't believe how easy this technique is and what a nice heel it produces.  My only confusion is why I would need fewer increases for the gusset with this heel.  This is what the sock looked like when I did the number of increases recommended by the pattern.  To make the sock fit with the total number of increases recommended in the pattern, I would need to make the foot of the sock no longer than 4 inches!  The heel increases would start more or less at the ball of my foot.  So I ripped it back (the heel on this sock has been ripped back 4 times -- this yarn wears like iron), and decided to try it with 16 increases, instead of the recommended 23.  Now, normally I have no problem with the idea that I would need a different number of increases or decreases recommended by a pattern, but knitting socks is what taught me that I have a high instep, so usually I have to add increases.  Anyway, I ripped back to 16 increases, did the heel -- so easy and smooth -- and the sock fit beautifully.  But now I have to figure out why I had so many extra stitches after finishing the heel.  I decreased at the ankle, knitting like crazy at the airport on my way home, and even taking off a shoe and sock at the airport, and on the plane, to try it on.  I didn't get home til 1 am, so I didn't try it on after all the decreases I made on the plane.  We'll see tonight if I can get the sock on over the heel.

Playing in NY was fun as usual.  We went to see Carrie Fisher's one-woman show Wishful Drinking, which was very good.  We had Sunday brunch at a restaurant on 10th Ave and 17th st, called Park.  It is an old parking garage turned into a gorgeous atrium-like garden space.  Even better, it is across the street from the High Line.  In a stroke of amazing foresight, New York City turned an old elevated subway into a park.  It is kind of like a boardwalk, with raised beds filled with ornamental grasses and small trees, lined with benches whose designs are artwork themselves.  Take a look at the High Line blog.  There are also other artworks to be seen, based on the river visible between the buildings, and there is one point where you can see straight downtown to the Statue of Liberty.  It was full of folks promenading and enjoying the sunlight, it looks like a couple of cafes might open, and there was a stand selling cocoa.  A new wonder in New York.

a fiber festival

Well, I have one vote for the shawl/vest, from Kim, and one vote for the sweater.  I think I will dither for a while.

Yesterday I drove up to Boerne (pronounced Bernie) Texas to the Kendall County Fairgrounds for the Kid 'n Ewe and Llama Too fiber festival.  Like many of these festivals, it was created by folks who raised fiber animals -- sheep, goats, and later alpacas and llamas.  Compared to shows like Rhinebeck and Maryland Sheep and Wool, Kid 'n Ewe is very small, which was quite a pleasure.  I drove up, found the fairground, discovered you parked wherever, and walked into the buildings.  No long line to park, no huge crowds jostling for access to commercial yarn, no entrance fee...  Just three buildings of vendors.  The center building was the most populated with vendors, there was an amazing amount of alpaca and mohair around, lots of spinning wheels, some classes.  I found the Brooks Farm Yarn booth.  I first encountered their yarn at Maryland Sheep and Wool, where they were crowded into one small outdoor tent the year I found them.  They told me that this year they were allowed to put up three tents. They told me selling at Maryland Sheep and Wool is an enormous effort for them.

As usual, I found them by spotting their yarn, not a sign.  I can immediately recognize Brooks Farm Yarn!  I fell in love with some gorgeous DK weight wool and mohair, and carried it around petting it until I acknowledged that I wouldn't have much use for a sweater made of DK weight wool and mohair here.  Yesterday at the festival, on Nov. 14, it was 77 degrees.  While that is a bit warmer than usual for around here, it wasn't by much.  This week, with termperatures in the 60s and low 70s, will be more typical.  But still, not exactly the wool-wearing weather folks experienced this year at Rhinebeck!  So instead I fell for, and bought, enough of Brooks Farm Yarn's Acero.  They describe this yarn this way:

After dyeing, the yarn has a heathered look with subtle variations throughout the skein. This easy to knit fingering weight yarn is 60% super wash wool, 20% silk and 20% viscose. Its versatility lends itself to needle sizes from US1 to US8.

Determined not to buy blue/teal/bluish greens, I fell in love with this. 
 And for once, I bought enough.  Instead of buying the least possible amount, I bought a generous amount of this fingering weight yarn so that I will be able to use it for whatever pattern or project attracts me. 

The color is a deep rich purple with some variation throughout the yarn.  This means I might be happier alternating skeins when I knit with it.  And I feel pretty good about buying it even as I work at destashing lots of what I have in the yarn closet.  I just found buyers on Ravelry for several batches of yarn and roving that I am not going to use.  So I moved out three residents of the yarn closet, and found yarns that are more appropriate, I think, for use here in San Antonio. 

Speaking of which, the Featherweight cardigan is progressing quickly.  I am below the armholes, knitting the body of the sweater, which is a bit dull right now since it is just stockinette, without any interesting construction (like top down shoulders) to interest me.  But it is going very quickly, I am loving working with a springy wool again, and I am enjoying the ability to simply try it on whenever I want.  I did want, yesterday, and am pleased with it so far.  When you knit a raglan sweater from the top, you increase the number of stitches for the back, each sleeve and the fronts.  I followed the pattern, which meant I increased back, sleeves and fronts at the same rate.  This is the kind of calculation I am going to want to think about for future top down patterns, since increasing the sleeves every time I increase to make sure the sweater fits my front can lead to very wide sleeves :>  I am at the point where the sleeve stitches have been put on holders and I am now knitting around the body of the sweater.  This creates the armhole and means I go back to the sleeves later on.   I like the current size of the top of the sleeve but may in fact want to increase the sleeves at a slower rate for other sweaters.

      There were lots of other goodies at Kid 'n Ewe, though I didn't find another drop spindle that attracted me.  That was a major purchase goal for me at Maryland Sheep and Wool every year.  I did find some inexpensive fun stitch markers.  I lose the darn things, even sitting on my own couch, so I don't indulge in fancy or expensive ones.  These are cute, and visible, and losing them won't create anguish. 

     I was heading home from the festival by noon, happy with my purchases.  Next year I might sign up for a class. 

Yarn Crawl in the Hill Country

With a friend visiting from Pennsylvania, the last 4 or 5 days were spent enjoying San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country during the local Yarn Crawl as well as exploring San Antonio.  The Yarn Crawl was a lot of fun, since we used it to explore the Hill Country towns of Boerne, Comfort, Fredericksburg and Wimberley.  We did sort of a triangle through the Hill Country, as Linda noted how the geography changed and enjoyed the 19th century Main Streets in each town.  All except Wimberley, actually, since the Old Oaks Ranch is literally that, on a country road outside of the town itself.  The Old Oaks Ranch was our favorite yarn store on the crawl, though it was raining -- pouring actually -- and so we didn't get to visit the Sculpture Garden or the alpacas, who were smart enough to get out of the rain into their shelters.  But they had interesting yarn.  I was amazed at the amount of heavy wool they had (still can't imagine it in Texas) but I did succumb to this -- the beautiful handpainted rayon on the left in the photo.  I am verging on buyer's remorse, since I am not sure really there is enough of it to make what I want, but we'll see.  Part of the problem is that the shop and Ravelry have different ideas about how much yarn is on the skein.  I might write to its creator, at The Drop Spindle, to see if she can clarify it for me.

At the Yarnivore in San Antonio, I bought a laceweight yarn I had been mooning over.  That's it on the right in the photo.  It is incredibly soft, and is part of the "Zara family," according to the label.  Once again, I have my doubts about the data about the yarn, since Ravelry says it is a one-ply cobweb, and looking at it shows that it is undoubtedly a two-ply yarn. 

We also had a good time at, ummm... sorry, they are running together a bit. No wait, I remember.  I found the perfect button for the Sausalito jacket at The Tinsmith's Wife (isn't that a cool name for a yarn store?).  This is a Gita Marie button, and it was very pricey for a button, but perfect with this yarn.  Linda bought a scarf pattern and a skein of Mini Mochi at the same store.  We both finished the crawl with lots of ideas floating around for knitting projects, and the button will, I hope, provide some motivation for me to finish Sausalito.

I also did my evil deed for the year -- I introduced Linda to Ravelry.  Bwa-ha-ha-ha!  Doing my part to spread the contagion.

Linda and I also explored San Antonio.  I introduced her to my new campus, and from there we discovered that I am about a two block walk from Market Square, and just over a half mile to the River Walk.  I took her over to the Southwest School of Art and Craft, and we walked about 3 miles on the River Walk from there along the new Museum Reach section -- very different from the tourist-y central part of the River Walk, which is fun in its own way.  The new section is quiet, beautifully planted on the banks, and includes a new lock system to raise the river taxis near the San Antonio Museum of Art.  Several public art projects are included in the Museum Reach section of the River Walk, including one I encountered for the first time walking with Linda -- it is an aural project, with different sounds forming a soundscape as you walk under an overpass.  There are good pictures on the River Walk pages linked above.  We then had dinner at Cool Cafe, overlooking the River Walk.

We also did a 5K walk on a ranch in the Hill Country on Saturday, saw a great concert by Ellis Paul, walked around the King William neighborhood of San Antonio, explored the Guenther House, and then headed off to visit a couple of the Missions that founded the city.  We walked around Mission San Jose and Mission Concepcion.  Mission San Jose has some beautiful land around it, as well as the San Antonio River.  I had been there once before for a bike ride along the Mission Trail.  The stonework is gorgeous.  I took a lot of pictures.

Mission Concepcion is a bit different in that the city is literally built up right to the mission, with apartment buildings overlooking the church.  Both are still active churches, though at the moment the church at Mission Concepcion is closed for restoration.

I will be going back to the Old Oaks Ranch.  They had two interesting woven hangings in the window, and I spoke to the weaver who made them and who teaches weaving there.  So I think, since my tapestry class was cancelled at the Southwest School, that I may go back up for a private class, using my rigid heddle loom.  That loom, a Glimakra Emilia, is still in a virgin state, not having been warped even once.  So again, the crawl created a lot of motivation, for weaving as well as knitting.

So when are the rest of you coming to San Antonio?

Yarn therapy

Sock progress -- I have finished the first Best Friend sock, with a picot edge.  And I have ripped out, yet again, the heel on the second Sockotta sock, have forgotten, yet again, to move heel stitches to the instep.  See, I stopped knitting socks and forgot some of the basics of my own pattern.  So I have to keep knitting socks, apparently, so that I do not forget.  I certainly have enough sock yarn stashed to keep going -- once I was silly enough to count up how many pairs of socks I could make from the stash, and that was so scary that I am NOT going to do that again. 

At the same time, tastes change, environments change and so sometimes you just need to add to the sock yarn stash anyway.  After a very startling day at work, I was delighted to be met by two new residents of the sock yarn stash -- the Almost Free Sock Yarn arrived!  On the right is Regia Cotton Java Color.  Color number is 1188 and it has turquoise, purple, red, charcoal and mauve.  While it is not sold as a stretch yarn, the label claims it is "uniquely stretchy," "incredibly stable," and "superbly comfortable."  Wow.

Accompanying the unique, incredible and superb Regia Cotton Java Color was a skein of Online's Supersocke 100 Summer Cotton Stretch in color #1158.  The colors in this one include turquoise (imagine that), blue and a warm variegated

toast color.  This one is indeed a stretch yarn. 

Getting packages is always fun, and I had come home from work after a day in which massive organizational changes had been announced to find looking at new yarn in beautiful colors is always a pleasant thing.  I am still employed, and still working at the level of a department head, but of a totally different department with totally different responsibilities. 

Good thing there was some beautiful sock yarn waiting for me, right? 

P.S. Got a chance to explore the stash that is Hill Country Weavers on my way home from a friend's place in Austin today.  An amazing yarn store.  And, keeping in mind the yarn therapy that had just arrived at home, I did not take advantage of the opportunity and did not add to my own personal stash while there.  But it was touch and go there, for a while...

Almost free yarn

Rainfall count is now 4.6 inches and counting.  And apparently it will continue, though we are having a few beautiful days before more rain is predicted.  So while they are not counting the drought over and done with yet, better days may be shining through.  There are green lawns and wildflowers all over town.

In love with wearing my wool-cotton blend pink socks, as mentioned in my last entry, a synapse in my brain fired and I remembered another skein of sock yarn.  I dug around in the yarn closet and found this -- no label, but I think it might be more Meilenweit Cotton Fun. No wait, I think it's Regia.   It is definitely a cotton blend sock yarn.  Then I got some more for kinda-free.  Kinda-free is when using your Paypal credit card has earned you enough points to redeem a $25 gift certificate, and you can use it wherever you can use Paypal, so you go to Wool Needle Work and discover they have Regia Java Cotton yarn for just over $10 (one skein makes a pair of socks) and Online Supersocke Cotton Stretch yarn for $13 (one skein makes a pair of socks).  So now in addition to having way too much wool sock yarn, once this stuff arrives I will have enough yarn for 3 more pairs of cotton-wool blend socks.  Oh yeah, I am also buying a skein of Meilenweit Cotton Stretch from a Ravelry stash, so make that 4 pairs.  The Online Supersocke Cotton Stretch also, of course, is a stretchy yarn, so we will see if that makes knitting with a cotton blend more pleasant. 

This too-much sock yarn spirals, though, in that unless I wear boots in San Antonio -- not unheard of, of course, in Texas -- most of my shoes do not lend themselves to sock wearing. They would be too snug, for one thing. So unless I start wearing running shoes to work as the weather gets cooler, I need to find shoes that go with handknit socks.  Oh dear.  I am being forced to buy shoes.  Especially since my boots are more trudging-through-Northern-winters type boots.

Continuing the sock madness, I got sucked into thinking about using laceweight yarn to make socks.  It was a discussion on Ravelry, of course.  It's insane, and would require using something like size 000 needles, which poke painful holes in my fingers, and would take forever to knit.  But it would also make nice thin socks, and I have some Zephyr in the stash and the silk in the Zephyr would be long wearing....

In the meantime, I screwed up the heel on this pair of neverending socks in Sockotta.  I can never repair mistakes I make in a heel, and kept screwing up the gusset stitches as I tried to unknit parts of it, so I ended up ripping back to the point where I will once again start increasing for the gusset. 

Way too much time is being spent on Ravelry searching out additional knitting projects, just immediately after deciding maybe knitting wasn't the appropriate fiber-using habit to have in South Central Texas.  Nevertheless, here I am working on two pairs of socks, and planning on more particularly at the moment the Nanner socks from WendyKnits), fantasizing about laceweight cardigans (I think I will wind the Prism lace yarn I have today), and even thinking about knitting this cardigan, a pattern from Knit Picks.  Mine would have more buttons, and I have been thinking it would substitute for a light jacket for what passes for winter here in San Antonio.  So I guess I am continuing to knit.  I would get more socks done, though, if there were more tennis on tv.

L'shana tovah to you all, for this new year of 5770.