yarn tootin'

My Favorite Knit

     I finished my second adult sized sweater last night and I think it's pretty good.  Unlike Klaralund (my first sweater), I will actually wear this one.  It's still a wee tad hot for sweaters in Big Texas, but I'm sure I'll find myself in an over air-conditioned building sometime between now and November when it might actually be cool enough to wear it outside.  Because I seem to be incapable of "modeling" without making ridiculous faces and because Bob says things like "Make it work!" while taking the pictures, I end up with this type of photo.  Sadly, it's the best of the bunch, but at least it's a decent picture of the sweater.

Pattern: Mr. Greenjeans by Amy Swenson.  I made the size small with longer sleeves and a wider button band.  If I were to knit it again (and I probably will), I'd use a different increase for the shoulders.  The one thing I don't love about this sweater are the YO holes across the shoulders.
Yarn: Brooks Farm Yarn Four Play which I bought at Kid 'n Ewe last year with this particular project in mind.  This is a great yarn and I intend to buy another sweater quantity at this year's Kid 'n Ewe.

     Bob and I are off to the motherlands (first mine, then his) tomorrow.  I'm sure that much knitting and yarn purchasing will ensue.  I haven't decided if I'll drag the computer along or not, so I may be away from the blog for a couple of weeks.  We're flying so I have some critical vacation knitting decisions to make and that may take the rest of the afternoon.

 

The Winners

      Thank you to everyone for sending comments and pictures to my blorthday contest.  I had a record number of comments and emails regarding my blorthday post, so I found it easier to break your pictures up into two mosaics.  I was able to use most of the pictures I received, but some pictures were not available (I used fd's flickr toys and I couldn't use the pictures from those of you who have opted out of Big Huge Labs) and a few belonged to someone else's blog or website, so I left those out.  I was able to look at your projects/yarns etc. and everyone's name went into the prize drawing.

Mosaic #1

1. Binsenkorbchen June 2007 001, 2. Hexacomb 1, 3. RIMG0005, 4. Yarntini scarf, 5. Harald back, 6. IMG_4626, 7. Embossed Leaves final, 8. P6220502, 9. Henley Perfected 2, 10. eyelet flame socks, 11. Not available, 12. Not available, 13. Goddess, 14. Gift from Taalu, 15. Jun14latoya, 16. Not available, 17. IMG_0828, 18. Turkish-Patterned Cap top view, 19. fetching1, 20. Christmas Sampler Stocking IMG_3730, 21. FO!!, 22. Picture 003, 23. Spiral Socks, 24. ski hat (3), 25. Purple Cabled Socks on Clint, 26. funky pair, 27. KureyVio3 (Small), 28. Knitting Jan-Feb 002, 29. IMG_0013, 30. bunny toy

Created with fd's Flickr Toys.

Mosaic #2

1. Blue Green Sultana 2, 2. FeltedBag+002-1, 3. socks delaney, 4. ashley's blanket, 5. scarf, 6. dishcloths, 7. happy dance, 8. MarketSquareBag, 9. sassy soph, 10. Hats+for+Alex, 11. 3Socks+003, 12. Anneli, 13. Elaine, 14. quinn Salmon Wrap 4MDK, 15. sockandapples, 16. hemlock ring 2, 17. DSC00534, 18. side view of klv sample hat, 19. P3220177, 20. Not available, 21. shawl, 22. 100_1583, 23. Clapotis, 24. birthday socks, 25. hollyhock

Created with fd's Flickr Toys.

     Now for the winners...Emily is the winner of the Zen String, Gretchen (Ravelry link) wins the Red Rocks Fiber Works skein, Jessica is the winner of the Pagewood Farm yarn, and Re wins the Twisted Fiber Art skein.  Thanks to everyone for playing and a big, special thank you to Amanda for coming up with this great idea in the first place.  Since Amanda lives in Portland and this whole thing was about favorites, Amanda wins a gift certificate to my favorite Portland yarn store, Twisted.  I spoke to an extremely helpful and enthusiastic woman at Twisted on the phone just now and she will email that gift certificate to Amanda.  Thanks for the idea!  If you've won and you haven't already heard from me, please email your mailing address to me at yarntootin at yahoo dot com and I will get that yarn out as soon as I can.  Thanks everyone!

Happy Blorthday To Me!

      My Blorthday is this week, so I'm giving away yarn in celebration.  A few months ago, Bob walked into the yarn room while I was sorting and reorganizing my sock yarn stash and he asked me how long it would take me to knit all of that yarn.  I told him I wasn't sure, but I thought it would take a very long time.  He said, "Would it take a year?" and I had to admit that it would take something more like a decade for me to knit up all of my sock yarn. 

     In the last year, I've been a member of three different sock yarn clubs and my business and family related travels have taken me to yarn stores all over the country.  Somewhere along the line, I stopped caring about the fact that I already have a lot of sock yarn and I kept buying it because it's pretty or hard to come by or because I was in a tiny LYS in some out of the way place and I felt like it was my duty to buy at least one skein of something.  Because I have a truly mountainous stash of sock yarn and only two feet, I've chosen four tasty skeins from some of my favorite independent dyers (all of whom are new to me in the last year or so) to give away to you, dear readers, in honor of my third blorthday.

     I wanted to do something different this year.  Just leaving a comment is too easy and it's not that interesting.  In my last post, I asked if anyone had any great ideas for my blorthday extravaganza and only one person responded.  Fortunately, Pretty (a.k.a. Amanda who I actually know in real life) was that person and her idea is brilliant.  She suggested that I have people send me a picture of their most loved knitted item from the last year and then I could post them all in a Flickr mosaic.  This is perfect because it gives everyone a chance to show their stuff, it gives me new ideas, and I just love Flickr mosaics.

     If you'd like to be entered into a random drawing for the yarns below, please send me a picture via email or post a link in the comments (if you Flickr, Flickr links are great) to a picture of your favorite knit or crocheted item, your favorite yarn or pattern or knitting book or any crafty item.  You can even link to a pattern on Ravelry or elsewhere on the interwebs, or even to your favorite blog post.  I'm not picky, but I will put all of the pictures I receive into a Flickr mosaic.  Since Amanda came up with this plan, she automatically wins one of the prizes which leaves three for the rest of y'all.  Here they are....

Zen String Lotus Toes in Hope 100% superwash merino from the Zen String Winter Yarn Club

Red Rocks Fiber Works Snowmass Sock in No Repeat 5 100% superwash merino

 

Pagewood Farm Yukon in Crayon,  70% Merino, 20% Bamboo, 10% Nylon

     And last but not least, my very favorite new to me yarn of the last year.....

 

Twisted Fiber Art Duchess  Sport Weight in Ravelry 100% Superwash Merino

     Good luck to everyone.  If you choose send me a picture, please send it to yarntootin at yahoo dot com.  I'll take entries until 12 P.M. Central time on July 29th.  Thanks for reading and thanks for playing!

I Don't Just Buy Yarn, Sometimes I Actually Knit

     By my standards, I've managed to do quite a bit of knitting in the last month or so.  I will never be the sort of knitter who cranks out a sweater in less than a month, but it's not because I can't knit that many stitches.  I simply lack the ability to devote myself to a single project for any length of time and that can make it seem like I never finish anything.  Being away from home and stash helps, but even then I usually have at least two projects going and yarn and needles for a third.  I knit this sock mostly on planes and I finished it about twenty minutes before landing in San Antonio last Sunday.

 

Pattern: Nutkin byKnitzi.  This pattern is fun and easily memorized which makes it great for air travel.  I hate it when I have to knit with my tray table down so I can look at a chart.  This pattern also uses a version of the short row heel which was new to me.  Instead of wraps, there are yarn overs at the beginning of every row. Once I got the hang of it, I liked this heel a lot and I will definitely use the technique again.  I chose to do my regular toe because I know it works and I didn't like the look of the toe in the pattern. 
Yarn: Handmaiden Casbah.  This yarn is now one of my favorites.  It's soft and squishy and not too fine.  It knits up nicely on US 1.5 needles which are my favorite for socks.  The colorway is Origin.

     Aside from the sock, I needed to have a totally mindless simple project to work on at Sequoia.  Knitting anything even remotely complicated at Sequoia is a bad idea for several reasons.  For one thing, I get interrupted a lot, so I need something that I can be put down at a moment's notice and abandoned for several hours.  For another, I'm often very tired and prone to mistakes, so the simpler the better.  When I left San Antonio, I put two balls of Noro Silk Garden Lite in my suitcase thinking that one of the yarn stores I was about to visit would have the same yarn in a coordinating colorway and I could do something Jared-esque.  I found what I was looking for at one of the LYS  I visited in Salt Lake City.  When I got back to my hotel that night, I spent some time looking at scarf and shawl patterns on Ravelry and I came across the Sunday Market Shawl.

     This project is perfect for Sequoia because after the first row it's just plain stockinette, yet the frequent color changes keep it interesting.  I could knit a row here and a row there and there was nothing to keep track of.  Since I'm using a circular needle, I could even stuff it in the bag in the middle of a row and no harm was done.  I'm making this bigger than the pattern suggests and I'm also knitting at a tighter gauge.  I'm also planning to drop every fourth stitch rather than every third stitch and my hope is that it will end up looking sort of like a straight, stripey Clapotis when it's finished.

     Tomorrow is my blorthday.  At some point in the next week or so, I plan to have a little Happy Blorthday yarn contest, but I'd like to come up with something more exciting than the leave a comment, get the yarn formula I've used in the past.  If any of y'all have a brilliant idea, let me know.  If I use your idea, you will automatically get a prize.

Pacific Yarns

     I'm back in Big Texas and it smells like fried in my house.  For some reason I don't quite understand, Bob is frying plantains to go with the lemon pepper chicken I'm grilling for dinner.  Doesn't that sound delicious?  Bob loves plantains (even with lemon pepper chicken), but I think they're just big, nasty bananas and I do not like them one bit.  At least I'm home and I'm not eating dorm food or sleeping in a dorm bed.
   I've spent the three of the last four weeks at music camps in the Pacific Northwest.  I love the Pacific Northwest for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, it's not that hot there.  For another, I have several good friends in the region, and yet another added bonus is that there are a ton of yarn stores.  Two Saturdays ago, I had several hours to kill in the Portland area and I went to four yarn stores.  I was in Seattle last Saturday and I managed to hit two very nice LYS.
  In Portland I went to Twisted which may be my new favorite Portland yarn store. Another good one and also new to me is Knit Purl. Twisted has huge array of sock yarns, as does Knit Purl.  Knit Purl is slightly more high end and about the tidiest yarn store I've ever been in and Twisted had the friendliest yarn store worker I have ever met.  Both stores had a good vibe and my aimless browsing was welcomed.  I would have felt comfortable walking out of either store without buying a thing, but of course, I didn't do that.

 

From top left: STR Heavyweight in Thistle from Twisted, Handmaiden Casbah in Vintage from Knit Purl, Churchmouse Yarns and Teas in Seattle, STR Lightweight in Carbon Dating from Churchmouse and two skeins of Plymouth Happy Feet from So Much Yarn in Seattle.

     This past weekend, I was in Seattle for my friend Leah's wedding and I managed to get to two yarn stores that I didn't visit on my last trip to Seattle.  The first was So Much Yarn in downtown Seattle which was a  solid LYS, and the second was Churchmouse Yarns and Teas on Bainbridge Island.  Both stores are perfect tourist destinations.  So Much Yarn is just four blocks from the Pike Street Market, and Churchmouse is a fun ferry ride across the Puget Sound.  Bob really wanted to take a ride on a ferry (he didn't really care which one) and I wanted to see many skeins of STR in person, so our trip to Bainbridge Island was a win win.

 

   

   
Bob and Me on the ferry and the view of Seattle from the ferry

    I have been knitting a bit and I have a new project to share as well as a couple of finished items, but they will have to wait for the next post as this is already long enough.  My Blorthday is also coming right up, so stay tuned for opportunities to win free yarn!

Viola Chocolate

     A couple of months ago, a fellow violist brought the fanciest and most delicious M&Ms to a concert for viola chocolate.  In our viola section, there is almost always at least one person with a chocolate stash on hand for when things get a little rough or for when things sound great and we want to celebrate.  It's always a good time for chocolate on our side of the stage, and it's gotten to the point where several of us try very hard to bring in chocolate that is so new and different that no one else has ever seen or tasted it before.  On one occasion, I came to work with a bar of Bacon Chocolate (interesting, but not so delicious) that I found at Whole Foods.

     Our principal violist has a daughter-in-law who works for Mars, so she sometimes has access to things that the rest of us have never even dreamed of.  This was definitely the case with the three unmarked tester bags of very pretty M&Ms that she was kind enough to share with us during our run of Cinco de Mayo concerts.  The section immediately dubbed them "bath bead M&Ms" because they were larger than regular M&Ms and they had a bit of a pearlescent quality.  The bath bead M&Ms were unlike any M&Ms I'd ever had and I think they might be M&Ms answer to the fancy chocolate trend.  Today while perusing the higher end chocolate aisle at Target, I was pleased to discover that the bath bead M&Ms (they're actually called M&Ms Premiums) are now available to the masses and they're on sale! 

     I immediately put a box of each of the three flavors I'd already sampled (Mocha, Triple Chocolate, and Mint Chocolate) into my cart.  The other two flavors are Raspberry Almond and Almond Chocolate, but those didn't appeal to me as much as the ones I already knew to be delicious.  So far I've opened the Mint flavor and they're just like the testers.  The one thing they lack is the crunchy candy shell of traditional M&Ms, but I don't miss it.  These M&Ms are just plain delicious and I, for one, hope they're here to stay and not some kind of sick, twisted Limited Edition.  Have you ever noticed that many of the most delicious editions of popular candies are "Limited Editions"?  I still miss the KitKat Dark.