Oh, I Got Your Yarn Porn Friday...

First off, thank you all for participating in yesterday's poll! The feedback was largely encouraging, so I listed the skein for sale at the shop. We'll see. It's nice to change things up at the wheel once in a while, too, so spinning different stuff is fun for me. If nothing else, the colors make me happy, so just having the skein in the room kind of cheers me up.

So! How's about we just get a whole year's worth of Yarn Porn over with in this one post?

Yeah....

(Hee - I just noticed the little drowning-in-wool lamb at the bottom of the pile on the left; not even sure how that got there! "Save me from the irony!!" Lambykins says.)

I finally stopped being a petulant and crappy Beta tester last night, and committed to photographing, at the very least, my sock yarn stash for Ravelry. (I was fortunate enough to get an invite way early on, before I even had heard a word about what the hell Ravelry was - and how glorious it has turned out to be! - and it has taken me forever to do my part. I think I'm afraid of getting totally sucked into it, so I've been resisting...but I'm wearing down...)

So yes, that's my sock yarn stash. The wool of it, anyway. Didn't get the cottons done...

If you'd like to drool over peruse the whole thing, skein by skein, you can do so at the Flickr photoset. I really do have some great stuff - I feel fortunate. And I love them each so very much - I realized when I was uploading the photos (PS: LOVE the Flickr Uploadr) that I could pretty much rattle off the brand and colourways of almost all of them from memory. And yet I have no idea where my favorite shoes have gotten off to... So check out all SIXTY EIGHT pictures on the photoset. (Oh, and I missed a couple - I think my Socks that Rock from the April club shipment might have ran away...I took it off the shelf, but I see no photo, and I don't remember putting it back on the shelf. I'll probably find it stuffed under the bed a month from now - wool gremlins.)

Other than that, not much going on here, other than my current obsession with planning our newly-and-suddenly-imperative trip to either Los Angeles, Las Vegas, or New York in December. (I'm thinking Vegas, but it could change...) Why? Oh, you know why. (Is my generation gap showing?)

This weekend? RATATOUILLE!!!!! Wahooo!!!!

(Edit: Or, cancel all my plans. This week's clue for the Mystery Stole came out - I only have to work the first ONE HUNDRED ROWS of the damned thing by next Friday. Gack.)

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

First things first! I won a contest over at Rosi's blog a little while ago, and I got my prize in the mail yesterday. Dude!

Handmade soap, handmade lip balm (her soaps and lip balm are the BEST), pretty glass stitch markers, sock yarn, cookies, and FIVE bags of yummy tea in some of my favorite flavors! (Five!! Geez, I hope I have enough tea to get me through the week. ;-D)

Funny thing about the cookies...


Shortly after Travis got home and I gave him two cookies and told him no more, I heard a rustling noise coming from the pantry.


Uh-huh.


Pretty....


I love this yarn! Details on it can be found here. It's totally my colors, and I think it would look really good in cables; maybe I'll try it in my new pattern, or tinker with my new pattern, add some details and complications, and do that...

Speaking of which:


Yay, progress!

Oh - and I joined the Mystery Stole 3 thing. Seems like it could be fun, and I don't do enough KAL-type things.

Now, I need your help.


I'm still not sure whether this skein is fun, or if I just messed up a perfectly good braid of Yarn Pirate's roving. It may just be that novelty-type yarn isn't totally to my taste; I've spun some of my little rovettes into yarn like this, and yarn with coils, and I liked them okay, so maybe it's just the fact that there's so MUCH of this skein, and it's throwing off my perception.


What do you think? I made up one of those nice little anonymous polls, so you could tell me honestly where you stand. (I have a lot of faith in your general niceness, so I don't imagine I'd get very many "Ugh, no way - burn it!" comments, and I want honesty, so I figure anonymity will help.) Please vote, I'm curious not only as to what to do with this particular skein, but also as to whether I should throw a skein like this out there once in a while or just stick to regular old yarn spinning and leave the fun stuff for somebody else. (And because it came out really hard to read here, and it wasn't on the poll generator thing - the poll question is "What do you think, is it worth listing for sale?")



(Psst, Friends to the north: y'all are just so much more delicate with your wording up there. Had to come up with a more subtle version of "Bleccchhhhh!" for you. Also suitable for those located in the UK.)

Envy Me.

I had the day off of work today. I spent the day working on a sock in some of the cushiest plastic chairs our fine county has to offer: drivers' license bureau, tax collector's office, bank, social security office (that one was exceptionally...something.) But at least I'm pretty sure I'm mostly kind of done with the whole name-change thing, and hallelujah for that. (What fun. I swear, this guy ever tries to take off, I'm kicking him in the nurtz. Hard.) ;-)

Nothing to offer in the way of progress, really, other than several more inches of Sockapalooza progress (and one step back - had to frog about six or seven rounds of what I believe happened on malfunctioning autopilot at that social security office.) I also finished a skein that I'm pretty sure will never see the light of day. Maybe I'll post it here and take votes to see if you think I should knit it, sell it, burn it, or tie it to some helium balloons, release it with my phone number scribbled on a skein tag, and see who calls.

Oh, I wanted to address a few things:

1. We do not have a new kitten. Nothing against kittens, obviously; it's just that I have a weird obsession with symmetry, and bringing a kitten home would be a disaster. We are currently a household of six: one boy person, one girl person, one boy cat, one girl cat, one boy dog, one girl dog. If I bring home a kitten...well, it would throw off the ratios and you can imagine where that would end up. (It makes it easy for Travis to talk me out of getting another ragdoll kitty though, because while the statement, "Now, sweetheart, you know if we get another cat, you're going to have to have a baby" may sound completely insane to all of you, it makes perfect sense to me.) Anyway, no; that kitten was at our knitting meetup at Fiber Art in (somewhere on the west side of the state....Odessa?) Bit of a long story about that sweet little kitty, and it's kind of open-ended for now. (It won't end in this house. I have too many socks to knit to suddenly start on baby garments.)

2. The shop is fun; selling stuff is wicked fun (thanks!!!); stressing over whether I'm pricing things fairly isn't as fun. I keep tinkering with the listings, but I think I've settled on prices for now.

3. In News of the Stuff I Should Be Ashamed of But Will Share with You Anyway Because It Keeps Me Grounded: I watched The Brady Bunch Movie on cable this weekend.

4. Twice.

Happy knitting!

What's Goin' On (what's goin' on)

It's been a lot about the spinning, huh? I've been working on knitting stuff, too, but I haven't really shown anything. It's all in progress, but I figure I could post pictures of the project bags to prove that I do still knit sometimes...

Here's Green Gable. It's a quick knit if you're anyone else, but since it's my here-and-there project, it's not going as quickly as possible. I think I have plenty of yarn, so I'll probably modify the pattern to have above-the-elbow sleeves to make it appropriate for work. (For no particular reason, I don't like wearing sleeveless or cap-sleeved things to the office.)


Here's one Gryffindor sock, patterned in my standard "just wingin' it" style. I really love the yarn; these just have to be done by you-know-when in time for you-know-what.


I *finally* started my Sockapalooza pal's socks. I went through several different ideas before I settled on Cabin Cove yarn in the Yankees Ikat colorway. Also pictured, a nice little simple Lantern Moon project bag. The small ones are about ten bucks; nothing fancy, but effective.


The pattern I'm doing is a 3x3 rib with a braided cable down the center back. I love the way the cable looks, even if it does get a little lost in this colorway; I'll probably try this again in a solid or semi-solid yarn. (And if anyone's interested - or probably even if you're not - I'll likely write up a pattern for it. It's a nice little twist on a plain old ribbed sock; adds something without being too much work.)

Wanna see something I finished? Yeah, we're back to the handspun.


I'm calling this one "Sweet and Low"; it's superwash merino, about a sock weight, heavy fingering, 325 yards, four ounces, from a Pigeon Roof Studios roving in the Punk colorway. It'll be up in the shop, maybe this evening.

Finally...okay, listen, Sock REALLY didn't want me to share this with you. You know what a reputation he has. And he wasn't thrilled that I managed to snag photographic proof of one of his weaknesses. But he's a tiny sock, so there's really nothing he can do to stop me...


Who doesn't love a little baby kitten??

Criiiiipes......

In the following post, I am not complaining, okay? I signed up for it.

But seeing this is still a little scary.

(In case you don't feel like doing all the scrolling and trying to intuit my maiden name so you can find what on earth I'm referring to, here's what I mean:)


(Sorry for the crappy image, but it was the best I could do at the moment.)

See the one in the middle?? Gah! That's me!! That's MY pending workshop at a somewhat major annual fiber festival! I don't know what I'm doing!!!!! (Also, I like to call the workshop listed above me "Keep It Simple Stupid Human-Goat!" because it makes me laugh; human-goat hybrids who tend to over-complicate things - talk about your niche markets!) Where was I? Oh: I'm scared!!!!!!

*deep breath*

Yes, I do know what I'm doing. I've made hats. I taught Travis how to make a hat. He didn't have a pattern, he didn't have anything; all he had was my gentle guiding hand. (Which probably didn't feel so gentle or guiding when I ripped back the crown for the third time because I kept getting the math wrong on the decreases and the stitch count was wonky. But not to worry - somewhere there is a crumply macchiatto-stained napkin with the right numbers jotted on it, and all I have to do is find it.) He wouldn't have a hat if it weren't for me. I can do this. No problem.

*PANIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*

This is how my days will go for the next, oh, four months. Same exact thing for the sock class, if accepted: I taught Travis to knit a sock, and he did so quite well, and yet I feel I'm incapable of doing so in a room full of strangers. Even with the added benefit of written materials and relative anonymity. (No one expects anything from me, because no one knows who in hell I am, so there's no reputation to uphold. But that might be worse; I'd kind of cotton to having a reputation, I think.)

In other news, I think it's likely I'll go to Rhinebeck as well, which is the weekend before SAFF. The only "vacation" I have coming is a conference in Seattle for work, so since those expenses are covered, I can swing a weekend trip. It'd be a good chance to hang with some of my bloggy friends, assuming they'll be there, and maybe they'll be kind enough to ply me with booze and convince me that I'm capable of pulling this workshop thing off. (Knitters? Anybody up for the challenge?)