I have received the most kickass mail this week!

First up, remember me begging for some of the discontinued Rowan 4 ply cotton? Well Caro heard my cries and we did a little swappy action for these 5+ balls. How cool is that? Answer: Very! I think this yarn is going to become a Phyllo Yoked Pullover from Knitting Nature, with (hopefully) a shorter yoke so I can wear it sans cami.

Then, Ashley offered to take some unexpectedly-variegated Koigu off my hands (I swear, the Yarnzilla photo made it look like a semisolid) in exchange for this lovely box bag. How cool is that? You already know the answer. The box bag is the perfect size for two balls of yarn and my in-progress Garnstudio baby jacket.

The baby jacket is such an awesome pattern – simple to execute, yet very cool looking. I never thought I could love garter stitch so much, but in the RYC Cashsoft, it’s downright delicious. Baby-in-law is going to be one pampered boy. However, I’m feeling a bit eh about the colors of this – I’ve had the olive yarn for a while, and just purchased the celery color last week. I was going for a tonal color scheme for the sweater, but I’m afraid that I’m imparting my drab color scheme on sister-in-law’s unborn child. Well, at least it will be a cushy, soft, and luxurious drab sweater.

I also have a swap in progress with NanC, for a subset of my oodles of Lang Fantomas. I really need to complain about my yarn more often, these swaps have been great.

Lastly, I got my Petal package in the mail yesterday. Happy early birthday to me! Yes, I already own that color of 4 ply cotton. I’m warming up my size 2 needles for this puppy!

Caterpillar:

Butterfly:

Or something like that. Heritage Arts TX merino/tussah silk fiber, about 100g. I’ve informed Amy about her need for bigger bobbins, and she’s accepting donations.

This is so much more evenly spun than the Spunky Eclectic, yay! My secret was to predraft the fiber, then to go back and predraft it again for reals. I still had some difficulty drafting it, especially when I hit a the occasional clump of silk that wouldn’t draft out, but overall I’m very happy with the result!

I’ve realized that 4oz of fiber isn’t very much – I’m basically spinning up a bunch of skeins to add to the oddball collection. What to do with 100g of yarn? Time to bust out the One Skein book, I suppose.

I have one more bunch of fiber that I plan on spinning up before I give back the wheel – 4oz of Spunky Eclectic merino/silk. Yum. After that’s gone, my fiber stash will be pretty much zero – there’s a couple of small amounts of stuff, and some horrid roving that I dyed the ugliest shade of purple one’s ever seen. I’m happy that I’ve spun up the stash, but now I’ve got other fibers on my wishlist, like the Knitterly Things roving that Lori spun up, and pretty much anything from pigeonroofstudio’s etsy shop.

This whole spinning thing has definitely cut into my knitting time – I’ve barely knit anything since I borrowed the wheel. I have bought a wee bit of yarn (for baby-in-law, which is totally allowed!). The Rowan Cashsoft is going to become this Garnstudio baby sweater, and the leftovers are going to make Saartje’s booties (pdf). Cute!

Ok, we’re off to do some grilling and drink lots of margaritas, if the rain around here ever stops!

Back in the day, I amassed a bit of a fiber stash after I learned how to spin on the drop spindle. Unfortunately, it really didn’t take long for me to realize how freaking tedious drop-spindling is, so I’ve somewhat abandoned it. So much work for so little yarn! I definitely have lots of respect for those who generate beauty from a drop spindle.

Lucky me when Amy agreed to let me borrow her wheel last weekend. I’ve been busy like a bee turning this:

Into this:

100g of Spunky Eclectic merino in Nova Scotia. I find it odd that yarn weights are usually in grams, but fiber is sold in ounces. These skeins are 100g on the dot, so there you go.

I’m not entirely clear on what I was drinking when I bought this, that browny yellow is so not my color. It’s slightly overplied, although that seems to have worked itself out after a bath.

A few observations:

• The wheel is faster than a drop spindle, but slower than I thought it would be. This is probably best for my wallet. I spent all weekend spinning this stuff up.
• Everything I know from spinning I learned from the internets. Sparse blog discussions do not a good spinner make. Anyone know any good spinning books to buy? I sort of understand the intro stuff, so I’m more looking for a book that breaks down drafting techniques, fancy plying, etc.
• I was seriously considering buying a wheel, but I think that borrowing the wheel has convinced me to hold off on that purchase. It’s definitely an investment, even more so considering that I would need a folding, storeable wheel that I can hide from the cats. Silver especially would like to eat every little string hanging off the thing. Also, I can see how people start buying lots of accessories – I already want a larger bobbin for Amy’s wheel, and a woolie winder would be very convenient indeed.

I’ve now working on some Heritage Arts TX merino/tussah silk fiber. This is stuff that’s basically a bunch of colors carded together – purple, blue, red, with bits of pink and yellow and the undyed silk. It’s pretty and shiny and happens to be a much more kelly color:

And it’s so much more evenly drafted than the Spunky Eclectic was. I can’t wait to see how this turns out!

Just when I was so over Chart A:

I’m finally finished with A and on to my modified B. I’m pleased with my mods, they look much better than the sloppy swatch. However, my shawl is a bit small. It’s about 12 inches tall, unblocked, and my hasty measurements show that I’m going to gain about 3 inches in height after blocking to make 15 inches total. Chart A takes up more than half of the shawl height and the total height should be about 30 inches, so I’m definitely on the road to knitting a smaller shawl. I didn’t do the called-for gauge swatch in stockinette, but I can only assume that my gauge is way way off.

It’s easy to add pattern repeats, but it makes me sad to rip what I’ve got, especially with all those nupps. Can I just say that working nupps is SO much easier on the pointy Knitpicks needles than Addi’s? I had to use a darning needle to do the p7tog when I made Madli’s Shawl, and that was such a royal pain. There are only 5 stitch nupps in this shawl and I can somewhat easily work them without pointier reinforcements, resulting in much less swearing from camp kelp!

I’ve been meaning to catalog my stash for a while, but the final push came recently from two directions: the faboo Ravelry and my no-more-yarn decree. I gathered up the troops and everyone got a nice mugshot outdoors last weekend. The good is that I thought I had many more oddballs than I actually do. The bad news?

That’s 18 sweaters worth of yarn, arranged roughly by weight. Clicky on the picy for details. When I first started knitting, I bought lots of random skeins of ooh, pretty! Now I’m a bit wiser about buying yarn, but hot damn! For the record, I have knit 5 sweaters in my knitting career, one of which I’ve actually worn out of the house.

There are a couple of beginner-knitter-with-credit-card, um, mistakes up there. Like the Nadia, which is a thick-and-thin, alpaca-blend yarn in a whopping 72 yards (!) per skein. Or the Lang Fantomas, which is essentially sock yarn, but I have enough to make a sweater and socks and I’ll still probably have extras (damn you, Webs tent sale!).

I’ll also say there are a couple of groups that Don’t Count. The Rowanspun Aran is currently becoming a robsweater, although that sweater’s on the back burner for now and I’m considering frogging it because of pattern issues. The black Rowan 4 ply cotton is enough for a sleeveless sweater, and that’s about it. I’d love to track down another ball, but it’s been long discontinued. Anyone have any off-black 4 ply cotton that they don’t want anymore? I’d love to take it off your hands!

The really good news in all of this is that 15 groups in the photo above were purchased at least 30% off. Go me. The lesson learned is that this will be the summer of sweaters. Seriously, I need to knit this stuff up!

There will be a teeny exception to my knit-from-stash decree – my birthday is in one month (3-0), and I’m going to buy myself Kim Hargreaves’ Petal as a gift. I really wish that she sold her patterns separately, since I maybe have the yarn to make it in three different colors.

This is the Double Breasted Seed Stitch Jacket, from Exercise Before Knitting. Baby-in-law is due in August, and I’m going to have a gaggle of baby sweaters ready. I’m still considering making a baby blanket – I’m afraid that I’m catching a bit of the miter fever that’s going around.

This sweater contains my first, real, live buttonholes – the double-YO action of the Asymmetrical Cardigan don’t count. I’m feeling the need to knit up a buttonhole-comparison swatch, you know, just because.

A swatch for the Spring Things Shawl, which I started for reals last night. I guess the Tess Laceweight was the first of the bunch to get balled up and knit. Beware – this yarn bleeds like a mofo when I blocked the swatch. It looked like a shark attacked my swatch. Like a knifefight in the sink. Insert your own simile here.

I’m planning on making a slight change to the pattern. If you take a look at the pattern photo, you can see a distinct line between the main body pattern and the edge pattern. I’m going to make more of a transition between the two charts – if you look at the left half of the swatch above, you’ll see that transition, while the right half is knit to-pattern. Clicky on the swatchy if you like, there’s boxes describing the action more clearly.

I have finished the Airy-whatever, but no photoshoot yet. I wore it to MDSW for about an hour – it was hot in that MD sun! Or maybe it was the frenzy for yarn that caused me to ditch whatever extra layers I had for additional mobility.

The yarn, oh! The yarn! I was at MDSW for a total of five hours, but did countless dollars of damage. Please don’t do the math and give me a running total, because I’m still in a bit of denial. At least I didn’t buy any fiber – I never spun up the stuff I got at Boerne, so I didn’t allow myself to buy any more.

First up, yarns for gifts! This is how I justify the purchases – a bunch aren’t for me!

The skeins on the ends are for baby-in-law due in August. The 8oz on the left is some superwash Tess worsted (YUM), and the 8oz right is Blue Ridge Farms organic cotton. That’s a pound of yarn for baby. I think the cotton will be one of the first yarns to get wound up and knit, for some reason I’m deeply in love with it. In the middle is some Spirit Trail laceweight for Sockpalooza 4. I’m still debating about this one – my sockpal is definitely into brights, and I’m wondering if this color is shocking enough.

There are two more skeins that don’t photo well with others:

Tess laceweight – this will be a Spring Things shawl for Rob’s grandmother. I had to do some fancy color-correcting to get it to look anything but RED.

Yarns for me:

The top yarn is Brooks Farm Acero, a wool-silk-viscose blend. It is shiny, and I couldn’t resist. I now have five skeins of Brooks Farm in my stash, all unknit. Bad kelp! Left to right: two skeins of Tess worsted for a sweater, some Koigu from the Mannings (I was determined!), and some Spirit Trail laceweight. I was thisclose to buying Spirit Trail’s silk laceweight in a gorgeous pink and grey colorway, but I went with the merino instead. Silk is expensive! I am absolutely in love with the Tess yarns. I wish that there was more of the skinnier merino, but I loved it so much that I bought the worsted anyway. I’m thinking that it will become a lacy cardigan so that I’ll actually wear it around these parts.

Overall I did pretty well. I went a bit over my budget, but didn’t buy too many frivolous things – I was on the lookout to extend my laceweight stash and stay away from the multicolored sock yarns, and was pretty successful at both of those goals. There’s also a couple of skeins that I got for Amy, but those are a surprise until I see her on Thursday.

The official I-have-too-much-yarn-and-must-knit-from-stash decree

Given the recent Yarnzilla action and MDSW, my stash is officially growing faster than I can knit it up, so I’m not buying any more yarn in my problem areas (sweaters, socks, scarf-amounts) for the rest of the year. Socks totally count – I’ve got more sock yarn than I know what to do with. There are a few exceptions:

• I am allowed to buy yarn for gifts. Especially for momma P, who is allergic to wool.
• Any money made from destashing yarn can be used to buy more yarn. But really, I’d prefer to plug it in to something else, like etsy non-yarn goodness.
• If I knit three projects in one problem area, I can buy yarn for another project in that area. I’m definitely hoping to knit three sweaters before the end-of-summer sales to get more sweater yarn at a crazy discount.

Wish me luck, I’m certainly going to need it!

We are back! We had a great time visiting our peeps in the midatlantic region, and of course visiting the yarn! We left on Thursday morning and flew into Dulles – my friend Amy lives pretty close to the airport. Also close to the airport is the National Air and Space Museum, and Rob really wanted to check out the planes. My fave was this guy to the right, who looked very hungry.

Then we were off to Georgetown to meet Amy after work. There was shopping. There were crepes and awesome calamari (but not together). There was drinking and mild ridiculing of the masses of urban professionals.

Back at Amy’s place there was Squarey!

I knitted Squarey for Amy a couple of years ago, and this is the first I’ve seen of him since. What followed was a XXX photoshoot with Rob and Squarey, but I’ll spare the internets those photos.

The next day we went the touristy route:

Rob’s seen many of the major DC attractions, so we hit up the International Spy Museum. Silence is safe, people. We also saw the Washington Monument. Again, there was plenty of food and drink – Rob needs to eat every couple of hours, it’s amazing.

Saturday was Maryland Sheep and Wool, the big yarny event. I got up bright and early to drive from near-Dulles to the fairgrounds and busted a move to the Koigu booth. It took me longer than it should have to realize that the booth didn’t exist – apparently there was a fall and injury affecting someone on the Koigu team, so they didn’t make it to the festival. I bounced back quickly enough and explored the main building, buying yummy stuff from Ellen’s 1/2 Pint Farm and Spirit Trail before exploring the rest of the festival.

I don’t remember if I called them first or happened to run into them, but the Dallas troops were at the Fold booth, standing in line with their masses of Socks that Rock. I had met Chris and Nanc at Boerne, and met Jen and Lilyan (and others!) there. We all meandered over to the Tess both, where we split up because I spent absolutely forever in there. There was SO much good stuff at Tess. I was there so long that I ran into awkwardly introducted myself to Jess and Erin, both of whom I recognized from their blogs.

Of course I visited the alpacas and sleepy sheep. Those alpacas were munching in unison, SO CUTE!

Next up was the bloggy meetup, where I met a bunch of the knitters from the internets. I spotted Stacey’s awesome Turkish Stockings from afar – it was slightly overcast at that point, and the socks made a great knit-signal. I also met Kristy, Turtlegirl (spotted her sweater, too), Katydid Knits (whose real name I forgot, sorry!), Jess of the awesome Ravelry, and saw Christine and the DFW gals again. I took off right after the meetup, and happened to stop by one of the first booths where I ran into Lolly, who had just arrived. Whew!

Overall, the festival was pretty fun. I wouldn’t go every year – my credit card can’t take that much pain all at once. Especially that damn Tess booth, their yarns are absolutely gorgeous. I was really surprised at sheer size of the event – the booths were all packed by the afternoon. I was also surprised at how much lamb was on the menu. You’re buying wool, yummy wool, then you eat the sheep? The poor lambs!

The rest of the vacay was spent in Baltimore, visiting some grad school friends. There was, naturally, more drinking (Cinco de Mayo, baby!) and food (Rob must FEED), lots of shopping, and some more sightseeing at the Inner Harbor and a history lesson at Fort McHenry (where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner).

All in all, fun times! We got back Monday morning, and I went straight to work, whee. Yarny photos to come tomorrow!

The Airy-name-is-too-long is complete! It’s still unblocked, and I can’t bear to post another photo of that lumpy mess. I’m also sure that everyone is sick of cats-in-felted-bed photos (joe and blackie were both lying in it at the same time, CUTE), so no photos for you.

I have other exciting news – remember me mentioning the deliciousness that is sponge candy, and not really explaining what it is? Well, Oiyi made some, and she posted some awesome photos of the little morsels of YUM. How cool is that? The recipe that she found is pretty darn close to what my mom uses. The process is two-fold: there’s the dangerous make-sure-it-doesn’t-burn phase, then the tedious dip-each-individual-chunk-in-chocolate phase. The end product is completely worth it, though, and it looks like Oiyi totally nailed it. I may need to cook myself up a batch sometime soon…

Other photoless excitement:

• Rob and I had our first crawfish experience last weekend. We went to a genuine crawfish boil (118 pounds of crawfish!) which was both fun and delicious. I went in thinking that crawfish were like shrimp, but they’re really like miniature, spicy lobsters.
• The international crimefighter was in town this weekend, keeping Houston a bit safer for a short while. I also met Everwhelming Liz, and am eagerly anticipating seeing her almost-finished Venezia.
• It’s Sockpalooza time! The planning will begin soon – I just bought a couple of Japanese stitch pattern books, and I’m thinking about cobbling together a sock pattern from them.

I’m leaving on Thursday for our mini-vacation to DC and MD, and will be swinging by the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival. I’ve set some ground rules (no variegated sock yarn, no 400 yard/scarf amounts of wool, no spinning materials), and I’m ready to hit the Koigu! You see, I now need to go to the Koigu booth, because I agreed to pay Amy in Koigu for catsitting. After this weekend, I vow to not buy any yarn for the rest of the year, except for gift knitting. Really!