Saturday, May 26, 2007

Maybe it just means that I really like it.....

Okay, I'm back from the yarn shop now. What a nice, nice store. Good inventory, and super-duper nice people. I was able to score some of the Neighborhood Fiber sock yarn, so I was very happy. I didn't go way overboard either, which is impressive. Here is my haul.



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I got the Neighborhood Fiber studio sock in Kingman Park, Tofutsies sock yarn in some color that I can't even think of how to reference seeing as how I don't have it in front of me, and some Malbrigo goodness. The Malbrigo is lovely, but apparently doesn't like to be photographed. Here's a much darker shot that's a more accurate representation of it's color.


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Frankly I surprised myself a little with my Tofutsies purchase. I'd been wanting to try it out since I read about it's impending release, but I just haven't been thrilled with the colors. They had a sock knit up with it at the store and it looked nothing like what I've seen poking around online. I initially went straight for the purple/pink yarn that the model was knit up with but then stopped myself when I recalled that I have socs made from Fixation that are almost the exact same color. After picking up and putting down about 4 different colorways, I finally decided on the one which I purchased. The whole ordeal got me thinking though, and reminded me of something I noticed the other day at work and my shopping practices at MDS&W. The first thing was me noticing how some of the colors from Art yarns are exactly the same as those of Scarlet Fleece. I was in awe because while I realize that there are only so many colors out there, these two colorways were exactly the same. Scarlet Fleece is a hand dyer, too, which made it more weird. Anyhow, I then thought about my freakish STR splurge at MDS&W and how I later said that I could tell if I really liked a color if I made a mad dash to scoop some of it up twice. Anyway, today I got to thinking about what I've got going on in the stash and on the needles. This is just a minor wedge of all that's going on, but do you notice anything?


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Here I have another Fixation sock I'm reworking (I frogged a pattern out of it last night and am redoing it all in stockinette), some STR in Algae, and the Tofutsies from today. This picture doesn't really show the lime green in the Tofutsies, but it's there. Then we have this.


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Hello! Totally the same freakin' thing! I mean, I suppose I could look at it as me just really liking these certain color combinations, but it's like that with sooooo much of my stash. It's like I've just gone from yarn company to yarn company buying the same exact thing. Thankfully I've bought so much that I have just about every color represented, only in a giant clump of sameness. I'll just have to be a little more aware with my shopping from here on out. The funny thing is that a lot of the colorways I buy come home with me because I think they're so unique. I must have some sort of short term memory loss when it comes to fiber.

Busy, busy, busy

What's that saying...."There's no rest for the wicked" or something like that. Well, I must be one of the wickedest then. That's not necessarily such a bad thing considering the modern connotation of the word as being something ultra cool. Anyhow, the end of school has yet to bring me any peace and/or relaxation. I haven't had a day off yet, and I'm sad to report that my sleeping issues from winter break have resurfaced. Those issues being that I no longer sleep.
So today my task is to drive my mother to UM and then drive her home a few hours later. Then it dawned on me, Hey! I can jaunt on over to A Tangled Skein and check things out. I hear Neighborhood Fiber Co. dropped off a delivery not too long ago. Now my day sucks far less ass! Pictures later.......

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Seven Facts

This is a meme that I found on Storm Moon Knits. While I was not officially tagged, she mentioned that she would be interested to see what I would come up with and , after some thought, I was a bit curious to see what I would come up with as well. I find myself living in sort of a dichotomy between feeling that it's terribly difficult to think of 7 facts that would be of any interest and feeling that it's terribly difficult to choose a mere seven things from the vast pool of facts about me. So, here it goes.

1. The first profession I ever wanted was to be a hooker. Oddly enough, one of my sisters wanted to be a hooker when she was younger, too. I don't really know what her reasoning was, but I know that I had the impression that hookers were fabulous and had rockin' clothes and went to fabulous parties and all the guys loved them. They were also very independent and didn't take too much shit from anyone. Now, looking back, I think my most of my career aspirations came from watching a few too many Jamie Lee Curtice movies at too young of an age. Things swiftly changed when we got cable and I saw a crack whore giving a guy a bj in a filthy alley while watching a documentary on something....probably crack whores. I can still recall my feeling of ,"Whaaa...??Uh....hold up...". That totally changed the course of my life. My sister didn't become a hooker either.

2. I don't have a complete brain. I was born with a brain defect that didn't really show itself until I was 12 or 13. I had to have 3 surgeries in total and was in the hospital for many months. They had to cut off part of my brain that had dried up. I should be a lot taller, and I like to think that I'd be a freaking genius if I had a full brain. In reality though, I'm only missing pieces that have to do with my balance and coordination. If you ever see me walking around like a drunk, it probably has more to do with my brain sending out creepy commands rather than actual liquor consumption. Besides, I generally stay sitting down when I'm drunk.

3. Speaking of my brain....I blew the back of my head open once at a WWE (at the time it was still WWF) event at the Patriot Center (which doesn't exist anymore). I left the hospital after either my first or second surgery and went to the event, got all spazzy and excited because I LOVE wrestling, ruptured all my stitches and had a hole in the back of my head. Yay, fun! I also once blew out the back of my head with a really bad sneeze. I like the wrestling story better, and I think the WWE should give me some sort of fan honors. That event may or may not have been the same one where a wrestler threw a quarter into my sisters eye, leaving a scar. That's the same sister who also wanted to be a hooker.

4. Due to the various back-of-head-blowing-out incidents, I had to have my head patched together with cadaver pieces. Yummy!

5. I was born a freakishly huge baby. My mom thinks I was born a month late, but my sister (the one with the quarter in the eye and hooker aspirations) was kind enough to regale me with the story of catching my parents in the act of conceiving me, being scarred by it, and knowing for a fact that I was born right on time. Anyhow, (yuck) I was so gigantic that I couldn't wear any of the baby things. I had to have big kid diapers and all that. I also pushed myself up on my hands in a crawling like position and cried big tears. They used me as some sort of freak-show exhibition for a few days before releasing me. One of my nephews was pretty freakishly large, too, but he didn't do too much of the weird stuff. He did projectile vomit pretty continuously for the first few years of his life though........perhaps we're some sort of demon breed. P.S. I almost never throw up.

6. I am an incredibly awkward sleeper. This has just been the way it is from the time I was born (see notes of freakishness in #5). When I was an infant, I would sleep flat on my back with my arms and legs spread out around me. I also spread my fingers and toes apart while I slept. My mothers theory is that I was rebelling against being crushed in her womb, seeing as how I was so monstrously huge. I think I must have spread out a bit in her womb as well, because I destroyed her abdominal wall. For those of you who have met my mom and witnessed her sort of apple-ish shape, a lot of that has to do with me. Back to the sleeping....there have been numerous times where I've woken up turned completely around in my bed, or even with my legs vertically pressed up against a wall. I also frequently flail about in my sleep and have mildly violent dreams. I always had to sleep away from other people when I had slumber parties and whatnot because sometimes I would punch people while I was sleeping. That mostly went away, but within the past 8 years I have broken an ex boyfriend ribs in my sleep, and thought I broke my hand while slamming it against a trunk. I also tend to build a nest around myself while I sleep and there are many pictures of me wrapped inside a huge piles of pillows/blankets. The bright side of this sleep issue is that I always get to have my own bed when we go out of town. Sometimes I also make siren noises in my sleep. That's particularly strange because I become aware of the fact that I'm doing it while I'm still asleep. Once someone wakes me up I usually immediately apologize for making the noises because I know that's why they woke me up.

7. Hmmmm.....last one. My first kiss was Billy Warlock from Baywatch. I met him at a Days of Our Lives convention downtown that my sister (hooker wannabe) had won tickets for on the radio. He was hot, but like 4 feet tall. At the time though I was much shorter so it didn't phase me.

Okay, so that was fun. I'm sticking with the plan of not tagging anyone else. It's fitting since I wasn't officially tagged at all myself. So tomorrow I get to go do step 1 of not having all my teeth fall out in a giant clump. (damn, that would have been a good fact, too. We've been speaking of it recently due to obvious reasons. I somehow decided when I was kid that when it was time for my teeth to fall out, they would all just spontaneously drop from my mouth. I lived in fear of not being able to catch them all and losing out o the tooth fairy loot. To remedy the situation, I would only wear outfits that had a giant pocket on the front of them, like Osh-Kosh overalls did. That way, when the fateful teeth-losing day came, I could just open my mouth over my pocket and they'd all be safe.) I HATE, HATE, HATE going to the dentist. I had to have all the literature about tomorrows proceeding removed from my reach because I kept looking at it and freaking out. I'm totally not liking any of it, and am half wanting to just say screw it and let all my teeth go. I also was smart enough to not take off work or anything so I have to be at the shop 2 hours after my procedure starts. So, if anyone wants a good laugh during the day you can call me at the store and listen to me try to drool out words like some sort of Quasimoto mouth. I don't know if I spelled that right, but it seems phonetically sound. Okay, I gotta run. I want to finish the heel turn on my mom's sock before I go to sleep.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Sock Tale

I don't know what it's been lately with all my sock mishaps. There's the one pair that I kept finding in dirty parking lot puddles. There's the one where I waited and waited to use this pattern that I really liked, only to find that it doesn't show up a single bit in the yarn.....Oh! And what's the deal with me never being able to get a sock over my heel anymore? My heels don't look like they've suddenly expanded greatly. My legs, maybe. Heels, no. Anyhow, remember how I ordered all that sock yarn the other month and it all accidentally came in at once and I thought I was gonna pass out? I stayed true to my prediction and plunged right into the Fire on the Mountain.

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preeetttyyy
With help from my mother, I was able to successfully wind it into a center-pull ball using hands and the winder, sans swift. I don't know why it never occurred to me that this could be done. I recently read somewhere about doing this, and while it was a tad troublesome and undoubtedly more time consuming/messy than doing it with a swift, it worked none the less.
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I decided to keep the pattern about as simple as a pattern can be 1) because I didn't want to obscure the color at all and 2) I wanted my socks quick. I opted for plain stockinette socks, loosely based on the Sock Love pattern at Chic Knits. Then this happened.
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fug
As unappealing as I found the severe, creepy tie-dye-gone-heinously-wrong appearance of this, I received multiple compliments on them. I kept thinking."Well, maybe they're not so bad." and kept knitting, in case you're wondering why I worked all the way thru the heel while a large part of me loathed them. I like my heel, so I new it wasn't the necessarily the sock yarn itself.
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I did some poking around on the internet and after I saw what some of the less goofy socks looked like, I knew what had to be done.
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ouch!
Luckily I was able to salvage the ribbing because I've developed quite an aversion to doing it. All I did was decrease 4 stitches around and this what I ended up with.
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worst FO shot ever
Please excuse the fact that it looks like my feet are propped up on a mountain of trash. They're not, really, but I quickly cleaned off the table afterwards. Since completion, my socks have travelled to Atlantic City, where I mistakenly hoped they would be some sort of good luck charm, and got to go on the beach. Then my f*cking shoe broke exposing a large chunk of metal that poked and rubbed away at my heel. I was able to quickly get another pair of shoes, but I thought my socks had bit it. After I got them home and washed up, I thin they'll survive. They must have had some luck in them after all. If I can figure out how to send my phone pictures to my printer, maybe I'll show some of our adventures. Maybe I'll also get off my butt and take some shots of my finished Quill Laces Socks, which I realized earlier that I had never done. Oops.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Some things I forgot

I was picking up around the house today and found a few S&W purchases that I had forgotten. I think this mostly has to do with the fact that I got most of them technically before the festival itself, but they either came from the festival or were something that was a planned purchase from MS&W but happened to be procured right before by chance. So here they are.
1. No Sheep for You by Amy Singer and Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off: The Yarn Harlot's Guide to the Land of Knitting.
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I initially hadn't expressed much interest in the No Sheep book. However, as I was standing in line for STR, the ladies in front of me had one very lovely tops which I was told were "Tomato" from the book. I know at least one of these ladies is a semi-local knit blogger, though I have no idea what her name is. I suspect I recognize her from the shop. She's one of the one's photographed on JavaJem's blog from the meet up.
2. A smallish umbrella swift!! Yay!!
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3. This next one is something that was gifted to me by Carole after she and pretty much everyone else who works at the shop got to go pick out yarn on Friday while I held down the fort. I couldn't have picked better myself.
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Ellyn Cooper Yarn Sonnet's Fine Merino in Strazzberry
4. Because I liked the yarn above so much, I decided to pick up a little more. I thought this color would work particularly well for my Horcrux socks from the Six Sox Knitalong.
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Ellyn Cooper Yarn Sonnet's Fine Merino in Misha
In unrelated news, I got some very bad news yesterday. As many of you may know, I've been having a great deal of problems with one of my wisdom teeth lately. I finally was able to see the dentist yesterday and it totally did not go as planned. During my initial look-over, it was discovered that I have bad periodontal disease and that there's essentially nothing that can be done to save mt front bottom teeth. The problem was amplified by my smoking (which I quit doing a while back) and my tongue ring (which I very begrudgingly had to remove). I also have some bad issues in all of my molars and my front teeth on top. As I understand it, hopefully the bottom ones are the only ones that are totally f**ed. I was also told that all of my orthodontal work has given me substantially less time before my teeth pop out like pez because all the shifting significantly shortened my roots. I guess the problem started a long, long time ago because it's way down in my gums and I have had extraordinary flossing practices for quite a long time. However, I have had a truly dismal history of visiting the dentist for like 10 years, unless there was an emergency. The ironic part is that my teeth themselves are fabulous. My gums just suck. I was particularly fond of the dentist telling me how wonderful my teeth were yesterday because it really doesn't mean jack right after telling someone that their teeth are soon going to be ejected. I'll tell you, if it's not one thing it's another. And the best part? They're not going to do a thing about my wisdom tooth until they can get however much of this periodontal stuff under control that they can. Now I get to suffer through the pain of that while thinking about the swarms of bacteria festering in the lower regions of my gums, destroying all my connective tissue. Super fun!! At least I'll be able to get a lot of knitting done while I'm hiding toothless in my house waiting for partials to be constructed.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Disclosure

Maryland Sheep and Wool was very exciting for me this year, to say the least. I didn't get to go last year because I was foolishly attempting to save some dough for a trip to France that was supposed to be happening a short time after the festival. That trip got cancelled not too long after I had missed out on all the yarny goodness. Anyhow, back to this year. I had a plan. All I wanted to do was get there, get some STR in colorways unavailable online, and get out. I had a party to attend later that day and I'm really not in need of any yarn. I made this plan one, maybe two weeks prior to the festival. As the weekend approached, I came across more and more accounts of STR selling out in mere minutes and herds of knitters storming the booth as soon as the it opened. I devised a plan to get to S&W really early and just wait. I heard more and more tales of empty yarn bins. I began to panic. At some point a few nights away from the festival I actually had a nightmare about lack of yarn. Scary. So Sheep and Wool day came and I got up super dark and early (in the 5am hour) and made it up to the festival by around 7. I can honestly say that I may have been the first non-worker sitting around that day knitting on a bench. By 7:45 others had joined me waiting outside barn 3, aka the STR barn. By 8:15 I actually had to go stand in line in front of The Fold because others were flocking in and I'd be damned if I was going to get up that friggin' early to be beaten out by a bunch of late-comers. When they finally undid the little rope that was between us and the yarn, it was anarchy. Luckily, since I was right up in front, I was essentially thrown face first into a giant wall of STR mediumweight by the 50 or so people pouring in behind me. It was heavenly......though I bit panic stricken.
So here's what I ended up with.

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Brooks Farm Duet......lovely
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Little Curly Mohair Handpainted by The Flock Bransonas
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Blue Heron Rayon Metallic in very pretty greens & purples
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Gypsy Girl yarn in Angela (pink) and Goblin (green/purple)
Oh yeah.......and that STR I was talking about?? I got just a weeeee little bit of it. It looks a little something like this......
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Wooo!!! I hit the motherlode. What can I say?
I wish I could tell you all the colorways, but I had to quickly stash the goods and didn't have enough time to write it all down. I'll give it a whirl from memory.....uh, holy goodness, I think I know it all....at least the majority of it. What can I say, I know my STR. Here it goes, from top left to bottom right. Algae, Crazy Lace Agate, Carbon Dating, Hard Rock, Neptunite, Red Rock Canyon, Highway 30, Lemongrass, Alina, Country Clare, Pebble Beach, Azure something or another, Romancing the Stone, Heart-something, and Amethyst.
I wasn't satisfied (somehow) with the first 13 skeins I got in the early morning so I ho the booth again a little later and picked up some more!! Hello, Psycho! My crafty coworker later pointed out to me that I picked up a duplicate colorway during my initial buying frenzy.
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Country Clare
While it is probably one of my favorite new colors, I just wasn't down with the duplicate. I had to go back and exchange it for something else on Sunday. I got there a little too late and there were slim picking to choose from. I ended up getting this......

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....which is a merino/tencel blend from BMFA in the Tiger's Eye colorway (damn, I good with the color names!). It's quite nice and I'm not too sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I also picked up a good number of patterns, all of the sock persuasion. I have a feeling that they might just come in handy during the next few months. I have no idea why.
Okay, that's it. I finish school in just a few days now. I'm so through mentally that I hope I can wait for the next few days to pass before I run off screaming in the middle of the night. I think I can do it. Oh, and I have at least one FO to show....maybe even a second by the time I get around to posting again. Excitement!