Total score

So in my last post I mentioned the spectacular online sale I took advantage of at the studio (which is not only an online storefront but also a LYS in Kansas City, Missouri). Well, on Friday the yarn arrived.

Oh.
My.
Gawd.

I'm practically giddy, I don't know what to do first!

Okay, well, firstly, we have the yarn that drew me to the sale in the first place - Elsebeth Lavold's Silky Wool. This is a gorgeous sportweight yarn that's 65% wool and 35% silk. I'm using it in a couple of projects already and it's terrific to work with. As I mentioned, it was going for $1.75US a skein at this sale, and the regular price is at least $6.99. Now, by the time I hit the sale, there weren't a lot of colours left, and none of them were colours I would wear. Their golden undertones were, however, perfect for my redheaded mother-in-law, so I figured I could snarf a bunch and really save on future Christmas presents for her. Unfortunately, I kept getting 'whoops, sorry, we don't have as many skeins as you want to buy' messages every time I tried to add the amounts I wanted to my cart. Given the incredible price of this yarn, this wasn't surprising, so I just snatched as much as possible of everything I was interested in: 2 of one colour, and 3 of two other colours. However, by the time the store started trying to pack up my order, it turned out that only one colour, this one...

...was left. (In the 3 skeins I'd asked for.) Cindy at the shop was incredibly apologetic in her email, but I wasn't really broken up. I'd obviously discovered the sale late in the game, and I'm sure orders were flying thick and fast. If they didn't have a back-end that was whizz-bang enough to handle it all instantaneously and with 100% accuracy? Totally understandable. 3 skeins of gold were not what I'd hoped for when I'd accessed the site, but for $1.75 a skein I knew I could find something fun to do with them.

So imagine my surprise when four showed up. Yep. Cindy had found an extra skein kicking around the store and tucked it into the box as a bonus. So that was four skeins for $5.25US.

Isn't she WONDERFUL? I tell you, if I'm ever in Kansas City, this store is going to be my first stop. But wait, there's more...

In order to "make it up to me" for not having all the Silky Wool I wanted, Cindy told me I could choose something else to substitute, for the same price. She suggested Elsebeth Lavold's Silky Tweed. This is another sportweight yarn, this one a 40% silk, 30% cotton, 20% extra fine merino and 10% viscose blend. I've never worked with it before, but I'm sure it's awesome. There wasn't a lot of colour availability, but I found something that will suit my mother-in-law really well:

Five skeins to replace the five Silky Wool skeins I couldn't get. For a total of $8.75US.

Of course, having found these marvellous prices, I had to check out what else was on sale. I have no self-control whatsoever.

Cashwool from Baruffa: 100% merino laceweight in a strong orange:

I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with it - my monitor made me think I was actually getting a muted red. But there's enough to make the small version of The Princess Shawl, so maybe this will also be for my mother-in-law? Or maybe I'll overdye it? Anyway, who knows. The point is that I snarfed three skeins for a total of $10.50US.

There was also sock yarn at ridiculously discounted prices. I got enough to make two pairs of socks for a total of $7.50US:

That's Regia Jubilee and ONLine Afrika. I'd actually ordered two of the Jubilees in two different colourways, but again, they ran out of stock so Cindy offered a substitute, and I chose the Afrika (I felt that picking Colinette Jitterbug would be unreasonably greedy and gouging, and unforgivably rude). My husband was very impressed with the sock yarn and indicated enviousness, so I offered him whichever one of the balls he liked more. (Share the wealth, right? Enjoy the generosity with the stash while it lasts, honey!) He's thinking about it.

I also found some Kashmir Aran from Louisa Harding, an aran weight yarn with a 55% merino, 35% microfibre and 10% cashmere blend, six balls for a total of $12US:

And finally, there was the real splurge: the Angora Extra. The gauge on the ball bands suggests it's an aran weight, but from feeling the strands I think it's more like a light worsted. It's 70% angora, 25% wool and 5% nylon, and comes in 25g balls. I went absolutely nuts and ordered 29 skeins: 19 blue and 10 red. That's 725g for $72.50US.

So if you haven't already guessed, I am now a total fan of Cindy and her store. She even sent me a lovely little note tucked in with the receipts and a business card; and a cute nail file, too (always handy) with the shop's logo on it. I think the folks in Kansas City must be very lucky to have her and her shop there. Of course I always try to support my own great LYS, but if I ever need/want to buy yarn online again, this will certainly be one of the first places I go! Great buying experience. Highly recommended.

I know, I know, I'm crazy. I plead a combination of extreme discounting, fever and virtual yarn fumes.

Speaking of my fever, thank you very much Knitika and Carrie K for your well wishes. Unfortunately, the party did not go off as planned. We had to reschedule it a second time. This cold is seriously bad. After taking off work most of the week before, it actually came back last week (more fever) and I had to take another sick day. DD2's nose is still pretty drippy. But DD1 and DH are doing fine, and DD2 and I are over the fever and on the mend, so we're going ahead with the party tomorrow and anyone in the family who doesn't want to risk that we're no longer contagious can stay away and no blame to them.

So, all gloating over the stash enhancement aside, has there actually been any knitting going on around here? Why yes, of course!

Lliclla for MIL

This has been the focus of most of my knitting time lately, and it's in the final stages. The main body is all done, and I'm just starting to pick up all around the outside (772 freakin' stitches) to make the edging.



I adore it.

Christmas socks for Dad

This saw a bit of action this past week. Nothing huge, but progress is progress.

Fistula armbands for bro

My brother called me up at work about a week and a half ago and told me that I needed to knit him something. My hackles were immediately raised, and I figured I would let him tell me all about this 'request', and then at the end tell him where he could shove it. :)

However, once I understood what he wanted, there was no way in hell I could say no.

Background: my brother has zero kidney function. He was born with only one kidney, and the one he did have lost function as he got older. Unfortunately, due to rampaging incompetence on the part of his pediatrician, this wasn't detected until my brother was about fourteen, at which point it was impossible to prevent further deterioration. (This was when the raging incompetent died and my brother's file got transferred to another doctor in the practice. You can imagine our impotent fury.)

So my brother has been on kidney dialysis for years. (You know that scene in Star Trek IV where they go back in time to the 80s, and Bones sees this lady in the hospital who's on dialysis? "Dialysis?" he exclaims in horror. "It's the stone age!" And then he gives her a freakin' pill and she grows a new, functioning kidney? Yeah. That scene always makes me want to cry.)

His dialysis is of the kind that requires a fistula, which is where (I think) they sort of fuse a bunch of the vessels in the arm together to make one big 'rope' that the dialysis machine plugs into. (Do not take my description for it, though, my understanding of it is very limited.) This results in a kind of freaky-looking thing on my brother's arm, it looks like there's a U-shaped snake living under his skin. He doesn't seem to like the way it looks (understandably), because he likes to cover it up with armbands. But they're uncomfortably tight for him, and he recently had to undergo some corrective vascular surgery on the fistula that increased the girth of his arm even more, so now the armbands are really too tight.

So he thought I could knit him some. Of course I could never say no to that. Geez.

So, based on the measurements he gave me and assuming 10% negative ease, I doubled up some laceweight crochet cotton in my stash, and knit up the following tube in 1x1 rib:



He ADORES it. Yay! The only problem is that it is too loose - when he flings his arm forward, the armband slides down to his wrist. So he came over a few nights ago and we figured out that I should only be casting on about 56 stitches. All other aspects of it are perfect, apparently.

I'm planning to make a bunch, in different colours. Navy, white and black to start, and then later maybe red and dark green. All from the stash, so no problems there.

A plague upon my house

Bleargh.

Thursday morning, my husband called me at work. My baby had developed a fever. No big deal, she was obviously teething like crazy, but it did mean that she couldn't go to daycare. And since my husband had to deliver a set of clubs to a client on the weekend, he couldn't both care for her and have the product ready when he said he would. So home I went.

Friday - still feverish. But improving. And the teeth were more and more visible through the gums every time I looked at them. I entertained hopes of going back to work on Monday.

Unfortunately, towards the end of the weekend, my kindergartener developed a fever.

Damn. Not teething.

By Tuesday, I had it too - the congestion settled in, and in the evening, the fever started.

I feel like utter crap. And I still haven't been able to go back to work. I'm sure my co-workers aren't pleased with me. But I have to keep telling myself that it's better that they take up my slack than to come down with this rotten thing. Hopefully I didn't manage to infect anybody before I left.

Betcha anything my husband is next...right when we're supposed to have a birthday party for the girls on Saturday (and it's the reschedule of the original party, which we had to postpone for the colds the girls both got last month).

Joy.

On the plus side, the yarn for my MIL's Christmas present, plus the additional sock yarn I bought as a budgetary excuse to soak up the shipping costs, arrived on Friday.

Lliclla for MIL

Soon after the yarn arrived, I did feel like crying. But not for the reasons you might think.

Were the colours wrong? HELL NO. The colours are gorgeous. I honestly could not have gotten better matches if I'd had them custom-dyed. Wellll, the pumpkin I suppose could ideally be more golden, but it's still great. The other colours are absolutely perfectamundo.

Did I find something at my LYS's Mother's Day Sale that would have worked just as well for a lower price? Nope. They do have some lovely stuff on sale (which ends Saturday, I believe, in case you're interested in heading in), but nothing that was right for this project.

What, is the yarn crap? Oh, goodness no. This is niiice stuff, this is. 100% highland wool, and it feels great. I still can't believe I paid so little for it.

SO WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?!?

I mixed up two of the colours. I ordered two of the burgundy when I should have ordered four, and I ordered four of the orange-red when I should have ordered two. All my own stupid fault.

There are no words.

So, I've had to switch the colour patterning around a little bit. I did a preview drawing on my computer beforehand just to make sure the new combination wouldn't look like ass, and it doesn't...but it doesn't look the same as the pretty pictures in the book, which really bugs me.

The other problem is that I seem to have completely lost one of the skeins of burgundy.

I am just screwing myself up right, left and centre here!

Fortunately, everything else about the project is absolutely awesome. It's knitting up ridiculously fast - I'm already almost two-thirds of the way done. Yes, you read that right. I mean, I know I've been flaking out on the couch for most of the past week, so I've had more knitting time than usual, but this is really a super-fast knit. Except for the cast-on, which was a complete BITCH. Seriously, folks. 514 stitches in a provisional tubular cast-on? Not even a little fun. Amazingly, I got the count exactly right on only my second attempt. (And the screwup of the first attempt was pretty minor and painless.) I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Oh wait...I guess the way I feel right now is the other shoe. As is the lost burgundy skein. Crap.

Anyway, it looks awesome:

Christmas socks for Dad

Coming along very nicely indeed. Except that DH tried the first one on and it seemed to be a tad short in the foot, so I'll have to lengthen that by two or three rows. But other than that - good stuff.

Jester Booties

Last week, when I was still feeling like a human being, I noticed that our neighbour ten doors up had this huge baby-foot-shaped balloon tied to one of the trees in their front yard congratulating them on their new arrival. Now, I'd met the mom of this family last summer when I was on mat leave and coming home from a nice walk with my baby. At the time, she was a few months away from going back to work after her first child. We exchanged names, I told her a few encouraging things about my experience going back to work and leaving the baby with a caregiver (she was dreading it, even though the caregiver was her mom...she had total confidence in her mother, she just didn't want to leave her child, which I can totally relate to). We told each other to drop round anytime, and haven't seen to each other since.

So I was delighted to hear of her new blessing, and immediately went home and cast on the kee-YOOT-est baby bootie pattern. It's "Jester Booties", from Zoe Mellor's "Double Knits" book.

I got this far before the yarn order arrived on Friday:



After that, as you've already read, life around here went completely to pot and I haven't picked the bootie up since. I think I shall just forget about giving the booties to my neighbour, chalk it up to Life Happening, and simply give her my warmest congratulations whenever I see her again.

Ummm...also, I might have gone a little crazy at the recent online yarn sale at the studio. I mean, they were selling Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool for $1.75 a skein!!! I rationalized it as future present spending - at last, I'd be able to make the projects I want to make for my MIL for future Christmases, with the yarn I want, at the prices I want. Alas, a lot of what I really had my eye on had already been gobbled up and I kept getting 'that's out of stock, sorry' messages, but I still managed an extremely respectable haul. Oh, and did I mention the free shipping because my order was over $75?

No, I don't know what money I'm going to use to pay for this stuff. And if you'd seen the prices, you wouldn't care, either. :)

And now, I shall wait for the painkillers to kick in to give my sinuses some relief so I can actually get some sleep. After I clean a bunch of filthy diapers, that is.

(Waaaahhh!)

I'm not dead

It's just really hard to find the time to blog. Without, y'know, neglecting the children; or leaving everyone with nothing clean to wear; or blogging at work; or cutting into my knitting time; or deciding that my kids don't actually need birthday parties. Stuff like that.

When did life get so TIME CRUNCHED?!? Augh!

(Don't answer that. I know when.)

But I digress.

Knitting has indeed been continuing to happen. Actually, finding knitting time is super-easy, as my work commute is about 85 minutes each way. As much as I detest having to get up really early; not seeing the girls in the morning; and spending so much time in transit, it is still really lovely to have a good hour and a half per day to myself, all for knitting, in a (fairly) comfy commuter train seat, with sun coming in through the windows, listening to knitting podcasts.

And so, here's what I've been up to...

Ragna for bro

This continues to grow. I'm about three or four inches away from the neck shaping, I think. The cables look awesome. (No surprise there, since Elsebeth Lavold designed them.)

Ljod for moi

I don't think I've actually worked on this any more since my last blog post, but I have taken an updated picture:

Prototype sock

Design inspiration struck again. (I love it when that happens.) After various false starts, I made a prototype sock (just one, made from leftover sock yarn that I've now used up, so it will, sadly, never have a mate). I'm really happy with it, but that's all I'm going to say for the moment. Hopefully I'll eventually be able to tell you more about it. :)

Christmas socks for Dad

Fresh from my triumph with the prototype sock of my own design, I decided to use the same design for my dad's Christmas socks this year (to heck with what I'd been working on before), ripped out what I had, and re-cast on. I may continue to try putting some snazzy subtle twist-knit cables on it to change it up a bit...but I'm not sure.

Comfy Angel's Nest for baby ?

I realised that I needed to do some more baby knitting. There are...

Hm. Wait just a second...

Chris, are you reading this? Get the heck off my blog now. You have a baby coming! Stop peeking!

(Not the most respectful way to speak to one's boss, sorry, man, but sometimes one needs to go to strange lengths to preserve the shroud of knitted gift mystery.)

Ahem.

You think he's gone now? (Admittedly, I don't think he ever reads this blog, I'm just being overly cautious and silly.)

Okay. Then, to resume...

I returned to work last month after my mat leave to find that my director was expecting his second child. (Yay!) He told me not to knit anything for him, but I am going to totally ignore that because I am, well, me. What I really would like to give him is the Sweetness prototype - it's recently knitted, already washed, hasn't been worn by my baby daughter except for the photo shoot, and is too small for her now anyway. And I really want that top to go to a nice home, because I think it's deliciously pretty and I really, really love it. The downside of this plan, of course, is that this would be a really useless gift if the baby turns out to be a boy. So I need a backup plan.

I found this sleep sack pattern through Ravelry's awesome pattern search, and I think it's really cute. I'm making it bigger than the pattern calls for, because it's a rather warm item of clothing, completely inappropriate for spring and summer wear. So if I make it about 6-9 months size, that will do well for fall/winter for this baby.

Here is how it's going so far:



Cute, eh? And the good part is that if I don't end up using it for my boss' baby, I'll send it off to Australia where my cousin (once removed) is expecting her first baby, due this fall (her spring). Again, the timing will be perfect, since the size I'm making will fit the baby in Australia's fall/winter. Tadah, I win no matter what, because if this project ends up going to my boss, I'll simply make my cousin something else nice.

Lliclla for MIL

Every year I look for something spectacular to make for my MIL, and every year I have tons of wonderful ideas, and every year I can't afford any of them. Le sigh.

I have deeply wanted to make her Helen Hamann's Llcilla mantle for almost two years, ever since I won the book with the pattern in it. It is truly spectacular, and the colours used in the model for the book would suit my MIL (a redhead) bee-yew-tifully. But I've been stymied by the price of the yarn it would take. Actually, no, not really the price of the yarn. I have actually found two places which offer appropriate yarn in more-or-less the right colours, and the yarn is vaguely within my budget: elann.com's Peruvian Highland Wool and KnitPicks's Wool of the Andes Yarn (hmm, I sense a theme...). Unfortunately, this affordability of both of these hits the crapper when you add the shipping cost.

I felt like weeping. Here was the yarn that would make this gorgeous thing, and my budget could almost handle it...but not quite.

But then...I had an epiphany.

If I ordered something in addition to the Christmas project yarn...something really inexpensive that I could slough off on some other part of our household budget...well then, I could have that part of the budget 'eat' the shipping costs, and I'd only have to assign the cost of the yarn for Lliclla to the Christmas budget! YES!

Almost giddy with glee, I added four balls of Elann's Sock It to Me 4 Ply yarn in black to my cart, and checked the whole thing right on out. I make black socks for DH as gifts and clothing ALL THE TIME. I'm going to account the sock yarn and the shipping charge to the birthday presents budget, or the clothing budget, and all will be taken care of.

Ahhhhhh. I can't wait to get the yarn. I'm going to cast that sucker on so fast it'll make your head swim.

Unless the colours end up being totally different from how they looked on my monitor. Then I shall cry.

Oh, and if it turns out that the yarn sale that my LYS is having this Saturday brings other yarn that would've been good for this project into my price range...well, I'll cry then, too.

Wish me luck!

And finally, I have the photographs for the two KWB/TSF hats I mentioned in my last post:

Child KWB/TSF Hat #2

Baby KWB/TSF Hat