Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The Haul

I have a LYS, a very delightful LYS. It is run by two women, who oddly both have husbands named Kevin, who seem to be the perfect balance of yin and yang to make their business a success. Stitch Your Art Out is a comfortable lovely place, with one flaw - it is cozy. I mean really cozy. Somehow miraculously Cynthia and Kim manage to fit two classes at a time in their space. Some of them quilting classes, with sewing machines. So their yarn space is at a premium. Even so they manage to get most of the yarns their customers lust for on their shelves. (Please do visit if you're ever in the neighborhood of PSU or State College. They're only about 10 minutes outside town. Stop at Watkin's Dairyette afterward for "real" soft ice cream.) But I was on a hunt for lace weight, and I'm thinking the local knitters are not lace weight enthusiasts by the extent of the stock they had on hand at the moment.

So when I visited a new-to-me yarn shop in northeastern PA, GoshYarnIt! and found yarns I had only read (dreamed) about, I had to fight down the guilt when I walked out with this:









Hand Maiden Sea Silk - Lord love a duck, it is out of this world. You can see the sheen of the silk and sea cell. OMG. I could only get about 440 yards because that's all they had in that color. A dreamy cream, gray, whitish variegated.






Zitron Filigran lace weight - A beauteous lace weight. that I'm thinking of using for Jellyfish..... 100% merino. Bezzie put me on to this pattern, and though I have a queue a mile long I sometime long for the bizarre. I'm not a mohair fan, particularly in lace weight (too hard to fix my mistakes), so this is all merino.







Madeline Tosh lace - in a variegated blackish/grayish. For a Dainty Bess scarf I'm turning into a wrap with beads. I've had the pattern from Knit Picks practically forever. But a trip to a ballet last month when we were hovering in the 60s made me wish for a fancyish scarf.



I could have spent longer than the hour I did (but my mom would've had  stroke waiting for me to get back - I was visiting), and way more money than I did, but I somehow stopped.

(An aside: Ann, the manager, was just the right blend of helpful, friendly, and chatty. She showed me exactly what I wanted (and they had a lot!) answered my questions, left me to browse. It was a very comfortable shopping experience. So many times I read about "unfriendly" yarn shops, but that's not the case here. As I was checking out I met the owner Jill, who was also quite friendly. This shop gets a big thumbs up for customer service and comfort!)

 You may also have noticed more Zauberbal in the "tropical fish" colorway. That's because I decided I wanted to continue Wingspan beyond its current nearly finished size. I likes me some long scarves. And yes, considering that I'm the woman who knit TWO pink flamingos, I kinda like the unusual.......

Just call me Isadora.

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Why can't I stop talking to myself?

Every day I swear that I will not write about politics. There is simply nothing new. But maybe that's the problem, I can't believe that so many people just don't learn from experience. I've even stopped reading a few blogs that I used to actually like, because they sound like "jabber chambers" of the ill informed.

Here's the bottom line:

HHS mandate, NOT about birth control, not about Catholicism, it's about the separation of church and state....remember that? Oh, right that's only when some group doesn't want to see a menorah or creche on the lawn of a public building. If you don't believe me read the FIRST Amendment to the Constitution. THE FIRST, it even comes before Freedom of Speech.

And one more thing before I leave the subject of the Constitution. It is NOT a living document, like your ill-informed history teacher told you in high school. It is a foundational document. Like the foundation of your house supports the structure, it supports all the laws of this country. And much like the foundation of your house, if you want to put that addition on your home your foundation has to be able to support it, or it needs to be reinforced. The Constitution CAN be changed, but, it is a long difficult process and correctly so.

Many of these jabberers are so ill informed about Catholicism in particular, and religion in general, I feel like I've stumbled into a Klan meeting. They seem to have forgotten, or there's that ill informed thing again, that the Klan had a knot in their knickers about Catholics in addition to African Americans. But these are mostly liberals - so the discussions are always civil, right? Right?

No one wants to stop anyone from using or obtaining birth control. In fact, in some of these cases I insist!
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A pallet cleanser:

My Liesel Scarf....well, not mine any more:


Off it went yesterday. It took about a skein and a half of Silky Wool. It turned out longer than I expected, but then so do all my scarves. More to twist and wind. It's an easy knit, but it has ten rows, that I could not seem to memorize, and I forgot YOs too many times to count.














And I'm not much of a joiner, but a friend gave me two balls of Zauberbal sock for Christmas. I was casting about for a project for the yarn, and lo and behold I found Wingspan! And someone had already done it up in MY Zauberbal color "Tropical Fish". So I was off. It's a remarkably fun knit. And I love the Tropical Fish colorway.

Apparently, thanks to Wendy Knits, a lot of people have caught on to Wingspan now - but whatever. 

Thank goodness for something else to occupy my brain. Sigh.