LYS Tour 2010

Last weekend was the annual LYS Tour around here. The yarn stores band together, offer a free one skein pattern and a discount on the yarn to knit it, and us knitters run around crazily getting our passports stamped at the stores - 25 this year! It was my first year actually touring on the tour, since last year I attended every day at one store - the one where I worked. :)

Thursday night after work I headed to 4 of the stores that are more or less on my way home from work... Weaving Works, Bad Woman, Full Circle (this was a new one for me) and Fiber Gallery.

Friday I met up with a couple of friends and hit So Much Yarn on our way out to Bainbridge where we visited Churchmouse and had a lovely dinner at Cafe Nola.

We got to "ride" the scooter:







And then got totally soaked running to the ferry in the rain...



... while eating ice cream from Mora!



A lovely but very chilly evening.

The next day some of us joined a bunch of others for a trek northward to 11 yarn stores! One of the stores had some lovely knitfiti outside.



Amy knit most of Fay's socks on the drive:



After some dinner we took yet another ferry home.



Then on Sunday a few of us hit the remaining stores, where we found this hilarious Opal yarn:



An Austrian pop "singer", Antonia, wears a different slutty outfit on every ball band! We're not sure exactly who the target audience is for this yarn, but it was too hilarious to pass up, so a couple of us bought some:



(Click the first picture to enlarge for a view of more of the outfits!)

All in all an amazing weekend, now back to the secret knitting!

Listening to: The Outsider ~ A Perfect Circle, Reading In Bed ~ Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton, Digital Bath ~ Deftones

Seriously Noro? SERIOUSLY?!?

OK, I wasn't going to blog today. And this doesn't even really count, but I just have to get this off my chest.



These 6 (yes, six!) balls of yarn come from about the last 1/3 of ONE 50g skein of Noro Kureyon. In which I already joined at least two other knots while knitting my sweater. And then after joining the turquoise - which was one of several colors knotted totally out of sequence - I knit not even a whole stripe before hitting another knot. Then I noticed a knot on the outside of the skein and decided I'd better rewind it.

Now, I know that knots are in yarn. That's the way it goes. And if I encounter one or two in a ball I'm slightly miffed but understanding. And Noro is notorious for having lots of knots, and often having knots with two totally different colors tied together. There's a section on the back of my other Noro sweater where the color sequence goes back two stripes and then repeats.

Yeah, it's annoying, but slightly less so when you can splice the yarn as you can with Kureyon. But this? This is not acceptable. And the yarn isn't cheap either! Beautiful, but not pretty enough to make this OK.

Ugh. Somebody remind me of this the next time I want to knit a Noro sweater.

(On a slightly happier note, progress is being made on the Kureyon Hoodie.)

The WIPs

Every once in a while, I realize that I have a lot of WIPs (cough 19 cough!), and I try to do something about it.

I focused on finishing up my Twists and Turns socks from the last post, and then moved on to my special Blue Moon Cast On socks in STR Rare Gem yarn:



I initially cast on for the Braided Gem pattern from Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn, but it wasn't working out. I have this thing about patterns - I'm happy to do more "complicated" knitting if it ends up looking complicated - like Twisted Flower, for example. But honestly my preference, and what gets done the fastest, are relatively simple socks.

Not necessarily plain stockinette or ribbing, I think Monkey and Jaywalker are good examples of socks that look complicated but are actually really simple to knit. But if there's a lot of switching between knits and purls and paying attention to which row I'm on, or maneuvering stitches around each other... Well let's just say it had better look awesome. This pattern in this yarn didn't, so I changed to a 5x1 rib.

Then last night at knitting I started my Central Park Hoodie!



It doesn't look like much yet, but I have high hopes.

Twists and Turns Twins

As some of you may remember, MJ and I have this twin sock thing. We get the same yarn, we knit the same socks (seriously, down to the number of repeats or rows of cuff ribbing!) and then we wear them 2002 miles away from each other. I Google mapped it. One time our twin socks even got to meet!

Well, here's the latest pair:



Pattern: Twists and Turns by me!
Yarn: ShibuiKnits Sock in Sky
Started: 11/16/09
Finished: 5/3/10

This is only the second time I've knit this pattern - the first one was, of course, for the sample in the book. I still like it. :)

I finished them at knitting group last night, which I think may be the first time I've ever finished a project there. I was forced to pull out my backup project - it was great!

So now that these poor neglected socks are done, it's time for the next pair of twin socks. These ones were unintentional, since I got the yarn from a club and MJ got it as a gift, but it is indeed the same yarn, so why not twin socks?

I think most knitters have had a yarn that just wouldn't work. You couldn't find a project, or when you did it never worked out, or maybe you just hated it... Well, I love this yarn. The color is lovely but the past two projects just haven't been right. First I tried to make Reversai for Sock Madness in April 2008 - the yarn and the pattern were just a bad match, so I frogged them.

Then they developed a new destiny... the Anastasia socks, which I still want to make... someday. They were just too big and I'm really not a fan of knitting socks toe-up.

But there's no motivation like MJ, so now they're going to begin a new life as twin socks, with a twisted 1x1 rib cuff and otherwise just stockinette. Hopefully this one will stick.

Knit & Crochet Blog Week - Day 7

Well, the blog week is coming to an end today, but I had fun. It definitely motivated me to post more than usual!

Day 7: What a Yarn

There’s one love that we all share: yarn. Blog about a particular yarn you have used in the past or own in your stash, or perhaps one that you covet from afar. If it is a yarn you have used you could show the project that you used it for, perhaps writing a mini ‘review’. Perhaps, instead, you pine for the feel of the almost mythical qiviut? You could explore and research the raw material and manufacturing process if you were feeling investigative.

The vast majority of the yarn that I own is sock yarn, and I usually post a mini-review whenever I complete a pair of socks with a yarn I haven't used before. So today I'll talk about another yarn, a worsted weight yarn... Malabrigo.

I love this yarn. It's soft, the colors are gorgeous, and it's pretty affordable. I remember when Manos was all the rage and I discovered Malabrigo - it's a little more evenly spun but just as beautiful, softer, and less expensive!

The only thing I've knit in Malabrigo worsted so far was a hat and scarf set in January 2006:



It was knit with two balls of Indigo, and I even had a little bit left over! For a yarn I love so much, it's kind of weird that I've only used it once, and so long ago...

But I have a big upcoming project that I'm actually swatching for today:



I've been planning to make Central Park Hoodie for a while, and I even bought yarn for it a while back, but you know me and sweaters... Well a couple of weeks ago Aubriana and I were talking about knitting sweaters and the Central Park Hoodie and decided to do it together, starting this Thursday at knitting! So today while we're knitting and eating cupcakes, I'm going to swatch.

Knit & Crochet Blog Week - Day 6

Day 6: Revisit a past F/O
Bring the fortune and life of a past finished project up to the present. Document the current state and use of an object you have knitted or crocheted, whether it is the hat your sister wears to school almost every day, or a pair of socks you wore until they were full of holes. Or maybe that jumper that your did just didn’t like that much…

For no particular reason, I decided on my Baudelaire socks.

Here they are just after being finished in September 2006:



And here they are now:



I'm pretty sure the difference in color is just due to lighting and my new camera. You might notice that the bottoms of the heels are a bit felted, but other than that the socks seem to be holding up really well. They did indeed turn my feet purple after the first wear, but they don't do that anymore.

They're in remarkably good shape for being 3 1/2 years old, but the truth is that each individual pair of socks doesn't get worn all that often - I have so many! So I'd say they're doing pretty well! They get worn about as much as any other pair of my socks, and they're still in wearable condition and looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. :)