hibernating is for bears.

My Knitpicks order arrived today with no problems. I like that they shipped it USPS because it was waiting for me.

It is very cold here. I am wearing my alpaca scarf. Yes, inside. I made it from Knitpicks Decadence. And it really did feel decadent because I bought 8 balls and made a rainbow scarf. So it cost $50 for this scarf. Yes, I still have the other half ball in each color, but until I use it, all the cost goes on this project. I did not really like the Decadence yarn. It is very soft but does not feel good next to my skin. I found the skeins to be a bear to wind and the 2-ply yarn to split unless great care was taken. But Knitpicks discontinued it, so my review matters not.

I was talking about spinning fiber sources with Seedless Grape recently and I really think I lucked into the best deal going with Spunky Eclectic. There exist cheaper places, but most of them only take paypal, plus Boogie is just awesome. I am starting to anticipate the January Spunky Fiber Club shipment. However, should you have a great source of intensely colored (fully prepared) fiber, please do consider commenting either here or via the form.

I found a shawl book. Wrapped In Comfort by Alison Jeppson Hyde. It is a whole book of part-circular shawls. It is also inexpensive. I wrote a letter to the author thanking her for writing exactly what I had been looking for (for a year now) and she was very gracious. ETA: I actually bought this book. It will arrive shortly. It will be my fifth purchased knitting book. All the others have been borrowed from the library and returned without qualm.

Starting Out

I am currently working on adding in pictures. I do not have the image hosting worked out yet. I know I can host images here, but the 50mb limit means I have to resize them. I do not have a good (automated) way of doing that. I think I will tag posts where I intend to come back with pictures, which will do for the meantime.

As a general goal, I want to talk about yarn-related things here because emailing friends who aren’t yarn fiends about my latest project is not amazingly effective. Hopefully by keeping it focused on a single (but large) topic, will keep it from drifting into navel-gazing. It should also mean that I will not stray into taboo topics that get one’s account banned without notice on other sites.

I have come from livejournal land, where the quirks are of a different flavor. I flailed around somewhat looking at the presentation/theme options. There are a large number of widgets that I do not understand yet. Your patience is appreciated. If you were not planning to be patient, well, I will be disappointed.

The current plan is to have weekly summary posts which outline all the projects I worked on and individual posts when I cannot help myself. I do not plan to include cartoons of sheep like Franklin. I do not have a gimmick where my sock travels the world. In fact, it is quite possible that these posts will be quite boring. Please feel free to read elsewhere instead of complaining.