March 30, 2016

On the Other Side of the Crazy

I've managed to come out on the other side of the back-to-back yarn festivals a little worse for wear.  The first (Spring Fling) was a piece of cake and a fairly short commute--only about 90 minutes each way. The second (the Carolina Fiber Fest) was a grueling turn-and-burn that more or less took all of the fun out of the Easter weekend. The extra 90 minutes each way thanks to A) 60 miles of road construction and very bizarre road planning in North Carolina and B) the not-quite-steady-rain that blurred the windshield but was only really enough to make the wipers squeak for 6 hours on the night-time return trip did me in.  There was only one hectic day between traveling.  I came home to a house needing a good clean-up, Easter dinner to cook, and a huge yarn order for Rainy Day Yarns in Seattle to tackle. (Note: If you are participating in the Seattle April yarn crawl, you will want to go to Rainy Day Yarns first because the yarn I dyed up yesterday is so absolutely gorgeous that it won't be around but for about five minutes. Just sayin'.)

The thing about me and traveling is that I can't sleep in hotel rooms with any degree of comfort.  The air/heat is always just musty enough to send my allergies over the top and the beds are always disagreeable.  I never get any sleep when I travel because I always feel like I might as well be sleeping on the floor. And so, 4 days later, I still feel pretty wiped.

But, here we are on the other side of the crazy and I have two lovelies to share. The first is my Arboretum Shawl, which I designed in 2014, submitted to Knit Edge Magazine for publication in 2015, and just now am seeing in print in the April, 2016 edition.  After a series of changes in editors and production staff that just seemed to be on-going, Arboretum is finally in print.  It is also on Ravelry if you want to check out the details, though you have to purchase the magazine, I believe, to get a copy of the pattern.  Or, you can wait 4 months until August when the rights come back to me and buy the single copy then.  I sent in oodles of pictures because they didn't want to have to schedule their own photographer, but in the end they went with the submission photos from my laundry room.  WTH? (Can you tell that I am less than impressed with Cooperative Press?)


Arboretum is knit in my Rocket Sock label.  This color way is Wild Blue Yonder, though the dye lot a bit darker in this picture than the lot currently in the shop.

The second lovely is this WIP that I am working on for the Shinybees Rewind KAL.  It's coming along very nicely and I was able to work on it a bit at the Carolina Fiber Fest.  I've left the bottom edge on waste yarn with the hope that when I finish the sleeves there will be enough yarn left for the collar band and also to put a matching band across the bottom.  The very kind people at Touch Yarns in New Zealand have made a search for one last skein of this discontinued Possum yarn, but with no results. With all of the calculations and alterations to the pattern I've made, I'm still afraid that I won't have enough.  There isn't even anything close to it that I can find that I could sub in as a contrast color for the bands. I've searched and searched.  I guess it's just me vs. the yarn on this project, and I intend to use every last bit of this AMAZING yarn.


I don't know if you can see it in the picture, but the thing about this yarn that has me just over the moon is that it is an oatmeal color but, if you turn the fabric slightly on edge, there is a coppery halo of possum fibers that covers the entirety of the fabric.  In person it's like looking at the knit fabric through a coppery haze. LOVE IT!


There's only been one thing that has gone wrong with this WIP and that is the consequence of just abject stupidity and watching the Sockmatician podcast instead of what I was doing.


The odd thing about this possum yarn is that it has an almost felted texture.  It's a bit sticky in a way that I cannot begin to describe.  It's not felted, but it does kind of stick to itself once you've knit with it like it is felted.  Anyway, I was putting the body stitches on waste yarn and when I went to tie the ends of the waste yarn together, I inadvertently yanked the working yarn in place of the lifeline end very hard, apparently and tied it to the other end of the lifeline.  The result was that, not only did I manage to pull about 30 stitches and muck up the lifeline, but they pretty much felted themselves together.  See those stitches? They became one in a fraction of a second.  It was a 20-minute mess to fix. Stupid, stupid!  I recommend that you don't do this at home.

Although I have other projects on the needles, and the March Socks will not be finished before March comes to an end because of this WIP, I am up for a good challenge and am committed to finishing this by the end of next week.  My other projects are getting a bit lonely, I think.

So, how about you? What are you working on as Spring rolls into town?

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