My Overstuffed Room

Nice Try

Consider this an open letter to whoever is responsible for delivering Interweave Knits magazines to my part of Pennsylvania:

I will confess that I should have been a subscriber all along.  The only problem is that when I think about suscribing to the magazine it is usually when I am looking through a Summer issue and let's face it, I'm not one of those 'in-season' knitters.  I don't want to knit a mohair tank top.  I knit year-round for those ever-fleeting cold weather months.  And then I put off subscribing. 

I will admit that hearing that the magazine was sold out on the publisher's website did pique my interest. 

The fact that they don't reprint issues got me a little concerned.

I looked at all of the projects on Ravelry that people are doing from the magazine and decided that I would be foolish not to get a copy.   (Happy Ravelry beta tester here.)

That's where you begin to matter in my life, magazine deliveryperson.  I stopped at a local Barnes & Noble to pick up the Fall issue with all of its fabulous patterns. 

There weren't any.  I even checked behind copies of the Decorative Scrollsaw Worker and a really strange one on many ugly dolls. 

Not to be deterred,  I checked the Borders a half mile away.

Nothing.

Finally, two more Barnes & Noble later, I found where you 'stuck' them all.  (At this time I am not willing to admit that I was obsessed with finding a copy, just highly motivated.)

How many did I find you ask? Not one, three, or even six, but a stack of 14! 

It's not nice to play tricks on Southeastern PA knitters desperately trying to find one of the best issues of Interweave Knits. 

Full Stop

Can you hear it?  Do you know the screeching sound of tires when a car has to make a very sudden stop to come to a complete halt?  Well, insert that sound [here]. 

My wonderful 70's color-inspired vest I shared with you before is at a standstill.  I realized that I don't have enough of the yarn to make the vest with the changes I want (making it much longer).   So I called the studio in New Mexico that sold it to me at the festival, Tierra Wools.  I *think* (because I'm not really sure) that they are mailing me some more, although out of another dyelot.  I got a little confused because they said if they didn't call me back they had it in and were mailing it out, but they did call me to check the color and then we realized that she had pulled a different yarn and when we got that straightened out she was pretty sure she had the stuff I needed and I don't think I received another call back so I think that means the yarn is in the mail.  Maybe.  I am waiting to continue knitting the vest until the new yarn arrives so I can mix it in the stripes in case the dyelot is really different.

Of course because I have to wait for the yarn to arrive, I want to knit the vest very badly. I can only think about knitting that vest and how great it will be when finished.

I'm wondering if I got my husband to hide a few skeins from each of my ongoing (and unending) projects if I would feel the stress of really wanting to get the projects done. 

I am drowning my vest impatience in reading.  Because I don't have enough knitting books (and if you've taken the photo tour of my studio you know that is a big lie), I found two knitting books really cheap yesterday at HomeGoods. 

The fact that I went into that store to find cookie cutters is irrelevant. 

If you have a HomeGoods near you, you know what I am talking about and if you don't I pity you because it is the best store ever (like you, Beth).  The first book I bought was Hollywood Knits Style by Suss Cousins (in hardback) for a whopping $7.99 and Knitting To Go for $5.00**.  Insert jealousy [here].

Gotta go turn on some 80's music and work on my legwarmers.

**Added later:

Unlike so many other pattern collections, I feel that this one 'speaks' to me personally.  I can't say it better than the back of the box: "Knitting to Go makes it a cinch to knit in trains, planes, and automobiles, at church, at school, bellied up to the bar...".  I mean, that's me, just in a single day.

Knitting my way through the weekend

The weekend is  now over.

So here's a short retrospective of my weekend:

This is some beautiful llama and wool blended fiber purchased in Taos at the festival.  It feels like a cloud and the camera doesn't pick up all of the subtle purply-bluish shades in the fiber.  I came across this fiber in a time-honored method, I looked into other people's bags while walking around the festival and asked them which booth they purchased from if I liked what I saw.  I should mention that I only looked into bags that were open like the one below, it isn't as if I have some sort of problem.  Trust me, you too would be interested in the fiber a handle-bar-mustached, cowboy-hatted, boot-wearing, western-shirt sporting man has in a bag tied with a nice ribbon (he did feel compelled to let me know it was his wife's).

I've begun spinning it, I plan on making a 2-ply yarn:

Maybe for a vest, because I've been into the idea of vests lately.

Then I was reading through my latest copy of Handwoven:

And decided that I really need to make this bag (and my sister wants one too)

With what you might ask? Why this silk sari yarn in the stash, what a coincidence!:

Of course, it was purchased for another project and despite that fact that I have yet to begin that said project I feel like it should be kept for that other project because it is all the same shade, something that is needed for the other project and something that can be difficult to have with silk sari yarn.

How is it possible that inanimate objects are able to exert guilt?

So I'm not going to use it to weave right now.  Sorry, Beth.  I still need to work past my issues.

But I'm planning a future project with this:

And this:

But more about that later.

Instead I'm putting this warp on my loom right now:

Once I actually get it on my loom I'll show you what it looks like.  Hopefully by then I'll know what it is going to be other than 'unknown weaving project with a width of 26 inches'.  That just doesn't sound very interesting.

My FINISHED wrap, washed, fringed and even worn to church today.  I lost count of the number of people who petted it and/or thought I was just being a smart-aleck when I said that I wove it my loom.

After waiting for forever I started my legwarmers from the Handknit Holidays book when I was in Santa Fe using stash yarn.  I changed around the colors a little bit to make them less "Christmas-y" and more "Winter-y" because even though I have no idea why I am knitting legwarmers, except maybe for some strange homage to the movie "Flashdance", I do know that I want to get the most use out of my legwarmers, in a theoretical sort of way because, again, I'm not sure how or when I'm going to wear them.  Once I figure that out, I'll let you know. 

Lastly I have continued to knit myself a vest with wool I bought in Taos at the festival using a pattern I bought in Taos at La Lana Wools.  However, unlike the model, I will be wearing a shirt under my vest, I'm a bit traditional that way, and I am making mine longer.  I just love those seventies colors. 

I am concerned that I don't have enough concurrent projects going right now.

Don't Faint!

Quick! Grab a chair to sit down!

The loom is empty

This can only mean one thing...(since the children are at school, the baby asleep and I hide my sharp scissors from them  - one too many impromptu haircuts necessitated that move)....

I HAVE A FINISHED PROJECT!!

ok, no I haven't washed it yet, nor have I finished off the fringe, but let's not be so legalistic in our definition of 'finished', ok? 

My wrap is 'finished'  (see I italicized it for emphasis), despite the fact that it is a couple of feet longer than originally planned, but we won't talk about that right now because I haven't decided what, if anything, I'm going to do about it.

More Pictures from the Taos Wool Festival

 

This is where I found some buffalo fiber to spin, one of my goals for the festival, I figured that if I couldn't find bufalo fiber at this festival, I wouldn't find it anywhere:

I have no clue what was up with the sign hanging on the tent, but the wool was very colorful:

 

This was true buffalo land, but EXTREMELY expensive:

This next one, a booth from the Taos Country Day School was by far the most colorful one there:

To cap off the festival, we stopped into the small town of Arroyo Seco (between Taos and the Ski Basin), just a few miles north of the town of Taos.  It was just as cute as a button:

 

Ok, we didn't stop for the town itself, we stopped for:

because the innkeeper where we stayed told us how great this yarn shop was.  And he doesn't even knit.  He was absolutely right.  Here's the link to Taos Sunflower

And this was after we had stopped at:

in Taos.  La Lana was very funky.

Taos Wool Festival

I don't know of anyone who can resist a good festival, I certainly can't.  Here are some of my favorites from Taos. 

What I bought:

What I would have liked to have bought:

More to come....

Work with me

This is my sock that I am knitting today.  I love the random striping of this Regia sock yarn.  But I don't really want to talk about my sock, instead I want to show you some pictures taken around my sister's house in Santa Fe.  So I've stuck the sock in every picture.  See if you can find it.

This is outside their front door:

This is the courtyard before their front door:

This is the door to their back walled-in courtyard:

This is a view of their backyard and beyond.  Santa Fe is considered 'High Desert'.  The mountains in the distance are the Sandia Mountains.  It is so different from Pennsylvania.

And another view:

And another view:

And now, I have to leave to drive to Taos with my sister because tomorrow is the Wool Festival.   

Airport Fun

Flight time without children yields a surprisingly large amount of knitting time, made even nicer by the fact that the people in the seat in front of me kept their seat backs in the upright position.  However, I am disturbed by the gleefulness of the retired generation when it comes to airport safety precautions.

I was standing in line at the security checkpoint in Philadelphia behind a retired couple I would term as ‘interesting’.   The wife couldn’t stop talking about whether or not they had everything they needed to pass through the checkpoint.  I really think that she was hoping she would be profiled as a risk, it totally would have made this woman’s day.   I am not kidding when I tell you that she conspiratorially leaned towards me (while I was trying to get all of my stuff into one of those gray bins, and take my shoes off without tripping over my stuff that had fallen on the floor) and said with a large and undisguised amount of delight  “I wonder if we need to pull our cell phones out from the bags to have them closely screened.” 

I didn’t understand what she was getting at when she explained loudly, “ You do know that the terrorists are making cell phones now that are really bombs!” 

I had one statement ready to say just in case,

"I am not with her."   

Be distracted

Let's take a moment and look at these pictures of the boys in their new hats and we can all take our minds off of the fact that I haven't posted in about two weeks.  I have, in addition to life, been moonlighting on another blog and spending a bit of time setting it up.  Happily, that is now done. 

Of course, trying to make them keep the hats on in the 80 degree heat of the other day makes new hat day lose some of its specialness.

And another of the baby.

And another, Harry is trying to help pose the baby:

Tomorrow morning I leave to spend a week eating extremely spicy food and spending time at a wool festival that I have wanted to visit for the last 10 years.  visiting my beloved sister.  I am going to the land of pueblos, adobe houses and buildings (real and fake), (because you haven't seen it all until you've seen an adobe-style McDonald's) and the capital of all that is aesthetically pleasing

That's right, the Land Of Enchantment.

I have spent hours deciding what to bring.

After all, the wrong knitting project can just ruin a trip.