Buyer beware

Why I avoid eBay:

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This one just cracks me up every time. Egg forwards me particularly good ones from this website, and when he sent me this one a few weeks ago, I nearly wet my pants laughing.

A woman came to the LYS this week who had a totally different kind of buyer beware experience. A beginner knitter, she lives about 2 hours away in a town with no LYS. She fell in love with a fairly advanced pattern in a Big Knitting Magazine, ordered the high end yarn specified in the pattern, and arranged for private tutoring through her Generic Craft Store to walk her through the process. Well, the tutor bailed out, and now she's stuck with a several hundred dollar investment in yarn and lacks the experience to finish it (buyer beware #1). So she and her husband drove up here for help. Four + hours later, I'd written out row by row, line by line how to finish the left front. She used the oddest yarn management system. The pattern called for alternating rows of two different yarns, and she had each of them wound onto empty paper towel rolls. The fuzzy yarn wouldn't unspool easily from the cardboard, so these tubes kept jumping around. Even tensioning was impossible, but she said it worked for her. She also used the heaviest pair of straight needles I have ever seen. 18 inches long, and they must have weighed close to a half pound each - I could barely knit with them. I asked her if the weight bothered her, and she agreed that they were too heavy, but she liked the pointy tips, and damn it, she had paid over $30 for them (buyer beware #2), so there was no way she was even going to look at some nice, light weight circular lace needles with extra pointy tips.

On my own personal knitting front, the wavy socks are done:I'll probably give these to my mother, She of the Perpetually Cold Feet (in a literal, not figurative, sense). They're slightly too big for me, and the pair of bed socks I already made her (those from that odd red/yellow/mottled Koigu) just need a little something something to go with them. This evening I cast on for the next pair, this time using Brown Sheep's Wildfoote in a really loud colorway, and am going to see how how Cookie A's Monkey Socks turn out worked toe up.

The entrelac bag is fully knitted yet still unfelted. It's HUGE! As in small children can hide in it. I'll try to get a picture of that - small children hiding in it - this weekend when we meet up with old friends and their kiddies. I double layered the bottom to give it some extra heft down there and also to compensate for a tactical error I made when I started it: the bottom is black, and everything disappears into the darkness of a bag with a black interior. The inner layer on the bottom is out of the light grey, which I hope will help. I still have to knit the handles (miles of i-cord?) and then felt it (tons of lint in the washing machine).

Speaking of horror

On my way home from Knit Nite at my LYS tonight, I got stuck behind a creepy-crawly driver, and while waiting for the traffic in the passing lane to clear, I happened to look over just as I was passing a small local motel. This motel seems to cater primarily to construction workers at local jobsites, sort of low-rent TDY or extended stay place. Just then, a fellow came out of one of the end units heading to his work truck dressed only in, you guessed it, his tighty-whities! Beer gut in all its glory! Yikes - I really didn't need that image burned into my retinas! That's my punishment for taking my eyes off the road. I guess his rationale was that it was just going to take a minute, why bother getting dressed?

Vicarious knitting

I haven't exactly been lighting up the blogosphere with observations of and witticisms on my own personal yarn adventures, have I? I'm in a knitting dry spell lately, and no, the hat pattern didn't suck all the creative energy out of me. ;-) (That would be pretty pathetic, wouldn't it?)

No, blame it on the effect of noxious household cleaning products on my hands. Last week I spent a few days at the white elephant house, now that it's empty (except for the garage) cleaning in an effort to get the place to a point where it doesn't look scary-neglected. I've spent three days - so far - on the bathrooms trying to get 10+ years of hard water stains off the glass shower doors and surrounds. LimeAway, CLR, etc. - all did nothing on those vertical surfaces except smell bad and do a number on my hands. A little internet research turned up the off-label use of glass cooktop cleaner, which with a non-scratch scouring pad and LOTS of elbow grease actually worked. Still not great on the hands, but at least it did scour the lime off those damn glass panels and doors, which is more than I can say for everything else I tried.

Yes, I did start out wearing gloves, but inevitably water and cleaning product run into them, rendering them pointless, so off they come. The feeling of LimeAway sloshing around your fingers inside a latex glove reminded me of touching fire coral back in my island girl days - a momentary, odd, little tingle followed by a scorching burning like your skin wants to come off.

So, combine that with some big yard clean-up action, and I suppose my hands would make a manicurist either scream and run from then room ("The horror!") or grin with glee at what she could charge for repairing that much damage. When I did try to pick up some mindless knitting (the entrelac bag), the yarn wouldn't slide through my fingers; it was like trying to pull it through velcro. Yuck!!!

I've contented myself instead with browsing the new Knitty, scrolling through Ravelry, and stumbling across other fiber fun that other people are having and posting online. The hand lotion has started to improve things a bit, so I should get some stitches done before heading back for more adventures with cleansers, vacuum cleaners and such later in the week.

Happiness continued

I've test knit my little hat pattern with several different yarn weights now (light worsted/DK, worsted and heavy worsted) and noted the adjustments necessary to accommodate them. I made a child's size by accident (miscounted my repeats - oops) too, so this is turning into an all-purpose pattern.

"T" said she'd test knit it for me too with yet another yarn - can't wait to see the results! This is in addition to proofreading my pattern notes and catching a glaring error!

Happiness is...

Today was one of those perfect days that we get here this time of year, when spring sneaks in a preview. I took full advantage it this afternoon (morning was spent with the neighborhood association cleaning up the common area planting beds and then giving the dog a much needed bath) and settled myself on the deck with the necessities. Please don't look too closely - I didn't bother to scrub the outside table yet of its winter layer of ick!

I started out noodling around on the current WIPs (entrelac bag destined for felting, socks) but picked up some new yarn from my LYS instead. It's the varigated green/blue/black stuff (Di.Ve Autumno) on the circ in the middle. Egg got a hat out of it yesterday, a top down variation on the Life O' Crime watch cap he got earlier but complained was too itchy. This was the manliest colorway of this yarn on stock, and it's soft soft soft, 100% merino. But what's in progress in the picture is mine mine mine.

I've loved traveling stitches from the first time I worked them and made the old classic "Celtic Cardigan" from Oat Couture several years ago mostly because the stitch patterns are all traveling stitches. This hat is made using the stitch pattern from the cardi's ribbing, worked in the round. For the crown decreases I wanted to maintain a semblance of the main pattern, so out came the graph paper, and I am really happy with the results! Yes, it looks like a mushroom on my improvised head model (a mixing bowl set upside down on a pillar candle), but just look past that.

And check out the close up of the crown!

The color of the yarn in the pictures is a bit off, though. It's actually a bit darker than shown, and what looks grayish is really a green and black melange. My mediocre photo skills notwithstanding, I'm so pleased with this little project. When the weather changes back to winter for a day on Tuesday (if the weather guys are right), I'll be able to wear it when I take the dog on his morning constitutional through the neighborhood.


P.S. I forgot to mention the one fly in the ointment with this: it took just a few yards more than one skein of the yarn. Doh! No big deal in this particular case because I had some left over from Egg's hat, but for it to be a true one skein wonder project, I suppose it would have made slightly smaller. (Sigh)