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).