One of my co-workers asked the other day whether Movember is still a thing. Shudder. I hope not. I'm all for the prostate cancer awareness and whatnot, but all that facial hair makes me twitch.
And speaking of facial hair, allow me to rant about getting older. My once leonine thick locks are thinning. I'm not going bald or anything (yet) (I hope), but my hair is thinner than it was. Even my eyebrows are less bushy, and I've always been able to give Brooke Shields a run for her money. And to add insult to injury, a bunch of my eyebrow hairs are now growing in white. The only hair which is still going strong is the stuff that magically sprouts overnight on my chin and my upper lip. It's got greater tensile strength than steel, and it's almost impossible to remove. It's unfair. So if you're a woman under 50 reading this, beware. This is what you have to look forward to: you will start to become the Bearded Lady from the circus, but no one will be paying admission to see you.
Rant over.
On with the blog.
Are you impressed? This is two weeks in a row. My phone tells me I have enough photos to bore you with.
My December shipment of the String Theory Colorworks yarn club arrived. I feel as though I can put this up now, because I've seen photos on Instagram. The colourway is The Greenhouse Effect. It's three different colours of blue and three different colours of green. The heel/toe mini is a pale blue. You know how I feel about pale blue. Either I'll find some green or I'll just suck it up. Caitlin knows her colours.
But it's lovely. And it makes me sad that there won't be any for a while. I am going to try to get the remaining 4.5 pairs from this club knit up before the end of the year. I think that's doable.
Look how beautiful those colours are. I love them. That sapphire blue in there is divine.
The Lad's girlfriend was here for 2 weeks. They went on a road trip to the Valley and had an awesome time. He took some amazing photos. (His Google android phone actually seems to have a better camera than my iPhone. I'm not jealous or anything. Oh wait, yes I am...). I won't share them all since this is my blog and not his. But I do have to share this.
Check this out. Apparently there is a yarn and coffee shop in Wolfville called the Wool 'n Tart. [Subject to verification - according to his text messages it was called Yarn and Wool, or Yarn and Tart, then finally Wool 'n Tart. It sells "Peru wool".] I have never seen this place. Mind you, it's been a while since I've been to Wolfville.
Oh, yeah. I'm going on a road trip one day. Check out the mugs on the North Mountain coffee machine!!!! I need one. They also brought back some Black Honey coffee from the North Mountain roastery. It's pretty good.
OMIGOD. Yarn and coffee. What could be better?
Now this may be old hat to those of you who live in places with a decent supply of LYS, but that's not the case here. There are 2 yarn shops in Halifax. There's Have a Yarn in Mahone Bay (which is awesome). Gaspereau Valley Fibres just outside Wolfville is also awesome (more on that soon). And then there's the one in Baddeck. There may be a couple of other random yarn stores here and there (I think there's one in Lismore somewhere), but they are not thick on the ground. You people who can do a weekend yarn crawl with 8 or 10 shops don't know how lucky you are.
But now I have another one: this Wool 'n Tart place. And just to put it in perspective, it takes an hour to drive to Wolfville from Halifax, and an hour to drive to Mahone Bay. It takes about 4 hours to drive to Baddeck.
Anyway, this place seems to have a decent selection. I'm not sure I trust the Lad when he says it's "Peru Wool". Some of it may be, but I doubt it's all Peruvian wool.
Okay, now it's on to randomness.
They have a big planter outside the Rosaria Building at Mount St. Vincent University. It has some of those cabbage-derivative plants in it. Here it is in November and they're still going strong. I love the colours. This would of course make an awesome skein of gradient yarn.
The sky and the light were magnificent on Friday. It was all dark and stormy by the horizon but got lighter higher up.
My bag from Vickie at Bird Leg Bags arrived yesterday! There was a beautiful smell of lavender wafting out of the envelope.
Her work is exquisite and the packaging is divine. AmphibiaJunior approves. I have saved the tissue paper.
Look at the detail on that - the topstitching is perfect. And I love the orange interior. It's about 14" across at the top. It is currently housing 3 skeins of yarn for a shawl plus the first skein and the start of the shawl on the needles.
There are a bunch of Vickie's bags that I want. Go and save me from myself.
The Lad and the Girl brought me back gifts from their little sojourn in the Valley. Talk about unexpected and delightful. They brought back a bottle of Grand Pre Baco Noir, which is a local red wine. We had it the other night. And they brought me back yarn from Gaspereau Valley Fibres. Win win!!
They bought a skein of Peruvian Tweed 100% Superfine Alpaca. It seems to be handspun. There are 595 yards and the label said 227 grams, but I weighed it and it was 232 or something like that. I figured there is enough to do each of them a hat. So I didn't even get a picture of it before I wound it. The first of the rolled brim Bankhead hats is on the needles.
The other two skeins are sock yarn (80/20) from the Mineville Wool Project. One is a mustardy yellow, and the other is shades of red and pinky purple and burgundy with a bit of persimmon thrown in. They're all lovely.
The alpaca is unbelievably soft. It's like petting a cat. There's a bit of a halo on it. So it's very much like petting a cat.
That's a little over-exposed, but you get the idea. It seems to be two plies of the Alpaca (white and grey) spun together and then there is a much thinner black strand plied with it. So it's officially a two-ply, but I think the thicker ply is made up of two different strands of the alpaca fleece.
I'm finding it quite splitty, which is kind of a torture for the twisted rib, and trying to locate the stitches for joining the double rolled brim was a bit of a nightmare. It doesn't help that my eyes are getting old and unreliable. (Oh well, at least they're not hairy ...)
I was thinking of switching to a blunter needle (this is currently on my 4" Hiya Hiya sharps), but I don't have one in the 3.75 mm size. I have a Chiaogoo. Actually, it's a bit less pointy than the Hiya Hiya, so I might switch needles and see if it goes any better.
The Lad is going out to see the Girl in December, so I have about 5 weeks to knit them matching hats. They should be soft and warm. The Lad sent a picture of the two of them, and they were wearing crappy commercially-made toques. I told him I wasn't impressed.
And that brings me to the final thing, which is a HO.
I mentioned earlier that I want to finish knitting with all of my String Theory Colorworks sock club yarns. So I started the Boomerang Nebula which was either April or June (can't remember - getting old, neurons dying at an alarming rate ...). I used the contrast skein for the cuff, heel and toe. It's a beautiful grey with purple undertones. I love this colourway. Even the blue. When I started a new block of colour I slipped every second stitch for the first repeat of the colour. I didn't want to do it with the first round of the black, since the black is only 3 rows.
I did a standard heel flap and gusset, and did the gusset decreases on the bottom. It's what I refer to as my Leaf Heel, since it looks a bit like a leaf. I just do the decreases on either side of the bottom of the sole. Easy peasy. I will write up the various options for this at some point.
I'm not sure whether I'm going to cast on the second sock next or whether I'm going to cast on one of the other colourways first. I might do that.
I gave the Girl two pairs of socks from my BoxOSox. I gave her the No. 2 Pencil and the BMFA Cloud 9 sock in the Autumn Harvest speckley colourway. I can still get 12 pairs done for the year.
I did not receive my October Pencil Crayon Sock of the Month and sent an email about it, but I haven't had a reply or an acknowledgment to my email. Since this is literally the third time that I've been forgotten this year, I am getting annoyed. I think it's probably because I joined for the entire year, and most of the shipments seem to be on a monthly basis, so perhaps I'm not showing up as part of the regular Etsy transactions or whatever. I get that it may be confusing to keep track of things and that sometimes things get overlooked, but a simple acknowledgment is not a lot to ask for. So I will not be joining that particular sock club in future. I love the yarn, but not the sock club service. The non-sock club service is fine.
And on that happy note, I am going to kick back and work on a hat or my shawl or perhaps think about casting on another sock.
Sayonara until next time.
Your Boomerang Nebula socks are gorgeous.
Posted by: Leslie | 11/06/2016 at 10:37 PM
OMG that Boomerang Nebula sock is awesome! It looks like you're just doing your decreases on the bottom, on the last stitch and first stitch of the needles where the decreases happen? Also, do you use the h/t yarn to pick up the stitches around the heel flap and then switch back to the main color after you get the correct number of rows for that color? I'm a big fan of not disrupting the stripe pattern on the top of the sock, so I'm loving this - and I'm really interested in trying this "gusset" decrease - I love how clean and smooth it looks on the sides because the decreases are on the bottom. And slipping the stitches around the color change just looks amazing!
I do not take for granted the number of yarn stores I have at my disposal. I'm super lucky in that regard! :) Plus there's lots of great dyers in the US so the shipping isn't crazy-expensive.
That would annoy the crap out of me if I'd paid for a year of a yarn club and had to constantly remind the dyer to send me yarn. Seriously.
Posted by: Erica | 11/07/2016 at 02:52 PM