First, a little non-knitting contents in honor of our mini-vacation this past weekend:
There’s no place like HOME! It was fun to visit San Antonio, but it was so good to get back to my kids, my pooch, and my peeps in general. (The hubby came up for the weekend or he’d have made the peeps list too.) It’s nice to be around people without having to tip them every few seconds. (Teenagers excepted.) Our tour included the Alamo, the Natural Bridge Caverns, the local mercado (market), Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and a visit to a highly rated local Tex-Mex restaurant (wherein I tasted my first dish of baby goat — yum).
And finally we get to the knitting contents of this posting: We of course made a stop at the Yarn Barn. Wow! What a selection! I was in awe just of their knitting needle selection alone, not to mention an entire aisle just of SOCK yarns. I went in and out of this largish shop in a blur due to our other plans for the day (”blur” meaning about 45 minutes when I wanted to stay there for 2-3 hours), but I fully intend to go back for an entire afternoon the next time I’m traveling nearby. The staff was nice and knowledgeable, with one staffer immediately noticing my dropped jaw and asking me if I needed help (I’m sure she was offering retail assistance, not mental health help … pretty sure, anyway). She then walked me toward the back of the shop to see the lovely selection of wool and cotton sock yarns.
You could probably get better prices online, but they seemed comparable to my local shops and it was nice for me, as a relatively novice knitter, to be able to squeeze and stroke the various yarns. I kept putting some skeins up to my face and sighing while my husband just sighed and found a comfortable place to stand with my purse. There were a good 10-12 patrons in there, happily doing needlepoint, crochet, and knitting as other shoppers puttered around. I think I and another gal had the only husbands in tow, though. And only mine was actually in the store. ;o)
As much as I love visiting the local yarn stores back home (I recently dropped the bucks for three projects at two of ‘em), I do so love being “unfaithful” to ‘em on those rare occasions when I’m out of town, too. It’s just nice to see what other knitters have available to them.

You see two future pairs of socks before you, of course. This is Cherry Tree Hill’s fingering-weight merino in Supersock Solids Purple and Supersock Champlain Sunset (such pretty colors they almost sparkle).
I didn’t make it to the nearby alpaca farm as I had hoped, but I managed to wear Texas-size blisters on my little toes by the end of the day, just the same. Those pinky toes were curled up little balls of screaming meat — and I was still happy, just the same. Caverns! Yarn! Historical site! Exciting new foods! Weird stuff at Ripley’s! Coolness! I’m struggling with my two-color stranding for my newest sock project, however. It kept me occupied during my downtime between events at my work division’s annual meeting. Busy knitting and then frogging, that is. I have no trouble at all holding one color yarn in the left hand and one in the right and knitting away. It feels very nifty and I think I’d like to knit an entire sweater like this. It’s definitely addictive. The problem is figuring out what to do about the color jogs. Either I’m not following the directions well or I need to find better references online. The only free advice I could find online about color jogs was in the Swirt pattern online at MagKnits; it’s Tip #1 on that page. But when I follow their brief directions, the main color intrudes on the row of secondary colors. I feel certain I’m missing something …
There’s also a “dealing with jogs” tip on this KeyWay.net page but it doesn’t seem helpful either, for my socks. (If anyone has some good online tutorials — especially with vidclips — I’d appreciate a comment with the info. Thanks! I’ve spent a bit much on my stash lately and am trying to avoid purchasing a book especially about Fair Isle knitting — at least for now.)
In the meantime, I’m anxiously awaiting tomorrow’s revelation about the new sock pattern for the August project of the Six Sox Knitalong that I recently joined. All we know so far is that it’s supposed to look best in a solid color, not even anything tweedy, and we need 100 grams of sockweight yarn. I’m reserving the new purple merino for this project and will begin looking for another cute sock pattern to try the spiffy colors of the Champlain on. (I saw a sock pattern that looked almost modular recently with little “scales” of different color streaks … I’m probably not describing this well … and have been desperately looking for that link ever since, darn it.)
Okay, that’s probably enough about my weekend! — Carolyn B.
[tags]San Antonio, Texas knitting, sock knitting, Yarn Barn, Cherry Tree Hill yarn, travel knitting, knitblog, LoopyKnits.com, Carolyn Bahm/tags]