LoopyKnits

Don’t hold your breath about seeing this product on your LYS shelves, but there’s at least one knitter who can lay claim to knitting with chocolate brown yarn made from the fur of shedding bears.

These are trained and socialized bears who enjoy treats and who tolerate careful brushing during June and July when they are getting down to their summer coats in Vermont.

The yarn is smooth and a little scratchy, in case you were wondering. See the story at SmallTownPapers News Service for details.

Technorati Tags: bear yarn, knitting with bear hair, knitting with bear fur

Well, very little knitting has taken place lately as I have been:

• busily setting up shop as a Girl Scout Troop Leader (Brownies, you rock!), and
• untangling this.

 What can I say? I like to untangle things. Necklaces. Yarn. Doesn’t matter. Hand me a mess and I’m happy as a clam. (It’s a sickness, really.) It’s the silkiest, softest royal blue boucle with a glamorous sheen to it, and it came free in a mountainously generous quantity from a blogging friend who just wanted to get the tangled nightmare out of her house. (I suspect it was taunting her, as it is starting to taunt me.)

It was actually *way* less tangled when she tendered it to me, but I’ve been poking around in it for several days now, draping it around my neck and patiently tugging and loosening on the knots. I’ve gradually picked out a few tiny balls of yarn. (I snipped it whenever it looked frayed, so I’m now up to about four blue balls of varying sizes. Heh-heh. Blue balls.)

In retaliation, it sits around and tangles itself up further at night.

It is now starting to piss me off, however; I will not be defeated by a fiber! I am starting to think dreamily about cutting the Gordian knot. But no. This skein is going on the edge of the sofa where I don it like a soft blue mule halter and pick out another inch or two of yarn whenever I watch TV. Mindless, yes. And I think I just may do a dance of victory when I’ve finished with this one!

[Update: Sad news. I was defeated after all. I gave up after hours and hours and hours of trying to untangle this. I was afraid my brain would start to resemble the tangles if I continued.]

In the no-other-news-to-report column, I took a silly little quiz about “What Kind of Yarn Are You?” And this is the thanks I get …

You are Dishcloth Cotton. You are a very hard worker, most at home when you’re at home. You are thrifty and seemingly born to clean. You are considered to be a Plain Jane, but you are too practical to notice.
What kind of yarn are you? … brought to you by Quizilla

Hey … A COTTON DISHCLOTH? C’mon … give a gal some hope!

Technorati Tags: untangled, tangled yarn, knitting quiz, knitblog, LoopyKnits.com, Carolyn Bahm

Oh yeah! It’s postman-hugging time!

I do love getting me a package. I couldn’t wait to tear into this one because I just *knew* what it would contain, and I was right. This was my reward for making one of the two winning logos for Cast On, Cast Off: Jennifer’s Knitting Dojo.

Thanks, Jenifer! As you can see, I got your two skeins of Noro Kochoran (my first-ever) in yesterday’s mail. Scrumptious! I love the smudges of teal, purple and cocoa throughout the light and dark gray yarn, and the little wisps of angora among the silk and wool make the yarn super-cuddly. If I sound like I’m squealing, that is an accurate guess!

I’m following Jenifer’s advice on a simple knitting pattern she provided to show off the yarn. I took a ball of the Noro to Caitlyn’s soccer practice and her game today and knitted inbetween cheers for the Fusions to win (a loss, but they played well). And here are the results so far. I’ve not made such an airy scarf before, but I like how it feels. I had to use size 11 needles instead of the 13s Jenifer recommended because I knit loosely, and I kind of liked dragging out this pair of my grandmother’s needles to make this too. I can already tell this one is going to whip out quickly. I’d forgotten how satisfying it is to make something on uber-large needles.

Cheers, everyone!

Technorati Tags: Noro Kochoran, lace knitting, knitblog, LoopyKnits.com, Carolyn Bahm

So. Disappointed.

I practically skipped out of the house this morning on my way to the local Tuesday Morning store to be the first in line for 50% discounts on Gefrida yarns. The only folks that beat me there were a handful of retirees, and I don’t begrudge them first place in line anyway. But when I finally popped through the doors and asked where the sale yarn was, they pointed me to the endcap of one aisle in the back of the store. About 25 skeins … weird colors … what, that’s IT?!

Yup.

As you can see, most were unfortunate color choices or low quantities. I did like the denim blue but there weren’t enough to make an ample-size sweater for me, and I’ve got enough scarves and hats to last me a lifetime. I passed.

Doesn’t look much like their ad, does it? (See the yarn photo I snipped from their ad, further down on this page.) I don’t expect fancy displays or the very best color selection when I go to a discount outlet store, really. But it would be nice to have enough of one color to make a garment … or at least a few nice yarn colors. Compare the above reality to the photo from their ad, below. Why would they feature yarn in their flier if they aren’t going to have enough on hand to make it worth the trip to the store? It’s misleading, as I told the sales clerk. (Nicely. I’m not a total jerk.)

So … instead of pouting like an infant, I shopped like an adult and bought a bedspread instead. ;o)

It’s nothing fancy. We’ll be repainting our bedroom in a year or two when we get finished with some of the other rooms, so I didn’t want to invest in something luxe. The only thing I could find to go with the currently way-too-perky pale orange sherbet walls was a white Egyptian cotton coverlet and pillow sham in a neat style (geometric pattern woven into fabric, with no fringe on the edge of the spread, which I hate anyway). Beats the heck out of the hand-me-down pink-and-blue striped bedspread we were using; at least now it looks like we’re trying to live like grownups instead of going with the “scavenged dorm room” decor. ;o)

And besides, it beats the heck out of the peculiar Gefrida yarns they had at Tuesday Morning — especially the chunky black yarn studded with tufts of orange and white. Yech. Hope you all had better luck with the yarn shopping!

Technorati Tags: Tuesday Morning store, yarn sale, misleading advertising, Gefrida yarns, knitblog, LoopyKnits.com, Carolyn Bahm

I ran by my LYS today to pick up the baby alpaca yarn I’d ordered for my very first shawl. It came in a light greenish-gray instead of the charcoal we had anticipated (shipper error) so I opted for another color she had in shop. Two skeins of Misti Alpaca laceweight yarn in a plummy wine color, and I’m good to go. OH it is so soft! I may never knit with anything else again.

I also picked up two skeins of hot pink Regia sock yarn in a wool/polyamide blend for my 6 Sox-Along project (finally), since I can’t find my two skeins of red (lurking somewhere in this house).

And also got another ball of Idena’s Mega ladder yarn; since I modified the width of the simple stole I was knitting, it came out a bit shorter than I wanted. I’m going to try to finish *that* one to wear out tomorrow for a dinner date with hubby.

Photos and decadent yarn fondling later — the dinner bell just rang at my house. ;o)

- Carolyn B.

Technorati Tags: Idena Mega, Misti Alpaca,  Regia sock yarn, knitblog, LoopyKnits.com, Carolyn Bahm

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]