Yarnivorous

G'day all! I hauled my sorry feet up to Stitches for the last day of the yarn fest. My bad. I bought Even More Stuff. I don't really need it. But I wanted it and some makes me happy happy :-) What colour(way)s do you think I like? Please excuse the lousy pics - it has been a very exciting day here weatherwise and I missed the best window for getting good pics. I was being cracked at the chiro instead. She gives pretty good crack. So we have some Lisa Souza petite hardtwist sock (it is actually a very pretty pastel pink, lemon and green with dots on it) and BFL top in Joseph's Coat (the amorphous mass in the top right), some Miss Babs top and yarn, Vintage Knits ($15 plus tax, given it is one of the books I've been trying to track down at the libraries here I figured I may as well buy it cos it has some good patterns in it), and some Brooks Farm solo silk/wool blend. And a roll of highlighter tape cos I have been looking for it for MONTHS. It is great for knitting ...

G'day all! Day two of Stitches West. Oh boy. I am starting to get over it somewhat!!! Here's the haul so far: I must point out the lovely Tactile twist of top in the bottom centre of the pic - it is yummy yummy yummy but I didn't get a good close shot of it. But I didn't take a pic of the thing that makes me happy happy happy! So what did I get? Two bags of Stella. This doesn't get a top rating on Ravelry but it is a blend I can wear next to my skin. I've already cast on a Hey Teach with the purple. ('Scuse the bodgy job with the colour correction) I think I'll overdye the hot pink (which is currently a match for my hot pink winter jacket - I seem to like some colours!). A bag of Shire (100% silk) in a pale green that is impossible to photograph, just like most of the coloured stuff I have bought. LOL It doesn't get a good rating on Ravelry either but eh, I can wear silk and I can dye it too! I queued for what felt like HOURS to buy this tuni...

G'day all! Spent a goodly time at Stitches today - what fun! I met up with Dianne , who has never been to a Stitches before. It really is overwhelming! You can see evidence of our meeting here . Silly me didn't take a camera so I don't have a reciprocal shot. You want pics? Umm, well see above - no camera1 Did I buy anything? Yep! How could I not buy with all this temptation around me? But again you have to wait! I will document all purchases faithfully (I've put some on ravelry and started knitting from one already!) and display them for you, and tell tales of derring do :-) Just not yet. anon!

G'day all! I hope that this really is the last Stitches stash post. I forgot to write this one up offline. Lisa Souza's dyeing. Purdy! Sock yarn and Blue Faced Leicester fibre to spin up. Yum! anon!

G'day all! I hope this is the last in our little series of flaunting my new stash. I feel a tad embarrassed but I have a LOT less than some of the ladies I saw walking out the door (though they mostly said that they only had the opportunity to do this sort of shopping once a year at Stitches...). The first shop I raced to when I got in the door was Blue Moon Fiber Arts. I expected to find that an hour after opening that it was almost denuded, with rabid women fighting over the remains. Boy was I in for a surprise! OK the queue was 10 long but it was not the all-in brawl I had expected to find. I managed to navigate the store quite easily. My aim was the Raven series, of course! I found one skein of Rook-y which I originally intended to send to a friend Back 'Ome but I could not let the yarn go. Rook-y is a rainbow of colours under the black and you all know how much I love rainbow colours. The close-up shot is not the best but it gives some idea of the subtlty. Then there...

G'day all! Ah the siren call of the sock yarn. On Friday I had admired a lovely wussy colourway at Ellen's Halfpint Farm in a merino bamboo blend. I am particularly fond of of what I call lilypond colours - a blend of light spring green, mauve, baby blue and aqua. On Sunday, on my second go-round (I have NO IDEA how people could put up with going three days in a row!) I saw that the yarn was still around. So it had an accident, well my credit card had another accident, and it came home with me. MMmmmm, pretty, shiny! I also saw this plait of wool and umm silk? Bamboo? I don't think it is bamboo fibre cos it appears to have dyed the same colour as the wool base. That sort of rules out tencel as well. The lady at the stall (Carolina Homespun) said if it was warm it was bamboo and cool if it was silk, or was it the other way around? Anyway it is prettier in the hank than it is in the pic. It came home with me too. anon!

G'day all! Y'know there is a problem with some indie dyers - they are so indie that they don't even have a label on their products. Silly persons! Without a label how do I remember who they were and how to get more? This indie dyer won't be a problem - Fiber Fiend labels all her stuff with her name and store URL. Plus Snidknits tells me she is a local and a good friend of Cindy's. This is some bamboo in such a lurid colourway it had to come home with me. She was very pleased with how the bamboo turned out - I have the feeling she was a little worried it might not take the dye or something. Ahem. Here are the fibres that I will have trouble finding again. The lady seemed very quiet and unassuming, at least the one who dyed them, not her large and loud blonde Valkyrie friend who was very friendly and helpful and one helluva enabler ;-) And they didn't have labels on their stuff. I need labels cos the wool fumes in such a place completely overwhelm me. So...

G'day all! One of the delightful things at Stitches West was that various designers were there. It was like "Wow, you are a Real Person!" One stall was occupied by Cheryl Oberle, who wrote Folk Shawls and Folk Vests. She is based in Denver (CO). I had a lovely chat with her - apparently the winter has been very cold there this year (when I had online access I noticed that towns in the area were often around -18C, which is negative F). I ended up buying this book from her and she kindly signed it though you can't see the signature cos I blurred it out and cut off half of it. I am not really that interested in making vests per se but I love some of the patterns in the knitting and figure I can filch them to make other things. As long as I don't sell my patterns on or give them to people, it should be fine, right? anon!

G'day all! Did you know that White Lies Designs does sock yarn? I didn't either! But they do! It is not a lightweight sock yarn, more a sportweight/five ply but it will make socks. And lookie at this luscious colourway. Mmmm, all for ME! I have more on Joan's stuff in the next post. anon!

G'day all! I never knew SEX hurt so bad! On Friday I wandered around Stitches West for FIVE hours. Yep, five whole hours. And I bought an Unreasonable Amount of Yarn (UAY)(see below). When I hopped on the train for the trip to the mall to pick up some shampoo for Nathan (Body Shop ginger - the only thing that stops scalp flakes for him) and turned my head, I had one of those freezing moments when you wonder if you'll always have your head turned to one side. Yep, I suffered SEX neck strain. Ouchies! My neck unspasmed relatively so I looked as normal as I ever do but the referred pain down my arm was halfway to unbearable. The only thing that sort of soothed it, thank heavens, was Our Favourite Hobby, aka knitting. I knitted like a demon on the way home (see Doing the Solstice Slip). I still had to walk a mile from the train/tram too when I got back and my UAY was not exactly helping and it was trying to rain on me. The only time the arm stopped burning and hurting fierc...

G'day all! Still not online unless I drag the laptop up to the business centre (= hassle, especially when it rains for five days in a row). And alas the pics I was going to upload can't be uploaded cos we had a whoopsie with the domain name, which has expired (thoug if i had the IP address I could upload stuff to there). I have so manyt hings to show off - when we get decent access and I can upload pics, be warned! Plus the pic I got at Stitches didn't come through to my email address so I can't put that up either even if we still did have a domain name.... So Stitches West 2008. This was my first big knitty event outside of Oz, and really it was the very first BIG event I've been to. For Australians, imagine a stitches and craft size show (and for Melburnians imagine it in Jeff's Shed). Imagine that instead of about 5 places having yarn, only about 5 places don't have yarn. That is what Stitches West was like. LOTS of yarn! Lots of knitting stuff! Lo...