Hill Country Weavers Releases Shelter Patterns

What a delightful Christmas gift, to wake up and see that Hill Country Weavers now has all of the Shelter designs available for download and hard-copy purchase.

Back at the beginning of the fall, HCW approached a handful of local Austin designers and asked us to design a project using Brooklyn Tweed's Shelter yarn. I am flattered and, frankly, still a bit amazed to discover myself among such talented company, and if I were more excited about this design project I'd be tap dancing on the Christmas ham. (Wouldn't go well, there's a basting sauce.)

Allow me to present my pattern Sarah Rose:

As you're looking around, please check out the patterns from the other designers as well. (Sweater-ophiles like me will get stretch marks in their queues from all the sudden growth.)

The yarn itself, Shelter, is sturdy, versatile, and soft. Even high-end wools can bother my neck, but this yarn didn't give me one bit of itch the evening I wore it. (I confess to spoiling the surprise to the trick-or-treaters on Halloween; I figured that was safe as knitting has yet to take off in the under-10 crowd.) While I'm often the first to go looking for substitute yarns, in this case, you should really look into ordering the yarn that's called for, because it's such a treat to work with.

Happy holidays!

Betrayed by a Towel

Hi there!

So tonight, I'm talking to a friend and teaching her to knit (inject quick dance of triumph and glee), and I mentioned some story or other. She said, "Right, I remember reading about that on your blog."

And I said, "I have a blog?"

Not really. But you know.

Tonight, I'm going to interject quick pictures of knitting - mostly WIPs, 'cause that's all I got - with a story that I personally find hilarious.

My husband has been sick the last few days with a fever, poor thing. (That's not the funny part.) Last night, he felt so achy that in a fit of desperation, he slathered himself with Icy Hot.

Unrelated knitting picture #1:

Later, I followed him to bed. I washed my face, and reached for a towel to dry myself off.

Unrelated knitting picture #2:

My first thought was, "This towel smells like Icy Hot."

Unrelated knitting picture #3:

My second thought was, "WWOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWW!"

My husband managed to get a picture of me:

(I bore a strong resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever, I think.)

See you soon, Kid 'N Ewe!

We're headed to Kid 'N Ewe tomorrow morning, bright and early - and not just to shop.

We're running a whole booth full of hand-dyed, handspun yarns. Strand Fiber Reserve debuts this weekend with one heckuva showing!

Say hi if you see us at Kid 'N Ewe!

Sorry, Rangers. I'm Ambrosia.

We went to a Rangers game (regular season, nothing fancy) a few weeks back. I brought some knitting. Lately I've been committed to working on a few larger projects, so I found myself running out the door with only a few minutes to find something portable. This is right after the most recent Knitty came out, and I just so happened to have 2 balls of Noro Silk Garden sitting out. I decided to work on a Spry hat.

Now, some might say that intarsia is not the best choice for a live sporting event. Perhaps. The concrete floor was sticky, and I was more worried about dropping one of the four mini-balls of yarn on the ground than I was about the game. Still, I pulled it off.

My fella might beg to differ. Josh Hamilton hit a home run and got something like two runners in? I'm not sure, because everybody in the whole stadium stood up and cheered except me with my four mini-balls of yarn in my lap that I didn't want to spill in the beer puddles.

"What are you doing?!" my fella demanded. "This is incredible!"

"I can't, I'm doing intarsia!" I told him, desperately stuck to my seat.

This didn't go over well with him. He brought it up again on the way home. "No, no, no," he mimicked. He did his imitation of knitting, which looks kind of like a baby playing with chopsticks. "Sorry, Rangers, I can't stand up and cheer, because I'm ambrosia."

At any rate, I survived the game and later finished the hat:



Here's a shot of the intarsia:




(Intarsia isn't that horrible. Really. It just gets a bad rep from knitters whose husbands have tried to take them to a baseball game.)

The Challenge on the Back of the Cheerios Box

We went to visit my parents last weekend. On Saturday morning, I got up before the fella and went in to breakfast. There was a plate of Cheerios on the table. I thought they'd been spilled, but as it turns out, it was a logic puzzle.

On the back of the current Cheerios box, there's a challenge:



Take away six Cheerios, but every row and every column must have an even number of Cheerios left.

My father, then my mother, had attacked this first. Then they tried it out on me. None of us figured it out, and I need to say here that we are a family of very intelligent people. (You just have to trust me on that one, sorry.) My father had even tried Googling for the answer but couldn't find it in such a way that didn't require him to fill out mailing list info. So we were stuck. In fact, we were drafting letters to General Mills telling them about the irritating typo on the back of their cereal box.

A bit later, in comes my fella. He sits down, asks about the Cheerios. We tell him. He stares at it for a bit, occasionally poking a Cheerio, here and there. Meanwhile, we start talking about how positively careless and cavalier those cereal box people are, how they shouldn't allow a problem like this onto the back of the box without thoroughly checking it, and don't you think there's a better way to spend a morning than to --

"I got it."

Huh?

Yeah. He got it in about three minutes.

(Jerk.)

Here's the answer:

Step 1



Step 2



Step 3




There you have it. And I didn't even ask for your contact information first.

A Medicinal Knit

What a week. One day, I came into work at my new workplace to discover mouse droppings all over my desk.

And that was one of the high points.

Two things that cheered me up:

1. I saw a really, really funny play. I can't tell you about it because the review won't appear until Thursday. But it was great, and the laughter was medicinal.

2. I finished an Ysolda hat. That Ysolda: the patterns are cute, sure, but there is something so ingenious about how she constructs these designs that they are more fun than average to put together.



The pattern is called Ripley. This is Malabrigo Worsted, and I now understand why there is a group on Rav called the Malagribo Junkies. Dang that stuff is good.

...and that's the news from Lake Woebegone. Knit on.

Stress-relief socks

The last several weeks have seen nutty things in the land of MightyGoodYarn. I started a new job and am still transitioning away from the old one. We went on a quick trip out of state. We continue to figure out what to do with this new house we somehow managed to make our property.

I have a number of exciting design and yarn projects on the horizon, and I can't wait to share them once they're, you know. In existence.

I did, however, knit these socks as a stress relief mechanism last month. Man, oh man - that self-striping sock yarn, and in my very favorite colors of all time? I'm tempted to frog them just to re-knit them again.

Tempted. Only tempted.