New Shoes!

I have Fluevogs.

Not quite sure how they have not yet made an appearance on the blog. I have wanted a pair for ages, and finally got the opportunity to visit a store at the end of last month. Time elapsed between browsing around chockablock shop and buying a happy-birthday-to-me gift: half an hour.

These shoes are absolutely fabulous: comfortable, fun, and sturdy. They have not transformed me into an adorable Scottish designer or a hip Canadian designer, but while I'm waiting on that to happen, I can at least wear them to get my week off to a good start!

Diversionary Tactics

Friday evening, I realized my knitting had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Where I should have been knitting pairs of lace leaves, I was knitting single leaves.

*gnashes teeth*

So--rather than dwell on a foolish mistake that is entirely my own fault, not the fault of a poorly written pattern, or uncooperative yarn, or any other uncontrollable factor, let's look at a pretty building!

The building above is the Luhrs Tower, which beats out both the Securities Building and the Old Courthouse as my favorite building downtown. The color! The ribbing! The way the blazing hot afternoon sun makes the stucco look like stone! Being able to see a building like that every morning almost makes up for losing a week's worth of knitting.

Not that I'm dwelling on that.

Shawl, Fast

Confronted with loads of laceweight yarn, I have taken the only rational recourse and started knitting shawls.

This is a new Haruni, in one of the *wince* three skeins of Silky Alpaca I picked up at So Much Yarn. The pattern is much more intuitive the second time around, and I am already halfway done!

Seeing beautiful examples of Estonian-style shawls with nupps and Shetland lace made me seriously consider doing something epically intricate and beautiful...but then I considered the facts that a) I intend this shawl to be gifted at the end of the month and b) Silky Alpaca comes in 460-yard skeins, not enough for a *big* shawl...or yarn-eating nupps.

So here I am with another Haruni. I have to say, near-instant gratification is pretty gratifying.

Summer Socks!

With all this yarn, what am I knitting?

The socks I began in Seattle are traveling around in my purse. In the past week or so, I've been lucky enough to see three movies and be the passenger on several long car trips, so these socks have gotten a lot of attention. Sock the first is finished, and sock the second is in the home stretch!



(I need to practice my car photography skills)

The yarn is Crystal Palace Mini Mochi in color 104, "Fern Rainbow," purchased at Sierra Vista's über-craft shop, The Squirrel's Nest. The fiber content (wool with a dab of nylon), construction (one ply, a little prone to splitting), and color (bichrome, long repeats) are all very similar to Skacel's Zauberball, which I used to make a pink-and-plum pair of Oak Ribbed Socks last summer.



Which would explain why I unwittingly chose the exact same pattern for my Mini Mochi socks. My Zauberball socks are fantastic--warm without being stifling, wooly without being scritchy--so I have high hopes my Seattle Socks will be the same!

Share Time!

After coming home from Seattle with so much yarn from so much yarn, I had to get creative. The Dream in Color Smooshy has been stuffed in a bag is helping one of my purses keep its shape while being stored. Two of the skeins of Silky Alpaca Lace are in the process of fueling my shawl kick. In spite of that, there's no way the remaining skeins are going to fit in the Yarn Tote.

And what do I find on the doorstep after work one afternoon?



My latest CSA share from Vermont Grand View Farm. This is the third year I've participated in it. The past two years' shares gave me the Pimlico Shrug, with a few skeins to spare.

I believe the sensible reaction would have been to cry out in duress at the prospect of having more yarn than I could possibly store until I can find the time to turn it into a finished project.



So what do I do? Open it, squoosh it (Kim's yarns are quite squooshy), smile at how she always packs in a little treat (gift cards this year) and start planning a cream-and gray striped raglan pullover with a little placket along one of the raglan seams.

In Motion!

Good news: I am out of my knitty funk! The body of the neverending summer bolero is off the needles, and there are two new projects in the works and skimming along.

Here's how it happened:



Mousie and I, with Querido & Co., took a train tip. Oh, how I love trains. If the private shower wasn't in the same cubicle as the shower and the windows actually opened, they would be pure heaven. I brought along a pair of Oak Ribbed Socks to knit on, and it was just the thing. No documentation, but I have high hopes of showing off a finished pair by next week...



We delighted in the cool, rainy-ness of the Pacific Northwest... (that's Portland's Union Station, under a fine drizzle)



And the complement of elegant old buildings in our destination of Seattle.



I made the mistake of taking Querido, who is not at all good at reasoning me out of buying yarn, to So Much Yarn, and, big surprise, I came back with so much yarn. Three skeins of the fabled Dream in Color Smooshy, plus three more of Classic Elite's Silky Alpaca Lace... I am feeling a shawl kick coming on.