Two Pointy Sticks

Sometimes you just can't beat the old fashioned way. Like when you're in a plane for 9 hours! Or when you're sitting in the garage with your husband while he watches endless hours of golf. Go ahead, roll your eyes--I get all these machines to do the work for me and then I get interested in hand knitting! So I knitted a little shoulder shawl from Regia's Mexican Wave yarn (I love this stuff!) and it only took a skein. I've got four or five more--whoo-hoo! I gave it to my mother--hope she likes it as much as I did!

I went up to Puyallup, Washington to meet my friend Rabecca, who lives in nearby Bellvue, and we went to the Sewing and Stitchery Expo. It was a lot of fun! Rabecca has a yarn store (youneedyarn.com) and I got to feel and touch and pick a big haul of yarn--so big her mother had to give me another suitcase to get it home. I got some big ole' Addi Turbo circular needles and I knit a hat (?) with some Homespun she threw in. Unfortunately those are big ass needles and that yarn, fat as it is, wasn't big enough. I think I could knit rope with those babies! So it will probably get frogged and reknit into something. But I practiced k2 together so all was not lost.

I have actually knit some lace on my 930. It's kind of tedious, as you have to run the lace carriage back and forth for 8 rows and then use the regular carriage for a couple, and I was unimpressed with the product, UNTIL I turned it over and saw the right side. It was GORGEOUS! I had a little trouble with the gateposts grabbing thread on one edge so it was just a swatch, but I'm planning to knit up this skein of 100% silk I bought for A DOLLAR, into a beautiful...something or other. Ha! I'm not sure what I will make from it. It doesn't seem to require a lot of thread--that's the beauty of holes!

I still entertain ideas of making some curtains for the sitting room with the thread lace pattern, but I haven't found the right yarn yet. Ah, the eternal quest for the perfect yarn! I thought I might try using the ginormous cone of dark blood red--the light coming through would show the pattern so well, but I think the whole concept of thread lace is having two different textures, thin and thinner, so I'm not sure how it would work. I see an experiment in the making!

I also knit up a blanket for Stinky, Ashley's baby. Stinky picked out a hideous combination of aqua and pink and a pig in a cart motif (equally awful) so I knitted up a little pink blanket with a single motif in aqua, and put pink satin blanket binding on it. Ashley proclaimed me the "Best Mom In the World" and everyone was happy. : )