Yarn Riot!

Yes, it's THAT time: Smiley's Annual Yarn Riot! Oh, the temptation...where's Robot when I'm REALLY in danger?? The prices really are INSANE, as Crazy Eddie used to say. Words fail me in trying to describe the delirium that seizes determined knitters upon seeing an entire hotel ballroom of massively discounted yarn. Luckily, other people are not at such a loss as I: I came across SistahCraft's blog describing this year's craziness, and her experience(s) last year

Although I lured a coworker and 2 friends to the riot, we miraculously each escaped without breaking into the triple digits. In fact, with the kind help of my friend Marci, I even managed to resist some incredibly gorgeous hand-dyed wool...

You can't really see it in my photo, but the orange/pink/purple tints of Filatura Lanarota Luxury Hand Dyed Wool's Tropical Heat are delicious and best seen on the Smiley's Yarns site.

Marci succumbed to a bag of the turquoise and I bought an assortment consisting of Lion Brand Wool-Ease (sweater for Mother's Day), 2 bags of Bernat Sox (sweaters for baby great-nephew and actual potential adult socks), Lion Fun Fur (scarf for friend who was eyeing similar items at Yarntopia), another Knit-Chek, and several $4 Susan Bates circulars (which feel like the more expensive Inox).

Better living through modern chemistry

I just LOVE the miracle of modern medicine! Thanks to a quick late afternoon trip to my doctor (he squeezed me in @ 3:45...oh joy) and a not so quick trip to Duane Reade afterward (do they have the slowest staff in the city or what?) I am moderately pain free courtesy of the wonders of Methocarbam and good old ibuprofen.

Of course, this might have made me a little overambitious, but I started working on a Lion Wool-ease Thick & Quick seed stitch brim hat for myself...which will require some judicious plucking afterward (what is UP with the weird shreds of sawdust in the brown wool?? just because it's a color called Wood, doesn't mean it has to HAVE it!) which I have adapted from the Lion Brand Just Hats book (thanks LQ!)

Okay, my left shoulder is starting to cramp, so I think it is time to knock it off for the night.

A Pain in the Neck

I fear that all of my diligent knitting has literally caused me to have a pain in the neck. Either that, or falling asleep on my couch in weird positions has finally caught up with me. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. OW!

Not even some Vicodin leftover from an emergency room visit this year seems to help. And I invariably wake up 4-6 hours after downing whatever painkillers I can grab, writhing in agony...migraine, neck cramps, etc.

And unlike most muscle aches, this has not gotten better after a few days. In fact, it has gotten worse. So I took today off work and will be going to see my doctor this afternoon. Hopefully, he can give me some relief. Or something. The ER is not somewhere I want to revisit.

The single upside to being unable to sleep from the pain was seeing this sunrise this morning, which was quite pretty. Something to console myself with, after being awake since 5ish.

Danger, Will Robinson!

So...ummm...as my friend Jane said upon seeing my stash, "You never need to buy yarn again!" She is: So Wrong. She is also not a knitter. Ahem.

This is after I dragged her, oh so "unwillingly" (er, did I forget to mention that she crochets?) to the new yarn store in my nabe, Yarntopia, which just opened on Black Friday. They don't seem to have a website yet, but the local BID has published their store hours, and The New York Observer's real estate column wrote a piece on them too, complete with photo.

Their selection (which is still being unpacked, I think) seems pretty reasonable and not weighted toward insanely expensive stuff (hello? would I be living in this neighborhood if I could afford $36 hanks of yarn?) as evidenced by their selection of Lamb's Pride for one thing.

Just what I need: a nice LYS a mere 4 blocks from home. (Cue visions of Robot from Lost in Space, shrieking "Danger! Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!")

Firefox 2.0 failure...alas

Warning!

Beta Blogger (ggrrrr......) seems to not display ANY images from my blog when I look at it in Firefox 2.0, and if I click on the links that would normally take me to the image, I get a 404 error. ARGH!

However, much as I hate to say it, the page works (mostly) properly in IE 6.0....except for some alignment issues.

Sigh.

Distractions

In the opposite of spring fever, I tend to get distracted by the view outside my window during autumn foliage season. While the first new shoots of spring are welcome after a long grey winter, to me the fall foliage is much more interesting visually.




And it's a good thing I took those photos last weekend, since the trees are now considerably more naked. Instead, the cloudscapes now pique my interest. (Yes, I have been accused of being an ADD knitter.)


And of course, a large gaggle of us went to see to the James Bond movie, Casino Royale, on opening night, and it was FANTASTIC! The Times in London had an interesting article comparing box office openings of Bond films adjusted for inflation. (Why do most news articles forget/not think to do that?! Argh.) It's amazing what's possible when you hire actors who can actually ACT. And since Ian Fleming's novels described Bond as someone who looks cold and faintly cruel (someone who you're supposed to believe can actually be a ruthless killer who's not worried about disarranging his coif) I had always thought that Daniel Craig was a believeable choice to play him, unlike everyone besides Sean Connery (of course), and a young (key word: YOUNG) Roger Moore, a la The Saint. And the villain was also darn creepy. Normally, I don't pay to see movies twice in a NYC theater (@ $10.75 a pop, they are usually not good enough to pass muster) but for Casino Royale, I think an exception can be arranged, and I know that my boyfriend and his coworkers are up for it too. Maybe The Ziegfeld Theater next time...

However, believe it or not, I did actually get some knitting in during the week and over the weekend (ah, the joys of football time with my sweetie) so my endless afghan and cacti have been slowly growing, even though each block of the afghan requires 4 strands: 2 chenille, 2 cotton. I find that knitting with only chenille annoys me visually, since the finished result has absolutely no stitch definition. At least with the cotton, spiderweb thin though it is, there's a hint of stitch def. To compensate (well, not really -- but that's my rationalization, and I'm sticking to it) I'm not binding off each edge, as per the traditional log cabin design. I'm merely putting the edge on a holder to await the next round.

Hmmm...now that I see it onscreen, I am a little uncertain about this particular color combo, but it's a little late now. Oh well.

And I stopped at the thumbhole for the 2nd cactus sometime during the Colts - Cowboys game, since I discovered that I had left my pattern at home. Oops.

I just HATE beta software

So okay, since they will be forcing us to move from regular Blogger to the "new and improved" version in a few months anyway, I thought I'd just go ahead and do it now -- stupid, Stupid, STUPID. Now for some reason I can't use Firefox 2.0 and if I had WANTED to use frakkin' Internet Exploder all of the time, I would have done so already! Argh.

(breathing deeply...)

On the bright side, my sweetie and I spent the afternoon watching the Jets sliding around the muddy turf of the Patriots' stadium. (Those boys could be the poster boys for a Tide commercial.) The Jets won, but only after much yelling at the TV from both of us. I'd forgotten how stressful watching sports can be, since I find baseball boring (and therefore don't watch) and watching the Knicks is an exercise in masochism. Sigh.

Anyway, all of that football watching has at least yielded some progress on the chenille afghan which is going to be an extemporaneous variation on the Mason Dixon Moderne pattern, I suspect. The worming will probably drive me NUTS by the time I finish the thing (my friend gets to say "I told you so") but at least the #11 Knitpicks Options needles are making my life easier.

Football angst update: I just watched one of those "I can't make this stuff up" moments where the Bears took the Giants' field goal attempt and ran with it ALL THE WAY FOR A TOUCHDOWN! So instead of narrowing the score by 3, the Giants are now behind by 10! For all I know, they're even further back now, but I chickened out and switched the channel. (Both teams also look remarkably CLEAN, after spending hours watching the Jets-Patriots mudfest.)

On to more cheerful news: I must give a shout out to all of my publishing friends for plumping up my knitting book collection, especially my friend LQ, who just helped me out with 3 new books, and during a very stressful time for her at work too. They are Melissa Leapman's [Cables Untangled], Barbara Albright's [Odd Ball Knitting], and Suss Cousins' [Home Knits]. More detailed info (courtesy of Amazon) is available in my Knitting Library.

I've also managed to add about 4 inches to the 2nd Blue Cactus.

And now, I suppose I should go to bed, as this is a school night, so tomorrow, I go off to earn money for my yarn habit.

Holy tostitos, Batman! (a/k/a My Knitting Library)

So okay, I thought I'd take stock of how many knitting books I had and holy frak! (as they would say on Battlestar Galactica) Jeeeeez...

Despite what the button says, I already own these books, and simply decided to use Amazon's Wish List feature for good instead of evil. (Repeat after me, Peter Parker: "With great power, comes great responsibility...") You can click on the icon above and follow Amazon's link to [Purchased Items] to see the listing, or search on Amazon's wish list registries for Squirrelette's KnittingLibrary.

Bear in mind, this list does not include my various Rowan, Jaeger, Leisure Arts pattern books, yarn samples, hardcopies of downloaded patterns, or any of my umpteen knitting magazines. Sheesh.

I guess this is the logical nexus of obsessive librarian + obsessive knitter (or at least, knitting researcher...my backlog of WIPs and UFOs is shameful).

The Blue Cactus

So okay, I finished one of the wrist warmers for my friend (a process which has made me think of knitting socks with interest instead of DEEP FEAR, incidentally) and it reminds me of nothing so much as a blue cactus, or a speckled turquoise cactus if you're being picky. (It actually looks more normal when it is on someone's hand, natch.) Now I just have to cast on the 2nd one (hopefully avoiding the dreaded Second Sock Syndrome) and tote it around with me on the subway, as it is indeed a nicely portable project, and my commute to/from the office is 30 min.

I have also started a new baby cardie project (yes, I am surrounded by pregnant women) which uses this random hank of Plymouth Fantasy Naturale Multi that I had lying around, along with an oddball of Knitpicks Shine Sport in Violet, and some teal cotton yarn I bought in Shanghai this summer (oh there will be MANY words in a future posting devoted solely to My Adventures in Chinese Yarn Shopping...) which the shopowner indicated should be knitted on the equivalent of #1s or #2s. (I now have the appropriate 14" bamboo dpns for that yarn, also from the same shop. They look like they should be used by a villain in a Rambo movie, or a New Guinean headhunter. Yikes!) The colors actually match more closely than my photo shows. I may have to double the teal in order for it not to look too unequal in gauge. We'll see.

Ribbit...
And finally (sigh) I have massive amounts of frogging in my future, as one of my earliest projects turned out way, Way, WAY, WAY too big (a/k/a why you should check your gauge while knitting -- ack!) and I have finally been able to face the thought of killing all that work. On the bright side, I really love the yarn (Tahki Willow, a cotton/linen blend) and the color. Luckily, (a) I have extra yarn and (b) it's already in garter, so that should give me some extra yardage when I use stockinette in my possible replacement tank top.

[Sidenote: I don't care WHAT Yarndex says about Willow. Tahki seems to indicate that they no longer produce it! Well, at least my first (and only) experience of the "Oh CRAP! I need to buy more of this yarn to finish my (increasingly expensive) garment!" trauma -- resulting in an odyssey across all of the yarn shops of NYC -- has yielded a safety cushion of extra yarn.]

The original intended pattern was from the Spring 2003 issue of Family Circle Easy Knitting (pictured on stick girl with the hat, on the right in the photo) but I may either use the aqua-colored Lapel T-Top from the August 2004 issue of the frequently hideous Knit 'N Style (their current, Dec-06 issue seems to indicate that they are starting to Get A Clue, however) or the Front Slit Yarn Girl Tank from Interweave Knits.

Hmmm...Upon looking at all of these photos, I see that I have a fondness for colors in the jewel tone family. Well hey, at least I'm consistent.