Tonight Tony and I went to Borders in Ann Arbor for the knit-in. It was fun-fun-fun, as usual. I love that group. My friends Mary and Fran and Riin from Spinners flock were there. (Fran and Mary just won awards for skeins of yarn they spun at a recent show… how cool is that?)

Tony talked to Heather for a long time and I met a new woman, Renee, who has only lived in Michigan for a few weeks. She has lived all over the world and is a musician. I really enjoyed our talk.

I hadn’t been there in a while, so I had a lot of things for show and tell. We sort of laughed about that… the two weeks I was sick, I really finished a lot of items. Since I hadn’t been there in two months, I could have probably taken up an hour with show and tell myself… I had to keep it as short as I could. I brought my cabled sweat socks, my Fast Florida Footies, my Turkish-style Seaside socks, two stoles, my September-to-September sweater, two pair of wristwarmers, the machine knit French beret and some of my handpainted yarns/fibers. What is nice is that everyone is genuinely appreciative. I don’t feel as though I shouldn’t have shown it all, people are interested in everything. What a nice group it is.

Some folks there gave me more yarn for my kids at Foster Center. Since I forgot my current socknitting project and had no knitting with me, I started crocheting a scarf from a more fluffy yarn that might be hard for the kids to manipulate. I’ll make that a project I can do in the classroom during quiet times and then it will either go with our donations to the homeless or I’ll make it some sort of prize for one of my knitting kids. I’ll have a bit of time to decide what it will be, as I am working on it. I’m doing it in a single crochet since I like that stitch and so it will take a bit longer to do than if I did double crochet. The yarn is very tweedy and looks absolutely gorgeous in single crochet. Yippee for that!

I spent all last night rearranging my yarn stash. It was kept in about 9 clear Rubbermaid boxes (two full of spinning fiber and handspun yarns, one with yarns destined to be sweaters, one full of fingering weight socknitting yarns, one with fatter yarns for socks, hats or legwarmers, and one only half full with decorative yarns and alpaca… and the rest held unfinished projects or leftover yarns from all sorts of projects I’ve completed).

We got new storage units (sort of for our anniversary) which hold about 3 of the plastic boxes’ contents per unit, and so I sorted and sifted and threw away a little tiny bit, and emptied six boxes. The new units function as window seats as well as yarn storage so this makes our living room look much less messy. If the living room is where yarn must go, it might as well not look like the garage or junk room, I figure. I’m so very bad at being “Suzy Homemaker.” (Suzy Homemaker was a brand name on a line of toys for girls to practice ironing, cleaning house and the like, when I was a girl in the USA in the 1960’s… I never got properly trained/indoctrinated at a young age and I’ve not adjusted well since, either.)

I’m sort of between big knitting projects. I do have some sox in process about 3/4 done for Brian, the yarn from Threadbear in green, orange and navy. In addition, I want to do another machine-knit hat. I want to do some machine-knit legwarmers.

And I’m sorely tempted to try knitting the cover sweater-dress from Sally Melville’s new The Purl Stitch book, out of some mohair yarn I have in storage intended for sweaters. I have two different mohairs, one lightweight and one heavyweight, both fuzzy brushed yarns. One or the other is sure to work up OK in a gauge that works for that dress.

However, that dress idea probably will need to wait until after the holidays. I’m now in “oh no, I’m selling at art shows this season” mode. I committed to doing a show called “Art for the Soul” which is the weekend after Thanksgiving. I need to crank out some merchandise between now and then. I have some handpainted yarns/fibers but little else. We’ll see what I come up with in the meantime.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2003 at 11:55 pmand is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.