Happy New Year!

:)

I gave in. Rob at BlackDog kept talking about this luscious yarn.... 70 % alpaca, 30% angora... yeah, I have Indulged. 2 skeins natural, one purple fire. I might dye the natural. Oooo, handpainted Indulgence... that sounds nice. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with it... something either for the face, or something that will get a lot of touching, like the belly of a teddy bear. Mmmm, maybe make a 'nu nu' bunny, named for the noise my friends child made when she stroked a certain stuffed friend.

On other news... ThreadBear rocks. I emailed them, and within ten minutes, my yarn was packed and ready to go. Bless you, Matt and Rob; enablers of our yarn habits, pushers of inspiration, purveyor of yarn lust. You are the madams of the bordello of knitting joy.

The other thing I'm currently obsessing over (mouse, obsessing? No...) is shadow knitting.

Don't roll your eyes at me. I know that most of the patterns are insipid, and that most of the people doing it are that strange and unknowable quantity the 'machine knitter', who will 'save time' and let the machine knit... and then hand convert the purl stitches... But the technique itself is so interesting, and my feral little brain has been chewing on it.

Vivian Hoxbro has a book coming out soon, and that might help, but my brain is churning with thoughts of dark garments in small pinstripe, patterned with messages and things glimpsed out of the corner of your eye... and intarsia type scenes with surprise elements... I know, I'm nuts. Let me run for a while with this, and it will either pan out or I will curse myself and get back on the well worn path of the knitting traditionalist.

I never could leave well enough alone.

I finished a Coronet hat for Biddy (hi biddy) and started one for myself. I love cabling. Maybe if I finish the Thready Bear sweater I'll be confident enough to make a real one, and maybe it will have cables... Now, if I could just read damn cable charts....