April 2008 Archives

It's been storming in Georgia all weekend, and yesterday our power went out for the better part of an hour. An hour with no electricity shows you exactly how dependent you are on power - everything we thought of to do ended up needing electricity! And, okay, I have a confession - I am a little obsessed with my cats. Combine the two on a lazy Saturday afternoon, and this is what you get:

Why yes, that is a cashmere argyle sweater vest that I knit for my cats. It fits both of them quite well, even though the other one is about four pounds heavier! I used leftover Rowan Cashsoft DK from a sweater I knit three years ago (and yes, I'm aware that this yarn is too nice for a cat sweater...) - about a half a ball of the main color, not even 50 yards of the green, and mere scraps of the white. I know I am not the only one out there who thinks this is endlessly entertaining, nor can I be the only one who has a little free time and some old stash yarn you have no idea what to do with, so here's my pattern:

It seems like every time things get a little busy, blogging is the first thing to fall by the wayside. We've also been busily restocking all of your favorite yarns and colors, so there aren't very many new yarns to share, but we do have one very special addition! Cotton Ball, from Claudia Handpainted Yarn, is our first handpainted 100% cotton yarn we've been able to offer in the store, and it's really lovely!

Cotton Ball is a DK weight plied cotton that really shows off the amazing colorways. We'll be getting more in the next month or so, but for now we do have a handful of gorgeous colors available.

Our other exciting addition is more exciting for me than for you, but I'll share anyway - we've had a new addition to our office! After six months of cranking out invoices and labels and patterns on a nine-year-old inkjet ....

Yesterday, this arrived:

A color laser printer, with duplexing! And networking! And PostScript capabilities! (I'm not sure why this is useful to us, but my husband assures me it will be.) By the way, it's huge. It weighs 50 pounds! And it prints so quickly, and the patterns look so nice with the duplexing that I spent last night just printing out dozens and dozens of them.

By the way, if you are waiting to donate to Ravelraiser '08, do it soon! Tomorrow (April 25th) is the last day to enter to win the fabulous prizes that have been generously donated by so many Ravelers.

As some of you already know, Ravelraiser '08 began this weekend - this is a push to raise funds to support this amazing free community. If you aren't on Ravelry yet, you need to be, and if you are on Ravelry, you've probably found yourself wondering what you did for patterns, yarn information, stash management, and daily knitterly online entertainment before it existed (or while we were on the seemingly endless waiting list last year!). What started out as a husband-and-wife team working on a weekend project has become a global knit and crochet community with tens of thousands of active members from all over the globe, in every age group and skill level. Ravelry has contributed so much to the knitting community, and now we want to give back. If you go to this thread and donate 10 lousy bucks, you'll be entered into drawings for fabulous yarn-and-fiber-related prizes, including the grand prizes - five (or maybe six now?) "Dream Stashes" - and the other prizes, which include yarn club memberships, yarn, roving, and gift certificates to several fine yarn establishments, including a $50 gift certificate to Eat.Sleep.Knit! You get one entry for every $10 you donate, and check out all of the amazing prizes!

I also thought I'd show you all the results of my Sunday activities. I am constantly surrounded by truly amazing hand-dyed yarn, and while I'd love to believe I could do the same thing, I'm really not creative and color-minded enough to do it - not to mention patient! About a year ago, I bought some Jacquard dyes and ten skeins of KnitPicks Bare in varying weights to play with, and after reading every free tutorial I could find, I set out about making a blue-and-brown variegated yarn (I'm a sucker for any brown-and-pastel-color-of-your-choice combination, if that's not really obvious). To put it nicely, the yarn came out looking really great after I knitted it up into a pair of Felted Clogs and felted it!

However, this weekend I saw that Sharon of Yarn Love and Three Irish Girls had a Guide to Gorgeous Hand-Dyed Yarns for sale on her website, and better yet it was downloadable. If you have ever had the pleasure of seeing a skein of Yarn Love yarn, then you know these ladies know what they are doing, so I decided to go for it. (By the way, the guide is awesome - it included directions for three different kinds of hand-dyeing and answered all of the questions the free tutorials had left me with.)

First I dyed two skeins with the Kettle-Dyed Solids method, wetting one skein prior to dyeing and leaving the other dry because I wanted to see how different they would look.

It turns out, not that different, but the dry one had a very subtle variegation to it that I think I prefer:

Next, I decided to try the Kettle-Dyed Variegated, which sounded to me like it could not possibly work, but I decided to trust the experts.

It turns out that it actually works pretty well - I love the end result!

Did you think I forgot about you? Of course not! Things have been a wee bit hectic around Eat.Sleep.Knit lately, with yarn arriving daily and so many of you hitting your first mile in the Yarn Marathon and winning fun prizes in our Yarn Lotto! We'd like to congratulate Agusta of StashDiva, who has just become our first member of the 10K club in the Yarn Marathon! Karen in CA is close behind her, and Cathy in VA, Thao in Irvine, CA, and Thao in San Jose, CA have all already passed up the 5K mark and earned their first $20 reward. We've had several winners of $5 store credit coupons, and Jessica in MN and Mary in KY each won free skeins of Smooshy with the lucky tickets in their orders!

We don't have any new yarn lines this week, but we do have new colors of J. Knits Charming - this lambswool/cashmere blend is a scrumptious yarn to knit with.

I've actually been getting a small bit of knitting done, believe it or not. The Anne Elliot Spencer shrug is shaping up, with only a few inches to go before I separate it out for the sleeves. I love the way the yarn is knitting up - really perfect for what I had in mind!

I've also been working on a Leaf Lace Scarf out of Malabrigo Lace in Lettuce a little bit at a time, but I can't seem to take a single decent picture of it. Believe me when I say that the pattern is lovely, and the yarn is incredibly soft.