i'm a STR newbie

or at least i was until yesterday, when this arrived!!


it's so squishy and beautiful and meaty - i mean there's a lot of yarn in those hanks! it reminds me some of KPM and i loooove Koigu. these colors are jade and blue moonstone and I really like them both. in fact, i'm becoming a really huge fan of semi-solid colorways. it might be my latest obsession. so these 2 hanks are part of a birthday present to myself. see below for the other part:


I also bought a swift. i ordered the 2 together from 'aspen ridge' on ebay and i thinked i payed $85 for all of it. the swift is a large, 100% wood swedish affair and it's gorgeous. anyway, it arrived like 3 days after ordering it, so thank you aspen ridge! they were great to order from. now that i have a swift and winder, i don't know how i ever lived without them. imagine how long it would have taken me to wind up those 2 str skeins!!! my butt would have gone numb. as you can see, they're much more nicely wound using the winder and it's amazing - the yarn cake (cringe - i hate that term - is there something else i can call it??) just sits there undisturbed as i pull more and more yarn out of the center. love it love it.


i had the package from blue moon fiber arts opened within 2 minutes of getting home and the yarn wound within 5 minutes of that and cast on for a new project within 5 minutes of that. if i hadn't promised my dog (and myself) that we would go for a run, i would have sat there all evening and night and knit away. can you guess what i'm making?


also, i recently bought the latest Vogue Knitting. i'm thinking about making this - has anyone else considered it? might be more trouble than it's worth.


i've got about a million WIP at the moment. i've finished the basalt tank, except to add some garter stitch edging around the bottom (i did 1/2 hexagons at the bottom) and will probably post to the knitting nature kal about that soon. i'm also nearing the homestretch with my purple fad classic. i've been too lazy to take it off the needles and try it on, though. hope that doesn't come back to bite me in the ass. so far it looks good! i will have updated photos of those (and other projects) soon...

~r

p.s. my str smelled a tiny bit like vinegar. is that normal?

posted by rockbridge @ 1:53 PM 0 Comments

dishrags and tanktops

i'm back from the field - 2 looong weeks of hiking around northern california finding and collecting rocks and seeing old friends and it was awesome. i didn't want to come home. here are some pics from the journey (not all from cali):




i was in such denial about returning to the hot hot desert that i stopped in northern arizona to hang with a friend and we went splashing around with the dogs in a beautiful canyon:


on the knitting front, this is all i accomplished while i was in the field:


progress on my fad classic - almost to the point where i'm ready to join the front and back and work in the round. loving the tahki cotton classic - color is beautiful!!

i also knit up a little mason-dixon dishrag for my friend who was keeping my cat for me while i was gone (she actually uses dishrags!)


i'm closing in on finishing the basalt tank - hope to have a FO soon!

~r

posted by rockbridge @ 11:42 AM 2 Comments