Etsy Shop Update- Yarn and Roving and OMG CASHMERE!

I had a bit of time off around Xmas to putter around the house with a nasty cold keeping me in. While the soulmate decided that the time was for making beer, at one point I jostled him away from the stove to put my dyepots on. Finally, I've got everything photographed and labeled and listed and ready to go! Oh, except for some lovely merino lace yarn that I want to re-photograph. That will be listed very soon.

Here's a few things in the listing.

A few skeins of handspun Shetland:


A couple colors of hand dyed Polworth-Silk top that I'm wild about:




A few colors of Superfine Merino/Superfine Kid Mohair pencil roving:




Laceweight Merino:




A few colors of Superwash BFL roving:


The best is for last (drumroll please...) MONGOLIAN CASHMERE ROVING!



SQUEEEEE! I can't say enough good things about this stuff. It's the softest fiber I've ever touched, and it spins up into a drapey smooth yarn, and then blooms into the most perfect little delicate halo ever. I have a limited amount of this, and I am still having a sale- 30% off! A real bargain as far as cashmere is concerned.

Check it out at KnotMyDayJob.etsy.com. The coupon code for the 30% off is "trente". Happy shopping!

FO: Turn a Square for Jerry

For the most part, I like my co-workers. Some of them have the uncanny ability to drive me to drink, but I can honestly step back from the situation and view it as almost entirely positive as far as a corporate job goes. I get paid well, I get a stack of gift certificates and bottles of Scotch for Xmas, and every once in a while, they let me take the group someplace nice so they can golf and get enough alcohol in their systems to stop thinking about work.

No one is a baby and calls HR on me when they get thrown in the pool, and I don't call HR on them when they end up getting hospitalized for dehydration while they are at a strip club.

It's good to have co-workers who are willing to talk about something other than work. Jerry is the source of good office gossip, the fixer of the Web-exes that I tend to screw up, installer of big heavy servers that I can't rack myself, and the bearer of cute kids that he'll bring to the office so I can feed them Sour Patch kids until there is a sticky mess of vibrating children to be rounded up for the long ride home at the end of the day.



Oh, that's a terrible picture of him. Here's a hatless one that I like better. I took that for his linked-in picture. I think he has the same problem as I do with those corporate website pictures as almost every picture I have I'm either wearing sunglasses and/or have a drink in my hand.



There. Just imagine him with a hat now.



I felt like it was overdue that he gets some knitwear. He's been begging for socks for years, but I have put on a sinister squint and asked him if he and his wife was ready for the commitment of handwash only. So he gets a hat instead.

It's my go-to guy hat, the Turn a Square. I used leftover scraps of Noro Silk Garden from a few different projects and the last bit of Shelter in "Nest". I tried doing it from memory and realized when I was done that the pattern calls for stripes every 3 and 2 rows. I just did every 2 rows but I don't think that's wrong in any way.

I told him he could wear it on his foot if he wanted to.

Time Well Spent

All those days off that we got in December and January over the holidays...well, those days got turned into beer. Lots of beer. Which, in turn, had to be bottled, which took a great deal of the weekend to do.



It took up all the kitchen space. I couldn't even get to the fridge and open it at one point, which was horrifying because I had a nice wedge of Roquefort in there that was screaming my name. Every surface was in the process of getting covered with brown sticky sludge- no matter how clean and careful you try to be, a little gets spilled. Multiply that by many little spills and you have yourself a nice mess.




The clinking of glass bottles haunted my sleep last night. A pact was made that we need to, uh, put a cap on this production.



Still...it's very nice to never have to do a beer run.

FO: Leyfi Pullover

Fa-la-la... I finished something....



Actually, I finished it a couple weeks ago, but their isn't enough daylight in my week to get a decent shot of it. I think if you are going to spend hours and hours handknitting something you really need to do your work justice with a nice well-lit outdoors or studio photographs. This usually isn't a problem from May to September, but wintertime can be a challenge.





The pattern is called Leyfi by Romi Hill. It's from Interweave Knits Fall 2010.



I used 2 skeins of Cascade Eco Wool. The way the sweater is constructed makes it fun- you start with the crazy open lace turtleneck, work your way down to the shoulders, and then split for the lace sleeves. It flows together seamlessly.

I might have made a mistake in interpreting the pattern- I think the sleeves are meant to be more of an open lace pattern. I knit all the yarn overs through the back loop like the pattern said, and now that I look at other people's finished project, I see that they didn't. It doesn't effect the fit per say, but it just makes it less lacy.



The only thing I did to modify was a few short rows in the front for boob-shaping. Otherwise, this sweater would be the same front and back. Also, I added some garter stitch to the bottom hem to keep it from curling up. This is my first completed sweater for 2012. I can only hope that I can order up some cold, snowy weather in time for this to get more wear before spring.

It knit up fairly quickly- once the sleeves were done, it only took me a few days to complete the body. It was hard to haul it around to work on the acres of stockinette stitch that made up the body, so I watched a few movies to get through it at home. Specifically:

In a Lonely Place:

The great Hitchcock film, "Shadow of a Doubt":

And, what might be my new favorite movie ever, "Le Trou".

I guess I've always been a sucker for great iconic acting and the suspense that these old movies had to rely on instead of CGI and pyrotechnics. I knew how this sweater would end anyway. Happily, and with a warm heroine.

It's Fun to be a Tourist in Your Own Home

I love hosting visitors from out of town. I don't get to see anything fun otherwise, and if I actually did see something interesting, I would blow right past it on my way to something else that I'm probably running late for. The leisurely pace of tourist in this town is an ideal way to really see things. Sometimes I have to give myself permission to walk slow enough to hear the grunts and huffs of frustrations of the people trying to get by me. Go screw yourself, I'm a tourist! I can walk as slow as I want.



The Tree, for instance. There is no way in hell I'm going to upper 5th ave from Thanksgiving to New Year's. It's just too much of a struggle to walk anywhere around there during the holiday crush. It looks like online shopping doesn't exist as everyone scrambles to go to Saks and Tiffany's.

Happily for me, the city was nice and quiet the week after New Year's when I took some guest from out of town out to walk and shop and eat and catch a show.



Luckily, it was unseasonably warm out. It's much easier to navigate your way around midtown when it's not freezing cold, raining, snowing, sleeting or whatever. Peeling off layers and layers every time you step indoors gets old fast.





The last time I was in Times Square, I was with my friend Jewel...in June. I work right on 42nd st, and it just never occurs to me to go anywhere near there. Even if I have show tickets, I usually go AROUND the square...it's too hard to walk through the crowds and I just find the whole place too overstimulating. Lights, noise, hawkers and suburban chain restaurants. But I like to bring people there just to see. Now that the TKTS booth was renovated into a fancy staircase that you can climb up and take it all in while resting your feet, I find myself kind of liking it.







I love showing people the hidden gems that they miss out on when they live elsewhere...Dim Sum Brunch, a tiny local bakery that makes amazing bread and pastry, the vintage shop with cheap-ish Chanel suits, the church where they filmed the last scenes in "Arthur" where Dudley Moore decides to leave his bride at the altar in favor of tuna fish sandwiches and Liza Minnelli.

It is days like this that I'm reminded how much I will miss it here when I leave.

Orlando

Traveling for business can mean that going someplace the most people view with pure joy and happiness can fill me with pure dread and loathing.



Oh yes. Seeing the sun coming up after several sleepless all-nighters due to the massive amount of work that needed to be done was some how a relief: that is one less sunrise that I will have to endure in this place. The weather appeared to be lovely outside, but days went by and I was inside the hotel and conference room the entire day and night. My entire life, for 5 days, was composed of forced socialization with middle-aged men for hours while eating mediocre hotel catering, drinking gallons of burnt coffee and trying to remember to smile and stand in a place where my phone gets reception.





I did go for a quick walk one afternoon in what was proclaimed as a "nature trail", but it ended up being a dirt road sandwiched between the golf course and a highway. I get my dose of nature when and where I can.







There were some interesting birds- egrets, ibis, grebes, osprey and herons.







Did I mention that they had has working while the rest of the states had a 3-day weekend? Nope, no bitterness here.









The company did do a nice thing and they had a buy-out of Universal Studios. Middle-aged men got to live out their fantasies.



They did have a few rides open for us. We got to test each other's bravery, and ridicule each other when the bravery failed.







The Magic 8 ball I won playing skiball came in handy when we needed answers about quota.





I told them they looked very "Rat Pack" and they smiled:



It's good to be home. I think I'll be having a nice, relaxing weekend with absolutely no contact with co-workers.