Ooooh. Shiny.

 

It’s heeeere. 

And yes it’s gorgeous and heavenly in every way. Including how WARM your lap is if you’re just . . . snuggling it.

I haven’t had any response to my email about their argleblarging website, but the yarn has arrived.  Which is to say that their customer service sucks but their mail room is ace.  And priorities?  Yes.  I’d rather have the yarn than a ravishingly nuanced apology for technological incompetence, including the fact that the yarn in question had been sold three days before to a gnarly middle-aged forklift operator who likes to sit at the back of the Troll and Nightingale* and knit while knocking back pints of an evening, laying** down his knitting needles occasionally to break chairs over other customers who annoy him. 

            So this counts as a win.

            Now I just have to chooooooose a pattern.***  

anne_d

Grrr. Argh. Now I want to dig out one of the knitting projects.

::Looks at current crop of UnFinished Objects of various and sundry sorts::

I will be strong, I will NOT start another project until I finish one of the UFOs. Really. Seriously. This time for sure.

Maybe just that little lace yarn scarf kit? Or one of the little knitted beaded bags?

Robin, you are a Bad Influence. Never, never change.

Yo, honey, you’re a long time blog reader.  Do you really think it’s LIKELY?  I just keep trying to throw my net a little wider around things to be a bad influence about. 

joseph_ine

I was introduced to malabrigo yarn whilst visiting the US. So pretty!! When I manage to pull it out of storage (in the process of moving) I shall photograph it for you all to drool over, however that won’t be until October.

In other words, you are safe until then! 

Sadly . . . wrong.  Malabrigo is hideously and surplusly to requirements available over here.  Ask me how I know this.  Not that I wish to discourage you from posting a photo(s) of edibly delicious YARN however. 

blondviolinist

Her knitting guru is obviously letting her down if she hasn’t told Hannah yet that you’re supposed to have more than one project on the needles at any given time!

Yes, I’m waiting to hear what her guru says after Hannah informs her that she had to have a friend tell her she could start a new project before she finishes the old one(s).  I suspect there may have been a collision of gratuitous businesslikeness between the two of them, both of whom are accustomed to terrifying lesser mortals with a glance.  Hannah however is clearly still human at least in private, or she wouldn’t be my friend.  It’s possible I suppose that her guru actually finishes whatever she has on her needles before she picks up something new.  ::Shudder::  I will, of course, try my utmost to lead Hannah into the paths of unrighteousness.

People keep telling me cables are easy. Go away.

But, but, but… they are easy.

::slinks away::

Sure.  Yes.  I totally believe you.  And Attila the Hun was nice to little old ladies.  And Marie Curie died of a surfeit of raspberries.† 

jmeadows

Her knitting guru is obviously letting her down if she hasn’t told Hannah yet that you’re supposed to have more than one project on the needles at any given time!

I agree. That way when you get angry with one project, you can show it how much you don’t care about it by knitting the other project.

We be of one blood, thou and I, not necessarily in a good way.  The problem however with having three projects all going pretty much head to head, or in your Mobile Knitting Unit, which is getting kind of crowded, is worrying about what the two you aren’t working on are saying behind your back.

Diane in MN

Some cables are difficult. This is true. But blondviolinist is exactly right–mostly THEY ARE EASY. REALLY. I don’t know that there’s any other knitting technique that gives you so much effect for so little effort.

You’re all just punishing me for those cliffhanger KES endings, right? 

* * *

* Hurtling hellhounds in town^ this afternoon we turned up into New Arcadia’s mini-industrial-estate.  There’s a footpath that leads out of the far end into more salubrious territory, and I’m not sure the hellhounds care a great deal about the broad view, so long as the immediate view includes things that other dogs have peed on recently.  But the town dump is on this street, and several specialist garages^^, and grubby warehouses for the kind of businesses that have more tasteful shopfronts elsewhere:  fitted kitchens and conservatories, for example, and a flash auction house keeps its junk here.  Its working population is nearly all blokes, and they’re nearly all the kind of gnarly middle-aged guy you don’t want to meet in a pub brawl, unless he’s on your side.

            I could hear the ice-cream van tune playing up ahead.  You’re out of your territory, I thought at it, there aren’t any little kids here.  But as we came around the rather spectacular fence that marks off the dump from its lesser neighbours, there was the ice-cream van with its twinkly lights and its really-bad-manga-style artwork playing its tune and surrounded by gnarly middle aged guys buying ice creams.

            Hee hee hee hee.  Several of them glanced up, saw me, and looked embarrassed.  Hee hee hee.  I may have been grinning.^^^ 

^ We are still mostly hurtling in town, while we all calm down from the recent unusually severe spate of the evil ratbag other dog problem.  Sigh.  Hellhounds give every impression of being back to their kindly, non-reactive selves (Darkness always maintains some residual wariness), which is to say that they’ve been fine with everything we’ve met lately, since there is nowhere you can hurtle your hellhounds that doesn’t already have dogs present, but I don’t want to take too many risks for a while yet.  But I’m getting fairly bored with these mean streets.

^^ Including the body shop I took Wolfgang to after I . . . ran into that stupid gate that had absolutely no business leaping into the middle of the road like that when it saw me coming. 

^^^ It is perhaps unfortunate that the hellhounds are so memorable because without them I’d be another skinny middle-aged woman with glasses.  And with them I walk past the Troll and Nightingale several times a day, because despite the fact that the cottage is in the desirable old part of town+, the Troll and Nightingale is my localest local, and tends to be where the gnarly element hangs out, and enlivens the neighbourhood in ways that the retired colonels don’t like.  I’ve never had a problem but then I’ve never giggled at anybody’s ice-cream-eating habits before either.++ 

+ And the triple-frelling ‘conservation district’ where you need permission to blow your nose and you’d better do it on a proper handkerchief.   

++ If there’s a Saturday-night assault around here, it probably happened at the Troll and Nightingale.  

** Has anyone been paying attention to the latest exposure of the depressing abuse of audience/customer book reviews?  I went to amazon to check out this R J Ellory fellow, since part of the depressingness is that apparently he’s a pretty good writer, and amazon usually has excerpts.  Ellory misuses lie/lay in the first line of the novel I looked at. 

            I’m out of here.  

*** And then add it to the QUEUE. 

Zerlina

 http://knitty.com/ISSUEspring08/PATTtempest.html

I had already put this in my pattern library. Love it. 

ME TOO.  If you knit it first . . . tell us about it.  

Katsheare posted a link to 

http://www.twistcollective.com/2012/fall/magazinepage_01.php 

ARRGH.  ANOTHER HOUR WASTED.  And another frelling email newsletter. 

http://www.twistcollective.com/collection/index.php/component/content/article/90-fall-2011-patterns/934-crane-creek-by-sandi-rosner 

Waaaaaaaant.  But it’s going to have to wait both till I get A LITTLE MORE RELIABLE^ and a little more confident since at the moment I don’t do solid colours and this would make your eyes explode in a multi.^^ 

^ Last night at the abbey I was, of course, knitting.  I happened to be knitting First Cardi because I am impatient although mostly I don’t carry it around at the moment because Second Front is almost done and bulky.  Leandra wanted to know what it was and I said it was my First Cardi!!!  And she said, first?  And I said yes, I’ve only been knitting about a year and a half, and she looked surprised and said, but your knitting is so regular.

            Hee hee hee hee, revisited.  I keep telling you, multi and ribbing hides AMAZING amounts of terrifying incompetence and mind-wanderingness. 

 ^^ gamma

Forget patterns, what you really want is The Ultimate Sourcebook of Knitting and Crochet Stitches. Start with a simple, all-plain-stitches pattern that you already have. Thumb through the pattern book until you see something nice in the approximate weight, difficulty level, and drape that you want. Then just substitute textured stitches for plain ones in part or all of your pattern. Now you have a shiny, new, unique pattern! 

I’ve got some other, less comprehensive but still quite scary and confounding book of stitches and furthermore I have Ann Budd’s Handy Book of Patterns which would make it easy [sic] to plug in a MINDLESSLY SIMPLE repeat pattern.  And I actually have the yarn for this exciting solid-colour opportunity some day in the future.  It’s, uh, pink. . . . 

† I have a very easy cable knitting book.  You have to COUNT!  Nothing that involves COUNTING is EASY!  Counting means you have to PAY ATTENTION!^  And you probably have to READ A CHART!  I DO NOT READ CHARTS!  COUNTING is BAD ENOUGH!  CHARTS are clearly MATHS!!!!!!!! 

^ Didn’t you read what I said about stitch counters?