New Toys

Here's another better-late-than-never Christmas gift hat:

Malabrigo Chunky, colorway Bobby Blue

The pattern is the free and lovely Robin's Egg Blue Hat that I modified slightly. I know I like my Mal chunky hats knit on size 10 needles to be 60 stitches around to fit right, so I cast off more stitches on the seed stitch flap to end up with 60 for the body of the hat. It's a very simple pattern with stylish results. This hat is for my cousin, Megan, to match the neckwarmer I made for her. Perfect set for a teenager, I think.

I received a new digital camera for Christmas (because my old one went swimming in a river while I was kayaking) and it has some really fun settings, like this:

Where has all the color gone?!

As you're taking the photo you can choose the color you want to keep (bright green) and the rest of the photo will be B&W. You can see that parts of the candle in the background still show up green. Pretty neat, huh? So you can expect the photo quality on this blog to vastly improve now from the cell phone shots that I was managing to make look halfway-decent before. While I was at it, I figured I'd show off my mini-skein collection:

As an aside: that candle? $1 at a yard sale. I love it. It is the candle we will use when the Fiasco and I finally tie the knot.

The top left container holds my STR Lightweight minis. The top right container is all Bugga. The bottom one is a mix of STR Mediumweight leftovers, large Bugga minis, and the tiny "emergency skeins" that come with the BMFA Rockin' Sock Club shipments. I like having my minis on display. I found the containers for something like $8 each at Michael's, not too bad. Someday, these minis will grow up to be a mitered square sock yarn blanket. I have almost 60 squares done, but I started in June, so at this rate it will take forever to finish. I'm hoping to get back into the habit of working on it regularly in the near future. As soon as I get to a nice stopping point I'll take a picture and post it here. I'm excited to start the middle portion of it, for which I have an interesting (read: hope it works) plan.

Finally, check out this little gal:

Cuteness!

My future mother-in-law gave me it for Christmas, and I think it's just too adorable. I've started reading an an interesting book called "Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet" by Catherine Friend on my Kindle (another new toy I'm addicted to). The book is sort of a sequel to a memoir about a city couple who start a farm and encounter wacky setbacks along the way. I haven't read the first book but I'm still enjoying this one. The author is clearly not entirely enamored of farming or sheep and she refers to people who really love wool/yarn/the fiber arts as "fiber freaks" but I'm only in the beginnings of the book and I feel a conversion to our woolly ways might be in the works for her later. This book might be dangerous for me to read, as I'm already a fiber freak and have pipe dreams of quitting this whole academia thing and getting some land somewhere remote and becoming self-sufficient. Just me, the Fiasco, and a bunch of livestock and crops in our own little happy place working hard, outdoors year-round... it's difficult to resist, even though we would have to start from scratch, both of us growing up in suburbia. But I'm not writing it off entirely, yet. What are dreams for, right?