I think the Loopy Ewe is in cahoots with Jimmy Johns. I placed my first order with them on Thursday afternoon, and the box was in my hands with Saturday’s mail. damn, that was quick!

here’s what I ordered:

Lone Star Arts Superwash Merino
color: Cricket

The Dyeing Arts Superwash Merino
color: Duos - Little Umbrellas

it’s cool - the Duos are two separate colorways. here’s what they look like separated

…

I have been spinning. today I worked on the beaded yarn. I went from this (spun earlier this month):

to this:

if the beads look familiar, they’re the same ones I used on Lilin’s socks and mom’s Mrs Beeton’s.

next up: plying it with the other bobbin.

I’ve also got the natural dyed coopworth that I bought at Shepherd’s harvest last year in progress. I’m thinking I need more of Stephania’s fibers this year.

yup, there was a falling down today. damn, I was doing pretty well. (17 days since my last yarn purchase)

I poked into Needlework Unlimited since I was sort of in the area for a doctor’s appointment. There was a ball of Panda Silk that was insisting it come home with me, but after further searches into the basket, there was only one ball. damn. they did have the Meilenweidt Tweed in an aran color, which I’ve been wanting since Nancy bought some a few years ago. and I also picked up 3 balls of Panda Wool (I don’t trust that there’s enough yardage in those tiny little balls!) - though now I’m having color regrets. (I like the color, but I’m not sure I’ll wear the color.)

then I poked over to their outlet, and only managed to avoid a second falling down due to the fact that I didn’t have enough cash on me. I’ll be heading back to claim that yarn soon.

the problem with this latest yarn purchase is that I didn’t really follow the rules of yarn buying. I’ve apparently not posted them here yet. Let me remedy that:

My rules for buying/swapping for yarn:
1. I need more to finish a project started from stash yarn
2. really good sale yarn, IF I have a project in mind for it and don’t have something suitable in the stash already
3. NO sock yarn unless I have a super specific need for it. (a vague “I’ll make socks” just doesn’t cut it anymore, until I actually start MAKING socks with the stuff I have, which is another goal for the year.)

the yarn purchased today does not fit any of my rules. the tweed is an ok purchase, due to the fact that I’ve wanted it for 2-odd years and has a little-less-vague thought of cabled socks. I did buy a pattern for socks as well, and I’m thinking I could use the Panda Wool for that, but it feels a little like cheating.

… might as well fry some eggs
as if that wasn’t bad enough, I discovered Christmas/holiday fabric on sale at JoAnns. what am I going to do with it? no idea. (I did come up with ‘fabric bowls’ as a sort-of vague justification.) I also bought a darning foot for my machine, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out if I’m putting it on right. must research that a bit more…

for the ‘Tools of the Trade’ shop hop. here’s a map of the shops - you can rearrange the route to fit your starting point (I love google maps)

I’m starting at Sheepy Yarn and working my way down and around to Amazing Threads. I’ve also added two shops to the route that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while - Double Ewe (my true start, since for me it’s en route to Sheepy) and Knitter’s Palette (since it’s so close to Zandy’s and I never get down that way anymore).

I’ll report back tonight or tomorrow. any bets on if I resist the Dream in Color yarns? (I think almost all the shops are listed as carrying it. I may be doomed!)

I’ve realized I never quite got around to posting about the fun of Irish Fest, which was back in mid-August. I spent much time visiting with my sister and the kids. I also made an excursion to what some might consider a yarn mecca - The Fold - in search of some Socks that Rock. next time, I need to consider what weekend I pick to go. apparently the week following Stitches Midwest is not the best of choices. but it was still fun. I met up with Heather (who I’d met at Camp Knitty a couple weekends earlier), since she lives not too far from there (jealous!).

en route to the Fold, I got lost in Whitewater (which shouldn’t happen. I know the town pretty well, considering lots of family lived there. my grandmother still does, matter of fact.) due to road construction. I ended up at the library, which just so happened to be having a book sale. I found some old knitting books, then hopped on the computer to double check directions and figure out how to get where I was going.

back on the road, driving thru the countryside of southern Wisconsin, I see a sign:

of course, I have to stop. what a great shop! I knew there were shops in the area, but I hadn’t really mapped them out or anything, so it was a fun surprise. I came home with a few things:

some sale yarn (a month later, that’s the only reason I can figure I bought laceweight) and a cute notepad

if you’re in the area, you definitely need to stop. here’s their website.

finally made it to the Fold and had a fun time with Heather, oohing and ahhing and petting all the fibers and yarns.

and of course, I had to come home with something:

the Gypsy Girl Creations yarn is local to the area, and she has an awesome Gryffindor color that I resisted buying.

Saturday I poked into The Yarn House. my friend Ginny said she still loved the hat and it sort of came up that a scarf to match would be nice. so I was poking around a bit and almost bought some yarn to match the hat. and then I found the Tweedy Cotton Classic that I’d been looking for for a project I want to make. so that took priority (since this will be outgrown if I don’t make it soon enough.)

Irish Fest itself was pretty fun the first few days - Thursday & Friday we had good weather. Saturday was rather cool & rainy all day and I left early. waffled a bit on whether I wanted to stay or not for Sunday, and decided it’s probably be better to just head home. only to have my ‘worn brakes’ light light up on the dash. yeah, like I could find something that’d be open on a Saturday night. after a bit of an ordeal I found a hotel room (Irish Fest tends to make finding a room hard, especially on short notice) and stayed the night and miraculously found something that was open on Sunday to fix my brakes. yay! so my sister, her husband and the kids came out to entertain me - we went to Build a Bear - and as we finished up, the car was ready. and then I headed home.

Yesterday while choosing yarn for the Mystery Stole, I attempted the bleach test (mentioned in the Yarn Harlot’s Knitting Rules on page 42) to verify the fiber content of some mystery yarn:

the pink is the 2-ply wool I’m using for the stole, the grey is a 4-ply dk/sport weight ??? and the white is a 3-ply fingering weight acrylic.

I wanted to be sure that the pink was indeed wool, for blocking reasons. (and I’m not sure if I want a pink stole, so dyeablility was also a concern). The grey. well, there’s a lot of it (compared to the rest of the cones that were in the box. thrift shop score from last year. these are the three fullest cones). The white, well, you never know if somehow the wrong label got attached or if they reused a cone or something, so I figured I’d verify it.

I dropped a small snippet of each of these, as well as another yarn that is known to be wool into a bit of bleach to see what would happen. when I came back an hour or so later, only one strand remained. the white acrylic. I did poke at the grey a bit before it disappeared - it seems the process is that the bleach attacks the color, and then it attacks the fiber. (the known wool also seemed to follow that process.)

I was bored (and entertained. my new guilty secret? I like torturing yarn.) so thought I’d document the process to save other knitters from any terrible accidents in the laundry room.

I dropped a bit of the pink wool in around 1:50pm. this was taken at 1:51pm. the wool is the strand with all the bubbles around it. the other strand is the white acrylic that’d been sitting in the bleach for quite a while (before noon, I think) by this point.

1:57:20 pm - I had poked at the yarn to see how things were progressing and it bunched up. it’s in the collection of bubbles at the bottom.

1:57:44 pm - well, it would have been in that mass of bubbles. I pulled out the acrylic (you can see it hanging on the edge) and gave it a swirl. nothing left.

so there you have it. 2-ply laceweight wool in bleach = no yarn left after 8 minutes. lesson learned: keep the wool far far away from the bleach (unless you want to torture it.)

I suppose if you have a truly hideous piece of FUG made from natural fibers (the Harlot says this happens to silk and other animal fibers too), bleach would be a good way to destroy all evidence of it.