Sunday, May 30, 2010

German Wool

I got back from my week and a half long Europe trip on Thursday afternoon. It was a trip in which I bought few souvenirs, but I did manage to visit a yarn store in Germany.









The first two skeins are sock yarn from Italy, the second two are handspun/hand dyed local yarn from Germany.

There were so many pretty things in the store, and part of me wishes I had bought more, but I think what I got is sufficient, considering that I had to get it back to the States. Had we more time, I would have gone back to the store with my mom, but other things ended up taking forever, so no second visit for me. Oh well.

And of course, by bringing extra projects, I ensured that I would not actually finish the Traveling Woman Shawl. I'm near the end of repeat 3 of chart a, and there are only 2 charts (a repeats as many times as you'd like/have the yarn for, b is the border). I'm definitely doing a 4th repeat of it, but I'm not sure if I have the yarn for more than that. I really don't want to run out of yarn. Maybe 600 yards actually isn't enough...

Friday, May 14, 2010

Two Treasuries

Treasury East is my new best friend. You can make a treasury whenever you want, you can make as many as you want, and they stay there as opposed to disappearing in 2-3 days. Of course, this leads to there being over 10,000 treasuries now (I think) and there being some with no items in them. People should really delete their treasuries when they stop having items in them. I probably would be in favor of the treasuries lasting for 4 months and then getting deleted so as not to be too overwhelming, or maybe capping the number of treasuries each seller can have.

Anyways, I have 2 treasuries up right now, one I made about a week ago, and one I made yesterday:

Dragons:



No Two People are Not on Fire (awww):


I think I might have created the second one solely because I thought that would be the best name for a treasury, ever. (It's a reference to this Strong Bad's E-mail)


In other news, I'm going to Europe on Monday (France and Germany) for a period of 10 days. The most time-consuming part of packing for me is figuring out what knitting/spinning projects to bring. The Traveling Woman shawl is going pretty quickly; I'm done with the center, and am now on repeat 2 of chart A. (There are 2 charts: chart A, which is the one that gets repeated x number of times, and chart B, which is the border. The person who made the pattern used 300 yards and did chart A twice. I want a larger shawl than that and have 600 yards of yarn, so I was thinking of doing chart A 4 times, maybe 5 if I think I have enough yarn. I would hate to run out before the end.) And chart A has 12 rows. So I think there's a good chance I could finish while I'm there.

Details of knittingness: the flight there is 7 hours, the flight back is 8. (I might sleep some of that time, but certainly not all of it.) Wednesday and Thursday are the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, so I won't be knitting then, and I also won't be knitting on Shabbat, so that leaves about 5 actual days of knitting, though I'll be doing other things as well (such as attending a wedding). But there will be a lot of transit time while in Europe.

I don't have another project I'm actively working on. I have a cabled scarf that I hardly work on, but don't want to bring, and a big Dr. Who-like scarf made of crazy yarns, but that one is too big. So I need a new project.

I'm also almost done spinning the More Purple yarn for my Etsy shop, so wouldn't bring that. Nor do I really have time to dye something else before I go. I suppose I could spin things for me.

Too much thinking. I probably just need to get over myself and start a new project. Usually I'm in the opposite situation, with a bunch of things going at once and taking forever to finish them since there are so many. At a certain point I used my magical willpower skills to finish things, and now I have this.

Maybe I'll bring the yarn for another shawl. You can never have too many hand-knit shawls, right?