No knitting, but we found a home!

Did you all hear my sigh of relief this morning when our new landlord handed over the keys to our new apartment? After seeing 18 apartments and experiencing rejection over and over again, we found this place through a friend of a friend. It's even better than anything else we had seen.

We're moving tomorrow so I'll be off line for a few days. When I locate the camera and the cable I'll have to put up pictures. It's a single family house that was originally a 2 room schoolhouse. You can even see the places on the floor where the desks were bolted down. It's so cool. I'm so excited!!

Project closure and some WIPs

I had a long distance call from England on Monday. The throw arrived and my friend loves it. She said it perfectly matches her couch (I told you her favorite color was purple). I couldn't believe that it cost $18 to mail it to England. Apparently they don't do surface mail anymore and this was the cheapest airmail price. It was amusing when I had to put a value on the throw for the customs' form. I ended up just putting down $50, which was the cost of the kit. Thank goodness it made it safely though, because there is no way I'm knitting that again any time soon.

Now that the throw is done, I'm back to my other projects like the Conwy socks:
I have to say, I love the Lorna's Laces yarn, but not so much the weird color pooling. It's a shame Webs doesn't stock the solid colors at this time.

I also started another picovoli for me. My mom, the great stash enabler, was visiting last month and I saw Debbie Bliss Cathay was on closeout sale at Webs. There were 5 skeins of this orange color left so it seemed like fate that it had to be a picovoli. I love my other picovoli from last year and have been wearing it a lot this summer.

Still no apartment. :( We do have a good lead on a single family house for rent so everyone please cross your knitting needles that everything works out!

Throw!!!

Pattern: Squared Up the Circle Throw
Yarn: Knitpicks' Mix and Mingle Kit in "jewel"
Needles: 10.5 DPN, 24 inch circular, and 40 inch circular
Mods:

• I used a provisional cast on so I wouldn't have to pick up stitches on 3 sides of the center rectangle.
  
• I inadvertently did not make decorative holes at the increases because I automatically twisted the made stitches. It looked fine so I just went with it.

• The pattern says "Change colors according to the Color Change Pattern until you run out of yarn. In our sample we repeated the Color Change Pattern 4 full times." When I finished the fourth color change round, I still had not used whole skeins of yarn so it was a no brainer that I would keep going. What they should have mentioned was, if you go beyond 4 color change patterns, YOU WILL RUN OUT OF WOOL OF THE ANDES BULKY HAND DYED as you bind off. Hmph. Luckily there was one other bulky yarn, Sierra, so I continued to bind off with it. Then I ran out again with more than 25% still to bind off. In my despair I remembered that the Yarn Harlot wrote a few months back about a sneaky way to bind off without using more yarn (sorry, I don't have it in me to search for the link right now). Basically you just pull the loops over each other as you would if you had knit them and then just tie the last loop down. Which is what I did. The arrow in the picture points to where I ran out of yarn and continued to bind off. It worked.

Thoughts: Love the pattern. The yarns were awesome and it really kept my interest during what would have been a really boring project otherwise. I definitely recommend the kit and pattern.




Oh, and still no apartment. :(