Monday, April 14, 2008

Too much yarn!

I've been buying more and more yarn lately. Loopy Yarns had a great clearance sale recently. They said they were sick of looking at the 60% off yarn already and to please come take it away for $1 a skein! Needless to say, I went as soon as I could and made away with a nice amount of yarn. I was able to find 12 skeins in one color so I gave those to my Mom. I've just updated my Stash page at Ravelry and now I have 55 skiens and still need to enter a few more.

Some of the clearance yarn is made up of only 1 skien of the particular type and/or color and some were 3 or 4 skiens of the same yarn but all different colors. I figure I use the different colors to knit a striped item, or use them for color work.

I also picked up a slightly tangled skien of sock yarn and I plan on using it to practice various sock toe up methods as well as some heel methods. I'm still a bit confused about short row heels and toes. They seem to be a great way to make a toe-up instead of starting with, say, a figure 8, and having to increase. I always get these ugly bumps with doing the increases. There are so many short row methods out there and I have to say that I became more and more confused. It seems that all the instructions assume you know how to get to the these things called wraps, and maybe it's easy, but I couldn't quite get a handle on it. I'm still searching around and now that I have fast internet at home, I can watch the videos about it.

Meanwhile I have 4 works in progress and need to finish them before I start another one with the new yarn.

I also ordered some circular needles recently and I'm really happy with them. They are bamboo and 40" long and very flexible. I've learned to do the Magic Loop method so they are perfect and the set of 15 cost me about $30 which is not bad at all.

I'll probably be getting rid of my Boye interchangeable needles which have very stiff cables.