Last week I stopped in at Sage Yarn, in Falmouth, MA, in search of some buttons.

One disadvantage of having spent most of the last three years abroad is that I rarely have had the chance to get together with other knitwear designers.  So when

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I buy the great majority of my yarn online, and to try to get an accurate idea of the color, I will often find the same yarn on several websites and compare the colors in the photos.  There can be a lot of variation!  WEBS and purlsoho.com usually have large and luscious photos of yarns (not always a guarantee of color accuracy, however).  I should probably buy a selection of color cards; at this time the only ones I have are for Louet yarns.  Anyhoo, I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to visit one of my go-to LYSs, Elissa's Creative Warehouse in Needham, MA.  I had my orders:  one son wanted red, the other, orange.  I was thinking something like Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece:  a wool blend, relatively durable and easy to care for-- since we're talking about a designing a vest for a 5- and an 11-year-old boy.  The Cotton Fleece was there, along with many, many other choices, but this is what I ended up with:  Adrienne Vittadini "Trina", a hand- or machine-washable heavy-worsted blend of merino, microfiber and cashmere.  Certainly not the cheapest, nor the most durable yarn available; I chose this simply because I loved the colors, both the red and the orange (the colors in the photo above are pretty close to the real thing).  The red is a vibrant true red, shading neither into pink nor purple, and the orange is a deep, crisp orange, without a hint of sherbet or neon.  One of the great advantages of buying yarn face-to-face!  (Oh yes, and it's also very soft.)     

When I first saw this store window, I thought it was a yarn shop, but then I realized that those rainbow-colored displays on the back wall are made up of scarves, not balls of yarn.  Disappointing!

A couple of weekends ago we took a little trip to Parma, ostensibly for my son's baseball tournament, but really, unbeknowst to my family, it was all a ploy to find a certain LYS that Connie had

This is the longest I've gone without posting since I started this blog; having three knit projects due in the space of a few weeks which also encompassed Christmas, the New Year, hauling the family from Italy to Boston to Cape Cod to Florida and back, and choosing tile, cabinets, countertops and paint colors for two building projects may have had something to do with that.  Maybe having a

I stopped by my LYS today to pick up a set of US size 6 dpns, and the only ones on their wall display were 12 inches long!  I mean, is there really anyone who would rather use 12-inch-long dpns than, say, a 24 or 32 inch circular needle?  Someone who works as a security guard and can use them as weapons in a pinch, perhaps?  Luckily, a helpful saleslady found a set of normal-length Brittany birch dpns tucked into a basket on the floor.  I know I had a set of #6s, but they seem to have disappeared, and I need to complete a sample of a special edition of /patterns/beaufort-hat">Beaufort I'm creating for sale at a certain LYS (not the one I just visited); the owner requested a version using a thinner yarn.  I feel somewhat awkward about offering a pattern for sale that is gratis on the web, but I am rewriting for a different gauge, in a larger range of sizes, and I plan to use a new photograph, and reformat the whole thing to make it more suitable for display in a bricks'n'mortar store (and more portable for the on-the-go knitter). After I got home, I realized that I had a pair of metal 14-inch-long dpns that look to be about a US size 8.  I have no memory of ever having used them for anything, and why do I only have two?  Did I use the others to stake tomatoes or hang curtains?   Hmmm. P.S.  Thanks for the well-wishes concerning the sailing accident; the victim is mending, and gives his assurances that that particular mishap will never happen again!     

I stopped into an interesting LYS today, in Bellagio.  No, not that parody of classic Italian design in the Las Vegas desert!  I mean the Bellagio on Lake Como, in northern Italy, where George Clooney likes to hang out.  In fact, I saw him by the boat dock...not really.  Yes, those are indeed baby bibs; along with yarn, this store also sells bibs, T-shirts and other sundry items of clothing.  I didn't recognize any of the yarn brands (where's the Filatura di Crosa?  the Filati?  the Berroco*?).  No needles or patterns, or at least none visible, and the yarn, aside from the tempting window display, was stacked in boxes on a high shelf behind the counter--no tactile temptation there!  And although I loitered in the store for nearly ten minutes (a really long time in these kinds of circumstances), no one ever appeared to sell anything to me!  No wonder they keep the yarn out of reach. Oh well.  After a splurge at the latest WEBS online sale, I'm finally on the dreaded yarn diet, anyway.  I wish my husband would go on a cigar diet.  This is his favorite store in Heathrow airport.  As one can see from the cigar box labels, the husband likes to practice the art of ignoring good advice.  These labels go on cigarettes in the U.K. too, and they hit every angle, from the high to the low:  motherly and fatherly instinct ("don't make your children breathe your smoke"), consideration for others ("smoking seriously harms you and others around you"), fear of death ("smoking kills"), vanity ("smoking causes ageing [sic] of the skin"), and the dreaded below-the-belt "smoking decreases blood flow and may cause impotence." *Ha ha.  Although it sounds Italian, Berroco is actually a Massachusetts company.

I have no idea who Elissa is, but I do know that my LYS, Elissa's Creative Warehouse in Needham, MA, has a great selection of yarn, lots of books, nice salespeople, and OK, they never seem to have current issues of Vogue Knitting or Interweave, but compared to the place I just visited yesterday, that is a very minor quibble.  True, both are located in a sort of industrial park, but this Jupiter, FL LYS has the odd concept of organizing yarns by color, making it a little hard to find them by fiber content or brand.  I could get used to that (although their selection didn't excite me), but the attitude!  I mean, listen to this monologue: "This one customer, she's a regular but seasonal-- you know, a snowbird--she's the type that sits in her car in the parking lot, waiting for us to open...so what I usually do is, I get in early, get things organized, and a few minutes of ten, I open the door.  Well, she comes in, and she says to me, 'Your clock is wrong.'"  (Commiserating chuckles from the yarn cronies.)  "So I said, 'Well, that's the clock we go by here.'  And she was fine--no further trouble.  But she's just the type, if you let her push you around...." I have to admit, that customer doesn't sound like a prize.  But can you imagine trying to go to the BANK on your way to work, and trying to open the door at 9, and ten minutes later, they open it and say, "Well, we go by our OWN time here.  We're on CHASE MANHATTAN time here!  GFY!"  Or the supermarket--"We're on PUBLIX time here!"  Elissa, I love you.  And WEBS, I love you too:  sometimes it's easiest to just order yarn online. 

Teenaged Stepdaughter has pointed out that the rabillettes might be even more appropriate for the Kitty Hat designed by Kitty Schmidt (http://www.kittyville.com/knit.html), and featured in Stitch 'N Bitch immediately after the Sparkle Hat.  I have to agree.  As for as how to best utilize the rabillettes, that will take some experimentation.  On the swatch at left, I tried using only seasonally appropriate green bells, which I thought went nicely with Berroco's "Medley" yarn. I suppose I could have used Christmas red yarn, although my eyes hurt just thinking about it. Anyway, the r-ettes are spaced fairly close together in the bottom two rows, which I'm thinking would work best for a border, and farther apart in the top three rows.  They are quite large, 1 1/4" wide and 1 1/8" high, and could probably be spaced even farther apart with good effect, or even used as individual accents.  Some of them wanted to turn and show their backsides, so I let them, to give an accurate idea of how they will look on a project.  What an odd direction I've taken since my first project after returning to knitting, a year or so ago.  Here it is again, the Aran Coat by Dame DB (accessorized with TV remote--a forbidden toy unless Mom is trying to shoot a few photos).  That same bright blue merino yarn (brand? no idea) used to be part of the project that caused me to stow my knitting needles for over a decade: a sweater in the round that I inexplicably did not realize was big enough to fit a sumo wrestler until it was almost up to my armpits. Anyway, once I decided to try knitting again, I thought to begin with something for the smallest person I knew--my year-old son.  I liked this pattern in DB's Classic Knits for Kids, but it only included directions for one size, 4-6 years, and it called for aran weight yarn--too heavy.  I pulled Sumo out (ouch!  I remembered that blue as being a little less intense) and the yarn appeared to be light worsted weight.  Well, what if I followed the pattern, using worsted instead of aran?  It would probably turn out to be, oh, size 2 or 3; if it was still too big, he could grow into it....  So I frogged the thing and got to work (no, I didn't make a swatch).  As you can see, the finished article did turn out rather oversized; I estimate it will truly fit him well sometime next year.  The only part that really gave me trouble was the collar border.  With no schematic of the collar, and no photo of how it looked from the back, these directions confused me:  "Cont in patt until border fits along shaped edge of collar to centre...."  Huh?  So I took the pattern and partially finished collar into my friendly local yarn shop, Creative Warehouse in Needham, MA, where one of the employees looked at them and said, "Hmm.  I don't know.  I guess you'll have to just trust in the pattern."  "'Trust in the pattern?'"  "Yes, just keep going, it will make itself clear.  Trust in the pattern."  Okay, Yoda. Well, Yoda was right--and the directions seemed crystal clear, in hindsight.  Next, I knit a scarf, slavishly following the pattern (see "Chevron & Feather Scarf" in "Finished!").  After that, I started making changes to the patterns; small ones, at first, but then....  More in my next post.