Photos of Yarn "Growing Up"

The Little Yarn That Could

Some months ago, Gretchen was looking for donations for an American Heart Association Walk. She generously offered a "prize" for the donations, each dollar would be one entry into a drawing for some yarn of choice, either dishcloth cotton or alpaca. For a good cause, I thought, and of course made a donation. I never expected to win, that's not why entered. I like to do my little part for charities. I pretty much forgot about it. In fact, when I got the email I almost dismissed it as I didn't recognize the sender. But I opened it, and much to my surprise I won! I chose the alpaca, as I already had plenty of cotton. Gretchen sent it out quickly, and also included some handmade soap as I'd asked about them when I saw a link on her site. I received 6 hanks of so very soft pink variegated Atacama 100% alpaca yarn by Araucania Yarns. The yarn smelled lovely. :-) I knew not what the yarn would 'grow up to be' as Gretchen said, and I told her someday it would let me know. Well, that day came, and I have been working on this on and off since October. I wanted to finish it Christmas week. I knew it wanted to be a scarf, and a felted scarf at that. So, I knitted. And knitted...and knitted. On #8 needles. All garter stitch. It was so soft and nice to knit with, but quite tedious. Good TV knitting though. I put it down a number of times to work on other projects. I was determined to have few, if no, UFOs going into 2007, so I knitted. ALL of the hanks. I didn't want the scarf to be too short after felting, and when I finished #4, I should have cut the fringe on #5, then finished #5. But nooo...what would I do with one lonely hank? So...I cut the fringe and finished knitting #6. And then felted. Well, they say felting is not an exact science. That is true. The width, perfect. The length, I sure didn't have to worry about it being to short! It is way too long, but really good if we ever get 20 degrees with windchills at 0! I do love the way it felted, especially the fringe, it's like dredlocks!

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday. Not much different than any other day. I've had some fun, memorable birthdays over the years (lots of years they are) but this was not one of them. Maybe because on most of my birthdays the weather is cold, and many years there is some snow. This unusually warm weather is so confusing!

This Week's Knitting

This week I knitted the Monthly Dishcloth Group's Jan 1st KAL. It was Rainy's Snowflake pattern, I'd wanted to knit that for some time now. When I realized that was the mystery pattern I was happy. I used S&C in natural and #6 needles. I like the way it turned out. Along with that, I finished my 2nd scarf for the Red Scarf Project 2007. It was an easy knit, and I liked the texture of the stitches.