Soaked and shaped!

The Baba Tree Baskets are drying in my living room today.  I have printed the tags and tomorrow they will be at the shop!  These make the perfect gift for almost anyone on your list.  Gregory has actually made a list of 108 ways you can use a Baba Tree Basket!   I love #27!

As today is the 25th I don't really need to remind you of the time left to get all those Holiday things done.

One thing I have done is my Christmas Holiday schedule:

We are keeping our regular Tuesday - Saturday hours of 10 am - 5 pm.  I need Sundays and Mondays for my own life!

However:

There are a few added times, the shop is open:

Sunday December 22nd : 1pm - 4 pm

Monday December 23rd :12pm - 4 pm

Tuesday December 24: 10 am - 3 pm

The the shop closes for Holidays from December 25 - January 1st!  

Road trip!

We went on a short 'holiday', 'The Farmer' and I.  It was our Anniversary (29 years) and his Sunday off.  We left  Sunday morning and headed north and west.  We stayed in a lovely hotel overnight, the weather was frightful.  The dinner out was a nice treat.

On the return drive home we just happened to stop by the Koigu wool designs workshop!  We chatted with Taiu and realized that through her association with Canadian Sheep she knew many of our neighbours!  The agricultural world is not very big.

I got to go through the stash and came home with a lot more than I had planned. I hope you will like them as much as I do!

We did get a bit of the tour of the workshop, it's amazing that all this colour and creativity is made in an ordinary building in the middle of 'Gods Country' and that it travels all over the world! We should be proud of these Canadians!

During the drive home we encountered: rain, sleet, hail, snow and sunshine!

There are bags to unpack!

See you soon!

Learning opportunity!

The most common phrase heard in the shop: "I can knit but I don't know how to fix my mistakes!"

The only way to learn how to fix the mistake is to actually try, or find someone who will show you and then attempt it yourself.

We all make mistakes, I make a lot.  Most projects have at least one 'learning opportunity'. 

This shop sample was going along quite nicely until I realized that I had skipped a yarn over about 8 rows back.  I could have ripped back the 8 rows and re-knit them but why not try to make the repair and if it didn't work I could just rip back?

There should be 18 stitches after the marker!

 Dropped the stitch before the forgotten yarn over, created an extra stitch and used a crochet hook to re-knit the two stitches, it got a bit tricky to recreate the purl ridge.

Blocking will take care of the un-evenness.

The yarn is Cascade Casablanca, the pattern is Urban Lace Infinity Cowl. (A free pattern on the  Cascade website.)

For those of you that really know me will be surprised at my choice of pattern, I have this issue with the 'feather and fan' stitch pattern. It's not because it is difficult, it's actually very easy; it's that when I first worked in the Yarn Department at Rickaby's almost 30 years ago the most popular pattern in the shop was a feather and fan afghan made with 4 colours of worsted weight yarn.  5 balls of 1 colour, 4 of three others...

Perhaps if I continue to 'practice' this simple pattern the better I will feel about it!

See you soon!

Matchy Matchy

I finished the mashed potato socks in record time, 8 days!  I was able to get them to almost perfectly match.  I only had to pull out a few feet to get to the right place to start the second sock.  Thing is it doesn't really bother me when socks don't match. 

I was commenting to someone about the fact that it is rare that I get the designs to line up perfectly.  Then I started to look at the socks that I have made, turns out I really do manage to get them to match about 50% of the time!

These are Opal sock yarn, Vincent van Gogh series. 

 The rest are all discontinued yarns, some of these were made before the shop opened!

 I just noticed today that the socks match but my feet are different! 


On to the next project, we are off to the big City on Monday to look at the Spring 2014 line!

See You Soon.