My friend Erin has a great blog: Damknit. Not only does it have one of the most creative and snarky names in craft blog-land but is also a fun read. Erin and I “met” online on a scrapbooking website eons ago. It was because of her that I rediscovered my knitting bug and started blogging and podcasting (briefly!)

She went from being a beginner knitter to spinning her own yarn in record time. She is pretty much self-taught in all her various craft forms. You should see her mad crochet skills! Recently she decided that she wanted to advance her spinning skills and applied for a scholarship to attend SOAR this fall in Oregon. She needed reference letters and I was more than happy to lend a good word or twenty to help her achieve this goal. I was not surprised in the least when she won one of the coveted spots. The thing is is that she lives in Arizona. As I mentioned, SOAR takes place in Oregon. Not exactly right next door.

You see Erin works really hard waiting tables to help support her family. She doesn’t make a lot of money so buying a round trip plane ticket is a real luxury. But in usual Erin style she looked at the problem and set a goal to solve it. She scored a load of decorator samples at a local thrift shop and set to designing an awesome needle holder for interchangeable needle sets. She has been working her fingers and sewing machine to the bone making these and listing them on her etsy shop. All proceeds from the sales will go toward purchasing her plane ticket.

I’m thinking I may just need to invest in a set of Addi Clicks just to have an excuse to buy one of these for myself. Looking at them I think they’d also work great for all those miscellaneous double point sets I have rolling around in the bottom of my knitting bag too. If you have a need for a small, compact, CUTE! needle case this would be the perfect solution. Go now. Buy one, or five!

This is so soft and pretty. I don’t care that it is a color that I’d never pick for myself, I love it. I love knitting with it, I love the way the stitches show with it, I love the drape and flow of the finished fabric.

What is it you ask? It is Cascade Venezia in Salmon. This is one of the yarns I won when I was crowned the Skip, Skip, Knit Obstacle Course Champion of 2007.

I loved the look and feel of this yarn but the color kept putting me off. Being as it is Merino/Silk blend I was hesitant to attempt over-dyeing, knowing that the plant based and animal/protein fibers would take the dye very differently, if at all, depending on what kind of dye I used. So I just stashed the yarn and returned to it on occasion to fondle and pet it and try to make it feel welcome in my home.

Then last week I was looking for something else and balling some sock yarn in my studio (get your minds out of the gutter!) and I stumbled upon my little pink bag of salmon-y goodness. I figured, what the hell, I’ll ball a skein of it too (again with the impure yarn porn thoughts! Shame.) and do some swatches and maybe find a project for this yarn after all. After knitting a plain stockinette stitch swatch I was smitten. So I started perusing my infinite number of pattern books and magazines in search of the perfect project for this squooshy yumminess.

Can you tell what that is?
It is of course the Origami Cardigan by Nora Gaughan from the Summer IK 2007. These pictures are from Tuesday morning, before I got sick. Last night I cast off the back and started on one of the front rectangles. Which reminds me, I need to go update my Ravelry notebook…see ya there.

I bought the New Pathways in Sock Knitting book last week at Friday Knitting with Company. I stand by my conviction that Cat Bordhi’s brain just doesn’t work the same way the rest of ours does. As mentioned during Friday Knitting, we’d love to see a brain scan of her’s while she is knitting and devising new ways to construct common knitted objects.

As I’m sure countless knitters around the world have done since this book came out, I devoured it. After a couple perusings, I grabbed a set of dpns and some scrap yarn and feverishly knit up the sample sock patterns. The above “booties” are the result of my practice runs.

The purchase of this book also required that I purchase new sock yarn:

The top one is Colinette Jitterbug and the bottom one is obviously Dream in Color “Smooshy”.
I cast on the DIC for a Spiraling Coriolis last night while watching Forrest Gump with the family. (My favorite movie of all time I think)

I chose to knit the little sample socks because I have a Great niece/nephew due in January and I figured a few pair of baby socks could be put to good use. As luck would have it, I received an invitation to the baby shower for my niece today so I just need to take the remaining Socks That Rock and knit up a matching hat or maybe even a Baby Surprise Jacket. The nice thing about the two colorways that I had to work with is that one is quite feminine and the other quite masculine. So I can give Mylene both and no matter the gender of the baby, she’ll be good to go. Her best friend is also pregnant right now so she can always pass on the other pair if her friend has the opposite gender. Or if she gets like many of us harried mothers, she’ll just throw on whatever is clean and handy regardless of the gender stereotype.

Other things on the needles:
I’m on the third generation of Little E’s socks. This time I think I will outwit her ever growing feet and have a pair she can actually wear. I’m only about a half inch from the heel but the Cat Bordhi socks have sucked up my sock knitting time.

I did complete the little Patons Classic Wool shrug for Little E. It looked really small while I was knitting on it, but the finished object fits perfectly. It got really hot and humid the day I finished it and so I haven’t managed to get it modeled and photographed.

The circular shawl I started out of the Briar Rose Angel Face is coming along slowly. I fucked it up a bit by forgetting the difference between knitting a lace chart flat vs. knitting it in the round. It isn’t bad enough to frog and go back (maybe if I had put in a lifeline but alas, I did not). I’m just not feeling this knit. It will probably be gorgeous when I do finish and block it, but right now the nondescript lace knitting is sucking the life out of me. Honestly, I wish I had knit this using a doubled strand of the yarn. God knows I have enough. Maybe if it sits idle long enough and I don’t have more frogs and reknits on simpler projects, I may decide to be a perfectionist and frog and restart this one AGAIN.

I can’t explain it, but I’ve been way more perfectionistic than normal lately. I knit, ripped and reknit E’s sock three times, ripped and restarted the Invisibility Cloak twice and restarted the Coriolis socks once last night because I didn’t like the toe. I’ve even been knitting gauge swatches for heaven’s sake! Oh! and I cast on, knit, ripped and reknit (and have to frog and restart still) an Origami Cardigan out of the Cascade Venezia I won this summer at the Knit Out. What the hell has gotten into me?