The nicest birthday present I could have asked for

If you’d been at my house this weekend, you would have seen a lot of this:


You can guess what the book is: the same one everyone else has been reading this weekend. I won’t say more, except that I picked it up and read without stopping, which is to say, on Friday night Joe and I took the kids to the Harry-Potter-themed dinner at Upstairs on the Square at 5pm, the only reservation we could get, and then headed to “Hogwarts Yard” for a great show with Harry and the Potters and Draco and the Malfoys, and from there to standing a long time in a long line at the Harvard Bookstore, and then home to collapse, so I picked up the book on Saturday morning, and I looked up sometime on Saturday evening, starving and tearful. The book is a fitting conclusion to the series, and satisfying, and I’m so glad we’ve all had something so pleasurable in our lifetime. Just what I wanted for my birthday! My heart’s full. P.S. I'm still blubbing over it...

That’s our herb garden up there, by the way. It’s growing like Topsy - soon the nasturtiums will bloom...

We come now to the near-end of le Petit Chou. This is the second full bra I’ve knitted with the pattern; the first one was missing an eyelet on the first row, ugh, and I discovered pattern errors in the left bra cup, and was unhappy with my improvised fixes. So I went back to the beginning (well, not the beginning of the beginning, because that would involve redoing the invisible cast-on, and there’s been quite enough of that this summer!) and examined the troubles in a more disciplined fashion. I need to knit the crotch, weave in ends, get some ribbon to lace everything up, and then [perhaps I’ll model] and write up my errata.

I do believe my next project will be Wing o’ the Moth, for which I bought some nice Addi lace needles. Because I am conscientious, I tried my LYS first, which was, as I was prepared for, pretty much out of needles altogether. In resorting to the web I found these fine people: Bob and Nancy of Colorsong Yarn, who shipped the needles at their standard price, with free USPS shipping (so much quicker and better than UPS, at least where I live) included. Thank you, Bob and Nancy!

As I told Stacie, though, I only want to do the Moth if the edge comes out like this. There will need to be extreme blocking.

Let us now praise Wild & Woolly

See that wagon, way off there in the distance? It's the one I fell off of recently.

Yep, in October, I made a pledge to knit only from stash until Rhinebeck 2007. I realized pretty quickly that I'd be breaking my pledge when I go to Taos in May (La Lana! Can't wait...), and that I'd need to get some yarn to make Miles the Hello Yarn pirate mittens he's been hankering after, but otherwise my plan was to divert the money I'd been spending on stash to Cheri Huber's Africa Vulnerable Children project.

Well I'm still feeding the orphans, so don't hate me, but man, have I been buying yarn. Two weeks ago today I hit theknittinggarden.com and ordered a bag of the yummiest Jo Sharp Silkroad Ultra in a beautiful chocolate-brown ("tamarind"), as well as some Rowan Scottish Tweed aran in lovat (a nice medium teal) for Kim Hargreaves' Demi from Vintage Style. This was on Friday afternoon. On Wednesday morning I got a note from the Knitting Garden saying the yarns were out of stock, but they expected a shipment 'next week'. No asking if I still wanted the yarn, no apology for the delayed response, just making me read between the lines to guess I'd get the yarn about three weeks after ordering. If I was lucky.

Maybe not such a big deal except the yarns weren't marked as out of stock on the site, and it's the third time this has happened to me with that vendor. I'm nursing a suspicion that the vendor might be ordering from their suppliers after orders come in from the website. Not saying, just suspecting. When I emailed the owner to cancel the order, I asked her that question, and she didn't respond to it. She did say her server had been down, but still: if you're telling someone their yarn ain't available five days after sending them an invoice, don't you want to mention something like that? Along with an apology?

Anyway, this is not really about the Knitting Garden, but more about Wild & Woolly, because when I called them, they told me they had both the yarns, the colors, and the quantities I needed had a sick sick thing for, and would overnight them for a total of $7 shipping. That's seven measly dollars.

I mention this because Wild & Woolly seem to have a bad rep on the web. The woman I talked to couldn't have been more accommodating - and she didn't have any superfakeynice anything going on. Just authentically nice. So, huzzah, Wild & Woolly!

Btw, I wanted the yarn right away because I was leaving the next morning for San Francisco, and I didn't really have anything to take with me that wasn't already nearly done. Just in case you thought I was totally freaked-out fiber addict. Or something.

Because I'm still feeding the orphans.