The first thing that comes to mind when the subject of "wild and crazy times" surfaces is not likely your knitting group. This would change were you to move to Jersey City and knit with these wild ladies.
For example, we went to the Hoboken event for Worldwide Knit in Public Day in June. Hoboken is the next town north of Jersey City and a quick Light Rail trip away. Everyone had blankets and chairs and it was a grand ol' time.
I brought Macy because she is a dog that enjoys fiber arts.
We met a woman who is pictured here using a nitty noddy.
Apparently she spins fiber while on her commute to work. Something about using a drop spindle while she walks to the PATH station, standing on the PATH using a drop spindle and walking to the office from the PATH. I imagine this is not a rainy day activity. You can see video here of using a drop spindle and I am still trying to imagine being coordinated enough to do that while walking and, say, avoiding being hit by a car.
The darkening skies did not scare us off, but they did break up the rest of the crowd. We simply decided to proceed on a yarn crawl and go check out Patricia's Yarn's new digs. One of her store workers gave out 10% off coupons which was definitely an incentive.
Macy approved of the new store and selection of yarn at shih tzu level.
Sue and Babs discussing which yarn to stash.
Barbara, aka Babs, suggested we get lunch and after knitting in public, she ate naked in public. This is a photo of her just after finishing the naked portion of her afternoon.
Sue and Kim just had regular burritos.
Our knitting group doesn't just go for the public nudity, we also do crazy stuff in the restaurant we call our home base. Though the group has existed since January, 2005 (there is another group that has been meeting in Jersey City longer but when we started no one could find anything out about them online) we have only been at Beechwood for about a year. The service is atrocious and usually their pastries are a few days old, but they serve dinner and usually have plenty of space for us. Plus, they don't mind when we do crazy stuff like convince Beth to bring her swift and ball winder and go to town.
We are usually an every other week group, but lately have been going on our "off weeks", too (right, we're getting totally unpredictable). What is funny is we see Beth on our "off weeks" at other groups. Once she was with her moms who knit group and she was with her book group (and about 8 bottles of wine) a couple of weeks ago. I can't wait to surprise her on a Wednesday and see her with her motorcycle affinity group or something.
And I'd like to leave off with a shout out to Spanky, Last One Skeining's betrothed, who totally bought LOS the beautiful knitting bag she is modeling in my below post. She deserves the awesomest boring brown stockinette stitch sweater ever.
I am jumping on the Mystery Stole 3 Bandwagon. Or, more accurately, I am already on the back of the cart, rain colored yarn in hand dangling my feet off and clutching my circs to my chest everytime the wagon hits a bump.
I haven't photographed my (slow) progress yet but I am totally digging it in full knitster geek way.
It has been awhile since I've embarked on something truly new and challenging*. While I have knit lace before (an entire blanket in lace pieces and the Perfect Pie Shawl from Weekend Knitting) and I just worked something very simple in laceweight mohair, I have never knit a complicated lace project on laceweight mohair. So I thought I would take on the challenge.
I cannot say enough about how awesome the support of over 4,000 knitters working on the same project at (relatively) the same pace is. I went to Patricia's Yarns in Hoboken to get some laceweight for the project and she suggested Rowan Kidsilk Haze. Or, rather, dangled it in front of me like a snake charmer and I was powerless to its influence despite the hefty pricetag.
To the right is a photo of Macy, the Official Spokesdog of the Totally Knitting Universe at Patricia's Yarns. They were very hospitable to yarn loving Shih Tzus who keep their paws off the merch. Macy helped another customer pick a color of yarn the last time I took her over there.
Then I brought it home and started feeling really insecure about the yarn choice. First of all, I have never had a lace project that did not specify the needle size. The ball band and the pattern gave a range of needle sizes, so I didn't even know where to start. Plus, I picked a color other than the recommended black, white or shades thereof. When I start getting insecure it eats at me and definitely puts a damper on the excitement of beginning something new.
So I did a quick search of the messages in the Yahoo group and lo and behold, not only had this question been asked by someone "Omigod I am using Rowan Kidsilk Haze and I don't know what needle size to use! OMG help!" but it had been answered! By list members and the pattern designer, who suggested size 7 needles and assured that it would work.
What a relief!
In addition to that, I am completely loving the resource links! Someone posted a video tutorial on how to do the crochet hook bead adding technique. So much easier than I thought!
And even though I haven't yet needed to add a new ball, I learned about the Russian Join technique.
Clearly I love to learn new things. For the mystery stole, however, I do need to remember not to bring it to my knitting group. My first missed yarn over on Tuesday night requires a bit of surgery.
*As lawyers, when Brian and I first began peeking under the skirt of the great monster that is the knitting universe, we wanted to learn as much as possible and mount our knitting challenges in quick succession. Now that the initial fires have cooled a bit, I had to scale back my thirst for extremely challenging knitting because it is hard to not screw up hard knitting when you don't devote huge chunks of time to it.
