More Sock Yarn, Yarn Stores in Tulsa and a Tow Truck

I went home to visit my parents, sister and nieces this weekend and to finally have Christmas. On Saturday my sister and I headed to Tulsa to visit a yarn store or two. The first store we visited was Naturally Needlepoint and Knitting. They were having a sale. 25% off everything in the store and more on some items. I bought more sock yarn.

I think I do that because sock yarn makes socks. You don't have to have a project in mind. The two skeins on the left are Regia. Jeri had the fantastic idea to combine two complimentary sock yarns to make her own pattern. I love how they look so I'm borrowing the idea. The top skein has dashes of color - green and light blue. The bottom skein is multiple colors of brown and blue. I think it will make for an interesting pair of socks. I can't wait to get started but I have to finish a couple of other pairs first.

The other yarn is Wildfoote from Brown Sheep. It's superwash and dyeable (I hope). I like to dye my own sock yarn, but I don't want to have to hand wash the finished product.
I didn't buy anything at Loops in Utica Square, but the store was wonderful. They had small groups of people knitting throughout the store. You didn't feel like you were intruding on just one small group. Everyone was very friendly.

We did hit a small snag finding Loops because we didn't have the exact address. While we were driving around we cut a corner a little short and hit the curb, then we drove over the curb. There was nothing on the other side so the tire was suspended in mid-air. Fortunately the tow truck made it in about 20 minutes and he unstuck the car in about 10 minutes. I had my camera to commemorate the moment.

Once unstuck, Jeannie asked a security guard where the store was. He gave us a personal escort to the store. Loops had a play room for the girls and Jeannie and I got to love on the yarn as long as we wanted.

I would definitely visit both stores again.

Swatcha Doin'

Here's a picture of a few yarns I've swatched recently.

The Den-M-Nit is from Elann. I bought one ball of each color. In the skein and even on screen I like the medium denim color. In person I like the dark denim better.

The upper right corner is a swatch of the blue and green kool-aid dyeing I did last Sunday. I just love how that came out.

The lower right hand swatch is the Autumn Flash colorway. I knit this tiny swatch so I could wash and dry it to make sure the superwash would hold the dye. It turned out fine. I do think I will give the finished socks a swim in vinegar just to be sure the dye is set before I wash and wear them for the first time.

It Rained - Praise the Lord - I Dyed Yarn

We woke up to rain this morning for the first time since Halloween - Praise the Lord. I wanted to dye some yarn and since I was going to have to be inside it was going to have to be short skeins. After church, I put on my dyeing clothes, got out the tape measure, my notebook, kool-aid and yarn and got busy.

The first skein I dyed was an 8ft test skein of knitpicks fingering weight dye your own. I put two chairs 4 feet apart to create a skein that totals 8 feet. The diagram below shows how I put the colors together. Changin' Cherry is a great turquoise color and artic apple is a yellow green.


The colors are great together and pictures in no way do them justice. I would definitely use these colors together again.

I had some kool-aid left over and I also have some knitpicks alpaca cloud in "sunshine" which is sort of cream. I dunked it in three of the colors.

Creating a skein that looks like this.

Here are the colors close up. I intentionally soaked these colors longer for more saturation. I didn't get a chance to knit this up tonight so I don't know how it's going to look. I made a 4ft skein by wrapping the yarn around a two ft ruler. In the picture above the colors are out of order. The lime green color on the right is actually in the middle. It will appear as two short repeats. The turquoise and blue are each one long repeat. I really like the turquoise and blue together, I'm not so sure about the bright limey green. I'm anxious to see how this knits up.

I have in mind to use this stole pattern to create a lace scarf . We'll see how that adaption works.

I should probably also mention the green sweater is coming along. I started the third ball of yarn and I'm nearing the 8" mark. I figure I'm going for 12" or 13". Then I get to start shaping the top.

More Sock Yarn

The last thing I needed was more yarn. However, I was in Addison this afternoon with time on my hands and Desert Design Knits just down the street. They had three big bins of sale yarn and the sock yarns caught my eye. I liked this yarn in particular because of the dashes of color rather than stripes. I don't know how a great deal it was, but I paid $10 for the two skeins.

The Frog Pond

The green sweater is headed to the frog pond. Rather than completely frog it now, I thought I wind the remaining part of skein 2 around the knitted part of the sweater. Then when I get back to it, I will frog it as I knit.
That's the sweater tucked nice and neat inside that ball.

Summer Sweater

I started a cute summer sweater from garnstudio.com. Here's the link to the pattern. http://www.garnstudio.com/lang/en/visoppskrift.php?d_nr=60&d_id=4&lang=us
It's not the best picture because the model is laying on the sweater, but I gathered from the pattern that it was the perfect first sweater for me.

Last summer I came across a sale at PassionKnit in Dallas and bought 7 skeins of Praemium Egyptian gassed mercerized cotton in a lovely pale green color (see 979 below). It was $2.25 per skein and I bought all they had. I've been waiting for the yarn to tell me what it wants to be. When I saw the sweater pattern above, I knew the yarn had spoken.

See how shiny it is!

I started knitting last Monday. I realized today my gauge is slightly off and the sweater is huge. Well the 5" that are done are too big. A big thanks to Jeri for helping me figure out what to do about it. I have to frog what I have, and start over with fewer stitches on smaller needles. It's OK though. I plan to wear this on the cruise in February, but I still have time.
Garnstudio.com also has patterns for den-m-nit yarn. I recently order 3 balls from Elann. I ordered 1 of each color. At the time I just wanted to see what the yarn was like and I knew it was kind of silly to buy single balls because what project can you make with one ball. But now I'm thinking, if I can make this sweater pattern work, I can make a striped version using the three different colors of den-m-nit even if I have to order more balls of yarn and they are they a different lot number, I can mix the lots in the stripes and it will look intentional.

Or I'll make a pillow case for a decorative pillow. That works too. Exciting projects lay ahead.