Score!

One of my favorite lunch time activities when I'm bored is to go wander around the local thrift shop. I've found some decent deals there - the occasional cone of mystery yarn, a nice sweater to unravel, and of course lots of books! Today, I made the ultimate score though.

As I walked over to the section where they tend to put bags of assorted things, I spotted yarn...then I got closer...and then I realized that there were about 8 or 9 huge bags of yarn. I must have looked like a crazy person because I started pulling down all the bags and looking at each bag to figure out what kinds of yarn were in there and in what colors. Some had rug yarn, not great for my uses, but I narrowed it down to 5 bags that I just HAD to have (so much for destashing). Usually I expect to score some vintage looking acrylic at the thrift store but these bags had yarn marked as 100% wool, 100% cotton, and one has yarn that's 80/20 wool/nylon already wound into balls. Did somebody say socks? Lots of them? There's also a ton of hanks in natural colors - white, cream, grey and light beige - that are perfect for dyeing. :)

I estimate that I ended up with probably 100 balls or yarn in some form or another, for the ridiculously bargain price of $30! I cannot wait to get them out of my car and sort through them. In the meantime, I took some fuzzy pics with my camera phone because I was too excited to actually wait until I had my camera in my possession! Here are the bags taking up the majority of the back seat in my car. I really hope my husband doesn't kill me for this one!
What was your greatest thrift store find?

An il"loom"inating past time

As part of a swap I'm involved with on craftster - sort of an ongoing thing - I claimed a potholder loom to play with. You may remember these from when you were a kid - square with a bunch of pegs to weave between? I know I don't remember having them in England when I was a child, but I've been intrigued by weaving for a while so I figured this was a great way to play around and see how much I'd want to really get into it!

The loom came with a ton of nylon loops, which to me seem completely pointless because it's not like you can put hot things on top of nylon anyway (assuming of course you're going with the original intent of the loom for making potholders). I found a couple of videos on youtube, to get me started and spent the next 20 minutes of my lunch break weaving squares with some vintage wool tapestry yarn in my possession. The resulting woven piece is actually very pleasing and I'm happy with my first attempts at weaving! I don't think I'll be using these first couple of squares for potholders though - more likely to keep weaving a few more squares and then sew them together into something like a bag or pillow. I think that weaving in general has a slightly higher start-up cost than most of the other crafts that I do and I know eventually I would love to make beautiful scarves, pillows, afghans etc. but I may have to work my way up.

A productive day off

There isn't really anything fun about having to wake up at 7:00am on your day off to let in the workers who are continuing to demolish things in your house. Having said that, I had a very productive day.

After a little Guitar Hero, and watching them tile the walls for a little bit, I took a little trip to the Salvation Army Thrift Store a few miles from my house. Firstly, the place is huge. Figuring out where to start was a challenge, but I had also taken note of the 50% off store wide sign on the way in so was definitely determined to find something good! About 45 minutes later, I had found quite the load.

• Soft pink cardigan with brown collar: Wool/angora blend, bulky weight yarn that is buttery soft. If I had to liken it to a commercial yarn, I'd say Malabrigo! This one is already half unraveled and has come apart beautifully with no knots and no argument.
• Red Benetton sweater: 100% Merino wool and put together raglan style with no seams!! It's laceweight so may take a while to unravel but the no seams thing makes me a little giddy.
• Lemon sweater: 100% cashmere. It's a women's small but nonetheless I had to snatch it up. Best part about it? It was $0.95.
• Men's tweed sweater: Nice 100% wool in good condition. It is a tweedy yarn but is also begging to be overdyed.
  

The grand total price was $5.45 and I also found out that they have the 50% off sale on the last Friday of every month. I know where I'll be spending those Fridays!

I did have to run off to a lunch with some clients from work, but fortunately they're great guys and it's not a business lunch in the boring sense, so that was a good break. Then I had promised the husband to make moussaka for dinner. It's one of those meals that my mom used to make and that I loved as a kid but never tried for myself. This is the recipe I used and it turned out great. It took exactly an hour to prepare and then an hour and fifteen to bake. To top it off, our friend is on his way over with carrot cake for dessert! I could have dealt with a chance to sleep in but I definitely can't complain about how the day's been overall. =)

'Tis shiny indeed

Our anniversary evening was lovely last night. We exchanged gifts (I got him an xbox 360, he got me a watch) and then went out to dinner. The server at the restaurant coincidentally was the same guy that headed up the waitstaff on the evening of our wedding reception that we had there. He gets two thumbs up from me! After dinner, we went to Best Buy to get a second controller for the xbox and then played a few rounds of Kung Fu Panda with the new toy. I am pretty much horrendous when it comes to video games, although he has now been instructed where to get a good deal on Guitar Hero for me. Hehe.

So, on the more crafty end of things, I've been hearing about people unraveling sweaters and reclaiming yarn for a while. I've never been one for patience when it comes to thrifting, but while out searching for a horrible holiday sweater for a party this weekend, I figured I'd take a look at some other sweaters to give recycling the yarn a try. I found a nice cabled sweater in a cream color. The fiber is a wool/cotton/acrylic blend and it was $5.99 at the local thrift shop.

With a little help from this tutorial, I have so far removed one sleeve, which came apart pretty easily. There were a few knots and breaks while unraveling the first sleeve, but overall a quick and easy experience. The yarn appears to be about fingering weight and I have no idea how much yardage so far, but the ball I made is about 4 inches in diameter. That's just from one sleeve! I'm going to be able to make a lot of socks with this I think...and I also think it's going to encourage me to experiment with dying the yarn. Yup, I might be out of control!

My so called yarn

I had ordered a drop spindle and roving from a farm on localharvest.org last week, so that I could make a few first attempts at spinning my own yarn. It arrived on Monday and of course, I spent quite a bit of that afternoon furtively spinning up the roving in my office at every opportunity I could. Waiting for a report to run? Spin the yarn. Waiting for the printer? Spin the yarn. Well, you get the idea.
Anyway, 48 hours later, I have 28 yards of something that could be mistaken for yarn in my possession. I took it home last night to set the twist and dry it. Then I woke up this morning, pulled it off the shower head and have my first mini-hank of joy!

I'm calling it watermelon. I know that much more practice is needed until I have something that looks more "regular" so to speak, and of course I have ordered more roving already because I'm almost through the practice wool that I bought. As if I need another obsession? Oh well. =)

Knit stitch overdose!

I am in the process of creating woolly items for the winter - to sell in my Etsy store, at an upcoming craft fair (held annually at my workplace) and also to give to friends for holiday gifts. In particular, I have wanted to find some fun knit stitches for scarves and, in my mad googling ventures, I came across the site Knitting Fool. This site has to contain the most comprehensive list of knit stitches that I have seen to date!

The stitches are all cataloged alphabetically by name, with an easy to read grid the number of stitches and number of rows needed to complete the pattern. You even have the option to sort the list by the stitch count in case you are looking for a certain number of stitches. My only complaint would be that not all of the patterns have accompanying pictures, so it leaves a little to the imagination (but I can't complain too much because I can imagine it would take forever to knit swatches for each of the stitch patterns on the site)!

Here's my simple lace pattern for today, I'm not sure what it's called, but I believe it's a variation of the Faggot lace stitch:
Cast on any multiple of 3.
K1, yo, k2tog for each row until piece is desired length

It's simple yet effective, plus it's a reversible pattern. Enjoy!