Closing in on finishing the sleeves of the Circus pullover. It's still not clear if I will have enough yarn for the hood.

And you know, I was thinking - as much as I like KnitPicks, one of the things that annoys me about them is their habit of carrying a yarn for a short period of time and then putting it on clearance, never to sell it again. They seem to do it with 'off-season' yarns a lot - last spring, all the bulky heavy wools went, and now, they're selling out the laceweight yarns for summer shawls.

I guess the people who run the business either don't realize (or don't care) that people knit things from various weights of yarn all year around. What I really want - and what Patternworks used to be (I'm still not convinced they are back to their former glory) - is a yarn store or yarn catalogue that carries a diversity of types of yarn, and stocks them "forever", as much as is possible with the vagaries of yarn companies. I don't particularly need to have new yarns presented to me every week, and I especially don't like to see that a yarn I was contemplating is now no longer being sold because it's not "seasonal". I don't like feeling pressured to "buy now or forever hold your peace."

and eKnitting, which used to be one of my favorites, is long gone.

My "dream" online yarn shop would be one with an immense, Amazon.com-like warehouse full of good dye-lot quantities of a huge variety of yarns - not just the lines from a few selected companies. They would only "sell out" or clearance a yarn when it was down to the last few skeins of a particular dyelot, and then they'd immediately reorder a new dyelot.

but of course, there aren't enough knitters for there to be an Amazon.com of knitting, I guess.