Started the mitts last night. After the chart-mess was figured out* they go pretty fast. I'm up to row 30 (after which you begin the thumb gusset). The yarn isn't as spectacular in color as the yarn pictured (it's much more Earth Mother in its tones) but you can still see the little twisted-stitch design ok.

(*not to be snarky, but how could that chart get printed so spectacularly wrong? I mean, it's not like the meanings of symbols were reversed or anything simple like that - some of the symbols meant something totally apart from what they were printed as meaning. You could not possibly have figured out the correction from the information given in the chart. And you couldn't from the Walker books either [I tried that before going online] because the symbols used are different and the one stitch where you basically k3 tog while knitting through the front, back, front of the stitch isn't even listed in the Walker books. You know, perhaps knitting books, especially ones with many pattern-writers, need to do what scientific journals do - send out proofs to each author, with dire warnings to check and read and correct the proofs within a week or else face the consequences of getting something wrong published. Or maybe they already do that. I don't know. It's just that typoes annoy the heck out of me.)

Also, the new KnitPicks catalog came in the mail. I know, I've complained sundry places about their apparent elimination of all but their own house-brand yarn. And I really can't tell whether the house brand yarns are (a) a fantastic deal for the price because they're high quality, (b) okay but just okay, good for folks with lots of gift-knitting to do, or (c) cheap and cruddy and probably the deathknell for what was once a good company. I've not tried any of them. In the interest of full disclosure, I did order some of the sock yarns, but have not knit any up yet. I will say the one called "Sock Garden" seems distressingly softly spun, like it would pill to oblivion after the first couple wearings.

I want to believe the yarns fit category (a) but I have to admit that I'm sort of a cynic. I remember the early days of generic house-brand foods - when they'd come in plain white or plain yellow boxes or cans with "CREAMED CORN" or "DOG FOOD" or "COFFEE FILTERS" written in big black letters. 'Member that? And at least the house-brands at the grocery where my parents shopped were frankly kind of dismal compared to national brands. And you know, there was something that seemed (to me at least) kind of, I don't know, "1984" or maybe Zamaiatin's "We" about the whole thing. You know, like Victory Coffee - which is as much like the real thing as chalk is like cheese, but you have to buy it anyway. It always depressed me to buy those products.

And now, of course, the store brands have morphed into things like "President's Choice" and "Essentsia" (or however it's spelt; I also can't stand it when companies try to "Europeanise" words by giving them wonky spellings) which are really quite good and are in some cases better than the national brands. But I don't know. I still have the spectre of those round white drums of "ROLLED OATS" or cans of (horrible, nasty, enough to put me off canned vegetables forever) "WAX BEANS" hanging in the back of my head.

So, as I said, I don't know. (I say that a lot, don't I?). I suppose at some point I'll order maybe a scarf's worth of the worsted-weight stuff, and work it up, and see what it's like. But for every bottle of Essentia blueberry 100% juice you find that is delicious, I kind of think that there's a box of dusty-tasting house-brand chocolate chip cookies that you wind up with because they seemed like a good idea at the time.