Well, it was a Grand Day Out (for those who are going "that's familiar but I don't know from where," I'm taking it from the Wallace and Gromit short film where they build a space ship and go to the moon. Because Wallace is out of cheese, see, and tea is no good without cheese.)

I went to the yarn shop first - here's the haul (plus a couple items acquired elsewhere):


Okay, at the bottom of the photo is five skeins of Cascade 220 in a beautiful baby-leaf-green heather (those who read my blog regularly probably have noticed that if I have a choice of colors, very often the choice will be green). I am going to use it for the zig-zag cabled "Skye Tweed Vest" that was in the Spring 2005 Interweave. (It's shown on a nice older man who reminds me of the "kindly vicar" in every British novel I've read). I think it will make a handsome vest and I'm totally excited about it. It will probably be my next big sweater type project after I finish Fibonacci.

Working up, you can see three skeins of Kureyon which will eventually become a Booga bag - either for me or for a gift, I'm not sure yet. There's also a skein of silly brown fun fur type yarn - that is part of Mrs. D.'s present-to-be. I'm going to use the rest of my blue Highland wool to make her a Booga bag, and use the brown fun fur on the top (Blue and brown together are her favorite colors). I also bought one skein of Artful Yarn's "Heavenly" to try out - I'm going to make the wristwarmer pattern that's on the ball band.

And there are two skeins of Trekking XXL sockyarn - one a mint green and pink probably-will-jacquard and the other a chocolate brown and pink combination.

And the pink, orange, and yellow worsted weight yarn will be for a pair of heavy socks, probably knit at a tight gauge, because it's not designated as sockyarn, so I'll need to knit them tightly to wear well.

There are also three skeins of pink "Divine;" that came from the Michael's as did the copy of the new Knit It! (I haven't really looked at that yet).

I also found the new Knitscene magazine; I'll do a review in more detail Monday but for now I'll say I thought I was going to be disappointed but I wasn't.

And there's the Charlene Schurch socks book. I really thought I didn't need another sock book (well, other than the Nancy Bush one, but that's because it's a Nancy Bush one). But I started flipping through this at the yarn shop and - yeah, if you're an avid sock knitter who likes doing texture and lace designs, you NEED this book. It's awesome. And I've not even had time to really sit down and look at it in detail yet. But there are a bunch of stitch-patterns in there that I had looked at in my Barbara Walker treasuries and said to myself, "If I can figure out how to circularize that and make it run in the opposite direction, I'm going to use that for socks." Not that I'm being lazy and not designing my own stuff, but you know, it's nice not to have to reinvent the wheel sometimes. Or, for those who are scientists: it's nice to have a procedure that's been tested, found to work, and is written up in the literature.

I also went a bunch of other places. Had a nice lunch and even got dinner out. Did a lot of Christmas shopping (mostly silly small items that will amuse people). More on that later. It was a good day. (I'm rushing through this entry because I have some data to type up before I can go drop my quilt off:)

Thursday afternoon (and Friday evening, after I got home, until late - later than I usually stay up!) I finished the Paris Flea Market quilt and am going to take it down to be quilted today:



I'm pretty happy with it. This was going to be my 'summer' quilt with a thin cotton batting but I think I'm going to go up one more thickness on the cotton than originally intended and use it as an "I wish spring would hurry and get here" quilt.