Well, I got my most-recent quilted quilt back today. It looks good - I still have to install the binding, which is always a step I tend to delay (lots of handsewing involved).

Also, in the course of errand-running this weekend, I stopped at Hobby Lobby and at JoAnn's. I was greatly disappointed to find that neither one carried 12" pillowforms (which I wanted for the Squarey I will eventually knit - it's a square pillowshaped object, but it has arms and legs - sort of a pillow/toy hybrid. From the Jessica Hutchinson booklet. I have some lovely gold, burgundy, and deep-green wools that will match my living room...)

Also: Hobby Lobby seems to be bracing for the death of hipness of knitting and crochet. Or at least my local one is. (It could just be the climate. But JoAnn's was also getting rid of lots of the non-Red Heart yarns. Maybe it's the economy; maybe people only buy the inexpensive yarns from them and those that buy more expensive yarns go elsewhere. I don't know). Anyway - Hobby Lobby had put on clearance all of its Kool Wool (it's been that way for a while) but also the self-striping Lion Brand sockyarn. And the Landscapes, which makes me kind of sad - it was one of the Lion yarns I liked fairly well. Expensive, yes, and there are probably more reasonably priced alternatives online - but sometimes, you just need to go out somewhere and buy a physical ball of yarn in the flesh, so to speak, rather than sending a pixelated version of your money off for a pixelated version of yarn, and then hoping that everything works out so that the pixelated yarn becomes real shortly after your pixelated money becomes real....


I did buy some Landscapes. Not as much as I might have at an earlier point in time, when I didn't wake each morning to see my auxiliary yarn-stash boxes at the foot of my bed. But I did get some in a brown mix with blues and some in a bright mix with turquioses - I think this will be the Year of the Hat for Christmas gifts and I'm going to make that big chunky watchcap that was in Real Simple a number of years ago. The brown-and-blue is for a family friend who loves that color combination, and the with turquoise will be for my mom - it is a color combination that should look good on her.

I resisted buying any of the Kool Wool, even though it's another yarn I liked (my understanding is it's been totally discontinued; not made any more) but I have enough odds and ends in my stash for whatever projects I'd want to make.

I will say there was an abundance of the mostly-tacky Yarn Bee (Hobby Lobby's house brand) lines. Maybe they're getting rid of all other brands in favor of those. Which is a mistake, IMHO. Most of the Yarn Bee yarns disappoint me - they are cute color combinations, or a nifty concept, but most of them feel SO plasticy that I might as well be knitting with a Wal-Mart bag. Even the "baby" yarns weren't all that nice.

If Hobby Lobby's choice of replacement-items for the decent-quality yarn they're clearancing is any guess, be poised for embroidery (especially punch-needle) to be the Next Big Thing.

Not that there's anything wrong with that; I like embroidery (and I found a v. cute pack of Clover designs of various animals at Hobby Lobby; there's a hedgehog in it and also sheep. Although, oddly, they recommend doing the embroidery with some kind of tool they sell - I suppose it's like a punchneedle. I wonder how many people read that kind of thing and reflexively buy the tool without thinking that they could just as well do the embroidery with a basic needle and just vary the stitches?)

But it does make me sad, the Next Big Thing and the Thing that Was the Big Thing but Now is Not mentality. It's like - here, you got thousands of people learning to knit, and now you're going to yank the rug out from under them? (Yes, I know most people are smart enough or savvy enough to use the internet or mailorder services, but still). Won't there come a point where people look at whatever the Big Thing of this year is and go, eh, I'm not gonna bother, because it will be hard to find supplies when this loses steam? At least, that's how I'd feel.

I will say I'm glad there are places like Morehouse Farms and Blackberry Ridge and Elann out there where they are pretty much committed to one thing, and they don't have to shift and change with trends. And I'm also glad that there are enough quilting maniacs that the quilt shops I frequent are unlikely to go away any time soon, even if local sources of yarn dry up.

But the promotion-of-fickleness that seems to be a hallmark of a lot of non-specialist stores bugs me. (Just like it bugs me that Clairol has TOTALLY retooled its Herbal Essences line and given each product a cutesy cloying tagline, and also changed the formulations. I had a shampoo in that line I liked, and that was good for my hair, and now they don't make it any more. Feh. I hate having to audition new shampoos and conditioners every couple months, and I can't quite bring myself to pay $10 a bottle for some salon brand.). Perhaps it's just a societal thing - loyalty to jobs has pretty much died with the risk of downsizing, loyalty of employers to employee died with the mania for pleasing stockholders and paying huge executive salaries, loyalty in relationships doesn't seem to be what it used to be, loyalty to a moral code doesn't seem to exist for many people...I suppose I shouldn't complain about a company making what was The Perfect Shampoo for me and then deciding its products didn't skew "young" enough, and so having to put irritating snarky faux-hip taglines on them, and package them in weird modernistic bottles, became necessary.

I also suppose the promotion of fickleness is either a cause of those "in vs. out" lists that most glossy magazines run, or perhaps both are a larger symptom of some lurking variable in our society (can you tell I've been reading the statistics book I was hired to evaluate?). But whatever it is, it annoys me - the "in vs. out" lists where there's no consideration that people might actually LIKE some of the things designated as "out" better than the things designated as "in." The Cult of Newness, I guess.