LYS Envy

I was at the theatre yesterday, working on the interminable tech production that somehow doesn't do anything technical in its tech rehearsals, when one of my friends gave me a little card. There is a yarn shop a pleasant walking distance from the theatre. Naturally, I went there, even though I probably won't need anything from a yarn shop for a year. It was amazing. Hip, lovely, lots of space, great couches, great help, okay prices. It was very cute. I resisted the urge to buy all sorts of fabulous, unusual yarns from places like France and South Africa. I bought patterns and darning needles. You can never have too many darning needles. Hell, it feels like I can never have enough, as I keep losing them. As I was leaving, I thought, why can't this LYS be near my house? Why do I have to have the somewhat unhelpful, old lady LYS near my house? My actually local LYS doesn't have velvet couches or wine tasting nights or even an appealing layout. However, if the hip young knitter LYS was near my house, I would never have a cent. So, maybe these things happen for a reason.
My Indiana LYS (actually only 20 miles away, according to my trip odometer) is having a big sale, as I mentioned before. Well, I had to go see it for myself, and ended up leaving with another project. It was on sale, though, an excellent buy. That's how knitters justify these things. This really was a steal. I had previously salivated over the t-shirt sweater pattern in the Ella Rae book (currently being knit by the lovely lady of Blue Blog).It's knit in hand-dyed alpaca, in perfect Piscean shades of blue, teal, and aqua. It looked kind of strange in its skinny little hanks, but I can make that leap of faith. Look how lovely it is once it is wound up! Well, I'd thought long and hard about buying it at another LYS which I will call Markup Central. It was on sale there too, except it started off with a $10 markup. Shameless! Well, I didn't buy it them because I was planning to buy all sorts of fiber on my trip (which I did). Good decision, since I snapped it up for $4.50 a skein and $6 for the book of patterns instead of $14 a skein at Markup Central. That's a cheap project for such a fabulous fiber!
I also picked up the Chicago-based hand-dyed yarn that I wanted to make another Classy Drug Rug. The colors are a little outrageous, but I think that I will like the end result. It is a little hard to envision an entire sweater out of it, as you can see here. So much for my denying a love of the color pink. Really, I love blues and greens; I'm a total Pisces. But pink makes me happy. It can be very flattering to my rosy cheeks (or tired, hungover eyes). So, I own a lot of pink things, but I'm not a pink person. Maybe it's a phase. I'm really rediscovering color after so many years of black. I wasn't a Goth: it's a professional hazard in theatre. You may end up with a closet full of black clothing.