I've been neglecting this blog shamelessly to play with Ravelry and feed my fiber addiction. Exciting stuff. It's hard to explain how great Ravelry is to people who can't try it out for themselves (you have to be invited to be a beta-tester at this point). It really appeals to people who like to make lists. It's really great for networking, looking at other people's projects, etc.

For example, I met an excellent dyer at Stitches Midwest last week. Her work is really amazing, she is a lot of fun, and she goes to my alma mater. We talked for fifteen minutes at the show and later connected via Ravelry. Now, I can see the yarn and roving that she's dyeing, what other people are making with her stuff, and buy the things that I regretted leaving at the store. I'll add a link later. Back in the old days, all of this would have required endless emailing, websearches, or paper catalogs.

Stitches was amazing, as always. It's an annual knitting convention (though crocheters won't be treated like lepers), featuring classes and loads of shopping opportunities. I acquired a lot of fiber. When I say a lot, I mean enough to feel the burn in my forearm the next day from lugging it around. I hadn't felt that in a long time! I prepared a list of projects I want to make and the pertinent yarn details, with the help of my Ravelry queue, and did pretty well. Webs had a well stocked booth of many things on markdown. Yarn on sale around knitters is like blood in the water near sharks. Fortunately, these were polite, midwestern knitters, so there was no trampling, elbowing, or pushiness. I bought some beautiful, pale aqua tweed yarn to make an cabled cardigan. If you look at my Flickr badge in the sidebar, you can see some of my haul.


I feel ready for big woolly jumpers, cardigans, and cables. In other words, I'm ready for autumn. Today was cool enough to wear a sweater, so I wore my current favorite, a green wool hooded pullover with moss stitch detail and cable panels on the body and sleeves. I got loads of compliments and even one inquiry about my pricing on knitwear. They seemed shocked when I named my price. Later, the designer that I assist told me that I've been underpricing my work, so I can only imagine the look a fair price would have gotten!


I'm also on a sock kick again (or at least a sock yarn buying kick). I think this is because of my recently acquired toe up skills. It's pretty neat! My desire to make socks is a little silly considering how rarely I wear them. I certainly wish that I'd worn some today. I got caught in a downpour while wearing a pair of Birki Superclogs. If you've never seen them, I should explain: they're plastic with a cork liner. The cork liner got wet and went squish, squish, squish as I walked. The damp plastic against the top of my foot wasn't too hot either. I've heard that this is less of a problem with Crocs, but I just can't wear them. I need arch support. My feet have gotten really spoiled after a few years of Danskos and I just can't go back to non-supportive shoes. As a result, my shoe wardrobe is basically clogs and Docs.


Well, I feel a bit better about blogging now. It's been on the to-do list for a while. I got out my old laptop to stream a movie from Netflix. I'm a Mac user and they don't support Mac (even with flip4mac, it says my system won't support it). So, I powered up my laptop and prepared to lounge in bed with, say, Sense and Sensibility. Small snag: Netflix doesn't support my Windows OS either. Now, I know that Mac users aren't as numerous as Windows users, though a lot of people are making the switch. Mac users are early adopters. We could really get behing something like Netflix streaming video service if they'd support it for us. I could really get behind it if it didn't want me to upgrade my Windows OS to XP. That simply is not going to happen.