NYS Farm - updates: December 2008

So.. my laptop hath bit the dust. Again. Data retrieved and on a cd, and now I am working on Nora's laptop (see: very old, outdated software and arguing over who's turn it is to either play elementary games or get some work done).

Look! Wintergreen Candy Cane Yarn, self-striping! (please excuse the photo quality. we're working on it but it's a different laptop... did I mention?) I'll get it on the website as soon as it's my turn with the laptop later today...

So it's a snow day today! You know, when we lived in the back of beyond, 4 inches of snow was no big deal. Plow trucks came by at the crack o' dawn and the bus was on time and the kids went to school as usual. Here? 4 inches and every school district gives up and stays home. Had to plow out our own road to get husband off to work, and still haven't seen a city plow truck. So, we're having a snow day. Now, if you'll excuse me, Nora & I have to go shovel some snow, look into building a snowman, and then watch 'Horton Hears a Who'.

...P.S. On a club update note, we're just about ready to ship out the 5th kit of the TsockFlock Tsock Club. Most kits this year have averaged at least 3 skeins of yarn (or skeinlets etc) giving me about 600 things to put in the pot, somehow or another. Somehow, we've wrangled this one into roughly 1400 skeins to go out this ol' round-up. (Love the cowboy-ish references or what?)

Holiday knitting progress:

The answer to my Christmas knitting list: Get the recipients to knit (or crochet) and give them yarn for Christmas. 2 down, 17 to go.

Before I forget, and before those of you who asked for it THINK I forgot, here's the latest in self-striping colorway yarns. Let's call this one 'Promise', and it's already on the website here for you.

And also before I forget, Angie S., come on down! Your the next contestant - no wait, wrong game show. But Angie does win! She was the first correct answer in an email contest for the club members. The most recent Tsock being all Margarita-ish, I asked for the correct origin of 'the worm' in the bottle. Angie was first with the most complete answer, "...Technically, the worm originated in mescal, not tequila, and it is an agave worm. However, mescal can mean anything made with the agave plant including tequila. In 1950, Mexico City entrepreneur Jacobo Lozano Paez hit on the idea of putting a worm in each bottle as a marketing gimmick...."

I'm going to award an Honorary Mention to Waldmaus for her smarty-pants answer: "...I’ll tell you where the worm in the mescal originates. It hatches from an egg, because it is not a worm at all, but a caterpillar, and caterpillars hatch from eggs..."

There were so many of you that sent in an answer on this one, I'll draw a couple of names from the entries as winners as well. Thanks for playing!

So... did you all have a good Holiday (for those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving...)? We actually went to visit family and had a lovely time, and Nora & I had a wonderful head cold which we succeeded in sharing with family. Feel the Love. (Zicam, anyone?)

I would like to say here and now that I took a suitcase of knitting projects - or potential projects, along with a spinning wheel and even fiber. I am thrilled to report that I do indeed remember how to spin (it's been months), and that I can even manage to put sticks & strings together on occasion... though more often than not it's followed by much ripping and cussing. Actually, I've matured. I've grown past the cussing, and now ripp in subdued and sullen silence... oh well.

Take this for example. An exercise in simple cables, because lately it was as if my knitting had become just a way to get to ripping, as if the ripping was the intended purpose all along. Very frustrating. Anyhoo, I began casting on hats. Simple, basic, add a cable... still going ok, getting bored now... the urge to cast on for an aran sweater or something was getting to me but that way just leads to more ripping and so I cast on one more hat allowing myself 'more' cables to keep the boredom at bay. (And while we're at it, let's change the yarn, the guage, and needle size, eh?)

Now up until now, we had a nice run of hats with no ripping - a novelty around here and I was starting to breath a sigh of relief. I mean if baseball curses can be broken... anything could happen and I might break the run of ripping I'd been doing. (though sometimes denial wins and instead of ripping it would get felted as if another felted bowl was the intention all along...)

Denial is a strong thing. I have cast this hat off. It is complete. It has not a single error (we won't speak of the 2 cables I had to fix in row 3 cuz they are fixed now). It is technically, a hat. It does not fit. I knew it was 'snug' at the 1/2 way point. (That's what I called it. Snug.) My grandmother loved the color and kept telling me it was hers. I finished it and handed it over. She tried it on, I guess to see how it looked with her denial as well. Eventually, even she had to admit it did not fit. And so, I will rip it. Perhaps tomorrow, maybe the next day. I find it interesting to note that the yarn I used will indeed felt... oh well. (Does anyone need a felted bowl or three?)

I took a moment at home to show my grandmother the scarves that Stephanie was working on, and she thought that was a pretty good project... and so off to the yarn store we went. On the way home, we actually had to call the house and have someone dig through the stash for needles just in case we had to stop elsewhere - the yarn store was out of straights in that size and she prefers straights. I love that the overwhelming desire to cast on a new project immediately does not fade with age. Here's what she had later in the evening:

My mother was also 'knitting' with us, except she crochets. One minute she's digging through a bag looking for a hook, and then everything gets blurry for a while...