spaaaah

Oh happy joy joy! I'm back! I will spare you all the drama and will only say "Good Bye Internet Explorer, Hello Firefox!!!". No more crashing!

Enough of that. I need to catch up!

This past weekend I went to the annual Spa, Knit and Spin at the Doubletree Hotel here in Portland with some friends, where we engaged in some SERIOUS yarn fondling, but not much buying.

Here's Lori with a serious case of yarn lust:and Porsche (yes, that's her real name) demonstrating her method of deciding if a yarn is soft enough to buy with some Alchemy Silk Purse. Unfortunately, the cost factor sometimes exceeds the desirability factor.

Aimee, on the other hand, inhales...

I practiced tremendous self-restraint and only walked away with a two little skeins of sock yarn, On Line Supersocke 100 Tropic Color #931:

and this sweet little number from Spunky Eclectic: Skinny Socks Hand painted merino in color way "Dinah". I love supporting local vendors, and this gal, Amy King, sure was spunky! Her stall drew such a big crowd that we waited in a line 3 deep just to get a chance to ogle here wares. It was well worth it! It almost made me want to knit giant lace shawls just to have a reason to buy more.

After exhausting ourselves at Spa, we gathered at Yosaku for the best Japanese food I've ever had and hauled out our show and tell over Sake.

Aimee showed off her "Dave Sock" (for her husband) and explained how she modified the toe to accommodate his foot:

Lori showed off her Debbie Bliss cardigan in Malabrigo - we won't talk about the little row counting error discovered the next day -it involved frogging and cutting ("ouch").

Porsche, an ambitious new knitter, has already started amassing a UFO collection:

I hauled out Bailey....

Oh yeah, you don't know about Bailey!!! Remember how I fell in love with the Natural Malabrigo back in December after charting this pattern with some scrap and then and couldn't find any? Yarnzilla came to my rescue! 4 skeins arrived last week and I've put everything else on hold to finish this scarf while it's still cold enough to wear! Unfortunately, I suffered my own little mishap:A miss-crossed cable. Pooh! I figured that I had 3 choices:

1. tink back to the mistake and fix it (48 rows)
2. knock back a stiff drink and fix it using Cara's method
3. fuggetabout it.

I chose option 3. Of course this meant that I had to intentionally make the mistake again to get things going back in the right direction. If it were a sweater, I would have chosen option #1 or 2, but given that this is a scarf and that it will be wrapped around my neck most of the time, I decided to live with it. 40 inches down, 20 to go. See, I've nearly forgotten about it already.

In the meantime, I've finished knitting the front, back and sleeves of CPH and only need to block them before seaming the shoulders and starting the front facings and hood. There's only one teeny tiny little problem: while working the sleeve decreases, I accidentally omitted a decrease row (actually 2 rows were omitted if you consider the purl row too) and instead of binding off 18 stitches at the top of the sleeve cap, I have 20. I did it on both sleeves (hey, if you do it twice it's no longer a mistake, it's a "modification"). The question is: will this make a difference when I attach the sleeves? I've considered working 2 extra rows before binding off, which will not only give me the correct number of stitches, but will also give me back the 2 lost rows. On the other hand, I've already snipped the working yarn and will probably need to re-join another skein. What do you think?

Geez I'm happy to be able to post again! Wahoo!