Woolgirl Oz Sock Club - Emerald City

The next kit in my Woolgirl Oz sock club has arrived, this time themed for the Emerald City. It also marks the start of a new Oz kit every month! Most of the year the club is on an every other month basis, but starting with this kit there will be one every month from September (this one was late and shipped in Oct., but was listed as a Sept. kit) through January. I seriously need to learn to knit a lot faster!

************ Spoilers from this point on! ************

So here it is all wrapped up like a gift:

And here it is unpacked:

The green corduroy fabric is a zippered bag from Sheila D - a bit small to hold an entire ball/cake of sock yarn, but large enough for the rest of what came with the kit. There's also another nice pen, this time with an appropriate green highlighter on top. The little Emerald City stitch marker is adorably detailed and was obviously a labor of love, and the Emerald City tin is going to be great for keeping track of little knitting accessories.

Although I held out the first night, I was anxious to try the Madelinetosh tosh sock yarn and cast on the next night (although this photo includes progress from a few nights):

I was also looking forward to trying my new Kollage square metal sock needles. I bought a set of US size 1 in anticipation of needing them for one of the Oz kits since some of the fingering weight sock yarn seems to require tiny needles. I already like working with them, but this pattern has been going really slowly for me. I think it's partly the tiny needles and partly the fact that I've acquired so much yarn in my stash and feel like I'm not knitting nearly fast enough.

But I'm trying to avoid burning myself out so I've been working on my first adult-sized sweater, too. It's nice to be able to switch to bigger needles and an easy pattern that doesn't require a lot of concentration on charts. I don't think these socks will be all that complicated, just a long labor of love. Plus, there's the possibility of some fall knits that might steal my attention, too, so we'll see.

Socks and a sweet gift

Since I've been keeping my sock club socks to myself I felt like it had been a long time since I'd made some for my husband, so I was determined to squeeze in a pair for him before starting the next club shipment. I let him pick the yarn, and even though it promised to be flashy, he chose Yarn Love's Marianne Dashwood in the Mr. Wonderful colorway. He is my Mr. Wonderful, after all!

So I worked up some Mr. Wonderful socks two at a time using Magic Loop on my new 40” Addi Lace Turbos. The yarn didn't disappoint on the flashy front - it pooled even more brightly than I expected. So I stuck with a tiny cable pattern and let the yarn do all of the talking this time since it obviously had so much to say! They ended up a little long, but otherwise seem to fit him well and they've already seen a lot of use keeping his feet warm in the house.

Two at a time on the same circular needle and yet they still pooled rather differently!

And of course with socks this bright I'll know that if he loses one or both it's because he was really trying to get rid of them! (I'm kidding - no, he doesn't have a history of losing socks anyway.)

Now I don't have updated photos of some of the other projects yet, but I do have a photo of this:


An awesome birthday present from Mr. Wonderful himself - a beautiful, hand made swift from a nearby woodworker! I love it! It spins so smoothly and silently and the best part is that both the arms and legs of it quickly fold together for storage and it came with a small storage bag for the movable pegs. It's a major knitting accessory, so I definitely have to keep knitting now!

Too Quiet

It might be noticeable that although I did manage to get through all of my Stitches recap, things have since stalled and it seems that none of us have anything to blog about. But it's not true.

There hasn't been a complete lack of knitting - I've finished a new pair of socks and started the second sock of a pair that has been waiting in the wings too long - there's just been a lack of photographic proof. I've been traveling on the weekend and much busier after work than usual and by the time I have a little spare time before bed I sit down for a quick bit of knitting instead of snapping photos of said knitting.

But, there is the promise of a little more spare time on the horizon, so I predict new knitting photos soon...ish. After all, there are more Woolgirl sock kits (both in hand and on their way) and even the start of my very first sweater attempt, just waiting at home for me to have time to pose them and give them their proper photo shoots. In the meantime, here's a random yarn photo and a reminder of ambitions to keep working through the stash!

Stitches Midwest Recap: The End

Sunday, Sept. 13 - It was our last day at Stitches, so we spent most of the morning getting ready to go and packing our things into the car. We moved the car to the Convention Center parking lot and headed into the Market for our last-minute browsing and to wait for the results of the final raffle. We didn't win any of the big prizes, but we did squeeze in some final purchases - some in sweater quantities, even! Mmm, some nice squishy Alpaca for me.

We decided to stop for one last lunch in Schaumburg before we left and ended up at the nearby Weber Grill restaurant. After a pretty quick lunch we were on the road and we even followed the original directions to avoid the Chicago traffic this time. The trip home was pretty uneventful and we were home by sometime around 9pm after the time zone change.

Random trip notes:

• We're pretty much convinced that everyone in Schaumburg lives mostly on pretzel rolls and diet Pepsi! The diet Pepsi thing was probably just the convention center making a deal with Pepsi, but the pretzel rolls were at every meal - even at Weber Grill. Don't get me wrong, we had a lot of them and they were tasty, but it was getting a little crazy.
• Remember how we didn't know exactly which direction Ikea was from our hotel? Turns out we could have known if we had really checked out the view from our hotel first. The blue and yellow building is pretty distinctive, but initially we weren't in our room very much and it was quite a bit off to the left so we didn't actually see it until the following day!
  

So there you go - all that you might have wanted to know about our Stitches adventure, and probably more! Now we really need to get to knitting some of our fabulous new yarn. And hopefully the timing will be better next time so that Sariebeth can join in on the fun, since it just wasn't the same without her!

Stitches Midwest Recap: Part 3

Saturday, Sept. 12 - Since we had an afternoon class we got an earlier start and we were back in the Market not long after it opened. I hadn't brought the yarn I needed for our Intro to Entrelac class, but I knew I could find a couple of nice, relatively inexpensive worsted weight yarns - especially since this was the day we planned to hit up the Webs booth and pool our purchases for their discount.

First, though, we were armed with our list of appealing items from the Fashion show and started our shopping by wandering to the various booths to see the samples in person. Some were not as appealing when viewed up close, but we did purchase some patterns along the way.

The bulk of the yarn purchases came later when we made our dedicated foray into the Webs area. We did have a bit of a red tweed thing going on, as both Xandermommy and I picked up sweater quantities in similar, but different yarns there. I got my yarns for class from Webs, too, and Xandermommy found some other yarns of various weights that she wanted to try working with. And, as seemed to be the case every day, time flew while we were shopping and before we knew it it was nearly time for class and we hadn't stopped for lunch yet.

So, we deposited our purchases in our hotel room and headed back down to the lobby with about 20 minutes for lunch. Sam & Harry's was offering a special express lunch for Stitches visitors and we started there, but as soon as we were seated we realized we were cutting it way too close on time and we hurried over to the Starbucks cafe to split a prepackaged salad and a sandwich wrap.

Even though we scarfed our lunch and took some with us as leftovers we were still apparently the last ones to the classroom and settled in just before class began. It was a very quiet and serious class, but within the first 10 minutes or so we were both confident that we understood the concept of Entrelac outlined in the course handouts. It seemed like we both kept up with our swatch work well enough, although after messing up the first part of the bind off row I opted to save the rest of my new yarn and just leave my swatch on the needle for the day. I don't know if either one of us has a project in mind where we might use Entrelac, even after the class, but it was still fun to learn a new technique - especially one that might seem counter-intuitive without the nice diagrams.

After the hurried lunch we were both hungry for dinner and a bit tired of running all over so we decided to return to Sam & Harry's for our expensive dinner out. It was a nice dinner with tasty wine and some fabulous steaks and we were well stuffed by the time we headed back to our room. This was the first night that we managed to return to our hotel room relatively early and we decided it was definitely a night for relaxing and knitting. Nearly an entire movie and a few TV shows later we settled in for our last night in the hotel and our Stitches trip was nearly over.