Tough Love

This yarn was frogged from my earliest sock attempt -- I bought the yarn in Germany and got about 3 inches before I set it aside for a few years and moved back to the States. The next time I picked it up, I decided the colorwork pattern was beautiful but too inflexible and small for me. I managed to try it on once, then had to frog it off my foot! I took pictures... I might be able to scare them up some day.

Grumperina's epiphany about spirals really struck me, and I thought it would be the perfect color play for my old favorite yarn. I had hoped that my subsequent (10 years') experience as a knitter would make this sock more wearable than the original incarnation... but that eternal hope-spring is all dried up.

I think my cast on of 62 was too much. Me and my loose knitting. I like this yarn a lot, though, it's been with me for a long time. And I can't make something not perfect with it, so... Tough love is a frog.

Teh Uber Suxxorz

On Christmas Eve, I lost these...

In my grief and despair, I turned to yarn shopping. Who doesn't, in troubling times? The yarn smorgasbord her in Oslo is a little limited... there are lots of totally great, solid, yarns coming out of Scandinavia that I really respect. Socks, colorwork sweaters ... this place has a long venerable history of keeping itself warm with sheep hair. But the yarn shops around here are a little light on the squishy sweet, twinkly-tinkly hand-painted yarns that make your eyes salivate. So, while browsing at Bente's Butikk, I decided to spring for a skein of Rowan Tapestry. I'd admired it before, at Uldstedet in Copenhagen.

Initially, I was in love.

Then, the honeymoon ended and my suave lover turned out to be coarse, hairy-backed and stubbly chinned. And too short.

Summation: boo to Rowan Tapestry. Expensive, coarse and scratchy, and pilly after barely a month's use. Pilly in that way that isn't really pills, like you can't pull them off. Just a halo of fuzz. But not in that nice mohair way. Just ugly dread-locky fuzz.