The Yarnarian is trying out a new yarn.

This is a new bamboo blend for me: 80/20 sw merino/bamboo 100 g approx 430 yards. Price is $20, although it costs me more than my usual Bambi. If you all like it, then perhaps I'll go with this one. I haven't yet knit with it, just dyed it. Elder DD tells me that it is so soft she just wants to wear it around her neck.

Bouquet:




Cool Breeze:




For Cynthia - Yep, a play on words of forsythia. When I was a kid, I thought the name of the plant was For Cynthia, so there it is. Also, the yellow in FC is not nearly as bright as the real forsythia, which is a real "in-your-face" yellow.




Forest Floor - Most dyeing sessions, I like to play around with a weird and wonderful colorway, just for the fun of it. And then nobody wants it, and I knit it up and always love it. So that's what this is. Also, I saw a pic of a forest floor on the Web and it had these goofy colors in it. I rather like it, myself.




Mocha Polka:




Rose Petal:




Springtime:




Weber's Parrot - this is a repeat colorway because I like it so much.




Let me know if you want. fritzL234 AT yahoo DOT com

Weber's Parrot and Bouquet are grabbed. grabbed, And now you know.

Cool Breeze and For Cynthia are taken.

The Yarnarian brings you the annual spring poem.

High up, over the tops
Of the feathery grasses, the grasshoppers hop.
They won't eat their suppers,
They will not obey
Their grasshopper mothers and fathers who say:
"Listen my children, this must be stopped.
Now is the time your last hop should be hopped.
So come eat your suppers and go to your beds."
But the little grasshoppers just shake their green heads.
"no, no," the naughty ones say.

"All we have time to do now is to play.

If we are hungry we'll nip at a fly,
Or nibble a blueberry as we go by.
But not now. Now we must hop.
And no one, but no one can make us stop."

The end

Whoo Hoo!

The Yarnarian is officially graduated from PT! Mama ruth is strong, mighty and powerful. The knee is still wonky, but that's arthritis. But the legs! Watch out world, if I kick you, you will possibly fall down.

Happy dance all around the house: Mighty mouse has finished PT. I am going to miss the therapists; they are funny and wonderful and very very professional. But now I can go back to the gym.

Dyeing news: None. I have been so busy with pattern writing, a back flare up (yes, we did PT on that) and such that I have had no time to dye. Well, folks, it's not as if you don't have enough PennyRose yarn. Um, change that: You always need more PennyRose yarn, but you can survive a week without new colorways. But only barely survive. Heh Heh.

And that's all I have to say. Have a wonderful weekend. Enjoy whatever weather you're having. We are going to have Chicken Soup Sunday, where the Hubbo and I make vats of the stuff, and freeze it, and then we are all set for Passover and beyond.

Holly - My house is almost beyond hope. What with wool all over the joint, and various projects with little bits of graph paper floating around, it's awful. Passover cleaning is going to be any cleaning I can do at all. It's really tough being the world's most disorganized woman!

The Yarnarian Presents Tikvah.

Wrap the World in Hope.

Tikvah is the Hebrew word for hope. For every Tikvah Shawl sold, I will donate 80 percent of my profits to a worthy cause.

Tikkun Olam, which I've discussed somewhere in a previous post or two, means repairing the world. In Judaism, we are all supposed to work towards making the world a better place. It doesn't matter if we don't succeed; what matters is that we try. If everyone works towards repairing the ills of the world, something good is bound to happen. I've been trying to think of a way to do Tikkun Olam, and finally came up with this idea:

This spring, from April through June, proceeds from the sale of the Tikvah Shawl will be donated to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). NAMI is dedicated to improving the lives of adults and children with mental illness and their families. Throughout the country, NAMI provides education, advocacy, and support, striving to eliminate the pervasive stigma of mental illness and increase the public and professional understanding of mental illness. To learn more about NAMI, visit their website at www.nami.org.

Over the last week, I designed and knit up a little fichu of a shawl, Tikvah, and now I have to write up the pattern. I'm hoping to get it ready for test knitting in a couple of weeks and then, when everything is set, I'll donate 80% of my sales directly to NAMI.

Just to tease you a little, here are some pictures of the Tikvah shawl.




Holly - Yep. But you have to wait until I get it written up. I've got two patterns in the works. And you know just how much I love writing patterns.

Scrabblequeen - I do indeed have great new software. I'm still learning it.

The Yarnarian Surfaces Again.

I've been busy but with what, I can't say. General hustle and bustle. OK, with a lot of knitting and frogging. Story later on in this post.

But yesterday I did a bit of dyeing. And while most of the yarns are reserved for the Flower Fairies Sock Club, I did do a teensy bit of other dyeing. I need to rev up my Etsy shop; I've been neglecting it for a while, and nobody is looking much any more. So, I have to get my act together (as much as I can ever do that).

Gillyflower:




Green Valley:




Rainbow Tangerine:




Primavera:




Snow Drops:




Tigerlily:




Virag:



If you want any yarn, email me at fritzL234 AT yahoo DOT com. Otherwise, wait until it appears in my shop. http://fritzl.etsy.com

Knitting news: This has been a week of woe is me and yes, I have it!

I started a shawl in a new format for me, one that's been around forever, but a shaping I've not really played with. So, OK, that's fine. Except I frogged 2 attempts at this brilliant shawl and finally decided that it was not going to work. I know I've tried this before many years ago, and it didn't work then. So why I thought it would be good now? Ah well.

But I am working on what just might be very nice. Or not. We shall see. I am at the edging part, and of course am worrying that I won't have enough yarn. That's normal for me. Worrying. Not the I don't have enough yarn part. Also I'm not sure how well it will lay on my shoulders, and that's my primary consideration. I do love all triangular shawls, but I'm very fussy about which one lays the best. So we shall see, and in the meantime, I've really been enjoying playing with this. Pics? Not yet.

Gilly Flower is grabbed by my favorite shark, and she knows who she is.

itsJUSTme-wendy - ruth the knitting spy. I spy; I dye; I'm a dyeing spy.

The Yarnarian brings you the good news and the good news!

Well here's the good news: Yesterday we had a Mommie medical crisis. You have to understand that anytime something medical happens with a fragile 95 year old lady, it's a medical crisis. You and I would brush these things off and get on with it. But at her age, you don't mess around. So yesterday, her residence called to say that we had something going on here. We were lucky to get a doctor's appointment, and off we went for the usual 4-5 hour activity. The end result is that we think we're OK. Just to make sure, she needs a CAT scan, but the feeling is that she's fine. Phew, relief. And I called this morning, and everything is OK.

The next good news is a lovely new shawlette I've just done. I was going to write up the pattern yesterday, but the Mommie took precedence, and I'm truly zonked today, so probably next week. Then I need it tested, and then we're good to go.

The shawl is called "Lili's Shawl" after our youngest grandkid, Little Lili. Poor Little Lili doesn't have any yarn named after her yet, and she is just about the most adorable, cutest, silliest baby/toddler around. She is the epitome of a one year old. No arguments here from moms and grammies: She is #1! And I can say this after 4 previous grands. Mind you, they were all #1 when they were her age, but since she's the latest and possibly the last of the grands, she wins that title. So here is Lili's Shawl:






I have lots more pics, but I just want to tantalize you today. Lili's Shawl looks deceptively mindless, and it is easy knitting (well from my point of view), but she has some neat knitty things going on: upside down pattern, blank spaces on the chart, faggoting border, cute edging, different row counts. Hah! And she is most delicious to hug and cuddle with, just like Little Lili. The only thing that she doesn't do is put things in her mouth. I leave that to Little Lili herself.

Now I need to design something for each of the other 4. Poor Benster has nothing at all named after him. Like a 4 year-old boy cares. This kid is like all the Katzenjammer kids rolled into one. A veritable Dennis the Menace, with a smile that will totally melt you and a personality to boot. He's a sketch. Have I ever told you how much the Hubbo and I like being Grands?

And now I'm going to take today off. I'm good in medical crises, but afterward, I collapse, and yesterday was scary. So today, I'm starting another project, a secret one at the moment. Secret because even I don't exactly know what I'm doing. It'll be another shawl, but something very unusual, I hope. I have these ideas in my head, and I need to see if they work out.

Have a lovely weekend. I'm going to try out my ideas.

itsJUSTme-wendy - When I heard that my stepdaughter was pregnant, I immediately started knitting a bunch of goodies. 2 years later, my daughter got pregnant, and I went into knitting overdrive again. This time, I made outfits from size 3 months all the way up to 2 years, and Miss P wore those sweaters forever. And that was that! I think the other 3 each got a Baby Surprise Jacket, but I was baby sweatered out. And now the kids don't want to wear sweaters. So go enjoy the knitting when it all happens. I think I knitted maybe 20 sweaters in total, plus the BSJ and assorted blankies. It was a lot of fun.

shortoldlady - You have to learn how to fudge when you are off a stitch or two. I swear I'm going to write a book called "The Fudge Factor", and then all the world will learn how to do this. Not the greatest idea when it comes to precision machinery or medicine, but for knitting and cooking, yep, fudging is fun.

Henya - Elder care is very interesting. It's not child care, and yet there are similar components. The Mommie is just fine and we do think this was just a scratch that caused the bleeding.

The Yarnarian chats about leftover yarn.

I apologize for not posting much this week. I've been buried in yarn dyeing for the BlankieMania forum on Ravelry. BlankieMania is for lovers of Shelly Kang's amazing Blankie. Basically you knit mitered squares out of left-over sock yarn, pick-up and knit them as you go along, and ta da, you have the most adorable blankie around. Very few of us have gazillion balls of left-over sock yarn. Yep, we have lots of it, but not in the variety you want for a genuine Blankie. So the good folks on the BlankieMania forum organize all sorts of swaps to get a lot of yarn goodies. And I had the grand time of dyeing up just sort of a swap. Such fun!

I personally have about 20 squares done. I have the feeling that my great-grandchildren will get this blankie. It's not from lack of interest, it's from lack of time that I don't work on it. But I am getting inspired.

Another great use for leftovers are Monstersocks, again with a forum on Ravelry. Basically you use up tons of leftovers to make really cool socks. The ones I've seen are so cute. I haven't made them yet, but I'm thinking that this would be a great summer project.

Other great uses for leftovers are here:

http://yarnloopie.blogspot.com/2009/05/sunday-morning-shawls.html

http://persnicketyknitter.blogspot.com/2007/08/what-to-do-with-leftover-sock-yarn.html

http://mollie.vox.com/library/posts/2009/09/

http://merelyasuggestion.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/sock-yarn-blankets-2/

That should keep us all busy.

Knitting News: A pair of socks knitted in my Rachel yarn, the one with the nice twist to it. I am playing around with variegated yarns again, just because I like dyeing them. Knitting with them is always a challenge unless you want to do ribbing or stockinette or one of my variegated yarn patterns: Roundabout socks, Forward and Back socks http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/forward-and-back, Slip Zig socks, and others in my collection.







So, this is my latest, goofy pattern. It's all knit and purl, no lace (!), but the way the knits and purls interact with each other, gives the pattern a bit of sway here and there. There are no weird knitting tricks here, and how it looks off the leg and on the leg are totally different. I don't have pics of it on my leg because I can't take a pic of my own feet worth a damn, and the Hubbo, as wonderful as he is, is a crummy photographer. (sorry, Dear.) No name yet. Got any ideas?





And because I'm still shawl-obsessed, here's my latest. Like you can tell what it is.



By the way, I love, love, love this colorway. I am not sure that anyone else does, but I can actually taste the colors here. Don't ask me to describe the taste to you, just that it feels wonderful on the palette.

pendie and Wendy - Clearly you have good taste!

itsJUSTme-wendy - Well what else are you going to do with all those little balls of yarn? Tee hee.

Hunter - some of us are very frugal, cheap, mingy. Also I rarely get holes in my socks. And now, having said that, they will probably all develop holes. sigh.

Susie - Those leftover balls of sock yarn are major bonuses to our knitting: they cost nothing, we make something very pretty and unusual, and we use them up, more or less. I say "more or less" because inevitably I have leftovers of my leftovers. sigh.