Recap time!

Time flies! It seems that I just posted, but then I looked and it's been 8 days! Most of the week was lost to working on a very long transcript. Once that was finished I lost a bit of time recovering (transcribing a 294-minute medical conference can be truly exhausting).

I did finish the Trekking socks. They came out nicely, although I wish they were a bit longer in the leg (not a lot, maybe another half inch). Also, when I washed them, they loosed up quite a bit. I did 80 stitches on US0 needles. I could have done with 72 stitches and been fine, but when I was knitting them, it seemed I needed those extra stitches. They're fine, though, and hopefully the reinforced sole (heel stitch all the way down the sole) will help them last a bit longer. Well, that and the 25% nylon content in the yarn. :)

On Friday, my friend Margie and I got up early and went to the beach for breakfast and to see if we could spot any migrating whales. After a lovely breakfast at the Lazy Susan, the shops still weren't open yet (I told you we left early), so we drove out to Ecola State Park to see what we could see.

When we got to the main parking lot, this is what greeted us:



That's a herd of elk, in case you weren't sure. Looks like they're all cows, but I bet a bull was around somewhere.

The folks who provide information about whales and help visitors spot them were just getting set up for what promised to be a cold, wet day. The view was very pretty. . .



But the fog off the coast was going to make it hard to spot any whales (we were told that most of them are spotted right around the fog line).



So we lingered for just a bit and then headed back to town. By then the shops were open and we browsed a bit, but didn't buy much. We visited Coastal Yarns at their new location on the main street (Hemlock) in Cannon Beach. Margie got a nice pattern book and I exercised as much restraint as I could and purchased a single skein of STR Silkie in the Rook-y colorway. After that, we headed back home and arrived here by 1:00.

I spent the rest of the afternoon doing a little bit of work and some spinning and then headed to the Old Spaghetti Factory downtown for a late dinner with more friends. It was a busy, but very fun day.

Saturday was a normal day at the shop. In the morning, a woman came in with her little girl and a very sad looking crocheted blanket. Someone had made the blanket for the little girl and it was her favorite. Unfortunately, knots were used to add new skeins of yarn and one of them had come loose. The result was that about 6" of blanket were hanging on only by the edging and there was a whole wad of unraveled yarn attached. The woman looked at me and said, "Is there any way to fix this?" I wish I had a picture of that poor blanket, but I didn't have my camera with me.

I looked at it and saw what the problem was and assured her that I could fix it. When I asked how quickly she needed it, she looked at the little girl and said, "As soon as possible. I don't know how many nights she'll sleep without it." I knew from how it had come apart that the blanket was going to get smaller in the course of repairing it, so I got some scissors and cut through the edging at the point where everything was unraveling and sent them home with a portion of the blanket. We both assured the little girl that the blanket was going to the hospital to get better, but in the meantime, she could hold onto this part of it as a keepsake.

When I got home on Saturday night, I took off all of the edging and undid enough of the main stitches to get an even edge. The good thing was that the piece had unraveled in the same direction it had been crocheted. That kept it from coming completely apart and made it fairly simple to get one complete row of open loops to pick up. From there, I attached new yarn (white, since I couldn't match the main color) and did a single crochet edge all the way around, picking up the live loops on the unraveled edge as I went. A few more rounds of single crochet and then one round of edging that matches the stitch in the blanket and viola! It's a whole new piece. A quick run through the washing machine refreshed everything and it will be delivered back to the little girl (and her mom) tonight. Altogether, a very satisfying way to spend a Saturday evening!

Oh, at the shop, we received a big order of Malabrigo. While I put price tags on what Tami hadn't had time to do and put it on the shelves, I had a very hard time not putting at least one skein of every color in my own pile. I did restrain myself, however, and managed to only come home with two skeins of the Oceanos color. So pretty!

When I got home and checked the mail, I had received two skeins of Handmaiden Great Big Sea Silk in the Ocean colorway that I purchased from one of Susan's Saturday destash events. If you haven't checked out her Saturday events, you might want to. She's got a lot of great stuff that she's destashing at very attractive prices. And even if you don't want to buy her yarn, her blog is great and she's got great patterns for sale, too.

Gee, I guess I should have called this post "Ocean Gazing" or something. Seems to be a theme here, eh? :)

Sunday was a very quiet day around here. I had no work pending, which is highly unusual. I took advantage of the free time to catch up on a LOT of stuff on my DVR, do some knitting on a lace project for a shop sample (sorry, no pics yet), and do a lot of spinning.

A while back, I purchased some Spinner's Hill roving from Dizzy Sheep. Half of that purchase got spun up already, but the other half was just sitting around waiting. Since Dizzy just offered more of this roving, and I of course succumbed and ordered some (okay, a lot) of it, I figured it would be a good idea to spin up what I already had in the stash. So here are the fruits of my Friday afternoon/Sunday labor, 8 ounces of green/gold singles.



This is a Corriedale-Fin Ramboullet blend and it's really nice. You can see I overtwisted the singles a bit, but that's okay as it will all work out in the plying. I think this is going to be very pretty yarn. Stay tuned!