I guess I’d better tell you about Christmas before 2008 comes to an end! I’m having a hard time trying to think of what to tell you. There was food, there was family, there was shopping. It’s all kind of a blur at this point. HWJF’s parents gave us a lovely holiday as always. Among the gifts was a bread board, which is sort of a rite of passage in his family. I guess we have to be grown ups now. There was also this beautiful vase they brought back from Kaiser on their trip to Germany.

Shown on a placemat my Mom needlepointed for us. It’s got bunnies!!!

I told HWJF he’ll just have to buy me flowers more often now.

There was one funny story I have to share. We stopped in Freeport on our way up to visit LLBean. After another awesome late lunch at Gritty’s we headed over to the Bean campus and what do I see on the side of the road but two people with live sheep!

I know the pic sucks, but it was the best I could do. They must have had a living nativity going on or something and they were wrapping it up. I got back to the street just in time to shoot a couple of pics and watch them load the two sheep in the back of…

A SUBARU WAGON!!!

This is much more funny when you know that HWJF’s car is a very similar one and there have been multiple jokes about me not being able to take his car to a Sheep and Wool Fest for fear that I will come home with a whole sheep in the back. I don’t know where he would ever get that idea. Needless to say, we had a good laugh at that one!

Of course, I know that you mostly come here for the fibery stuff, so why don’t we just get to that?! When we are in Maine for Christmas, we’ve begun to make it a tradition to visit Yardgoods in Waterville on the 26th for their annual sale. I love this shop! They are very friendly and have a great selection of yarns and 20% off doesn’t hurt either! After much debate with myself I decided on yarn for two sweaters, one of which I can’t believe I found the pattern for, as I’ve been looking around at it online for quite sometime now and haven’t really been able to locate a copy. Wouldn’t you figure I wasn’t looking for it at the time? This lopi book:

Has this sweater which I adore:

I kind of have a thing for roses. Of course, since I get to pick the colors, my roses will be BLUE! I’m sure you are shocked. Since there was no lite lopi to be had and it got the same gauge, I choose some lamb’s pride instead.

Then I found some DIC Classy hiding on a bottom shelf. I’ve heard good things about this yarn (although I hear now that it stretches when it hits water, which can be resolved by a quick trip in the dryer- wouldn’t you know our dryer died a couple of weeks ago?!?) and there were two lovely colors. Unfortunately the rich brown that I really loved was only one lonely skein, so I went with this instead:

It’s going to grow up to be a Red Rings pullover, because after I saw Kim’s, I decided I needed one.

One other item followed me home. This shop has everything you could possibly imagine for crafting, so I took advantage.

Expect to see that on my shop materials very soon.

The next day HWJF was kind enough to humor my still burning desire from this summer to visit Halcyon. So we ventured out on the 2 hour drive and let me just tell you, Totally Worth It. It’s a lovely shop with knitting, spinning, felting, rug hooking, weaving and other supplies. They have a ton of books, all sorts of samples ready made and great shelving and lighting so you can wander about and find things. The help was also kind, friendly and knowledgeable. It was a great experience. They weren’t having a sale per se, but I did find some things I haven’t found elsewhere. First up, two more bobbins for the wheels:

These are the high speed bobbins that go with the high speed whorl I bought at Rhinebeck. I was getting good take up without them, but I have some plans for some serious lace spinning this year so I thought it was time to make the investment. I have yet to have a chance to try them out.

I also found Harrisville Shetland on cones! I plan to make two pairs of these mittens, one set for me and one for HWJF and I should have plenty of yarn to do it with now. We decided on a russet red and a dark blue:

I have dreams of making the Ivy League vest someday, which also calls for this yarn, so I think this will be a good test run.

As if all that wasn’t enough, on the way back home we stopped in Portland and by a stroke of luck, Tess was open on a Sunday! I had a really nice time talking with the owner (and being greeted by her daughter’s dog!) about dyeing and festivals and such and tried to put the bug in her ear to come back to Rhinebeck soon! You may recall that I bought two skeins of her superwash merino this summer, which I only returned home to find out was not enough to knit Portland. I wasn’t able to get another skein, so I remedied the problem another way:

This picture doesn’t do the yarn justice. Trust me. But I have enough for Portland now.

As many of you noticed, there was also another stop on the way back. After spending the night with friends in CT we took a quick detour to Webs! I haven’t been back there since I moved to NJ in 2006 so it was really awesome to get the chance to go back. I visited the new bead store, which was quite nice, but didn’t have what I was looking for at the moment (and honestly, I walk past 12 bead stores every day I go to work that are at least twice the size) so there were no purchases there. I saved it for the yarn!

We were on a bit of a tight schedule, but I managed to make it out only one min. after my deadline. And that was mostly because the place was Crazy Busy. Gotta love that end of the year sale. I was very glad we got there when they opened! By this point, my credit card was pretty much screaming at me to knock it off, so I managed to limit myself to yarn for just one more sweater. Colorwork is definitely on my goal list for 2009 (more on that next time) and I’ve been dreaming of a Dale of Norway sweater for quite some time. What should I happen to find as a browsed their patterns?

Say hello to Sirdal, who has been patiently sitting in my queue for quite some time. I’ll be knitting this baby in a dark navy blue and white, because lets face it, this one is going to last a while and it had better be in colors that I’ll wear!

I also found the Canadian Olympic commemorative edition booklet and will no doubt have a couple of those sweaters in the queue none too soon. Especially Lake Louise (since I’ve actually been there)!

I’m so excited about these projects I don’t know what to start first! And you should have seen the car. HWJF started calling it the “jersey wooly” there was so much yarn! I guess it might have been cheaper if we’d flown after all.

I hope you have a wonderful New Year’s Eve! I plan to kick off 2009 on the blog with a 2008 wrap up and then it will be on to a new year of knitting and spinning fun. See you then!

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Tags: planning, sweaters, Travel, yarn

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Stash, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.