Too good to be true

In preparation for an upcoming vacation to San Diego, Brian and I had the following conversation:

Me: have you ever heard of LegoLand?

Brian: (looking skeptical) No.

Me: How about Sea World? Have you ever heard of that?

Brian: (rolling his eyes): You're making things up.

He's in for a big surprise in a few weeks.

Nancy (She Who Can Do Everything) and her son Nate will be stalking us on our trip. There will be at least one "boys with boys, girls with girls" day, so that Nancy and I can have strangers play with our feet and put goop on our faces. Don't you wish you were me?

Oh, and I've heard there are a few good yarn stores in those parts. So Cal readers, any yarn store recommendations?

Rock 'n Roll Preschool

"For those about to read, we salute you."


Though our musical tastes rarely overlap, I did appreciate these shirts Dave got for da boyz.


The sun decided to shine on our little corner of Michigan yesterday, so we headed to the Farmer's Market, where B&E enjoyed the Superbowl football sculptures.



Across from Kerrytown we encountered this motley crew of buskers. They were really terrible, but entertaining anyway.














Obligatory knitting content - Evan likes his purple socks.

Spindling at Sweetwaters

My close-knit little group of cafe knitters has become infiltrated by the likes of this:

Yes, spindlers have been spotted at knit night, on more than one occasion of late. It's gotten so bad that we've had to spin off a splinter group of spinsters.

The patient staff at Sweetwaters have taken it all in stride. We've offered free knitting lessons, but so far no one has taken the bait. Our plan is to subvert the youth of Ann Arbor, one barista at a time. Through knitting. It all starts innocently enough, with novelty yarn and large needles.

This will be our first victim:

Sara's crime? She's been sending me subliminal messages through her latte art.

This one positively screams "teach me to knit!"

Big honkin' roses

I've been a blog slacker of late. For the curious, here is what I am knee-deep in at the moment.
















Yes, the big honkin' roses I threatened you with last fall. They are for this:



For my crazy friend who wants to pay me. I won't accept money, but I will accept a weekend at her "cottage" (can it still be called a cottage when it comes with staff?) up in Harbor Springs in a few weeks.

While there I will cast on for the Knitting Olympics, thanks to the always motivating harlot. My personal challenge will be Wavy from Knitty. Not exactly an Olympic feat, but I have to finish spinning this before the opening ceremonies:
















It reminds my friends of Kermit the Frog. But I love it.

The day I dyed

Over the break Anne and I played with dye and yarn in her basement. I used mostly food-grade dyes, and Anne used acid dyes. Here's some photodocumentation of our dying day. First, the results:

The Lopi on the left was supposed to be blue and green. For some reason the green came out brown.

The ruddy mess on the right was supposed to be copper and burgundy, with small flecks of green and pink. It looks mostly pink to me.

The motivation for the day was the purple and green skein on the bottom. It is a 10 yard skein, space dyed in four quadrants, with the goal of self-striping sock yarn. Here it is fresh out of the microwave, still cozy in saran wrap:




The repeat is supposed to be purple, green, purple, blue, but the blue came out so close to the purple that I am afraid the socks will end up purple with a strange occasional green stripe. Initially this green also came out an icky brown, so I had to resort to some serious crock pot action:



This last shot is of the steaming hot pile of wool, splatter-painted ala Pollock. In the photo above it looks rather blotchy but after reskeining I was pretty happy with all these colors together.



When will I ever find the time to knit all this stuff?