Loretta

When you're friendly with your LYS owner, you get introduced to people like Loretta. Loretta, a 75 year old knitter who was looking to get rid of her 50 year collection of Vogue Knitting Magazines. She has health problems and while she still knits, she no longer has use for all of the magazines and was looking to give them to someone who would use them....ME! It's so much fun to look at the magazine articles from the 50's, 60's and 70's...a couple by none other than Elizabeth Zimmerman and Meg Swanson. It's like opening a knitting time capsule.

September Deadline

The baby blankets must be finished by the end of the month. That's it. I can't take it anymore! They're cluttering up my living room and putting a damper on my creativity. Plus, the plans for Christmas knitting have begun and I want/need to get started. But, I can't think about that as long as I'm procrastinating the baby blankets!

Cheer me on, please. I can use all the help I can get!

Yarn Drive

In the spirit of Cast-on's Honor Beads for Grownups I've planned a yarn drive for charity.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that Podcasts and Cast-on in particular have jumpstarted me out of my knitting/blogging sabatical. Upon listening to a recent episode Brenda mentioned that the Interim House in Philadelphia could use yarn donations. Rather than just clean out my own stash, I figured it would be fun to invite other knitters, namely my knitting groups to de-stash for a good cause. The Yarn drive will be held on September 29th. If you live in the Philly area and are interested in attending and/or stash-busting for a good cause drop me note.

Food Poisioning

According to Jake, I have a cast iron stomach. I can eat most food and not have any gastrointestinal problems. Knowing that, I ask a lot of my stomach. Yesterday was case in point. It was IPA fest at the Drafting Room. We were meeting a friend at 2pm for "A drink". Yeah. There were 19 different beers on tap, six samples and two hours later I had decided on my drink. During that time, we won a bottle of Rogue's 10th Anniversary beer. We decided that it must be enjoyed "in the moment". At 6 o'clock we decided to go get dinner. We went to a little BYO restaurant (for those who don't know BYO = Bring your own, very popular in states like PA with crazy liquor laws) with a bottle of Le Chouffe Houblon (sp?) quite possibly my favorite beer right now and a bottle of Pinot Noir. Our dinner companions brought with them some of their delicious homemade wine and port for dessert.

Here's where my system decided it'd had enough...

I'm not quite sure if it was the mixture of all the beer/wine of the day or the Thai Peanut Pork or the really rich creampuffs for dessert but my cast iron stomach let me down. I got sick. At the restaurant. At the table (which thankfully we were seated outside and I was in front of a flower bed). On the way home.

Not only was I sick, but very embarrassed!

It was Bad News.

Update: As it turns out, one of our dinner companions (who ordered the exact same meal as I did) also got sick that night. Giving creedence to the fact that it was food poisioning and not the alcohol.

KiP'ing

I was introduced to a new Yarn Shop. It is now my favorite LYS. Although it's not quite local. Catherine introduced me to The Wooly Lamb in Pennington, NJ. (Note: There website is under construction today, but here is a link to a review of the shop from Knitter's Review). The shop is beautiful. For me, the inside is laid out very pleasing...yarn and colors everywhere, but not crammed and cluttered that would make it difficult to shop. Catherine and I spent close to 2 hours just wandering around and looking at all of the yarn. The staff is very helpful and friendly and the displays of knitted garments and samples from all of the yarn is stunning. I could have emptied my entire bank account in this store. But I was good, only buying yarn with projects in mind. My purchase included:

6 hanks of Berroco Ultra Alpaca for my Blaze sweater
2 balls of Hacho Hand-dyed for a chevron scarf (like the one that's been circling the blogosphere)

After our venture to the Wolly Lamb, we drove to Lambertville, NJ and wandered through some of the cute shops there. We crossed the bridge into New Hope, PA and found a bar with outdoor seating and good beer where we whipped out our knitting and enjoyed the glorious weather. Catherine was working on these beautiful beaded scarves, which she generously gave me a pattern for. I began swatching Blaze with my new yarn (yes...I'm going to swatch like a good girl). Two Unibroue Emphemere's later and we were off to meet the boys for dinner.

Heaven.