Yarnlove

Or soaking.

I've been knitting the "Birchette" from Bergère de France, free pattern, with the Habu yarn Pia gave me at my housewarming. This is what it looked like a week ago:

Blocked picture coming soon. It's not a big shawl, but a moderate little thing to wear around the neck. I think the upper edge will measure about 70 cm.

And today I bought 15 skeins of Drops Karisma for a project I've been actually considering for a while, and not just bumped into, fell madly in love with and bought yarn for with money I don't have. It began with inspiration from a yarn catalogue, but since I don't want to pay twice as much in handling and shipping as the pattern actually costs, I browsed my knitting dictionaries and other sources of inspiration to find written instructions for cables looking just like it, and then I figured it can't be that hard. I've knit sweaters before. I've knit cables before. And I can modify it as pleases me. This is how Garntjänst knit it:

I knit a swatch from some of the leftovers from my first knitblogging project, the disappointing Colchique:

I think it turned out quite nicely. I'm wondering if I should put a little something in the middle of the diamond cables, just to fill out the empty space (like the one in my heart, you know). But it might be overdoing it. Thoughts?


And then I'd like to tell you about my crazy Monday this week. I had a day off, since I've been working the entire weekend, and had decided to sleep until nine. The doorbell rang at 07.11, and I bounced up, took quite some time to find appropriate clothing (any clothing, that is), and when I finally got to the door a nice postal lady apologized for waking me up and gave me a brown, suspiciously British, parcel. It was the long gone last SP10 parcel, that had come to Sweden, waited at the post office for a month for me, who never got the notification, to come and get it, then went back to England and finally made it back to its final destination - my eager arms. I had a Christmas morning moment in bed before going back to sleep for another hour. As always, my SP Melissa outdid herself again and sent me the most beautiful stuff a knitter could ever wish for. In this pic you see four hanks of Cascade 220 for the Candle flame shawl I've been dreaming of for a year or so, a hank of nice, solid sock yarn (very tasteful), two balls of Rowan Silk Wool DK, a sheep tape measure (it took a while to figure out I had to pull the poor animal's tail to get the tape out), an elephant key ring and five fruity stitch markers. Not seen in this picture is "Accessories", a pattern book from Rowan. Yeah, a crazy good parcel, in itself worthy for a whole round of SP.

Then I went to get a haircut, yarn for my weaving class starting next week, and came back home, and when I took in the mail I had gotten a notification for a parcel. From England. I was very confused since I had already gotten my parcel delivered at my door, but I went to pick it up, and I actually got another parcel. From my SP. Stuffed with more goodies. I should blog this, since knitters will now break into my house when I'm at work, but this is what I got this time:

Four (4) hanks of Debbie Bliss' Pure silk. Three skeins of a Phildar cotton, lilca, with matching beads. Knitter earrings. Two balls of sequin yarn. Bamboo DPN's. Plastic colourful crochet hooks. An I-cord thingy. A card making kit. Another elephant keyring. A knitting needle case, very pretty. A Louisa Harding pattern book. A hairclip with a button on it, very cute. And I've probably missed half of it anyway.

As you can see, I've had the best SP ever. I've written extensive thank you-emails to her and I still don't feel I've gotten my message through. Go have a look at her blog and tell her she's the best SP ever and you wish she will be your SP sometime soon.

OK, this is obviously a vast post to compensate for the last weeks of bad blogging, but I think everyone seem to be suffering from it these days. Have we lost it, or are we just busy?