My stash is bloating. Not that I mind.

Now, I go to Upper Secondary school. I guess. I've always been a bit fuzzy about such things. Anyway, around here the school year is divided into five periods with different subjects and courses and stuff. We have all the exams, up to seven, during seven consecutive days, but nothing else. That means so much free time it's only barely funny. (You're supposed to study for upcoming exams, but I simply can't spend that much time reading the books over and over again without going crazy, and I do pretty well anyway.) That, in turn, means that I have the time to go to yarn stores.

So, yes, most of this post is going to be complete yarn pr0n. Yay!



Two balls of Regia sock yarn. Of course I managed to get two different weights, but I think I can mess around with needle sizes enough to make it work. I'm going to have to hunt for a ball of yellow and a ball of turquoise, so I can make the Tiptoe socks. The green I'm going to get from the leftovers of this ball:



That's a one-hundred-gram ball of OnLine (OnLinie?) Supersocke in a really, really great green. I visited one of the three yarn stores I go to, with no intention of buying anything, but then I saw this, and, well, I can never resist a good green. It's going to become a pair of Pembrokeshire Pathways socks.

The store I got that from is the smallest of the three, but they have lots of good, cheap sock yarn. The second one has Colinette Jitterbug and Skye and some basic yarns in tons of colours. The third one, which is my favourite, is the largest, the farthest away, and the only one that stocks Rowan. (I'm a Rowan Ho, can you tell?)

This is from the second one.



Colinette Jitterbug in Mardi Gras. Jitterbug is the only handpaint available around here, so it's a good thing I love the yarn itself as much as I do. (I just finished my Snakes on a Sock, FO post forthcoming.)

And this is from the third shop.



A ball of Rowan Felted Tweed. I bought this for swatchy purposes, mostly because I didn't have enough money to buy an entire cardigan's worth. Eventually, though, I'm going to knit Mrs. Darcy with it. I have no chance of getting gauge, but I'm not afraid of a tiny bit of math. I actually rather love math. :D

I think a part of why I love Rowan so much is their ballbands. So wonderful. (Also, Finnish craft mags occasionally translate Rowan patterns, and I've loved most of them so far.) I was going to see if I could persuade myself to buy a cheaper yarn that has the exact same fibre content as the Felted Tweed, but it was just so much uglier. Oh well.

I have actually done some knitting, too. I finished the socks I was working on, for example, and cast on the Felted Tweed, and worked on Tempting II. Photographic evidence:



I'm most of the way through the body and still a bit worried about running out of yarn. I think it'll be enough, though.



It's a Topi hat. I knit it in two days and did a few mods to be able to call it a swatch.

I knit the top as set, though with more increases, and then knit the straight part flat. I was halfway down the brim when I realised I had skipped a bit of the instructions. At that point, I safety-pinned the hat together and tried it on. The result? It looked like a shower cap. My flat gauge and circular gauge are so drastically different the hat flared out and was then pulled back in by the ribbing. That and the screwy brim were all it took to make me rip it. Of course, it took me an entire James Bond movie to un-tangle the ball and wind it into a center-pull ball by hand. How I managed to knot it that badly I'll never know. I'm just special that way, I guess.

Most random photo ever:



It's my tape measure. Yes, I only have one. Yes, I've had to for a few years. I'm fairly certain I'm going to lose it sometime in the near future, because I simply can't keep track of my things. Also, it's starting to fall apart.

The one in which I mercilessly abuse parentheses

First up, a spring update:



The snow's nearly all gone! I've taken my motorcycle out for a ride! I don't have to dress like I'm in the Antarctic anymore! I've bought shoes! Spring!

(Speaking of shoes, I very nearly bought insanely cute mary-jane-type flats, perfect for showing off socks, but instead I got a relatively hip pair of Fakeverses. [In my world, Fakeverse are shoes that look like Converse shoes, but aren't.] I decided that if I still covet the flats on Monday I can go and buy them.)

(I love knowing that very possibly no-one reads this, so I can ramble on about anything and everything and abuse parentheses and no one's going to mind.)

Knitting!



Today's exercise: find a sock-in-progress among all the crap on my desk. :D I just turned the heel of the second Snakes sock. (I love my camera. The colour of this photo is pretty much true to life, at least on my monitor, and it's not even taken in daylight.)



On Friday, the Tempting and I went out to soak up the sun and study geography. I'm about ten inches into the body and mildly freaking out about having enough yarn and the sweater possibly being too large. Oh well.

If the rib looks odd, that's because I subbed a twisted 1x1 rib instead of the regular one, because ribbing has a bad habit of spreading so it looks, in my opinion, a bit amateurish and rather crappy. I don't twist my stitches by knitting into the back of the loop, because that would drive me insane, but by wrapping the yarn around the needle in the opposite direction than usual. (I'm also very glad that I was taught to purl the Norwegian way, because moving the yarn back and forth between the needles = oh my god I'm going to strangle myself with a circular.)

I've made some yarn purchases, but because I have exams in physics and maths on Monday and Tuesday, respectively, I should probably study and I don't have any photos of those. Maybe tomorrow.