Pfaffenhofen and the Wollmeise Shop

Saturday I went to Pfaffenhofen! My friend Yasmin drove, she lives in a nearby town so we're practically neighbors. And we (she) found a parking place right in front of the shop and we saw lots and lots of people and hugged lots and lots of yarn and sat on couches and knitted and it was fun. And now some pictures. My photos here, Elemm's photos here, Goldbek's photos here, and here is Maria's post.

And I really wasn't going to buy any yarn. I just wanted to say hi to people and see the shop, and um, well, I didn't buy a lot, not really. I mean, compared to what I already have, it was actually quite a small amount.

Eh. Maybe that's not the best argument.

I got mail!

Today I went to Pfaffenhofen, but that post will have to wait till tomorrow, because before that, on Thursday, a box came in the mail. It looked like this:


When I opened it, there was newspaper.







Under the newspaper, there was this!
I almost stopped right there, because oo! Shiny! But eventually I remembered I was sort of a grown-up, and peered under the shiny. There was happy!

It's a swap, I'm sending some of my blue-and-green yarn in return.


Here's the not-yarn: Chocolate! Stitch markers! A teeny-tiny sock and a very nice note!

And here's the yarn:
Merlot.
Buxkranzl.
Der letzte Versuch.













And roter Himbeermund.

Ooooo.

a handy tip that is also a very bad tip

So I picked up this habit, when I knit socks, of jotting notes on the back of the ball band about gauge, cast-on, things to remember about the heel turn, etc. I suppose it would also work for hats and gloves.

You know what it doesn't work for? A sweater for a largish man. I'm making a sweater for DrBob, designing it myself because I have a problem with authority am wholly incapable of following directions am creative like that, and the bottom of my knitting bag now holds a salad of pointy, slippery, pencilled gibberish. There's a design that will never get published.

Hm. Perhaps I should learn from this experience...

...nah.

Sindelfingen photos

Not that I took any pictures of Sindelfingen itself, though I should have because it was all half-timbered medieval fabulousness of the sort that makes American tourists squee. But I didn't think to take my camera because the battery's only good for five minutes or so, and anyway it takes sucky photos. Have I mentioned lately that I hate my camera?

But it was sunny today, and really, what is the point of buying superfabulous yarn if you can't photograph it, post it to your blog and try not to feel smug about it? So without further ado, my Wollmeise haul. Click to embiggen.

Ooo, the laceweight - we were told there wouldn't be any at the market, something about the supplier running out. I'm not sure if that meant permanently or what. Anyway, around lunchtime they brought out the last two bags of dyed laceweight, and I managed to snag one for me and one for a friend (not photographed, because I sent it off on Tuesday, though you can see it in the previous entry's group photo).

I also got some Twin sock yarn in Farn, which is my favorite non-busy colorway. (I couldn't possibly choose a favorite busy colorway - as my stash will attest, I have about 25 favorites.) I've never actually knit with Twin, though I do have a skein of Boboli Twin that I really should do something with...

Aaaaand the old faithful, 100% Superwash Sockenwolle, the yarn I have more of than any other kind. I hardly ever use it because I love it too much to waste on something that isn't truly fantastic. Yes, yes I am insane. What, you're only just noticing?


Anyway, none of these photos really capture the color of the yarn, but they're as close as I could get them. From left to right: a versuchskaninchen that is almost like Neptun, a bit more green in real life; Vergißmeinnicht (forget-me-not), my other favorite semi-solid colorway; sündig & verrucht (sinful and wicked), a bit less blue in real life; and herzblut (heart's blood). There are so many other colors I would have loved to get, but ten skeins seemed like enough to buy for one day. Eleven, with the laceweight. Fourteen, with the laceweight and sock yarn that I picked up for a friend.

So there you have it. Sindelfingen. A very good weekend.

haul

All right, just a quick photo - I'll try to go into more detail later, but you can't imagine how tired I am right now, and I still have the whole Eurovision Song Contest to get through.

more zero-sum knitting on the same thing, yay.

Turns out, that mitten-cuff from the previous entry was actually a swatch, though not a very good one: when I was first getting the hang of double knitting, I kind of knit too loose and the cuff was huge. I got up about 26 rows and decided that, while I loved the two colorways together, they weren't working with the zigzag pattern. So I frogged it and started over with the same red (Campari Orange) and a new color, Zur Lederhos'n, left over from the test knit, and my second draft is much more even and less loosey-goosey. Sometimes you just have to back up.

zero-sum knitting

Yesterday I had a train ride and then two hours to kill while Ignatz had his first Dutch lesson. A knitter never minds having time to kill (as long as she has her knitting handy) and I did make some lovely progress, though it's double knitting, which naturally goes rather slowly. But then I found an error, had to frog waaaaaay back, and by the time I had all my stitches back on the needles it was time to fetch Ig and go home. The rest of the day did not contain any uninterrupted 2-hour stretches of knitting time, so it took me the rest of the day to get back to where I'd been when I found the error and had to frog. Twice the knitting, half the progress.

Gnarf, as Tini says.

grade fail

So Aliénor was not graded for different sizes because it was written to be flexible: do this until it's long enough, pick up enough stitches, stop when it fits there and then do this, that sort of thing. And I did it that way on purpose, because I really don't much care for standardized size charts. I, for one, am one size when buying pants and skirts, and another size when buying shirts. (I don't wear dresses. Or, God forbid, jumpsuits.) I think many people are, and that bust measurement A doesn't necessarily mean armhole depth B. It all makes me feel quite curmudgeonly.

But Juana is... different. Yes, you're supposed to try it on as you go, but certain things have to happen in just the right place, so you have to know when you cast on exactly what will happen 55 rows later. So it required much intricate planning, and I can't just say "do this until it fits." Therefore, I need to write the pattern for multiple sizes, and hooee, pattern grading is a fussy business. Once I had the initial pattern charted, the math was easy, but drawing seven pattern outlines on the same chart is... not easy. I mean, it was fairly easy to draw them, but now what I have looks less like a knitting chart and more like... a subway map drawn by a demented neo-plasticist.

Hm. I've known for some time that this charting strategy would not work out, but I keep plowing ahead with it in the hope that a solution will occur to me. Something other than seven completely separate charts, resulting in a gigantamundo file that's too big to email or upload, and requires ten trees' worth of paper to print out.