15,365...

...words, in case you're wondering. I managed to write while up north, even late into the night with my mother sewing at the dining room table, yakking at me occasionally, and the next day with Tess running around and my dad tickling her and Egor glaring at me for not stopping! the! madness! (my dad is the world's worst tease, and his tickling can bring a small child to tears...although he knows to stop just short of that).

Mom and I hit the craft show circuit Saturday morning, Tess in tow. She was amazingly well-behaved for all the dragging in and out of the car we did with her. The first show was at the F.O.E. hall and it was like stepping back in time. People were already sitting at the bar (at 10:30 a.m.!) smoking and having breakfast (at the same time, naturally! We were Up North)! I wanted to walk around outside afterward until my clothes freshened up, but we had craft shows to hit.

The next show, at the local elementary school, was packed. The first table in the gym was piled high with hand knit mittens (acrylic, and seamed up one side). Adult sizes were $2.50 a PAIR. Crazy. Crazier is I only bought one pair. Too bad they didn't have a purple pair for Tess. Perhaps even crazier to my knitting buddies is that I just don't KNIT MY OWN DAMN PAIR. Well, I will, I will, as soon as I knit up the 5 more pairs of socks I have yarn for. Now at least I have a sample pair of mittens, right? For less than a skein of acrylic yarn.

At one point we stopped at the knit shop in the mall; I was looking forward to this as I bought some of the owner's (what I thought was) homespun when I visited in the spring. The shop owner had two more skeins so I bought them and had them wound. While she was winding them I thought to ask what kind of sheep they came from (she had just shown me a pile of natural homespun on a bench in the shop, and told me those skeins were from her Blue Faced Leister). She slipped and said my yarn was Wool of the Andes. Wha...? Isn't that Knit Picks, I asked (naturally, since she was selling colored Wool of the Andes in her shop, with the Knit Picks label on)? Well, she said, I get this from the same supplier as Knit Picks.

Well, my slow little brain took the rest of the day to process this. I got in the car with my mom and said, wait a minute, she was selling Wool of the Andes for $4 a skein...and I'm pretty sure it's $1.79 in the catalog...

Later, we looked in the Knit Picks catalog, because what I bought was fingering weight and I was pretty sure KP only sold a worsted weight in natural, at $2.29 a skein (and not 440 yards, either). Alas! I forgot about their dye-it-yourself sock yarn.

Fingering weight.

440 yards.

$3.49 a skein.

What I just paid $9 for, without the benefit of the KP label, and with the assurance, last spring, that this was her yarn, she just had it "sent out to be spun."

Luckily, this experience was offset with a trip south to the lovely yarn shop in Harrisville. Robin truly does spin her own yarn, and showed us a stand of more rough looking, but prettily dyed, yarn from sheep she can call by name. ("This is Harry Belafonte," she told us, handling two particularly lovely orange skeins, "my friends ate him. They didn't tell me but I heard it through the grapevine after I sold him to them. They apologized later, but I knew that might happen when I sold him.")

I picked up some glossy purple fur for a hat I'm making for Tess (I should have enough to edge some mittens with, too) and two very pretty skeins of pale pink Wildfoote yarn for, of course, socks.

I'm trying not to obsess on my bad yarn shop experience. I'm taking a "buyer beware" stance, and a "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" attitude. That store owner has lost two customers, and, knowing my mom's penchance for gossip, she will lose many, many more. What goes around comes around.

In the meantime, I need to change my home page from Flickr. Because I always get sucked in to other people's photos. My latest curiosity lead me to this gal trying to lose her virginity. Strange but true...