Well I bought yarn (ducks behind sofa to avoid the hecklers' cabbage and rotten eggs). I have an excuse - honest I do. It is all YOUR fault! (Points accusingly at fellow heckling bloggers). I had no defence against the lovely yarns and patterns you all linked to during Blog week. I drooled so much over the lovely yarns and the pretty patterns, I might possibly have got a bit giddy with it all.
Firstly, I had been resisting like mad the latest update on Kemps. If you have never heard about the marvellous Clearance Section of Kemps Wool Shop, you are probably lighter in stash and heavier in pocket than the rest of us. They have lots of great bargains with end of line yarns and discontinued colours of well known brands. It means that often a garment's worth of yarn is affordable. The yarn in question, that I had been resisting with all my will, was the Sirdar Tweedie, which I used to knit Martin's Manly Scarf, and the matching Manly Hat. I really liked this yarn. It is chunky and soft with density, without being heavy, made up of 45% Acrylic, 40% Wool and 15% Alpaca, and I believe it may machine wash. It is a lovely yarn and I really wanted to knit myself something in it. I have never bought this yarn for myself, as it has a short meterage, and then I saw lovely colours on Kemps. I particuarly loved the Mallard colourway. I was doing really well at resisting until I saw a pattern on someone's blog. (I hate that I can't remember who it was who was talking about this pattern.)
The pattern in question was Josephine from Knitty, Fall 2005. I am now totally smitten with this pattern. I have no idea why, I'm not even sure it will suit me, I just know I have to knit it. Then I looked at the yarn requirements, and the next thing I know I've got a bundle in front of me, courtesy of the nice people at Kemps.
Come on, you have to admit, it is a damned fine colour isn't it? And look at all the little specks of tweedie yumminess.
At the bargain price of £1.62 per skein (if you include postage) I really was powerless to resist. At least grant me that knowing what I want to make with it, before I buy the yarn, is at least a step in the right direction??
And that all sounds so well and good until you consider my next slip up. I accidentally saw on my Twitter feed the tweet from @PoshYarn, telling everyone that the shop update was going live in an hour. I saw the tweet 1 hour and 10 mins after it had been posted. I went and had a look at the shop update out of curiosity and look what slipped into my basket.
It is Daisy sock yarn, which is comprised of merino wool and bamboo, which gives it a lovely sheen. The colourway is 76 Trombones and I fell in love with it. I felt it was meant to be when I saw there were 2 skeins left (or maybe I was so shocked that there were some skeins left unsold, when I went to the site, that I blacked out). By the time my purchase had completed, the shop had sold out of pretty much everything. You have to move fast on update day with Posh Yarns, and this is the first time I've bought Posh Yarn. One day I'm going to treat myself to one of her saturated and sumptuous cashmere yarns, when I empty a couple of boxes of stash that is, oh and wait on the website until it goes live so I can snatch it from the jaws of other knitters.
So I have been quite bad this week, my only excuse is that I'm feeling a bit wonky about the upcoming surgery and I wanted something to pick me up. I have to confess that it worked! Oh and for the record, I managed to squeeze all the new skeins, in the new stash storage system - woohooo!
