cosmicpluto knits!

home sweet home

Following a crazy airline scheduling thing that had me scrambling to find a flight on Monday (and thinking I might end up staying in Edinburgh a lot longer) I finally flew home yesterday! I have so much still to catch you all up on – all my adventures in India and Scotland, what I knit, and what I bought!

I have lots of photos to go through so it might be a few days of intensive posting, if I can manage it. I’m a homebody at heart and I’m so glad to be back, even though it’s barely changed a bit. Sleeping in my own bed for once was just awesome, with the added side effect of changing time zones so much that I able to sleep for 8 hours and still got up at a reasonable time.

In the meanwhile, take a look at my Errata page – there are a few corrections to the Amelia pattern and a few to Teach Yourself Visually Sock Knitting as well. And on my Classes and Appearances page, something new: I’ll be speaking at the Downtown Knit Collective guild meeting on March 18!

I guess I’d better start writing something to say! Also, I need to find myself a new project or two – as you can imagine I’m just a little bit sick of the 2 projects I worked on (intermittently) for the last six weeks. Time for a little stash diving.

tyv sock knitting: errata

A couple of errors have come to my attention – oops! Here they are:

p. 83, under “Work the Heel”, step 3 should say:
3) Row 1 (RS): * sl 1, k1 *, rep from * to * across.

p. 84, under “Gusset”, step 1 should say:
1) Next Round: K 8 (8, 9, 9, 10, 10) sts.

These will also be posted on the Errata Page.

P.S. Trip planning is eating my brain. But my Lucy-for-the-trip is almost almost done!

it was bound to happen!

Oops. The first errata for TYV Sock Knitting has come to my attention – it’s in the Slip-Stitch Ridges socks, and it’s important if you’ve never knit socks before!

Page 142, Step 4 should read:
Row 4: Sl 1, p to 1 st before gap, p2tog, p1, turn.

I’ve put up an errata page up top in the tabs, so any other errata will go up there too (along with a note here in the main bloggy area!). I’ve also picked up on a couple of incongruous photos in the book, but nothing in an actual action-y shot yet (just a needle photo that should’ve been a different one, etc).

Here’s hoping the errata page doesn’t need to be posted on too often!

winners!

Whoops, sorry it’s taken me so long to get to this! When I went to get the names of the winners, I realized that in the site redesign I’d forgotten to add a bit of code that numbers the comments for me to make it easy for draws! Well, that’s all fixed now.

Without further ado, the names of the winners are Heather N, Nada and Jennifer (comment #19). I’ve emailed the winners, so you should get your book shortly!

Also, since it seems like it’s been a rather long time since I had an FO to show, here’s the mini Simple Yet Effective shawl out of Noro Kureyon Sock.

Noro Mini Shawl
Pattern: my Simple Yet Effective shawl
Yarn: Noro Kureyon Sock, 1 skein
Needles: 3.5 mm Addis
Finished Size: approx. 45″ across the top, 19″ deep

I’m reformatting my pattern into a little pattern card, memo size (half the size of letter paper) to sell at lettuce knit along with the yarn. It looks like this, which I’m quite happy with:

(ETA: I’ve decided to offer the pattern for sale, so I’ve taken down the photo of the pdf.)

Since it’s a free pattern and all I’m not going to worry about it if you guys want to decipher the pattern from that screen cap to knit it! I just wanted to have something small and inexpensive as a pattern to accompany the Kureyon sock (or any sock yarn, for that matter). Now I just have to figure out how to print them properly!

It’s quite a little shawl, but great for an accent scarf.

And it photographs awfully nicely!

giveaway time!

Apologies for the lack of blog posting! I’ve been working and otherwise a little busy this week:

Yesterday I (with some help) canned two bushel boxes of roma tomatoes from the grocery store – getting to the last of the season, they were only $10 each! I’m so tempted to go back and get another one to make sauce. The tomatoes that didn’t make the canning cut went into a vat of sauce to be frozen, and the good ones became 29 L jars of halved or diced tomatoes plus 18 500-ml jars of diced tomatoes.

I can’t wait to crack some open a little further along in the winter! Mmmm.

Another random food-related little note – I’ve been working on following a hypoallergenic and anti-candida diet these days (except for at my launch party, that was a special occasion!) and today I made the most awesome snacky food!

I found brown rice tortillas in the frozen section of the grocery store where I bought the tomatoes – they have quite an extensive health food-type selection. I had ripe avocados today, so it was time for the guacamole and chips! I cut a couple tortillas into wedges, sprayed them with a little olive oil (I’ve got a little pump bottle that you can fill with whatever you want), sprinkled them with a little salt and garlic powder, and then baked them in the toaster oven for a couple minutes at 400 F. They were super crispy and tasty, just what I wanted. I’ll definitely be making these again. I think they’re go great with all the soups I’ve been making.

In other news, I had my book launch party at lettuce knit last Wednesday and it was great! Unfortunately I suffered a bout of camnesia and didn’t take photos at all. People dropped by, yummy food was had (thanks megan!), I signed books and even managed to knit a little bit.

And now to celebrate, how about I send some more books out into the world?

I’ve got THREE (3) copies of my book, Teach Yourself Visually Sock Knitting, to send away to three blog readers! All you need to do is leave me a comment to this post pointing me to something that you think is cool, interesting, funny, delicious (and vegetarian), or otherwise entertaining!

Comments will close Friday, October 3 at 11:59 PM EDT (can you believe it’s almost October already?). Winners will be chosen at random.

the yarn…and a first!

I bought a lot of yarn while I was away. A lot. I only bought one piece of clothing (an expensive but amazing, made-in-France skirt) and the one pair of shoes (which, by the way, are Doc Martens for anyone who asked), but I bought a hell of a lot of yarn. I hadn’t really intended to, but whatever. Yarn makes a great souvenir!

I got some at k1 in Edinburgh, some at Le Bon Marche in Paris, but most of it came from iknit day.

In the top left, there’s cashmere from Devon Fine Fibres, some for presents and some for me – they raise their own flock, and have a very limited supply of yarn, but it’s sooo beautiful. And inexpensive, for sure.

Top right is organic merino from ColdHarbour Mill, a working mill and textile museum! They had 100g skeins of the undyed organic merino on for 5 pounds, and I bought a sweater’s worth of the 4ply plus some others for gifts.

Bottom left is two skeins of Bowmont wool from Devon Fine Fibres, a new rare cross breed. It’s a mix of merino and shetland, and is really soft in a still-wooly way! They didn’t have much left when we got there (I blame erqsome, she bought a sweater’s worth of the grey) so I just got the two skeins. Now, what to make?

And in the bottom right, not yarn of course, it’s fabric from Liberty. Expensive, but sooo pretty. I’m going to have to make a few more practice skirts before I commit to cutting this up!

And the first?

Last night I held my book for the first time – a box came into the store just when I was starting to work last night. And I sold my first book, to my friend Jeff (I’m sure books have sold so far, but this was the first one *I* sold!). And I signed my first book.

Whew.