This morning, I was dreaming about a yarn blend of cashmere and angora.  Wouldn’t that be something to work with?  And to wear?  Ahhhh…..

When my Knitpicks order didn’t arrive on Friday, I - shamefully, I admit - pouted like a three year old denied a lollipop just before dinner time.  I know better than to be planning something that depends on the arrival of materials.  In the past, orders have been placed to try yarns out, or needles, or even with a project in mind - but a project that was still out there a ways.  This time it was something I wanted to start right away and I can’t say my attitude about waiting for delivery was especially adult :)

However, when I got home Saturday afternoon, there was the box, sitting on the back porch, waiting for me!  Yay, yippee and hoo-rah!  I practically danced up the stairs :)  Contained within were the following items:

There are 4 skeins of this - Gloss lace weight in the color Port.  I wanted to see what it was like and figured as long as I was ordering it, I might as well order enough to actually do something with.  It comes to something over 1700 yards, so there’s plenty of yarn.  I’ll have my usual arguments with lace weight, but it does have a slighter thicker feel than, say the baby alpaca, so I’m hopeful.  The hand is luscious and the color is rich - it practically gleams in the sunlight.  I won’t be using this right away, but I am looking forward to trying it out.  I am not looking forward to winding 440 yard balls, but hey - that goes with the territory :)

There are also 4 balls of the Merino Style in Cornflower as requested by Myria for a Here, Kitty, Kitty…scarf.  I love this color myself and since the scarf is a simple and fairly quick knit, this should be done before too long - certainly before the seriously cold weather gets here!

I had also ordered some of the wooden Harmony interchangeable needles to try.  I’d had serious concerns about the colors on the needles impairing my ability to see the stitches clearly but these needles are so clearly beloved by so many lace knitters that I felt I had to give them a shot.

The verdict?  They are all the good things other knitters have said about them and knitting with them sails along nicely with less danger of stitches slipping off - as with a shiny, metal needle.  The sharpish points are wonderful!  On the whole, they were quite a bit better than I expected.  Two things though - on one of the size 6 needles, the tightening hole has a little lip where it was not quite properly machined.  The lip catches the yarn.  Not good.  I can take care of this myself so it’s not a serious issue except that I don’t expect to have to “fix” things that are brand new.  The other thing?  The colors of the needles are indeed a problem.  I can see that they won’t be with lighter or brighter colors of yarn, but for what I’m using, it doesn’t work very well.

As this picture was taken in bright, direct sunlight, you can see the stitches clearly on the wooden needle (the one on the left).  I don’t generally get to work in bright sunlight though and under standard room lighting, things are a lot less clear because the yarn is in the same tonal family as the needles.  Here, I am knitting the project onto metal needles (the one on the right) so that I can see clearly what I’m doing - always an advantage with lace :)

I will save the wooden needles for a project with lighter colored yarn.  The lace weight mohair blend I got a few weeks ago is a light grey/beige and should work beautifully.  I probably won’t buy more of these however because I don’t want to have to worry about the color of my needles when considering the color of the yarn.  It seems basic to me that needles should work with any yarn - not just a certain range of shades.

Finally there was this - Palette fingering weight in the Wood color.  This color had been discounted making the yarn an exceptional buy and I got 10 balls of it - somewhere around 2300 yards.  I’m not fond of browns and had ordered this with the intention of overdying it with a deep, burgundy red.  Only when I opened the package, the color was so warm and almost coppery, that I had second thoughts about the dyeing.  It’s still a possibility, I suppose, but as I get further and further along on this…

...the less likely it becomes.  I tell you, I think I had this cast on less than a half-hour after I opened the box and I’ve been working on it ever since.  This is the circular, music/composer based shawl that finally crystallized in my brain a few weeks ago and for which I had been most anxiously awaiting the yarn.

I’m ready to do the next set of increases which will jump the stitch count to 288 around and to begin the next stitch pattern.  I’ve never worked a circular shawl before and it’s interesting to think about.  It’s starts easily and simply with a few stitches in the middle and grows from there.  But every bite is bigger (by a long shot!) than the one before it and I find myself taking a deep breath before starting those increase rounds.  I’m not generally a big stitch marker user either, but I have to say they’ve been a lifesaver here, not to mention making keeping track of all those stitches much less of a headache!

Oh, and as EZ observes in The Knitter’s Almanac, the whole thing draws up nicely and neatly into its own pouch with the yarn ball inside when you’re not working on it.  A very tidy project indeed!

So far, so good!  Onwards :)

  I was incorrect about the lip on the tightening holes being on the needle.  They are, of course, on the ends of the attachable cable of which I had ordered a pair.  My apologies for such a silly error :)