Best Quote I Heard All Day
I love to go shopping. I love to freak out salespeople. They ask me if they can help me, and I say, "Have you got anything I'd like?" Then they ask me what size I need, and I say, "Extra medium."--Steven Wright

Shopping online is the nirvana of those who hate to go to stores. I hate shopping, I hate malls, I hate traffic.

I do the shopping thing as rarely as possible, as opposed to my sister who is intimately acquainted with every mall in the Northeast.

Does that make me an odd woman? Most likely. However, the men in my life have always cherished that quality and appreciated my anti-mall credo.

There's nothing better than boxes on the doorstep.

Weave, Wove, Woven
I dedicated my some of my holiday weekend to finishing up my sampler so that I could get on with my weaving life. After fiddling around with different treadling sequences, I finally got tired of looking at blue and red and switched over to plain weave aka tabby.

As you can see, I managed to break a warp thread, much to Loopy's glee. (She's been waiting for this with great anticipation.) It really wasn't difficult at all to correct using Chandler's T-pin method.

I'm getting better at this shit.

And my mother, having finally seen the loom on Thanksgiving, was impressed enough to ask me for placemats. Almost as good as warshcloths, only far more useful. So I put together these three colors for her placemat.

And I worked out a simple chart which will help me when I warp and weave. I'm not yet 100% confident of my drafting skills for weaving but this is simple and will suffice, since the placemats will be plain weave.

It looks quite stark in the chart but I think it will make acceptable placemats for my mother. The chart really shows more the finished product than the set-up. The warp will be 22 purple, 2 red, 22 violet, 2 red, ending with 22 violet. The weft will be the same. So use your imagination until I get it on the loom.

And please, no comments about those Red Hat idiots. I've been using purples and reds together for years. What scares me is that the RH dopes are women my age, who presumably went through the '60s fashion revolution. Now they think that red and purple are daring.

Starry Night Ad Nauseam
My other weekend project was to get two bobbins of Starry Night skeined and washed. These are motherfucker huge skeins, thanks to the Woolee Winder, which is very efficient in winding the bobbins evenly. I haven't yet measured the yardage but I'm betting they run about 450+ yds each.

This yarn presents an interesting challenge designwise. It's a good thing I will have plenty because there will be a good deal of swatching with this before I settle on an appropriate design. It's 20 wpi, which pleases me greatly since I am finally spinning what I want to knit.

On the other hand, it would make for a wonderful weft, with perhaps a silk warp. But that's just a random thought. I'll probably knit it.

Oh Yeah, the Other Thing
My mother, who is an excellent knitter but not one given to designing her own, asked me for a vest pattern now that she's finished a number of projects and is ready to knit the Wensleydale I gave her last Christmas.

Good thing yarn doesn't get stale.

Never mind that she has the Ann Budd books. She can't seem to take a basic pattern and add a cable to it. Ma claims that she can't visualize anything and I believe her. So I took a cable from the Harmony Aran book and did a quick vest pattern for her using Sweater Wizard.

Nothing exciting or extravagant. However, the charts in the Harmony book were so awful because they use bizarre symbols created by the author that I had to redo the chart on Stitch Motif Maker, which was a pain in the ass.

I'll take a picture of her wearing the finished vest. Knowing my mother, it will be done by Christmas.

I hope you all had a filling Thanksgiving. If I never eat turkey again, it'll be a rare and handy thing.