Swatch That You Say?

Best Quote I Heard All Day
"Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty"--Nathaniel Hawthorne

Are you ever tempted to cheat on your swatch measurements?
"Oh, wait, this could be 5 stitches to an inch...let me move the tape measure a little bit."

Hopefully, you never use a tape measure to check your swatch. Why? Because tape measures do stretch out and aren't accurate enough for measuring a swatch. They're fine for body measurements and that's it.

If the garment is worked in the round, ya swatch in the round!

You do, right? Don't fucking lie to me.

Here's the swatch I'm doing for the Go Gansey! socks, in Cascade Heritage sock yarn, which is 75% superwash merino/25% nylon. Soft as shit! And yep, these are my fabulous new Signature DPs. At $45 a set, they are truly the Hope Diamonds of the needle world. I do wish that Signature would make them in #0s too.

WEBS Walkabout (not in the Aussie sense of the word)
Jerry and I took a quick trip to the Adirondacks last week but stopped in South Deerfield, MA so that he could go to Yankee Candle's flagship store and buy his aunt a present. Needless to say, I stopped at WEBS, which is just a short 11 miles south in Northampton. For shits 'n' giggles, I took a little video using my Android cellphone. I put it up on Facebook already but for those of you who ain't my FB friends, here's Mar sneaking about the store.

It is a fabulous place! New England has some of my very favorite string joints--Halcyon (Bath, ME), The Fiber Studio (Henniker, NH), Harrisville Designs (Harrisville, NH) are three that I love. I've not yet made it to Bartlettyarns in Harmony, ME, but that's next on the list. Don't waste your time going to Patternworks in Center Harbor, NH. It's really just a glorified LYS and there's nothing terribly special to buy, although the building is lovely. Jimmy and I used to vacation in Center Harbor back in the '90s because it's right on Lake Winnipesaukee, so go there for that.

I did buy a skein of off-white Cascade Heritage to make the Go Gansey! socks in both blue and off-white so that users have a traditional choice. And then I bought this:

Beautiful Madelinetosh Prairie superwash merino laceweight in the Fragrant colorway. This will become a lace scarf that I'll submit somewhere. Or sell in my Ravelry shop. Oddly, this colorway is not listed on her site but is available elsewhere. I guess they need to update the website.


Fiberality Designs
I finally got my shit together on Ravelry and set up Fiberality Designs, where you can download the Leaves of Grass and Yeti sock patterns for free, the ones that used to be available in the sidebar here. Plus, I have a couple of things for sale, too. There will be more added as I get 'em done. Of course, I'm starting a new tech writing job next week but I'll be knitting on the train, during lunch, and after work, as usual, working on the book proposal still.

So that's it for this bit. Thanks to all for your blog anniversary comments. You ARE rare and handy, ya know. Let me know if you're going to Rhinebeck, which is where I usually hook up with readers. Next entry, a couple of book reviews...and other shit, no doubt.

Later, skanks. By the way, for some half-assed Blogger reason, when I published this entry, a couple of the widgets weren't displaying data. Fuck.