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Today we looked out the window to find an intruder in the front yard. 
It's not everyday you see a backhoe digging up a big section of your front yard. There is quite a bit of roadwork in the village this summer, which has really NOT affected any traffic, much to my surprise. On our street they're just replacing the water main that's located on the other side of the street. They're trying to find where they can attach the temporary water supply to our house. And guess what? They can't find it. :)They could run the temporary supply in through a basement window, but then the window would be open for over a week, and the building would be unsecure. Not good! Also, I didn't think my customers would appreciate stepping (or tripping) OVER an annoying water hose each time they came or left, so I told them to keep digging. I feel very UN-stressed about this. Hey, it needs to be done. Sure, it's an inconvenience and it makes a mess, but why waste time worrying about it? So I'm not!My latest project is a set of organic cotton baby washcloths. What a great idea for a baby gift! I chose three balls of the Rowan Purelife Cotton (which is on sale this week, online... by the way!) and made my first one in half double crochet with a single crochet edging. I really like it! I'm going to knit one next, but I need to come up with a pattern first. I like these because the yarn is so soft, and it's organic cotton dyed with all natural plant dyes. The shades are so soft - they're really lovely. I think three balls will make a nice gift of 3 washcloths, a tiny hat and perhaps even a set of booties. Not bad!
This is the first week of summer for us. The girls are spending the week at a camp at UVM. So far so good. Their favorite part is archery - though Sophie says she still hasn't gotten her arrow on the board. But wow, what a great attitude she had about it. She still loves it, and she just keeps trying harder. I love when you see that kind of personal growth in your children!Today was SO busy in shipping. We got the Norah Gaughan books in yesterday. We have shipped over 60 of them and we have another 70+ coming in tomorrow and almost all of them are spoken for already. LOTS of international orders. We've sold a lot of the other Berroco pattern books as well. They are just GREAT this season.
I have several friends who are pregnant and due to have their babies soon... a sign that spring is here! The tough part for me, is to decide what to knit for them. We have several books and patterns to choose from, so it makes the decision even tougher. I love all of the patterns in the book Simply Baby by Debbie Bliss. Most of the patterns in this book are knit with sport or DK weight yarn. This may give me an excuse to finally knit with a few of the new yarns we got in, like the Rowan PureLife Cotton, the Cascade Cotton Rich DK, Berroco Comfort DK, or the so soft Babyboo! I also have my eye on a few Plymouth Patterns... I've just been helping Jill to add hundreds of patterns to our website. I've been doing lots of data entry on over 100 Plymouth patterns and let's just say I am now very well acquainted with these patterns! During the process, I found several I'd like to make... including the Booties, Sweater, and Hat pattern. 
Pattern #1121 is a Baby Sweater, Hat, and Blanket which would be a great gift set especially for someone having their first baby (and like all things knitted, can be passed down to the future kiddos too.) 
And, since I love color so much, I am immediately drawn to the Adriafil KnitCol Yarn. We just got in more colors that are ideal for babies, and children too. Since the yarn changes color all the time, you never get bored. In fact, you don’t really want to stop knitting, because you want to see how the pattern evolves. I find myself saying, just one more row! Patterns #1213 Baby Cardigan, 
and #1214 Baby Pullover are super cute and easy to knit with this yarn. So I’m back to my original problem of what to knit. Too many projects and not enough time!
It's been sitting in the classroom for weeks now, and it's finally done! I knit the hat but wasn't too sure of my artistic ability when it came to the needle felting. So I asked Michele to do it, and both she and Kalen contributed some flowers, and yay! It's done.
Very cute! Now I just have to find my notes from when I made up the pattern... Need to recreate it. Why am I always so bad about keeping good notes?We've been going through a lot of tea recently - we've sold Harney teas for several years now, and we just love them! Many of our internet customers have been turned ON to Harney - most of our boxes go out with a little Harney tea sample... and we're amazed at how many of our customers love tea!Every afternoon I seem to need a pick-me-up at about 3:30. My favorite is the Hot Cinnamon Sunset - a black tea with 3 types of cinnamon, orange peel and sweet cloves. Yum! I had been drinking the Hot Cinnamon Sunset for about a month, when I started to have difficulty falling asleep at night. It's most likely NOT the tea's fault, as it was during the last full moon, and I often have difficulty sleeping during the full moon. But I figured it couldn't hurt to switch to a decaf tea, so I switched to the African Autumn, which is a blend of herbal Redbush, cranberry and oranges. It is delicious! And so no more counting sheep for me!
I just finished a gorgeous scarf out of Pure & Simple. I can only show you this much... 
... because it's in Massachussetts at a Tilli Tomas photo shoot right now, along with several skeins of our custom colorway "Leaf Peepers". They are doing a shoot for fall ads and may use our stuff... COOL!I'm also working on a cute little sweater from the Nashua Handknits Blossom booklet. I chose the Cascade Cotton Rich DK and I am really enjoying working with it. I had already knit a swatch with this yarn and really liked it. 
It has very subtle color variations that add some nice depth to the finished piece. The sweater I'm making is cute - and should be done soon as it's only a 3-6 month size.
We've already made two other models (still drying!) from this book - it's a keeper. We used the new pink Ecologie Cotton for one,
and the Purelife Cotton in Lipstick Tree for the other.
This past Sunday was spent mostly in the car... we drove the girls to see the Hannah Montana movie in Hooksett, NH. It was really cool - the 3D stuff was impressive to say the least. 
Helen and Sophie were wide eyed, throughout. I was blown away by the people in the movie trying to dress and look like HM, even wearing HM wigs! There were thousands of young girls on screen screaming at the top of their lungs at this concert. I guess HM is quite the sensation with my daughters' generation. My first reaction was to laugh, but I was young once too. Weren't we all?I didn't have a favorite singer when I was 8. But this movie brought back memories of my high school days, when all my friends had their bedroom walls plastered with posters of Michael Jackson... the Michael Jackson of way back, who we all thought was cute, and normal! (How things have changed.) And Madonna, whose songs we all knew every word to and played over and over in our "walkmen." In September of 1984, my senior year in high school, I saw Michael Jackson moonwalk in front of 60,000 screaming people who were mostly wearing white socks and lone white gloves. 
I went to Madonna's Like a Virgin concert in May of 1985, and I am guilty of wearing black leggings, an off the shoulder top and tons of black rubber bracelets. So I can relate to these little girls, in a way.Anyway, on the drive back we made a quick stop in Bow, NH to drop off some Purelife Cotton for Joy. She has started knitting a beautiful sweater for herself out of the Yellowwood color. It is really nice! She needed more of it, and she is only a mile off the highway, so I told here we'd stop by. We've dropped off yarn before, but this time I went in to see her place. She has all these beautiful paintings on her walls and I noticed on that on the lower right hand corners, there are three letters "J-O-Y". Now I was amazed enough, to find out that she had done them herself. But when she told me she did them between the ages of 10 and 12? I was a bit speechless. This was my favorite:
And this:
Check out the detail:
And this:
And this was a bird she had done when she was only 5 years old.
Nice to have a talent like that! Well, it's really just one of many. She showed me all of her recent knitting projects, some finished, some not, some hers, some for the shop. 
She posed with Sophie for a picture, when I noticed a gorgeous throw on her couch! 
I thought it looked familiar! Remember this?
Times have changed - something that was so in fashion several years ago, looks so out of fashion now. But how stunning it looks on a handsome leather couch!
I thought Barb's post yesterday on the Sierra yarn was interesting. I think it's really important for knitters to understand that buying a skein of yarn, just to swatch, is a critical part of the whole knitting process. Just because you see a new yarn on the shelves, and you think it feels good when you fondle it, and you like how our swatch or sample looks, doesn't always mean you will like it when you work with it yourself. I know how hard it is to leave the shop with just one skein. Especially when you really want to start a project. It can be really difficult to get excited about swatching. Believe me, I know.This past weekend, I was off on Saturday... which meant, I had two days off in a row. And with the rain/ice/freezing rain we had on Friday, I knew I was not heading up to Stowe to do any skiing. When I have two days off in a row, I usually pick a new project to take home with me. But this time I showed some restraint. I decided that I HAD to finish my Babyboo "I Love You Baby" sweater (which I did!)...
...and then I would do some mindless swatching of our Tilli Tomas yarns. We sell a TON of Tilli Tomas. And we do have several samples knit up. But we sell ALL of the Tilli yarns, and we don't actually stock all of them in the shop. Tracy had just sent me some Plie, which is comparable in weight to the Pure & Simple, but it's plied, which means less pilling. Just holding the skein, I wasn't convinced that I liked it as much. So I swatched.
I am now convinced. It's gorgeous! I went on to the Beaded Plie, the Pure & Simple, the Disco Lights, the Rockstar and finally the Flurries. I learned a lot about each of these yarns in the process, and now we have them all here for you to see and touch. 
Suzie came in the other day to look at all of our new spring yarns. She is trying to select a new spring project, and she couldn't decide which yarn she wanted to use. She's always excited when we get new spring yarns... because she doesn't like wools! She ended up buying 4 skeins: a Love It Colors, a Cotton Rich DK, a Purelife Organic Cotton, and a Natural Silk Aran. If any of you know Suzie, you know she is a swatcher. She doesn't always end up using all of the yarns she buys in sweaters, but she certainly gets to know each yarn VERY well while swatching. She emailed me and told me how much fun she had knitting during our mini ice storm on Friday. She said knitting with the Love It Colors was speedy - the color change kept her interest, and before she knew it, she had knit the entire ball!She also really enjoyed the Cascade Cotton Rich DK - she said she only had one split stitch... and that's because she looked up for a moment and was startled to see a deer looking right back at her through her window. "Up close and personal with mother nature I guess. I love the little bit of color variation (the different way cotton vs nylon takes the dyes maybe?) The swatch turned out incredibly soft and drapey! So, now I'm thinking summer sweater out of that..."Swatch #3 was the Rowan Purelife Organic Cotton. She had to drop down to a 4 (she knits a tad loose!) but she got really even stitches in both stockinette and seed stitch. She said, "It is so soft to knit with that I have a hard time remembering that it is indeed 100% cotton. Also, it doesn't fuzz and absolutely hasn't split on me -- even when the 6 large wild turkeys went wandering through the woods behind my house! (Like I'm running a wildlife show here or what?)"Her final swatch was the Rowan Natural Silk Aran. She fell in love with this yarn a few years ago, when she made the sleeveless funnel neck striped top from Sally Melville's Color Experience book 3. She picked up a ball of the light pink the other day, and is thinking about making another one of those tops. "a repeat as that was a really great top - just dressy enough if it had to be, but still comfy and cool! So, here's my conundrum... which yarn to use for a spring/summer/fall stitch work sweater? Nice problem to have! Thank you for adding those awesome cotton and cotton blend yarns!"
This is the first week of summer for us. The girls are spending the week at a camp at UVM. So far so good. Their favorite part is archery - though Sophie says she still hasn't gotten her arrow on the board. But wow, what a great attitude she had about it. She still loves it, and she just keeps trying harder. I love when you see that kind of personal growth in your children!
