This is the Cascade yarn section at the Amazing A--'s new yarn store. I really want her to succeed, so I took this picture so that I could send it to the Cascade Yarn Facebook page, which would put it on feeds around the world. The picture, with information and links, appeared twice. The yarn is Cascade 220 Sportweight, in case you need some.
Rather than carry a few skeins of a bazillion yarns, A-- thought back to her days working at the LYS and remembered what people actually bought and what they frequently had to special order, and tailored her stock using those indicators. Thus, she features carefully chosen yarn lines but with wide color choices, and she tries to have enough on hand for you to pick up a whole sweater's worth of yarn at once.
Thus, I was able to select exactly which yarn I wanted to use for Jupiter. Berocco Vintage is a superwash merino/acrylic blend, which isn't usually what I use when I knit garments. However, this is meant to be a workhorse sweater that will be washed. And it comes in such beautiful colors! And it has a fantastic hand feel! Finally, it knits up beautifully. Below is the cuff of the sleeve (I started knitting the sleeve as a gauge swatch). This is "Forest Floor," an acorny olivey green-brown. I've got several more inches completed now than you see here.
She also carries Opal and Berocco Sox, my two favorite sock yarns. In one room, A-- stocks spinning fiber, and will be featuring spinning wheels soon. While New Hometown Smack In The Middle has a yarn store that has a huge selection of great yarns, it's just not the same. I'm not finding the knitting friends I had hoped here, and not for lack of looking.
The Emperor and I have been home almost a week. On the one hand, it feels like we never left, and on the other it's like we've been home just a few hours. I've been back up to my office to try to get my mind back into working mode because I need to get my tenure file in order -- it's due one week into the semester, right at the same time that everything else lands on professors' plates, so I want it done and dusted before the end of this month. It's do-able, too -- the work is mostly just entering data and producing charts, and writing two short essays. I just have to do it.
The craft room is still in chaos, but I'm sufficiently recovered from being gone to begin working on it again for an hour or two per day. My goal is to have the room in order so that I can set up my sewing machine and get a blouse and a couple of cotton scarves thrown together for the upcoming school year.
Weather-wise, this has been a funky summer. It stayed cool and rainy until just before we returned from Way Out West, and has only really become characteristically hot since the weekend. Normally, temperatures rise to the 90s and occasionally the low 100s around the Fourth of July and stay there until early September. The temps got up to about 100 for two days, they're in the mid-90s now, and projected to get back down to the 80s next week and perhaps to rain (just in time for me to mow the lawn). I don't mind! I "requested" a cool wet summer, and I got it, but I'm paying the price.
I mowed the lawn right before we left on our trip, figuring that if we had a normal summer, it would stop raining, get hot, and the buffalo grass would go into hibernation and quit growing. But no. The Emperor kept track of the weather back home while we were gone, and the news wasn't good for my plan. After the third rain, I knew the grass would be waist-high and I came home thinking my first morning here was going to be spent cutting things down again.
The grass must have gotten really high, because although it was already dark outside, when we got home we noticed that someone had recently mowed it. The next morning, the identity of the mower was immediately evident -- it had been done with a riding mower, so it had to be the landlord. I'm going to have to let the lawn grow a bit again before the next mow, because our yard is not flat and even -- at one point, there were trees in all of the lawns and when they were taken out, nobody bothered to fill in the holes. So when a riding mower is used on our yard, some areas get scalped right down to the dirt. Other areas looked like the lawn is sporting a Mohawk haircut. I'll let it grow until next week and when the temperatures go down again, I'll even things out.
And now I will recite the saga of the lawn edger. The German part of me needs nice, clean edges to my lawns. My mother (a real, born-in-the-Old-Country German) used to get down on her hands and knees and edge the lawns with garden shears held at right angles to the sidewalk. Rejecting that option as mother-level nuts, for years I used a tool similar to the one shown below -- a manual edger. Because of my Germanic need for perfection, I've spent hours on a twenty-foot lawn edge trying to get it right, wearing holes in my gloves and blisters on my hands. Mother-level nuts, indeed.
I could have made this easy on myself and bought a power edger, but noooo. I'm also a well-known cheapskate and when I'd stop and admire edgers at the home improvement store, I'd tell myself "you lazy bum, you have a perfectly good edger and you only need to get your happy butt out there and use it." The Emperor has threatened more than once to hire somebody just to edge, but I refuse to allow it because I'm "young" and "strong" and "as long as I have breath in my body I'll do my own yard work." And then, we rented this place. We're on a corner, and there must be about a quarter mile of lawn edges -- no exaggeration. I just can't keep up with it and most of the time I haven't tried. I did get a nice edge with a weed whacker, but it took me about ninety minutes to do that same twenty foot stretch and while that's an improvement, it's still not a viable option. Finally, right before we left on our trip, I bought an electric power edger similar to this one.
I can't tell you how it works because miracle of miracles, the Emperor of the Garage (and more frequently, the Occupier of the Recliner) is now the Emperor of the New Power Toy Lawn Edger. No longer will I have to march out alone to face the Monster of the Lawn. I will now have company while doing battle against weed and grass. I figure that eventually I'll teach him how to produce Germanically satisfying straight lines but for now, I'm just happy that he's out helping me. In his defense, the Emperor has never been a cheerful gardener and openly detests lawn care. He grew up and lived most of his life in Arizona and had water-wise gravel instead of grass. I can usually get him to fire up the weed whacker, and more than once he's "edged" the lawn with the whacker, but I don't approve of that. Weed whackers don't edge a lawn, they bevel it, something that I find worse than a naturally overcreeping grass edge and upsetting to my Germanic sense of linear order.
All right, it's time to get to work.
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