fiber day!

Fiber day at Veneta’s Downtown Market (the link takes you to the slideshow in case you need more incentive to check out the market during September) takes every Friday afternoon starting at 2:00 p.m. and ending at 6:00 p.m. Look at all that yummy Alpaca! These are shots I grabbed last week with my old camera, which has now been replaced. And now with my AmeriCorps year gone and the project nearly finished, regular knit blogging should resume.

She dyes roving too! Obviously I will miss my old camera. Of course, any half-way decent camera is good during the day.

We had an Olympus Stylus 4.0, which died because of a problem with the sensor and the door. It was sad really, because if the door is open, it works fine. That being said, we messed around with it for a month or two and it finally stopped budging. After some hemming and hawing, my husband and I finally chose the Olympus FE340. It’s a nice camera; 8.0 megapixels with a 5x optical zoom and a sweet little super macro mode. The super macro mode is what won it over for me. We liked the old Olympus, even though it is a bit on the sluggish side. On the other hand, we were used to it and not running around taking action shots.

Here is a photo taken with the super macro mode of some recent knitting I did. It’s the Branching Out Scarf I finished during the Ravelympics. I unfortunately failed to post about the finished project so I will not be receiving a medal. It’s okay though; I love this soft alpaca silk (Blue Sky Alpacas) and the scarf is reward enough.

I have been buying a LOT of yarn lately. I always get kind of crazed when switching jobs and can never really seem to focus on anything when that happens. There is some beautiful Jitterbug I need to show you along with some Kureyon Sock and Cascade Sock Yarn (yes Cascade sock yarn…) I bought on sale during labor day. And then a couple of days ago I was reading the yarn harlot and totally fell for Hey Teach from Knitty. It looked quick easy and just the sort of thing I wanted to work on. It didn’t hurt that my subsequent trip to Have You Any Wool in Salem found me some gorgeous forest green yarn from Crystal Palace. It’s Merino 5 and I love it, although it could be a little tightly twisted. It would be softer if it weren’t. Depsite not having quite enough yarn I bought it anyway and just hope I can find a matching dyelot if the time is needed. I cruised through the majority of the back to the armhole shaping and that is where I’ve been stumbling. Trying to get the stitch count set in the lace pattern is a tad trying, although I hope to have it done next week! I will wear it at Oregon Flock and Fiber (weather permitting) and maybe maybe at TKGA. I’m still trying to figure out how to justify $140 for a class with Ms. Cat Bordhi. I really want to take it. I don’t want to work; I just want to hang out with Cat all day (with apologies to Todd Rundgren.)

This photo was taken under horrible lighting conditions and on unfortunately no amount of color correction is going to work on this beautiful forest green yarn. What might work is if I resorted to my trick of using a yellow pillowcase as a background. But check out that stitch detail!

This is some yarn I traded for.

Here is some Noro Kureyon Silk that I have been toying with. I’m going to make a hat, but this one is way too small.

Hats, colorwork hats in particular, are the current bane of my knitting life. More on that later.