Must. Not. Buy. Yarn...yet...

Universal Yarn Classic Shades - Rainforest

Crystal Palace Yarns Mini Mochi

I've been staring longingly at the WEBS website all day trying to resist making a big yarn order of all these beautiful yarns I've been dying to try.  BUT there are so many yarn-buying events in my future that I really should hold off and buy my yarn in person because that is SO much more fun. This weekend is the Knit and Crochet show in Greensboro.  I'm signed up for a fair isle class and I'm planning on driving up 2 hours early so I can check out the sales floor.    Then Oct 8-9 is the raleigh/durham/chapel hill/cary/apex yarn crawl so I'll be driving all over the place and probably buying a little something at each shop.  I'm super super excited.  I tried to make a little yarn excursion this past weekend but it didn't work out all that great...I was driving to Atlanta to visit my sister and I intended to try to stop at a bunch of yarn stores over the course of my 7 hour drive. Unfortunately, I didn't get started until 2pm so I only got to visit 2 yarn stores cause they mostly close at 5.  The first one was The Twisted Knitter in Mebane, NC.  This store was AWESOME.  I bought 3 skeins of universal yarn classic shades which I'm pretty sure is my favorite yarn ever.  The colorways tend to remind one of Noro but the yarn is SOOO soft and as an acrylic/wool blend it is machine washable.  I'm not sure why acrylic gets so much hate...no one is allergic to it, you can machine wash it, and it can be quite soft.  Maybe the people complaining about it have been getting all their yarn at Michael's/AC Moore.  Red Heart Super Saver is NOT a good example of acrylic yarn people.  

OK I did work. Knitting Time!

Chaos Afghan

For once I’ve actually completed a law school assignment with a reasonable amount of confidence that its not complete and total shit.  At first I was like “this is too easy, I must be missing everything important”  (this how i’ve felt the entire time I’ve been in law school and usually its true) but after re-reading the assignment and the chapter of the textbook and the hornbook and a form book I’ve decided that this assignment was actually just meant to be really easy.  Yay!   Now I can go home and play with yarn!  The chaos blanket is sooooo close to being finished…I think I’m down to 3 skeins of yarn that have enough left for more rows…2 of them are practically laceweight though so they’re gonna take a little while, not sure if I can finish it tonight.  Once I get this done my next work-in-progess to finish off will be a REALLY SOFT baby alpaca mitten thats been sitting around with no thumb for like a month and then a granny square baby blanket made of different shades of pink.  

I just want to FINISH something

I'm in that awful knitting place where I have like 8 REALLY BIG works in progress and I just want to do something different.  I promised myself I'm not gonna start anything new until I finish these and from now on I'm only gonna have two works in progress at once: one nerdy thing for the etsy shop, and one thing that lets me use fun yarn (because cheap michael's yarn is great for amigurumi but sometimes a girl just needs to play with cashmere).  One of my giant works in progress at the moment is what I'm calling a Chaos Afghan.  I purchased a single-skein grab bag from Webs and picked 22 bright, fun yarns from the mix.  I'm crocheting 2 rows of each yarn in a ripple pattern and as I run out of a yarn I drop it out of the pattern and just keep on going with the yarn I have left.  When I run out of yarn it will be done.  This has been a really really fun project, I love playing with a bunch of different yarns.  And its getting pretty close to being done...not counting the gazillion ends I'm going to have to weave in once I'm finished crocheting.  I'm definitely keeping this one but I'll post a picture of it on Etsy as an example of a custom project, I'd love an excuse to buy another grab bag and make another one of these, perhaps in a different color scheme.  Once its all finished I'll get a pic up here too.

Okay weather, thats enough, now leave me alone.

The weather is out to get me today.  See I have a major phobia of tornadoes.  I’ve never experienced one but i dunno, maybe I was too young when I watched the wizard of oz because tornadoes are just the scariest thing in world to me.  This means that when the weather is in any way severe (even very heavy rain)  I get very nervous and when there are high winds I am reduced to cowering in the bathroom (because it has no windows) just waiting for the roof to blow off and me and my kitties to fly into the air and get carried away never to be seen again.  AND today the weather is absolutely screwing with me.  First, I woke up 30 minutes before my alarm went off (so annoying) because there was very heavy rain blowing against the window by my bed and it was making me too nervous to sleep.  Then the lightning and thunder started.  I was contemplating not going to class but my wonderful boyfriend offered to drive me to school on his way to work so that I wouldn’t have to walk to the bus stop in the weather from hell.  This was very sweet of him but since he starts work at 9:00 and I start class at 9:50 that meant I got to the law school an hour early and had nothing to do.  That would have been fine…except immediately upon my arrival at the law school I get an email that my first class is canceled.  Now I didn’t have anything to do until 11:00.  If I hadn’t been too scared of the weather to take the bus, I would’ve gotten the email in time and could’ve stayed home and knit for another 2 hours.  I waited out my 2 hours and went to my 11:00am class.  Halfway through I heard this siren somewhere on campus.  I was a little concerned cause hey, I have anxiety issues, but nothing came of it so I figured it was an ambulance or something.  Nope.  10 minutes later the dean (or someone else important) bursts into the classroom and informs us we need to stop class, get away from the windows, and go cower in the basement because there is a tornado.  Now the law school seems pretty sturdy, and is halfway underground so I wasn’t too worried about my own safety but my boyfriend was at work above ground and my poor little kitties were all alone at the apartment!  Thankfully after 30 minutes of shaking uncontrollably the warning was cancelled because apparently the tornado had dissipated a few miles away.  Then, in my 3rd class, the sirens came on AGAIN and we were all ushered to the basement AGAIN because there was ANOTHER tornado.  Once again, the tornado did not actually hit my part of the county and we were allowed out of the basement after 30 minutes.  All in all, I’ve experienced a lot of really unnecessary anxiety today. And I have one more class...god knows what will happen next.

I'm OLD. And also some knitting websites.

I turned 23 today...that age sounds rather adult...but yeah...a year into law school with a full fledged yarn addiction I'm not feeling all that grown up.  When my BF turned 24 last May I was like "oh god I can't believe I'm dating someone who's 24.  Thats so OLD!" and now I'm OLD too!
Anyways, while in Hawaii I discovered that my skin is extremely sensitive to sunlight and consequently I spent a lot of time indoors at the hotel (this is not a complaint, the hotel was gorgeous and I got to knit).  Thankfully, the hotel also had free wireless so I've discovered some really cool knitting stuff on the web.  My LYS's facebook page posted a link to the Fall Knit and Crochet Show which just happens to be in Greensboro this year.  YAY for copious amounts of fun with yarn just 45 minutes away from meeeee!  While I contemplated taking every single class, I've decided just to drive up for saturday afternoon to take a fair isle knitting class (fair isle and color knitting in general is something that has terrified me for far too long) and check out the shopping room.  While exploring that website I THEN discovered TKGA (The Knitting Guild Association).  Any knitters reading this should go check out their website immediately, they have all kinds of useful resources.  I'm particularly excited about the knitting correspondence courses that they offer, including their Master Knitting Program.  I want to be a master knitter!  Just you wait, 2 years from now I'll have a law degree and a knitting certificate and I'll go around bragging about the knitting certificate.  Anyways for now I've enrolled in their "Basics, Basics, Basics" course so that I can make sure I have all my basics technically correct (since I have never gotten any knitting help from another human being) before I start the masters program.  I'm SUPER excited about this because I get to knit swatches and then send them in to get feedback from someone who knows much more about knitting than I do :D  My class materials came on friday so I'll be getting started knitting my swatches this week! I'm also getting close to finishing the rainbow spectrum afghan I've been working on...I decided to block every square individually before sewing them together so thats taking a little while but expect pictures of the finished product very soon!  I think its coming together really well but I gotta say, I regret using Cascade 220 yarn for this.  I've been trying to purchase higher quality yarn from WEBS or my LYS for most of my projects, but for even a moderately sized afghan this just costs too much!  This project was super fun to make and I hope to make more to sell on Etsy but in the future I will be using nice, cheap, machine washable Red Heart Super Saver for any afghans.

Thank you Geek Crafts!

So today I was checking out my shop stats on Etsy to see if my facebook page (Niki's Knerdy Knitting on Facebook) was generating any traffic when I discovered that several views had been directed from my FAVORITE blog: Geek Crafts .  They featured my Soot Sprites on one of their postings today!  I am super excited to have them notice me just a week after I listed items for sale in my shop.  Thank you Geek Crafts, you guys almost made me start jumping around and squealing in a very quiet resort lounge in Hawaii :D On that note, Hawaii is completely gorgeous and fabulous, look at this big manta ray I saw swimming around in the ocean just a few feet away from me!  And of course, I've been doing lots of knitting (my needles made it through security after all!).  I've started a new project just for this trip, its an afghan made of 49 squares: 7x7 to represent all the colors of the rainbow!  Here is my progress so far, you can see I've incorporated all the combinations of red, orange, and yellow and am just starting work on the green sections:

Big News!

After a summer of working at a law office full time and not knitting nearly enough, I have FINALLY gotten my Etsy shop, Niki's Knerdy Knitting, up and running!  I'm uploading pictures to my computer as I type this and will be adding bunches of new items to the shop throughout the evening, please check it out!  In other news, I'm leaving for vacation to Hawaii (YAY) on friday, lets keep our fingers crossed that the ever inconsistent TSA doesn't take my knitting needles away at security and I can get lots of knitting done on that 12 hour flight.