Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

What's 300 miles wide and a big tease? A week ago, we Atlantans were salivating and giddy with delight at the prospect of finally getting a good dousing from tropical storm remnants. Although the drought is better, it is still not gone. We really do need the occasional hurricane remnant to refill our water table. A foot or two of rain dumped on Lake Lanier would be just fine, thank you very much. Now we've watched Fay slow waltz over Florida, making a lot of trouble for those fine folk who don't deserve such bother. Today is our second day of dark, heavily overcast skies and brisk wind. But no rain. The forecasters keep saying we're going to get rain, but I keep not seeing it. So, if anybody knows how to ship water from Florida to Atlanta, please, feel free to speak up now. Or please tell Fay to waltz her windy, wet hurricane butt over here where she'll be appreciated. What a hussy! By the way, the picture is our house in high summer earlier this week. The...

We needed some photos for updating the Atlanta Knitting Guild blog. So, I got out the yarn, went outside, and took pictures. I'm sure the neighbors were wondering what was up with me as I lovingly laid out skeins and carefully photographed them. Then I burned the whole mass of photos to a disc and passed that off to the webmistress. I've also been listing my stash in Ravelry. Oddly enough, I'm feeling a little stashed-out right now. All this looking at yarn has reminded me of some of the wonderful things I've already bought. Some of these I even have plans for in that I already know what I want them to become when they grow up. Anyway, I thought I'd share some stash pictures here. You can see at left that I keep most of my stash in a stack of rattan boxes in the studio. The boxes were purchased at Hobby Lobby. I must admit to having a tremendous weakness for the basket and boxes section in that store. And they run 50% off sales frequently. The stash is, ...

I’ve been wanting for awhile to write a review about Lynne Barr’s book, Knitting New Scarves (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2007). I typically buy my knitting books in local yarn stores, but I bought this one last year while browsing at a big box store. And I wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't browsed through it, read a pattern or two, and realized what this book really is. I hadn’t seen it before or read anything about it in the knitting magazines. When I see “scarves” in the title of a knitting book, I think this is a book for beginners. After all, scarves are beginner-level projects, right? And there are several scarf books available that are just that. But Knitting New Scarves is not a scarf book and it is not a book for beginning knitters. If you like the work of Norah Gaughan, Cat Bordhi, or Debbie New, you need to see what Lynne Barr is doing. This book is basically a series of interesting knitting experiments. Some of the techniques are quite unusua...

Our friends Camille and Clayton were here in town over the weekend. They met through an online dating service, fell passionately for each other, and Camille moved from Atlanta to Lexington. Clayton is a cool enough person, however, that we forgive him for robbing our Dungeons & Dragons game of a very talented (if often hidden) halfling. They had just enough time for us to meet for Sunday brunch . And my cuddly hubby actually got up early on a Sunday so that he could join us! Wow! There is a truly excellent bookstore where they live in Lexington KY. This is even more true now since Camille found there and bought for me an autographed copy of AntiCraft by Renée Rigdon and Zabet Stewart! Zabet is infamous in knitting circles for the snatchel . Their blog is also well-admired. Of course, I had to take the book to knit night and show it off amongst my knitting friends. And all of this just a couple weeks before Dragon*Con . Good timing, indeed!