re-stash

i have been destashing for a while now; i'd stockpiled yarn for a little while, squirreling it away and have gradually worked through it over the course of the last couple of weeks. well, we were interrupted by the noro niji for a minute or 20 but i have otherwise not gotten new yarn recently.
until today.
in a huge leap of getting out and actually driving, i visited yarn garden. (i was going to put a link in there but the blogger and i are not getting along at the moment. it wants to continue the link, indefinitely and i'm not fighting with it at the moment. www.yarngarden.net. there.)
and i was hemming and hawing on several things, trying to decide if i really want to work with little bitty thin yarn right now. i think soon, but not just yet. i blanked everything else out and just followed my color eyes and found an intense red pink purple. it's called orchid, but it makes me think of retina-searing azaleas down in texas. i have some gorgeous roving that i got in alaska over the holidays, in a teal (color i'm loving right now) and a nice orange/brown that has some little azalea pink flecks in it and the teal too. it may sound funky but when i just wrote that, i saw the idea i'm going for and it will not be easy for me to put that one up for sale, if indeed i do.


and then other errands intervened, and finding myself on the northeast (kind of) side of town, i went to (see it's doing it again and i am annoyed and unable to fix it) grr.
so i went to close knit. i haven't been there as many times as i've been to yarn garden, as yg is walking distance from where i live.
and lo and behold, they had their big worktable in the back, covered in yarn. all 40% off. their destash = my restash. it's a great shop, though a little more compact than yg and they have a lot of wool. i talked myself out of a couple of things, namely this hotpink wool silk blend with little light pink slubs(?) in it. it felt incredible and was nice, and on sale. but reason prevailed. i don't think it'd be useful until next winter and it was awful loud to keep around until then.
i touched some cashcotton that i liked a lot, but it seemed to have a lot of acrylic in it. that actually happened with several yarns- they looked great and felt wonderful, but were over 10% or so synthetic. and i've fixed this as kind of being a guidepost, for some reason. and there's so much lovely looking and fanciful yarn out there, but most of the animals that make the yarn i use, well, their poop is pretty good for the soil. not so much, chemical plants.
and i know cotton's pretty intensively fertilized and herbicided- i'm trying to get more and more organic as i go.

today was pretty much the first time that ever felt like a sacrifice, like i wasn't working with something that aesthetically, shallowly, i'd like to work with. some of the louisa hardings, oh my goodness, there was a two-dollar bin with this awesome sequined yarn, but it was polyester. but TWO DOLLARS?!? unheard of for this stuff. but i was unable to give in, and left with some cotton/silk, some wool/mohair, a stray almost lilac superwash fuzzy merino (for a baby something, i think) and some gorgeous golden buff color bamboo.
okay. nevermind, seeing it written like that, i realize, it was no sacrifice at all.

commentary on these yarns upcoming, to be sure.

*on an unrelated side note, a person for whom i write has requested a head-shot type picture of me. turns out, i don't have one of those. i use my camera a million kittens a week and have a billion pictures of myself, but they're all uninhibited or very posed myspace type pictures. there's probably a whole generation of us, with this easy advent of digital cameras. cameras have generally always encouraged the shy to retreat and the hams among us to be ridiculous (think bunny ears, tongue sticking out, wacky off center poses) but i would think that the digital photo era, combined with the internet has really layered the ridiculous onto the sublime.

thoughts on progress, yarns

projects set calmly aside in annoyance:
1
by 9:30 this a.m.
but let's not go there.
let's go instead to the ball of louet's "clyde" sitting on my shelf, twinkling at me. got it in vancouver at stitchcraft- i agree with whomever said it's near impossible to go into a yarn shop without buying something, especially a new one or one you'll only be visiting once. (i have vacation sprees at fantastic fibers every time i go to alaska, and hit up nancy's knits pretty hardcore in houston- though julia took me into one that was also pretty cool in the heights.)

so. this stuff. boucle. wool with 5% silk, boucle. i approach this yarn with trepidation and limited expectations, as i've never felted a blend with silk in it before.
wait, scratch that, i've used plymouth boku, which gets really soft but is difficult in my experience to felt. let me google that for you: oh no. it's the same silk content. rats.
(oh and folks, let's quit comparing boku and nuro's kureyon. i have a girl-crush on noro, and my thoughts on another noro yarn follow shortly. to compare the two might lead someone to believe that noro is thin, which it's not. i spent some time last summer working with both at the same time and the boku is thinner. it doesn't have the sometimes psychotically wild color variations, though it has some very pleasing ones- i'm thinking fondly of a boku that reminded me of watermelon tourmaline (do yourself a favor and open that link in another tab- it's pretty there! nice work karengilbertdesigns!) okay. so boku's good, and i have an admitted bias towards noro kureyon (which is also all wool, no silk) but they're not interchangeable. nor really comparable- apples and oranges.

additionally, i have a poor track record with boucle yarns. i can't stand the lack of stitch definition (which i'm thinking will be good for felting) and dislike how difficult it makes counting. i'm too detail oriented - the devil on my shoulder says "too anal" for boucle. i made a small pouch with it and we'll see how it felts before moving forward.

so. lastly we come to the noro. it's the noro niji. fiber wise, it's almost the same as blossom, only with less nylon- which i would imagine contributes the core thread (correct me, spinners?) and the really flashy bits of color in blossom. niji is still 5% nylon, which does not excite me about yarn, but as established, i'm a sucker for noro. i snagged color 86, which to me means golds violet, a little green and a dark pink peeking at me on one skein beneath strands of the turquiose i'm crazy about right now. three skeins, and they're all saying something slightly different.
moving through the skeins- they're soft. they're fuzzy. they are all in agreement on the point "spring scarf."
i was attracted by an etsy forum thread on the topic the other day. and i see a piece that's flexible enough to wear day afternoon night. how some lifestyle-y/fashion-y spread would say something about wearing it with a "blouse and khakis or cute boot cut jeans to meet mom for brunch then transition to with a sweater while walking your golden retriever, then over your shoulders with a little cardigan over a dress over tights for a date with a hunk." or something.
but cyndi lauper's "time after time" on my internet radio and the yarn appears to be giving me meaningful looks. more as it comes.

the stats:
louet "clyde" labeled by stitchcraft as "green summer" color 06, lot 17642
chunky wt/bulky 5
95% wool, 5% silk
boucle 50 g/82 yds

noro niji, color 86 lot a
i'm not sure about weight. it's fluffy like a boucle, but not as dense as the louet clyde. comparable to noro's blossom
45% wool, 25% kid mohair, 25% silk, 5% nylon