Ocean and knit shop visit

I spent last weekend with a trio of co-workers on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state where one of my coworkers owns a home and was kind enough to invite us all. It was a lovely weekend. By lovely I mean good company, good food and good laughs, NOT lovely weather. The weather was quite bad. I did a little knitting on the sock and started and restarted and restarted a lace scarf. Obviously, the amount of talking we did was not conducive to working on a complex pattern which I had not yet memorized.

I also visited a very darling yarn shop in Ocean Park called Tapestry Rose (http://www.tapestryrose.com/) which had a nice looking cafe in the front room and a surprisingly large yarn store in the back. It was somewhat crowded (both in number of people in the store and inventory) so I didn't linger for too long. It seemed to have a wide variety of yarns including the largest box of qiviut I have ever seen in one place. I didn't even look at the price. I was good in the extreme and only bought tapestry needles to use to put a safety line into my lace scarf. I discovered when I attempted to do this that the scarf already had yet another fatal flaw. If something's worth doing once, is it really worth doing twenty times? I shall return to knit lace another, quieter day.

Below is the sock, nearly complete, at the Pacific Ocean. The weather was beginning to break as we were leaving (and I took this shot). The large bumps you see in the background are vehicles, hence the tire tracks in the sand in the foreground. In Washington State, in many places, it is legal to drive on the beach. I don't know how common this is but I've always found it a bit strange and disconcerting even though I have lived here most of my life and it should be the accepted norm of beach behavior in my mind.



I have quite a bad case of SSS at this point but do plan to cast on for the second sock this weekend when I am traveling to Spokane Washington for a class. I will get the second sock done, I will get the second sock done, I will get...

So you are going to start a knitting blog...

I don't know what has possessed me. Perhaps I am just procrastinating as I have a huge paper due in ten days for my graduate program. Perhaps I am not getting enough knitter contact locally. Perhaps I really have lost my mind to think I can have a blog on top of all of my other commitments. Or, maybe this is a wonderful idea.

I've been lurking about reading other people's blogs for some time and it seemed only appropriate that I should join the ranks. It seemed somehow necessary for me to have a web presence (a ubiquitous phrase that I actually abhor) NOW (again, the sense of urgency probably goes back to the need to avoid my homework).

When I think about what I do, I realize the thing that is "cool" about me is that I have what I consider to be some fairly interesting knitting tales. A friend once said that there are two types of jobs in the world; when you are introduced to someone new and you tell them what you do they either say "Oh." or "Oh, wow." I have an "Oh." job. That doesn't mean it isn't interesting (albeit to a fairly narrow group of people: even more narrow than the number of people who are interested in a knitting blog) or challenging or rewarding. It is just "Oh." to others.

I do, however, manage to have a lot of interesting knitting experiences. Interesting knitting experiences is enough of an oxymoron to send many heading for cover, I am sure, but those who have read this far know exactly what I mean.

I live in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area and we do have TONS of wonderful yarn shops. I haven't even been to them all and I do go adventuring to visit them fairly often. In the last year I've been to countless yarn shops (I probably could count but I think that would be a bad idea somehow), the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival, met Stephanie Pearl-McPhee and Vickie Howell, and have had a lot of good knitting times.

I also like to travel and can frequently combine my love of knitting/fiber (I may as well be honest: I love shopping for, purchasing and owning fiber at least as much as I love knitting with it. Maybe more.) with that pursuit.

My most recent journey took me to Palm Springs, California for a little fun in the sun. We stayed at the Orbit In which was a great hotel and I am sorry my photo doesn't do it justice. It is very 50s and very mod with the hills looming over it. The last morning we were there, I woke up long before dawn (fear of missing the plane syndrome) and got out my lighted knitting needles and sat on our private patio and listened to the desert come to life and watched the slow changes of the light. It was perfect.

I did get a number of pictures of my travelling sock (nod to the Yarn Harlot) as I journeyed around the area.



This shot is at Indian Canyon. The scenery there was spectacular though with this shot, I seem to have chosen something rather unimpressive. It looks more like a construction excavation site than anything really scenic.



This one is a bit better. It is taken from the top of the tram about 8,400 feet above the valley floor. Amazing views and cool, fresh air. We hiked until we found a quiet spot where there was still a little snow and I just sat and knitted and enjoyed. Note my tail waving in the wind. I had a death grip on my poor sock as I didn't want to lose it to nature, however lovely.

I also visited a yarn shop while in the area. The Yarn Company of Palm Desert (Yarn Co) was a delightful experience. The people working in the store struck the perfect balance between being helpful and letting me wander on my own. They had a surprising amount of wool and when I asked about wool in the desert they said that the felting craze had caught on there. I am knitting from the stash this year but did decide that I could buy things when I am on vacation so here are a few little things I picked up.




This is a Tilly Thomas pattern, bag form and yarn that I fell in love with. Not my usual style but I thought that the yarn (silk) was so lovely that I couldn't resist this bag set.



These are just a couple of balls of yarn destined to be scarves. The colors called to me. I also bought a ball of the silk for a friend who always makes herself a spring scarf.



Finally, I bought this ball of Southwest Trading Company Melody to make a shawl that they had a sample of in the store. Unfortunately I have no recollection of what it looked like so this will be a bit of a surprise pattern for me. Looks simple enough but the pattern doesn't have any picture so this one will be an adventure.

So that's it...I haven't made any promises to myself about how often I will blog or anything else. I don't know all of the blogging rules so I am hoping that if I put a link to someone else's blog, it won't upset the blog host. I know that I need to put "putting links into text" and "better pictures" on my to do list.