1) 12% angora, 55% silk, 30% nylon, 3% lamb’s wool
2) 100% angora
3) 100% merino wool
4) 25% angora, 75% lamb’s wool

I went shopping yesterday. I bought A LOT. But seriously, when’s the last time you bought $100 worth of merino for $10 and a cream-coloured silk/nylon/angora blend for $4?

I’m heading off to London or Montreal for the weekend and won’t be able to do much internetting, so if you want to submit to Yarnival!, you can still do so until the end of Sunday.

Here’s another idea along the destashing/restashing via Flickr line: Check out all the Flickr photos tagged with “destash”. A surefire way to find destashing items that may or may not post to a central pool.

Have no fear! I shall in fact be posting pictures of my FOs fairly soon! And I will do many other fantastical things, including:

1. posting pictures of cute sock bunnies and wacky-hilarious seventies knits
2. posting Episode Three of The One Spinner
3. replying to my email!

My mum is in town, so I’m spending all my evenings with her. Since I don’t have photoshop at work and I’m a perfectionist, I don’t want to post pictures until they’re all prettied up. I’m off to Sharbot Lake for the weekend, so some of the writing and picture-prettying will take place then; massive posting will occur shortly thereafter.

I’m seriously considering the Knit The Classics KAL. They’re reading Lolita right now, and since I’ve been wanting to read it for a long time (that and “Invitation to a Beheading“), I figure knitting it as well would be a really neat idea. Perhaps I can try my hand at doing something vaguely Elegant Goth Lolita, as I previously mentioned in my post about how crazy Japan is. Did Lolita dress like that? I always picture her dressing like that.

Someone emailed me a little while ago saying there was a mistake in one of the diagrams for my Soccer Ball knitting pattern. I finally fixed that about a week ago, so you can take a look at the updated version here, or grab the PDF here. The only difference is the construction diagram.

On Friday I’ll be emailing a pattern update to everyone who sent me an email or left me a comment about the pattern. If I told you I would email you and you haven’t gotten anything from me by Saturday, grab it here and poke me because I’ve probably forgotten.

Jen at pieKnits has a great blog post about saris and their crafty possibilities.

Over at Whip-Up, there’s a great exercise to try that’s aimed at quilters, but it could really apply to anyone:

At our annual Design Camp for quiltmakers last week, students were assigned a painting. Using our scrap bins, they were asked to assemble in one hour the palette that the painter used in the piece. The goal of this exercise was to have students analyze just how many colors and in what proportion they were used. We also hoped that students would be able to differentiate between liking a color on a bolt of fabric and appreciating a single color can add to a quilt, even if it doesn’t look so appealing on the bolt. You don’t need to want a dress out of it, you just need to realize how much 4” of it might add to a quilt.

This is a great idea, and I believe I’ll try it to improve my knitting colour choices and (hopefully) future dying experimentation, as well as my own web design skills. As a matter of fact, it would be a cool to create a little web tool that takes a JPEG and breaks it down into its colour scheme. I’m sure there’s something like that out there, but I might try to make one myself because I’ve never done any work with JPEGs before and it would be neat to know exactly how they work.

This is just a reminder that submissions to the Yarnival! Blog Carnival are due by August 4th. That means you, dearies! Submit what you think represents your best or most interesting work for the past month, and then come back on August 11th to see the top submissions. Your submission can be about anything that’s vaguely knitting-related. If you don’t know what Yarnival! is, here’s some more information about it.