Colour!

SUNSHINE ON THE FRINGE OF MY ELEMENTS SHAWL

Dear Blog-

Yesterday, while waiting for people to come to our yard sale, I sat on the couch and listened to a book while I worked on finishing up a few last details on some projects. One of them was to finish that last lonely tier on my Argosy Scarf from the last Knitty. You may remember that this is the second of these that I have made, the first I made in Silk Garden (in all honesty I bought my yarn in haste before starting work one day, I really ought to have used Silk Garden Light), this second I made in SGL in the same colorway that the designer shows in the pattern. I am really pleased with the result and look forward to wearing it tirelessly. The pattern is very easy to follow and to keep track of once you get into the groove. Like most knitters I can never resist changing patterns and I did so here as well, changing her ssk's to k2tog's, and vice versa, so that they would lean away from their respective yo's. I really love all the color in this scarf, I'm finding that the older I get the more color I like to have around me.

ARGOSY

If you know much about Tucson, you probably know that once a year, for two weeks at the end of January and the beginning of February, our city hosts the world's largest Gem and Mineral show, with all the hotel rooms in town booked a year in advance, and many of the hotels acting as Gem Show venues as well. You can drive up and down the freeway and see hotel after hotel with big tents all set up for the show, as well as the Civic Center and pretty much any flat, empty stretch of dirt.

The Gem Show is our opportunity to buy jewelry and supplies as well as numerous other pretties at well below retail prices. Any woman in Tucson sporting jewels that were not bought at Gem Show prices is a fool. I make it a point of hitting it every year, and even DH loves to go and look around (probably in hopes of curtailing my spending, LOL). This year I am looking forward to taking my sister while she is here visiting. It is a GREAT place to buy your year's worth of b-day gifts for any women in the family. Walking into any venue is like walking into Ali Baba's cave with tables piled high with strands of pearls, cut and uncut semi-precious stones, finished jewelry, settings and findings, amber, silks, weavings, carved pieces, enormous geodes, salt crystal lamps...

So yesterday afternoon after we closed the yard sale DH decided that he wanted to go have a good wander around the show. With my asthma I am not the great wanderer that I used to be, and I have learned that sometimes it is good for him to be out on his own poking around and looking at things, he gets to go see things that we don't go to when we go together.

Not long after he got there he called me and told me that he had found a treasure trove of recycled glass beads in a whole lot of colors at $2.00 a strand. You may recall that I use these quite a lot in my knitting, especially in my felted bowls, and in fact I also used some in the Elements Shawl both in the body of the shawl and in the fringe that you see above. It is very hard to find colors other than blues and greens, and any of the other colors that one does find sell out fast - like the first day. The guy G found bought the whole lot off of another vendor the day before for a dollar a strand, and I know the second guy will sell out in no time as even at double the price these are a steal! I know that one of the local bead stores was selling these at about $12.50 a strand three years ago! So I asked G to get me two strands of any color he could find, about $50 worth in total, and look what he brought back for me!

WoooHoooo! Jackpot! I am delighted! These will last me well until next fall when the mini Gem Show comes to town.

In the meantime the felted cable bag dilemma is fermenting in my mind and is almost resolved, and this morning I woke up with the answer to the fingerless mitts that I am designing as well. Those will show up here in the next couple of days, so be looking for them.

Enjoy your day-
Lynda