Sometimes what you pay for is awesome!

Okay, you know the saying 'you get what you pay for?'.  Usually it's said with negative connotation that you didn't pay enough for the 'thing' and therefore you deserve it's crappy quality.  Uh, not so with Knitpicks yarn.  Lemme tell you, it's some NICE yarn for very little $'s.  I knit up my Gaenor, shown below in my first skein of it, which was hand dyed by a friend.  The hand dyeing would do nothing to change the quality of the yarn, so I'm convinced that it was essentially exactly like it was off the warehouse shelf.  It's soft, it's springy, it's even and it's not splitty.  I loved knitting with it!  It was 75% merino and 25% nylon, which would give a nice durability to socks... It's also superwash, which means that it will be more difficult to felt.  I say 'more difficult' because I wouldn't put anything past me!  The cost of the 462 yards of fingering is $6.29.  Not too shabby!

So on the heels of that I am VERY excited to knit with my new Knitpicks Tonals.  They've gone above and beyond and delved into the realm of semisolid (forgive me if they already had that... I'm new!).  I bought one skein of the Stroll Tonal, shown here in Canopy to make Undine.  The yarn is absolutely gorgeous and unbeliveably well priced at $9.99 for 462 yards.  It will have the same percentage of merino to nylon in it and it's also superwash.  It's a bit more blue in the picture than in real life where it's a gorgeous deep green.

I also bought two skeins of my very first laceweight yarn ever! (not including the cashmere ball that my friend in Florida sent me, but lets not talk about that because it makes the other yarn jealous! ) I don't know what I'm going to make with this but the colors were too amazing to pass up!  It's Shadow in Gypsy and I bought 440 yards of it for $4.29 (well I bought two skeins... details!).  it's gorgeous and I can't wait to make something amazing with it!

Part of me wants to put a black streak in it, but I don't think I will....

Now, don't get me wrong, there are a MILLION yarns that I'm in love with that Knit Picks doesn't have and never will, but they're really awesome for some stuff and you certainly get a LOT more than what you pay for.  I recently bought the yarn to make knee high ribbed legwarmers which are on the cover of the Joy of Sox book... the Alpaca that they call for would have been over $50 but I got 100% wool from Knitpicks for less than $18US!  Plus, I think Alpaca will sag, and I'm not interested in saggy baggy legwarmers.  I also got some wonderful bulky weight yarn for my friend in Manitoba to make me a crocheted Totoro toy.  While I now know the basics of crochet, I'm not good at it enough to make this toy and she really wanted to crochet him, so for the cost of a ball of sock yarn, she's making me my toy!  I'm so excited for him!

Here's a wee picture of the cartoon.  I don't think mine is having teeth...

That's all in my world... except for that I'm sticking to my plan of knitting one pair of rows of Girasole every day... in fact, I'm five days ahead of schedule since I've been knitting two pairs a day... wish me luck to keep going.. the thing is getting heavy!  when it's done it's going to weigh 2.2 POUNDS!  Yikes!  That'll be a sucker to wash and block... lucky I think I'm doing it at my friend's house and then we're taking it to her studio to pin...she has a washer, which should make the whole thing easier... and it won't take a week to dry!



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