Guess what arrived in the mail Tuuesday night? If you're in the club and still waiting (and don't want the surprise to be spoiled) don't click the "Read More" button. If you're too anxious to wait or want to see something sublime, please click on.


Meet "Sweet Pea". Isn't she lovely. So subtle and quiet and so, so girly. How about another picture?


There are such delicate shades of green and yellow and pink in this yarn. I love it. Here's the mini skein - you can kind of see the colours mixing.


According to Tina's notes this yarn was inspired by a flurry of Blue Moon employees who are about to become grandmothers. For this reason the patterns also include child and even bootie sizes. Too cute. Inside my ball band it says "pookie" and others have a wide variety of other cute pet names for wee ones (buttercup, Sweet Cheeks, Princess etc.).


Both patterns this time around are for anklets and as soon as I saw them I knew I was going to be knitting the Swing Set socks. They're so simple and sweet. I don't know how I will wait until my needles are free to knit these. Sometime soon I'm going to buy a whole bunch of (matching*) 2.00 mm sock length double-pointed needles so I never have to wait to start a new pair of socks.**

*So when I break one I don't end up with a partial set.

**I'll also need to invest in a much larger Works-in-Progress basket.

I realized a little while ago that I would soon be receiving my sock club package for May/June and hadn't really done anything but swatching with the yarn from March/April. I still don't care for either of the patterns that came with the kit but it didn't seem appropriate to knit special yarn into a plain sock. I spent a bit of time on Ravelry hunting for a good pattern and eventually settled on the Leyburn socks (Actually the process went something like this: I'd be looking for something else, come across the Leyburn pattern, think "Ooooo, that's pretty", try to add it to my favourites, discover it was already there, and return to my original search. At some point I make the important connection that I needed a pattern for my sock yarn and I really liked this pattern. Sometimes I wish my brain would go a little faster.)


There is a whole bunch of slipping stitches in this pattern so it goes really quickly. I love the way the lattice stitch works with the multi-coloured yarn: it shows off the yarn and the yarn show off the stitch pattern - perfect.

I was making good progress on my socks but put them aside last week when I remembered that this little jacket (yeah - I know - it doesn't look anything like a jacket - I'm trusting in the pattern and the thousands of knitters who've already made it) is meant for someone who will be arriving in about a month and will probably grow out of it by September.


I was working on this over the weekend and I'm now a little farther along than this picture shows. I've finished the decreasing and started the increasing (it still looks totally weird). I thought the linen would be really difficult to work M1's in but it seems to naturally form loose stitches and they are no more difficult that if it was wool. It looks like there will be more counting from now on as there are a few spots where I increase across the whole row and a section where I only work the stitches between the markers.


I love the way the stripes look with the decreases. So sharp. I'm planning to add in another thick band of orange towards the end of the sweater so that it will show on the fronts. I don't seem to have any proper crochet markers so I've drafted a couple of paperclips to do the job for me. They actually work pretty well and don't fall out when my knitting gets shoved into my purse or tossed on the table

I finally made up a binder for my sock club patterns. I actually spent quite a lot of time thinking about how to decorate my binder but in the end I decided to keep it simple and just use the bumper sticker that came with the first shipment. I chose a black card stock binder and put the sticker on so the "rockin' sock club" part of the URL would show on the spine.


I like the minimalist look of my binder. It seems kind of fun to have a plain container full of so much colour. I might put my mini-skeins in with the patterns - hooked on the binder rings - I'm not decided yet; I think they might get dusty. I'm looking forward to filling out all my charts and worksheets now that I can actually find them.


I think the next shipment will be going out in a couple of weeks. I can't wait to see what colours arrive this time.