Slow news week here

But let me blog about it.

I made my first order from Elann today. Got yarn for two pairs of socks. One for the monkey(olive), one for my sister(pretty blue). Peruvian Highland Wool (Purple, Olive, and Navy) for a Spork. Two skeins of organic cotton for nothing in particular - thought I'd try dying them with RIT. Four skeins of denim. One in each color. Again, for nothing in particular, but someone on Mason-Dixon Knitting speaks so highly of denim (although it's probably rowan denim or something fancy like that) that I couldn't resist it.

The "random" feature on the various knitting rings is super-fantastic. That's how I came across the spork. It's a felted courier bag pattern by Larissa Brown. Calls for Lamb's Pride Worsted, but I was ordering from Elann and there were lots of colors of that Peruvian highland wool to choose from. Which is a yarn that I'd learned of (in fact, Elann as a whole, I had learned of) via other knit-bloggers, too numerous and too randomized to mention.

Now, when I'm picking out colors on the internet, and the shades are in whatever order on the screen, I have a lot of trouble figuring out how to see how the colors would look together. I was doing this on my lunch hour at work, so I didn't really have an super-spiffy graphics programs at my disposal or anything. But I had an epiphany. I copied the images and pasted them into MS Paint. Then I would grab the next potentially good color and paste it in next to the first and try it out. OK. It's not as good as holding the two yarns next to eachother in a LYS. However, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of picking out colors for a multi-color project. Which was the whole point. I went through a lot of spork iterations before settling on the purple-olive-navy. I wanted the colors to be balanced - that the spork (such a fun word) wasn't left off balance with dark purple on one side and something much lighter on the other.

Got a few more inches done on the laptop case. 50" seems so long when you're doing cycles of stripes that are only 20 rows long. But it seems to be coming along slowly but surely. It's been a couple days since I had a chance to knit. Speaking of...I'm going to leave the dishes in the sink, get MIL in the shower, and go knit me a few in front of the TV.