Home Again

My whirlwind tour of the West Coast (such as it was) is over now, and I'm hip-deep in dirty laundry and bags of fleece. (As if I needed another hobby -- I saw one of my knitting buddies from work and my friend Pam while I was out there. One gave me two lovely bags of combed, ready-to-spin roving and one gave me a bag of washed-but-uncombed raw wool. I'll either take up spinning, or felt them as is.)

I also managed to meet up with quite a few Beardie buddies and one college classmate, collect Beardie kisses from three Beardies (Pam's two blue dudes plus a darling six-month-old puppy girl belonging to friends in Santa Clara), dine at a couple of wonderful seafood restaurants (Il Pescatore in Oakland and Gladstone's in Santa Monica), visit the See's Candies factory store, and go on a yarn-shop crawl that included the Knit Cafe and Stitches from the Heart in the south, and the Menlo Park Building 17 parking lot in the north. (My knitting buddy from work met me there. We were both in a hurry, but we managed to show each other some works in progress and play with some yarns.)

I had intended to work on my Fletcher sweater while I was in the air, but my initial gauge swatch was too tight on 10 1/2 needles. My larger circulars are all embedded in other projects (including my Denise needles), so I needed to pick up an 11 and a 13 before I could continue. I took a skein of Schaefer Yarns' Elaine (in the Indira Gandhi colorway) with me to California instead, and made myself a nifty skinny scarf in 2x2 ribbing. (The skein is big enough to make two such scarves, so I'll make another one sometime.) I picked up the circulars at the Knit Cafe, and am now ready to tackle a second gauge swatch in earnest.

Lots of good knitting news to report:

• Pam is reviving her blog soon. She's the one who inspired me in both knitting and blogging.
  
• I'm making good progress on the felted tote bag.
  
• Before I left town, the nice ladies in the local yarn shop explained what to do on the Warm Winter Poncho, so I'm no longer buffaloed by it.
  
• My friend Susannah bought me some Twisted Sisters Voodoo yarn to play with. She gave me a skein of yellow, a skein of jade green, and a skein of blue-green variegated yarn. They should be fun to play with.