Friday, August 25, 2006

TGIF

Uuhh...just in case you haven't heard that acronym: Thank Goodness It's Friday!

I spent yet another day playing…er, inventorying at my local wool shop. We even sold some of the weaving yarns already! Sweet Georgia didn’t even wait for me to reply to her comment on yesterday’s post, but zipped on in to see what we had. And another lady stocked up too when she came in for knitting yarn. This is good. Maybe it’ll convince 'em to keep the weaving supplies stocked. They already have spinning and knitting so it’s not that big of a stretch. However, there really is a space crunch in the shop! Swinging a cat (as if anybody would be mean enough to do that to our furry friends) is definitely out of the question. You already guessed I stocked up too, but since I haven’t actually paid for it yet, I’ll keep mum on that for the mo’. On the other hand, I did put in 12 hours of hard check-marking. I’m sure we’ll come to some agreement where I’ll owe them less than a zillion bucks. I hope. You didn’t think I was actually doing this inventory thing for the money, didja? When I could have books, magazines, spinning fibres, and yarns? Hah! I would have spent money on those things anyway.

So apart from watering my planters and picking the tomatoes this morning:


...I haven’t done anything around the house, particularly fibre-wise. Except that I learned a different way to do attached i-cord. I did some i-cord-ish research (Yahoo’s search is My Friend) and came up with several different methods. This one is worked on live stitches (though it could be picked-up ones) on circular or straight needles and doesn’t require a dpn. There’s even a video here showing how to do this, but she knits like I used to before I learned how to knit Continental. Geez, it looks awkward! The technique is simple though, and I’m halfway around the top of my Denise Bag already. With no time to knit, that’s pretty impressive though I feel as if this darn bag is taking forever and a day. But not really.

Is it possible that someone might not know what i-cord is? The wonderful and amazing and sadly passed-on knitter, Elizabeth Zimmermann (aka EZ to us knitters), coined the phrase as short for idiot-cord. Maybe because it is so easy that even an idiot could do it? You might know it as spool knitting, french knitting, horse reins (hey, we called it that in the '50's!), corking, or something else — but in this case it's done on knitting needles rather than a spool or "knitting nancy". You can do it as a separate tube or you can work it onto a knitted fabric, either on an edge or applied to the surface. It's way fun and has lots of applications. In this case it makes a nice thick edging on my bag. Look it up.

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