I Hate Online Shopping Carts

Whew! That was a very stressful 45 minutes I spent this morning! Trying to get registered at Maiwa for the Symposium workshop, lectures and fashion show that I wanted. Every time I got to the final checkout button it would give me an error message. Took 3 tries but I finally got a confirmation. Hope I don’t get charged for the other times it didn’t…quite…finish…

I would have held off until later today when the initial rush is gone before attempting the whole thing but I wanted to take the Woad Workshop with Bleu de Lectoure’s Henri Lambert from France. (You know how obsessed I am with woad!) It said there were only 3 spots left available of 16. Plus I thought the lecture with Elizabeth Barber, author of “Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years”, would be sold out pretty quickly as well. Watching little timing arrows go around and around is not a lot of fun. I was willing the pages to load with my mind. At least it finally went through. I’m nothing if not persistent.

Going back to yesterday, we had the biggest turnout ever at our Sunday Afternoon Ravelry Meetup at the Saltspring Coffee Shop on Main St. A dozen of us knitters took over the inside and even when we rearranged furniture the staff didn’t blink an eye! We put it all back when we left of course. Then most of us trooped the few blocks to Three Bags Full for our usual pilgrimage. They had a huge new shipment of Blue Moon Socks That Rock just in and we did some definite damage to the pile. I kept saying I didn’t need more yarn but succumbed to the wool fumes and the general encouragement and got these:

 

That’s Valkyrie on the left and Ravenscroft on the right. Subtle dark colours that might be a bit tough to distinguish on the screen especially with the distraction of my rag placemats underneath! They will not necessarily become socks. I’m kind of tired of socks lately for some reason. Maybe because I’ve finally saturated the family’s sock drawers for the moment?

Also yesterday I pulled out the old polymer clay stash and whipped up a funky handle for my 3.5 mm Aero aluminum crochet hook. It looks like crap (literally) but it feels just right because I shaped it with my hand. A wee bit heavy (due to the large chunk o’clay I used) but very comfortable to crochet with. The square in the upper left is the reject one, being too open and floppy (though pretty). The one on the lower right is better, more dense and with smaller holes. Now to make a gazillion more and crochet them together for my Frankenblanket. This is going to be a long-term project. Especially when I keep removing sock yarn from the leftover pile thinking “This is too nice and I should use it for gloves or something else instead”.

Somebody explain to me why most crochet hooks don’t have more of a substantial handle on them? It might depend on the way you hold it: like a pen or like a knife. I hold it in my fist and skinny little hooks are harder to grip. Maybe one day I’ll get a whole set of the Clover Soft Touch. Meanwhile I’ll modify my Aeros! One at a time.

And speaking of notions, I also got some of these in the grocery store:

Teeny little hair clips. (That’s a quarter in there for scale.) I got 2 dozen for a fraction of the cost of Knit Klips, though they’re perhaps not quite the same as the patented version. They seem to work just fine for the job of holding two pieces of knitting or crochet together while you stitch them and they stay in place much better than pins. Anyway I don’t have enough to clip into so I’m certainly not going to be using them in my hair!