MDSWF Part II

On Saturday the first thing I did was hit up the Tess' Designer Yarns booth. With no further ado here are my purchases:

This beautiful microfiber ribbon yarn in cool pastel colors...


Will be used to make this stylish baby kimono.


Next up we have this lovely superwash wool fingering weight baby yarn. Since I don't know the sex of the baby I'm knitting for I'd figured rather than go yellow or green I'd just use every color of the rainbow!


I was planning to purchase the Tess pattern for the "Lace Leaf Baby Cardigan". However, for the second year in a row they ran out of the pattern by the time I was ready to purchase it. I opted for the generic "Raglan Sleeve Baby Cardigan" figuring I could always add any pattern stitch I wanted to the basic template.


And then since the shawl I tried to make without a pattern turned into a disaster I decided to start fresh with this pretty lace weight yarn. I'm going to do at least one shawl from a pattern before I attempt to design another one.


Then I guess I was on a purple/turquoise/white kick because I bought this sock yarn at another booth in the Main Exhibition Hall.


I realized that at these festivals I've become a victim of what Julian calls "Pretty in the Hank" Syndrome (PITH). I go crazy for the varigated brightly colored yarns because they look so unique. Then when I get home I realize I can only use garter or stockinette stitch because any pattern stitch will get lost. So I bought this apricot colored sock yarn from a booth selling all Canadian yarn. It's really soft and I can't wait to make some beautiful lacy socks with it.


Since Julian is sadly blogless I'm also featuring some of his purchases here. He became interested in the Tess microfiber ribbon before I did and purchased these rainbow pastel skeins. We attempted to wind one of these into a ball last night. It wasn't until 2 tries of using my swift and ball winder when we finally read the instructions on the inside of the label that explicity states DO NOT USE A BALLWINDER WITH THIS YARN! The problem is that it is super slippery and rather than adhere to itself the ball just starts falling apart and getting tangled. What we had to do was set up the swift at a 90 degree angle to the floor and wind it into a non-center pull ball by hand with super tight tension. I hope the finished product is worth all the trouble!


Julian decided to reattempt knitting a replica of his Jimmy Johnson number 48 hat. The intarsia design became too bulky when using worsted weight yarn. So this is the same Canadian sock yarn I bought but in team colors. He's going to see if the fingering weight yarn will create better stitch definition.

Believe it or not this is only day one's yarn purchases. In the next couple postings I'll share Sunday's yarn purchases, some interesting non-yarn purchases, and the details I promised on how Julian popped the question ;-)