In Which I Visit My LYS

Although it's Sunday, I haven't touched my wheel all week, so this isn't your run-of-the-mill Sunday post. Instead, this post is all about how I've enhanced my stash this weekend. If you can believe it, I visited my LYS a total of three times in the last two days -- and made a purchase at each and every visit. Lest you think I'm blowing my paycheck and going crazy due to wool fumes, I can tell you that two of the three purchases were for very specific things.

The first trip was yesterday morning, right as the shop opened, and I had Rainbow with me. In return for her accompanying me to get a flu shot (she had hers last week), I took her to the shop to pick out yarn and colors for the sweater I promised I'd knit her this fall, Hiro Petite. She'd picked out the pattern herself two weekends ago when she was sick and I was trying to cheer her up a bit, but she'd been coming up with different color combinations all week, ever since I'd told her I was going to take her to the yarn store to pick out colors. In the end, this is what she chose:

The colors are not quite accurate here, but the two skeins in the back are a gorgeous deep royal purple (the colorway is Pansy). The two skeins in the front -- Pool Party and Banana -- will be the contrast colors. All four skeins are Berroco Vintage, a wool/acrylic/nylon blend. Normally I'd choose a regular wool, but given all the messes she gets into these days, I needed it to be washable, and obviously I had to give her a lot of color choices. This really fit the bill. I've used the yarn in the past and really enjoyed it, so I'm sure this'll be another pleasurable knit.

I was back at the shop in the afternoon for my usual Saturday afternoon knitting time (working diligently on my Calligraphy Cardigan) and decided that I would treat myself to another sweater's worth because the store's pre-inventory store was in full swing. I've had Heidi Kirrmaier's Vitamin D pattern in my queue for quite some time but have almost no sportweight yarn in my stash. I'd also had my eye on a yarn line at the shop for a while and decided this was time to give it a try.

This is Imperial Yarn Tracie Too in a colorway called Rain. The color in the photo is pretty accurate -- it's a slightly blue-tinged gray. I'm really looking forward to knitting with this.

The third LYS trip was this afternoon and was necessitated by the fact that I had just about finished the bottom ribbing on my Calligraphy Cardigan before going to bed last night. Despite the fact that I'd cut about two inches of length from the body, it was pretty apparent when I put it down last night that the two untouched skeins left for this sweater were probably not going to be enough to finish both sleeves and the (pretty wide) button bands. So today I ran over to pick up one extra skein, which, thankfully, they still had. Then I came home and finished off the ribbing. This isn't the best picture, but you can see just how much yarn has gone into this sweater so far:

I've got just a small amount left in the third and fourth skeins (probably less than 10 yards in each), so I'm glad I picked up the extra one!