Do you know what tomorrow is? Margene. You MUST know. My girl Carole must know too. And of COURSE Lucia and Chris know!!! Who else knows what day it is? Scooby snacks to everyone who gets it right. I’m waiting…..didja get it?

PROJECT SPECTRUM JULY!!!! What colors are July?!?!? VIOLET AND PURPLE Whoo hoooo!

I think the purple loving crafties should do something special this month. Any good ideas? This is the best color month so we really should …. Anyone? This is the month to celebrate. Fo SHO!

And the cocktail I’m currently working on has absolutely nothing to do with the zealous nature of this post.

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I haven’t updated the shop because I’ve been super busy doing custom orders for KSKS. I offered up free shipping for anyone doing the swap and it’s been fun creating some new colorways. This one is so beautiful it’s going to be a regular in the shop. Puesta del sol. (named by the person ordering the yarn!)

I dyed two skeins of this if someone wants to grab the other one before I put it up in the shop let me know ASAP. 440 yards of superwash merino for $25.00. The other two new colorways are the ones I did the other day. Think Pink! and Purple People Eater will be added to the shop as well.

There are two other new items that will be up in the shop. One is this cool yarn that dyes one ply a darker color than the others and it’s worsted weight. I did this one in a lighter version of my Orchid colors and I love how it came out. It’s 100% Merino and 225 yards. I’m keeping it the same price as all of my other yarn even though it’s more expensive for me to buy. Again, if you want it, let me know before I put it up in the shop. I’m calling it Orchid Twist.

I have a bunch more of this yarn so contact me quickly if you’d like me to dye something special for you before I dye it all up for the shop. This can be felted too!

The other item will be merino/tencel. I will hopefully have some ready to go this weekend. That’s all folks!

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The latest Spin-Off magazine has a super cool article about creating self-striped sock yarn with a variegated stripe as one of the stripes. Has anyone else seen it? The article is called Dyeing for Socks by Paula Egbert. I decided to try it out and I love how it looks. Want to know a secret? This is the first skein of yarn that I’m keeping that I’ve done. I don’t have one single skein of anything I’ve made. I know. Crazy. I did this one with my Orchid colors with an added skinny white stripe. This is definitely something I’ll offer as a custom job. I recommend reading the article if you want to learn how to do it. I actually taught my first Dyeing class over the past two weeks and a number of my students tried this technique on their self-striping sock. I found out yesterday one of my students has a blog! Go over and check out the yarn she dyed in class. She did a really good job.

See. Knitting! From me. Socks out of my own yarn. There will also be some yarn up in the shop within the next day or two as well.

In other news. If you have been reading the Flat Scout Blog you’ve seen how much fun she’s been having with her hostess with the mostest Cynthia. Go see her blog. The pictures are so funny. She goes to Estonia next!

And I’ll leave you with a few pictures. Supergirl insisted I take a picture of her saying “Word to your MUTHA!”

And finally, I’m not sure if Gus is really comfortable living here with us yet.

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See these cute flip flops?

This cool little dude?

Made them in his new elective at camp. Princess Class. Yep. He and his two buddies decided to boycott and told the counselors that they didn’t think it was fair that only girls could take the Princess Class. So they made those yesterday. I think it’s because he’s smart enough to realize that all the cute girls are in that class. Pretty damn funny. I keep thinking today, “I’m so glad I’m busting my ass selling yarn for him to go to camp and be in PRINCESS CLASS!” Actually I think it’s cool that he could care less what anyone thinks and that he’s secure enough to do something like that. And that he’d stand up for something he didn’t think was fair. Most 7 year old boys would run from something like that. Oh wait, he just told me, “I think we’re making tutus tomorrow.” I told him that he had better make it for his sister!!! Jaysum crowbaits. Maybe I’ll tell the teacher that the boys should make some cool crowns and be cool Hip Hop Princes.

***Okay. He just took all the fabric off and just wants the regular flip-flops. He cracks me up.*** 

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The good news? I got a bunch of knitting done yesterday on my Shadow Shawl.

The bad news? It was in the Emergency Room for T. who has torn his medial meniscus.

The really bad part, not yet to the ugly, is that he is a Lead Physical Therapist. Not only does he practice PT but he has 5 other PT’s to supervise as well. It’s a very physical job and a hurt knee means no work. You can’t quite transfer a spinal cord patient when you can barely stand. This is actually how he tore it. He’s had some really hard patients lately and it finally just tore on Friday when he was on the mat working with a patient. He’s going in today to get the ball rolling with work-comp. Luckily it’s fairly minor surgery. They just go in and do a meniscectomy (removal of the meniscus) through an arthroscopy. Nothing major, but when you do heavy lifting for a job? Not so much fun. At least he knows how to rehab himself! HA! My father’s a Dr. and he’s had a trillion of these done on himself and he always stayed awake so he could watch the scope which of course, T. informed me yesterday he will want to do too. “Of course I want to see what they do!” It looks like there’s lots of waiting room knitting for me on my horizon. Oh yeah. Did I mention that T. is one of the top bike racers in New Mexico? Yeah…..so that’s done for this summer too. Fun STUFF! At least there are 3 full weeks of live Tour de France to watch on TV right?

The ugly? Dang. I’ve spent my whole life growing up in hospitals. I used to make rounds with my dad when I was little. Then T. managed a Physical Medicine Department for 7 years outside of Boulder, CO. I’ve even been in the ER about 3-4 times for my own injuries and never, in my whole life have I seen what I saw yesterday in the UNM ER. I saw stuff I only thought happened on shows like ER. I had no idea what a real ER looked like. Patients lined up on stretchers in the halls? Drunk people ripping out their IV’s because they don’t want to be there. Beat up drunk people. People screaming because they needed stitches. At least 3-4 people just walking around moaning. And one dude who was sick of waiting and just ripped his IV out and got pissed off because he had been there too long and said he had to go to work. He was drunk too. Maybe it was because it was a Sunday morning? Holy crap. Scary. And I actually have friends who work there too! That my friends, takes a special kind of person to work in a place like an ER. I know it has a lot to do with the fact that UNM Hospital is the only Level 1 trauma center within 400 miles.  But still ….  it made me want to run back to the cute, quiet Monadnock Community Hospital where Supergirl was born where people come in with injuries like chainsaw cuts and BB’s logged in their arms…….

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Click to see the set. Since we had a pretty sunset I thought I’d play. I just took these from around my house about 15 minutes ago. I worked all day today so it’s the first chance I had to do this one.

Check out Sandy’s blog if you haven’t seen it already.

Looking at my pretty sky reminded me of this:

Click for more info and pass it along…..

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and these pretty girls

make me feel better. Thank you all for your words about Scout. I would respond individually but some of you made me cry all over again so I’m not going to. I felt all of you giving me a big hug and I needed it. I was surprised by how upset I got expecially since it’s been almost 4 years since we had her as our own. But since she was my first real baby, there’s a lot of emotion involved there.

On to happier things ….. baby Gus is doing great. He’s really adjusted to his new house and has flourished in his new environment. We take him all over the place and everyone loves to pet him and gush over how cute he is. We even took him over to a friend’s house last night with us. I think we do an excellent job in wearing his little puppy butt out. He’s so sweet and gentle with the kids even Supergirl who has super energy and can super annoy him. Let’s hope we have happy dog times from here on out.

The yarn? They are four custom orders. All are completely new colorways. (click the picture to see them) Three of them are for the Knit Socks Kit Swap. You might be the lucky recipient of one of these! The all pink and gray one is called Think Pink and it’s for Dani’s contest for anyone donates money to her local Avon Breast Cancer Walk. Her father’s wife is walking in it and she’s looking for donations. If you donate ANY amount, you could win this pretty pink skein of yarn. So head on over there if you want it. (I think I’ll do another one for my contest for Keith)

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**If you aren’t able to read a sad animal story click the X box and go now **

Some of you may know the story about how I got my online username but most of you don’t. See this sweet Chesapeake Bay Retriever?

The other one is her brother Reilly. We got them when they were puppies in 1996. At the time I was teaching high school English and we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird. When T. and I drove up to get her (we got him later) we pulled up to the house and saw this rough and tumble puppy come out to greet us. She was 3 months old and already weighed 35lbs. Her paws were gigantic and she just looked like such a tomboy. I knew she had to be a Scout. Her AKC papers actually read, “Jean Louise *Scout* Finch.” Three years later Superboy was born and it wasn’t until he was 2.5 years old that we found out he was serverely allergic to dogs. He started breaking out into hives, developed asthma and we just knew we couldn’t keep them. We were very lucky to place Scout with one of T’s best friends and Reilly was adopted by another amazing person through Chessie Rescue.

Over the years we were fortunate enough to hear all about Scout through our friend Tiffany and what she was up to. She ran with our friend Tiff almost 4-5 days a week. She just turned 10 years old a few months ago and was doing great up until last week. Tiffany e-mailed us to let us know that something wasn’t right with her. About 30 minutes ago she e-mailed me again to tell me:

I’m so upset right now I can barely see through my tears to write this. Even though it’s been a long time since she was ours I’ve just still felt like she was a part of our family so this is devastating. In 30 minutes my baby Scout, will thankfully, not be in pain anymore.

If you’ve ever wondered why my username is Scout, it’s because of that beautiful baby up there.

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That other post was completely messing up my blog. If you want to come to see Stephanie - aka Yarn Harlot, the tickets are free and all you have to do is either call the shop and we can hold it or just swing by. There are only 150 tickets so get them ASAP.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee aka “Yarn Harlot”
on her 2006 - Knitting Rules Yarn Crawl Tour
Thursday July 27th, 2006
6:30 - 8:30 pm
at Jewish Community Center JCC
5520 Wyoming Blvd. NE
Albuquerque NM 87109

Have all of the Abq SnB Knitsers gotten their tickets yet??

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Not! But I got your attention right? Hee. Check out the Julie’s Fighting Illini in the works! Click to see the full picture.

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