Sweaters, Sweaters Everywhere

Ah, this is kind of embarrassing. Ladies and gentlemen, I am almost ashamed to present:

…yet another Thrift Store Sweater. Hey, it’s not cashmere this time! This sweater is, in fact, 58% silk, 30% nylon (meh, a little nylon never hurt anyone), 10% angora, and 2% lambswool – $3.00. Hahahaha. It looks like it will frog out to a nice fingering weight, too, prompting some daydreams about fuzzy silk mittens. I have to admit to you, I’m falling a bit behind, here. You see, this is why I just don’t go to the thrift shop every week. We actually went because my sister was eager to rip into the green cashmere we found a few weeks ago. She’s never dismantled a sweater, though, and I suggested that she should practice on something…bulkier. They almost always have big ‘ol cotton sweaters for sale around here, and they are so easy to disassemble. When we got there, though, we found a nice big sweater made out of worsted weight wool (100%) – also red. I proposed a wool frogging / dyeing / felting extravaganza. She accepted. It will be awesome. Sadly, there are no photos of this (late) sweater, as it was quickly dismembered, frogged, and is now half-wound into skeins like the one seen here.

I suggested that in the future she may want to limit the yardage per hank to just over 100. You know. For ease of handling. We’re neither of us too big on red, but it seems like the best sweaters at the thrift store are a bright red! Red wool. Red lambswool. Red lambswool and angora. Red silk and angora. What’s with the red? We’re going to attempt an overdye with Koolaid and see if we can get orange, or purple, or even tone it down to a burgundy. If not, Valentine’s day is coming up, I guess, and we’ll see what we can come up with.

In other news, my sister has been pseudonymed! You know the question I posed – if you could name yourself anything, what would it be? Apparently for my sister, the answer is ‘something obscure and bizarre.’ We hammered it out, though, and from now on we’ll be calling her Wren. This is a compromise.

And, finally, I’d like to announce that my website has been completely transferred over to the new format! I love it. I love it. I think it’s so much cleaner and more professional-looking than the original format. Now that I have a layout that I LOVE I can go back to transferring patterns from here on the blog to their new, more permanent home on the site. I’ve also installed some ads on the site. Apparently websites cost, did you know that? Anyway, it’s this new thing called Google Adsense, and it’s really cool. They choose the ads for your page based on their content. Therefore, most of the ads are for yarn, or crocheting, or knitting sites. I’m not allowed to click on them (the conflict of interest should be apparent) but I’ve seen more than one ad that has made me go “OOH!” and copy the url into another tab for a shopping visit. They’re so much less ooky and intrusive than I was afraid they would be that I feel better about putting them in. So yeah. Go wander around the new layout! Let me know if you see anything dangling or about to catch on fire, and I’ll glue it back up or toss some water on it, respectively. Woohoo!