Rolling Thunder and Puréed Clown

Various good things happened last week, including a Tuesday lunchtime spent with EJ and Baby M., who has discovered Feet and Their Tastiness;

a KTog meeting at the Cambridge Blue on Tuesday night including some new people; a very pleasing dye-batch knocked up on Wednesday night when I needed to rinse out my made-up-dye-pots in preparation for SkipNorth, and had just discovered the bag of laceweight silk I thought I'd lost - this was from a women's co-operative in Peru and this part of the consignment was a gift from a kind friend in Texas several years ago. There's about 700m...

[Amelia has decided that if I plonk a ball of yarn on the kitchen counter and attempt to photograph it, this is where she needs to be. It is also the only time she feels the need to get onto the kitchen counter.]

.. and a relatively unexpected visit down to London to see Jan and knit at Stash yesterday (making the most of not spending the day teaching). I was Good - I bought my allowance of 200g of sock yarn, the new Interweave Knits, a pattern for a top-down sweater from Knitting Pure and Simple (the one from the homepage, in fact), and an Addi needle to replace the 3 mm one I bought last month and which I had lost. Of course the first thing I found while clearing up this morning was the Other One. But having two will be handy when I want to try on the garment in question (Thermal, from this time's Knitty)...

Jan gave me some beautiful yarn she'd hand-dyed with food colouring, which is amazing and makes me wish for a cheap microwave to try some out... Look at this!

I'm thinking about a pair of Rolling Thunder socks - unearthed some beads in the right shade of lilac in the clearup this afternoon...

While I was at Stash I cast on a scarf using the incredibly bright Colinette Firecracker I bought at Textiles in Focus and some of the leftover cotton/viscose from last year's Olympic shawl.

I'd been thinking it looked like a parrot; Nathalie picked up the ball and said 'you know, this looks like.... puréed clown...' And a Scarf was Born.

It's scribble lace on a 12mm Addi needle (which looks sort of surgical...). Here's a detail, but actually, it's quite a bit brighter than that. Quite frighteningly bright, in fact. And growing very fast. SkipNorthers, get the sunglasses ready.