Rain Again

It's raining again.  I was thinking that where the world is burning, like the West Coast, they'd probably like to have some of this rain.

I wish I could send it their way.

Miss Kitty and I are just looking out at the weather and thinking gray thoughts.  She IS gray, and I'm knitting on a gray sweater.  We need to have the indoor lights on so I can see what I'm doing.  I'm glad I don't have to go anywhere today because it's in the mid-50s F for temperature.  

It's a good day to sit and knit.

I tossed the stash today looking for some more bulky yarn in a quantity large enough to knit another sweater.  If I do that and find more bulky weight yarn, I might be able to knit the grands some sweaters for Christmas.  That's always a risky proposition because you know how kids are about clothes.  You want to dress them one way and they want to run in the opposite direction!  But I have two approved sweater patterns from the middle girls, and I'm willing to go there.

The one I'm doing is almost done.  One sleeve is nearly finished, and that leaves one more sleeve and a button band to go.  On bulky yarn at three stitches per inch gauge, that could happen this weekend.

I did find a few more yarn choices in bulky.  One is dark chocolate brown, one is deep purple.  I also found another batch of the silver gray that I'm currently using.  I would NOT knit the same sweater in that yarn unless that got the thumbs up from the girls, so I'm looking for another pattern to use.

If I could spin this, I could have some fantastic yarn!

Miss Kitty said "That's not funny!"

LOL!

Knit on...

Yesterday's Squirrel Has a Beaded Cousin

It's going to rain off and on all day today, according to the hubster/weather authority.  That's nice in a way, because it lessens the threat of guilt for doing what I really wanted to do today, which is going into the sewing room.

But then package delivery happened, and here I am at the computer talking about the day's haul. But not of sewing items, those are still on the way.  I did get beads.  I ordered some seed beads from a couple of places because I'm knitting some beaded bracelets, and they're like potato chips -- you can't do just one.  

In September when I signed up for Vogue Knitting Live and a class with Laura Nelkin on beaded knitting I just pulled some random beads out of my little stash along with some random sock yarn scraps.  Nothing really matched or had any relationship to each other.  The resulting swatch turned out to look halfway decent though -- anything blinged up looks nice I guess!

I stopped when I ran out of beads.  I guess it's sort of a pattern... I get a little 'regular' on the randomness sometimes.  That must come from living for 49 years with Mr. OCD.

So next step was ordering a bracelet kit from Laura Nelkin's website, since that's how you get the patterns, and the one I got came with leather ends with snaps inserted so it was a win-win.  I was also digging in the knitting stash and found a couple of additional LN kits that I'd purchased back in the dark ages from a local yarn shop, but was not in love with the color combos.  I don't know what I was matching when I bought those but my taste has changed. So off I went to the world wide web and bead shops on line.

I've purchased beads on line before, so I knew a couple of sources, Auntie's Beads, Shipwreck Beads, Fire Mountain Gems... Laura had warned us about shopping on line at some places, where they keep telling you "only 275 more items to get to the next discount level".  LOL!  Not really 275, but it keeps you shopping to see what happens!

The problem was that the quantities made price comparisons difficult.  Just how many #6 beads make up 25 grams?  8.9 grams?  40 grams?  Does it make them less expensive when you buy the larger package even without a discount? 

Some patterns say you need 250 beads, some say 250 grams.  If the description doesn't give a count of beads per gram, what to do, what to do?  Like the teeshirt says, you said there'd be no math!!😖

So I ordered several packages of different sizes from three sources in order to do the eyeball test, and then did the math on price per gram.  If your eyes glaze over at the mention of unit pricing, skip down to the pictures.  Laura recommended Japanese beads, so I stuck with those brands.

Auntie's Beads: I bought four different packs.  I didn't buy the same beads in each place so this is not an apples to apples comparison.  These were 25 gram packets, which was a lot of beads, and the price ended up being 11 to 13 cents per gram before shipping.  Beads alone were $12.39.  No discount was received and shipping was $3.95.  So after shipping charges were applied that made the average price 16.3 cents per gram for Miyuki seed beads, two kinds of size 6 beads and two of size 8.

Lima Beads, somewhere I'd never tried, had TOHO beads, sizes 6 and 8, and a few colors in size 3.  Size 3 is larger than size 6, and 6 is larger than 8.  I got a little wild on this order because the packages were small, so I got more colors.  (Made sense to me at the time.)  Beads added up to $22.70 for 17 vials of 8.9 grams each. That was 14.59 cents per gram, but I got a 15% discount off my first order and that brought it down to 12.75 cents.  Shipping was free on this order, I must have reached a threshold.  They also sent me a stick of red licorice.

I still have a package coming from Fire Mountain.  You have to order 14 items before any discount kicks in, and I stopped short of that.  The unit prices on what I did order went from 14.5 cents per gram for some #6 beads to 7.9 cents for some tiny #11s.  Total for beads was 31.22 or 13 cents per gram and that increased to 16.35 cents per gram after tax and shipping.  They were the only ones who charged sales tax.

The Lima Beads haul.

The Auntie's package.

So what have I learned?  Nothing too profound.  

• I like getting things in the mail.  
• You don't need to be a math genius to spend a lot of money on craft supplies.
• Beads come in dozens of different packet sizes.  
• Not every website carries every size.  I only found big #3 beads in one place.
• Discounts are enticing but can lead you to overspend.
• There are a LOT of beads in even an 8.9 gram tube!
• I'm not counting individual beads.  It's like guessing how many jelly beans are in a mason jar.

Craft on...

Squirrel!! Squirrel!!

It seems like every day I wake up with a plan.  I know exactly what I want to do today.

And then... 

Yesterday was laundry day.  On Mondays I generally do the laundry and while it's running I stay upstairs in the area of the laundry room and do some computer work or clean and when that's done I can read or knit until the laundry is done.  We generally have only three or four loads, depending upon if it's the week to wash the bedding.  But with each load taking an hour, that shoots the day.

This past week, I started the laundry, but the computer was down in the kitchen, so after I cleaned upstairs, I went into the second bedroom to look for some yarn for a project I had in mind for a Christmas gift.  

Two hours later, after the washer had chimed twice and then given up, I had three bins of yarn on the floor and was deep into pulling three OTHER projects and reorganizing the bulky yarn.

THEN I had to put it all back.  LOL!

The good news is that I DID find a project I could start and that will knit up quickly, since it's bulky and I'm knitting a size small.  However... 

Well I did manage to finish the laundry except for the towels which are sitting in the dryer one day later, just waiting for me to come back to fold them.

Then I pulled out a bunch of yarn that was gifted to me two houses ago, when I was still working so at LEAST two years ago.  It's 100% acrylic, from a chain store, and was part of a haul from a co-worker whose mother had it for a number of years before she developed dementia and could no longer knit.  It's smelling a bit oily and it feels like it's coated.  I think old acrylic yarn sometimes starts to deteriorate when it's binned in plastic, and it develops a funky feel.  When that happens, it just needs to get tossed.

Which breaks my heart, but it's too icky to use, and why inflict it upon someone else who might buy it at the Goodwill??  Just grit your teeth and toss!  In my defense I didn't spend any money on it.  Does that help?

After a trip to the freezer to pull out something for dinner, I remembered to bring up the pile of pillow cases I sewed last week.  (I forgot to bring up the box of staples I pulled out of the downstairs desk though.)  DH claimed the Badgers one for his pillow.  The others are now in the closet.  Some could end up being gifted, since they're kind of juvenile, IMHO.  :-)

In case you thought I forgot about the title of this post, I came upstairs with nothing from the freezer.

We ordered a pizza delivery.

BTW did you know there is a shortage of pepperoni due to covid?  I did not know that before yesterday... but my cousin posted to FB that she could not find something in the store and that sparked a discussion of random shortages.

   

Evidently it's aged sausage like pepperoni and salami, artificial sweeteners that go into diet soda, and canned pumpkin in my area.  Thanksgiving is going to be a bummer if the pumpkin thing is true.

This weekend had me thinking about the pumpkin cranberry muffins that I used to buy from the coffee shop where I worked, back when I actually went to an office.  They were over a dollar each back then and probably had a calorie count that was triple digits, but they were so delicious.  I would drive downtown for one of them right now, if I knew I could get one.

Let's research recipes for cranberry pumpkin muffins...

It's after twelve, what was I going to do today??

Bake on...