That's A Lot Of Yarn!

Happy New Year's Eve Eve Purly Gate readers! I'm sure everybody is busy finalizing plans for the big night. Personally, it hasn't been a big night for me in many years. In my old age, I've found that going out in all of those crowds and then driving home with all of the drunks makes me tense and I'd rather stay home. This year, in fact, I considered canceling our usual get-together with my brother and his wife and new baby because I didn't want them driving home either, but they still want to go forward. I usually do fondue, but since we just had a fondue party, I'll have to be more clever this year. But you can be sure they'll be plenty of Trader Joe's $3.99 champagne. Last year when Joe came back from Iraq, we celebrated with a bottle of Dom Perignon, and it wasn't as good as the TJ's stuff in my opinion. The Dom was very sweet, but the TJ's stuff is very dry - "delish" as Rachael Ray would say!

Anyway, I've been knitting, but most of the pictures would bore you to tears. For starters, I cast on for the Ombre Blanket and worked a few inches, but I haven't done more because of this:

Look at all of that beautiful yarn! What could possibly hold me back? Well, maybe that the ball winder and swift at the Grove is broken! I wound the first two by hand, which isn't a big deal, but c'mon, that's a lot of yarn to wind by hand. I'll probably do a couple more today and push forward.

Which brings me to another point. That photo represents less than half the yarn for the blanket (yikes!). For the rest, I have a decision to make. The Grove carries it for $8.25 per skein plus CA tax of 7.75%. Kpixie has it for $7.50 with no tax and $5 flat shipping. However, Knit Happens is having a sale right now and is selling it for $7 with free shipping for orders over $100. So, if I did that, I'd save around $25 for 14 skeins. The drawback is that it's much less painful to buy it one color at a time, when I'm ready. I'm not really ready now, having just bought the yarn for Clapotis and for the Somewhat Cowl. So, my question is, is it worth it to bite the bullet and buy a lot of yarn now to save $25? What do you think?

Finally, I got a PDA for Christmas from my husband. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but it does what I need it to do which is keep track of my contacts and my appointments. However, it didn't come with any sort of case, so I decided to knit the one from Stitch and Bitch: The Knitters Handbook. I thought about buying yarn in fun colors like pink, orange and green, but see the above-referenced self-imposed poverty. So, I dug through my stash and came up with this. How can such a little project generate SO many ends?

Here it is all pinned together. It still needs to be blocked because it's curling so much. I knit it at a fairly tight gauge so it would truly provide some protection in my Bermuda Triangle of a purse.

I need to seam it, add some kind of a cute button, sew on velcro, and voila! I don't think the colors are bad considering they're from my stash. You may recognize a couple of them from Joe's bag.

I also finished the left front of Chill, but that's boring. I'll put more photos of it up when it's completely finished. Happy New Year!