The Heathen Housewife

I just updated the etsy shop with all the yarn that’s left. Come and get it!

So I ordered this giant photo lighting tent from some web site to take pictures of all the yarn in, and to have around for taking better pictures of other stuff for the blog. And I knew it was going to be big – big enough to handle various stuff I might want to some day sell on e-bay or whatever. But really, I had no idea just how freakin’ big this thing was going to be. Are you ready? Brace yourself.

Oh, and I called Joe in to be in these pictures for scale…

And then we started to have a little fun with it…

And this? This is why I love Joe. He has the best sense of humor when he gets going.

Moving on, look what followed me home from the yarn store tonight…

It’s a skein of the awesome new Opal, enough to knit a pair of the newborn size of my new pants pattern. For a shop sample. One more thing to add to the very top of the to-knit list. As soon as I finish Julie’s pants, these are next in line. Hopefully, they shouldn’t take to long – about as long as a pair of socks, maybe less.

Oh, and look! I used my new light tent. But I didn’t have it set up with the lights on the outside, so I just used the camera flash. I hope to get the whole thing together and take some good yarny yarn yarn pictures tomorrow night.

And back to the pants at hand…no cute model in them tonight, but I thought I’d get a clearer picture of the stripes. I think I mentioned that I was going to run out of the stripy yarn, and I’m implementing my plan for dealing with it.

An awesome friend of mine had a skein of undyed Knitpicks laying around and was kind enough to trade it to me for a skein of my hand dye. I plunked it in a pot of blue, and I’ve been striping it in wherever there was a blue stripe in the original colorway, starting mid-thigh. I think it looks pretty good.

There’s only a little chunk of the original stripes left, but it will be enough to spread around a bit through the waist of the pants and give it what I hope will be an “I meant to do that” look instead of an “oops I ran out of yarn” look. Oh, and see that cute little gusset? There it is.

Finally, a truly gratuitous cute-kid picture. Sophie has been pretending that everything is a phone lately. There is an old remote control we let the kids play with, a book light, and today the actual cordless phone that she climbed up and grabbed off the counter. It was so cute how she was standing there at the counter, babbling into the phone and looking up every so often to smile at me, all the while shuffling through the little pile of papers the same way I do so often when I’m talking on the phone. And her hair is finally long enough again to wear in her signature fountain ponytail.

G’night.

Oh! and one more thing I just remembered from the store. Next weekend – the 13th – is the Twin Cities yarn store shop hop. The Yarnery is organizing a bus for knitters to ride around town to all the shops. Guess who gets to ride along on the bus and play hostess? Me! I think there are still seats left on the bus if you’re interested. Just call the store. I promise, it’ll be fun.

There won't be nearly enough of these glorious, golden fall days before
winter cold and gray set in. So for a moment this afternoon, we are
outside in the occasional rain of technicolor leaves, soaking up some
warm sunshine, storing it up, steeling ourselves for the long dark
months to come.

By Spring, Julie will be ready for a big girl bike with pedals and
Sophie will be ready to do more than sit on the trike and propell
herself in the style of Fred Flintstone. Today, we enjoy the moment and
try to commit it to memory.

A couple of items to follow up on yesterday’s brain-dump….

First, about the yarn. I am so disorganized about selling things! I swear, if I were just a little less scatterbrained, life would be ever so much easier. A couple of e-mails from people interested in buying yarn made it clear that I really should have at least posted a picture with descriptions of some of the yarns available. So here it is:

This photo is clickable for the full-res version. All but a couple of self-striping skeins are $22.50, including priority mail shipping. Starting on the top row and moving from left to right:

Tween Fantasy – I think this one makes barber-pole type stripes, but I’m not sure.

Tequila Something – This one is a non-striping, random type.

Rainbow Barf – Not the original Rainbow Barf like my socks, I have several skeins of this, some are barber-pole striping and some are more random.

Here Kitty Kitty – This one makes barber-pole stripes of gold and black, with a little bit of blue at the edges of the black.

Northern Twilight – I think this one makes barber-pole type stripes, but I’m not sure.

Festive – This one makes barber-pole stripes.

What Willie Wore – This one makes barber-pole stripes.

Juicy Melon – This one makes barber-pole stripes.

Spring Rain – An almost-solid that would be great for lace or texture-patterned socks.

Stripey Stripey – This is a true self-striping yarn, and therefore costs a bit more – $27.50 including shipping.

Bottom Row, left to right:

Tween Fantasy – another skein – even though it’s basically the same colors as the one on the top row, it looks a little different. I think this one is barber-pole stripes, but I’m not positive.

Brick House – This is a non-striping yarn, fairly subtle color differences that would be good for lace and texture.

Mystery Mauve – This one makes barber-pole stripes.

Southwest -This one makes barber-pole stripes.

I Got the Blues – A monochromatic colorway that randomly varies from light to dark.

Cheezehead – This one makes barber-pole stripes. Perfect for your favorite Wisconsin football fan.

Neon Melon – This one makes barber-pole stripes.

Northern Twilight – Another variation on the skein in the top row. I think this one makes barber-pole type stripes, but I’m not sure.

Neon Landscape – This one makes barber-pole stripes.

Electric Stripes – A true self-striping yarn, $27.50 including shipping.

For anyone ordering two or more skeins, I’ll waive shipping charges – subtract $4.50 per skein. Again, feel free to e-mail me for more information.

Oh, and about the handbags…hey, MelonKelli! Damn you for showing me that bag. I SO did not need to see that – because it is very nice, and I can’t afford it. But thanks anyway. It was the right idea. Actually, after I wrote my post last night, I did a little poking around on e-bay, and I found this bag, which is almost exactly like the one I linked to yesterday. So I bid on it, and ended up winning the auction for about a third of the price of the new one. Hopefully I will like the way it carries as well as I like the way it looks. The search for the perfect handbag is never-ending.

Oh, and Joe e-mailed me this afternoon to share that he found information about the new Sidekick to the effect that poop-brown and crappy blue might not be the only colors available. I SO do not need to be tempted by another fancy electronic toy.

I feel like I’m finally almost recovered from the craft fair and all of the prep work that led up to it. It wasn’t just the craft fair, it was finishing up as many skeins as I could, making note cards, and a bunch of other little business bits and pieces that needed doing. And the energy that I spent in the whole process was just as much emotional worry over thinking up and remembering all the things I should do to prepare as the actual doing of those things.

I have to say, I’m really grateful to my neighbor Laura for doing this with me. Laura came over Friday night and did a practice table set-up with me, and she thought of all kinds of little things like putting out a bowl of candy, and bringing the right sales tax documentation (which we didn’t end up needing, but still.) and she has a great eye for layout and design, and she contributed most of the stuff that made our table look organized. Not to mention, she has the bigger car, so she drove and helped schlep all my junk up the hill to the campus and back down. And she kept me company throughout the day. It was so much better with her there!

And we learned a lot about selling at craft fairs in the process. We learned about setting up and talking to people and writing receipts and lots of little subtle details. We both went into the day with relatively open expectations for how much would sell, and it was great to get some positive feedback from customers, both their words and their open wallets. I have to admit, though, that I was just a little disappointed in the bottom line at the end of the day. I mean, it was a low-risk venture as there was no registration fee for the table. But having put so much work into preparing for the event, and sitting there all day talking up our goods, I really would have liked to come home with more money and less yarn.

I’m not grousing, I’m just being honest. I think there were two major problems. One, the crowd just didn’t seem to be in a super-buying mood. We were in a great spot, and we had lots of traffic past our table, and lots of people asking questions, but it was just the wrong crowd. They were there to see their kids at college, to go to the football game, to relive their own college experiences. They weren’t there so much to buy gifts for themselves or others. Half the crowd was poor college students with much less disposable income than those of us who barely blink an eye at spending $20 on a skein of sock yarn. The other problem was that the crowd was somewhat devoid of hard core knitters. Very few people who walked by knew what a stitch marker was without Laura explaining it, and even those who claimed to knit rarely knew how they are used.

So, even though we each made several sales, we both came home with plenty of stock for our etsy shops. Good news for you, dear readers! I actually just ordered a lighting tent online, and as soon as it shows up, I’ll start photographing the collection and putting it up. (As an aside, I tried to make my own lighting tent like Laura did a month or so ago, but mine was miserably shabby, so I gave up and just ordered a collapsible fabric one.) In the mean time, if there’s a certain colorway you’ve been wanting or wishing for, e-mail me about it and we can avoid the etsy fees.

Okay, and while I’ve been not blogging very much, I have been knitting a little bit. You know how we knit bloggers complain about being stranded on sleeve island? Well, I have been stranded on pant-leg island. But I think I am almost done with the legs for Julie’s pants, so I’ll show you one more legs-in-progress shot.

At least the cute kid wearing them adds a tiny bit of interest to the shot. They’re scrunched down a bit here, but they are plenty long and will gain another inch or two when I go ahead and knit the gusset for the c*r*0*t*c*h. Julie seemed pleased.

Oh! I have an argh! to share with you. I don’t want to go into super detail, but let me just say that if your child is sick, don’t hesitate to take her to a specialist when your pediatrician repeatedly shrugs her shoulders and acts like it is no big deal. This is the second time in my parenting experience where I’m kicking myself for not dragging my children to a specialist despite the pediatrician’s lack of concern. First was Julie’s food allergies, which went undiagnosed for 18 months till I figured it out on my own and took her to the allergist behind the ped’s back, after more than a year of multiple visits per month begging for help.

And now, last Friday I finally took Sophie to a GI doctor after a year of very little help from the pediatrician with her – ahem – issue. Those of you who’ve been around for a while know all the details you need to know, and those of you who haven’t will have to just go search the archives, because I’m not willing to rehash it all again. But let me just tell you that the GI doctor was shocked that I hadn’t gotten there sooner, and was horrified baffled when I told him what medication and dosage the pediatrician had prescribed for the problem. From what the GI doc said during our visit, and the results we have already started seeing since then, there are simple solutions to our problem – other drugs – and basically Sophie has been suffering unnecessarily for way too long.

Stand up for your kids, trust your instincts as a parent. I only wish I had truly taken this mantra to heart more seriously after the whole allergy thing with Julie. Gullible me wants to believe that the people who call themselves experts and claim to have our kids’ interests at heart really do, but I’m afraid they’re more interested in the bottom line and the insurance company guidelines. It sucks!

On to more fun stuff. With the season change, the shopping bug has hit me, and I’m sorely tempted to buy a new hand bag. For so long now, I’ve been carrying diaper bags and backpacks, and I’d really like to have a nice leather purse in a current style to haul around. I think Sophie is old enough now that I can pare down enough to consider a medium-large handbag. But the way I shop for purses always leaves me unsatisfied. I get an idea in my head of exactly what I want, and then I go looking for it. So far, the closest I’ve found is this bag by Kenneth Cole Reaction. I love the way it looks. The only thing is, I want something a tiny bit bigger, and with just slightly longer straps. The straps need to be able to fit over my shoulder even when I’m wearing my winter coat, as I will be within the next month or two, and the bag needs to hold a diaper or two, wipes, a small wallet, a large cell phone, a small camera, and maybe a box or two of raisins and maybe a sock in progress. Oh, and it’s all about the dreams, baby, because even $150 for a new bag sounds like a giant chunk of my discretionary budget at the moment. Much as I’d like something even prettier. So anyway, if you know of the bag I’m really looking for, let me know.

Oh, and more shopping-type activity. But not really. I know I talk about my cell phone on here a lot, and most of you have no idea what a Sidekick is. But I love my Sidekick 3, and my darling husband sent me a link to the new model coming out. I’ve upgraded every time they’ve come out with a new model so far, but this time I may have to pass. The new version has a bigger, higher-resolution screen, and a few other appealing features. And it’s a shiny, new toy, which we all love to have. But, aside from the fact that my current model is not all that old and I’m not exactly made of cash, the new model is just plain ugly. It’s offered in a poopie-colored brown, and a cheap plasticy navy blue. Color me disappointed.

Finally, I owe several of you a huge apology. I know I promised I was sending out copies of the legging pattern to my test-knitters. They are still not out! I’ve just been too busy and/or tired. I was going to send them all out in the regular mail because I just didn’t want editable copies of the Word document floating around in cyber-space. Now that I finally have a little brain power freed up, I’m doing what I should have done last week. I’m installing OpenOffice on my laptop, something I hadn’t gotten around to since I upgraded to Windows Vista. OpenOffice’s word processing program has the ability to export Word documents into .pdf documents. So as soon as I get it installed, I’ll be converting the pattern into a .pdf and sending it out via e-mail to all those I promised it. Also, because of the delay, those of you expecting skeins of yarn as your payment will have at least through the first week of November to get your photos and comments in to me and still qualify. Sorry!

Now, I must go pay some bills and dig through some e-mails before (I swear) I go to bed a bit earlier than usual. I’m still trying to catch up on my sleep.