Yarn-Go-Round

I know I've mentioned my love for Ravelry here more than once, but I have another nice little Ravelry-related story to share with you. It's a perfect example of just how great Ravelry is, and why we should all love it to death and support them and enter in all our knitting information that we can. Pretty much all the links in this post are to various pages on Ravelry, so my apologies if you don't have an account yet - go sign up for one and you'll have it in a few weeks, tops.

A few weeks ago, Laura Mate sent me a Ravelry message. She explained that she had some Sir Galli by Muench but was just a few skeins short of the sweater she wants to knit. She had found my stash listing for the three skeins I had left over from the shawl I made a couple years ago, and figured it couldn't hurt to ask if I was willing to part with it.

Well, the back story on that yarn is that my best friend from college, who my daughter Julie is named after, died of ovarian cancer in July of 2005 after a four-year fight. She had learned to knit after she got sick, and had planned several projects that she never got around to. I inherited most of her yarn, and one of the projects was a shawl for her sister, Jenny, which I ended up making. The FO post for that one is here.

So those last three skeins left over were probably never going to get used - I don't really love knitting with 100% silk, and there were only three skeins left - but I didn't feel like I could throw them away or donate them to charity. Or at least, I hadn't gotten around to donating them yet. But when Laura asked me nicely for them, and told me that she had ten balls of the same dye lot waiting to be knit up, well it was like fate. I was grateful to Ravelry for connecting us, and grateful to her for taking this yarn and putting it to good use. Plus, after all the yarn people have given me over the last few years, I knew I couldn't accept any money for it - I got her address and off it went. It felt great, and then I pretty much forgot about it.

A week later, I was poking around Raverly again, looking at the long discontinued yarn that I'm slightly obsessed with (Pomfret by Brunswick). I noticed that Wei-Wei had five skeins of it in a lovely Blackberry Heather shade. This is somewhat unusual because it's not often that you find so many intact skeins of the same color and dye lot of this yarn together after twenty years out of make, but when you do it's usually in some not-very-fabulous color.

Five skeins is not quite enough to make a sweater out of - I have some old Brunswick patterns, and they say that for a cardigan in my size I'll need about nine skeins - but that purple-y heather will go great with some of the colors I already have and I will (eventually) make a sweater out of it.

It turns out that Wei-Wei had inherited the yarn, and had no immediate plans to use it, so she was happy to sell it to me for a very reasonable price. I think she may have felt the same way about it as I did about the Sir Galli - perhaps happy to see it go to a good home where it might get used. She asked a ridiculously low price for it - I may have had a slightly better idea of its value after having purchased a few several more than my share of skeins on e-bay in the last few years - so I sent her a bit more than what she asked and still felt a little guilty but not THAT guilty when she messaged me back that it was in the mail.

It arrived on Saturday while I was out at Yarnover, and it is just as gorgeous as I had hoped.



Okay, and that little scenario alone should have been enough - I helped Laura find the yarn she wanted, Wei-Wei helped me hoarde collect some more Pomfret that I neededwanted, it makes a nice little Ravelry-assisted karmic circle. But then Laura had to go and literally put the icing on the cake. Look what showed up in the mail today...



Laura is from Kentucky, where aparently this candy is a tradition. She says she and her mom used to make it every year at Christmas when she was a kid, but that it was so complicated it would only come out right about one time in ten. Sheesh! Now they just buy it from Ruth Hunt Candy - and I don't blame 'em. Nine batches of sugary mess for one good batch sounds a little frustrating!

This candy is good and like nothing else I've ever tasted. It's super-crazy-sweet, and it sort of crumbles and melts in your mouth kind of like those old fashioned peppermint sticks, only softer and more crumbly, and sweeter and without the mint. I tried one this afternoon and knew that I would need a cup of coffee for my next one. I just had another one with a cup of decaf, and it was nice. The foil-wrapped bar is the same candy, dipped in chocolate. Not THAT was good. The bitter from the dark chocolate really balances the sweet and makes it yummy.

Laura, you know that was totally unnecessary. I told you to pay it *forward*! But, um, thanks. I really appreciate your thoughtfulness.

And now, I'm going to try to make some headway on that scarf. I am SO itching to start my Sunrise Circles, which means I better hurry up and finish this scarf before the willpower runs out. I'm working on the last repeat of the main lace pattern now, and then just have to do the row of border at the end.



Harry cat thinks it looks like a big ole lump o'not-much-exciting. I'm camping out in the office room tonight watching a DVD on my computer because Joe has hockey on in the living room while he irons. I am so not into hockey!