Fur Piece

My vacation got off to a rocky start.

When I got home from work yesterday afternoon, I heard a hissing sound by my garage. Not a snakey hissing (which would be bad), but a watery hissing. Either my house or the front yard retaining wall shifted, breaking our main water line right where it enters the house. It wasn’t exactly spewing, and I’m pretty sure that it hadn’t been doing that when I’d left in the morning, but it was pretty disconcerting. Jeff got a plumber out (at after-hours rates, grrrr) and we had it fixed by 8. At 10, we were able to turn the water back on, so all’s well that ends well. Still, scary.

Jeff and I went out for breakfast this morning, and then, while he headed to campus to finish up his grading,  I went to Joann’s to pick up some more Lion Brand for placemats. I accidentally turned down the wrong aisle and ran into a wall of “fun” fur. Yikes! It was all so weird looking. And funny. And sad. I like to think I’m not a yarn snob – knit with what you want, I say. But I just do not get the appeal. It may be fast, and you can use giant needles with it, but how they heck can you see what you’re doing? Any beginning knitter starting on this stuff isn’t doing him or herself a favor.  I think fun fur’s time has come and gone, but it can still be found. It almost always seems to be on clearance, though. That’s gotta be saying something.

Back to the placemats. They only had three more balls of the Clove color in the dyelot I’d purchased earlier. And the dyelots were radically different. So I’ve decided to knit three placemats in Clove and three in a new color I picked up, Espresso. You can see what I’ve got so far, here. I’m hoping that the Clove and Espresso will go well with each other and the widely divergent colors of plates that we have.

So things are much more relaxed today than they were yesterday evening. Here’s to calm days ahead.