Potpourri

Today, I bring you a collection of randomness...

This morning, the gals and I had a wonderful time over at Peggy's Strands of Heaven (check Meg's blog, I think there will be pictures up soon), the new preferred LYS of my old Sunday knitting group. Bridget, the owner, has been super nice and very accommodating to our little clatch after we got the "Oop, sorry, did we forget to tell you we're not going to be open on Sundays anymore, too bad for your little charity knitting group" from the other shop, and then the coffee shop we'd been meeting in randomly and abruptly went out of business. She had a FABULOUS SALE. Fabulous. Here's what I got.

This is a mohair-lambswool blend called Yarn By Bessie in the color Black Cherry, from Farmhouse Yarns. It's going to become a felted bag for work.

This is two balls of Cascade Superwash in Chocolate and four balls of (sigh) Rowan Tapestry (wool and soy. Squee!) in, uh, that color, that's destined to become a scarf, hat, and fingerless gloves set, just as soon as I come up with a stitch pattern for the scarf. I'm thinking I might do something along the lines of the Fetching mitts, so maybe something with mini-cables? Or maybe bigger cables? All suggestions are certainly welcome...

And then I got a sock pattern, and one of those GoKnit pouches that enable you to wander around with your knitting attached to you. It's even camouflage, so, um, you know, if I ever want to knit in a hunting...lodge...or...whatever you would be in when you went hunting...

The whole store was 40% off. Forty percent!! If you got there early enough, which of course I did. And my mom even came with me, despite the fact that she doesn't herself knit. And it was really good to see everyone one more time. And I got yarn! And there was coffee! Could this get any better?

As long as we're on the topic of yarning, I've got two whole repeats of my Fawkes socks done. Wanna see?

Here's a close-up.

Cool, huh? Sarah was right, it's a great, very easy pattern.

And as long as we're discussing things I made, here's the end result of my mom and my bread adventure yesterday:

The white stuff on top is sesame seeds, FYI. We made four big loaves and eight little tiny ones. My mom's been doing this for years; this was the first time I'd attempted to make this bread (I have been known to bake other bread, in the past, so I wasn't a total novice). It's my great-grandmother's recipe (a word I use loosely in this instance) and starts with a five-pound bag of flour and you add "enough" of stuff until you get it the way you want it. My mom remembers watching her grandmother make it, using a saucer to measure out her flour. That's how we roll, the cooks in my family. You add enough of things and you cook it at hot enough until it's done. And our new twist on the recipe, which we tried for the first time yesterday, was to use roughly half white flour, half wheat flour (which my aunt's dad - i.e., my grandfather via my uncle's marriage - does, when he makes the same kind of bread). It turned out really well.

It was a good time.

And the final bit of randomness I'll leave you with today is this, a quote I stole off of the BABble blog:

My shape has taught me that some people will love me for how I look, some people will hate me for it, and others will find it to be entirely irrelevant.

It strikes me how true that is, regardless of what "shape" you substitute in there.

Anyhow.

I'm off to pick up my best friend for lunch, then we're going to kill some time, and then go over to my soon-to-make-me-an-aunt-again friends' house for dinner with the crew. It's been a good week.