I would totally marry Cascade 220. Cody is only slightly uncomfortable with this. He just doesn’t want to end up on Jerry Springer. My wife left me for a ball of yarn.

I made a felted bag using blue Cascade Heather and Nashua Ivy which is an alpaca peruvian wool blend with estrellina (?) in it. I took a risk and just felted that Ivy (ooh no swatching!) and it is beautiful.

The blue is just a little fuzzy but the white is glittery and quite fuzzy! I’ve been calling it Peruvian Delftware since it’s got Peruvian wool and the colors remind me of Delftware. Love this bag!! I bought some silver grommets to make it into a drawstring bag around the thin part using some felted cascade I cords.

I pretty much made this up as I went along. I’ve been mentally playing around with drawstring bag patterns. You can see two of my earlier attempts later on in the post. They’re loosely based on other patterns I’ve seen around I guess. But I’m not referencing any specific patterns at all while I’m knitting, just freestyling.

I doubled the cascade and knit on 15s from the bottom up and this yarn is SO SOFT and warm and the colors are beautiful! I actually bought some Cascade Quatro at the store today. Which means that I’ve been to the new Village Wools three times and I’ve bought Cascade each time. And I still have the cabled shawl to knit for Jocelyn’s grandmother. Lots of Cascade knitting in my future!

I’m working on another bag right now that has a long rectangular flat bottom using khaki colored Manos and some purple Nashua Ivy. I have a pair of bamboo handles for that one. It’ll be funky and felted. Can’t wait to see how the purple felts. Hopefully it’ll keep its rectangular shape too. It’s hard to guess with this freestyling thing.

This is that handspun kool aid dyed hat that had started out as a drawstring bag but was too short and became a hat. I threaded this lovely iridescent ribbon in the eyelets and now it looks cute and retro. This hat is adorable.

And I finally pulled Peach Kelli Pop from the Etsy shop and knit something with it. It had been sitting in there for a year so it needed to find some new use. I couldn’t believe how it was knitting up as I went along! It striped! Like trekking style! I remember the spinning technique I used for this (really just pre-drafted roving fluffs in different colors put together in a bag picked up at random, I think I learned about this from Adrian) so I’ll have to try it again sometime!

This was another top down freestyle drawstring bag. And using ribbon on the hat I’ve been sort of into the juxtaposition of textures using rougher handspun and shiny ribbon. So I used shiny pink ribbon for the handle on this bag.

I made a cute handspun lacey scarf with ribbon in the eyelets too but I forgot to get photos of that one.

And here’s a felted bag I made using some Lion Landscapes that was leftover from Beverly’s yarn swap last year. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since that party! It’s a cute bag and I looked around to find a nice little button to close it. The Kokopelli seemed really appropriate. It’s a weird little bag but hooray for stashbusting! Now if I can just get rid of the last ball and a half!

We were at the polls when they opened at 7 am and had a bit of a wait in line. Maybe 15-20 minutes. We had coffee, ipods, reading materials, and knitting to entertain ourselves. I actually followed the Alibi recommedations. Which included two Republicans. I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life (I’m not kidding) so I was somewhat traumatized by this. They were for local candidates (County Sheriff and State Auditor) though so it’s not like I really care all that much and I pretty much agree with the Alibi’s opinions about them. So everyone that’s given me crap about being a bleeding heart liberal yellow dog democrat can stick it right up their arse I can claim to be bipartisan now.

After voting we went out to breakfast then visited Target to get a freestanding garment rack and hanging shelves for displays for the show. Then went to Village Wools, of course. I mostly behaved myself. Just some Cascade Quatro, Noro Iro, and, ok, some koigu. And an umbrella swift so I won’t have to worry about leaving my precious Goko swift at the Lujan building.

Oh, just so you know, we’ve had so many automated calls for this election we unplugged our house phone yesterday and don’t plan on plugging it in again until after the polls close tonight. So if you need to get in touch with me call my cellphone or email me!