New yarn! And: Why I should not order yarn after a concussion.

My new yarn arrived! Yay! First, came the gorgeous cashmere fingering from Argosy Luxury:

Yum, yum, yum! It is beautiful. The color is just great and perfect for Kevin.

One small matter, however. When I picked the yarn, based on the Ravelry page (without reading what others had used or looking closer at the yarn used in the original), I thought it was to be fingering yarn. Actually that's what the page says, but if you read further, it says look for something about using a yarn somewhere between fingering weight and sport. And the yarn used in the original pattern is DK. Ha. Well. This is what happens when I make choices when I'm not completely cognitively intact. (I'm totally blaming the concussion. I'm typically way too detail-oriented to make a mistake like this.) I tried it out to see if I would get gauge anyway. Maybe if it were to be a hat for a baby and not an adult....so I frogged what I had and just ordered some DK weight yarn from Argosy. Zen 4Ply in Coal, which likely you won't see on the page either because I think I ordered the last one. Coal is basically black with just a wisp of greyishness or maybe even brown in it.

I'm considering going double-stranded with the Zen 4Ply and Zen 2Ply because I love the colors in the 2Ply...all blue-grey-black. We'll see how it goes. I'm still hoping that I can have the hat ready for Vermont. The first order from Argosy shipping quickly and it isn't a really difficult project. A 3x3 rib with 114 stitches cast on and then basic k2tog to decrease at the crown. It didn't end up requiring too much translation because of the chart. And when Kevin did look at it to "translate" it turns out that half of the kanji could mean the same bunch of words, depending on context, and not being a knitter, he had no idea what a lot of it meant. So. Yay for charts.

(FYI - the concussion is mostly gone, or rather its side effects are. I still am getting headaches more often than I used to...like right now...and I've got a tiny bump that is getting smaller each day and some bruising that is fading as well. I have noticed my recall is much poorer than it ever was though. Hopefully that will improve, too.)

Well, thankfully the yarn I ordered from Knit Picks arrived as well, because otherwise I'd have nothing productive on my needles. And the needles I needed arrived from eknittingneedles.com, too. With my yarn stash growing as it is, I'm going to need a much bigger and better storage and organizational system.

I'm going to start....in a few minutes as soon as I bring up the laundry from the dryer....the Valentine Mitts. Just in time, too, because we're trying not to turn the heat above 60 (originally we were trying for 55, but I am not that hardy it turns out). I have on a turtleneck and a heavy, long, hooded sweater and it's not enough....damn the old, drafty house (and old, not double-paned windows, and lack of proper insulation) and old furnace that makes our heating bills way too high and doesn't even warm up the place.

Anyway, isn't the yarn beautiful? I just love the color: Iris Heather, mmm....lots of purpley, reddish loveliness. I think the cabling will really show it off nicely. So it's off to the basement I go and then back to make something pretty and warm.