Knit Happens

We will be closed Sunday, July 4 so we can all celebrate the holiday with family and friends. We will reopen at 11am Tuesday.

We hope that you all have a happy and safe 4th of July holiday!

Ahhh, the age old question of which to get first if you can only get one: do I get a ball winder or a swift?  At Late Night Knitting this past Wednesday, we might have come up with the answer.  (Well, it’s always been my answer, but it convinced one of our customers!)

Arabella had picked up the last of the Araucania Lonco from the clearance bin – the Lonco is a gorgeous mercerized fingering weight cotton with amazing stitch definition, but it’s a bit of a b!#&% to wind.  I am convinced that drunken monkeys were hired to reskein up the yarn once it was dyed.  In almost every skein that I’ve wound, there has been an extra twist put into the hank, making it a tangle.  I gave Arabella some warning about it (probably not enough) and she was off winding.

Fast forward an hour: she’s got 5 ends to the yarn and she’s about ready to quit winding and just cut her losses and run. Bolstered by my fourth (very small) cup of wine, I tell her that we’re not going to cut the yarn, that we can save it.  Fast forward another hour or hour and a half: it’s after 9pm, we’re still hand-winding the yarn into 3 different balls, just trying to find the end that’s attached to the ball on the ball winder.  The entire time, we’re cracking jokes about the mutating ends of yarn and how we’re lucky we’ve got the swift because neither of us know anyone who’d be willing to hold the yarn for that long!  I offer to wind the rest of the skeins for her before Knit ‘n Nosh, so she doesn’t have to deal with it, besides, I’ve had decent luck with getting the Lonco wound before, right?

The next day, I spent another three hours with a tangled mess of yarn – the drunken monkeys have been at it again.  However, the next few skeins weren’t bad at all.  (Apparently, the drunken monkeys only work on about half of the dyelots.)  Yesterday I handed it all back to her, wound of course, and she told me that I had convinced her that she needed to get a swift to have at home. 

I got a ball winder about a year before I splurged on a swift and it was a huge pain in the rear to get anything wound into balls – I had to have someone standing right there holding my hank of yarn while I wound it, or laid it on the ground and wound slowly – not good when there are pets around…  Once I got my swift, life was a lot easier.  I could hand-wind or use the ball winder – and my yarn was (relatively) safe from my cats (who love to think of it as theirs).

So, weighing in on this debate, I’m going with get a swift first if you can’t get both.  However, if you can get both (or are dropping very last minute Mother’s Day hints to husbands and children) you can save 15% off of the set!

Have you noticed the new tab at the top of the page? Take a look, I’ll wait. Yes, that new tab says “Classes and Events” – which can only mean that the classes are finally up! Hooray!

When you click over there, you’ll notice that we have a snazzy calendar on there (provided by Google Calendar – however did we get along without the little things like that to make life easier?) that lists both our classes (in green) and shop events (in pink, natch). You’ll notice that we have a couple classes in April and May on days where the shop is closed – that isn’t a typo, we will have those classes that day.

How to find out more information and register for the classes? Click on the class and the information will pop up, including price, materials needed and reading recommendations/prerequisites, if any. Then, give us a call at the shop – or stop in – and we’ll get you all squared away. Remember, we keep our classes small and they fill quickly, so register early and tell your friends!

So, the holidays are fast approaching and I’m sure that you all want know just when Knit Happens will be open – just in case you need some time away from… the hecticness of the holidays. Or a yarn fix. So the following will be our holiday hours through the beginning of the year.

• Wednesday, November 21 – we will close at 3pm to help our families out with Thanksgiving dinner.
• Thursday, November 22 – Thanksgiving Day, store closed
• Tuesday, December 25 – Christmas Day, store closed
• Wednesday, December 26 – Boxing Day, store closed
• Tuesday, January 1 – New Year’s Day, store closed

In addition to these hours, just as a heads up, we will be closed Wednesday, January 2 through Friday, January 4 for inventory. (If a day isn’t listed – like Christmas Eve – it means that we’re following our regular shop hours.)

**I am going to try to “sticky” this to the top of the page, so you may receive this in your Bloglines or GoogleReader multiple times. I apologize in advance.**