Archive for ‘June, 2007’

Thank You and Lisa with the Summer Wine


We’re a little dazed after yesterday, please forgive us!

I just want to thank all you lovely customers for emptying my house of all that yarn and fiber! After I get all your orders packaged and shipped, I might roll around on the floors of the empty rooms for a couple of days before making any more yarn. :)


This is a note for Julie with the single Summer Wine skein-

My emails to you keep bouncing back, but this is what you are looking for. Hopefully if you put my email (yarn at helloyarn.com) on your safe list, we can correspond properly.

4 Comments

Shop Update Today!

I’m adding boatloads of new stuff to the shop today.

From Hello Yarn we’ve got Single Color BFL Lace skeins, Single Color Sock, a successful attempt at re-doing Herbal Fat Sock, tons of Sock in happy colors, hand-dyed BFL, Corriedale, Superwash Merino and 21 micron Merino spinning fibers. I’ve also bagged up lots of thrums. Sarah from Maisy Day Handspun sent Merino sock yarn and lots of gorgeous handspun, including a thick and thin called Cupcake that I want to steal and lots of 2 ply.

Come see us at 2pm EST.

PS: I think the newsletter worked! Well, at least for one of you!

PPS: The Flickr set of everything Sarah and I made for this update is here.

Thanks for all of your purchases! We’ll have to do these updates more often. :)

8 Comments

A Little More Tomten

I left you last with a description of the Tomten’s modified waist shaping, underarm gusset, and v-neck. The hood is finished now, and fits very well. I’ll describe changes in both stitch counts and percentages, since I played around with the original pattern and altered the stitch count a bit for fit, casting on 120 instead of 112 stitches.

You can see the v-neck shaping well in this photo. My original front section stitch count was 15. I reduced that, decreasing at the neck edge every other row to 6 sts., or 40% of the original count.

This brought my hood stitch count down to 42 from 60, or 70%. Increases were done as described in pattern, resulting in 56 sts. for the body of the hood. I’m finding this to be a very nice depth, taking into consideration the addition of the button band, which continues up and around the hood.

Instead of weaving the top of the hood together, I used a 3 needle bind off with the right side facing. It creates a nice, sharp edge.

Now, on to arm fit. I shortened the length of the armscye only a small bit (by 2 ridges). I’ve been using a favorite jacket as a model for my Tomten from day one, since this old jacket fits like a glove. The Tomten is a thicker fabric, so I’ve been upping the sizing a tad, but being able to follow the shaping of this jacket is great! I matched the armscye length to this jacket and away we went.

To shape the shoulders and make the sleeves angle down a bit instead of sticking straight out in a big T, I’m adding short rows to the shoulder area. At 7 ridges in, I short-rowed (wrapping but not knitting up the wraps, and it looks very nice) the center 20 sts. I then knit 2 ridges and short-rowed again. I’ll get back to you about whether this creates the proper angle. Things look promising.

On a happy final Tomten note, I think there’s enough yarn. :)


Comment Spam:

People, comment spam is going to be the death of me. I’ve been using Akismet all along, and added HashCash today. Akismet is great- it catches every bit of comment spam and puts it in a folder I can moderate. The crummy bit is that it sometimes catches legitimate comments, and at 1,000+ spam comments a day, I just can’t go through them all. It’s a shame that people take the time to comment and I never even see it. Hashcash is supposed to be able to tell the difference between bots and actual people, not allowing the bots to comment. I don’t think it’s working very well, as I just installed it a half hour ago and have 50 spam comments already. If you happen to use WordPress and know of a great spam plug-in, would you let me know? Thanks!

10 Comments