WooHoo! and a Question for you

My yarn stash is growing by leaps and bounds this year. I've got so much yarn and so little time. What a great problem to have.

Here's another wonderful problem:

A friend of mine (who has a gorgeous hubby and four perfect children) went on a mission trip to Peru. I asked her to bring me back some yarn. I didn't mention color or anything, just said "surprise me." Well, she did.

I got 20 skeins of an alpaca/wool/cotton blend. 10 are dark gray, 5 are a medium/light gray and are a bright pink. And get this - all 20 skeins were only $39.00! Woohoo!

Now, on to the problem. The label states that it is 5o grams. There is no yardage listed. I'm getting 13 wraps per inch, so I'm guessing it's either a light worsted or heavy sport, take your pick. I'm at a loss from there. I don't know how to figure out my yardage and I suck at math. Any brilliant math people out there who can help me figure this out?

I also don't know what to make with it. But I'm so excited about this!!!

I don't have a pic of it yet, but here's some sheep pr0n for you: ;)

Poor kid

This poor kid. He's at a High School Science Fair and his mom makes him wear a 3 year old's sweater. At what point are we knitter's responsible for our children's humiliation? Can you just imagine the bullying he's going through right now? If this was on a pre-schooler the comments would be, "Awwwww, he's so cute in that sweater." But at this age? "Dude, what a geek. Did your Mom pick out those clothes? Did Gramma knit you a new sweater?" How can he possibly pick up chicks dressed like this? Come on mom, face the facts. The boy's growing up and deserves a grownup sweater.

This is your sweater on drugs

Happy Camper

Call me a Happy Camper. Go ahead, do it. I got a "new to me" hand me down toy from my overly generous (a couple of months ago he also gave us a large screen rear projection tv) baby brother:

This replaces the dinosaur monitor that I had that took up the entirety of my desk. This is so cool. Notice the obligatory child's toy. There's not one space in my home that is devoid of one. How do you possibly "declutter" when there are children in the house that are 7 and 2?


Here's the progress on the Circular Shrug:


In the mock rib section, it takes four rows to make one vertical inch (row gauge for the beginning knitters.) I need 20 inches of this. 20 freakin' inches. I've got about 8 now. It's killing me. This project is monotonous and slow, so get ready to be looking at this one on the blog for a while. But it will look super cute when I'm done. I hope. I'd hate to spend this much time on it and have it suck, ya know? The colors are striping up super sweet. I love the colors to death and how the stripes are fairly thin.

Pig-Pickin' in South Carolina

The weekend was fun. The Eldest and I went to a family reunion/"Pig-Pickin'" in Florence, South Carolina. This was my Dad's family who I didn't know growing up. I didn't meet most of them until I was married and had one child. I took all my family genealogy stuff with me, but did little research while there. We just didn't have enough time and some of the key people that I need to speak with weren't there due to family health problems.

It took us 5 hours to get there. I got some more done on the Circular Shrug. I got about 16 rows done. It doesn't sound like much does it? But multiply it by 120 sts per row and you'll understand that it took a while. I was only able to work in the car for a couple of hours each way, so that is all I managed to accomplish. I am already very tired of doing rib and mock rib though. I am ready to be finished with this project already!

Besides the knitting, which I had to knock off after a couple of hours due to sore hands, this is what I had to look at during the drive:

Obviously The Eldest was not the best conversationalist on the ride up.

Anyway, back to the Pig-Pickin'. They had cooked a big hog on a humongous grill and it was quite tasty. The hog weighed around 138 pounds! The turnout was a bit of a disappointment. Only about a third of the people that were there last year showed up this year. I did get to wear my new Bella Paquita sweater though, so that was one consolation. :)

On Sunday, we took a drive out to the sticks (which is most of the area to be truthful - lotsa farmland) to see if we could find where the old family farm was and to find a couple of the homes my Dad lived in as a young child.

We found the remains of what was once his Grandmother's house:

(I always told my Dad he came from trash and there's my proof, a huge pile of trash!) Seriously though, it always makes me sad when I pass by old homes that the owners have let delapidate. She was incredibly poor, so I guess noone wanted to do anything with what was essentially a shack by the time my g-grandmother inherited it. She died in the early 1940's.

It was cool to be able to find it though. At one time this was part of a plantation that had 450 acres of land and that was after the Civil War. Now why couldn't someone have taken care of and held onto all that land so that I could inherit it? Why?