Suss Over the knee

I visited the new Suss store on Lafayette between Houston and Prince. From work it's just a bunch of blocks east (damn, that makes it seem so close!). As soon as I opened the door my senses kicked into overload mode. The bright colors, the obvious fuzzy softness, the smoothness of the wood, the fabulous noises the calming smell, the perfect temperature, it was just all too much. When Suss Cousins herself walked by me and said something in my direction, I was taken aback. I recognized her at once from her books (and dude, you just don't see real blond like that anywhere in NY!), but didn't really comprehend what she said because this was the exact moment my brain was being flooded with sensory perceptions (she actually said hello to me in Swedish I think). So Jill and I just sat on the couch for a bit and knitted. I oogled the yarn and pulled an Amélie moment when I surrounded my hand with the fabulous Suss yarn. It's a gorgeous store, the sales staff were all really nice, and I'm totally coveting their couch.

On the Over the Knee Stockings front, here's where we stand:


We're looking at about nine and a half repeats of the lace (read around 96 rows). We have successfully gone over the knee, and are about to embark on the shaping of the calf. I'm kind of worried that they're not really going to fit. They're a bit tight over the knee, and I'm worried if I do the shaping that the pattern requires, that they're going to end up being too stretched out when I wear them. So I might skip one or two of the decreases. Although, I do kind of have to go from 13" around the thick part of my calf to about 8 and a half inches around my ankle, so we'll see what happens. To give you a better sense of what the lace pattern looks like:


That's going in the right direction with the top of the stocking at the top of the page. They're knitting up pretty quickly which is cool, and there's just enough in the lace pattern to make all the stockinette bearable. I'm going out shopping at Sal's (what a friend of mine often calls the Salvation Army, I kind of adopted the terminology and forgot that no one but him really calls it that) with my cousin this weekend, and I'm kind of hoping that I can find a cute skirt to wear with these.

Meanwhile, at The Point tonight, I ran into someone who made the most amazing hat out of some Noro Kereyon. I've decided that I must make this hat. I must wear this hat too. It looked too cool not to. But I still have all this yarn in my stash that I really, honestly, must use up before I buy any more yarn. I felt guilty looking at my bank account this morning (mostly because it was actually in negatives - ouch). On the up-side today, I taught someone how to knit in the round on double pointed needles today. That was pretty cool. I think I even remembered to tell her the important things like, don't twist your stitches and those kinds of things. She'll be alright in the end I think. It made me feel pretty proud to know I could pass on such knowledge.

So I'm teaching thiswomand and knitting and just observing everything around me. There's this girl with her mom in the store. The girl, we find out later, was about six. Now, around six years old, things begin to sort of becomeinterestingg. Lots of people start doing important things around the age of six. The girl wanted to make her own scarf. She doesn't know how to knit, but she wanted to learn, and make something herself. For whatever reason, the mother kept saying she didn't think her daughter could do it, no, we'll teach you when you're older, that kind of a thing. Now, this pissed me off. I don't like it when people limit themselves, and when parents limit their children, telling them that they actually can't do something, that really pisses me off. The woman goes to one of the women that works at The Point and says "Can you maybe tell her why she might not be able to learn to knit right now, she's only six." and Dawn says "uhm, well...not really. I started knitting when I was seven." The mother looks at Dawn in shock and Dawn continues and says, maybe you could bring your daughter over after school someday and we'll see what we can do. But, I need to reiterate that I totally wanted to slap that woman. If a child has the drive and interest to pursue something, why would you want to hinder that?

TECH UPDATE (more of a checklist for myself than anything else): There's still a few things I want to do to this, but just haven't gotten around to doing. I need to check out blogger's help stuff to figure out how to make my comments page in the same theme as the rest of the blog as opposed to that generic page. I also want to add an RSS feed button somewhere since my blog does, in fact, have an RSS feed attached. I think that might be it for now. We're taking baby steps. It's a good thing.