Full retreat

And then the day after New Year's, I went up to Ben Lomond for the South Bay Knitters annual retreat at the Quaker Center. You may recall the weather-related drama of last year's retreat, and so will be pleased to know that everything went smoothly. It was a lovely time.

I did have to rip out all of the knitting I'd done at Año Nuevo, due to an undetected yarn over in row 3, but the project went quickly, and I'm on the first sleeve.



The fabric is luscious, very drapy and soft.

And I bought some yarn at the Yarn Place, since she stayed open specially just for us, and gave us a discount, and I was the only person in the store, (yeah, yeah.) I got two balls of lace weight merino with those long color changes, and so I thought I'd play with them and swatch during one of our coffee breaks on the yarn crawl. Bad idea. I pulled out huge wodges of yarn, in my attempts to get at the ends of the center pull balls, then stuffed them carelessly back into the bag when it was time to go.

Saint Jocelyn spent over an hour of valuable knitting time helping me wind the barfed up parts back into useable balls, with her magical case of surgical crochet hooks that she used to untie knots I couldn't even see. And then Saint Cris, who had already made the whole retreat happen, anyway, helped me when the partially-wound ball of my project ripping-in-progress flew off the ball winder and got itself tangled. I was pleased to provide diversion and merriment to the group.