Recognized in Public

Dear Cynthia,

I **finally** got myself over to my LYS, Lakeside Fibers, this past Sunday so that I could spend the nice $25.00 gift certificate which my recent houseguests sent to me out of appreciation for staying at my house. I found myself some nice Cascade yarn to make a felted bag which I am designing....but also, a few weeks ago this same LYS sent out a newsletter to let everybody know that they are now carrying patterns for Noni bags...and ever since then, I've been wanting to check them out. And so, check them out I did, right through to the cash register.

Actually, I only bought one Noni pattern, shown here. I wanted the flower pattern, and it is sold separately for $5.50. But, I also thought these two bags were cute, and the flower pattern was included, all for $8.00, so that is what I did. Here is the bag on the front of the pattern:....and here is the bag on the back of the pattern.

I'm going to make one of the little ruffled bags for my mom for Christmas this year. I think it is okay to tell you this, because my mom doesn't read this here little blog.

I must tell you, however, that THE most amazing part of this story is that, while I was paying with my $25.00 gift certificate, the person whom I gave the money to said, "You're YarnThrower, aren't you?"...or something like that. I was so dumbfounded that it is all just a blur, so details might be sketchy. I asked her how she knew, and she said that she had stumbled on our site by accident one day, and at some point she saw the posting in which I showed the gift certificate, and she recognized the writing on the gift certificate to be hers, and MY MOM had mentioned something about the blog to her when purchasing the gift certificate via phone -- yes, my same mom who doesn't actually READ the blog is PROMOTING the blog, so that's definitely worth something...... Anyway, I was sooo caught off guard that I didn't know what to say, or how to act, or whether or not I should give her a knitted dishcloth for being the first non-virtual person to address me as "YarnThrower"...... What would you have done? I think I mumbled something about obscurity and thank you very much, and I walked away feeling all weird. Anyway.....

In other news, a friend of our family gave me some knit fabric having printed bugs on it, so I'm trying to sew a shirt for each of the boys using it, adding some black ribbing for the neckbands. Here is the first shirt. Can you guess what is missing?

And the Summer in Kansas Shawl had a bad day yesterday. Three stitches slipped right off the needle and got lost about four rows below..... After first just grabbing them with a needle to contain the damage, I ended up having to un-knit seven rows and dink around with it for an hour or so.....so once fixed, I decided to work on other things yesterday and am back on track today. Also, after not putting in a lifeline for something like 500 rows, I thought it was time for another one. It could have been really ugly.....

We've been having cable outages this week, so hopefully when I click "Publish", this will work!

Warm regards,
Laura (YarnThrower)