How I Went Shopping and What I Got

Since I mentioned taking that Yougov payout card to Michaels, which is a huge U.S. arts and crafts supplies store chain, here is the obligatory Amazon-friendly quickie post:

Following the advice of a non-knitting friend, which is something I like to do when possible, I chose this from the yarns that were on sale.




And since two "Big Scoop" skeins, on sale for $8 each, should be more than enough to knit the sweater I had in mind, I also bought a skein of this:



(Not nearly so good a picture because, for reasons unclear to me, Amazon ruins some pictures with a zoom feature that makes them copy badly.)

And since the giftcard was for $25, it actually had enough money left for me to indulge in one skein of a yarn that wasn't on sale:



For reasons unclear to me, Amazon resists linking to this popular color, although they're willing to link to the same yarn dyed different colors. Michaels has a link for it. Hello, Michaels, would you like an affiliate link? Send me the code and I'll link this yarn to your page.

One skein of multicolor cotton yarn, all by itself, equals a washcloth; there's no longer enough in a skein to make much else. Luckily I'd been asked for washcloths in different light, soft, summery colors, so I went home and knitted one.



Amazon has no problem linking to the page for this vintage magazine, but as of today nobody has a copy for sale there. What I wanted to do with the aqua-and-white yarn was an updated version of a classic early 1990s Silly Sweater Contest candidate, the "Butterfly Fish" design with the monstrous cartoon fish straddling the wearer's shoulder. I'm eliminating the fish and tweaking the shaping so the little ocean waves the stripey yarn suggests will run diagonally across the waist rather than horizontally around.

The pink-and-white yarn still has me torn between buying another skein and making another lightweight winter sweater, or just doing a baby blanket. Anything lighter than blanket weight yarn is hard to find these days, so it seems a shame to waste lightweight yarn on a blanket. The pink-mix sweater I have in mind is in a back issue of Vogue Knitting I happen to have. I think it was reprinted in one of Trisha Malcolm's big retrospective pattern books, as one of the basic/classic patterns of which knitters kept ordering reprints, but I've forgotten which patterns were reprinted in which books.