Chaos Attraction

Yarn and Writing Weekend

2007-12-10, 10:43 p.m.

Saturday was pretty busy.

I ended up going shopping with Merry at a few places:

(a) Toy store. For one of my friends, I've decided to make her a box of silly office toys for gifts, so I picked up a few items- baby Slinky, rubber duck, cute Japanese erasers, stuff like that. Merry picked up some rubber ducks for gifting hersef.

(b) Dollar store. Oh man, GO TO THE DOLLAR STORE FOR YOUR WRAPPING STUFF. Whoa. I spent $20 and got boxes, paper, ribbons, all the stuff. (And some "ex-boyfriend" gag gift thingie for the silly office toy box as well.) Easily taken care of. Yay. Oh, and I found YARN there. Lion Brand stuff, mostly in random lime and orange colors, but I also found three $1 balls of Incredible ribbon yarn, which I love. Had to buy 'em, make another scarf or something. (Usually that stuff goes for $6 a ball!)

(c) Yarn store. We no longer have any yarn stores in town at all, and I haven't been yarn-shopping in ages. So when Merry wanted to get some to make a scarf for her son, I was all, "Oh. Yeah."

As per me, I ended up spending...a good chunk of money on yarn. Mainly because I managed to find some decently colored and pretty cheap bulky yarn. I love bulky yarn, but rarely (if ever) find any in person that I like. I got about five skeins of a multicolored bulky to make a vest for myself after all the damn holiday gifting is over, and bought nine skeins (about 1200 yards) of royal blue bulky. I had a sweater in that color that I loved, but somehow it's falling apart on me now, so it's time to DIY-replace it. It is really iffy to buy yarn without having a pattern in mind for it (plus I have seven skeins of DK in royal blue I bought at a yarn store closing that I don't know what to do with either), but...hey, that's what Ravelry is for these days, isn't it? I also found two ginormous skeins (on sale) of fuzzy multicolored worsted yarn to make a skirt out of, which is what I originally wanted to look for at the yarn store in the first place.

Okay, so my "don't go spend tons of money before vacationing" plan ain't working. *sigh* Oh well.

Man, I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to go work with my new yarn. I'm not feeling the love for my current big sweater project (crocheted hoodie), mainly because I already made one for Mom for her Christmas gift and I know for a fact now that the smallest size comes out really huge...and eh, I dunno if I am into it being that huge. I'm thinking about "resizing" it at some point. I've been wanting to make a crocheted skirt, and now I have the yarn for it! But...I still have a bunch of presents to go. And there's no way in hell I am going to have the scarves for Mom's side of the family done by next weekend... (so far, two are done, three to go) and they need to be done by then. And my arms are hurting to boot. ARGH.

I got home to find out that surprise, I could get a ride to the NaNo party after all! I quickly made up some more dip and ran to the store for chips.

It was a good time. We had about twelve or so people show up at this one (about half of the crowd last time), and we did the following:

* Passed around the Plot Box (submissions to it were done at parties/write-ins) and read aloud the ideas in them. Most of which seemed to involve zombies, but some of which were along the lines of "Help, we're trapped in the plot box" or "What? You thought the plot box would help you?"
* Read aloud novel excerpts, a lot of which also involved zombies. (There is a guy in our area named Zombiegoat, and because of his heavy pre-planning before the noveling began, he said at the kickoff party that we were free to hate him. This amounted to everyone killing him off in their novels.) I read this one. Apparently we have a couple of sleep-writers in our midst, who for their excerpts brought in the really painfully bad parts of their work. I wish I had written them down.
* Discussed various ways to keep the writing momentum going, such as creating a forum for our area and having a retreat in April. I guess April is going to be another NaNoWriMo in our area...busy time, but oh well.
* Two of us were knitting through the party, and I was amazed that of the cats of theirs I saw at the house (I should indicate here that this was the party at Jenipurr's), the two that were hanging out with the partygoers were remarkably well-behaved when it came to yarn, especially since they live with it every day already. At which point Jenipurr (who was in the computer room at the time) yelled, "I've got the cat who eats yarn in here!" I yelled back, "Thank you!" and she yelled back, "You're welcome!" Heh heh heh.

As for Sunday...uh, Merry wanted to go shopping again. At JoAnn's, again. But this time, bringing along a few other friends, Jen and Ray. Having picked up the yarn habit, she now wanted to go spend $50 on yarn herself for scarves. Jen got beading supplies and I...got $13 more of yarn. Hah. This time it was multicolored DK weight yarn to make one of the many DK weight sweaters I have been eyeing. Then we went bowling. I actually didn't do too badly. God knows none of us are terribly great at it, but I managed to get four spares and a strike, YAY!


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