I ordered watermelon self-striping yarn from knitpurlgirl on etsy a little while back and when it came , I was very pleased. The colors are great…very watermelonny! After Abi offerred her pre-sale, she sold out in a couple of days, so I was lucky to get a hank. Especially since I didn’t have a credit card at the time because my account had been compromised and I was waiting on the new one to come in the mail. Luckily, a good friend floated me a loan. She’s totally an enabler, but I appreciated it.
When the yarn came in the mail, it came with the cutest little watermelon stitch marker! That was a lovely surprise. Here are pics with and without a flash.

I stumbled across this blog post all about Abi’s yarns and found it very useful.
I plan to make Susan A Gordon’s Self Striping Toe Up Socks I’ve not done toe up socks before. Wish me luck!
ps. speaking of lovin’….Happy Anniversary, TH! :-)

While on vacation, I was able to finish my second Yomut sock from Silk Road Socks. Lorna’s Laces in the Tickled Pink colorway is very pretty.

It seems that if you finish one sock, and you try to make a matching sock and you do not have the first sock with you, you should have written down how many pattern repeats you’ve done on the first sock or when you try to finish the second sock, you might end up with one too many pattern repeats. This MIGHT happen… or you might be one of the lucky ones that gets it on the nose. I was not. I struggled while on our trip trying to figure out how many repeats I’d done on the first sock, but I was torn, and I guessed wrong. oh well. I spent one movie ripping back and the next movie reknitting and the third movie in a row, I cast on for another pair of socks. Hi, my name is Katie and I watch A LOT of movies.

I ordered some yarn online over the last month or two. First, I ordered Senke from MacKintosh yarn. Then I ordered Milkweed from Handwerks Textiles and finally Teal Mist and Robin Hood from Barking Dog yarn.
I had different experiences with each of these shops. Two great and one not so good. Here are the stories.
Senke was ordered on 6/18. Everyone on Ravelry seems to really like Liz’s yarn and she had the best colorway selections of her yarn on her site, so I decided to get it straight from her. It finally arrived on 7/13. Now, I don’t mind waiting a few weeks for yarn to ship provided I’ve been informed of this. I emailed Liz three different times asking for a status on my yarn and never received a reply. She got a tracking number on 6/29, but the yarn was not actually mailed until 7/11. So, no matter what it looked like when it got here, I was going to be irritated with the yarn. It couldn’t possibly look good enough for me to be happy to wait in silence for almost a month. If you really want MacKintosh yarn, my advice is to buy from a reseller.

I ordered the yarn from Suzan of Barking Dog Yarns on a Sat. and it was here within a week. The Teal Mist (Achilles) is amazing. I wasn’t as crazy about the Robin Hood (Achilles), so I emailed her nicely about being interested in something more forest green and she had me mail it back and she’s shipped me something darker. Totally nice and GREAT customer service!! I will definitely buy from her again mostly because her use of color is genius, but also because she is crazy nice and gives wonderful customer service.

Laura at Handwerks and I emailed about her different yarns on a Saturday because I was unsure which one might be coolest (temperature-wise). It is a tad warm here in Texas right now…a tad warm in the way that the Pope is a tad Catholic. She emailed me back right away and was able to give me advice. I selected the Milkweed colorway of So-Soft-Sock. It is lovely and I cannot wait to see it knitted up. She even sent me a little sample of her Super 8 DK sock yarn for me to try and a card with a tiny sample of each of her yarns on it. Fabulous customer service and her yarns are beautiful!