Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and among those things for which I am truly grateful, I can count the friendship of some absolutely wonderful knitters. Kathy recently drew my name out of a hat for a blog contest and sent me this:

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That’s Indian fry bread mix, cookie mix, hot chocolate, and best of all, a mix CD (so how much does it date me that I wanted to just call that a “CD mix tape”?) Kathy is a princess among women - and those cookies were Yum. Thank you Kathy!

And Sarah, in trade for British wools, just sent me this tremendous box of Southwestern wool goodies:

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From the top, that’s raw Suri Alpaca, and Tunis, Romney, & Border Leicester Longwool roving; in the second row we have a Cheviot/California Red cross, natural black Churro roving, and California Red roving; and across the bottom we have some CVM fleece from a sheep named “Penelope”, Cheviot roving, a Suffolk-Churro cross, natural grey Churro roving, a fleece sample from a CVM/Corriedale cross lamb named Janet, and some Columbia top. What a fabulous package! I don’t know where to start in telling you about each one - rest assured that as I go through them in my ever-growing stash you’ll see them again here.

In knitting news… in addition to basking in the afterglow of actually finishing something for once (anybody who’s been reading a while knows that I’m even slower at knitting than I am at blogging), I’ve been chugging along on the hourglass sweater. I’ve decided to modify it a bit. I realized that the big bell cuff I was knitting would drive me crazy, so instead I’ll do close-fitting, tapered sleeves… conserving yarn as well. Because I think I’m really going to need to. I have pretty much both sleeves and the yoke to do out of four and a half 100 yard skeins and I think I’m not going to make it. I’m almost sure that I won’t be able to get much farther than a sleeve, maybe a sleeve and a half - in which case I will need a radically larger amount of yarn than the pattern calls for. I’m getting gauge, using the suggested yarn, everything. This pattern notoriously runs out of yarn by one or even two skeins according to the KAL… but this is crazy! I got two extra skeins to begin with, and I think I’m still going to have to order at least one or two more. It’s a total mystery to me.

I suddenly have the urge to knit a ton of Christmas presents. Which I swore this year I was not going to do. Somebody stop me.