A little light reading

Richard and I both like to keep a book or two on the breakfast nook table for something to read while we’re eating breakfast in the morning. It may seem a bit antisocial to be reading at the table, but mornings are when we’re both bleary and tired and waiting for the coffee to kick in, and not really feeling much like trying to make small talk over our bowl of cereal.

My current breakfast reading has a set theme, because lately, it has been all about the acquisition of knitting books. While at the knitting night on Friday night, one of the women mentioned that she’d found a number of books at the local Costco, including Inspired Cable Knits. Since I was already planning a trip to Costco Saturday afternoon to stock up, I just *had* to swing by the book tables while there, and after all, I’ve got two cardigans worth of wool that need pattern inspiration, so the book just had to come home with me. Plus, since I was out of the country for my actual birthday, this means all my presents have been trickling slowly in, among them a copy of Mason -Dixon Knitting. This is a good thing because i have a sizable pile of kitchen cotton in my stash, given to me by various other knitters who were clearing out their stash, and I have been pondering making washclothes and handtowels, and now I have patterns and ideas!

But very best of all of my birthday presents so far came from my wonderful husband, who may not ‘get’ knitting, but understands that sometimes it is just easier to feed the knitting addiction, especially because this means that he then gets free rein to go off to Fry’s and buy new hard drives and routers and other computer gadgets, and if I am surrounded by yarn and books, I am less likely to raise an eyebrow when he decides that even though we already have 6 computers in the house and someone (who might have been me) once made a snarky comment about how the number of computers is not supposed to ever get larger than the number of cats, we really need another one because look honey, there is a new version of Linux I don’t have installed on anything yet.

Anyway, all of this is a long-winded way for me to say that for my birthday this year Richard bought me the entire set of Barbara Walker’s Treasuries of Stitch Patterns. All four of them! Do you have any idea how many stitch patterns that is? It makes me positively giddy just thinking about it, when I am not on the verge of weeping from the sheer futility of knowing that even if I started today I could not possibly knit enough items to try out every single pattern included in those four books, and if I thought picking cables for the last cardigan was bad enough how the heck am I ever going to be able to narrow down a selection for my next Aran project, and all those lace patterns mean that I may just have to break down and make lace panels for every single room in this house (none of which will match, of course) because no one needs that many lace scarves or shawls and this does not even begin to take into account all the books and folders of patterns that I already have on my ‘must do’ list.

All these glorious, beautiful stitches, and all these wonderful ideas. Many of the smaller patterns will work perfectly on a pair of socks, and there can never be too many afghans, especially afghans made of pattern swatches that will let me play with a whole pile of some of my favorites, and also, surely, somehow, there is a burning need for me to make someone a Halloween sweater/pillow/afghan that incorporates not only the laughing ghost cable and the jack-o-lantern cable, but also the most amazing cabled spider pattern I have ever seen.

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Don’t forget to try to win a pair of pink handknit socks by sponsoring either me or my little sister for the Avon Breast Cancer walk. We’ve got less than a month to go, and we’ve still got about $1,400 to go!