Here's what I bought at Trumpet Hill last night. For some reason, I thought it was wool. When I got home, I looked at the tag - it's alpaca. It was a great bargain. The tag says laceweight but it appears to be cobweb weight to me. I've wound it until a ball and have been looking through my lace books but it hasn't told me yet what it wants to be.

A yarn store near where I work - Trumpet Hill - has open knitting night on Thursdays. I went for the first time tonight and had a wonderful time. There is nothing like sitting with a group of knitters. I felt very relaxed right away. It was like I had come home. Everyone there is very nice and I enjoyed looking at what everyone was working on. I also bought a lovely skein of lace weight yarn.

Tomorrow is my day off!!

I decided to join Secret Pal 11 and got notification today that I've been accepted! It looks like a lot of fun. Regular blog posting is one of the rules and I'm hoping that this will help me to get in the habit of blogging. I love reading other knitters' blogs but never seem to get around to posting to my blog. I'll start off with posting short posts every day and see how that goes.

I know that part of the problem is that I don't like to be on the computer much at night. I'm a computer programmer and spend so much time on a computer at work. Sometimes the last thing I want to see at home is the computer. I'd rather be knitting!

I updated Wool Wanderings last week.

I've been looking for new fiber related web sites and have about 500 to add for next week.

I don't normally knit socks but it's been too hot lately to work on any of my projects. I'm doing 2 at at time using the magic loop technique. I have this coming Friday off - I hope to post some pictures then.

We bottled the hefeweizen today. 51 bottles. 1.022 final gravity. We brewed it on the June 10th. I'll post the recipe soon.

I updated Wool Wanderings yesterday. I added a comment/send a link page so that users could let me know if there is anything they would like to see on my website. Over the next few months I'm hoping to expand categories so that I could do things like list the yarn stores by state or view the patterns by type.

I've been collecting links since I've been on the internet (1993) and started Wool Wanderings in 1996. I now have over 2800 links in my database!

If you see anything you'd like me to add to the site, please let me know.

We bottled the Irish stout yesterday. 46 bottles. Gravity: 1.016

Yesterday we brewed some Irish Stout, following our general instructions and recipe. We'll bottle next week and it will be ready to drink the week after. There's no homebrew left in the cupboard so it's good that we made a style that is very quick in terms of time from day of brewing to day of drinking.

I updated Wool Wanderings yesterday. It's been almost a year since the last update. I've got better tools now so I hope to make more frequent updates. Have a list of more than 1000 new urls to check so I 'll be adding lots of new links soon.

Well, that wasn't a very good start, was it? A post in January and nothing since then. Sigh.

I finished knitting the shawl last week. I haven't woven in the ends or blocked it yet. These things take time!

Tom and I been busy following our fave Celtic music groups: Hair of the Dog, Glengarry Bhoys, and Hadrian's Wall. Saw HW at the Parting Glass last night. They came up to our table to say "Hi!". We're such groupies. lol

The wine that we bottled in February is just starting to really taste good. We've brewed several batches of beer since then - our favorite being a single malt scotch ale. We bottle our second batch yesterday. Today we're bottling a reisling that we made from a kit that had juice from grapes grown in Washington state. The wine will be ready around Thanksgiving. We had a taste of it at the homebrewer's store and it was very good. While we're bottling, we'll have some of one of my fave: Glennora Reisling.

Pics to come soon.