The thing about knitting sweaters is that worst case scenario, one can rip the whole thing out and just end up with yarn. No blood, no foul.

A good friend of mine lovingly wore holes in a sweater her husband brought her from England. Then, she sweetly requested my help in returning it to its former glory. The stakes here were a bit higher for if I totally botched her sweater, I couldn’t just rip the whole thing. She said I could keep it as long as I needed and never mentioned it again.
for years.
Seriously. She brought new meaning to the words, “no pressure”.

As our friendship grew, we exchanged self help book recommendations. It’s handy to have a friend that likes to discuss such things because people that are not into self help books do not like to discuss all the personal growth they should be doing. Trust me on this. One day, she mentioned “Daring Greatly” by Brene’ Brown to me. I started listening to the audio book and found myself spending the better part of a Sunday pouring over this sweater and managing to turn this:



into this:

I had been too afraid to fail to even attempt fixing her sweater, until I wasn’t.

I volunteered to knit a pair of socks, selected blue yarn, and immediately started to re-think my color choice. Was the blue perhaps too smurfy? Then I saw it in person. Ladies and Gentlemen, it is exactly the color that Cookie Monster must be in real life. I am in LOVE. It’s got this depth to the color that makes me imagine Cookie is in my kitchen baking and talking to Siri right now. I adore it. I think I may be crossing into ‘Space Cadet doesn’t dye a color I don’t love’ territory.

I sat cross-legged on my back patio and snapped a few pictures to capture the joy I’ve felt as I knit these socks. In addition to the color, the stitch definition on these socks is great and they’re going to hold up well, I can feel it.








Yarn: Space Cadet Oriana 8-ply
Colorway: Look up!
Needles: 2.25mm Addi Sock Rockets for the legs
2.25mm Nova DPN’s for the feet
Pattern: Test knit for Hunter Hammersen

Tags: handknit, handknit socks, hunter hammersen, knit, knit socks, knitting, knitting and crochet blog week, sock, sock yarn, socks, Space Cadet yarn, yarn

I recently found myself in Dallas with nary a care in the world. So, I did the only logical thing and hunted up a yarn shop.


A year ago, I purchased knitting classes for my nieces from Holley’s yarn shop over the phone. The nieces gave the shop rave reviews, so when it showed up on Google, I hopped in my car. I wandered around Susan’s store (Holley is her maiden name) for over an hour, chatting with her. I found the shop to be tidy, reasonably priced and to contain a great selection of knitting gifts like mugs, yarn bowls and Knit Kits.


She also carries a nice selection of Twisted Owl yarn, Knitted Wit yarn, and Done Roving Yarns. I could have used a little more indie dyed sock yarn, but that is nearly always the case for me.































This bright cotton display had visions of dishcloths dancing in my head and I got a tiny bit of Christmas shopping checked off my list.







If you’re still not sure you want to make the drive to try out a new yarn shop, allow me to tip you over the edge. It’s two doors down from Liberty Burgers. I ordered a Baby Bella (mushrooms, queso, a fried onion ring, basil garlic aioli), a torch (bacon and queso filled fried jalapeño served with ranch), and a strawberry shake. The food was so good that I stopped Instagramming and focused on savoring every. single. bite.


Now, this may sound like a lot to consume in one sitting, so if I’m being one hundred percent honest, I spent an hour on a treadmill afterwards to burn off a few calories so I wouldn’t feel completely ill. It was worth it.

Tags: Done Roving Yarns, Holley's Yarn Shop, Knitted Wit Yarn, knitting, Liberty Burgers, Local yarn shop, LYS, sock yarn, Twisted Owl Yarn, yarn