What to get

For Christmas my Aunt and Uncle gave me a $50 Gift Certificate to Knitpicks. It turns out that my Aunt asked my Mother what I wanted. And Mother, having found and read by blog had seen the wishlist I posted about when I was plugging the Knitpicks contest. But anyways it is totally like an amazing awesome gift and I have been thinking about it since the evening I received the code in my inbox.

My first solid plan was to buy the yarn to knit up these amazing Penguin Socks. These suckers are actually what first drew me to knitpicks. It was a few years ago and for some reason my parents had received a knitpicks catalog in the mail. I think it had these super cute guys on the cover, or maybe they just decided to keep it and give it to me when I came home/visited. They had a whole little kit you could buy of the yarns needed for the project if memory serves. I drooled over everything but at the time sock knitting still seemed way out of my league, plus I'm totally cheap. So I just tucked it away in my memory. And at some point along the line when I was on ravelry I found it and added it to my (large) project queue to make sure I would remember it. This winter I actually came *this* close to offering these socks as a gift to my friends, but the weird IOU-ness of having custom socks when I didn't know the recipient (we were doing a Pollyanna) made me decide against the idea in the end. However before it was rejected I had already purchased the book. So now all I needed was the yarn. I spent a good bit of time debating over which yarn/colors to choose. Palette had more colors available but I liked that the Stroll Sock Yarn was super-wash and so I added the yarns to my online shopping cart.

In browsing I had completely fallen in love with pretty much all of the luxury yarns Knitpicks carries: Alpaca, Angora, Cashmere, no matter the flavor if it sounds soft I will drool over it. I wasn't quite sure what to make however. But then I feel in love with a beautiful delicate lace pattern on ravelry that I thought would be perfect for my Mother and or Aunt. Now over the holiday's I learned that they've both read the blog so I don't want to spoil the surprise but I found a perfect lace alpaca blend that seemed just divine. Plus I was being super good and thinking about and planning to start my Christmas knitting super early.

Knitpicks has free shipping at $50 so, of course, I must hit something just above that value. My cart needed more stuff.

After seeing it on someone else's blog I had absolutely fallen in love with the Peerie Flooers Hat. And having somewhat recently become comfortable (and dare I say good) at stranded knitting I thought it would be a super fun project. Plus I had some left over palette finger colors from the tiny Christmas ornament knitting I had been doing. So I set about choosing the other colors I needed for the project. But in doing so I was perusing all of the other projects on Ravelry and completely fell in love with the idea of using a different color palate. So I went about drooling over all of those possibilities and spent lots of time excruciating (did you know that excrutiated is not a word? well at least not one I can manage to spell. weird) over finding the perfect colors. As much as I love online shopping this is where it really let me down. There was really no way to know how perfectly the colors would work together firstly because my monitor could be showing something different and then secondly because it's yarn and the dye lot could be different.

In the midst of all that color planning I realized that since the pattern I needed for the lace alpaca scarves was from a book, Knitted Lace of Estonia, so well maybe I could use a Barnes & Noble gift certificate (also a gift) to purchase that. They had the book but before I ordered I realized that so did Knitpicks! Plus the Knitpicks version included a DVD and was a few dollars cheaper.

Well adding that to my shopping cart just messed up my whole plan entirely. After much deliberation I realized that I just wasn't nearly so enthralled with knitting the Penguin socks as I had once been. Many other projects seemed more appealing. So out of the cart they came.

And then to really shake things up instead of Peerie Flooers I had the brilliant (crazy) idea to make a different hat from the same designer. Originally made from all different shades of sheep I could blend up my own shades of alpaca! And possibly even come up with my own alpaca charts. Crazy, but awesome. And it requires no more purchasing. Out of the cart came all of the yarns for the hat.

Now I was left with another $20 burning a hole in my pocket. So I ended up thinking about more of my linen stitch scarves. On numerous occasions I had contemplated how some of their sock yarns would look knit up in one of those marvelously colored scarves. But I was already planning two spinning project ideas to be knit up in the same pattern so it seemed like over kill.

But the more I thought about it the more I convinced myself that it was ok. This was my Christmas Present after all. Why not go ahead and splurge (ok ignore the fact that all of this is splurging really) and just do whatever I want. After a good bit more excruciating over color options I settled upon the crazy wild and bright Over the Rainbow which was in a luscious sounding 50% Merino Wool 25% Superfine Alpaca, 25% Nylon blend. The colors are super wild and I'm worried that the whole scarf will just be too super saturated and not look that great. But then when its cold and I'm bundling up in a scarf I really will need something bright and festive to warm me inside and out. So it'll be good.


All very very good.