Luksusproblem

As I do every year, I had a "buy nothing" day yesterday as a protest against "Black Friday." It's not like it's that hard, since in our family most days are "buy nothing" days, but I like to make a special point of not participating in the consumerist hysteria that ensues each year after Thanksgiving here in the US. Yesterday a person was even trampled to death in a Walmart and two people were shot in a toy store, according to news reports. Something is very wrong with human nature.

Instead of shopping we went over to my mom's house to help her with a bunch of paperwork. She wants to get all the health care stuff taken care of, including what to do with her body when she dies. She wants to donate her body to medical research, which is what both of her parents did. Kind of a melancholy topic, but always good to air it. I've known for years that this is what she wants, so it was no surprise.

While we were there she pulled out 19 skeins of this yarn from her weaving room to give to me--Donegal Tweed Homespun by Tahki in color 849 (discontinued):


It's a huge amount of single-ply aran weight yarn--over 3000 yards! It's kind of a yucky color actually, with navy blue, burnt orange, and ocher flecks in the brown to make it a tweed. But in a way it's appealing too, in a puky sort of way. When we got home I became totally obsessed with making swatches and trying to figure out the perfect pattern for it. It turns out that this tweedy yarn looks terrible with any kind of stitch pattern, but really good in stockinette (plain knitting). It is such a generous gift, and I felt like dropping all other projects. It would work wonderfully for a Brooklyntweed "Cobblestone" sweater, but KE swears he doesn't want another sweater right now (just skiing socks!) and that kind of sweater wouldn't work well on me. Finally, this morning when I woke up I realized that the only pattern that will really work is the "Hourglass" sweater from Joelle Hoverson's Last Minute Knitted Gifts. Conveniently, I had photocopied that pattern when I had the book checked out from the library, so at about 6 this morning I started in on it. So this is a totally unexpected turn of events, but I'm excited to see how it turns out--I'm definitely going to do it with a (mock?) turtleneck instead of the wide neck opening in the pattern, but otherwise plan to follow the pattern.