One of the posts at the Yahoo Dulaan group mentioned that www.smileysyarns.com was having a sale, so I surfed on over and scored myself some yarn.
All told, a little over $100 and I'm set for some charity knitting. On the outside of the box:
At left, 2 balls of Lion Brand Watercolors, an ack-wool blend destined for a fluffy-but-warm Dulaan scarf or two.
On top, 12 skeins of Bernat Lana worsted, 100% merino wool. I've already made 2 Dulaan hats from this. Although the label says merino, it doesn't feel as soft as merino, more like ordinary wool. I've been wanting to have a whack of worsted-weight wool for when I feel like knocking out a hat or attempting some mittens. Now I'm set for a while.
At the right, 3 50-gram skeins of Filatura Lanarota Puno, 100% alpaca, worsted weight, destined for the Red Scarf Project.
Inside the box, from left:
6 balls of Cervinia Londra, a wool/alpaca/ acrylic chunky weight. I'm hoping to get one Dulaan hat from each 86-yd. ball; if not, I'll have to combine some of them. The colors all look good together so that shouldn't be difficult.
8 skeins of Lite-Lopi worsted; 5 blue, 2 natural, 1 gray, for a Dulaan sweater, pattern TBD.
8 skeins of Panda Woolbale (yeah, I'd never heard of it either) 100% Australian wool worsted. I bought it intending to make Dulaan socks of it, but after seeing the pictures of the barefoot children in Ryan's blog I'm thinking felted clogs instead. I bought the Fiber Trends pattern to make a Christmas present, knowing that I would probably use that pattern again and again.
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My sweetie recently bought me a delightful new/used camera, a Fuji FinePix S5100.
(I can't show a picture of my actual camera because obviously I would have to take it with the old cheapo Kodak, whose batteries are, as always, dead. That thing ate batteries like there was no tomorrow. So here a couple pictures from the web.)
I'm loving this camera. It has all the usual digital camera bells and whistles, plus a 10X optical zoom (take that, Kodak! I spit on your 3X optical zoom!), what seems to me to be a very good "recovery time" between shots, and makes the most endearing electronically amplified click when I snap the shutter. It's totally autofocus if I want that, which I do, but also allows for several other methods that I haven't explored yet. Plus it has a macro setting, ditto. And videos with sound, ditto. And other stuff I don't even know that I don't know.
What I need to do is dedicate some time to learn the features and read the manual and experiment. I've done a little of that but not nearly enough. Time is always in short supply. Anybody got a day stretcher I could borrow?
Besides learning about the new camera, I have been acclimating myself in the Mac world after 20+ years as a PC person. The same sweetie that gave me the camera got me a Mac Mini to replace my 5-year-old Dell because he knew that was what I
really wanted. But the bootleg PhotoShop I was using was obviously for Windows and there was no way I would fork over the hundred$ it would cost for a real Mac version, plus I never used 90% of the features of the program. So I have been learning about iPhoto. I was having trouble shrinking the photo files to a manageable size; unlike PhotoShop, iPhoto -- or at least the version I have -- doesn't have that handy "Save for web" feature that automatically does whatever it needs to in order for the photo file to be around 300k. You may have noticed that the photos I've posted in the past couple weeks download v-e-r-y slowly. Sorry about that. I had downloaded a 30-day trial version of PhotoShop for Mac, but I never found the magic "Save for web" button in it.
Since that 30-day trial version expired, though, I searched the web and found a Mac freeware program called Imagewell that seems to do the trick. It's not as one-click as PhotoShop was, but overall it seems to work quite well. There's an upgrade version for sale, but I am resisting even seeing how much it costs. Freeware = good.
Edited to add: I just checked the Imagewell site to get the URL for the link and discovered the upgrade costs all of $9.95. So I did it. Primo me.
