A really nifty idea: this is a row counter bracelet from Debbie at Knitnsewstudio.
You push the small beads through the little circle of beads for each row up to nine and then a large bead to mark the 10th row. It’s on your wrist so you don’t lose it, the beads don’t fall through the circle like a post-it note falling off the page, and on mine, the beads are wood, a plus for this natural-materials fanatic. Very cool.
After dinner, a game of Trivial Pursuit 80’s edition got going, and it was one of those things where, given the size of the group and the number of ongoing conversations, eh on my hearing; I pulled out my needles over to the side and nobody minded.
Lisa Souza’s Timbuktu has a shine to it and just enough variations in the shading to make it a really gorgeous yarn.
I wanted it knit perfectly. It had to be bookworthy. I wasn’t sure of matching the upper and lower lace patterns and experimented rather than thinking it through. In hindsight, a project at the point where it needed a lot of thought was probably not the best one to bring to a crowd. I’d actually knitted the pattern before, but had lost my notes while packing for the trip East. Swatching again would have been the right thing to do, but I didn’t.
I went ahead, sure I’d gotten it, found that nope, I’d made a mistake, and debated: do I tink back three whole rows, nearly 1200 stitches worth, or just wholesale frog them and then work them carefully back onto the needle? I looked around at the crawler, the 18-month-old, the 3-year-old and the 4-year-old and the dog and wondered about the ball rolling around forgotten on the floor and one of them running off with it with my stitches running freely. No thanks. Tink it is.
Which would have worked, too, had I not let myself get distracted by cries of delight and gotcha over from where the game was going on. During which I managed to drop a few stitches that quickly became (oh goodness) something like 15, down down down.
Yeah I could have worked them back up carefully. But yes I wanted everything looking exactly perfect, and I was being a little obsessive about it.
The three younger children had been put to bed during my tinking. Hmm. I thought of a comment on my blog awhile back, someone saying she’d never regretted frogging.
I frogged. That made seven rows’ worth.
The four-year-old started watching as I did, and clearly that looked like it might be a fun thing to come over to help out with; I looked him in the eye from across the table, smiled, and told him, I’ll play with you when I finish this. Please don’t touch it before that.
Oh, okay! Cool! And he hopped off to something else. (Phew!)
Then last night, as Michelle worked at her laptop in the chair next to me, throwing out the occasional comment and conversation, I reknitted those stitches. I have it written down now, no longer on lost notes as to exactly how that lineup should be worked. There is no question now about how to work that pattern. And it’s on paper. Solid. It WAS worth it all.
Meantime, a little showing off:
Amanda aka NHKnittingMama never knew that I kept looking at her Huarache yarn on her Etsy site and debated buying it; 
On that note, Paula aka MadAngel likewise surprised me at Kaleidoscope with some cashmere/merino. Nice work! I’m a dunk-the-whole-skein-in-the-pot-at-once kind of dyer, and people who do multicolorwork are way beyond my skills.
Speaking of which. Melinda of Tess Designer Yarns gifted me with some of the most gorgeous merino she’d dyed. I don’t know the name of the colorway, but was there ever so cheerful a yarn?
And, just in case of homesickness, I now have this Maisonette yarn by Neighborhood Fiber Co. in the colorway “Grant Circle” to remind me of Washington, DC, dyed by a fellow native. Karida and I instantly hit it off, and as knitters so often do, could have talked for hours. I’ve been wishing I could knit her yarn into, say, the Lincoln Memorial or some such.