So. On the knitting front.

One skein of the Rios had a knot almost exactly midway as the scale measures, its presence highly unusual in my Malabrigo experience. I snipped it right there, not wanting a princess and the pea effect, and knitted the baby afghan with the other five skeins in the two different dyelots I had, alternating them. (Note that the left side in the picture looks lighter because it’s the right side of the blanket while on the right is the back side.)

I didn’t start it with ribbing because ribbing eats yardage and at the time I didn’t know if the Webs dyelot on the way would work at all. So the starting end curls. Which bugs me even though I told myself it wasn’t allowed to.

I’m now at the far end, out of yarn besides those two half balls, finished with the last pattern repeat, and thinking I’ll just finish it off with a half-ball’s worth of ribbing and then pick up the beginning stitches and add the other half a ball in ribbing over at that end. That would work. There, no curling.

Except, in my dreams, I’d like to make that ribbing really big and go buy several more balls and add more ribbing to the sides too to match and to widen the blanket. Yes, it’s good enough as it is. But yes, I wish I could do that.

Fine. Go buy three or four more skeins, make this thing really big!  And hurry, the baby shower’s coming up.

All well and good–except one thing.

That means finding more Solis (that matches).

In Malabrigo Rios. Which has been on the market for a month or less.  The yarn stores have been standing in line, it’s like a first-year Toyota Prius, everybody wants it and with good reason. It is seriously nice, useful, supersoft, densely-spun machine-washable wool.

Imagiknit doesn’t even have the line on their website now, at least not for the moment. Not a single skein in a single color up there anymore.

On the mail order front, which I don’t have time for anyway, Webs is sold out of Solis. Jimmybeanz is sold out of Solis.

I’d rather shade-check in person anyway.

I could call Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco in the morning and Golden Fleece way down in Santa Cruz. Green Planet in Campbell, dunno if they ever got Rios in at all. Anyone got any other Bay Area leads?

Width, 32″ unstretched/42″ mildly stretched (the pattern tends to pull in on itself sideways) by about 46″ length, unstretched, before ribbing and definitely before water touches it.  I intend to wash it to get any (probably nonexistent) possibility of lingering dye away from the baby and knowing that laying it out to dry flat will give me a blocking effect, relaxing the pattern. That will give me a few more inches all around.

I think I should just be glad I’ve got those two half balls to go polish off those two ends (that knot actually turned out to be highly useful and in just the right place) and call it done.