Have I Mentioned That I Love Fair Isle??

I've always loved the look of Norwegian and Fair Isle sweaters. What I didn't like was knitting them. It was tedious. All that dropping one color to grab the next color and knit with that. It took forever. Then, I found out about the two handed method detailed in a videotape from Philosopher's Wool (and now a video on their website), and I was off. Once you master this technique - and that doesn't take long - you'll never have problems again knitting two colors in one row. Not only that, you don't have "floats" across the back, so there isn't anything to get stuck on your fingers, belts, or buttons. I love this technique!! I can't believe how fast it goes. Here's my progress on the body of my Philosopher's sweater. I actually knit up a bit more than this last night, but as I progressed, I realized I'd made a counting error, so had to back up a bit. Apparently, knitting two handed and counting are two different skills, and I still have to work on counting.No, that's not a mistake under my finger, where the yellow marker is. It's the center front of the sweater, where the steek is. I'm just hoping that I'm doing this right.

No Saturday sky today. It's the last day of my vacation, so I decided to Go Shopping. I bagged $75 worth of shoes at DSW for only $23.95, and over $100 worth of books, magazines, and audio books at Barnes and Noble for $55. Not bad, eh? I love sales and discounts on top of sales. I did stop at AC Moore, and saw some nice yarn. I want to make a sweater in one of my new Dale books, and I saw some yarn in a beautiful dark teal color. Patons classic for $4.95 for 100g, and Modea Dea Superwash Wool in the same color at $7.99 for 50 grams. I know that the MD was more than twice the price of the Patons, but I'm wondering if being able to wash this sweater in the machine is worth it. I hate hand washing, and I have several sweaters in the works in non-washable wool, so I have to decide. Oh, and both yarns were 25% off, which ends today, unfortunately, but I'm not worried about it, because yarn goes on sale pretty often there. Plus, I have a LOT of yarn to knit, and a lot of projects, so I decided to hold off on this one for a while.