New from Cat Bordhi

Cat Bordhi has written the second book in her New Pathways for Sock Knitters series: Personal Footprints for Insouciant Sock Knitters. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting my hands on this book. I love a lot of the socks in the first book in this series, New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One. Cat Bordhi, you’re amazing. Talking about thinking outside the box!

Knitting

On the knitting front, I finished knitting up the secret project I was working on. Finished up the second mitt, started a third mitt in the same pattern but with different yarn. And I’ve even managed to work on the blue floral shawl a little bit. Between labeling and boxing blocking wire sets, of course. Sorry I don’t have progress pictures of these projects. Hopefully soon. The way things have been going I’m lucky just to get this post written up for you.

Blocking wires

A significant amount of time last week was spent dealing with blocking wires—more specifically, with the tubes that they go in. Dave found a local vendor who has minimums low enough that they’re willing to do business with us. Finding them was quite a feat in itself. I don’t even know how many Internet searches he did, phone calls he made, people he talked to. But he did it. Last week they extruded almost 1,000 tubes to our specifications. We went to their shop the day they were making our tubes, to check, to make sure they were coming out the way we expected. They did. They’re fabulous. We love them. Our salesperson even ran back into the shop with my camera and took this photo for me. Yup. That’s one of our tubes, coming out of the extrusion machine.

Having the tubes made for us saves Dave tons of time in the shop. He still needs to buff and polish the ends, so that they’re nice and smooth, but what a difference! Up until now, it took him five hours in the shop to cut the tubes to length, sand them so they’d have a scratch-resistant surface, buff and polish the ends, fill, and cap 27 tubes. Now it’s much, much faster. He was in the shop Thursday afternoon, and all day Friday, and came out with 216 finished sets of tubes. Yeah. I know. Tons faster.

The photos above are the finished tubes sitting on the bed in the guest room. In the first photo they’re awaiting their labels. In the second photo they have their labels, and are waiting to be boxed up. The third photo is of a very disgruntled cat who is quite unhappy about having her bed overtaken with this project. I’m not sure she’s forgiven me yet.