Tales of speedy Elann delivery times were impressively demonstrated when my Rubino arrived on Saturday morning:

13 skeins of soft, white Austermann Rubino. It reminds me a great deall of Rowan Wool Cotton. Elann describes it as being of "Worsted Weight", but it seems a little finer than that. Of course, I couldn't resist pulling out a ball and swatching it up for John's sweater. In this case, it turned out to be a good thing that I did.

This picture gives you both a glimpse of my knitting journal and the two swatches I did for the sweater. I did the swatch using the stitch pattern for the sweater. The swatch on the left is done on US 8s (bamboo), the swatch on the right is done on US 6's (Swallow Casein -- as an aside, I found that the yarn was very "grabby" on these needles, I liked the bamboo feel better). Since it was John's sweater, after I did the first one, I handed him the swatch and asked his opinion. "Too open for a white sweater" was the response, "I'll have to wear a T shirt under it." Now, the first swatch was definitely smaller than recommended gauge, but even I didn't think that it would be good to go up a needle size.

Since I liked the stitch and the sweater pattern, I decided to go down to the smaller needles (incidentally, the size needle recommended on the ball). I figured that since I wasn't getting guage with the bigger needles, I was going to have to alter the pattern anyway, so what could it hurt to go down a little more?. The swatch done on 6's met with much more approval from the intended wearer. It had just one small drawback: it's exactly 1/2 the area of the original swatch. So I made a quick "trip" (sometimes I love to shop on line) back to Elann and ordered 5 more skeins -- I made this estimate based on the pattern's estimates, increase in area and the free patterns for the yarn that Elann sent along. That gives me ~2500 yards to work with (900 g!).

I managed to get all this accomplished before taking my trip out to see Julie to make stitch markers. Julie let me dig around in her wonderful collection of beads and then showed me how to play with pliers to achieve the desired results. Believe it or not, these little fellas were all made by me:

Julie is a wonderful teacher of plier arts! By the time I set off for home, I felt like I actually knew a little bit about what I was doing with the tools. The hardest part is wrapping the tail of the loop around the wire and trimming it so that it won't snag knitting. I initially wanted to make a bunch of different markers, but fell in love with the little bears and decided that I wanted to make a collection of matching markers with them. The markers in the picture are shown haning from a US 7 needle, and they could easily swing from an 8 or a 9. For anyone who is interested in a source of beads, much of Julie's stash came from Caravan Beads in Chicago.