Florida Vaca

So Florida was great. As usual. Every year my mom and I go (here's 2007, here's 2006). Every year I try to remember to take lots of pictures. Every year I forget. I emptied my camera last night and seriously I have twice as many that look like this:

Dexter hating the snow

Than of anything Florida related. It’s frustrating. But perhaps next year… I did take a few pictures, though so let’s work with those.

We started the trip by doing a little souvenir shopping:


Did you expect anything else?

The shop is called Uncommon Threads and it’s owned by a friend of my grandma. It’s good when your friends own yarn stores! In the car on the way my mom and I were wondering… It’s really hot here. All the time. So what do people in Florida knit?

Answer? Everything:


Seriously this store was amazing. So much variety in such a little space. It was wall to wall to wall yarn with a good amount of beads thrown in. I could have spent days in there. Here’s a blurry picture of just one area of sock yarn:

Crazy variety going on there. And I was thinking it would be a store of cotton and novelty yarn! Silly me.

We bought lots of fun things

but the most exciting for me is this:

4 skeins of Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran

See for almost 2 years now I’ve had this sitting in my stash taunting me:

I bought it at a going out of business sale and have enough for a sweater… I’ve swatched so many times with so many different ideas but this dark purpley yarn doesn’t show patterns very well. And I’d be bored just knitting a plain old sweater. Then thanks to my recent obsession with stranded knitting I got it into my head that I wanted to knit this with it:

Hela

Beautiful, right? Problem being that I didn’t want to pick out colors online. And nowhere around here sells this yarn. I know I could have used something else but I just wasn’t feeling that. So when I saw it in this store I was super, super excited. We laid out all of the colors and thanks to the wonder that is Ravelry I was able to quickly pull up the pattern in the store so we could all discuss color options. In the end I decided on a simple, 2 color route:

I think the creamy white against the deep plum will be spectacular.

Anyways here's the rest of the haul:

Indie dyed roving that is only sold at this yarn store and at another one in Georgia.

Jitterbug in Parrot

Maize in Miami Nice

The pile is actually missing some sock yarn that my mom immediately started knitting with. She swore she wasn’t going to buy any more sock yarn and managed to come home with 3 skeins. Uh huh. True confessions later on revealed that she has enough to make something like 11 pairs of socks. I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all (someone back me up on this).

The other highlight of the trip was doing this:


We made gnocchi! I’ve never done that before and it was much easier than I thought it would be:

We were worried about making them too tough and overcompensated by not using enough flour. So they were a bit on the soft side. Even so they were amazing compared to the lumps of lead that you can buy at the store.

Like little potato clouds. Mmmmmmm.

Other than that the trip was pretty typical. We walked every morning, napped every afternoon, and soaked in as much of the sun as possible:



We were lucky and managed to completely miss the snowstorm that blasted Ohio while we were gone (Michelle has some good pictures of it here). The airport was closed for a good chunk of the weekend and there were signs of that all over coming home:

Bags piled up at the airport. I wonder where there owners were…

Monday it was back to reality and dealing with bus stops that look like this:

And crazy work deadlines that are going to make the next month very… interesting.

It was so nice to get away, though!