Nothing gold (or purple) can stay...

Well, the gloves were received with great appreciation which of course makes it all worthwhile.

In other notes, I received some skeins of Koigu KPPPM years (and years) ago from a dear online friend. I loved it but struggled to find projects worthy of the skeins- it can be hard to think of something that will be more beautiful than some yarns are, just in the skein. I finally decided to try a pair of socks in the dark purple, but as they were planned for a man with rather large feet, I worried that the 2 skeins would be insufficient, so I searched around online and hunted down some more skeins. Now, it's true, we as knitters know colors change from dye lot to dye lot. This is a bit extreme however- you can clearly see in the photo that the 2 original skeins are dark purple, while the 2 newer ones (which aren't that new since the color appears to be out of production) are far far lighter. Okay, THAT won't work. It's okay, in the meantime I ordered some sockweight Noro to make striped socks (and some more Silk Garden to make myself a Noro striped scarf- this yarn is knitters' crack).

In the meanwhile, though, I dragged out my old knitting machine to see if it still works and used the old purple KPPPM on that- and discovered that a. the machine works; b. it can handle fingering weight yarn and c. the yarn has all kinds of breaks and hair thin spots in it- see all the tiny balls I had to wind from one skein?! I don't know if it's just that skein (fingers crossed!) or if it has anything to do with it being in storage so long (and I don't know how long it was in storage in my friend's stash before she gifted it to me) but I doubt it helped. So let me encourage you to USE those lovely eye-candy skeins and don't just let them languish in a basket looking pretty- you may not be able to get more if you need it, and sitting in the skein might not be good for it. Like the good china and the nice lingerie- USE IT, don't save it for some mythical perfect day....