blogging is brilliant!

Uh, not mine, necessarily. I just mean blogging in general.

The title of this post violates a basic rule I set for myself when I started blogging, i.e. Don't Blog about Blogging. How interesting could a blog about someone else's life really be anyway, and then when people start blogging not about their lives but about their blog... well, you see what I mean. That gets really boring.

Point of interest: I have many rules about what I will and won't blog about, all designed to protect you, the reader, from the perils of Way Too Much Information. Boundaries about public communication do not come naturally to me, unfortunately, and so I must carefully study the behavior and blogging of other people in order to learn what does and does not cross lines of propriety.

Anyway, I knew I'd have to violate one of these rules one of these days, and today, it's the one about hopelessly self-referential meta-blogging.

Now then.

It seems that taking pictures of my knitting equipment, or lack thereof, has had a most delightful effect: people are sending me stuff! What could be better?

My mother's friend Liz noticed that I was blocking my Shetland Triangle with lots and lots of straight pins, like so:
Liz and my mom got their heads together electronically, which resulted in the arrival of this on my doorstep yesterday:
That's a set of lace blocking wires, available here. Liz told my mom it was the kind of thing I would love to have but wouldn't buy for myself, and she was right. Mom was going to wait until my birthday, but hey, why wait when you can have it sent now? My birthday's so far away, anyway. Much lace knitting to follow! Probably some previously blocked pieces will get blocked again, just for the heck of it. Fun fun fun.

And then last night, Joe came home from work bearing gifts from my good friend Amy, whose husband just happens to work with mine. Amy and I have been friends for years, and our lives are overlapping in some new and interesting ways these days, but sadly, we don't see each other very often at all.

Amy saw a few posts back that I was using a newel post as a skein holder, and sent me this:
A folding swift and a ball winder! Much fun was had with these two tools last night after dinner. First I had to wind some sock yarn. Then I wound some of my homespun. Then I ripped out a sock in order to wind some Shaefer Anne. (Don't panic; the sock wasn't working out. My cut finger is causing some gauge issues, which I devoutly hope will be solved when the finger heals completely.)

Meanwhile, I'm going to start a new project: socks out of kitchen twine. Think people will start sending me Trekking XXL?