Fleeced

After sleeping through most of yesterday (some of you read the now deleted late night drunken post, so you know why), today was catch up day - grocery shopping, garden centre shopping and delivering stuff around town with some light BookCrossing on the way. The idea was to spend only what had been budgeted and bring home only groceries and gardening supplies that would be immediately used.

I had to drop wool off at Mum's (8 x 25g vintage Totem in mustard and 6 x 25g mystery 8ply in purple) for her Voodoo Wrist Warmer marathon (stuff out), then the last lot of completed hats had to go to Stasia (more stuff out) and there was a bag of baby yarn for Lynne, a friend who has decided to knit premmie stuff for the hospital (even more stuff out). There was also the box full of books in the car to be BookCrossed. Postive de-cluttering activities you might think, but trust me, there are some well known pitfalls en route.

First stop the hardware shop for gardening supplies and a bolt to complete the skeiner. I spent $5.85 over budget for the gardening supplies (Flax Lillies, Convolvulus mauritanicus, and brachycome daisies). I love hardware shops almost as much as stationers. All those potential projects just waiting for the spark of creativity. Dangerous places, hardware shops but I managed to resist all temptations but the Flax Lillies were 65c per plant more expensive than I'd bargained for.

Then onto the groceries. The shopping centre I frequent has a very good newsagency. It gets all Vogue and Interweave titles and several other knitting mags. I'm relieved that today it didn't have anything in I particularly wanted to take home (Knit1 is now $19.95 - I don't think so!). The newsagency has also opened a discount book store in the same centre. The last time I was there I dropped $50 on knitting and cooking books in an instant. Fortunately others have found it and there was nothing I really wanted there. Phew!

The shopping centre has a discount shop that often stocks reasonable craft materials. Its yarns were 4 for $5 today, but fortunately they were feathers and eyelash styles in hideous colours.

There are also two op-shops in this centre, but today being a public holiday, I was safe from their siren charms.

Relieved to have got out of these potentially perilous parts of the trip and with the groceries done and $10 under budget and 4 books released, I dropped the hats to Stasia's and was cruising!

Again, the Yarn Goddesses laugh at all attempts at restraint. I got to Lynne's. Instead of handing over a small grocery bag of baby yarn, I swapped a small grocery bag of baby yarn for this.



Yup, it's an enormous gar-bag full of a quite fine Merino fleece. The poor sheep had two years' growth on it. It's mine for the price of a skein of the yarn I make from it.