A Moral Dilemma

You find yourself living in a new area, and by chance, you find a new hairdresser that does an incredible job and charges virtually nothing for her appointments. Do you tell your friends?

Recommendations
Sometimes making a recommendation is easy. "Go to this yarn store", or "buy this yarn", or "purchase this book", or "check out this new web site". None of these resources are likely to run out because of a recommendation, even if made to thousands of people.

However, recommend your favorite restaurant or give a tip on how to find the best parking in a popular area, or tell friends about your inexpensive beautician, and you risk making them less exclusive, and possibly less available, and sometimes even more expensive. Especially when you have a blog that gets read by about 500 people a day.

One example of this, was a local orchard that sold incredible cider and fruit that they grew on their property. When we first started going there, you'd pull up a rutted driveway and park on the grass right in front of the shack that they used to sell their stuff. It was dark and dingy and had a swinging bare lightbulb above a rustic wooden shelf. They used a calculator and a cigar box as their cash register.

Fast forward five years, and all the New York tourists that come to this area on the weekends have heard about Solebury Orchards, and it's impossible to park and get checked out at this place anymore, and often the best fruit or cider is sold out quickly. I keep thinking the next time I go there, they'll have bar code scanning to speed up the process of checking out.

Current Knitting
I finished one whole 28-row repeat of the edge stitch pattern on the Celestine Shawl.



The combination of limited knitting time and a new stitch pattern to get used to has slowed down my progress a little on this design.

Current Spinning
I've made slow and steady progress on the multi-colored Merino from Ashland Bay that I purchased at Twist a while ago.



I'm almost finished with the first bobbin of three, so I can triple-ply the singles. I still have a long way to go.

New Magazine
I've always been a fan of Spin-Off Magazine. It never tries to be a glossy national magazine, which I appreciated. Oftentimes, I wish the Xmen and Interweave would be a little bit more, well...homespun, since usually their designs are often at best, folksy.



This issue has an intriguing article on a simple weaving technique for which the sample project is an interesting looking woven bag. There is also a very well-written article on using machine knitting fabric for dyeing yarn. Excellent idea.

Readers' Comments/Questions
Regarding the flea market find of crochet hooks, Katrina writes, "And the hooks look so shiny! Did you have to clean them up or were they like that when you got them?

They looked great when I got them. The prior owner used a cylindrical glass jar, like something spices might have come in, to store the needles.