Purple Day ♥

Okay, it's official. This Monday is purple day for me and Jewels. ;) Anyone else in? I'm going to wear my purple stripe sweater, which I've named Vertigo, and my new Koigu socks, which, although they don't have as much purple as my Winter Eclipse socks, do have some purple. Besides... wearing a brand new pair of crocheted socks, especially as ones as soft as these, has to be a special day! ;) (To be thoroughly purple, I'm considering wearing a red turtleneck under Vertigo... is that too much?)

I started answering Jewels about "hearts" in a comment, but it really deserves to be an all out post. Here's my comment:

Hmmm... *3 doesn't look like a heart in this font, although it does a bit in the "typing up the comment" font. What about <3 ?

Oooo... I looked up some stuff on unicode, and there are hearts! Here they are: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♡ ♡

Then there's also the floral heart: ❦ ❦, reversed rotated floral heart bullet: ☙ ☙

This web page has a whole fun set of symbols: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/miscellaneous_symbols.html

You can use "view source" to see how I got all these characters. (Although they show multiple times, that's because I was using multiple ways of showing them.) I will tell you how to get the easiest, and that one is the black heart, ♥: simply type &hearts; where you want the black heart to appear. Simple enough? Now everyone stop saying "I heart this"!!!! ;)

(I left part of the comment as a comment, rather than post. Just a "heads-up", Jewels. ;) )

Now back to my regular programming... as promised, today is picture day. :)

Introducing my Koigu socks:


Since today is laundry day, I ran my fulling swatches through a few more loads... four to be exact, to make six total:



The potholders were run through too... here's before and after pictures:


(Aren't potholders exciting! Wooo....) Well, my plan is to get a needle felting needle, and add some excitement to these. After all, I might as well have my fun with felt, right? (So the question is... how long to I make myself wait before purchasing the needle felting needles... grrrr. Oh well, these could use a few more turns through the wash first, anyway.)

And last, but not least, a small project bag I started this morning, and is still on the hook:

What? It looks like a potholder, you say? No! It's completely different. It has two sides (crocheted in the round), is sc instead of hdc, and uses a sport weight yarn instead of worsted. I'm using that thin, overspun yarn which doesn't appear to be felting well in my test swatch. I guess I'll have to line it. It's going to be for carrying around my socks in progress, so I don't want the hook to fall out through a hole.

I watched The Return of The King, extended edition, for the first time today. (It, and "The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques" arrived from Amazon earlier this week.)