Check this out:
The big orangey-browny autumny coloured yarn cakes are more 100purewool that my swap buddy so nicely wound for me -- after I finally came to the conclusion that yes, although skeins of yarn look really nice piled up in a yarn stash, when it comes to using them, it's better to have balls. (Okay, I just thought that made a good pun. Anatomically, it's actually better to have labia in my personal opinion, if you really must know. Did I actually just type that? Hmm, we'll see if it stays there long enough to get published.) Anyway, doesn't that particular yarn just make you think of October with those colours?
Moving on now, there is also some pretty pink-and-purple Poems yarn, which is self-striping and therefore a very likely candidate to be on my "yarns I love" list once I have actually knit with it. Just in case anyone hadn't noticed, I'm on a big self-striping kick right now.
There's more with the sheep theme, too, started last month with the sheep-shaped soap. Now I have a fluffy sheep-shaped tape measure (it's retractable!) and little sheepy stitch markers, handmade by my swap buddy herself.
The most interesting thing in the package is a book called Cast On, Bet's Off, A Lisa & Max Devereaux Sit & Knit Mystery. When I opened it I saw that it's even a signed copy. I have started reading it, and I find the writing to be very visually oriented. There is nothing left to the imagination about the setting, even the brand name of the fine china from which the main characters eat their breakfast (served to them in bed, incidentally, by their "very attractive and completely indispensable Household Manager", Giselle Conroy). So far the main characters are not people I can identify with, but I am trying to imagine them as kind of the McMillan and Wife of LYSOs. (Oh, and in order to keep my own breakfast down, I kind of skipped over the part where the happy couple were having postprandial sex in their lovely spacious bed in the well-appointed bedroom. So don't ask me if they enhanced the experience by listening to classical music through the "strategically placed black Bose Jewel Cube speakers suspended from the nine-foot high ceiling", because I don't actually know.)
I thought this book might be my cup of tea, what with being a mystery and all, but I do have my "standards"* where writing is concerned (the curse of having studied English Lit. at the post-secondary level). So now I will enjoy a cup of tea from one of the selection of tea bags my swap partner included in the swap package. Hopefully that will help make the writing a bit more palatable.
Oh, and my opinion of the writing is no reflection whatsoever on my swap partner for sending me the book. Or even on the author for writing it. My understanding is that the author spent most of his career as a television writer/director/producer. Presumably that would skew his writing style towards the visual, and it might also make him more inclined to simplify characters a bit because of limited time slots on TV.
* Being a picky reader is like being a picky eater. I imagine I miss out on a lot because of it.
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