We’re back from Asheville, and back to the home repairs. Asheville (indeed, all of that part of North Carolina) is just gorgeous, the people we met were delightful, the weather was at least 10F cooler than Birmingham, and the occasional rain made for many pleasant hours spent knitting on my friend’s back porch. I brought most of the projects on the list — for variety, you understand — and ended up focusing on the baby blanket, on which I made serious progress. In fact, it’s a border away from being done.

Now it’s wallpaper stripping and the daily game of ‘what’s behind that wall/under that soffit/who built that deck and would we have to dig him up to smack him because you know I almost would’,  but I have two things to comfort me: I did not go completely nuts in the yarn store, despite the very nice staff and the siren song of some very tempting local yarns, and I did buy these:

Two skeins of deliciously soft North Carolina-grown huacaya alpaca fingering weight from EverThanks Farm. I’m pretty sure these skeins want to become a lightweight scarf that will be just warm enough for our Southern winters. My Asheville friend suggested a contrasting border or stripe or something, and I like that idea a lot, so I’m on the hunt for a suitable yarn (silk? more alpaca? alpaca and silk?) in red or blue or, well, I don’t know what colour yet, for the border of this imagined scarf. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping these skeins on my workroom table, where I can look at them and think of North Carolina and ignore the unfolding chaos.