Christmas Secrets, Glorious Yellow, and Knitting at the DMV

As the holidays grow larger on the horizon, my spare time is taken over by secret Christmas projects. No pictures or details will be given out until after the magic morning. You'll just have to check back.

Meanwhile, I have found myself short on yellow so last night I mixed up a dyepot with a generous amount of "Sabraset Sun Yellow 180". I threw in a mixed mass of white wool including romney, merino, and some alpaca. I stewed the stuff in the crockpot on low for a couple of hours. The resulting color (after rinsing) was the most glorious yellow imaginable! Unfortunately the picture doesn't come close to its full glory. There was still plenty of dye in the pot, so I threw in a mixed bunch of... well.... pretty ugly pastel stuff. The blue turned to a nice green, but the best transformation of all was the pink mohair curls that turned a beautiful russet orange-gold. The dyepot still wasn't exhausted so I threw in more white and and left it slowly cooling in the crockpot overnight. The result was a lemon yellow - not as glorious as the first batch, but good enough to allow me to save the first batch for a special project.

Saturday I took my new little trailer to the DMV for VIN inspection and registration. This should have been relatively simple. It took over 4 hours. The VIN was nowhere to be found and the nice inspector's computerized engraving tool refused to engrave through 53 year old petrified paint. He ended up dusting off an old toolbox full of metal stamps and hammering the VIN into the trailer tongue with a heavy mallet. (The folks in the cars behind me in line looked kinda testy, but noone honked. Perhaps that was due to the obvious presence of traffic cops.) Once inside, the DMV officer mistyped my drivers license and, due to the arcane complexity of the DMV's computer system, it took several supervisors and a couple of hours to keep my trailer's plates from being mailed to some guy named Roger Marsh. This is where the magical stress-relieving properties of knitting came into play. I just sat back in my chair and knitted. Although I did not, as predicted by one frustrated employee, finish a sweater while I waited, I was able to remain calm and breezy.