Erica’s Blog

Speaking of birthdays, HAPPY 24TH, KNITTING MAGIC GIRL!

Please stop by her blog today and wish her a happy birthday.

In these days of rampant customer NO service, it’s really refreshing to encounter great customer service.  Since we are all so quick to complain and spread the word about our bad experiences, I thought I’d give credit to some people who’ve given me fabulous customer service lately.  Is it any coincidence they’re both knitting-related?  Nope, I don’t think so.

Elmore-Pisgah

These are the folks who make the renowned Peaches & Creme cotton yarn so popular for dishcloths, etc.  I had ordered several cones for dishcloths and baby stuff.  There was glitch when I was ordering, and I ended up somehow placing the order twice.  Apparently, the first one that went through had a mistake on my part, ordering double worsted instead of worsted on one cone.  The second order was correct, all worsted.  The first order was what I received.  MOST companies would have just told me Tough, you got what you ordered.  If you want worsted, place another order.  Not Flo at Elmore-Pisgah.  She figured out how the mistake happened, sent me the worsted and left it up to me whether or not to send back the double worsted.  [I couldn't in good conscience keep it for free, so it's going either to the senior ladies at the Municipal Building or else to Miss Claudia for preschool Christmas crafts.]  Today, I noticed that they made a change to their online store, making it harder to order the wrong weight yarn by mistake.  Thank you, Flo!

The Yarn Tree

I wanted to order some fiber for a pal’s birthday b/c I knew she was receiving a spinning wheel as a gift from someone else, so I went to The Yarn Tree and ordered a bunch of wool roving.  The next day, I received not just an email but also a phone call from Linda, apologizing that someone had come into the brick and mortar shop and purchased the entire batch of roving I’d ordered.   Since she gets it from a small farm in VT, it would be a while before more was available.  She had noticed that my order was a birthday gift, so she offered to substitute a wool/mohair blend for the same price so that my gift would be able to arrive on time. How cool is that?

So, should you need some dishcloth cotton or some wonderful fiber for spinning (anything from the simplest wool roving to cashmere to baby camel to yak fiber), please do send your business to Elmore-Pisgah or The Yarn Tree.  They deserve it!

Between Halloween and Bobcat’s mom’s funeral, last week was rather hectic.  To top it off, my stomach exploded on Friday (I’ll spare you the details). 

We were really grateful to Uncle Eddie and Auntie Simona for letting us crash at their place Wednesday night so that we didn’t have to trek out to Carmichael on Thursday morning.  Thing Two was really inspired by all of Simona’s artwork in their house.  I need to get the name of it b/c I forgot, but some of Simona’s paintings got included in a big book about 40 years of Latino art in America.  Very cool.

Thursday, we spent the day at Mrs. G’s house, keeping an eyeball on Andrei, the Things, and Andrei’s twin cousins Johnny and Josh.  It took a while, but they eventually warmed up to us.  Luckily, we had several hours before the rain started, so the kids got to burn off some energy outside before they were trapped indoors.  We were wiped afterwards, but we were really glad to be of help.  MarkyMark & Bobcat were with us at the hospital till 3:30 in the morning the day Paul died; watching the kids all day is the least we could do.  As I told Bobcat’s brother John, That’s what friends do.

 Slept in Saturday.  Hubby went with his brothers, some old friends, Poppa, etc. to the Cal-UCLA game on Saturday.  It was kind of a bummer, though, b/c the whole point of it was getting to spend time with his old friends, but they were late, and he got bumped from sitting with them so that someone else could, but the game was good anyhow.  Things & I went to Adri’s for a Pampered Chef party.  Too much food, spent too much, had a great time! 

Oh, and BTW:

November 24th - November 6th = 18 days

I’m just sayin’………

It’s currently 24″ wide by 32.5″ tall.  I’m going to keep knitting till my yarn runs out (yarn pictured is all that remains).  If you’ve been reading since at least this spring, then you should recognize the multi-colored yarn as the leftovers from the sweater I made for Hubby’s manager’s baby.  I got the yellow & green on sale ($3/ball; hard to beat that!) to coordinate with it.  US 9’s.  The yarn may be mostly petrobarf, but it’s SO soft!