I am finally feeling at home here now that I have scoped out my LYS. There are two! Who would have guessed? On Friday after school I raced to one on my bike before it closed at six and was wowed with their selection of pretty nice yarn. The ladies there were also really nice to me and we had my standard Japanese conversation in which I wow them with my first sentence or two and then don’t understand another single thing. We talked briefly about the fact that I like knitting, I am an English teacher and I’ve studied Japanese for one year. Then she tried to ask me about 20 more questions that I didn’t understand and finally got outta my way and just let me look at the yarn. I ended up getting some yarn to start a blanket, some cotton to make placemats or something fun for the apartment, and some thick and thin yarn to make this vest:

This could be one of those things that looks really cute on 99% of cute Japanese girls and ridiculously goofy on me. I’m optimistic though, and I am putting all my effort into making it look cool. I don’t have a button yet though, that is going to take some serious thought. The store was only about a 20 minute bike ride from my house, and conveniently located next to the post office that I have to visit on a regular basis.

I didn’t make much progress on the sweater vest because on Saturday, I just happened to be in the same building as the other yarn and craft store around here. They were restocking all the yarn so I didn’t have much to look at, but I did wander into the fabric section and get sucked into buying some fabric for some new pillowcases. My bedroom really needed help! Well I could have used Mariko's pillowcase tutorial, but since I am still without internet at home, I had to make do with my own limited experience and common sense to put these babies together. It really wasn’t that hard, just a little time consuming since I had to hand stitch all four! Well they’re done now:

Here are close-ups of the fabric--the blue one says moony chick!

I’m happy to have some projects other than Caryl’s Kerchief, because it is just not moving along too smoothly. I don’t really understand how to effectively use markers when there are so many yarnovers, and every few rows the pattern ends up off by one stitch because I haven’t been paying close enough attention. I think I need to do some simple size 13 needle knitting, and then hopefully I will be able to give it more time. Until then...