If I could just replace that cupholder with a ballwinder...

I had this idea in my head: "Mondays! I shall blog on Mondays, nothing ever happens on Monday." So of course yesterday I got to drop everything and drive to the far side of Indianapolis (about two hours away). But I came home with this:

I've been shopping since February to replace the old beater my husband totaled by driving it over a curb and down a hill into a tree ("But at least not into the creek, honey!"). He was actually still driving it, but the air conditioning went out on it last week, so the project became just a leetle more urgent.

Since I didn't drive on the way over, and the dealership insisted on making me wait while they washed my new used car (in spite of it being already cleaner than any car I'd driven in at least ten years), I also came home with this:

I got several rather long rows added to this shawl, which I'm crocheting from The Verdant Gryphon's Mithril. It's one of my very favorite laceweight yarns for crochet. In fact, here are some closeup shots of three I love. It's hot outside, so you get indoor shots, but they're in natural light, albeit from the skylight over my stovetop, with a cutting board for a backdrop.

Here's the Mithril; it's the only one of the three that hasn't been blocked, since I'm still working on the project, so cut it some slack.

This is Wollmeise Lace-Garn. It's a little heavier than Mithril. It's challenging to get your hands on this stuff, but it's worth the trouble. I've gotten most of mine from other Ravelers' destashes, actually, although once in a great while The Loopy Ewe gets some (it usually sells out within about twenty minutes), or sometimes I'm still awake at 2 a.m. here for the German website updates.

The lightest of the three is Lana Grossa Merino Lace. Lana Grossa isn't all that common in U.S. yarn stores, but not impossible to find either. I bought mine at a LYS in Indianapolis. And right now, with the exchange rate, it's possible to order it from Europe for about the same cost, even including shipping, as buying it at home. (That reminds me, I wanted to order some green...)

So what's so great about these yarns? The thing they all have in common is that they all have three or more plies, which makes them "round." With fingering weight yarns, there are a lot of round choices, but lace yarns are frequently two-ply. Sometimes the structure of two-ply yarn obscures the structure of the crochet stitch. This can be a good thing with very simple stitch patterns, but if I'm going to the trouble of designing complex new edgings (which I am), I jolly well want every detail to show up.