It went down to 49 degrees last night. Today it's mostly cloudy and in the mid 70s, breezy, but not harsher wind gusts like we had yesterday. I was too achy from PT Friday so I didn't go out yesterday. Tomorrow's rheumatologist appointment is late morning so I may go to the laundromat later tomorrow afternoon.

It's a quiet day, just taking care of the basics around the house. My Whole Foods and Amazon groceries order arrived earlier. I ordered another small maple flavored ham steak. I heat it up with additional maple syrup, eat part of it for one night's dinner, then cut the rest into small cubes to put in a sandwich bag to pop in the freezer then add a few ham cubes to my eggs when I make dinnertime omelettes. My sister is off pet and house sitting this week for friends who left for their vacation yesterday. They have a couple of cats and live in an old Victorian era house just over the border in a town south of us.

My order of yarn from Herrschner's arrived yesterday. I have an order from Hobby Lobby coming on Tuesday, and they ship through Amazon which is interesting. Every other week all their yarn is 30% off. It's mostly yarn but also a couple of double ended Tunisian crochet hooks coming as well. Two of the solid colors of the yarn from Herrschner's and one skein of variegated yarn from Hobby Lobby will be used to recreate a lacy granny square color scheme I saw on a YouTube crochet yarn video recently. This is for my crazy quilt style afghan with both knitted and crocheted pieces. The nice thing about making an afghan crazy quilt style is you get to play around with lots of different colors of yarn, get to try out all sorts of patterns.

Those yarn discussion videos get into using color theory with your yarn choices and can showcase how various brand's yarn lines colorways work together in particular stitches or in granny squares. When my hands were less fumbley from the arthritis and I was doing beadwork with the tiny size 11 seed beads I was using a wide variety of colors and finishes, so I like to play around with color theory with my craft projects.

A little while ago I watched a knitting video on a technique which focuses on creating interesting textures to knitted pieces by simply using knit and purl stitches and altering their placement on each knitted row, and doesn't use any other techniques like yarn overs, knitting stitches together or cabling. The YouTuber was showing small sample swatches of the technique plus a shawl she made which were all from a small booklet she bought on the technique that sells for $10 from a needlework website. She also showed a copy she purchased of the main big instructions book on this technique which is a hardcover coffee table sized book, but it sells for $60 new on Amazon. That's a heck of a lot of money for one knitting book! Used copies were selling on Amazon for $40+, which is still pretty pricey. I'll have to look around for lower cost used copies on other websites like Thrift Books. This book was first published in 2015 so I doubt a less expensive trade paperback version will be released. Sure, the author is making more money per unit from each book that sells at $60 a pop, but by making the book so expensive a lot of knitters are going to look around for used copies instead or give the whole thing a pass altogether because $60 for a knitting instructional book is just a greedy money grab price!

I miss the days when the really big fat needlework pattern instructions books sold in the $15-$20 range. I have a couple of Elizabeth Zimmerman knitting patterns books that are like 250-300 pages each purchased in the 1990s which were just over $15 each. But everything is so expensive now.