Countdown to Ravelympics: 13 days!

I am soooo looking forward to the upcoming Ravelympics. I'm planning on entering three events: WIPs-Dancing (completing a project which you have not worked on for at least 3 months); Skele-gurumi (toys & amigurumi) and Nordic Colorwork Combined (any sort of colorwork, intarsia, & fair isle). Today's picture is the chart I'm going to use for my colorwork piece. For the WIPs, I'm intending to finally finish that poor orangutan that I started more than two years ago, and then for my toy I'll be making a small hammerhead shark. The colorwork is going to take a long time so I don't think I'll be able to enter any other events.

Today I went yarn shopping for the colorwork piece. There are actually about 20 different Harry Potter charts, so in addition to the Hermione for the Ravelympics I was also looking for yarns for Snape, Fred & George, and Hedwig. Such frustration! Please note that every chart uses black, white, & two shades of grey (I'm choosing not to use the greys on Hermione, going with brown & tan instead). I wasn't too fussy about the background colors. Anyway, the first place I went to only had one brand of yarn that was suitable. The only white available in that brand had sparkles in it. Sparkles, I tell you! I'm doing Harry Potter intarsia, not Twilight for pity's sake. Also, they didn't really have any colors that I liked for the backgrounds.

The second shop I went to had two brands that I was willing to use. In fact, one of them was the brand I preferred to use for the project. In the preferred brand, they only had one shade of grey and no black at all. The other brand had black, but only in bulky & I need worsted. They did have two shades of grey, but no white. The clerk suggested another brand, but it was much more expensive than the brand I wanted ($9 for 100 yards, compared to $6.25 for 200 yards). I explained to the clerk assisting me that I didn't want to, nor was I going to, pay that much. Back to the preferred brand I went.

I picked out the colors that I need which were in stock, while the clerk puttered around trying to find other brands that would work for those colors that were out of stock. For some reason she kept bringing me totally unsuitable yarns: black in cotton (I'm using a wool/acrylic blend), a pure wool peachy-pink that would have been perfect for Hermione if it hadn't been $10 for 99 yards (um, hello, if I'm not going to pay $9 for 100 yards I'm certainly not paying an extra dollar for one yard less!!) She kept saying, "But you only need it for this little part of the face!" as if that made it less expensive. I finally explained to her that while I had only brought four charts, there are about twenty charts altogether and I was not paying that much for so little. At that point she tried to convince me to switch to another, less expensive brand that was a) 100% acrylic; b) had no black, grey, or white in stock & she wasn't positive it came in grey since it comes in "children's" colors; and c) had no color that wasn't way too bright for the backgrounds. Anyway, long story short (too late!), they are getting another shipment on Thursday and the clerk assures me they will have black & dark grey in the brand I want, which are the only colors I'm missing. I'm tempted, though, to head back to the first shop & see if the black & grey there would be compatible with the yarn I bought at the second one.

It's really odd that I had such troubles at the second shop. I've shopped there before and generally they have just what I'm looking for, and the clerks have never tried to push the "wrong" yarn on me like that. Weird!! I really do believe she was trying to help, and I am not upset with her at all. It was just frustrating when I knew exactly what I wanted, to keep being offered something completely different.