Tales from the River: A New Favorite Thing (Should be titled "True Confessions")

A friend of mine once told me about a relative who grew up on a farm where they raised beef cows. You would think that he would have had steaks and roasts every day. But no, they sold the beef and only had pork themselves. At my house this has come to be an inside joke when we need a reminder that we need to enjoy life a bit and let ourselves have something nice.

Being a beef farmer that only eats pork would be like being a yarn shop owner who only knits with Red Heart; well or maybe Wool Ease. (Pork isn't THAT bad!) Not wanting to be that farmer, I decided to treat myself to one of these:

It's a Denise Interchangeable Needle Case.

I know, you might be thinking, "They already come in a case; what's the big deal anyway?"

That's where the true confessions part comes in...

The plastic case that the set comes in is perfectly adequate; IF you only have one set.

I did have one set. In 1994. I ordered it from a yarn shop in Maine when I lived here and didn't know where else to find good knitting supplies. I fell in love with my trusty Denise set and loved having nearly everything I would ever need in one box.

But then I opened River Knits and they started making Denise needles again. That's when it really all started. Eventually my one little set in the trusty powder blue case grew to look like this:

I told myself I needed a set to use at the shop at first; I didn't really even need an excuse when the third set joined my life. But I found out that it was a lot harder to keep track of the needle tips and especially the end buttons on three sets. I had discovered the joys of multiple projects and all the commonly used parts were always somewhere else. And when I did finish a project I invariably had the wrong little plastic case at hand and there wans't an opening in the right spot to store the recently liberated parts.

Imagine my joy when everything you see in the 3 cases above, plus an extra 40" cord, my extra 7mm needle tips (as yet unused), and my secret cache of end buttons, was transformed into this: