Upscale Red Heart

Sigh, at least if nothing else, I will get this accomplished today. Which is not, admittedly, saying much for my day, but I have a week to get my sleep patterns settled up, and I figure that's going to take some doing. I've really screwed them up, which seems to be a family trait, and now I'm suffering for it. Wish me luck.

Anywhoo, back to Red Heart yarns. They have apparently caught on that squeaky, rough acrylic isn't going to give them a dominant market share and started milling some rather nice yarns. Take a lookie-lou:

Red Heart Boutique Unforgettable in colorway Parrot. I love this yarn and debated heavily between this color and one of the others (all of them are luscious, really) but since this was the one that first caught my eye and made me feel the most decadent and guilty, I went for it.

One of The Coven pointed out that the color saturation is more like Noro than Red Heart, and while that's especially true for this particular color, all the colorways are this saturated.

Just take a look at this:

It's like a swirl of psychedelic cream in the Primordial Universe Soup or something.

Also up to bat is Red Heart Boutique Midnight -- this colorway is called Borealis. Me likey. I've already started a long loop cowl for myself in this yarn which I'm calling my Birthday Cowl, because I cast on the same number of stitches as the year I just celebrated. It's my third 13th birthday, an accomplishment that should, naturally, be memorialized in gorgeous yarn. Of course, I tend to memorialize things like buying new underwear by buying nice yarn, so is it any surprise that I'd memorialize a birthday?

Ahem, so here's the yarn:

Here's the side on view:

It's got a gold thread in there, and the yarn is unique to my experience because it's not spun, it's braided.

Interestingly enough, I managed to find the number of stitches -- simply by surviving this long, despite my worst efforts -- that allowed this yarn to stripe out:

To continue my original thought, from before I got completely sidetracked by the thought of the gift I'm making for myself, there are a couple braided yarns in the new Red Heart line-up. I also noticed, on my way out of the store, several other lines have braided yarns, too, which is interesting. I'm wondering if this is going to be a new trend. Or if it's an old trend that I've totally missed out on because of my extreme obliviousness to trendiness in anything, much less yarn.

Maybe I should look up once in a while, yes?