my pal

It's not quite time yet, but soon all will be revealed. June is the final month in the tenth round of Secret Pal.

I can't tell you who my pal is just yet, but I am enjoying finding things here and there to include in her final package. Today I picked up a wonderful-smelling eucalyptus candle for her while I was doing some grocery shopping at the Whole Paycheck Foods.

I like to put a package together slowly, usually starting with the yarn, and then building some kind of theme around it. It's very important that the colors coordinate, and that there be a little something for as many of the five senses as possible. But not too much of any particular thing - too much smell, for instance, would be very bad.

So what can I tell you about this Pal without giving it away?

She is funny. She is a stylish geek, which warms my heart to no end. I love a scientist with style. She's kind of sporty, in a way that at first I found a little intimidating, but she spends plenty of time on the couch with her cat, too, so I can relate to her pretty well. Her cat is great - he is big and happy and spoiled like my cat, and he's so cute that I think I will include something for him in this last package. She has a significant other who seems to be highly supportive of the yarn fetish (always a good sign). I'm not going to say where she lives, but it's a place I'd love to visit. I have been there once - much too briefly.

One of the challenges of making packages for her is that she's not a beginner, and she's a yarnaholic, so there's not much out there in the knitting world that she doesn't already have (her various yarn diets go right down the drain as soon as she gets near a yarn store, though she always finds a good get-out-of-jail-free card). So I have tried to find fun, out-of-the-way knitting pleasures to share with her, and to focus on color and texture rather than introducing her to "new" yarns - since I don't think there's a yarn that gets past her untrammelled. She is the kind of person that I'd love to have in my local Stitch & Bitch - she'd be a terribly good influence on my knitting, if you know what I mean.

To my Secret Pal - soon we can be real pals, or at least virtual real pals, or whatever we call each other out here in the internets. I love surprises.