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Last week, I finished my lilac yarn, but I haven't had a chance to let it dry / take pictures / upload them until today, when I'll share them with you!
I'm really happy with how this yarn came out. It's somewhere between a fingering and sport weight, 350 yards, a merino-tencel blend. Look at that tencel shine! I'm very happy with how it came out, as you can imagine! There seems to be a clump of blue and a clump of pink/lilac, and then other colors, green, grey, and violet, in between. I'm looking forward to making a nice scarf out of it for next year's spring - maybe Palette or Lace Ribbon (knitty spring 2007 and 2008 respectively). Coffeeboy and I also took another hike this past weekend, and we saw some mountain laurel blooming (no rhododendrons, yet!) (This one is by Coffeeboy himself, lover of macro-flower-photos!)
It's been amazing to watch spring and then summer come out in the mountains. This weekend at a juncture between trails, we stopped for a few minutes and listened to the birds chirp, and to the wind rustling the trees. It reminded me of when I was a kid, living in the suburbs, hanging out at my friend's house. There I'd listen to the wind in her pine trees and think of hiking and camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains (we lived in CA when I was a kid). It was lovely just to take a moment to hear the wind in the trees. Tomorrow, we're headed out of town, to go visit Coffeeboy's family in Chicago and Milwaukee for a family event. We're driving - still cheaper than flying, especially where we're coming from and since we're going to more than one city - so we've downloaded some books to listen to, and I'm debating whether or not knitting will make me carsick! Sometimes it does, sometimes not. I'll definitely have a range of projects to choose from, though! When I get back, my busy month of June will already have started. I'll spend a few days renew books at my home library; much of that time will be spent traveling, also. Then, a few days after that, for the last half of June, I'm off to Chicago (again!) for two weeks to do a whole lotta research. If any of you live in or near the Windy City, let me know of some good fiber haunts to check out!
Lately, my knitting and spinning has all been geared around the weather: a mohair sweater perfect for those ever-fewer still-cool mornings, or a braid of roving aptly named "Lilac" by the lovely folks at Three Waters Farm. (I bought some of their Lavendar-Oatmeal Goat's Milk Soap at SAFF last year, and it is divine! Come to think of it, I knit a stole/shawl for my mom out of their merino in that same colorway!) Here is what it looks like, however, in roving and unplied singles of a merino-tencel blend (purchased at Yarns Etc. in Carrboro):
  I've also been trying to knit the trees and sky and trails that I've been hiking on these last few weekends. It seems every time I get out into the woods, I start thinking of knitting a stole to wear when I'm inside a cold, air-conditioned library thinking about being outside in those woods. I finally screwed up my courage this weekend to learn a new cast on (a basic provisional cast on) and start the stole, ideas for which have been roaming around in my mind these last few weeks.  While I like how it's going so far, unblocked it is only 14" wide. I don't think blocking will quite get this to a respectable 18-plus inches for a stole, so off to the frog pond it'll head shortly - unless a bunch of you tell me that it's likely to grow that much. Knowing how I tend to block lace (which is usually not as vigorously as is likely possible, due to lack of blocking wires and frustration with many tiny poky pins), even if it's technically possible, I doubt it'll work for me, so I expect that before too long, it's froggie-frog we go!
As promised, here's my latest FO, the mohair sweater! After several amusing modifications, I can finally put it out there on the 'net! Although for some reason, I felt like making this a faceless post; not sure why. This way you can see that the neck edge is rolled (using where I picked up stitches to stop the roll), the sleeves roll, too (except there's ribbing to stop the roll), and the waist edge is crochet. A bit schizophrenic, and there are some funky pooling issues in places I'd rather them not to be, but other than that, it's not bad for a cozy, lightweight spring sweater!
First, you see, I had to redo the bind off on the collar. You should have seen me trying to pull it over my head at the knitting group meeting. You could see a little bit of blond poking out the top, but that was about it! Several women kindly suggested that I bind off more loosely ( more loosely?), which worked well. Then, of course, there was the rolled hem. Now, I have several sweaters with rolled edges, all machine-made, store-bought, and their rolled edges don't seem to add bulk where it doesn't belong, so I was foolishly unworried about the plan to knit myself a rolled edge. What a mistake that was, even after blocking!! This meant that on a Tuesday evening listening to election coverage on the TV, I found myself crocheting the bottom edge of the sweater. Yes, listening to the TV because I couldn't not look at the little hook at the end of a stick. The Stats:Pattern: The raglan pattern in The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns Yarn: Brooks Farm Primero, about 1.5 hanks Time; Ravelry tells me it took about a month and a half or so Needles: size 5 for the body I've been doing a lot of dissertation work - most of it inside, in the study, all previous posts and photos to the contrary - and have actually been making progress. Well, at least, the progress of a quote strung together here and there with another quote plus a possibly off-topic analysis of a few photographs, all added up to make a few really long sections scattered over several MS Word documents... and it's starting to feel like a chapter draft is taking shape in my mind, even though I can easily see many more pages of typing before it gets printed out in something resembling a coherent document on a date with a red pen. (Or pencil or blue pen - it depends what's lying around). Given that May is about half over and I haven't had any drafts to show since January, like the funky pooling on the sweater, I'll take what I can get! I'd like to have an actual draft-to-show-the-advisor by early June, which is when I'll be driving all my books to my home school so they can be renewed. In person. All several shelves of them. Given that Coffeeboy and I'll be gone for a week or so in late May, this just might be a dubious goal. But one can always hope for the best, right?
This past weekend, my MIL was in town. We had two surprises: one was a very small fiber festival at the Southern Highland Craft Guild off the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the other was a gorgeous hike full of spring color and amazing wildflowers.
The fiber festival was, as I said, small, but a lot of fun. We watched an expert sheep-shearing (my basis for calling it expert was how well the shearer handled the sheep, holding it between his legs, moving its legs around his in order to expose the parts to shear next, the whole fleece coming off as a unit), I watched spinners and thought of my wheel, and we observed several other interesting crafts - basketweaving, weaving, making pretty felt-covered boxes, tapestry weaving, beaded jewelry, doll-making, and much more! I didn't have my camera, though, so I couldn't get any pictures. (There also wasn't very much for sale, so my wallet was in little danger!)
I did have my camera for our hike, which turned, unexpectedly, into a wildflower hike of sorts after I saw the pink lady slippers. I remember looking for these flowers when I was a wee kid in the woods of Massachusetts; I remember my parents telling me, during our last spring in the state, that they were very rare and that one was lucky to see them, but so far as I recall, I didn't find them that year. This year I did, and I was amazed by their beauty, and by the beauty of the other flowers we saw in a scant two hours of hiking.
 
 
 
 
As you can see, I didn't know the names of several. "Mini-daisies" and "hanging bells" are far from technical names, and I'd love to know what they really are, if anyone knows! You can see bigger images over in Flickr. I am constantly struck how beautiful it is here. My MIL kept remarking on how many different shades of green there were (she lives in Colorado), and it's true, springtime really is alive with greens, in so many more ways than one. I've finally managed to get a picture of my latest sweater FO, so I hope to show that to you soon in the upcoming days!
You know, I know I've not always been the happiest about being so far from my home institution, but right now, life in the mountains has its advantages: Such as dissertating on one's back patio, with mountains in the distance and the springtime sounds of birds, wind, and a stream nearby. The folks I'm writing about appreciated the "restorative powers of the pastoral," and I have to say, I agree with them. This really is a great way to dissertate. Lovely smells and sounds, a cup of coffee, my computer's screen easily visible in the shade, wireless internet.
I'm not sure it'll be quite so pleasant in the summer when it's hotter, but in the shade and springtime, it's really, really great! I'm also not sure this is the best place to churn out the pages. That would probably be upstairs in my office, or 45 minutes north of here in the library at UNC-Asheville, where on Wednesday I churned out seven whole pages in the course of an afternoon's burst of productivity.
Today Coffeeboy and I purchased tickets for several concerts at our local summertime classical music festival, the Brevard Music Center. We stepped inside the shed and it reminded me of nowhere so much as Tanglewood, where I spent one of the best summers of my life. To have music in the mountains that I can go to all summer (all summer, that is, except the several weeks I'll be away at archives!) is yet some more icing on the cake.
I promised I'd show you a WIP and an FO. I haven't had a chance to get the FO photographed yet, so we're just going to go with the WIP, Tailored Scallops, my current leading-love in the fiber world. It's Malabrigo, it's blue, and it's feather-and-fan - - how better can it get than that?
My MIL is in town this weekend (she needed to come to the area on business) so we're looking forward to getting out with her into the nice springtime. I hear the rhododendrons, which grow the size of trees along the streams of mountain coves, are starting to bloom, something we've been waiting for months to see.
"Some weekends are grey, some weekends are mean, this one had plants, and so was green."
Coffeeboy and I spent this past weekend getting the garden, in various permutations, going. When we moved here, we didn't think we'd garden much. After all, we don't own the land outside our condo, but we figured we could put in a few plants, just a few. Then the college where Coffeeboy works started a community garden and we got a 4x20 plot of land to use. Now it looks like we'll be gardening more food than ever!
First, of course, was the very exciting Asheville Herb Festival. We'd had a poster on our fridge about this for the past month, and knew we wanted to go there to stock up on our favorite flavorings. I was hoping to score some soap and maybe some interesting lavendar products, but we ended up with only an hour at the festival, barely enough time to scope out the growing (as opposed to turned-into-products) herbs we wanted.
 As you can see, we had quite a loot! In addition to chives and lemon thyme which we picked up at a small local plant sale, at the herb festival we found, as you can see above, plenty more to flavor our lives with. The festival itself was tons of fun, with dozens of herb vendors, colorful signs, and interesting varieties. After the festival, Coffeboy and I headed to Asheville where we had a beer at Jack of the Wood Pub followed by a lovely dinner at the all-vegetarian/vegan restaurant The Laughing Seed. Of course, it wouldn't be a spring night in Asheville without a drumming session going on in Pritchard Circle, so we stopped to watch young hippies and old hippies groovin' together to what's always a really amazing impromptu performance, and of course, to watch the tourists watching the action, too. I didn't have my camera then, so I couldn't take pictures (oh well!). Saturday afternoon we planted the herbs in their containers: In order from the back, the plants are:
Back row: chocolate mint, placeholder plant, spearmint
Middle row: chamomile, a petunia, lemon balm
Front row: thyme, sage, oregano, lemon thyme
Round container on left: lavendar
Middle round container: cilantro, parsley
Round container on right: regular basil, cinnamon/Thai basil, chives
We'd decided to plant the herbs in containers so as to have more room in the ground for vegetables - and because I liked the idea of framing our little back patio area with herbs. This, to me, seemed like just the thing to do with such a little patio: make it smell really, really, great, and be useful, too! Yesterday, we planted our veggie garden. We put in several varieties of tomatoes, saving two for the community garden and planting five by our house, to the right of the air conditioning unit. To the left, we planted four peppers, green and purple bell, and left of that, four Japanese eggplants. As you can see, there's still a lot of room to grow where the black anti-weed cover is. We're going to put in beets, spinach, and parsnips there, and also some of those over at the college garden. (You can see the plants better in the bigger images at Flickr!) Finally, just because they're cute, pictures of the cats: Juniper (the Sock-Lord, apparently, who loves handknit socks as well as her daddy's smelly, just-gardened-in socks as well) and Magellan (curled up on my desk chair):
In the next post, I promise I'll have some fibery goodness - a finished object, and a new sweater-in-progress made of the to-die-for Malabrigo!
Yesterday I actually bound off the mohair sweater! I tried it on, too, and was very happy with the fit. Now all I need to do is add the neckband, sew up the armhole seams, weave in a few ends, block it, and it'll be done! Excellent!
I also acquired some new yarn to work with that I'm excited by for two different reasons. The dishcloth yarn excites me because it's dishcloth yarn in pretty colors, and was inexpensive. The Malabrigo on the right, there, well, that's my first ever Malabrigo purchase, and I can't wait to start using it! The color is just gorgeous, "indigo." I'm hoping it'll work out gauge-wise for the Tailored Scallops sweater, but I think it might be a hair too thin. We'll see. As soon as I get that mohair sweater blocking, I'm going to turn to the Malabrigo Scallops!
Well, folks, I'm behind, as usual. Behind, that is, on the dishcloth craze. Right about when dishcloths came "in" a couple of years back (remember the Mason-Dixon Ball Band dishcloths[Ravelry-only link], anyone?), I ignored them. After all, I'd recently switched to sponges, and all dishcloths did was get smelly in the sink, just like they'd done when I was a kid. (Yes, they did get washed, but the smell left a stronger mental impression!)
But a couple of days ago, Earth Day caught up with me and I thought to myself, I should really get back in the habit of using dishcloths, rather than so many paper towels! I mean, I'm not that bad; I do try to use the sponge, but sometimes I just want the convenience of a paper towel... but still, I should try, shouldn't I?
Yes, we recycle and watch the temperature of our house and buy cars that get good gas mileage - but couldn't I be better about this one little item? Maybe if I had my own handmade dishcloths I'd use them, I thought, so out came the cotton and the needles...
Coffeeboy swore he wouldn't use it, that he couldn't subject anything I'd knit with to such treatment as scrubbing dirty sinks and counters. Besides, he'd grown up with sponges, not "those cloths" as he used to call them back when I was using cloths, not sponges, so I expect there was some resistance to the dishcloth funk. But knit one I did, use it to wipe the counter I did, and now, boy doesn't our sink look too pretty for its own good? There are other ideas I'm finding equally inspiring - many of them, to give honor where it's due - mentioned on Zarzuela's Earth Day post. There I was introduced to the Greencraft group on Ravelry - if you're on Ravelry, you should definitely check this group out! It's fascinating what people are doing, the little ways they are getting back in touch with the world!
I bet you thought that I was preparing last week for an actual Passover seder, not passing yarn through itself? Well, in the end we had a little of both:
Also this weekend, a visiting friend was winding some yarn on my swift. I noticed she was taking a really long time to wind yarn, which, granted, takes a while when you bring several skeins, but still... I went upstairs and found scenes that looked a bit like this: It was like a game of cat's cradle sprung into existence on the swift. Twice every turn, the yarn caught in a loop and we had to thread the growing ball of yarn through the loop, or the loops, as the case may be. Sometimes things got really, really messy. Eventually we finished, and miraculously the yarn eventually also stopped being caught in its own loops, but wow, was that not one of the more messed-up skeins I've ever encountered! Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to getting back to the wheel and to the mohair sweater, for which I'm rapidly running out of cool days to wear it! I haven't blogged this one yet because it's all stockinette. However, now that it's starting to look like a sweater, I decided to take a picture. I'm hopeful that I can control the roll on the bottom there. Silly me. Rolled hems and mohair sweaters do seem to go together in my mind, but who was I not to do something to stop the roll? Oops! Oh well, I will just have to hope that the powers of the iron are enough!
Last night I needed to clear a few singles off a bobbin. A few weeks ago, I'd spun up a little bit of this juicy merino fiber from Lorna's Laces that I got for the holidays. I thought I'd give reputedly slippery merino a test-run. As I recall, it wasn't too bad. It was, however, a while ago.
Then I was left with very little on the bobbin, but I didn't want to spin the rest of it then. So I set it aside, and last night, I navajo plied it. See? This new type of plying was a bit tricky. Since I'm a lefty, I tried doing it with my left hand, but I kept needing to use my right to help pull the single through the loop. Eventually I was getting my left index finger to take care of the pulling through the loop, while the right did something with the twist. I saw what hadn't been clear on the on-line video, that somehow the creation of the loops gives you a three-ply. Pretty cool! I'm not an engineer, I can't explain how it works, just that it did! What I got was something like this: I have a few questions about navajo plying for you more experienced spinners: Do you see that purple strand on top, on the right side? Right there you can see where the two loops interlock. Why is that? Is that normal for navajo plying, to see where the loops are? I had another question, which is how the heck do you finish it? When I was done I had an awkward floppy loop that didn't quite twist and ply up nicely. Also, why is it called "navajo" plying? Here is the little skein-let, only a few yards long, all twisted up. I think it looks pretty good for a first attempt. Of course, that's probably half the dye job on the fiber - hard to go wrong with such gorgeous colors!! They remind me of summer berries. I don't remember what the official colorway name is, but these sure do speak to me of berries. Last week I went to a conference at my home institution, a conference I've been planning for the last year or so. It went really well - great papers, interesting people, good networking. The conference involved people working on topics very similar to my dissertation, so it provided a lot of excellent food for thought and really has me actually thinking about the diss with excitement for the first time in about a month. I came home and scanned 16 pages of notes so I'd have electronic copies of what I wrote down. I've never actually scanned in notes before, but it seemed to make a certain amount of sense. Add them to the e-file for the conference, and I'll always be able to find them. The paper notes - who knows? Of course, I can't really capitalize on that excitement because now that I'm home, I'm preparing the house for Passover & the arrival of guests this weekend! (Granted, since the Judaism represented here is Reform, the housecleaning isn't as, um, thorough, as it could be, but there's still plenty to do!) I'm going to try to put in some time on the diss this afternoon and tomorrow, but I still have to clean the house and go grocery shopping, so it's looking like the diss will have to wait till next week!
Hi everyone - everyone who hasn't dropped me off bloglines, that is! I am still alive, believe it or not! I've just been away from the blog, mentally speaking, and from blog-world too. Since I last posted, I: - made a quick run to visit a friend who lives a few hours away and has access to some really old books that I need in the dissertation. She wrote about my visit way back when. (I was tempted to link to her blog to say, "Look what I've been up to!" and that's when I lost my blogging mojo...)
- a week later I found myself in New York City, surrounded by big tall buildings, for a week of research and crashing in a hotel room with a relative. I got so busy with family, research, and seeing the city that I forgot to check out yarn stores. I did see Spamalot, though, and I laughed a lot; I did get to go to bookstores, which are sadly in short supply where I live
- then I had a week off from travel, except I got off a wait list for a retreat
- and I went on the retreat March 14-16, which wasn't quite what I was looking for but was probably a productive time anyways
- Now I have a couple weeks off from travel before I head to my home institution and a conference I've spent the last year planning...
So it's not as if I haven't been busy! I've just been focusing my free time on things that don't translate well to a fiber arts blog! I also feel like what I've been working on in the knitting world hasn't been terribly interesting, in that it doesn't merit more than a "show and tell" type post. I'm not sure, right now, how to make the blog more than a show-and-tell, without making what it's not meant to be. Maybe when I finish the prototype of a shawl I'm trying to come up with, then I'll have something more fiber-related to talk about. But for now, I don't know if I'm going to come out of this internet-hibernation, or remain in it?
Regardless, there's still fiber. I finished the long-suffering socks for my MIL, and have been spinning some pretty, baby-blue, tweedy corriedale from Greta_Jane. I have three 4 oz. balls of the stuff, and I'm spinning it fairly thin. I'm about halfway through the fiber; I have still another ball to go. One of these days I'll get to try three-ply! Or the gorgeous merino-tencel I bought while in Carrboro a few weeks ago! Coffeeboy and I also have been hiking, looking for signs of spring and finding beautiful scenery nonetheless. In that picture on the right, what you see are the evergreens of the North Carolina mountains - pines, rhododendrons aplenty, and mountain laurel.
I hope all of you are well! I do stop by many of your blogs from time to time, but truth be told, I haven't been reading blogs all that much of late, either. (There's been a fair amount of book-reading, as in, books that are not related to the dissertation, and that cuts into the knitting time, too!) I hope wherever you are, you are having a beautiful spring!
May yours be as warm as, well, a handknit sock resting uneasily close to the jaws of a kitty:
Coffeeboy thought that Juniper would make an ideal background for the sock. Juniper thought the sock - and my handspun yarn nicely wound into a yarn cake - would make an ideal lunchtime plaything. Luckily, as the camera indicates, she had plenty of supervision, and no yarn, WIP-socks, or cats were harmed in the making of said photograph. I've been a bit of an MIA-blogger lately. Last week, I visited my academic home back in New Jersey, taking along the handspun sock yarn and turning it into what you see above. I met with friends, advisors, and lots of library books. My trunk was noticeably heavier on the long, 10-hours-plus drive home. I even made it into New York City to visit an archive, always fun after spending a while in the small-town mountains! I find it interesting how the sock's colors are spinning up. I would never have guessed that it would have a large chunk of red like that, and be so mutedly tweedy elsewhere. The yarn is a pleasure to knit with, though, not only because it feels nice but because I made it all by myself! I decided to reinforce the heels with some mohair, or rather, with some Kidsilk Haze, to be precise. Believe you me, my heels cannot wait to slip into that softness! Well, regardless of whether or not you celebrate this commercially-induced festival of sugary-sweetness, I do hope you get to feel a bit of the fiber-love either way!
Remember how I said I'd made sock yarn? Well now I have pictures! I'm pretty tempted to let the pictures express how very, very excited I am to have made fingering weight yarn that's enough for socks!!
The Fiber:  4 oz. BFL fiber from The Painted Sheep, in the Dublin Bay colorway
The Fiber, unfurled  I divided this in half lengthwise, and then for half A I split it again, for half B I split it lengthwise four times, following a trick I saw on Ravelry about making space-dyed roving into barberpole-striped yarn.
(Click to make any of these bigger in Flickr!!)
Spinning the fiber: 
All plied up, it overflows from this bobbin said to hold 4 ounces: 
What it looks like washed and dried:   All bundled up as a pretty little skein:   What we have here is 380 yards, 4 oz., fingering weight. It's not superwash, but it sure sounds like sock yarn to me! I think I'm in love. I'm half tempted to pull out the sock needles right now and cast on to watch this yarn make socks! The other half wants to stare at it, squeeze and pat it. It's soft. It's squishy. It's enough for socks. I'm a happy, happy spinner. I think I'll hang onto it a bit before turning this FO back into a WIP. As we close this week and come to the weekend, I only hope you find something fibery that makes you quite this happy!
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