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In the first of what promises to be several catch-up posts about what I've been up to, fiberwise, I give you a spontaneous cowl knit out of merino handspun. For some reason, the yarn didn't come out very even; I think I was too excited by the pretty colors to think too much about the spinning; plus, I'm still getting used to merino. I love knitting with it, but it's a bit slippery in the spinning.
I spun this out of approximately 2 oz. of variegated merino and 1.7 oz. of teal-blue fiber, and then plied them together. With the extra 0.3 ounce, I navajo-plied that and used it at the top and bottom of the cowl.
You can see the more solid colors at the top on the left; on the right, you can see how the variegations in the handspun from the multicolored fiber created a striped effect despite the tweedy barberpoling.
This weekend, my FIL was in town, and we took him up to the Blue Ridge Parkway to go hiking, where the temperatures would be cooler (high fifties to low sixties, farenheit) and the fall colors further along. We were not disappointed in our quest! I got to wear my new cowl and get it photographed for the blog, and I also had a chance to take many pictures of North Carolina's finest fall showing.
It's funny, now that I've been here a year, I've started to really notice the differences between fall foliage here in Western North Carolina, and the foliage in New England and the northeast, which will always be for me the quintessential autumn tapestry. Last year, I was still determined to like it here, and wanted to see the best in the WNC's mountain display. This year, though, as I've come to realize that this place is yet another temporary place to live, I find myself really wanting to move back north, to somewhere with real winter, with autumns of maple and oak covering the hillsides, and a real crisp chill to the air, a chill that hasn't quite hit where I live now. Certainly, the mountains do often provide this idealized setting, making it a very pleasant reality, as this photo shows:
Despite glimpses like this, other scenes remind me that I'm not quite where I want to be. Fall is my all-around favorite season, so it's not surprising that I'm picky. When the mountains reveal scenes like this --
-- scenes that are admittedly very, very gorgeous--I can't help but also see how the shrubs and the land are just somehow different from the pictures in my mind. I am probably being overly picky in my fall foliage desires, and should try harder to be happy with the fall I have, not the nostalgic fall of my memories or my imagination. At least I have a fall to enjoy! But still - but still. As I go through the academic job search this year, I find myself checking out the potential for fall in the places to which I've applied, and I haven't limited myself to places where that idealized fall could be a reality again. Whether I ever get back to that kind of a place again, such as I enjoyed in relatively-rural New Jersey, in Boston, and in Western Massachusetts, I don't know, but I do know that I'd like that very, very much.
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!
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!
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!
This year December has just flown by. I cannot believe that Coffeeboy and I are leaving tomorrow to visit family for Christmas, and then to visit his family for a belated Hanukah and for New Year's. Is it really that far into December already?
Part of the disbelief, I think, has been caused by the weather. A week and a half ago, it was warm enough to go for a nice hike in our beautiful mountains. The clouds and the light combined to make for a truly eerie backdrop.
    Looks a bit like Middle Earth, doesn't it?This weekend, however, the weather took a turn for the colder, and although it didn't snow (like the forecast said it might) in my little town, on Saturday snow did dust the ground in Asheville where Coffeeboy and I went for dinner and a "Swannanoa Solstice" concert. I've been knitting and spinning a lot, realizing that the spinning has bitten into my plans for holiday knitting. But, I spun up the BFL from Jessica into about 220 yards. That's enough to actually make something with! The yarn was still quite unbalanced; I haven't quite figured out how to ply correctly. It also didn't work out to be nearly as many yards as I'd hoped; at only 220 or so yards for 8 oz, I think I made a pretty dense yarn. Oh well. I'll learn. And thank you all so much for your encouragement of the spinning! I don't have a picture, but I think last night I did get a balanced yarn! I experimented with some plain fiber of unknown variety, only spinning enough to cover a single layer on the bobbin, and then plied it together, this time really trying not to overdo things. It worked! Let's just hope that when I return to my wheel in January, things go as well and I remember what to do! Besides spinning, there has been a remarkable amount of Cobblestone, and remarkably little sock progress. Cobblestone has just a few inches of sleeve left before I join it all up for the yoke. Fun stuff! But now the crunch is on, and I need to finish those socks up before I can really focus on Cobblestone! Thankfully, I have until after Christmas for the little red sock, and the brown/blue socks are for Coffeeboy, so that is a bit more flexible as well. Now, the question remains, what knitting should I take with me this holiday trip? And how much work? I'll have 2 weeks worth of knitting and working and seeing family, so the question always returns, just how much is realistic? So many possibilities!
This past weekend - as promised - Coffeeboy and I took a hike to check out the foliage at Blue Ridge Parkway elevations (here, about 5,500 feet). Here's what we found (you can visit flickr for bigger pictures, and for more pictures):
The great blaze of autumnal glory isn't quite here yet. Bits of yellow leaves dusting the tops of trees, as if the hillsides were covered in a light coat of autumnal pollen.
 
(Isn't it interesting how the vegetation on the hill in the left photo there changes as one moves from one side of the ridge to the other?)
Beautiful fall wildflowers attracted even more beautiful butterflies. (Coffeeboy snapped that butterfly closeup; isn't it gorgeous?)
 
Shrubs change more quickly than trees, as you might be able to tell from these pictures. This includes the blueberry bushes, which still had a few hardened, only slightly juicy berries left on them. (Believe me, we looked, sampled, and marveled at how many berries remained).
And, oh yes, one hiker saw fit to break out the woolen socks. It was a cold morning, after all, so he thought maybe his feet wanted something a little cozier to wear for this hike. What better than trekking while wearing socks made of Trekking yarn?
On the dissertation front: I've finished a really official, penultimate draft of my dissertation proposal! This feels especially great because tomorrow, I'm heading off to somewhere between Boston and Providence to go to a wedding. The proposal has been sent to not just my advisor, but to several professors and a few trusted friends. I'll defend it in approximately a month, after they've had time to critique it, and after the proposal has had lots of time to sit on a shelf in the department, available for public perusal. Yikes. I mean, I know it's a public proposal defense, but thinking about my proposal hanging around in a public place all by itself, makes me very nervous. (How will I feel when I turn the whole thing in, then, I wonder?)
This weekend, we're off to Massachusetts - south of Boston - for a wedding. I'll be on and off the net till we get back, and when I do, I'll have pretty pictures of beads! And socks. Oh yes, more socks.
Yesterday, Coffeeboy and I decided to check out a weekly summer event in our new town - square dancing on a block of Main Street. Yes, it's really called that! It was quite fun to see!
Older folks, kids, middle-aged people, all tried their hands at the promenade and the doe-see-doe, while a crowd of onlookers sat in their foldable camping chairs and chatted or watched. We didn't dance - at least one of us would have had trouble remembering whether we were an "odd" or "even" couple. In front of the courthouse (that building with a steeple), a band played fiddles and banjoes for the music. It reminded me of nothing so much as, well, "A Prairie Home Companion," except in the mountains of the south, rather than among the Lutherans of the north. Looking north at dusk from the top of the hill.
We live sort of behind that white steeple next to the phone pole.
I've never lived in a small town before. Prior to this, my life has been either entirely suburban or in cities, the exceptions being two college towns that sported large universities of many thousands of people. This town has 7,000 or 8,000 people to its name, and its population is more affected by the comings in spring and goings in winter of Floridian retirees than by the migrations of 700-or-so students in the summer and fall. This should be a very interesting place to live! I mentioned that we'd hiked to see some waterfalls? Well, here they are: High Falls and Triple Falls! (Click to see bigger pictures at Flickr!)
It's amazing to live in a place with such natural beauty so close by!
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