Welcome to Taos

As you may have guessed from the sagebrush and clear light of the last post, I'm not in Arizona anymore. Mountain Man and I are in Taos, New Mexico. And how I love this place, with its rugged, high desert beauty, its summer thunderstorms crashing through the big sky, its perfume of sage and pinon pine!

It's a landscape that really resonates with me (or should that be the other way around?), and I feel so blessed to be able to escape the heat and house-sit for friends here for a couple of weeks.

The knitting projects that I brought with me are all fittingly in blues and silvery sage greens. I didn't plan it that way. It just happened that I wanted to bring along some projects that had been stalled for a while, and the colors were serendipitous.


From left to right: first, a simple tank top in Hand Maiden Flaxen, which has been lying unfinished for over a year; second, that dreadful cotton smock that I'm going to frog and re-knit; third, a slinky one-shouldered top in Farmhouse Bamboo.

I'd love to have these all finished by the time we descend back to Phoenix.

lovely blue

After the debacle of my improvised smock top, it's good to watch something pretty roll off my needles.


This little beaut is Flower Trim Tank, knit up in Jo Sharp Desert Garden Aran Cotton. I modified the pattern to a smaller needle, larger gauge, and circular construction, which made for easier knitting but, unfortunately, trickier finishing and mistake-fixing.

It's basically a brioche stitch tube with a higher front. The smocking comes from stitching together the brioche ribs after knitting, which means you can very easily tailor it to your own proportions. My favorite part are the crocheted straps:


In other blue-hued news, I had a wonderful visit to Liesel Orend's Earth Arts dye garden and studio. She's lovely, friendly, and inspiringly talented. I brought home two skeins of indigo-dyed yarn: a wool single, to be made into a purse-sized Contemplation Pouch, and a merino/silk blend, for a lace kerchief.


She also sent me on my way with a handful of woad seeds from her garden. She has a veritable forest of these plants, dripping with lustrous purple-black seeds!


I'd love to get these to grow in my own modest garden, to make some of my own natural blue hues

Florida

Spanish Moss

Hibiscus

Sand and Seashells

Brioche Stitch at the Beach

Quick trip to Florida over the weekend. Basked in family, sun, and seashore. Sneaked in lots of knitting and will have a finished garment to show soon ....

a grave disappointment

It's really a bummer to spend 30-odd hours sketching, swatching, knitting, seaming, and finishing only to admit that you've created something that's monstrously unflattering.


The idea was for a top with a smocked upper chest and a loose, flowing body. The neck is high to keep a recent scar out of the sun. The back is low but echoes the same smocked cable panel.



Not a bad design in theory, but I waaaaay overestimated how much ease I'd need to make it loose and flowing. It's at least twice my circumference. And all the extra fabric eats the center cable, so that instead of intricate center detailing, I have a thick, lumpy faultline. If I could cut six inches of fabric out of each side, it would look more like this:


which is really more along the lines of what it was supposed to look like. The worst part of it is that I realized it was going poorly when I was just a quarter of the way into the project, but I kept going because I irrationally hoped that it would drape alright once it was all sewn together.

As I see it, I'm left with four options: (1) steek to remove the center panel, (2) steek to remove fabric from the sides, (3) frog and reknit, and (4) burn the damn thing. What would you recommend? (because clearly, I am not shaped like this thing that I made)


Steeking cotton is theoretically possible, but it's not easy when you don't have a sewing machine, and it would leave me with some strange shaping and possible a ruined tangle of yarn. Frogging is heartwrenching, but at least I know I could turn it into a wearable garment. And burning would at least be a spectacle to remember.

Sigh.

so close!

Gorgeous day climbing in Isolation Canyon. I thought I'd have a finished project to show you -- that improvised top that I thought I was nearly done with a month ago -- but I still have a couple hours of finishing left to do. I did bring it along on the climbing trip today and was steadily seaming it up between climbs.


I really do mean to show more progress shots of my projects, but it's hardly worth it by now, when it's so achingly close to being finished ....

happy socks

Well, by golly, these were the fastest socks I've ever knit. It usually takes me f-o-r-e-v-e-r to finish a pair of socks. Years. Or at least a cross-country drive. But these were finished in just over a week. Happiness!


The trick was that they were the simplest socks I've ever knit. Toe up, stockinette foot, short row heels, 3x1 ribbed legs, 1x1 ribbed cuffs. I made them up as I went along and didn't even worry too much about getting both feet exactly the same.


It was a much-needed lesson in how keeping things simple means that I actually get things done. Now, if I could only apply that to my dissertation, I might get somewhere!

Now, I bought the yarn -- Mind's Eye merino/tencel in "Oceanic" - to commemorate my trip to Cambridge, the defense of my dissertation proposal, and the amazing blue skies and green leaves that marked the day and season. To me, these colors are just so east coast.

But when I got back, my friend Amy and I went peach picking down in Queen Creek, and we drove by this beautiful field. It was a good reminder that it's not all dust and rock down here. My beloved blues and greens are here, too.


And one last delightful story: Mountain Man and I had a fantastic weekend on Mt. Lemmon with thorny desert girl. I'd been reading her knitting blog for sometime before I realized that she's a geologist, as is her boyfriend, and that he also happens to know Mountain Man. We finally all connected in person, and it was a perfect coming together of worlds: knitting, rock climbing, geology, and big dogs.

Green leaves, blue sky

Green leaves, backlit against a blue sky. It's one of the most lovely and peaceful views in the world.


I snapped this photo last week on a visit to Cambridge, which was a tremendously stressful and sleep-deprived trip to defend my dissertation proposal. When it was all over, and I walked out into the perfect, sun-streaming, blue sky day, I kept thinking how I wanted to forever capture that feeling of strength and harmony with the world.


I walked up to Mind's Eye Yarns, where I found the a skein of her wool/bamboo sock yarn in luminous sky blues and grass greens. I've made good progress on a pair of simple socks. When I wear them, I'll remember the beauty of that day in Cambridge.

After Cambridge, I headed up to Vermont for the weekend, where I got a good dose of family, woodsmoke, pine sap, maple syrup, cold water, lilacs, and lily of the valley. It's heavenly. So heavenly that it makes my heart hurt when I think about it.


Anyways, it's been a whirlwind few weeks of travel, and I'm looking forward to being relatively settled for a little while.

desert blues

Well, I'm back in Arizona. Back to the big blue skies. The hundred-degree heat. The wide open spaces and the long driving distances.


Over the weekend, Mountain Man and I joined some friends in the Chiricahua National Monument, which is one of the "sky islands" southeast of Tucson. It's a gorgeous and rugged place, almost unworldly, with these wild pinnacles rising high above the desert.


We took the scenic route there and back, giving us a solid ten hours of driving over the weekend. Between that and the quiet camp mornings, I thought I'd finish my current knitting project, but it was not to be. So, here's just a snippet of a progress shot for now:


And after all that blue, wouldn't your eyes like a shock of another color? I'm happy to oblige with an Engelmann's prickly pear flower, shining in the midday sun.

spring blossoms and knitting memories

I stole a few days in DC this past week to visit my sister. It was glorious: my chance to drink in a real, honest-to-goodness East Coast springtime. The air carried the perfume of cut grass and honeysuckle. The sky was blue, except when it was raining, when it was gloriously gray and wet.

And my soul got its fill of spring flowers: catnip, azaleas, peonies, buttercups, irises, wisteria



Gorgeous!!

There was a bit of knitting content snuck in during the week, too. We stopped at Knit Happens in Alexandria, which is one of the sweetest knitting stores I've ever visited, with an impressive array of organic yarns. And, of course, I was knitting on planes, trains, and automobiles.

I'm thinking very fondly of the drive back to the airport this afternoon. My sister was driving. I was riding shotgun and knitting. We sang and sang the whole way, me singing the melody and my sister singing harmony. It was a beautiful moment.

Contemplation

The Contemplation Pouches pattern is finished! Here's how I describe them in the pattern: "I knit these bags to carry the essentials on my meditative morning walks. They’re seamlessly knit in eco-conscious yarns and embroidered with symbols of mindfulness, nature, and flow "


I made a conscious effort to use environmentally-friendly yarns for both the main color and embroidery:
Green: Fleece Artist Lanica and Ever Green Yarns Organic Worsted (both are organic merino, naturally-dyed)
Brown: Cascade Eco-Wool (minimally processed, undyed wool) and Earth Arts (naturally dyed wool)
White: Pakucho (organic, colorgrown cotton) and Be Sweet Bambino (organic cotton blend, from an awesome women-owned South African company)

The pattern is available for purchase (at a very reasonable $3!) over at Ravelry. Alternatively, you can email me at evergreenknits@gmail.com to buy it directly from me.


The winners of the free patterns from my contest (thank you for your patience!) are:
todayandeveryday, Eve, TheRaven, Vickie, and AmIAKnitterYet. I'll be sending you all out a pattern pdf today! And thank you to everyone who took the time to leave me an Earth Day message.