Shelter Scarf, Part II: New Years

Wow. The last two weeks have passed in the blink of an eye. I've been sitting on this post all this time, weighed down by the burden of a deadline, never having the time to work out the words.

And what an adventure to share! For New Years, we drove west, west across the desert to celebrate the turning of the year in Joshua Tree ...


to bask in the sun, work our muscles, feel fingers on rock ...


That was Mountain Man, of course. And here's me, with my handknit, scarlet Cliff Dweller chalk bag:


We had plenty of sweet, quiet downtime in camp, too.


And on New Year's morning, I finally bound off the Shelter Scarf. Ta-Da!!


Very pleased with myself. I think this scarf is so damned cool and clever.


It's knit lengthwise, from one ribbed edge to the other, using horizontal cables that form interlocking circles.


Pattern to come ... someday. I have plans. But it'll be a while, I reckon.

Anyways, one more knitting anecdote from this glorious weekend. By the end of the weekend, I was worn out of climbing and intense sunshine. So while Mountain Man and his friend climbed one last hard route (Bird on a Wire -- they're tiny specks in the middle by the dark spot):


My friend and I stayed in the cool shadows of the valley. And I taught her to knit:


Long tail cast-on. Learned lightning-fast by nimble climbers' fingers.

Shelter Scarf, Part I: Christmas

This is the beginning of a scarf story. It begins with a ball of yarn. Brooklyn Tweed 'Shelter' in Button Jar, to be exact:

Actually, truth be told, it starts much earlier. Years back, in my pre-blogging days, I knit my father a cabled scarf for Christmas in soft, tweedy, pea green wool. At the time I wasn't even sure if he'd wear a scarf! But he loved it and wore it faithfully through many cold New England winters.

All good garments run their course, though, and this year it was time for a replacement. At first I set out about carefully reconstructing the original scarf. But this turned out to be impossible. The original yarn (Queensland Collection Kathmandu) had been discontinued. I couldn't find anyone on Ravelry who was willing to sell their stashed yarn to me, and the closest substitute turned out to have also been discontinued. So, I decided to try out Shelter, which is a remarkable yarn, woolen-spun in an historic New Hampshire Mill.

And try it out I surely did. I had to swatch nearly an entire skein of yarn before I figured out what to knit with it.

See, Shelter is a woolen spun yarn, which means that the fibers are all whipped up rather than aligned. It gives the yarn an amazing, lofty, pebbled texture. It's such a tactile pleasure to knit and wear, but it also brings challenges for cables or colorwork because you lose a lot of stitch definition.

Dad's original scarf (based on what I can reconstruct from photos) was knit in horseshoe cables and seed stitch in a sportweight yarn. It was understated and gentlemanly. But those slender cables and delicate seed stitches seemed to be swallowed up in the dark sproing of Shelter.

And that's why I ended up endlessly swatching, because I was putting this yarn through its paces, getting acquainted with it and learning about what did and didn't work in it. It was a fascinating process, but it gobbled up so much time that I couldn't actually finish Dad's scarf by Christmas. All he got was a narrow strip of fabric, all bunched up on my needles. It looked more like a snake than a scarf!

I'm nearly done by now, though. I worked on the scarf all through the Christmas weekend. Here I am, knitting in the Phoenix sunshine, with Isis snoozing in the grass behind me ....

To see what I ended up with, you'll have to wait for Part II of the story ....

Green Christmas

Christmas in Arizona doesn't naturally feel like Christmas to a New England native like me. The nights are chillier than you might think (down into the 30s) but the days are brilliantly sunny and warm. So I decorated the house in cool, crisp, whites and evergreens to evoke a more wintry land. I started with a handknit and felted white wool dove, nesting in the front door wreath ....

(It's my own design, which I made up after I was displeased with the other dove patterns on Ravelry. I meant to write it up and release it as a pre-Christmas pattern but ran out of time. Ay!)

When you walk inside the house, you enter into the living room. The right wall of windows look out onto a banana grove; admittedly, that's not very wintry. But we put up a Christmas tree, fragrant and piney. I decorated it in glass icicles, bells, and crocheted white wool stars.


Hung over the fireplace were the green felted stockings I made last year and white wool fabric stockings that I sewed for everyone in the family, decorated with green leather nametags and evergreen sprigs.


(Ay, again. I meant to share the pattern with you. I took photos and was going to put up a post with a pre-Christmas tutorial for the stockings, but I never found the time. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow just the same!).


On the tables were all kinds of woodland curiosities. Deer antlers. Fresh mistletoe, gathered from the mountains. And green Korknissser. A comical story: at some point during the holiday, someone in the family who was the last to bed found a half-finished bottle of wine that needed to be corked up, and they sneakily grabbed one of these for the purpose!


At the back of the room, perfuming the house were magnificent white stargazer lilies in a silver metal birch bark vase.


And towering over it all was the feathery owl tree topper that I made a few years back. It turned out to be just by the heat vent, and whenever the heat came on, the owl quivered in the airstream and looked liked it was flying. What a vision!


I hope that you all had a very merry winter holiday season! I feel like I have so many crafts and stories to share, but this has just been a terribly busy time for me. So, just a few snapshots for now and happy tidings.

crunch

Crunch time. At my desk, there's been a crunch of stress.


In the backyard, a crunch of leaves.



Up in the mountains, a crunch of snow.



There's much going on in this season to keep my hands busy with writing, raking, climbing, and crafting. Will write more one of these days when the crunch clears!

Ay, I'm falling behind! Late autumn is such a busy time for academics. Just catching up now on our Thanksgiving in Durham, NC. Though the highlight was undoubtedly the new kitten in the family, the rest of the visit was splendidly season.

Homemade Pie

Campus Foliage

Bare Branches

Postprandial Strolls

Recognize those shawls, by the way? They're the Lotus Shawls (lavender silk and white cormo) that I knit this past summer. We took the pattern photos in Duke Gardens ... one step closer to having the pattern on its way ...

cat & mouse

Thanksgiving. Traveled across the country to spend it with family, friends, and a Siamese kitten.

I knit him a mousie ...


And he loves it! He's been thundering about the house with it in his mouth, playing with it constantly, biting a hole in it that I've already mended, growling cutely when we try to take it away from him, and mewing when he's lost it under furniture.


My favorite game is to dangle the mousie by the tail and watch him jump and jump at it. He's a first-rate leaper.


And just look at those beautiful blue eyes!!

happy girl, sad doggie

Late November. The desert is cooling down, with chilly nights and crisp days. I finished up my green Open Studio late last week (in Malabrigo on size 6's), and it was just the thing to wear during a cloudy day climbing in the Refuge.


Isis had a good day, basking in the beauty around her. Such a sensitive beast.


The knitting that I'd brought along was yet another Open Studio hat, in the same rich brown wool as Mountain Man's sweater. I thought I could cajole Isis into trying it on. She was a good sport as long as I was there petting and reassuring her ....


But as soon as I moved out of the frame, it was another matter. A very serious matter.


Awwww.

Well aside from a few sad moments of puppy dog eyes, it was a glorious day. And as we drove out of the climbing country on rough dirt roads, we were treated to a beautiful sunset.


Such an amazing land this is!

greens

Back in Phoenix now. Had a few days of luciously cool weather.

raindrops on the citrus trees

kitty cat pondering the backyard

knitting weather

It's another Open Studio, this time in rich, green Malabrigo. It's a shorter one, a cap instead of a watchcap. I love it. And it's just screaming for a big pom-pom on top!

Open Studio (+ hat pattern)

Hats. One for my friend, one for me. With cables and ribbing and a turned-up brim for a warm, winters-coming watchcap.


The hat was designed for my friend Andrew. Sometime last January, we spent an evening sitting at the Cambridge Brewing Company, sketching out the hat elements that he'd like. In February, we crossed the river to Windsor Button to pick out a yarn, and he (in good, manly taste) went for Donegal Aran Tweed. In early March, I showed him some swatches, picked out a cable arrangement, and knit the body of the hat. But I didn't manage to finish it for him before winter ended.


I kept re-charting and re-knitting the top of the hat, but I couldn't get the cables and ribbing to come together in a way I like. So, I put the hat away for several months. And this month -- November 2011, nearly a year since we started this process -- I picked it up again, knit myself one in red, and finally finished his! I mostly finished it at a dinner party, then got up early the next morning and sewed in the ends just in time for an outing Andrew and I had planned: Open Studio day at the Vernon Street Studios in Somerville.


We had a marvelous time. We wore our matching hat and I smiled ridiculously the whole time. This particular studio belongs to Robert Puig Reyes, whose paintings really captured me and who graciously chatted with us and was even willing to take our picture. See: smiling!


The red one, by the way, was my way of reinvigorating my energy in this design project. It's knit in a handspun wool/hemp yarn that I picked up in Nepal years ago, when Mountain Man and I went trekking there for our honeymoon. It's a thick and thin, DK-ish, sturdy, single-spun yarn. Very rustic, a good match for the Donegal tweed.


When I was thinking of what to name this hat, I thought about something that geographically linked it to the Boston-Cambridge-Somerville area, because it was infused with such a sense of place for me. But that day at the artists studios, I realized that working on this hat was like giving my friend a behind-the-scenes tour of my design studio, so to speak. So, "Open Studio" it is.

If you'd like to knit one, too, you can download the free pattern from Ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/open-studio

High Autumn Splendor

soaring elms, cool morning sun

crisp golden russet apples

late season farmer's markets

colorful squashes

scarlet maple foliage

feeds my soul