camping with yarn

I spent a couple of days this week camping, hiking, and birdwatching with a dear friend. We were primarily in Madera Canyon, a birdwatching hotspot south of Tucson. It's at reasonably high elevation, so it's forested, cool, even a bit snowy in places. Such a breath of fresh air!

I mostly was just getting in a few rows by the campfire in the evenings (all my yarn has a woodsmoke aroma now!). The last morning, though, I let my friend go on a birding walk alone, and I took the hour by a pond to just listen to the morning birds and catch up on some fiber arts. Here's what my backpack looked like:


The pink is a new hat I'm working on in Nature's Palette organic worsted wool, colorway 'Owl's Clover.' The camel-colored fiber is a lovely, straight-off-the-animal alpaca fleece that I got from a local alpaca farm. I'm spinning it up into a fingering-weight 2 ply on that there spindle.

The hat was meditative. Stockinette stitch in the round. I don't even have to look at it while I knit, so it was the perfect accompaniment to bird-watching...