Heidi knits a preppy top

Mountain Man and I visited friends in some serious mountains over the weekend. It was glorious: snow-topped peaks,meadows of alpine wildflowers, intense blue skies and glacial lakes. When I pulled out my knitting on the 12,000 foot pass, I felt like a modern-day Heidi!


In case you're wondering, modern-day Heidis knit themselves preppy little tube tops. Here's what I was working on, all finished now in Vermont:


Yarn: Knitpicks' Shine Sport in 'grass,' 3 balls
Needles: size 5 bamboo circular
Pattern: improvised -- just a stockinette tube with 1x1 ribbing at the top and bottom and ribbon straps.

The story behind this is that I received 3 skeins of Shine sport from Studio Knit, as part of an awesome prize that I won on her blog (also included: spinning fiber from Hanks in the Hood). I loved the color and immediately started planning a top that I could finish in just 3 skeins.


Initially, I thought I'd make a lacy camisole. But my lace swatches looked so unbearably bulky. And, frankly, I find those lacy camisoles kind of annoying to wear. (In my mind, the whole point of a tank top is to have a lightweight garment, so I find it bothersome to have to layer them.)

So, a tube top it was. It took a few false starts to get the sizing due to the incredible stretchiness and drape of the fabric. In the end, I decided to forgo waist shaping because I realized that as I wore the top, the fabric would stretch downwards and the waist could move. The solution: I designed it to just fit my waist and have negative ease elsewhere. Worked like a charm! And to finish, I sewed some simple straps out of matching ribbon.


I feel pleasantly preppy in this little top, mostly because it matches my high school color (girls' boarding school in Connecticut -- can't get much preppier than that!). The clean lines and grosgrain ribbon help, too. :)

In the swatching stage

When we left Arizona, I carried with me enough yarn for six projects: thee pair of socks, two camisoles, and a pair of gloves. I figured I'd find some lovely Vermont wool this summer, but my overall goal was to go home with less yarn than I brought here.

Fat chance!! To my credit, I did finish the Sea Wool and Jitterbug socks on my drive. But thanks to Webs, my local farmers' market, and one contest I won through WiKnit (more on that in another post), I now have enough for eleven projects! And that's not even counting the spinning fiber. So, I'm swatching and trying to get on the ball with a few projects.


That's farmers' market wool for a baby sweater and a felted bag, organic cotton and Fleece Artist flaxen for the camisoles, unbleached linen for a grocery bag, and Shine for a little tank top. I don't know what your swatches tend to look (tell me! I'd be curious), but mine usually turn into these long, strange rectangles because I'm trying out so many stitch patterns. I start with garter stitch and some stockinette and then move through cables, lace, seed stitch, ribbing, etc. Some of the swatches in the picture above are a foot long!

From those swatches, I've got three projects on the needles. And I should have some FO's to show off soon enough ....

Roadtrip Part 3: Vermont!

How I love Vermont - its forested hills, clear lakes, cattails, pale blue skies, and, above all, its wild and enveloping GREENNESS!!


I had a fantastic drive through thunderstorms to get here last week, with a few yarn detours. In Connecticut, I visited Tranquil Morning Farm for silky kid mohair and maroon alpaca for spinning. In Massachusetts, I stopped at Webs, where I found Blue Sky Alpacas sportweight and a cone of Louet unbleached linen -- green yarns at excellent prices. (I also met Cirilia, who was gracious and good-natured about having a stranger say "I know you from your blog!")


I ran out of time to stop at the Green Mountain Spinnery in southern Vermont. But the next day, I found myself some lovely, minimally processed and naturally colored wool yarn at a farmers' market. So, now I'm happily settled into my family's cottage for the summer with plenty of yarn to keep me busy. Isis is pretty blissed out, too.


In other knitting news, the end of our cross-country adventure brought the finishing of Mountain Man's socks. Here are the details: 2.5 mm needles, Colinette Jitterbug yarn, figure-8 cast on at the toe, garter rib stitch, short row heels. Simple but with a subtle texture.


I'm pretty happy with how they turned out -- and Mountain Man says he loves them -- but I was displeased by the yarn. After the glory that was Fleece Artist Sea Wool, the Jitterbug felt like icky string to knit with. I will say that it makes a nice, hard-wearing fabric once knit up. But here's the real kicker: one skein of Jitterbug is not enough for a pair of mens' socks.


I planned to get a skein of plain sock yarn to finish the socks with a ribbed cuff, but Mountain Man says he likes them as is. So that was the end of that. And it's probably time to wrap up this post, too! I'll leave you with a photo of a painted turtle that I caught at the end of the lake, among the cattails and waterlilies. Everything about this place is so beautiful!

Roadtrip Part 2: Back East

From Taos, we drove north through stormy weather into the eastern edge of the Colorado Rockies


We took a deep breath of mountain air and then headed east across Kansas, with its straight roads


and even straighter horizons. If it weren't for my knitting and NPR podcasts, I might have gone mad.


Every now and then, we'd see a billboard for yarn stores. I'd never been anywhere where yarn was so important that it'd be advertised so broadly (note: most of the other billboards in Kansas were either fire-and-brimstone religious messages or ads for adult stores, though, so I can't say that all their signals were right).


Then it was on through Missouri. The weather gave the landscape a beautiful, soft, painterly feel

when we could see through the rain, that is! The midwestern storms were so nervewracking that I couldn't even concentrate on my knitting!

Anyways, from there we went on through hilly West Virginia and Kentucky. Isis was all smiles to find sunny weather and a lake to swim in

And I was happy to see the rolling, green, pastoral Appalachians.


We finally started taking it easy when we got to Washington, DC, where we took a few days to rest up and visit family. My sister brought us to a lovely outdoor jazz concert in the National Gallery's sculpture garden. Perfect knitting time. Here's Mountain Man showing off his new sock, while I work on the second one. Imagine jazz floating through and enlivening everything up!

We took a few tourist photos as we walked around the capital, but I think they were much improved by a sock monster. Raaawwwwrrrr

And then we got our manners back together and headed up to Connecticut. Here's the rose garden in Elizabeth Park, just down the street from where I grew up in Hartford. It's lovely to be back!


Next up: it's on to Vermont, and I'll have photos of the finished socks. Still a few inches yet to go ....

Roadtrip Part I: Taos

Mountain Man and I are on the road again, driving across this country to spend the summer back east. Our first day took us to Taos, New Mexico, with its rugged plains and snowy mountain peaks. After the blistering heat of Phoenix and an 11 hour day on the road, it was bliss to find ourselves in this high country, with air perfumed with sagebrush and rained-soaked soil.


While in Taos, I finished the first and perhaps only item of the trip: a pair of socks in Fleece Artist Sea Wool, colorway 'Nova Scotia.' Here they are in the bright sunlight the next morning (and if you peer carefully, you'll see Isis wandering in the background).


These socks may be what finally turn me into a sock knitter. The yarn, which is a blend of wool and seaweed-derived lyocell, was marvelous to knit with. It's soft but durable, gorgeously painted, and pleasantly thick for a sock yarn.


I made the pattern up as a I went along, using the magic loop method on a 2.5 mm (I think) circular needle . I started with a figure-8 cast on at the toe, increased to fit the width of the foot, and then added a subtle slip stitch pattern (I slipped every 5th stitch every other row). I did a short-row heel on slightly more than half the stitches. And then I just kept knitting until it was my desired length. It was simple and meditative, and the fit is divine.


The other major excitement of Taos is that the friends we were staying with were friends with an alpaca farmer. We had a great visit to the farm, Phi Beta Paca, which could not have had a more beautiful location.


In addition to the alpacas, they raised angora goats and one lumbering Dorsett sheep. It made for a wonderful, spirited menagerie.


I love Taos, and I hope to be back before long. Any Phoenix knitters up for a road trip to the Taos Wool Festival this October?

Vinnlands!! (and flood irrigation trivia)

Yay, yay, they're finally finished! The process seemed to go on forever: I dyed the yarn in early December, picked out the pattern and knit the feet when my sister visited for Christmas, measured and turned the heels when I visited her in March, and finally finished them now in June. But it was so worth it to have such a FABULOUS pair of socks for my sister.


Here are the details....
Pattern: Vinnland Socks
Yarn: Henry's Attic Treadsoft, which I dyed a semi-solid red with kool-aid (color is much deeper and richer in real life, but I desaturated these photos a little so that you could see the stitch pattern better -- red is very hard to photograph!)
Needles: size 1 circular using the magic loop method
Modifications: Instead of a short-row toe, I used a figure-8 cast on (tutorial here). I think I added a few stitches for width. I did the short-row heel using a no-wrap method (tutorial here). And I used plain ribbing on the back of the leg.


I love the central vine motif and will undoubtedly use it on socks again in the future, although I think next time I'll find a slightly thicker yarn and go up to 1.5 needles. I'm really not so refined that I need to knit on size 1s.

Now, you may notice something strange in the pictures above. I'm standing on a picnic table, but that's not the strange bit (it gets the best light). What may strike you as unusual is that our yard is flooded to several inches. You see, our little 1940s ranch house was built in a grapefruit orchard, and our neighborhood still retains the flood irrigation rights. Eighteen times a year, we open up the pipes at the front of the yard, and we get water flooding out for an hour and a half. Here's a full shot of what the backyard looks like during a flood irrigation:


We do feel guilty about this water use. But doing a deep watering every few weeks is more efficient than a sprinkled watering every few days. And we've tried to make productive use of it by planting lots of fruit trees around our yard: valencia and blood oranges, meyer lemon, tangerine, apples, apricots, fuyu persimmon, and black mission fig in addition to the mature grapefruit and pecan trees. Anyways, this was a curious thing to encounter when I moved to the southwest, and I hope you enjoy getting a glimpse of it!

Colinette in Connecticut

I spent a delightful week in Connecticut, visiting my parents and dearest old friends. One of those friends had a birthday. And I knit a fantastical collar for her ....

(I swear, she must have been laughing at a great joke I told, not the collar)

It's a little strange, but I love it! What a big, bold piece to wear over a dark jacket in the depths of winter. Much more modern than a scarf, and a good windblocker to boot. There are lots of ways to wear it, with different effects.


Rachel was a great sport, gamely putting up with this extensive modeling session. The fact that we were visiting a Connecticut vineyard, and had just finished our lovely wine tasting, may have assisted in this matter. I think I timed it well.


Oh! And I suppose I should share the details ...
Yarn: Colinette Shimmer 5 in 'Fire,' every last inch of 2 skeins
Needles: 10.5 bamboo straights
Pattern: improvised!

Red Socks & Red Rocks

Mountain Man and I went rock climbing in Sedona last weekend, and I toted along the Vinnland Socks. I fully expected to have them finished by the end of the weekend, but the intensity of the climbing and the sun left me too exhausted (and stiff-fingered) to knit. So, all I've got is 1.75 socks to show you.

They're shown off in front of Queen Victoria Spire, which is the spindly, 220-ft formation in the right background. It looks small compared to the socks, I know. But it was a spectacular climb, and more than a little scary with the whipping wind, the crumbly sandstone, and the vertigo-inducing looks down.

We got to the top just before sunset and got a breathtaking view of Sedona. In the rosy light of sunset, the red rocks looked almost - almost! - as red as these Vinnlands.

a sweet moment

Here is a knitting moment that I'd like to capture: taking refuge from the heat of the afternoon, reclining on the sofa, kept company by my napping kitty cat.


Other small thoughts run through my head now that I look at this picture.

My cat is most often portrayed on this blog as eating my fiber, tangling my untangleable mohair, chomping my needles, and generally being a troublemaker. Along these lines, you may notice the puncture wound on my left hand in this picture, which is her gift to me from a recent 'playtime.'

But I think I've been unfair. Ninety percent of the time she's an incredibly sweet and affectionate girl, and I'm glad that I could show that in this picture. Especially since she's had such a tough week (the mockingbirds have been terrorizing her, and I keep seeing the poor girl running headlong across the yard with a bird buzzing at her tail).

The other notable thing about this picture is that I'm actually knitting with straight needles! OMG! This amazes me. The last time I knit with such needles was in spring 2000, a full eight years ago. That's when I discovered circulars, and I haven't touched the straight ones since. But I will say that they have a nice nostalgia to them, and it makes for smooth knitting when you don't have to slide stitches over a join.

One-shoulder tunic

My fresh-off-the-needles tank top makes me feel like I'm wearing a dramatic Grecian costume, as if I were in a Martha Graham dance.*


And I love it! It's knit from a handspun, rosemary-dyed silk yarn from Avril in Japan, with a cottony texture that suggests tussah or muga rather bombyx silk.

The construction is based on the One-Shoulder Tunic in Teva Durham's Loop-d-Loop. Her pattern used ribbon tape on a size 13 needle; I was using a much lighter yarn on size 5 needles, so I had to change the pattern considerably to adjust to my gauge.


In addition, I added a few inches of crochet to the bottom to keep it from curling, and a few rows of crochet to widen the strap and stabilize the top edge (I might even go back and add a few more rows in the future). I could've added waist shaping, but because it already had some negative ease I didn't think it was necessary.

Martha Graham was my high-brow cultural reference for this project. I have a low-brow reference as well. Do you remember the song that never ends? Back when I was a kid, singing that song was a sure-fire way to be annoying. Similarly, it made for an annoying theme as I knitted this top: "This is the knit that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends. I guess I started knitting it not knowing what it was, and I'll continue knitting it forever just because..."


It took me forever to make this, because I was working with a yarn that was an unknown (and stretched a bit) and because the strap fitting was a bit tricky. I had to do the strap and top inch three times, at 2 hours each. I had to do the bottom crochet three times, at 2 hours each. It became a joke at my weekly knitting night that I was still endlessly working on it. But all's well that ends well!

*I love modern dance and took Graham classes for years, so this was the first thing I thought of when I put on this tunic.

Maryland Sheep & Wool Roundup

Ah, Maryland Sheep and Wool. Marvelous animals, gorgeous yarns, and kindred fiber-minded spirits.

The highlight for me was meeting Nanney Kennedy of Seacolors yarns . She's a dynamo, who raises her own sheep and solar dyes her yarns, with seawater as a mordant (get a wonderful glimpse into her world with this little video). I was so excited to meet her because I'd been reading about her farm and dyeing in Shear Spirit, a new book that profiles life on ten US fiber farms.

It's a beautiful book, and I want to talk about it for a moment because it was kind of a theme for who I talked to at the wool festival. I got to meet and praise the photographer, Gale Zucker, who captured the farmers and animals in such a magical way. I didn't get to meet the author, Joan Tapper, but I would've sought her out if I'd had more time; her writing is rich and natural, and she has a wonderful way of drawing out the stories of these farms.

I've been savoring the book over the last couple of weeks, reading a few pages with my morning coffee and fantasizing about living such an authentic, rural, creative life. Makes me want to pack up, move back to Vermont, and find myself some alpacas and angora goats! Seriously! Look at their Shear Spirit blog and see if you don't start fantasizing too.


Anyways, after reading about Nanney in the book, I was incredibly excited to happen upon her at the wool fest. We had a great conversation about green knitting. I had to run off to the Ravelry meetup and, unfortunately, ran out of time before I could come back and buy some of her amazing yarn. I'll be back in New England for a good part of the summer, though, and I hope to make a pilgrimage to Maine to find her and her yarn there.

The other dyer that I'd read about in Shear Spirit and met at the festival was Jody McKenzie of Botanical Shades. She is a natural dyer who partnered with Tregelly's Fiber Farm in Massachusetts, although she's now moved to Maine. I bought some gorgeous naturally-dyed mohair locks from her, which were my sole purchase of the festival.

The only downside to the day is that I didn't leave nearly enough time to see it all. I'd completely underestimated the scale of the festival and its subsequent traffic, lines, and slow-moving crowds. The main casualty of this was the Ravelry Meetup. I showed up right on time to see Jess and Casey come in, where they were treated like rock stars (cameras, applause!).

(if you look hard, you can see them entering towards the left)

Since it was crowded and hard to circulate right then, I decided that I'd come back a bit later. But by the time I got back, hardly anyone was there and they were out of buttons. Drat! Next time I'll leave more time and strategize more carefully. I'm already planning for next year!

sheepsies

Everywhere I go, I seem to seek out fiber animals. I've been in DC for a few days, and even here I've managed to find some sheep. This was at Mount Vernon, which was George Washington's beautiful estate. Here's my sister just before she pet the sheep:


It was a good opportunity to give her a lecture (and you can guess how much she enjoyed it -- but she was the only one around to lecture!) about lanolin and fiber processing and why sheeps' wool is not the greenest fiber around. Ah, obsessions.

Here's me, getting a little lanolin on my hands:


There were two types of sheep. One of them had a curious, curly coat. Can anyone tell me what kind of sheep this is? I'd love to know.


As we'll be heading out to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival on Saturday, there will undoubtedly be more pictures of fiber animals coming soon. I'll be at the Ravelry meetup at 11:30 on Saturday - hope to see you there if you're coming, too.

And a last little note -- I've been getting more commenters than usual (thank you!) with the launch of Green Knitter. But more than half of the commenters are impossible to respond to, since their Blogger profiles are private or they don't include an email in their profile. If you haven't gotten a response, would you check your settings? Takk!