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!

emerald shrug

Pattern: I used the construction of the Little Lace Shrug in Lace Style as a starting point. Basically, it's a knitted rectangle which is sewn into a tube for a couple of inches at each end, with a picked up border around the back and neck. I changed the stitch pattern to 'Openwork Diamonds,' I adjusted for my own gauge and sizing, and I added a ribbed border.
Yarn: Kaalund 2-ply Merino Lace in Camphor Laurel from One Planet Yarn, which is a deliciously springy lace yarn
Needles: size 6


Shrugs are slightly strange little garments, but I think I'll wear this one. I love it!! It's an easy way to inject some gorgeous color into an outfit, and it's lightweight enough to wear even when the weather is heating up.

For example, I took these photos when it was 93 degrees in the shade even, and there I was in the blazing sun. As I wanted the oleanders as my backdrop, I had to standing on our picnic table (now I wish I'd taken a full-length photo to amuse you!). My feet were burning. But my shoulders? Quite comfortable in their laceweight wool, thank you very much.

Happy Earth Day!!

To celebrate Earth Day, I'm announcing my new website: Green Knitter

I started working on this website a few months ago when I was trying to find reliable information on organic, natural, and eco-friendly yarns. I wanted a website with straight talk about the sustainability of different fibers and yarns. When I couldn't find one, I took matters into my own hands...

I hope you check it out! And I look forward to hearing what you think about it...

coffee as dye

Mountain Man recently handed me a pair of white linen trousers. He told me he never wears them, and he asked me to dye them. Yay! I love a dyeing challenge.

The reason it was a bit of a challenge is that plant fibers are much less receptive to natural dyes than animal fibers. They usually require a labor-intensive series of mordants, and even then they often don't come out with the same pleasing colors.

I decided to search for a substantive dye, which is one that requires no mordant. I thought about pecan hulls and tree barks, but I settled on the nearest one at hand: coffee. (A big thanks goes out to Mama Java's, our local independent coffe house, for collecting some grounds for me.)

Before I got to the main event, I wanted to do a little experimentation. I set up two dye vats: (1) one for the stovetop, with a conventional 1-hour simmer of dyestuff and 1-hour simmer of fibers, and (2) one for solar dyeing, with a 2-day soak of the coffee grounds and a 2-day soak of the fibers. I made mini-skeins of wool, handspun alpaca, and cotton yarns for each vat, and I added a silk skein to the conventional vat as well. The results:

Left to right: tussah silk, conventional wool, solar wool, conventional alpaca, solar alpaca, conventional cotton, solar cotton.
Overall, I was pleased with how the solar dyeing compared to the stovetop dyeing. It produced slightly lighter colors, but it was free, carbon-free heat.

I love the caramel color that came out on the silk and wool. You'll notice, though, that the cotton just came out looking dirty. Had me a bit worried for those trousers, but I tried them out anyways, solar-style (that was the lesson I took from the experimentation). And, reasonable success!
I did two rounds of solar dyeing on them, and they came out a light khaki color, a little warmer than it looks in the photo above. I had to agitate them in the dye pot (basically, plunging my hands in every couple of hours and giving them a good scrub) pretty often in order to get the color even. Both my hands and the fabric seem coarser after all that, but it was worth it. Now Mountain Man has a pair of pants he can spill coffee on with impunity!

handspun and a book

These past few weeks, I've often spent a bit of time spinning in the morning, after coffee and the New York Times but before I really start the day. I need to spin outside because I'm working with raw alpaca fleece with a fair amount of hay and dirt in it. And I need to spin in the morning because the rest of the day is now getting to be too hot. It's becoming a lovely morning ritual.


I'm experimenting with making different yarns, so I don't have much of any one yarn. But I have it in my mind to pick a special project to spin for. And to that end, I picked up a marvelous new book: A Fine Fleece: Knitting with Handspun Yarn, by Lisa Lloyd.

The patterns in this book weren't what I was expecting, but I fell in love with them. What I'd been expecting, and what would be useful for a beginning spinner like me, would be a book with many small projects that could help me figure out what to knit with what I've spun. What this book offers for the most part are intricately cabled sweaters (although it does have a few patterns for socks, hats, and scarves).

That makes the book less functional for my immediate purposes. But, but! I LOVE these sweaters. The patterns are full of symbolism and beauty, and the author's passion really shines through. She's very thoughtful in these garments. Every single one is shown in both a handspun yarn and a commercially made yarn, so that you can see how the texture changes (and so that you use these patterns even if you're not an accomplished spinner).

So, I'm very, very happy with this book. I would highly recommend this book if you're a cable fiend like I am! Now if only I could figure out what to do with these little skeins of my handspun ...

family members taking an interest

It's usually gratifying when a family member takes an interest in your craft. But that's not the case when it's your cat, whose interest involves eating your spinning fiber:


My god, this is one crazed cat. I'd been spinning by the picnic table on Sunday morning, and apparently I dropped a scrap of raw alpaca fiber.

Leila pounced on it, rolled over it, ripped it into bits, and seemed to be eating part of it.

This went on for quite some time, and I couldn't stop laughing. And then Mountain Man got a laugh out of at me, as I crawled around on the ground trying to get a good shot of her. The best part was that I'd been Andean plying, so I had some 30 yards of singles wrapped around my left wrist, attached to the spindle, which I couldn't put down during this exciting photo session.

But I had my own good laugh at Mountain man a day earlier. He'd just returned from a workshop in the UK and was trying to describe one of his colleagues to me.

She was wearing an interestingly constructed vest, a peasant skirt, some wild boots. He summed it up as: "She looked like a Rowan model."

Mwa ha ha. My plan to indoctrinate him into my knitting world must be starting to take effect ....

knitting in green

This is a beautiful season in Phoenix. Temps are in the low 80s; it's already too hot in the sun, but it's incredibly pleasant in the mornings, evenings, and shade. The citrus trees are blooming, the grapefruits are ripe and full, and the sky is clear and blue. Outdoor colors of the moment: green, yellow, and blue.


Knitting colors of the moment: green, green, green. I didn't realize this until I tossed my active projects together. They're all predominantly GREEN. Starting at the top and moving clockwise, there's a strange felting experiment in a green wool, a camisole in pale rosemary-dyed silk, the Primavera socks, and a new lace project in green laceweight merino.


The lace project is my obsession for this week. I love the yarn, which is Kaalund laceweight in 'Camphor Laurel.' The color is a gorgeous, saturated emerald with hints of blues.


It's going to be a delicate shrug, adapted from the 'Little Silk Shrug' pattern in Lace Style. I changed the stitch pattern to the more defined 'Openwork Diamonds,' and I'm probably going to add a ribbed edging like Cast & Bind's version.

Happy spring to you too!