mountain bliss

With Phoenix still hovering near 100 degrees, Mountain Man and I headed north for the weekend. Our destination was Oak Creek Canyon, a beautiful, forested area between Sedona and Flagstaff. It was gorgeous and rugged country.

For Mountain Man, the primary point of the trip was the rock climbing. For me, the deal was sweetened by the fact that chilly, fresh air is conducive to both the wearing and the production of knitted items. Here's an early morning snapshot from our campsite this morning, where I was happily doing both!

You may recognize the blue storm cloud wrapped around my neck. But the kerchief is making its first appearance here. I whipped it up a few months and am not sure how it fell through the blogging cracks. I actually get a great deal of wear out of it for rock climbing, gardening, driving with open windows, and so forth. It does the same thing as a bandana, with the extra panache of a hand-knitted item!


The yarn is Be Sweet's Bambino, a 70% organic cotton and 30% bamboo blend, in the color 'dark denim.' This is a company that I feel good about supporting, as it pays a fair wage to women artisans in South Africa. And the yarn? Lovely, soft, and substantial, with a bit of shine from the bamboo.

All in all, it was a very fine weekend. Mountain Man was blissed out by the rocks. I was blissed out with all the knitting time. And Isis? Well, you can see for yourself ....

Black Walnut Dumpling (bag)

When I was back in Connecticut late last month, I went on a walk in the park with my dad. We passed under some black walnut trees whose branches were heavy with walnuts, and I had my dad whack a bunch of them out of the trees with his cane!

It was a sweet and lighthearted moment, and I was happy to come home with those gorgeous, fragrant nuts. (Kitty took an interest in them, too)

I gave the hulls a good boil and a two-day soak, and then I tossed in a huge hank of wool yarn from my local market in Vermont. The yarn started out with one strand of white wool and one strand of gray. It came out as a warm, marled brown.

Now, about this time, I'd seen the dumpling bag in the autumn issue of Interweave, and I couldn't wait to cast on. I used size 10 needles since that's what I had. I made two other main adjustments: First, to make it more of a purse size, I added an extra increase row so that it was 80 stitches around. Second, instead of the handle in the pattern, I cast on provisionally, then picked up stitches on one side, knit two long strand of I-cord, twisted them, and kitchener stitched them to the picked up stitches on the other side.


Before felting, the bag was 12.5" wide, 9"deep from the V, and with a 20" handle. After felting, it was 11.75" wide, 8" deep, and with a 21" handle. Don't ask me how it ended up with those dimensions -- it should have felted down much more, and the handle should have gotten shorter, not longer! All I can guess is that I'd slightly felted the yarn during the dyeing. Something was definitely off, because my initial swatch -- which I'd done with a small swatch that was barely dipped into the dye -- felted much denser than the bag itself.


You can see for yourself how texture and color varied during the course of this project: (1) gray marled yarn, (2) brown dyed yarn, (3) big swatch unfelted, (4) small swatch felted, and (5) finished bag (note: those two swatches didn't start out at the same size, but you can still compare the texture).


All the same, I'm going to get a lot of use out of this bag. I've been using it as my purse for the last few days, with a kilt pin as a closure.

goodbye Vermont, hello desert

In the last few weeks, I found a dissertation topic, survived/celebrated a family wedding, said goodbye to my beloved Vermont, and drove the three thousand miles back to Arizona. It's been a scattered, whirlwind time. So, as sad as it is for me to be back in the desert, there's also a relief that comes with settling down again.

I spent much time knitting, but it, too, was scattered. Take these three shawls for the wedding. Two weeks before the wedding, the bride asked to borrow my wedding shawl. I happily and joyfully blocked it out and readied it for her. But I thought she might like to have a shawl of her own, so I set scurrying about to see what I could put together in that time.


My first idea was a storm cloud shawlette in a delicate lace yarn. I cast on with the silk/alpaca laceweight that you see in the top of the picture, but it just didn't work. Too light. And, doubled, too clunky. I probably wasted 8 hours of time on this project before I had to admit to myself it wouldn't work.

By that time, I had only one week left before the wedding. I overnight ordered the ivory mulberry silk that you see in the bottom of the photo. I designed another half-circle shawl to show it off. And it would have come out beautifully, if I'd only had enough time to finish it. Instead, in my haste I was splitting stitches and making beginner mistakes that I thought were a decade behind me. I couldn't pull it off in time. So now I have TWO unfinished, unnecessary shawls.

I did finish one shawl for myself to wear to the wedding. It's, of course, another storm cloud! This time in the silvery, sparkly kidsilk night yarn, which is a silk and mohair yarn with a bit of spangle thrown in. I'm not modelling it, though, because it displeases me.


I switched up the stitch pattern (from elongated garter to elongated stockinette) and it looks dreadfully boring. Blah color. Blah texture. To make matters worse, the shape has changed with the stitch pattern (I just thought I could block it any which way -- not true), so now it's too long and not wide enough, and that damn ruffle falls in a less proportionate place. Nothing worse than boring, except boring with a bad ruffle.

But I did have one success: simple ribbed hats for the bride and groom, as a reminder of their Vermont wedding. I went down to the Green Mountain Spinnery for the yarn, which was an excellent visit that I'll post about later. Here's a little aerial shot where you can see the beautiful texture and color well:


I knit matching hats for the happy couple, and they seemed quite appreciate. Success at last!

Seacolors

The most marvelous part of my trip to Maine - other than seeing my friends, of course - was our visit to Nanney Kennedy's farm. I first read about her in Shear Spirit and then tracked her down at Maryland Sheep and Wool, and that set the stage for this visit in Maine.

Nanney is an oracle, an incredible swirl of energy and movement, an extraordinary sheep farmer, dyer, spinner, knitter, thinker, activist, entrepreneur.

When we pulled up to her farm, she was up to her elbows in yarn, working all stages of her dyeing from the solar dye vats to the final rinse in an open-air bathtub.

Yarn rinsing in the outdoor bathtub. Photo by Kristen Von Minden

Everything was so vibrantly alive and intense: the colors of the yarn, the sparkling midday sun, the green pastures rolling down to the forest, and the conversation, which excitedly ranged from color theory to sustainable agriculture to the politics of information. The experience was almost surreal in its beauty and vividness.

Barn, with yarn drying. Photo by Kristen Von Minden

And I can't even begin to express how inspired I was by Nan's energy. Everything that she does -- from being an sustainable and politically active farmer, to developing her innnovative solar dyeing methods, to coordinating with local craftswomen to make sweaters and blankets, to starting up an internship program -- is infused with conscientiousness for her animals, her environment, and her community.

Daisy the donkey, protectively watching over the flock of sheep.

The visit got me thinking again about the ways in which we weigh different meanings of greenness - organic, sustainable, local, natural - and the degree to which these words capture the meanings we want them to. Her wool is no longer certified organic, but it's as sustainably-produced as you can imagine. Her dyeing isn't called 'natural' because she doesn't use plant-based pigments, but it incorporates mineral pigments and seawater and is incredibly low-impact. It really emphasizes, for me, how keywords are no substitute for getting to know your producers personally.


In the end, I can't imagine any yarn being more sustainably created. Oh, and did I mention how superlatively gorgeous and soft they are? If you're interested, you can find her Seacolors Yarn and Maine blankets on her website, Get Wool. Or even better, check out her show schedule (including Rhinebeck!) and see her wonderful yarn for yourself ...

Storm Cloud Shawlette Pattern

(This pattern is also available as a PDF document and as a French translation on aufildesenvies)

This airy, half-circle shawl is roughly constructed like Elizabeth Zimmerman's pi shawl. It's very, very simple and can be knit at any gauge and to any size. The two versions here - a plain one in gray mohair and a ruffled one in blue wool - can be worn draped over the shoulders like a small shawl or wrapped around the neck like a scarf.



Here's the intuition behind it (more specific instructions are below): You start with four stitches, which will be in the center of the half-circle. The shawl is then shaped and enlarged by doubling the stitches at increasing intervals. For the stitch pattern, I've used an elongated garter stitch; on the right side, you always do a row of yarnovers, and on the wrong side you usually knit the knit stitches and drop the yarnovers, except when you need an increase row, when you knit all the way across.


Materials:
-Fingering weight yarn, at least 150 yards (For the grey version, I used about 150 yards of handspun mohair. For the blue version, I used about 210 yards of wool dyed by the Northeast Fiber Arts Center).
- Size 8 circular needle. Length doesn't matter too much.

Gauge
With fingering-weight yarn on size 8 needles, I got 4.5 stitches and 6 rows to the inch. But this pattern will work with any gauge.

Size
The grey version is 36" wide and about 14" deep. The blue version has a ruffle added around the edge, to make it 41" wide and about 16" deep. Note: I did not block these!



Pattern
Cast on 4 stitches
Row 1 and all odd rows: K1, [yo, K1] to end
Rows 2, 4, 10, 20, 38, and 72: knit across (this doubles the stitch count)
All other even rows: knit the knit stitches and drop the yarnovers

The best way to remember where to put the increase rows (i.e. Rows 2,4,10, 20, 38, and 72) is to count the number of plain garter ridges between them. The first two increases have no plain ridges between them. The next two have 2 plain ridges, then 4, 8, and finally 16.

For the grey version, I bound off after that 16th plain ridge, which is to say after row 70. For the blue version, I did the final increase at row 72, then knit 12 more rows (still in the elongated garter stitch pattern) for the ruffle. The more rows you knit after that last increase, the less pronounced the ruffle will be.


Use a flexible bind-off, or at least bind off very loosely.

I didn't block either of these shawls, because I like the texture as is. But you could block if you wanted to make the elongated garter stitch look lacier.

Blue Storm Cloud

As I come into my last two weeks back east, I'm traveling quite a bit to see friends before I go. Montreal. Connecticut. Now, Maine. I love the earnest classic-ness of this place


And it's fitting that I brought along my new blue Storm Cloud to photograph by an ocean inlet. This one is a little larger than the first one, with a pronounced ruffle that makes it gives it real kinetic energy.


The yarn is about 200 yards of a lovely fingering-weight wool, hand-dyed by the good folks at the Northeast Fiber Arts Center in Williston, VT. I stopped there one the way home from a fantastic trip to Montreal to see Kim, who used to be in my knitting group in Phoenix. It was a pleasure to visit someone I could "talk knitting" with, and a treat to find this yarn on my way home.

I immediately cast on when I got home, and I was finished in a few evenings' worth of knitting. I love this simple pattern. And I'll have it posted for you in the next day or so, now that I have photos and measurements of two of these small shawls.

Storm Clouds

This last week in Vermont has been full of misty mornings and magnificent thunderstorms. I wish I could paint the the mist nestling around the white pines, or the clouds rolling, dark and tumultuous, across the sky. But as my medium is fiber, what I did was knit myself a little storm cloud to wrap around my shoulders.

This was the first garment that I knit out of my own handspun. I started with 3.5 ounces of silvery kid mohair from an angora goat farm in Connecticut. It was drum carded, which loosened up the locks, but I still flick carded the whole batch to align the fibers and sort out second cuts and fiber tangles. Here's a handful of fiber to give you a sense of it:

I spun it on my spindle over several weeks into into a fingering weight, Andean-plied yarn. It took me a while to figure out how to get those silky, slick fibers to behave, but I ended up with about 150 yards of usable yarn. I had half a dozen small hanks - like this one - and I used Russian joins to seamlessly weave them together (Andean-plied yarn works well with Russian joins, because one end of each yarn strand already has a tidy loop)

Since I wasn' t sure how much of a wrap I'd get out of that yardage, I wanted something that I could knit until the yarn ran out, and that would be usable at any size. I settled on a half-circle shawl in elongated garter stitch, constructed along the lines of Elizabeth Zimmerman's pi shawl. It's just big enough for a traditional shoulder shawl (I'll never wear it this way, but it shows off the size):

I prefer to wear it wrapped asymmetrically around my shoulders. For the time being, I'm fastening it with a spiral pin that I improvised from galvanized steel wire. I'll be keeping my eyes out for a lightweight pewter pin - let me know if you have any suggestions!

This shawlette is also the perfect size to casually nestle around my neck. This is where the mohair really shows off its special qualities: it floats like a cloud and creates the most luscious, airy layers rather than just sinking into a mass. So, I do feel like I've reached up to the sky and grabbed a stormcloud to cloak myself in!

I promise a pattern in the next post ...

memories of sheep

In the end, I won't really be writing about my trip to Wales. It was such a whirlwind of a reunion that there was hardly time to sleep, let alone knit or yarn-seek. But, it being Wales, I did get to see some sheep and evidence thereof.


I used to walk along here a hundred times a day, since this pasture is right in the center of campus. The lambs would frolick here in the spring and then fatten up and settle down over the year, and they are such a part of my memory of the place. It's curious that I never asked what became of those sheep; clearly, I wasn't a knitter in those days!

London & Loop!

In London here. I popped across the pond to come to a school reunion in Wales, and I have a few delicious days in the city beforehand. All I want to do here is walk, walk, walk! and observe things and reacquaint myself with this city that I used to know. And, of course, visit yarn stores along the way.


The premier destination of yesterday's 8 mile walk was Loop. It's a darling and colorful place with beautifully composed scenes tucked about: a collection of vintage buttons in apothecary jars, a basket of knitted dolls, swatches hanging as a garlands, and pom poms strung up in the windows.


I picked up four skeins of Rowan's purelife yarn, which is a naturally-dyed organic cotton that I've been coveting and which was on sale there. My plan is to make a simple camisole, like my green one from last week. Of course, this being my London yarn, it had to be a steely gray. But I'll stripe it with bit of pink.


Next stop was the famous Liberty store. I marveled at their fabrics and Rowan selection, and I found a sweet cotton ribbon to match my gray and pink yarn.


The last treat for me came in the post. I've been hankering for Garthenor's organic wool yarns ever since I came across them in my Green Knitter research. I ordered a hat's worth of their DK Loghtan Sheep yarn, and it came promptly in the mail to my friend's flat here.


Another time I'll tell you about trying to track these four-horned sheep down on the Isle of Man, which is why I have a special place in my heart for this rare wool. This yarn - and this place - is a wonderful trigger of memories.

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!