weekend update

just a day trip, a wee excursion to Tom's Thumb


Mountain Man climbed


I did, too. but also got in a few stitches.


and here's what's shaping up ...


half-circle, lace edging. pictured with vibrant yellow brittlebush

too busy to blog these days. thanks for hanging in there!

city brights

Change of scenery ... flew back east for a work trip to Boston ...


And with all the travel -- planes, trains, buses -- I made good progress on that yellow shawl. It's a half-circle of stockinette with a wide lace edging, and I'm already on the lace section.


It's funny. I was never into yellow before. Never, never. I have tons of yellow yarn from natural dyeing, but there's a reason this sat in my stash for years! But now that me eye got attuned to it, I've kept looking for yellow everywhere. Street signs ....


Plastic chains along the sidewalk ...


Spray-paint on pavement ...


It has me feeling bright and sunshiny in the winter city.

refuge

We went to The Refuge last weekend.

We had beautiful weather. Blue skies. Sunshine. And the desert was beginning its spring bloom. Here's ragged rock flower (Crossosoma bigelovii), spiky and fragrant ...

and Mexican Manzanita (Arctostaphylos pungens), seen with the dramatic "Torch" rock formation behind it ...

The Sonoran desert is shockingly lush and green at this time of year, as winter is turning into spring. Moss and small ferns sprout in the shade of boulders. Grasses and green weeds carpet the desert floor. It's probably hard to imagine if you've only ever seen the desert in the heat of the summer, when it's bone dry and brown.

And though the nights get down to the low 30s, the days warmed right up in the intense sunshine. Here I am, taking a knitting break with Isis in the late afternoon (working with my yellow yarn!) while Mountain Man and his friend got in their last climbs on the high outcrop in the distance.

No photo of the knitting -- anyways it's just a semi-circle of stockinette for now -- but I'll leave you with the amazing jaggedness of a decaying juniper stump. I love collecting textures.

sunshine

Sometimes a blast of SUNSHINE is just what you need.


Or yellow yarn. That matches the Arizona sunshine and the yellow grapefruits hanging ripe and lush on the tree.


Honestly, I don't even like yellow usually!! I just happen to have a ton of yellow yarn from all my natural dyeing (this is sock yarn that I dyed with goldenrod back when I was living in Vermont, four and a half years ago).

I was in a mood recently when I suddenly needed a blast of its energy. So I put it on the swift (which is also homemade, and which also dates back to those Vermont days).


And wound it into a sunny orb of a ball.


Knitting to come ...

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!!