Overcome by fiber fumes

Sock Summit 09 started with a bang - the noise Paige's car makes when it is rearended and then pushed into a semi. So, 20 minutes before Roni was going to drive me to the train station on Saturday, we upended our plans, cancelled the train ticket, packed a bag for Roni & J, and drove the SUV to Portland instead so we could bring Paige and her kids back at the end of the weekend.

J didn't handle the drive down very well, "It's a long time. Why it a long time? Why we go such a long time?" Three hours of that. Oy. Four was almost the last birthday for him.

But we made it, picked up Paige from her sister's, were dropped off at the Convention Center, and entered into yarn bliss. Oh, the color! Everywhere, things to pet and covet. The marketplace was beyond fabulous.

I hadn't managed to get into any classes - 30,000 attempts to get into 5,000 spots crashed the server the day sign-ups started, but we were happy just to wander, fondle, and see the sock museum, knit some stitches on the world's largest sock, and talk to vendors. I really want another shot at the classes someday, however. All the wonderful knitting I saw "on the hoof" really made me want to learn.

The funniest part was at the end of the day when Paige and I laid out all our new treasures and were reminded yet again that we have definite color preferences. All my yarn was pretty much the same colors (though in amazingly beautiful variations) and her skeins also had a pretty clear similarity to each other. Green-red-purple dark tones for me. Blue-green-purple for her.

My one color anomoly was a 2 1/2 pound bag of alpaca/wool fiber that started as one brain of 10 oz. Then I added a second, cause they were only $10. Then Paige pointed out that that was silly-cheap, and why not get them all? So, I did. Luckily, the woman had only four left or we would have had to leave one of Paige's kids out of the car to fit in my fiber.

My treasure - only add four more skeins from the next day.

My budget melted down a bit, but every bit of it will get used! There are some fabulous woven scarfs, and lace knit wraps coming up in the future.




Paige's stash additions - also partial as she added more the next Marketplace session as well.



We sat in on the Luminary Panel on Sunday - amazing group of women, including the inventor of "ssk, " Barbara Walker. Imagine originating a stitch combo used thousands and thousands of times a day by knitters everywhere. Also, Judith MacKenzie McCuin who someday I will get to take a spinning class from, and Pricilla Gibson-Robers, who wrote Kniting in the Old Way which is helping me become brave enough to knit a sweater without a pattern telling me every single stitch to increase or decrease. Full list of participants here. Then we sang happy birthday to Elizabeth Zimmerman (it would have been her 99th), her daughter Meg Swanson (someday I will have the skill to make one of her sweaters!) and headed home.

When I talked to my uncle and told him that I'd spent the weekend at a sock yarn event, he said, "Was it some kind of assigned therapy?"

No one knows if there will be another Sock Summit - if there is Paige and I will be there.

The ride back was happier for J with Paige's kids to entertain him. It was very crowded with six of us and all the stuff they'd needed for a week's vacation (and the fiber) but we made it in, all the doors shut, and we got home. J didn't fall asleep until we hit our exit, at 10:30 p.m. Just like a grown-up! he said today.

Biking in the sunshine

Yesterday it finally felt like summer around here. Warm and blue and blooming flowers everywhere. We took advantage of the brief respite from grey and headed out on our bikes, driving first to Matthews Beach Park and then switching wheels and getting on the Burke-Gilman Trail into Seattle. Of course, this is us, so things didn’t go smoothly. We got started an hour (or two) later than we’d thought, bike helmets were forgotten or broken, we switched cars and bike carriers after getting everything loaded and then deciding it wasn’t secure. But we did eventually get pedaling.

From the trail we road into the U District for the street fair. I was underwhelmed by the offerings – I remember a lot more funky artists in previous fairs, and less mass-produced imports – but we got to eat street food and watch violin playing unicyclists and a rather frightening woman dressed entirely in grocery bags, so it was a success. J was ecstatic to eat a hot dog on a stick (corn dog) once we taught him to eat from the side, rather than jamming the pointy end deep into his mouth to bite off more.

J melted a bit in the heat, and we were way past nap time, so on the way back, he fell asleep in his bike seat. Not the most comfortable ride back for either he or Roni, as his limp leg kept slipping out of the foot rest to kick Roni in the back of the knee with each rotation of the pedal. And his poor little head had no where to rest so he was either bent in half or trying to slump onto Roni’s moving backside. It was pretty funny to watch from behind, once I decided it wasn’t likely his neck really would snap. He’s always had a talent for sleeping no matter how much noise or movement is going on, but this was a personal best.

Mom took a scary but recoverable spill when she bumped a curb, and Roni and J were almost wiped out by a right-on-red driver who didn’t slow or look at the crosswalk before whipping around the curve, but other than the near deaths, it was a lovely trip.

We rounded out the day by taking a spaghetti and salad dinner over to Tina’s to admire their new hardwood floors (so much more hardworking than us, they’re installing their own!) J was braver this time and was willing to bounce on the trampoline a little bit. And there is nothing better than his giggle when he’s chasing around with other kids! Melts my heart.

The rest of the weekend I devoted to spinning, continuing in my theme of ugliest-and-brightest-yarn-ever. Exhibit B is shown. (Exhibit A is in a lead lined box buried deep beneath a mountain to avoid it hurting anyone.) B has already been dunked in blue dye to tone it down to something a little less blinding. It is my first effort at long draw spinning, though I was using top rathe than roving so the results were mixed. Lots of underspun spots, and it would have been better navajo plyed to keep some of those colors apart. But I got better with the one handed part with the practice. I also made a calmer skein with my usually short draw method with some wonderful natural cream pygora B & silk top that I got from Paradise Fibers. Amazing stuff, and it smelled pepperminty the entire time due to a small vial of pepperment oil that the producer, Peppermint Pastures, include with the fiber.

Expanding my spinning

I am just an intermediate spinner - I'm getting better at being consistent, but I'm not yet able to intentionally choose a particular type of yarn weight I want and then produce it - still in the "let's see how this turns out" stage.

My usual style is sort of a modified short draw as I mainly spin with commercially prepared top, which results in a worsted or semi-worsted yarn. My goal is to learn to do long draw and make woolen fiber, but I'm not there yet.

Lately it has been fun to branch out into new (for me) types of fibers. I've been buying bits here and there and now that I've gotten the sweater yarn long term project finally about wrapped up, and freed up some bobbins, I'm starting to explore these new fibers. Yesterday was so beautifully sunny that I spent some time on the back deck with a bag of llama fiber. I have two colors of top, a cream and a pale tan/cream mix. Just 3.9 ounches, so I plan to spin the colors into separate singles and then ply them together and hope that I'll get enough yarn to knit something real.

The llama staple is longer than the Finn I've been spinning lately, but very soft feeling. It isn't as clean as I'm used to and there are bits of veg. matter in spots, but it is still easy to spin. I've heard that llama can be very dusty and that even pre-cleaned, the resulting yarn can use another bath when it is finished. The single so far is fairly thin, but I'm not managing to get rid of the occasional lumpy spot, which I wasn't getting with the Finn. Pretty sure it is me rather than the fiber, however. It is also a bit - hairy I guess I'd call it. I think this yarn is going to be fuzzier than what I've been spinning.

I've got lots more to play with - some merino/silk, pygora, and some baby camel/merino mix that I bought at the fair. Plus some blue faced leicester in natural and hand painted colors, and also the Jacob roving that I got at the fair. If only the pesky day job didn't get in the way of the spinning!

And then the spinning is getting in the way of the knitting. I'm not making a lot of progress on the many projects I have on the needles. Mom's cardigan is languishing because I'm afraid that it is turning out too big and I don't want to acknowledge the truth of it. My Aeolian shawl is coming along, but it is white and delicate so I couldn't drag it places like camping, which means I now have a camping-knitting lace scarf in a dark color to finish as well. And then there is the cable cardigan with the Roni-created stain that needs to be reknit partially, and the t-shirt strip rug for the bathroom that I'm reknitting in a different stitch, and that red sweater that needs sewing up and . . . and . . . and . . . I need to schedule some enforced project completion soon.

My Aeolian swal in progress. 2/31 yarn, 50% cashmere/50% linen from Colourmart. The thinnest yarn I've ever knit with! It really needs smaller than size 2 needles, but I was afraid that either the shawl would turn out too small, or I'd be knitting extra repeats for the rest of my life. So, it will be very open and airy fabris.

Spinning my wheels

I've been working off and on to spin enough wool for a sweater - time to break out of hat sized amounts of yarn! I was very happy with some goldish yarn that I'd made, so I tried to dye a big batch of Finn wool the same colors, but ended up with more and darker brown patches than I meant to have.

I've spun and spun and spun over the last few months, if we take that to mean every once in a while I got a chance to spin a little while J. was otherwise occupied. So the time span was long, but the spinning time was sparse! But now I have plied seven skeins of what seems to be sport weight wool.

And I don't like it.

I had almost convinced myself that I liked it and then a knitting friend visited and commented that it looked like 70s appliance colors. Harvest gold, wasn't it?

And now I know I don't like it.

Luckily, there is more brown dye in the world, and it will be going back into the pot. A more solid color will open up options for patterns anyway as I won't have to worry about the effects of variegated on the pattern.

But it seems like a lot of work to have done to make sort of ugly yarn!

These are the singles - I like them much better than the plied yarn. The gold stands out more than the brown in the singles. I still need to take a picture of the plied yarn.