Sheep to Shawl

As the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair (SAFF) gets closer, we are still looking for some teams to compete in the Sheep to Shawl competition on Saturday, October 22, 2011.  A friendly competition, but there is a bit of money involved - - $100 to the winning team.  Just gather 6 like minded individuals to card and spin a bit of yarn and weave a beautiful shawl.  All in a day in front of a healthy number of fans in the delightfully rustic sales arena of the Western North Carolina Agricultural Center. 

All it takes is one weaver and a pre-warped loom, 4 spinners with their trusty wheels & carders (including one drum carder if you like),  and an educational liaison.  That's a fancy word for announcer.  That lucky person gets to tell the crowd what is going on as the fleece is sorted, picked, fluffed, carded, spun, plied? and woven.  It should be plenty of fun, but we need you to join us!

Does your guild, school, yarn shop or even Ravelry group have a team of 6 individuals ready to step up to the challenge of transforming a fleece - carding, spinning and weaving it - into a beautiful shawl in just a few hours?

If so, please contact me!!  I am the demonstration coordinator at this year's SAFF.  That means I have been working with vendors to do fiber demonstrations at their booths as well as setting up craft schools to have a presence at the  Drop in & Spin or Knit or Crochet (I call it Drop In & Whatever), Drop in and Weave with one of the regional guilds and of course, Sheep to Shawl.

Please mark your calendar to join us at SAFF.  In center stage at the Sheep to Shawl or around the edges, cheering on your favorite team!

Coming Out of Hibernation

Only the blog has been hibernating.  I've been (in local parlance) covered up.  A few highlights...

Kitchen remodeling is mostly complete.  Cabinet knobs and a few minor issues remain (non-functional electrical outlets, but I am moving into my new kitchen and the rest of the house, but it's nearly done and I love it. 

The first picture is the view as you walk into the house.  The dining room wall is now green to better frame the mostly white kitchen and its orange accents.  Note the shiny wood floor.  There was oak flooring under those incredibly grungy tiles.  The best surprise of the project!

You'll also see new cabinets and appliances including the dishwasher (which I LOVE), a stove that heats up fast (the old extra slow stove has been moved to the (still non-functional) dye studio) and a counter-depth refrigerator with an icemaker.   I may not be in the 21st century, but I'm out of the 1950's!

Under-counter lighting, interesting tile work and a decent range hood make this a lovely kitchen.  It's not perfect, but on my budget, it's just fine. I now have a lazy Susan-equipped cabinet that gives me access to what was a wasted black hole, electrical outlets where I need them and a lovely space to work in.  There's more to it, but these are the best pictures.

Not having a kitchen for a month was annoying, but living on raw fruits & vegetables, yogurt, tomato sandwiches and roasted chicken from the grocery store left me 5 pounds lighter.  The garden was lovely and most of the produce was eaten raw, dehydrated or given away.  I spent a couple of quality hours last evening watering, weeding, picking beans and generally putting it back into shape for the cooler weather.  I need to shell about 3/4 of the 2 bags of Kentucky Wonder beans as they got WAY ahead of me.

On the fiber front, I finished and blocked 2 sweaters, made good progress on another, knit a few hats for the upcoming season and have spun a LOT!  I have gone to my spinning group most Wednesday evenings and have spun a good bit at home in the evening.  Not spending time cooking opens up time for spinning - a decent trade!

Because the kitchen stuff (and living & dining room stuff) had to go somewhere, the dye studio has been down.  After this weekend it will be back in force.  I have felting and spinning and knitting ideas and the right fiber colors are so important.  I need red!

The day job is also keeping me way too busy, but that's seldom blog fodder.  I think I'll keep it that way.

Random Monday

I've been doing a bunch of interesting stuff lately, but not exactly knitting-spinning-dyeing blog appropriate unless you have rather low standards.  Here are some random highlights...

1. I am hosting a meeting at work and tomorrow I have a bunch of my colleagues coming from around the country.  It's hot as blue blazes, but it's hot everywhere, and I can't do much about the weather.  August is hot.
2. The garden continues it's summer growth & I have to water it with city water, so the cucumbers, green beans, tomatoes & zucchini may be only a little cheaper than the organic ones at the neighborhood Whole Foods.
3. My 1940's era kitchen is being remodeled (Yeah!) so I can't cook.  The zukes are being dehydrated into zucchini chips.  The green beans are being given away if they are too big to eat raw
4. I will soon have a decent kitchen.  It is the last room that I have fixed up in my little 1920's house.  The electrician is there today.  Imagine: code!
5. I have been trying to finish a sweater I started 2 years ago.  I picked up the button bands 2 weeks ago when I was staying in a hotel with the air conditioning set to minus 0.  I haven't quite gotten around to sewing them down
6. Socks are smaller knitting projects to hold onto when it is hot out - and in.
7. I have been spinning - a lovely wool silk blend that I plan to turn into a sweater.
8. It might get finished in 2 years.
9. Maybe 3, because I am spinning the yarn.

So obviously there is gardening, home improvement and professional work going on.  Oh and fiber.  Note to self:  Take some pictures.   Perhaps this is blog fodder after all.

When the Day's List Starts with '1. Make a List...'

...you know the week is going to be busy!

Last week, I facilitated a Professional Development 'Institute' (the code word for week-long workshop) and this week I am co-facilitating another Professional Development Institute at a university a few hours from here.  So I have exactly one day in the office to prep.  By prep I mean figure out what I have to do, say and take to make myself come off as a knowledgeable professional grownup, instead of a babbling half-wit.  Of course I also have to figure out what knitting I need to bring, as well as SAFF work that stubbornly refuses to do itself.

Between these weeks, I attended the Friends & Fiberworks Summer Fiber Retreat as a teacher, student and general hanger-on.  It was so much fun - Thanks to Lisa and Friends for pulling off another rousing success!

I taught 3 sections of Crock-Pot Dyeing to a total of ten students.  Small classes (like the 2 students here) mean lots of individual attention, but still enough variation in the dyepots that everybody can vicariously experience lots of color-ways. 

A wonderful weekend, but the rest of the list calls!

ADD Travel Knitting

I took a little dutiful non-vacation last week.  You know the kind - hanging out with the older generation - talking, cooking, movin' kind of slow.  Add excessive time riding in the car.  Sounds like lots of knitting time to me.

And although it's the heat of the summer, those hats don't knit themselves.  So I spent some time in the stash, selecting yarns for my in-car and around-the-house knitting, figuring that I would knit at least a dozen hats.  I wound lots of balls of handspun and pulled yarns that I don't always grab because they are fairly small gauge.  But when you are stuck in the car and have limited choices, you will use the small yarns and needles.

Then I did something kind of naughty.  I grabbed some sock yarn.  Pretty blue & green self striping sock yarn.  Sock yarn is so very small and light and I might could reach my hat goal .  Besides, I like to knit socks - even when I am so finished with the sock of the month plan.  Six is enough.  Really!

Then some other yarn snuck into my tub.  Did I tell you about the killer fiber yard sale a few weeks back where I ended up with a newish Lendrum spinning wheel and a shopping bag full of yarn?  One of the yarns was 6 skeins of Peace Fleece worsted in an earthy greenish tweed called Grass Roots.  A sweater was already started and I was pretty sure that the pattern was Melissa Bare's Garter Yoke Cardi [rav link], but because my gauge didn't match the original gauge, I abandoned that idea.  Only 2 days into the trip I cast on for the Knitting Pure and Simple top down cardi #9725.  I've had this pattern for years, even have the yarn to knit it, but somehow it never knitted itself.  I knit most of the yoke, then put it aside because, I'M SUPPOSED TO BE KNITTING HATS, DARN IT!  Besides I seem to be a bit off gauge so need to make the yoke section longer and needed to refer to EZ or Barbara Walker (which I had in a suitcase pocket but didn't find until I got home).

There is so big reveal here - kind of a lame results show.  I ended up with...

• Seven hats
• About 40% of one sock -- most of the cuff.
• About 80% of the raglan section of a top down cardi - probably about 22.7% of the sweater.  Sounds much more scientific that not quite 25%, eh?

Not bad for a 6 day stretch!  And now I have several yarns nicely staged for some quick hat knitting. Unless I sneak back to the sweater...or the sock!

June Socks - Done

Should I mention that I started the June socks in August. 2010?  They were stalled on the needles for a long time, but were recently taken out of the hibernation chamber and finished.  I dislike the yarn as much as ever.  It is Knit Picks long discontinued 'Dancing' in the colorway 'Jig' - a wool/cotton/lycra blend.   It splits, the pooling looks terrible, but I really do like the way they feel on my feet.  I am wearing their fraternal twins today.  I bought a healthy amount of the yarn when it first came out.  I have knit 3 pair and still have enough to knit another pair, but no time soon.

The blog has been rather quiet and I mostly have the day job to blame.  I have been preparing for 3 summer teacher workshops, and am finishing up workshop #1.  It is going well, but it does take a lot of energy.  But because tonight is spinning night, I'll pump some of it right back in.

I've also been having a fine time in the garden.  It has seldom looked better and we've had good rain lately.  The vegies, fruit and flowers all look good.  I'm still eating peas and blueberries, the summer squash are beginning to come in, the green beans are very tiny but I really need to pick and cook and eat kale.  Yum!

There has been other knitting, spinning and dyeing, but more about that later.

Spinning Yarns

I've been on a spinning binge lately.  It seems to happen after a carding binge - and this time I have some nice batts to spin.  It's sort of like putting food in the freezer.  eventually you have to take it out and eat it.  The difference is that carded batts don't get freezer burn (though the white that you see here bit have sort of a basement-y smell before I washed it.  With plied skeins still on the bobbins and recent knitting aside, here it a bit of yarn that I made recently.

On the left is a big honkin' skein of a wool-mohair blend  from Bitsy Knits.  It's one of her custom carded rovings in a lovely blue-green color.  I don't have the label with me so I can't tell you the official name.  I got it in a gift exchange and finally got around to spinning it.  I didn't measure it, but it's big!  Just past that is a merino-alpaca blend that I carded myself a long while back and kind of forgot about.  When I was tidying up I found the box and though it was a bit musty smelling, it spun up fine and after a wee bath, it smells good too.

On the far right is one of 3 skeins of a Corriedale-like fiber from   Cherry Tree hill via Discontinued Brand Name Yarns.  The colorway is 'Irish Mist' but I am a bit tired of it, so I overdyed the last 6 ounces of the pound in blue, so the resulting roving is a lovely peacock blue-green.  Easy to spin, btw in case you have wondered about that roving.  I spin rather thick and it came out nicely squishy.

The deep blue is another overdye.  I spun it a while back - a natural grey carded with a medium blue wool and some angelina, but I didn't love it.  It was too grey with not enough blue to really pop, so into the dyepot it went.  I love it now - deep and heathery.  I rolled it into a ball this morning and brought it with me to knit at the SAFF board meeting tonight.  It is destined to become a Trailside hat.  I'll post pictures when I'm done.

I heard about a big destash yard sale over the weekend.  The flyer said there were 2 spinning wheels, 6 sowing [sic] machines and lots of yarn and fabric.  There was, indeed!  I was the first person there when she opened at 8 and bought a Lendrum double treadle (and a bunch of yarn!).  It's quite beautiful and it spins nicely, but by the size of the skeins above, you can see that I like fat yarn and BIG skeins.  So my trusty Louet S10 isn't going anywhere.  So far I've only spun 2 bobbins on the Lendrum & plied them on the Louet.  A nice combination, I think, particularly for smaller quantities.