Three more pints of dilly beans on the shelf.
Boh, worrying about something. (What’s new?)
166 yards of light worsted 2-ply falklands wool from 3 oz. of the silent undergrowth colorway from AVFKW. This stuff is soft, squishy, shiny, and all-around delightful.
Off to pour another cup of coffee…
Do you have those days that seem to take forever to progress? Yesterday was that kind of day. I tried to fill the hours, but the time refused to pass.
All of that changed just before evening, when I ran into a friend on the street, finally started another book, met friends from out of town for a great dinner, relaxed with the dog, and (wait for it) chased our friend, the bat, out of my apartment with a broom around midnight.
An incredible lightning storm and the ruminations of my brain kept me up quite late last night, so the morning’s cup of coffee must again feature prominently in today’s post.
More glimpses of yesterday:
I finished spinning and plying the AVFKW falklands fiber in the silent undergrowth colorway, but I couldn’t capture the depth of the browns and greens with yesterday’s overcast sky (even with the change of background.) The skein is still hanging to dry — I’ll try again tomorrow.
A bit more of the toe of my second vanilla sock, and a particularly concerned Boh. It must be Monday…
My morning ritual, the first falklands bobbin, starting a second toe, the aging sunflowers with their pile of pollen: pieces of a Sunday morning.
Boh and I took a walk through the campus arboretum yesterday, accompanied only by the sound of the wind and the hum of bees conducting their business.
A collection of nut trees lines the road to the central part of the sprawling, manicured landscape. Tucked into a string of walnut trees, this particular cluster caught my eye. This tree, like the others, had a small tin tag pegged to its trunk: Japanese heartnut. The name made me smile.
When we returned home (our muscles sufficiently stretched), it was time to start a new spinning project, and this fiber seemed appropriate to the moment: The Silent Undergrowth, 3 oz. of Falklands from AVFKW. The colors are hard to capture on camera, but there is a lovely depth to the range of browns and greens in this fiber.
Also, here’s an update on my alpaca test-knitting:
I’m approaching four inches on the body, and while this will not be a quick knit, I love how this feels in my hands.
Also:
I love this dog.
Happy weekend, all.
My new favorite shirt: Know Your Parts, from AVFKW. It was a little chilly yesterday when Boh and I stepped out for our morning stroll, so I grabbed Mara, and snapped a photo in the mirror:
I love my Mara, and I realized something incredibly practical about this shawl (and who knows, maybe all wool shawls) — the wool grabs a bit, which means that Mara stayed put on our stroll — a particularly important detail when you’re walking the dog and holding keys, phone, leash, and a certain pup’s “business,” if you will.
I wore my spinning wheel t-shirt while spinning the second bobbin and plying the 2 together. (See that transition?) I still noticed a difference in the saturated versus the more lightly colored fiber, but this bobbin was easier to spin. My troubles might have something to do with needing to adjust to the incredibly long staple length of the wensleydale.
126 yards of 2-ply wensleydale from AVFKW in the Intergalactic Space Travel colorway. There is something a bit otherwordly about the sheen of this stuff, don’t you think?
Boh certainly seems to like it.
Time to pour another cup and get to work. Happy Friday!
My apologies, up front. I have A LOT of pictures of this skein of handspun.
Just one more. Okay?
3-ply, 325 yards of almost 4 oz of Crown Mountain Farms Superwash Merino in (wait for it) Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I didn’t measure wpi, but it is definitely sock yarn, slightly thicker and squooshier than the blue Spunky Club sock yarn I finished a few weeks ago. I say “almost 4 oz” because I stopped plying when I could not fit any more yarn on the bobbin, rather than when one of the bobbins ran out.
I navajo plied one of the leftover bobbins, and here’s how it looks, unwashed. The trick really is to just slow down. I did this while listening to NPR’s coverage (downloadable!) of Billy Bragg at the Newport Folk Festival, and I found myself treadling very slowly along with his guitar. There’s something really quite graceful about navajo plying, and I’m excited to keep practicing.
I have more spinning to share — my wheel was looking so empty that I just had to start a project. Or two.
This is the last of my AVFKW shetland in Fruit Loops — 68 yards of singles. While the rest was done on a spindle, I spun this on the wheel. Not sure what the collection of singles skeins will become, but I’m quite happy with the lot of them.
And this. I only intended to start this last night, but I ended up spinning a whole bobbin’s worth. This is AVFKW Wensleydale in Intergalactic Space Travel, dyed with indigo, which, as expected, turned my fingers a gorgeous shade of blue. I’m still learning about how dye and fiber react, and with this stuff, I could really see how the saturated spots were different (and more difficult for me to spin) than the lighter sections. I’m aiming for a worsted-ish 2-ply with this, but it might turn out more thick and thin, as the coarser, more saturated parts were making it really tough for me to get into a rhythm and find some level of consistency. I’m really interested to see how this yarn feels once it has had a good soak, as the indigo really changes the feel of the wensleydale.
(One of these things is not like the others…) A friend from my high desert knitting group emailed me this recipe for a savory zucchini-cheddar bread, and I baked a loaf yesterday afternoon. I used monterey jack instead of cheddar, and upped the dill to make up for my dwindling supply of parsley, and whoa. My go-to zucchini bread is more of a breakfast loaf, but this makes it possible to have zucchini bread at every meal. So delicious.
Three weeks until the semester begins — I can’t believe it. Time to get to work!
(And other stuff, too. But first, the shetland.)
I was digging through my fiber bin yesterday, and found some shetland in progress on a spindle, as well as some singles stored on metal knitting needles, patiently waiting to be plyed or finished. I worked on the shetland for a little while, and just had to snap this picture of Boh, laying on my left foot, back arched and ears-a-flapping, directly underneath my spindle.
This is shetland from A Verb For Keeping Warm in the Fruit Loops colorway. I have a little bit left to spin of the brown and red section, but the spindle was getting heavy, so I wound it onto the niddy noddy and set the twist. I did the same with the stored singles from the other half of this bump, which was much bluer/multi-colored.
Picking up my spindle yesterday felt sort of funny after all the wheel spinning I’ve been doing, and it took me a few yards (or 10) to get back into a rhythm. Soon I’d like to work on thicker, even, low-twist singles on the wheel, as I really like the way these smaller skeins of shetland turned out. (The thinner, more uneven yarn on the right is the earliest spindling in this picture, before I was doing things like making plans for the kind of yarn I wanted to spin. Fun to be able to see my progress in these side-by-side singles.)
Yardage: 145 yards of the reddish-brown shetland, 88 yards of the blue-multi shetland, and 96 yards of the thinner blue shetland. (I found a new way of doing math that is a bit easier than the 32 and 36 inch increments: Total number of strands x 5 (my niddy-noddy is 1.5 meters, or 5 feet) and then divided by 3 (3 feet =1 yards) = total # ofyards. Thanks, ravelry!)
Progress report on my Beatles’ song-inspired CMF colorway:
Bobbin #2 is moving right along. The colors are hard to capture when the light is wierd, but these pictures are pretty accurate — I love that chunk of super-bright turquoise on the right!
After the dilly beans, I decided to keep on tackling the zucchini that is taking over my fridge. Last night, I made a big batch of summer squash and zucchini pancakes.
They aren’t super pretty, but they were VERY tasty. It’s a good thing I made a hearty meal, because about an hour after I had settled in with my knitting to watch an episode or two of the second season of Mad Men, a fairly large bat began flying around my apartment. (Story to follow. If you don’t like bat stories, stop reading now.)
It is unclear how he got in, which is a little disturbing because my landlord had called to say that the folks upstairs had seen a bat in the basement. (The house is on a hill, and my apartment has great natural light on three sides, but is technically the finished side of the basement because of the building’s orientation. The idea that there is a way to move between my bright and cheery apartment and the dark and scary basement is not encouraging.)
It is roughly roosting time, and while I have shared open-air spaces with bat families before (see posts from last summer), I am not that interested in sharing my in-town, rather small apartment with a winged rodent (as my father calls them). I trapped the bat in my bedroom, shut the door, and packed some fabric at the base of the door so that the bat would not be able to squeeze underneath. I got out my headlamp, grabbed a dinner knife, and went outside to pry the screen off one of the bedroom windows to give the bat a clear escape route. And then I waited.
And waited.
I finally opened up the bedroom and took a look around, and it appeared that the universe had righted itself. So I replaced the screen, and went back to my evening plans. And then Boh started to bark in the direction of the 1960s-style dress I have hanging on my bedroom wall. I went back in the bedroom, only to find my bat peaking out from behind the Jackie O-inspired wide neckline of the dress. I closed the door, repried the screen off the window, and watched through the window as the bat yawned and found a cozy spot to take a nap. This bat was serious about moving in.
I called my dad for advice, and in between comparisons to a situation in which he’d had to deal with a hummingbird trapped in the garage (NOT the same thing as a bat in the bedroom), reminders of a summer vacation we’d taken when I was a baby that involved bats and netting over my crib at night, and a lot of laughter on his part (“Well, do you think it is a vampire bat? How big are its fangs?”), he recommended broom warfare and gave me a pep talk.
At about 11 o’clock last night, I put on my raincoat, pulled the hood up over my hair (to prevent any sort of accidental touching of the bat or entanglement in my curls), barged into the bedroom, and took a golf-like swing at the wall, sweeping the bat towards the window, and likely disorienting it with the force of the blow.
It landed, stunned, in a plate full of shiny jewelry on a shelf near the window. I picked up the plate and set it on the ledge, and gently poked the bat with the broom bristles until it flopped out the window.
And, that, my dear friends, is the complete story of Rooster vs. Bat, 2009.
That (hopefully) concludes our bat content for the year. More knitting, spinning, and cooking to come!
You may recall that the title of this blog post is also the name of this gorgeous melon-y colorway in Targhee from the Woolly Wonders Fiber Club at A Verb For Keeping Warm. I hung this to dry (on a hanger hooked on a planter-less planter chain over the sink) and headed north to my dear friend P’s farm. I returned to find this dry and ready to be skeined and admired. (It is currently sitting here right next to my computer so that I can pet it while I type…)
This is 327 yards of fingering weight yarn — 16 or 17 wpi. (I think I’m measuring this correctly — when I put a lot of tension on the yarn and wrap it tightly, I get 21 wpi, or solidly laceweight, which doesn’t seem right. When I do this gently, with just enough tension for the yarn to lay flat on the wpi tool, I get 16 or 17, and that makes more sense to me. Is that right?)
See my pretty wpi tool on a bed of targhee?
I am really happy with this yarn — thanks for all of your encouraging comments. I’m having a lot of fun charting my progress with the wheel, and I’m glad you’re enjoying it too.
Now, about my weekend. I kept meaning to take some photographs of the gorgeous rows of arugula, pea shoots, flowering potato plants, a whole slew of onion varieties, garlic, tat soi, gourmet lettuces, mustard greens, broccoli, beets, spinach, chard, baby kale (and the list goes on), but the camera was inside, and I was outside. (There are also laying hens, broiler chickens, and piglets growing into pigs on the farm.) When I visited P. this fall, she was wrapping up a transitional growing year with a different CSA and working to prepare these fields for cultivation. We spent an afternoon at this land then, and it was absolutely incredible to see that picture in my head transformed into a thriving 3+ acres of veggies and livestock.
I helped wherever I could, harvesting some serious poundage of arugula (and eating handfuls in the field), cutting pea shoots, and bundling cilantro stems together for a Sunday farmers’ market. I love markets, and it was a lot of fun to see the experience from behind the table.
I hit the road on Monday morning laden with arugula, a braising mix of baby kale, red mustard, and chard, a couple dozen eggs from the hens, and pride and appreciation for P. — in my mind, she is doing something both incredible beautiful and critically important — connecting people to the food they eat by mindfully growing a sustainable, natural harvest.
I wish I could show you the land there, but all I managed to photograph is P’s home — a one-room hunting shack she re-floored and fitted with shelves, a loft, and her keen sense of style:
I saw this place when it was first delivered to the farm, and P. has truly transformed a run-down refuge from bad weather into a magical haven for her few hours of sleep during harvest-time. (Up at 4:50 for morning chores.)
Next time (which will hopefully be another weekend this summer) I’ll take more pictures!
Midway through my dinner — a salad comprised of red lettuce, mustard greens, radishes, harukei turnips, tomatoes, avocado and a homemade vinaigrette, I realized (a)Â that I was eating out of a 2-quart metal mixing bowl and (b) that I hadn’t even considered eating out of a cereal bowl.
Ridiculous — and completely awesome.
Something else completely awesome? This targhee 2-ply:
The actual color is in between: not as pink as the first picture, but more vibrant and shiny than the second. It is amazing what light coming through the window will do to the same bobbin! If I’ve done my math right, we’re looking at 327 yards of 2-ply — no wonder it took almost twice the amount of time I had budgeted for plying this morning!
Time was budgeted because today Boh and I are heading to the north country to stay with my dear friend P. and help out in the land of CSA veggies, piglets, and farmers’ markets. We’d be on the road already if it weren’t for the plying that I absolutely HAD to do this morning — that way, the yarn will be dry by the time we return. (Obsessed? Who, me?)
Baked some muffins for the road, washed and hung the yarn to dry, even vacuumed the spot usually occupied by Boh’s box. Time to hit the road! Have a great weekend.
This morning I began the second sleeve of stripes!(!) More significantly, the beginnings of cuff number 2 (with its lovely corrugated ribbing) sat in my bag waiting patiently as my graduate school career moved from one to two.
It’s strange, but I don’t actually feel as though I’ve finished anything, perhaps because I am already looking ahead. Today’s committee meeting helped me to more clearly see the meaning in the work I’ve done, but more importantly, it did some helpful pointing towards where I might want to go in year 2.
In keeping with this broad theme of progress (small p), I’m excited to show you a few pictures of that gorgeous melon-y targhee:
This is my most even spinning to date, and I am absolutely in love with this fiber. I’m aiming for a strong 2-ply with a consistent wpi — maybe it will be sport weight? We’ll see. (Did you notice how I threw “wpi” in there? My measuring tool arrived today, so I’ll have that info on my next finished yarn.)
I left my laptop and camera here when Boh and I went to spend a few days with my parents this week, so I can’t show you all of the gorgeous plants and flowers in the yard, or the delicious food we ate, or even the socks I finished (yay!) and deposited with a love note on my uncle’s porch on my way out of town.
Boh and I are off to meet friends (human and animal) at the d-o-g-p-a-r-k to celebrate. Happy almost weekend!
barefoot rooster 