Knit Sisters

As you may have noticed, I really enjoy being on the road. I’ve always liked it. When I was in my twenties, I had a job that involved a lot of travel. I liked it then, I like it now.

Okay, maybe not the plane rides, but everything else: the red convertibles, the new sights, the cacti, new yarn shops… I even like living out of a suitcase. I like it because it cuts my clothes and shoe choices to a bare mininum so that it is very easy to get dressed in the morning. (Yes, I realize that I have just revealed that under normal circumstances, I have a hard time performing the minimal task of dressing myself in the morning, a task that even low-functioning individuals are expected to master. Try not to bring that up too often and when you speak of me, speak kindly.)

It’s true that I do miss

Alex

and

Shelley

but on the other hand, as long as I’m out here, someone comes to my room every day and cleans it. I hear that’s how they do things in heaven.

And did I mention that I don’t have to cook?

Of course, some of the food and libations that you can get around the casino are not only not “home cooking,” they are downright dangerous. They sell margaritas by the yard here. I asked the bartender exactly how much margarita is, ahem, in a yard of margarita and he replied, “Forty-eight ounces.”

The guy next to me at the bar said, “Heh, heh. I like to drink a couple of these to get kind of relaxed.”

I said, “Funny you should mention that, because I like to drink of a couple of these to get kind of hospitalized.”

But back to my original point: there is, however, a downside to being on the road for a long stretch of time on your own. And that would be that you start to go just the tiniest bit insane.

Just the tiniest bit.

You know you are slipping over the edge when you start engaging baristas at Starbucks and cashiers at CVS in long, inappropriately involved conversations because you are so starved for live, human interaction.

Thankfully, knitting can come to your rescue. When I started to get a little weird, I just hopped in the car and cruised over to Gail’s Knits on Sahara. This is the place to be when in Vegas. Not only did Gail set me up with a fine little travel bag for Icarus, but she put me onto some Cascade Fixation:

Sarah, take note. I now have a respectable bag for my portable knitting.

Even better, though, I was welcomed into the little group of knitters who were hanging out at the shop. It was a better corrective than Prozac. And in such good company, I made considerable progress on Icarus:

Hello, I’m Icarus and I am notoriously difficult to photograph.

Revitalized and rehumanized, I drove back to the Strip in a much better state of mind. All thanks to the fine knitters of Las Vegas! And I gotta hand it to them, these people knit in temperatures that routinely reach 105 degrees. That’s some serious commitment to the fiber arts.

On my drive back, I saw a Chevy truck with a special Nevada license plate that read, “Nevada: Rich in Art.”

Huh.

Let’s play a game, shall we? I will say, “Nevada,” and you say all the words and phrases that come to your mind in the next 60 seconds.

Did “rich in art” make the list?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Back on the Strip, I made it down to the Palace of the Mighty Caesar:

Rich in art. Or whatever you’d call that.

And leaving no Vegas stone unturned, I caught the Bellagio Fountain in full eruption:

Drought? What drought?

Alas, the time has come to leave Fabulous Las Vegas, but I will certainly never forget all the fine people I have met here and the good times I have had.

Viva, my friends.

I’ve been in Vegas for a day and a half now and have been astonished to find that most people are not here for the knitting. Yes, I know. It is shocking.

Instead, they seem to have come for this:

I decided not to spoil the fun by reminding them that, in the end, the casino always wins.

But just to catch you up on my road adventures, I enjoyed my last day in Tucson with an early morning drive out to the desert in The Car:

Car like that won’t let you down.

The Car and I saw these wonderful scenes:

Hello, Saguaro!

Yes, I suppose there is a certain sameness about these shots of the Sonora Desert, but I’m still feeling the love.

I visited Lynn at Kiwi Knitting Company, a wonderful shop not far from the University of Arizona. Since I was mere hours away from flying out of Tucson, Lynn and I got to discussing the new restrictions on carry-on items and wondered whether or not I would now be allowed on the airplane with my Addis.

Me: Well, it’s not like I personally am inclined to violence, but you could garotte someone with those things. You know, if you had ninja training!

Lynn: To me, it would just be easier to take one with a longer cable, say a 60″, and strangle your victim.

See what knitters talk about when no one else is around? When I related this conversation to my dear sister, she thoughtfully added, “Hmm. If you were going to go the strangulation route, you could probably just use a length of cabled yarn. It has a lot of tensile strength.”

If knitters ever go over to the dark side, God alone can help us.

Since Lynn went a long way towards making me feel right at home in Tucson, I couldn’t in good conscience leave her shop without a little something to remember her by:

Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock makes such a nice souvenir, shown here in colourway “Tahoe.”

The air travel story had a happy ending, though. The TSA confiscated my toothpaste and sunscreen since those are items universally carried by “evildoers,” but they let me on with my garotte Addis.

Sock progress was therefore made.

Ever notice how “the evildoers” never seem to get sunburned? Yeah, well. Now we know why.

Now I’m here in Las Vegas where everything is 100% authentic:

Even in his wildest dreams, Ramses the Great never foresaw this.

Life inside the pyramid—everything, all the time!

Did anyone ever mention to the Luxor bigwigs that pyramids were burial structures? Doesn’t send the most positive message, guys. I’m just saying, is all.

The pharoahs prided themselves on their vast chlorinated swimming pools with poolside bars:

Now I hate to be a party-pooper, but I probably just better confess—however reluctantly—that I do not love being in Vegas. John Ruskin once pompously said, “When I am at Paddington, I feel I am in hell.” But for all Ruskin’s pomposity, if you substitute “the Strip” for “Paddington,” that sentence would pretty much describe my feelings about Las Vegas.

Of course, Oscar Wilde took the wind out of Ruskin’s sails when he responded, “Ah well, when you are in hell, you’ll think you are only at Paddington.”

Touché, Oscar. When I go to hell, perhaps I’ll think I’m just in Vegas.

Yesterday I went out to my friend John’s farm to collect some free wool he had promised me (gotta love that free wool) and he and his son took me on an impromptu tour of their land.  Of course, since I did not foresee the tour, I didn’t take my camera with me, so I have no pictures to actually prove I was there.

But I do have the wool.

 

This is a total of 4 1/4 pounds of raw lamb’s wool (well, not all in that one bag), and there’s a lot of grease in it.  Here’s a closeup:

 

See those little orange dots on the butt ends?  Those are beads of real live lanolin.  I weighed the fleece before washing so that I can do a comparison of the weight after washing.  It will be interesting to see how much loss there is from just the weight of the grease.

And, because I just couldn’t wait, I rinsed a few locks in hot water, just to see how they’d turn out.

 

Aren’t they pretty and fluffy looking?

I enjoyed the tour of the farm quite a bit, too.  It had been a long time since I’d piled into a truck with a farmer and taken off cross-country across the fields.  To a native Midwesterner, there’s nothing prettier than this kind of local farmland, full of hidden and unexpected beauties.  And cows.  I got to pet a day-old calf, and listened with interest as John talked about many of the individual cows, who all looked the same to me.  He told me about the ones he’s lost over the last months:  one got hit by lightning, one had a heart attack while giving birth and he lost both the mama and the calf.

He raises corn and beans as well, and told me about how much that corn brings when he sells it.  Not much.  It’s a hard life, and easy for the rest of us to forget just where our food comes from.

John and his mother, who lives near him, gave me some peaches off their tree.  This is bona fide local Missouri fruit.

 

Today’s task is to make peach preserves.  A little bit of bottled summer.

On Saturday Rob and I went with his family over to Jamesport, MO to do a bit of shopping and a bit of sightseeing.  While the rest of them looked at antique shops, I spent a happy hour at Wool Ridge, a lovely little knitting/spinning/weaving shop, where I poked around in the wool and talked to the equally lovely owner, Geri.  Of course I couldn’t leave without a purchase (or two or three) and so I acquired this naturally-colored brown wool:

 

And this black wool:

 

This stuff is very cool; it has reddish-brown highlights, as well as some grey strands that Geri told me were the next year’s wool growth coming in before the sheep was sheared.  I couldn’t resist–I already combed up a little bit of it:

 

I also (somehow, I just don’t know how it happened) acquired some raw white wool that I’m not picturing here today because, let’s face it, pictures of white wool are kind of boring.  But I have big plans to dye it, and I’ll keep you all posted about that.

In spinning news, I made some progress on the butterscotch wool and also did some hard thinking about what to ply with it.  Here’s what I came up with:

 

This is a Brown Sheep mill end roving that has been in the stash for a while.  It’s interesting because there are so many colors in there:  pink, red, light blue, yellow.  This gives the spun yarn a kind of richness that you just don’t get from solid-dyed rovings. 

 

The two singles side-by-side:

 

I started out thinking that I was going to make this yarn a 3-ply, and I even briefly considered making this the third strand,

 

but I really think that it’s asking to be a 2-ply.  (Besides, that lime green just looked too yucky next to the golden beauty of the butterscotch.)

Who am I to stand in the way of a yarn’s true destiny?  Sometimes you just have to get out of the fiber’s way.

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who left comments, emailed me, or posted to the AK list about my simple summer sweater.  The response has been overwhelming, and I am truly touched.  I am now planning to write up the pattern in a range of sizes (to fit a 38″ bust through a 62″ bust) and post it on the site as a free pattern.  I am hoping to get this accomplished in the next couple of weeks.  This will be my first foray into pattern-writing for others, and I’m pretty excited about that.  A chance to stretch my wings a little and learn something new.

In the meantime, the stash, which has become an almost living entity, must be dealt with somehow.

 

 

 

 

Let me just say that my stash, while large, was not so alarmingly large until I became a spinner.  Those of you who are thinking of learning to spin, take note.  When you are a spinner, somehow large bags of fiber take up residence.  It’s such a good deal, you see–you can get pounds and pounds of raw fleece for stunningly small sums of money.  (Remember the raw mohair?  Enough said.)  In fact, sometimes people are willing to give you raw fiber for free.  Well!  I can’t turn down free fiber!

And then, of course, I didn’t just stop buying yarn, either.  Those boxes in the corners up there?  Yarn.  The clear bins?  Yarn.  Sacks on the floor?  Yarn.

In any case, what it boils down to is that something must be done.  Now, if you’re thinking that what must be done is to give some of these riches away, you’re obviously still an amateur.  No, no, no.  What must be done is to organize.  I have a plan which involves large Ziploc bags and hours of happy time spent with my fiber.  And I still have several weeks of summer left in which to accomplish said plan.  I’ll keep you posted.

And now, something tidy to end with today.  My current socks in progress:

 

These are a cabled pattern from Sensational Knitted Socks, by Charlene Schurch, which was given to me by my own dear sister and is a great sock book and definitely worth owning.  (Or giving to a knitting friend or relative, as the case may be.)

 

If you’ve just popped over from Ample Knitters, you can see my sister Sarah’s lovely finished summer sweater in the previous post. A lot of us would like to have the pattern in a range of sizes available on the blog (that includes me), so if you feel the same way, leave a comment now, y’hear?

Yesterday was a very special day because my friend Tope (pronounced “toe-pay,” and a very manageable abbreviation of her lovely full name “Temitope,” which apparently means “she-who-was-born-to-knit-lace”) began working part time at our LYS Woolcott and Company. Legend has it that Paul Revere stopped off there during his famous ride to pick up some nice lace-weight mohair and a retractable tape measure shaped like a sheep, but this may be apocryphal. Today it is under new and very fine management in the person of Sean, who writes a store-related blog right here. And people, the man knows what he is doing! Master knitter. No question.

He made points with me when he offered sympathy and help when I came to the end of my beloved Bianca, only to make the bitter discovery that I had only enough yarn to make 3/4 length sleeves.

Here’s a little close-up:

In spite of the fact that far worse fates had befallen knitters, Sean helped me find another ball to lengthen those sleeves. There’s a special place in heaven for men like Sean.

Since it was Tope’s first day, I toddled on down there to see how she was doing…and perhaps coincidentally to check on a ball of Trekking XXL and a skein of cobweb-weight silk/yak blend that looked like they needed a good home, but naturally these were only secondary considerations. Naturally. I can report that Tope is doing a great job already and will certainly be a major, major asset to the store.

But I also learned a shocking fact: you can work at Woolcott for store credit and Tope is considering this option.

Tope is playing a dangerous game.

And yet I find myself wondering if Woolcott might need another part time employee. I’ve decided to spend most of the weekend standing outside the shop wearing a sandwich board that reads “Will work for yarn.” Meanwhile, that ball of Trekking XXL followed me all the way over to Tealuxe,

and once you give them iced tea and a little snack, there’s no getting rid of them.

A brief visit from my friend Emily, Miss A., and her junior sister made it a doubly special day. Having stopped off about half-way through a car trip to points north, Emily and the littlest one were a tad road-worn:

But Miss A. was eager to show off “The Gap”:

She is in ongoing negotiations with the Tooth Fairy for fair and just compensation for the temporary loss of her front teeth.