Knit Sisters

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.

Next week I’m going to the Carolinas for vacation with some family friends. To the beach!

No way! You’re leaving? Who’s gonna feed me?

And talk about timely! I just read this article in Yoga Journal about the mindful vacation. Given yoga’s ties to vegetarianism, it is more than a little ironic that I read this article while loitering around Wild Oats Market—known affectionately in this family as “The Goat’s” for reasons no one can fully recall—waiting for the butcher to make me specially four hot Italian sausages.

Anyway, turns out that the yoga folk have noticed that most Americans have trouble truly relaxing, that we tend to pack our vacations full of activities and busy-ness and then return home more exhausted than when we left. Well-observed point. The article recommended meditating on the beach. Or chanting on the beach. I think the latter is supposed to bring you “the twelve gifts of the sun.”

The obvious question here is, what the deuce are the twelve gifts of the sun? I’ll surely never know because chanting on a public beach is just not in my life plan.

Because here’s the thing: when a middle-class, middle-aged (give or take), Midwestern (by origin if not by current residence), American WASP is caught sitting in the lotus position chanting on the beach, having cherry-picked a practice from Vedic Hinduism, she looks—at best—like a total dork. At worst, she could even appear disrespectful to an old and complex religious tradition and its legitimate practitioners, even if that were not her intention.

As you may have noticed, I have no real problem looking like a dork. I embrace my Inner Dork and I regard her with compassion. Still, I think I’ll leave the beach chants to those who fully embrace the tradition of which they are a part.

You know the chants just aren’t for you when you find yourself secretly hoping that one of the “twelve gifts of the sun” will be hot Italian sausages and that another will be a six-pack of Negra Modelo.

But I think this whole “mindful vacation” is an idea worth entertaining, as long as it doesn’t involve Vedic-chanting, sausage-eating, Episcopalians down by the seashore. How about mindfulness through knitting? You know, the new yoga.

Here’s what I’m taking with me:

Rogue, of course. Note progress on sleeve.

Because nothing says “fun in the sun” like a hoodie in aran-weight wool!

Bamboo socks:

Regia, 45% bamboo; 40% superwash wool; 15% nylon; 100% fabulous

Since a number of you have asked, I’ll say a little more about the bamboo sock yarn. First off, photos cannot capture this yarn in all its glory. It glows. It has internal luminescence. You also cannot tell from a picture how wonderfully soft it is. Which brings me to a concern: how will these socks hold up in the long run? Remains to be seen, but the wool content should help. It certainly ameliorates the tendency of bamboo yarn to split, which is a blessing while you are knitting with it.

On the ball band the yarn claims to be, “ecologically pure and environment friendly.” Sounds good, but I don’t know how you would verify those claims. And compared to what? Are sheep so terribly bad for the environment? I guess they consume more resources than bamboo, but I seriously doubt that the lifestyles, consumption patterns, and emissions of sheep are really the most pressing environmental problem confronting our leaders today. Still, nothing wrong with a really nice fiber made from bamboo (and wool, let’s not forget)! It’s an idea whose time has come. Thumbs up!

And because I have absolutely no ability to judge how much knitting I can get done in a week, I am also taking Alchemy Haiku for Icarus:

Here’s what I am not taking with me:

You come to me two days before you go on vacation and you ask me to do murder. To kill mice. But you don’t show respect. You don’t show friendship.

Mr. Kitty has been especially insufferable since we let him watch The Godfather.

Since I’m leaving, I’ve also had to do a little housework this week so as to leave the place clean. What with the animals shedding like mad in the heat, it has been no small task to keep up with the sweeping. And yet, the moment I notice veritable drifts of dog and cat fur monumental enough to make Frosty the Snowman say, “Howdy!” any evidence of shedding, I get out my trusty vacuum and sweep that right up. Heloïse would be so proud!

Fittingly, the “mindful vacation” does not include an internet connection, so Sarah will be blogging next week with a little assist from Alex. I look forward to reconnecting with everyone in August.

Oh, and guys? May the twelve gifts of the sun, whatever they may be, be yours. Namaste.

Well, despite my protestations about “getting out of the fiber’s way” and all that, I have bent the butterscotch and pink wools to my will just a bit.

 

I did make a 2-ply yarn out of them, but then I thought how cool it would be if I took things one step further and made a cabled yarn.  Here’s a detail:

 

A cabled yarn, for those who may not know, is made by taking two 2-ply yarns and plying them back together in the opposite direction.  You could conceivably take two 3-ply yarns and ply them, two 4-ply yarns, etc., as well as doing other nutty things like plying a 2-ply with another single, a 2-ply with a 3-ply, and on and on.  These yarns, according to Diane Varney in Spinning Designer Yarns, fall under the broad heading of crepe yarns.

The advantages to cabled yarns, in addition to having almost limitless yarn design possibilities for the handspinner, are that they are very strong, they pill less when knitted and worn (because more of those little fiber ends are locked into the yarn), and they show stitch and cable work beautifully.  Disadvantage?  They take more time to execute for the handspinner and they eat up your yardage.  (Although, of course, you are getting a thicker yarn.  You pays your money and you takes your choice.)

For example, this yarn has been through my hot little hands four times.  Once, to spin the singles.  Twice, to ply into a 2-ply.  Thrice, to ply into a cable.  Four times, to take off the bobbin and wind onto the niddy-noddy.  You can see how this can get time-consuming.  But it sure is pretty, no?

In the midst of all this mad plying, I took a little break to comb some more of that lime green superwash.  Except it’s not really lime green to start with.

 

Isn’t that ugly roving?  Gold and khaki.  Yum.  And yet, when you put it through the combs, it morphs into something quite lovely.  Amazing.  Those folks at Brown Sheep really know their stuff.  (This is a superwash mill end from Brown Sheep, in case I didn’t already say.)

And, hey!  Remember my plan involving Ziploc bags and wool?  Here’s proof that I am, indeed, moving forward with that:

 

A very large Ziploc bag full of 4 1/2 pounds of washed wool.  This is a natural grey/brown Romney fleece that I bought last year (in the grease) and just finished washing recently.  Don’t ask me what the plan is for this–I don’t yet know.  But, man, I love those natural grey/brown/black fleeces.

Lorinda, you asked what we’re reading.  I listen to lots of books on tape and CD from Recorded Books.  Right now I’m listening to Monk’s Hood, a Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters.  I’m reading Sharpe’s Tiger, by Bernard Cornwell, a prolific author of historical novels whom I recently discovered.  In general, I like to read historical novels and mysteries, with the occasional guilty pleasure of a romance thrown in.  Oh, and I do like a well-written fantasy or sci fi now and again.

 

S4, aka Sarah’s Simple Summer Sweater (sizes 1X-5X) Fits bust sizes: (1X 49-51, 2X 52-54, 3X 55-57, 4X 58-60, 5X 61-63)

A link to this range of sizes is also available under “Free Patterns” in the side bar. For more and larger pictures, click here. For all posts on this sweater and its evolution, click the category “S4: Sarah’s Simple Summer Sweater” in the sidebar.

Please note that if you downloaded the previous pdf, there has been a correction on page 3. This minor change is highlighted for your convenience. Happy knitting!

Although yesterday was downright pleasant, the weekend brought us some truly horrific weather in the form of the tail end of a hurricane. Those tails still have some lash left in them, I’ll tell you.

Results, regrettably, all too typical.

In one case a whole, mature tree was cut down in its prime. My attempts to photograph it on Saturday morning were foiled by—and I know you’re not going to believe me at first—the humidity. Yes, it’s true. There was so much humidity in the wake of the storm that the felled tree was barely visible through a nimbus of suspended moisture.

There were reports of 197% humidity.

Yeah, yeah, I know. But it felt true.

Fortunately, I had read an article earlier in the week about running the marathon in adverse conditions of high humidity, so I was able to explain to Alex what happens to your body when you force it to perform in 197% humidity.

Me: “Your body produces sweat, but then when it doesn’t evaporate, your body produces more sweat. And then do you know what happens?”

Alex: “No.”

Me: “Your blood volume drops!”

Alex: (Pause.) “That doesn’t sound good. That doesn’t sound good at all. (Pause.) How about if we go to the museum today? Where the lights are low and the AC is set to 78 degrees?”

Note that I did not emphasize (a) that, unlike the people described in the article, we would not be running 26.2 miles that day, or (b) that I have no clear idea what the medical ramifications of a blood volume drop are. But who cares? It sounds absolutely dire. And I wanted air conditioning.

Others had the same idea:

On a brief break from the galleries, I enjoy a contemplative and civilized knitting moment with my Regia bamboo sock yarn:

Knitting, the “new yoga,” can be practiced virtually anywhere with little or no risk of public humiliation. The old yoga, with its undignified poses and unfortunate insistence on bare feet, often proved socially devastating to its public practitioners.

Still working on the bamboo sock under the watchful and slightly disapproving eye of a 19th-century Boston socialite:

“My dear woman, it is hardly as though I approved of the old yoga, either.”

The bamboo sock relaxing with a book in a quiet corner of the museum:

“Oh, thank God we didn’t go to the zoo! I would have been forced to spend the entire day fending off pandas.”

And thus was a cool afternoon spent and normal blood volume preserved.

Just for the record, after admitting to you all last Friday that I had a Sleeve Problem, a magical thing occurred: I started one of Rogue’s sleeves. From the top down, of course. Because I would rather go to a quadruple root canal appointment at the All-Night Dentist than set in a sleeve.

But the real fun is gonna happen when I get to that complex Celtic cable on the lower part of the arm. The one that is charted going the other way? Assuming that you would knit the sleeves from the bottom up instead of the top down? Uh huh. That one.

Stick around. Things could get very interesting…

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.

I’ll just admit it: I’m stalled on Rogue’s sleeves. Lorinda has suggested that I just forget the sleeves and use the existing hooded sweater-vest as a vehicle to show off my tattoo. Appealing though this idea is, winter will come and I’ll be sorry. This really raises the question: could there be a widespread disorder known as “First Sleeve Syndrome?” Or am I the only one afflicted?

With Bianca, it was the second sleeve that was the heartbreaker. I briefly considered sawing off my left arm instead of knitting the sleeve, but I ultimately saw sense.

Obviously, I have a sleeve problem. Of course, as you know, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

In the meantime, I finished those pink cotton/wool blend socks:

The feet of diverse species can coexist peacefully together if given an appropriate and gradual introduction.

I’ve also been down to our local CVS to see if I can find a remedy for my sleeve malaise and, of course, to see my favorite CVS cashier.

The first time I encountered her was a few months ago, when I tried to buy Alex some allergy medicine, but found that their stock was utterly depleted, what with the run on pseudoephedrine products by allergy-sufferers and methamphetamine addicts alike.

So, having failed at my central task, I instead bought a Diet Dr. Pepper, which I paid for with exact change, and here I do mean coins. I gave them to the cashier. She looked at the coins as if I had just put seven little turds in her palm.

Now that’s exactly the kind of dynamic, positive approach to a job that has made this nation great!

In an interaction with this same cashier a couple of weeks later, I attempted to jolly her along with a friendly, “How’re you doing?”

In a tone of infinite weariness, she replied, “Just as miserable as ever.”

Heh. I love that response, although admittedly my warm feelings toward this incredibly negative cashier are probably a direct result of my three strange and not-so-wonderful years in Berkeley. Berkeley, the town where no one would ever have said such a thing. It’s just not how things are done out there. Either you get the phony-baloney Teflon cheeriness or the “I-am-one-with-the-universe-and-I-transcend-lowly-human-things-like-mood-by-ceaselessly-doing-yoga-and-grounding-my-spiritual-life-somewhere-between-Buddhism-and-Scientology” routine.

I don’t know about you, but I just can’t get any traction in those kind of exchanges. What am I supposed to say? “Sorry, pal, but I do not believe your absurd story about transcendence, yoga, and Scientology. I suspect that you too run out of toilet paper at inopportune times, experience seasonal flooding in your basement, and have been known to yell at your children.”

Misery, however! I know from misery.

I told the cashier that I appreciated her honest response and I paid my bill in exact change: a $5 bill and six coins. True to form, she regarded the coins as though they were six little turds. And truly, it warmed my heart.

There was no remedy available for “First Sleeve Syndrome,” however.

In the wild, hand knit socks sometimes use reflective surfaces as a form of camouflage, making it impossible for predators to discern which are the real socks and which are the mere simulacra.

First off, proof that Rob was really in St. Louis over the weekend:

 

It looks hot there, doesn’t it?

Second, thanks for the kind comments and great response to the first five sizes of the S4.  I am working on the second group of sizes even as we speak, and hope to have that pattern completed and up on the site (thanks Alex!) within the next week. 

If, as you work through the pattern, you have questions or things are unclear, please feel free to email me directly by clicking on my name where it appears at the top right corner of the site.

And now, as promised, some new pictures of what I have been working on.

I finished spinning and plying the two handpainted rovings. 

 

A close-up:

The two singles worked out to be almost exactly even in yardage when it came time to ply them together, which made me very happy.  I was afraid that I would end up with significantly more of one than the other, and then I would have to decide what to do with that extra bit.  Ply it back on itself?  Leave it as singles?  At any rate, such a dilemma was, happily, averted.  I ended up with 5 good-sized skeins (1 pound) of 2-ply, which I have no idea what I am going to do with.  But it’s pretty, isn’t it?

I started spinning that butterscotch-colored wool:

 

This is wool that I purchased at the Heart of America Sheep Show and Fiber Fest this year.  It was washed and dyed, but not processed any further when I bought it.  I put it through my combs, and have finally started spinning it.  Let me just say, I love, love, love spinning my own combed fiber.  It’s so easy, it almost spins itself.  Compared to those handpainted rovings, which required splitting and (tedious) predrafting, this stuff is like magic.  Don’t get me wrong, those handpainted rovings were fun and ended up being quite beautiful, I think, but they were definitely more work. 

I haven’t been doing much knitting.  It’s too hot, even in the air conditioning.  I find spinning to be a cooler activity, because you don’t end up with a heavy, woolly thing in your lap. 

Hugo says, “I know it’s really hot out there, but I still kind of want to go out.” 

S4, aka Sarah’s Simple Summer Sweater Fits bust sizes: xxs 34-36 (xs 37-39, sm 40-42, med 43-45, lg 46-48)

Link also available under “Free Patterns” in the side bar. For more and larger pictures, click here. For all posts on this sweater and its evolution, click the category “S4: Sarah’s Simple Summer Sweater” in the sidebar.

I’d like to claim that my time with Rogue has all been a joy, a lark, a summer fling, but I’m afraid there is a darker side. See this?

And this?

And, from the other side, this?

Hard won, hard won. What I never mentioned before when I was proudly showing you all those photos of the emergent hood (and brazenly fishing for compliments) was that when you finish with the two sides of the hood, you must graft them together at the top. Since this is a cable pattern, that means grafting in both stockinette and purl and alternating between the two over stitch combinations of two, three, four, and five.

I’ve grafted before, I thought. No problem. What I failed to appreciate was that I had never before grafted a combination of both knit and purl stitches with aran weight wool in 98 degree heat and 85 percent humidity.

So what?, I thought. I’ve got the chops. And with a little help from Montse Stanley, of Knitter’s Handbook fame, I can do this thing. Now you must understand that I love Montse Stanley. I love her not only for giving me instructions for eleventeen million cast-ons and cast-offs, but for help with beading and seams and…the list goes on. But there is this side to Montse, a Calvinist side, an uncompromising side, a side that has no truck with the kind of person who would call knitting “just” a craft or who might (great seething intake of breath here) suggest a quick, half-*ssed fix for a mistake.

Here’s Montse on errors (emphasis, by the way, as in the original):
“DON’T LIE TO YOURSELF. You will know the mistake is there and you may even feel compelled to point it out to others. It is better to face the truth and correct the mistake, no matter how painful.”

On a lapse in tension:
“Stitches that are uneven are NOT a charming sign of a handmade item. THEY ARE A SIGN OF POOR CRAFTSMANSHIP.”

Every time I try to rationalize some cockamamie solution (one that does not involve frogging, you see) to some awful knitting mistake I’ve made, I can hear her words ringing in my head: “…poor craftsmanship, poor craftsmanship, POOR CRAFTSMANSHIP…”

Okay, Montse, okay! I’ll do it right. Just leave me in peace. Just…get out of my head!

Montse was pretty much her old reliable self on the question of grafting—how it must be invisible, how you must not pull it too tight or leave it too loose—but after half an hour of struggling to understand her grafting instructions, I was not my old reliable self. I was sweating, I was angry, my yarn was knotting up, I was splitting stitches with my tapestry needle, and the graft was looking like a “sign of poor craftsmanship.” Actually, it looked worse than that. It looked like the work of malicious wild tree elves on crack.

I may have said something along the lines of, “The devil take Montse Stanley and the friggin’ high horse she rode in on! Oh, and you know what, Montse? I would never feel compelled to ‘point out a mistake to others.’ You know why? Because I’m not crazy. I’m not an obsessive compulsive like you. I’m not…” But then I realized with a thud that I am both obsessive compulsive and slightly crazy.

Just like Montse! My heroine!

Anyway, I let it sit overnight while I tried to decide if I ever wanted to knit again, let alone do this graft. The next day, I tried again with another set of instructions (sorry for the betrayal, Montse, but it just wasn’t working out between us…) and things went much better. I used the instructions for Kitchener stitch in Simple Socks by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, which for whatever reason was much more intuitively obvious to me. For the purl grafting, well, I just kind of had to feel the magic.

After all that,

“Is my head still here or has it exploded?”

Rogue, the Vest Years:

Now the only thing that stands between me and an FO are those sleeves. More on that Friday…