Yarn Harlot

On Wings

Yesterday's day off seems to have sort of been what I needed. I've still got a bit of a stuffy nose and cough, but I've turned a corner for sure, because it's clear that I'm going to live, and I don't mind that, which isn't something I can say about every day of the last week. I really did spend yesterday doing something close to nothing - and made excellent progress on my wingspan, though I thought for sure I would finish it, and that didn't happen. Against my will, I fell asleep on the chesterfield, and as I'm sure many of you have noticed, holding knitting is far less effective than knitting it.

Did I tell you how I came to be knitting Wingspan? Truth be told I was in a weakened state. I'd had this cold for a week and I was right at the end of the little teaching tour, and I was in River Colors Studio in Ohio, and everyone there was so nice and so charming, and I'd been so good about not really buying anything. (Actually that's sort of a lie. I bought a big fleece from Beth when I was at the Spinning Loft - but I don't think that counts. Fleece isn't technically yarn and besides Beth cheats. She washes you up a lock or two, and puts the fleece near you so the fumes get to you- and this time she even spun me a sample. That's not fair - but it does work, and I have the fleece in the living room to prove it. ) Anyway, I was in the yarn shop and students started coming in, and a bunch of them were wearing Wingspan. Now, I'm not blind and I don't live under a big knitted rock, so I'd seen this pattern around - and it didn't interest me much. Sure it's sort of a cool construction and it looks fun, but there was something about the jazziness of it that didn't scream my name into the night, and life's too short to knit things that can't even mumble in your direction. So that's what I thought, and then all these students came in (clearly this pattern and yarn combination had run through the shop like a virus) wearing Wingspan knitted out of Kauni.

I've got a soft spot for Kauni, as I do all colour-changing, self-striping yarns, and while the rainbow Kauni in wingspan was a little bright for my taste, there were knitters there wearing it knit out of the more subtle, lovely colourways - and once I'd seen three, I started to get a little suggestible. I'd finished the Color Affection and had started a little sweater for Lou, but I wasn't feeling it. (Never mind that I wasn't feeling much, except for some fairly strong feelings about human frailty as it relates to viruses) and somehow, when I got into my car to drive home from Lakewood, there was Kauni in my car.

I started it that night when I got home, and now I'm really, truly almost done, and what a fast, fun, knit this is, and I really think that knit out of a lovely subtle shade of Kauni (EF) that it's sort of classy and cozy looking. (I totally get where the urge to knit it out of the rainbow shade comes from too. It's supremely entertaining to watch the different wedges emerge in different colours, and I can see how that entertainment would only be more exciting with more colours. I'm resisting through.)

The pattern calls for 8 wedges, but I'm going to keep going as long as the yarn holds out (probably 9 wedges, so not a huge modification.) I totally would have finished today, but with the Bike Rally looming (and still feeling like I've made a big mistake to sign up) I'm swapping out my usual knitting time with coffee in the AM for putting my bum on my bike and going for training rides. This morning was 30km, and it didn't go too badly, which is a big change from Sunday morning when ... well. I don't want to go into it, but let's say the world has one less chipmunk in it, and I have one more bruise. (Unrelated events, sadly. It was a bad day.) There's an excellent chance I'm not quite built for this. (Maybe I am. Who knows - it's a family team this riding the 600km this year - I'm riding, Ken's riding, my sister is riding, Amanda is riding, and so is Sam. Megan's taking a year off because of work, but Pato's doing it. That's most of us, and if my sister can do it, so can I - or die trying.)

This afternoon I've got a ton to do, from writing to cleaning to shopping to... well all of the stuff I should have done yesterday and didn't, all lumped together with what I have to do today, and will. Top of the list, tweaking my speech "This is your brain on knitting" (if you were in Sarnia or London to see me lately, you've probably heard it) so I can tell it to a hometown crowd tomorrow night when I'm the guest speaker at the Downtown Knit Collective.
Looking forward to it - way more than the next training ride, and a tiny bit less than finishing Wingspan.

Jammie Day

I got up this morning and staggered downstairs, making only a minor attempt to cough up my right lung as I did so - which is a considerable improvement in my health, so I put in a load of laundry and made coffee and surveyed the disaster that we're calling a home. Joe and Sam were on their own for a week, and it shows. Sure, they do dishes, and cook and clean - Joe had fresh sheets on the bed for me when I arrived home, and I noted the freshly cleaned bathroom with as much glee as I could muster, but when I'm not here, the house just sort of comes unglued. That's the only way I know how to put it. It's like whatever fragile system that holds this house together needs me to work, and when I'm gone these tenuous bonds disappear and the whole house starts falling apart like something out of a science fiction movie. For example, last Friday when I left, I owned five laundry baskets. Today, I appear to have two and there's no word on where the others might be. Everything in the fridge smells funny and there's ice cream, but no bread, and it turns out it must be me who sorts the mail, because there's a mountain of it on the dining room table along with Joe's 25 year old Royal Canadian Sea Cadet uniform, which I really can't explain, except to think that as the systems that run the house dissolved they ravelled the continuity of time while they went.

We could use some groceries, I really should unpack and sort out all my teaching stuff, and I have a huge backlog of email and work to do - the scope of what I should be accomplishing today is amazing, and yet, I can't do it. I really can't. I don't seem to even be able to get dressed, and while I managed to toss that single load of laundry in, that was apparently the sum total of all the housework I can bring myself to face. It doesn't make sense, because last week when I felt like death I kept on trucking, and here I am today, feeling a ton better and I'm sitting around in my jammies. There's a discordance between what I should be doing and what I am doing, and I can't even seem to work up the energy to care. Normally taking a day off like this, I mean really, really taking a day off, not doing hardly anything when things really need doing makes me feel sort of guilty, but not today. I'm tired. I have the tail end of this wicked cold/flu/black death, and yesterday I fell off my bike (literally) and you know what?

I feel like I have a lot of knitting to do today, and that I might have a nap, and screw the laundry. Screw it. There's absolutely nothing in this house that's so important that it can't wait a day for a sane, healed, healthy woman who can think in straight lines to do it. The kitchen floor doesn't even care if it's clean, it's inanimate, and if that email waited three days, it can wait four.
I'm taking a day, I'm kicking this colds arse, and I think I can finish the wingspan I started Saturday night, and that feels plenty productive to me.

Dashing

I'm finding it really hard to blog this week, but I'm going to try and do better. I'm travelling and teaching, driving my car around Lake Erie. So far it seems a lot like sleep, drive, teach, drive, sleep, drive, teach - you get the idea. I'm also struggling with what I've been trying to convince myself is a bad cold, but is seeming more and more like the plague as it refuses to give up its hold on me. I stagger into the hotel room and collapse into the closest bed each night and think about blogging for about 20 seconds before falling asleep in a nest of tissues, tea and bottles of water. I'm finally feeling a little better but last night as I arrived in Indiana my voice left me at the state line, and this morning, it wasn't back. On my way to Knitting Today (my friendly host here) I panicked and staggered into a drug store, walked up to the pharmacist and whispered "Help me." He suggested sign language, and then a bunch of other stuff, all of which helped enough to let me croak, cough and whisper through a six hour class enough to communicate pretty well I think. (I hope, anyway.)

Unbelievably, I'm enjoying teaching and meeting knitters anyway, which must mean that the knitters and shops I've been in are darned nice indeed- to be able to make up for the plague. The first night on the road (in Sarnia, where I had a lovely time at Feather Your Nest, just lovely) I finished my Color Affection/Infection/Addiction/Affliction and I washed it in the hotel sink, then blocked it on the bed and left a note for housekeeping explaining that it was a hand knit, and how I was drying it, and how it was okay not to worry about making my bed or anything.

When I came back, the lady had written "Ok - this is nice" on the note.

It is nice too.
(I took these pictures three metres from my hotel. Indiana looks just the way you imagine it does. )

Yarn was BMFA lightweight in Winter Solstice, Sky Blue, and A Hazy Shade of Blue. I've already worn it a couple of times, and tossed it into my hotel room nest of a bed each night for a snuggle. It's super cozy.

I thought knitting one would get it out of my system...but on Friday night Sarah- The Plucky Knitter herself, gave me some yarn, and then I might have bought one to go with and now the only thing standing between me and another one is a swift, ball winder and the little sweater I'm trying to bash out for Lou.

It's coming along really, really slowly, since the only knitting time I'm really getting is at red lights in the car (which is where it's posed in that picture) and I've had to split that time between knitting and blowing my nose. (It's a super elegant scene in my car these days, let me tell you.) Still, I am feeling (if not sounding) better today, and maybe I'll cut loose and stay up past 8:30 tonight and make some real progress.

Dear Kelly

I know it's hard for you, to be Auntie Kelly and to be so far away from little Lou, so that's part of the reason I wasn't really totally pissed when you dropped off a basket of baby sweater chunks (with no pattern, I'm just saying) and high-tailed it home to Madagascar, leaving behind only the admonishment to make sure Lou didn't outgrow the sweater before I sewed it up and dropped it off.

Also, the Auntie's have to stick together, so I told you I would sew it up, but then I sort of didn't.

I saw Lou on Saturday, and then I was going to see him again last night for a little celebration, and I realized I'm leaving today to go away for a week and that meant another week would go by without me doing this sweater, and so I busted a move. I worked on it before dinner, on the way to dinner (we picked up your mum) and at dinner, and somewhere around the cheesecake and champagne, a sweater was born.

I think it looks pretty good.

I put it on Lou, and we started going over the basics of sweater modelling. We tried a serious face...

and then I told him that babies should really smile in pictures, because you want to leverage the cute while you've got it.

Lou got it right away.

Anyway Kelly, I bet you miss him, and I just want to tell you that last night on a cold, rainy night in Toronto, your nephew and mine was snuggled in the sweater that two aunties built (mostly you) - and I think he was pretty cozy.
That sweater is going to fit him for a long time. I rolled the sleeves up.

We miss you.

Love,

Steph

(PS. Joe is getting a little better with him, but not really.)

(PPS. Next time dropping off the pattern with the sweater chunks would be great.)

(PPPS. Katie says this is now the only sweater Lou has that fits him. That sounds like a mission to me.)

A New Retreat

As we were weaving in all the loose ends from our colour retreat last November, we started throwing around ideas for future retreats, what would be different, what would be fun. We were looking at some of the feedback we got, and noticed that many knitters had pointed out that our current class structure (a dye class, a knitting class, a spinning class) was fun, but left out those knitters who don’t (yet) spin. We sat down with the fabulous staff at Port Ludlow, and started to talk about what we could do instead of spinning, and the very first suggestion was brilliant, and we’re doing it. From June 22nd until June 26th at the Resort at Port Ludlow, we’ll try our first ever Gourmet retreat. The idea is for you to spend a little time with the nicest possible ingredients... both food, and fibre. Three days jammed packed with luxury fibers and yarns, beautiful foods and cooking, and anything we can think of to do with them. One day dyeing, one day knitting, and one day (be still your beating heart)- one day of gourmet cooking classes.

The Executive Chef at the Inn is Dan Ratigan, who’s not just a wonderful chef, but a skilled teacher and he’s got an amazing day planned. Your adventure will start at the farm, learning how to select the best ingredients. From there you’ll go with Dan into the classroom and start cooking dinner for the rest of your retreat knitters. Chef Dan will lead you though everything you need to create a nutritious, delectable and stunning dinner, teaching you skills that will improve every meal you ever make. From planning, prepping, cooking and plating, all the way through the steps of service, and how to choose the wines to go with your creation. (We both want to take this class from Dan so badly that we can hardly stand it.) The class ends in the dining room - when you serve the meal you created, and we all eat!

In the dye room, Tina Newton will help you work with all the amazing yarns, and how they can best meet their chromatic counterparts. We’ll learn about dyeing coloured yarns -how do you dye brown bison? You’ll create your personal recipes - not just any blue but your very own blue. We’ll delve into sophisticated palettes to go with our sublime yarns. Bring an apron it’s sure to get messy!

In the pretty room overlooking the water, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee will host an all day exploration of knitting with luxurious yarns and the tools that go with them, and how to make the most of these precious ingredients. What are the challenges of cashmere, bison, silk and angora? How do you use them to their best advantage... and how do you take care these valuable projects when they’re finished? If you’re afraid of spending the money on these yarns because you don’t know how to handle them? This is perfect.

The weekend begins when you check in on Friday night, when we’ll gather and welcome you in the Sunroom. Over the next three days, you’ll attend classes during the day (punctuated by gourmet meals) and spend the evenings relaxing and learning more about the fibers we’ll be learning to love in really fun ways. (Reeling silk, anyone?) On the last night we’ll have a Q&A and a show and tell, and part from each other sadly.

The price includes all three full-day classes, evening fun, all materials, and breakfast, lunch and dinner Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The food is fabulous, and we promise that there will be very good vegetarian options, and the same flexibility for those of you with food allergies that you’ve come to expect from Port Ludlow. Chef Dan is very excited about being part of our teaching team and we’re expecting even more beautiful food from him than usual - and that’s saying something.

Accommodations are separate and you will arrange those on your own. We have negotiated special prices with Port Ludlow, and there are some shared accommodations (condos and town-homes) if you’d like to come with your friends. We’ll give you the promo code when you sign up, and you can always day-trip if you live close by.

Price for the three day/three class intensive with meals:
$795. (Credit card or paypal are fine) All Materials (except tools) included.
Gift bags, presents and surprises forthcoming.

(If you’re a vendor and you’d like to talk to us about putting a little something gourmet (food, or yarn or anything) in the gift bags, just drop us a line. We’d love it.)

To register, simply send an email to registration@knothysteria.com with “Gourmet Retreat” in the subject line, and include your name, address and phone number and a good time to call you, and we’ll ring you to arrange it. We’ll leave registration open as long as there’s room, but it’s an intimate retreat. Don’t wait too long.

Things I learned this week

1. If you teach your kids to knit, someday when they are 20 years old and they move you will experience the irony of having to carry their stash.

2. Megan labels boxes in a really great way.

3. I'm giving my "This is Your Brain on Knitting Talk" on Friday night in Sarnia: 7pm, Quality Inn, Christina St N, in “Winterbrooke Hall” put on by Feather Your Nest. Calling them will get you all the details you need I think - if you wanted to come, that is.

4. If you get up and eat your regular breakfast, and then do something highly irregular (like right your bike 20k as fast as you can) then when you are done you will feel absolutely craptastic, until you eat something, feel instantly better, and remember that humans use food as fuel. Duh.

5. If one time when you're talking to your knitter sister-in-law, and tell her that you don't mind doing the making up on knitting, it's really only a matter of time until she drops a baby sweater off at your house in chunks, and then leaves for Madagascar.

I've got to sew this up for Luis before he outgrows her efforts.

6. It is really a lot easier to sew up a sweater if you have the pattern.

7. The border rows on the Color Affection/Infliction/Infection/Addiction are really long.

8. Those long border rows do nothing to make me like it less though. Already thinking about another one.

9. I still enjoy pizza as much as I ever have.

10. If you start arranging your June Retreat at Port Ludlow right after coming back from your April Retreat at Port Ludlow then some people who work at Port Ludlow will think you're trying to move there. Which you might be. Just in a really sneaky way. (More on that tomorrow, I think.)

11. I am never going to like my new washing machine as much as I loved Sir Washie.

Looking Down

I'm about to tell you that I've had a stressful few days - and anyone out there panics and worries, let me assure you that this is stress that is well within the range of normal for human beings, and totally the result of normal life stuff, and that I have already dealt with most of it by scrubbing the baseboards, which always affords me a great deal of satisfaction. (I know some of you are just now thinking "I'm supposed to scrub baseboards? Who notices baseboards?" and I have two answers for you. Yes, and me. It's a personal quirk. I don't know what to tell you -except that part of the reason I love cleaning them is that I do it so seldom that they're really transformed by the process - so clearly my baseboard standards aren't that high.)

I spent the weekend doing Bike Rally stuff. (I told you I'm doing the rally this year - didn't I?) Saturday I got on my bike and did my second training ride, and a few things happened. First, I finished. I don't know how, considering that the ride was mystically uphill both ways and that it was so cold I couldn't feel my hands on the handlebars. The second thing that happened was that I got properly afraid. That ride was a challenge, and it's small potatoes compared to what the rally itself is - 600km over 6 days - Toronto to Montreal. My sister and I comforted ourselves by saying that if we stick to the training schedule we'll be fine, but I'm starting to think that we might have been using "fine" in a non-traditional way. I'm just going to keep getting on my bike and riding far and hope that it all comes together. It's very scary.

Sunday I went to the bike expo and did my required workshops. I'm pleased to announce that I can now fix a flat on my bike - although not without swearing violently and creatively. The instructor reassured me that the rally only requires that I can do it - not that I do it with any sort of grace - so I guess I'm okay. (Even Sam changed her inner tube faster than I did. It was a bit demoralizing.)

Somewhere in all of that we did a bunch of family stuff, I unpacked from Sock Camp and started re-packing to go out the door on Friday (See here, I'm on the road for a week.) and then magically managed to finish Ken's Birthday Socks, which fall entirely into the category of Better Late Than Never.

I love knitting socks for Ken. He always seems so pleased to have them, and since he's a knitter himself, he knows how much work they are.

Pattern: Francie, yarn Everlasting - in Congo.

The sharp eyed will note that I changed the toes. I just whacked my standard favourite on there - I like it better.

More tomorrow, when I've got a grip on things here. There's more baseboards.

That thing

You know that thing where you rip some piece of knitting back, and you wrap the yarn you have to re-use around the ball -

and then you start re-knitting, and keep knitting, and keep knitting and you're waiting for that moment. That moment when you're all done knitting the old yarn that you knit before, because pulling fresh yarn from the middle of ball and knitting virgin yarn means that you've recovered from whatever knitting error set you back in the first place. You know that thing?

I love it.

(PS. I'm re-knitting the Color Affection//Affliction/Infection with a yarn over between the first and second stitches, dropping it on the way back to give it a little ease along the edge. It's working great.)

Warning

A wonderful time was had here at camp, although an unexpected virus ripped through a very great number of campers. Tentatively called WWJK - or "What Would Josie Knit" it appears to have been touched off by this camper:

and her two gorgeous Color Affection Shawls. So beautiful was her example, and so infectious was her enthusiasm, that knitters began to fall almost immediately. Symptoms include putting all the yarn in groups of three, discussing the nature of the shawl's construction ad nauseam, and being unable to manage an evening without saying "I just want to nail a few more stripes before bed."

Even the staff is not entirely well.

This one is mine.

By the end of camp all of us were calling it the "Colour Infection" shawl - since it seemed more appropriate. Only a few campers remained well enough to resist,

The rest of us are hoping Josie doesn't decide to knit an afghan next year.

(PS. I ripped mine out and tried again. The edge was too tight.)
(PPS. Have you ever noticed how well people pick the colours that are right for them?)

Shazam

Sure as rain, last night I finished those socks I was working on all day. There's nothing like a whole day of travel to rack up the knitting time.

Yarn: Berroco Sox, colour 1440, 2.25mm needles Pattern: my standard Sock Recipe from Knitting Rules - worked over 64 stitches.

My thanks to Tina for modelling them this morning. It takes a special dedication to the humble hand knit sock to stand on a bench at 6:30am- taking direction about the placement of your feet.

We've got a day that moves at breakneck pace today as Sock Camp begins - every room at the Port Ludlow Inn will have a knitter in it by nightfall. We have rooms to set up, bags to organize and a game or two to pull together. (We have reluctantly decided against a sock yarn version of dodgeball, although it was really, really funny to imagine.) We have class notes and supplies to place, teachers to welcome (Hi Lucy! Welcome Carson!) and a few surprises to arrange. It's going to be busy, and wonderful, and a world with just knitters and knitter support people in it for four whole days. I'm excited.
And I need more yarn. Those socks were supposed to take three days.

Time Lapse

Toronto to Vancouver, five hours, and I know how to amuse myself.

I knit in the cab to the airport.

I knit while I watched a movie. (Mission Impossible nineteen, or whatever.)

I knit while I watched a show on my ipad. (Primeval .)

I knit while I read a book (The Golden Compass )
I'm only in Vancouver, so maybe there will be a whole sock today.

Instead of writing here, today I blogged at Cari's place, as part of her Writer: with kids series. Be sure and read the other authors too. It really is wonderful.

Leap

I'm just poking my head in here, since to say I'm swamped would be an understatement. I got up this morning, wrote my to-do list, and then had a little bit of a hysterical giggle and about 8 cups of coffee. That might be a start.

I leave in the morning for Sock Camp, which is going to be a very good time, but it means that I'm fresh out of anything resembling a minute here. I have meetings, phone calls, writing, work - as well as the pervasive belief that I'd be well served by taking at least a few clean articles of clothing with me on this trip - and I need to plan my knitting for the trip, and find everything I need to teach, and think over and gather up about a thousand things I have to remember to bring... oh crap. I need darning needles. Suffice it to say, I'm slightly deranged.

None of that stopped me from doing a completely sensible thing last night, and warping my wee loom with several shades of yarn, and trying to weave a scarf today. (Please forgive the crappy iphone pic, it was late.)

I'd take better pictures of it today, but the finished project is a surprise, and I don't want to give it away with details.) It's bonkers. Totally bonkers, and a complete leap of faith to even think that I could have it done before I leave tomorrow morning, and I know it's probably not possible, but there I was last night, warping a loom and feeling pretty positive about my odds.

Today? Today I can see I'm crazy, and I'm trying to fit a loom in a suitcase.

My Inner Knitter

I have an inner knitter. I'm sure you do to. It's the part of every knitter that has a pure and unreasonable love for knitting and yarn, but, unlike the rest of you, lacks any sort of maturity when it comes to getting what it wants. My outer knitter is what shows after personality traits like patience, self-control and reason slap down the inner knitter's impulsive wants and desires, although I only try to control her when I need to.

If my inner knitter wants to cast on another pair of socks and there are already four pairs on needles? I don't stop her. What does it matter? It's only knitting. It's supposed to be fun, and I can cast on as many pairs as we want. This assumes of course that I'm not on a knitting deadline - in which case I'm probably going to end up talking with my inner knitter about commitment and responsibility. If my inner knitter wants to buy a skein of yarn, and there's room in the stash and her plan is good, we buy it. If my inner knitter wants me to bail on cleaning the bathroom and knit instead, we might do that. I only have to wrestle her to the ground and hold her there by the metaphoric throat when she wants to buy eight skeins of cashmere or take a week off work or tells me to screw off when I suggest we might want to get off the couch and get a little exercise. (My inner knitter likes knitting, TV and chips. We discuss this often.)

This brings me to something interesting I've noticed about my inner knitter. We've had a few weeks of relative silence. This is totally normal for us. It's not like she doesn't want me to knit, she's just laid back about what. It's probably because my inner knitter is about 14, and like many teenagers, has her periods of intensity punctuated by periods of complete apathy. I'm walking around saying "What would you like to knit?" and she's lying on her bed wearing black clothes and too much eyeliner and listening to Fall Out Boy really loud, and whenever I check in with her she just says "Whatever. Why are you always talking to me? Close the door... Wait, do I get the stash when you die?"

At that point I just wander off, acknowledge that while we still love and must knit, my inner knitter doesn't have an agenda right now. I actually like these phases. They let me finish up projects that have been languishing, clean out the stash (you can't do that except while your inner knitter is checked out. They don't like getting rid of stuff) and catch up on spinning or weaving. It's never permanent. When she's done pouting because I made her clean her room and get off of Ravelry, she's see something or want something or be on fire for a vest. No way to know. Usually, I just wait her out.

Today though I figured something out. Inner knitters want you unemployed. That must be what's going on, because after about a week of lying on her bed wishing her bangs were longer and she had more black nail polish, my inner knitter has suddenly perked up. I have three writing deadlines that I'm thrilled and happy to be working on, and bingo. There's our girl. She wants to surf patterns. She wants to rip up the stash. She thinks everything we're knitting right now is crap and wants nothing but new stuff. Out of new yarn. I've explained that I have a lot of work to do, and it's not working. The more interested I am in writing, the more interested she is in knitting. This morning, when I told her that there was no reasonable way that we were getting up from the desk before I had met my word count and written a blog entry, she screamed "I AM SO SICK OF YOUR STUPID JOB, YOU NEVER CARE WHAT I WANT."

I took a deep breath and reminded her that without a job, I can't buy yarn, and I like buying yarn and that we are actually on the same side, and then I realized that I was arguing with the part of my brain that's a teenager, and I quit.
Now I'm just sitting at my desk, trying to write, and my inner knitter is totally carrying on in a way that makes it really hard to work, but I'm pretending that I can't hear her.

I'm a woman of some fortitude and I'm proud of what little self control I have, but dudes.

She's loud.

Potatoes

I've been at this fibre arts gig long enough to tell you a few people I don't argue with anymore. If Judith MacKenzie tells me something about how my wheel works , I don't argue. If Lisa Kobeck tells me something about how to put a loom together, I've got nothing to say, and if Deb Menz says something to me about colour in spinning , I just do it. What ever she says. The woman's brilliant. So it came to be a few years ago, that I was sitting in Deb's class on using wool combs to blend coloured top, trying to do something to improve my skills so that I could both use wool combs and let my tetanus shot lapse, and the class was great, and when I was leaving, Deb said to take a bunch of the top. A little of each colour. A really little bit of each colour. I asked why - and she said "It will come in handy some day." So, because it was Deb Menz, I did as she said, and brought home this big zip lock full of tiny little virtually unusable bits of top. It's sat there in the stash for a couple of years, bugging me. I could think of lots of reasons why Deb Menz would want that zip lock, but not very many reasons that I would, and I've only barely resisted the urge to give it to a spinner like Denny about a thousand times, but still, Deb said it was a good idea, so there it was.

Last week, I fished this batt from Hanks in the Hood out of the stash.

I spun it, and got pretty, pretty yarn that was just what I was hoping it would be..

I warped the little loom with it. (In response to many questions, my loom is a simple little rigid heddle loom. A Cricket. Quick, easy, fun. I have two reeds for it, an 8 dent and a 12 dent. For this project I used the 8.)

As soon as I got the loom warped, I knew I had a problem. I picked up what was left of the ball of yarn, and I got that feeling. You know the one. Where you've got a half a sleeve to go and you pick up the ball and get the heebies, because that ball of yarn isn't the right weight to go the distance? I knew right away that it wasn't enough, but I'm an inexperienced weaver, and so I hoped that I was wrong. Lisa (one of my many weaving mentors) told me that a good thing to remember is that the weft (the yarn that goes side to side) will probably take about 60% what the warp did. (The yarn that goes front to back.) I probably could have used that rule if I'd weighed the yarn before starting, or if I hadn't starting weaving while I was thinking I didn't have enough - but I didn't, and I did, so I just was sitting there with this sinking feeling. Another few shots with the shuttle, and I realized I had to face it. Not enough yarn. The batt I spun it from was gone, and Oregon's a bit of a ways to go to get another one, and even if they would mail it to me this project had a deadline, and so - I decided to stretch the yarn, sort of the way that you stretch a stew when two extra people arrive for dinner. I started to think about what I could use as potatoes.

I considered looking for a yarn that matched or contrasted prettily, one that would look good as stripes. If I put in a 2cm stripe every 10 centimetres, that would probably give me the length I needed. I looked through the stash with that in mind and discovered that I had no yarn that was appropriate. Now, I have enough yarn that there's no way on earth that there isn't something good for this in there, so that meant that I really didn't want stripes. I accepted that, and wondered what my other choice was? I only wanted the scarf out of that multi-coloured batt, but I didn't have more of the multi-coloured batt and didn't have time to order it... I was thinking that I was doing that thing I do again. I bet you do it too. That thing where you don't want to change anything that you're doing - but you also want a different result? (My favourite is "I don't want to stop buying yarn, but I wish the stash would stop growing.") I was just wondering if this was one of those times, when my eyes settled on that bag of bits of top from Deb Menz. I got an idea. I could make a little bit of the rainbow batt. I could fake it. If I could could create a yarn that looked a lot like what the one I was using looked like, then I might be able to phase it in and out of the weaving, like I would do if I had two yarns of different dye lots. They wouldn't be exactly the same, but I started to wonder if I could magic a yarn that was close enough. I grabbed the little bag of bits and my hand cards and went downstairs to the loom.

I started looking really closely at the yarn I had made, and picking those colours out of the bits, and putting them on my cards in what I thought was the right proportions.

Then I carded them together until they seemed blended enough, ran to the wheel, spun, plied, wound it off the wheel onto a shuttle, and came back with my several metres of potato yarn.

Whoa. Way too purple. The batt clearly had that purple in it, but that was way, way too much. I tried again, and this time when I had the bits carded together, I felt like it was going to be spot on.

Back to the wheel - then back to the loom. (For all you spinner/knitters out there, you should know that unlike yarn for knitting, if you're using your handspun for weaving, you don't wash it/set the twist until after it's woven, so it was okay to do this. Don't freak out.)

That's my new yarn on the shuttle, and the old yarn on the loom. Looks pretty good, right? I worked back and forth, a little of the potatoes, a little of the original, switching here and there to phase it in and out. Luckily for me, the original yarn is stripy and changes colours often, so I didn't have to be too careful.

By the time I'd done it for a while, even I couldn't tell where I'd used the potatoes yarn. The original batt had merino, bamboo and sparkle - and the potatoes yarn was just merino, so I never used it alone for too long, thinking that the texture would look too different, but of course, the warp was the original yarn, so there's always some bamboo/sparkle around. I saved a chunk of the original yarn to do at the end, so that both the start and the finish of the scarf would match, and whammo.

Done like dinner. I gave it a wash, and now even I can't tell where I put in the fake yarn.

I think it totally worked, and I can't believe that Deb Menz gave me that top, and that I kept if for this long, just because she said it would come in handy. I mean, she was right, absolutely right, and maybe 2g of each of a million colours of top is just the sort of thing that all right minded spinners keep in their emergency drawer, but right now it feels like Deb Menz knew this day was coming, and she pressed that bag into my hands so that I would be prepared when it came. It could be that I read way, way too much fantasy and sci-fi, or maybe watching all those reruns of Sliders on Netflix was a bad idea, but right now I have to tell you the truth.

I think Deb Menz is not just a textile artist. I'm pretty sure she's a time traveller, or at least folding time a little bit on weekends.

Bright Day

The sun is shining brightly today, it's Easter Monday, and everyone has the day off. Joe's reading the paper on the couch, all three girls are bumming around, joking, cooking, dancing and singing to Meatloaf and Jack Johnson. (It's a game of musical whiplash.)

Our egg hunt was this morning, and the ladies found all of them, except for one chocolate egg that I'll undoubtedly find on a Thursday in July. Megan (Canada's top sock model) agreed to do a little bit for me, and so I have rainbow bright socks for you.

Details: String Theory Colorworks, Continuum in Trifolium. (Merino, Cashmere, Nylon.) Plain toe-up socks, short row heel. (Home made recipe.)

These socks aren't for Meg, and ever since she found out that there's no money in sock modelling (even if you are at the top of your field) she has started charging me in knitting. This session cost me another pair of rainbow socks.
I'm going to have to get better at taking pictures of my own feet.