that was fast

Nearly two months since my last post? They zipped by awfully quickly…

Well…

I finished Leaflet:

…Just in time to wear it to NHSW. Which was wonderfully full of fiber people.

Spring has continued–it feels more like summer now–and there are lots of things growing in the garden and at the CSA farm.

(a balloonflower in the front garden)

There has been some family and personal excitement, but things are mostly better now. Going forward, anyway. I’m continuing to look for a Real Job, but I have made some progress toward feeling more productive. I went to MAS&W (also a fantastic place to see fiber people), where Jennifer of Holiday Yarns let me use some of her booth space for my batts. That went quite well, and I have since set up an Etsy shop. Sooo… With the shop (which may soon contain things other than batts and yarn) and some freelance editing work, I at least have something to do that feels less like shouting into a void than the endless round of job applications.

(one of my favorites of the batt sets. even though it’s merino.)

 

spring!

I’m just a little excited about the lovely weather today and all the blooming and growing things outside.

Which makes it a little weird that I’m also excited about knitting a bulkyish wool sweater, but so I am.

That’s the cast-on and first two rows of Leaflet. I’m being careful to avoid aggravating my hand, but it seems to be ok with short bursts of not-too-intense activity.

 

shades of blue

Mostly, things are continuing in the same pattern. Applying for jobs, waiting to hear, doing fiber stuff in the meantime. Yesterday, though, it was a beautiful day (if a little chilly and blustery), and my dad and I went for a walk along the bike path.  My shoes were bothering me, so we stopped for a few minutes at the first overlook on the way north, and I’m glad we did.  The lake and the Adirondacks are always beautiful, and it’s good to get to see them for longer than a few seconds at a time, while out running errands.

 

october summary

October has been a pretty decent month.  I’m still unemployed and feeling antsy about it, but I’ve gotten to spend some time admiring the fall color and hanging out with awesome people.

Two weeks ago, I drove over to Manchester, NH to visit people at SOAR.  Once I got there, I spent the rest of the day inside the hotel, but the drive was utterly beautiful.  I’m not really a fan of getting up early, but it was lovely to be off in time to see the sunlight on the morning valley fog.  SOAR itself (okay, the marketplace and the collection of people, since the only activity I observed was the fashion show) was great.  I ran into friends as soon as I walked through the door, and I got to spend hours and hours with people I don’t get to see enough.  The one problem, really, was that I only had ~13 hours of interaction.  Internettily, though, I suppose it didn’t happen, since I took no photos.

Oh!  But I do have a photo of a bit of yarn I spun on Friday morning, when Rosemary let me play with her milk-cap spindle (made by JimBob):

That was quite an interesting spindle. I usually spin on medium-sized spindles that start off weighing about an ounce and weigh at least twice that by the time I’m finished. So a spindle that can’t possibly have weighed more than ~10g…it wanted to spin very, very fine yarn. The sample above is from singles I wrapped around my fingers and then allowed to coil up, so it’s effectively something like a 2×6 cabled yarn.

And then, this past weekend, I drove down to Rhinebeck. I camped at Lake Taghkanic State Park again, in a cottage this year (rather than a cabin), and it was almost perfect. The setting was lovely, and the rain politely allowed me to unload and then reload the car in the dry (even if the ground was squelchy).

Again, I didn’t take any pictures of people (though I know I’m in a few), but I did take some of sheep and goats:

It was a weird Rhinebeck for me–for the last few years, I’ve made a thorough circuit of all the booths and spent most of my time looking at things, even when I didn’t buy much. This year, though, I prioritized finding people. So I started with booths where I knew people, and then flitted (a bit) from one set of friends to another, wishing I had at least three times as much time with each group.

Except for Sunday morning, when I wasn’t wandering about with people because I was in a class: Getting More Done With Spindles, taught by Abby Franquemont. It was a lot of fun, and it’s gotten me thinking about actual productivity versus perceived productivity, and I’ve learned at least two new techniques.

I learned something else last Sunday, in a much less enjoyable situation: if I’m going to attempt a 4+-hour drive on back roads on a Sunday evening (or, really, any evening), it is wise to acquire plenty of caffeine when it is there, whether I need it immediately or not. Since I miscalculated (and the restaurant where I’d intended to stop must’ve been closed and unlit, since I totally missed it), what had been a 4.5hr trip on Friday turned into a 7-hr trip on Sunday night.  (On the trip down, I spent much of the drive looking at the gorgeous foliage and plotting how best to get those colors into fiber/yarn/garments.  More about that later.)

I’m back now, though, much to Mel’s satisfaction.

It is definitely lapcat season around here.

 

general update

 

Well.  I’m still in Burlington, still looking for work, still enjoying some aspects of living in semi-suburbia.  Like this:

I haven’t seen the orioles in a while, but the hummingbirds seem happy.  We’ve got at least three, probably four, near enough that they use our feeder regularly.  And now that we’ve brought out the other birdfeeder for fall, the woodpeckers are more visible, too.

I’ve also continued to work on Bernhardt:

And I’ve been spinning, and carding, and doing some dyeing to have more stuff to card:

That’s most of yesterday’s dyeing, drying in the sun.  Maybe I’ll go out and join it for a little while.

 

home is good, too

Not a travel post!  Whee!  There’s still a fair amount going on, though rather different stuffs.  First, as many of you know, there’s a spinners’ event called the Tour de Fleece in which much yarn is made during the Tour de France.  (Some people watch the TV coverage of the bicycling, but lots of us don’t.)  I got a fair bit of spinning done this year.  Less than I’d hoped, I’ll admit, but I’m happy with my pile of fresh yarns.

These are Shetland, Wensleydale, Polwarth, Merino/silk/camel, and Merino/Corriedale, with a couple of partly-spun batts (not my carding) in the back.  I also finished spinning a couple of other yarns that didn’t make it into this photo.  (The ones on the left side here have been washed; the ones on the right have not.)

One of the things that’s been distracting me from spinning and job-hunting has been raspberry-picking.  It’s taking even longer these days, as it’s the peak of the first crop of red raspberries (there’re fewer black raspberries, so they’re faster to pick).  This is what I picked on Thursday:

Yes, there are some not-raspberries in there.  That bowl holds about two quarts, though, and it was totally full yesterday and overflowingly full today.  Which is why there’s also a (second) tray of raspberries in the freezer, plus two batches of raspberry jam on the counter.

The garden is full of lovely inedible things, too:

That’s a black-eyed Susan and a buttonbush in bloom.

 

wildlife interlude

Two major things contributed to this post: First, being friends with someone who knows a lot about dragonflies has made me notice them more, and second, my dad is ridiculously hard to find gifts for. So part of his Fathers’ Day present this year was an afternoon of walking in the woods. (Not hiking, really, but two pleasant walks.)  (Okay, okay, that isn’t gift-y, ’cause I don’t take much persuasion to go out in the woods, but the more-than-cursory gardening help was.)

So! First, the giant dragonfly I saw in the iris garden in Florence:

And a frog in Colchester Bog:

And a variety of insects in East Woods:

 

home again

I’ve been home for nearly two weeks now, but it’s gone by amazingly quickly. Oh, especially because I went to Massachusetts over the weekend, mostly for the Sheep and Wool festival.

I’m still working on labelling my photos from Europe, but here are a few from since I got back.

If things go more or less as planned, I’ll have a post on Venice up tomorrow.

 

saturday eye candy

My dad called on Wednesday afternoon to ask if I wanted to go walking through the woods. I’d had a whole bunch of other plans for the rest of the day, but hiking was an easy sell. We went to Red Rocks Park and walked up a hill and then down to the lake.

Right by the lake, we found some snow:

(And interesting rocks.)

There was plenty of evidence of spring, too, though:

And it was good to be in the woods.

…

It’s been a while since I’ve genuinely finished a knitting project of my own, and my recent knitting has all been a commission, but I do have a new pair of socks:

Georg kindly agreed to knit socks for me out of my handspun in exchange for me weaving something for her. (The warp is measured and partly threaded, but it’ll probably be June by the time she sees it…)

 

spring flowers!

It’s been another weird few weeks around here, including a whirlwind trip to NYC and Philly, but it’s genuinely looking like (Vermont) spring now.

Flowers and more flowers! And some leaves!

And a very full lake:

***
In other news, I am planning a trip to Venice, Florence, and the UK, for two weeks in May. I’m planning to do basic touristy art-and-architecture-and-glass stuff in Italy and wandering around in the countryside in England and Scotland, but if any of y’all have recommendations that wouldn’t show up in a basic guidebook, I would appreciate anything you want to share.

 

welcome back

The title refers both to the fact that I think I’ll be back to blogging more regularly now that I’ve basically finished school stuff and packing/moving stuff (unpacking is a different question, but it’s less urgent) and to the welcome I got from the weather here in Vermont:

That’s looking out toward the deck and backyard, a few minutes ago.

This next photo is from last Tuesday, in Philly:

Just a little different, there… But I don’t have to go anywhere today, so the snow and wind aren’t a problem.

*

As far as fiber, I’ve finished a batch of spindle-plying and started a new set of AbbyBatts:

And I finally finished knitting my Hedgerows of Screams:

(Photo taken before moving.)

*

Also, thank you to everyone for congratulations on my defense. (WP had some comment-emailing hiccups, and I got caught up in an extra experiment for my paper as well as moving stuffs, but I do appreciate your comments.)

 

weekend eye candy and randomness

• I was on vacation last week. I visited my parents and had basically the most slothful vacation ever. It was great.

(The cosmos and sunflower were cut flowers from the farm; the copper beech is in my parents’ backyard.)

• I did, in fact, take my sunflower shawl with me, in case the airport/airplane was cold. They weren’t–in fact, they were rather warm–but it got chilly in the evenings. I love Vermont summers. (I did not, however, remember to take a better photo. And then I left it there.)

• I packed two knitting projects and three spinning projects, only to knit less than in a normal week. I made enough progress on the silk plying to have finished it yesterday, though…Photos soon.

• Mel really missed me. So much that 8 hours of my company on Sunday wasn’t enough to keep him from waking me up several times on Monday morning, something he only really does when he wants to play.

• Echo Flowers continues to grow, and I’ve gotten pretty bored with the blossom pattern. I now really dislike the 3-into-9 stitch, but I have another 4 or 5 repeats to knit before I switch to the border pattern.

• That means that the past week’s evening knitting time has gone to recharting the border pattern for my Chai Phoenix shawl and winding a plying ball from my Grim singles.

• Except that some of it went to carding: I took a couple of club fibers from Spunky Eclectic and combined the red/pink/brown bits into 154g of batts.

• Half of those batts somehow totally filled a bobbin on my Lendrum (not really packed tightly, but still…).

• And here’s another sunflower, from my parents’ backyard, just because.

 

eye candy friday: more vermont flora

How did it get to be Friday again already?  (Yeah, yeah, okay, the 12h workdays do make time disappear…)  I should have some fibery pictures to post soon, as I’ve been spinning for the Tour de Fleece (if nothing else, while walking to work), but, for now, here are a few more photos from my vacation in Vermont.

The herb robert is from a hike up Mount Philo; the Queen Anne’s lace and delphinium are from my dad’s flower garden.