More Strolling and Woolgathering

I couldn't resist just a few more glimpses of the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival before saying goodbye for another year. So here's a little photo album.

The Spinner's Hill booth, in the Main Barn, with gorgeous- colored batts of spinning fiber and dyed locks -- though not as many as the day before!

These lustrous dyed locks are from another vendor in the Main Barn, Triple "R" Farm.





Just a couple of guys taking their alpacas for an afternoon walk. What's so unusual about that?





The stall where I found this cutie bore a ribbon that said "Champion Ewe." I'm not sure if that's for a particular breed or an overall award like Best in Show. But she gets extra points in my book for the hairdo alone.








This booth was full of nothing but Icelandic wool. There were whole fleeces in the bushel baskets. I coveted them, but I'm not ready to take on another fleece just yet.






There were plenty of interesting books to be had. This one came from the Yarn Barn of Kansas.






Mid-afternoon seemed to be a drowsy time in the sheep barns. I love the rich plummy brown color of this guy's coat.








This young man was playing beautiful music with his hands, while operating a pedal with his feet that made the puppets dance.


Some charming family togetherness from the little lambikins.









Here's to another wonderful festival, and many happy returns!

Funny You Should Ask...

Did I get a chance, at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, to fill that great big shoulder bag? Why yes, Beate, as a matter of fact, indeed I did. :) Thank you for asking!

In anticipation, since the New Year, I've been tamping down my acquisitive urges, keeping yarn and fiber buying to a minimum, looking forward to shopping joyously at the Shangri-La that is Maryland Sheep and Wool. I decided to concentrate on spinning supplies, though the offerings and selection of finished yarn are inarguably superb. For now, I am infatuated with handspinning, and spinning fiber and tools are much harder to come by than beautiful yarn at the local yarn stores within easy reach.

At the same time, I didn't want to go overboard buying at the festival. I've already built a respectable stockpile of fiber, and I'd rather not inflate my backlog to hopeless proportions. My goal was to find fiber for one sweater, a wraps-per-inch tool, perhaps another spindle, and maybe a few other odds and ends. A secondary theme was to continue sampling types of wool that I haven't tried yet.

So there was a sweater's- worth of this Rambouillet wool, from Mangham Manor in Charlottes- ville, Virginia, the owner of the colorful stall pictured in Sunday's post. Their rack looked even more bounteous before I relieved them of the batts you see here. Rambouillet sheep are a French strain of Merino, so this wool should make a very soft sweater. These lovely colors are destined for blending using the Frumious Bandersnatch (my drum carder), to make a subtle heathered yarn.

There was also this hand-dyed roving of wool and silk from Cloverleaf Farms in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Their address there is on Huff N Puff Lane -- isn't that wonderful? The roving is in a colorway called Oz, quite a bit greener and more brilliant than it looks in the picture. (One of these days, I really must learn more about how to adjust my camera to balance the colors.) I've never tried spinning anything with silk in it yet, so this should be fun. It ought to have a bit of drape from the silk, so I'm thinking it may need to be spun at a fingering weight to make a scarf or shawl.

I found the wraps-per- inch tool I was looking for at Woodchuck Products, a crowded booth where I had to stand in line for an hour! I've seen a couple of very utilitarian models that are readily available, but I was hoping for a pretty one. This one, made of cocobolo wood, fits the bill nicely.

For any non-spinners out there, this tool is used to measure the thickness of the yarn you've spun. You wrap the yarn around and around in one of the notched areas near the top and the number of wraps that will fit in the measured notch helps tell you the weight, whether it be sport-weight or bulky or anything in between.

In keeping with my theme of trying new fibers, I bought this little taste of Icelandic wool, from the Three Farms Icelandics booth. Because of the severe climate where they live, Icelandic sheep have a thick double coat, with long outer hairs and a soft undercoat. In processing an Icelandic fleece, spinners may choose to separate the two types of wool or mix them together. This particular package comes from Aboundingful Farm in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, and contains roving that mixes both coats, like the famous Lopi yarn.

I've been toying lately with the thought of another spindle. I taught myself to spin initially on a handspindle, but soon developed a ferocious desire for a spinning wheel. Once I made the acquaintance of Rastro, my spinning wheel, I had little patience for my spindle.

However, as I've become more skillful with the wheel, I understand drafting and twist so much better that I think I could enjoy the spindle more as well. I've also learned about having spindles of different weights for different purposes. And you sure can't beat the portability. This beauty is a lightweight 1.5 ounce spindle made of zebrawood, from Millpoint Emporium, in Amsterdam, New York.

What might I want to try spinning with my delicate new handspindle? Well perhaps this lovely little one-ounce sample of pure superfine cashmere from Hillcreek Fiber Studio in Columbia, Missouri. It seems too fragile to spin on the wheel. In fact, I'm not exactly sure what I will do with it. I really just wanted to see what it's like. I may spin a little on its own and save the rest to blend with a bit of alpaca. Or I may just keep it around to fondle. This downy fluff is incredibly soft.

There were a couple of other items, but I think I'll leave it at that for now. As I write this, at a time when I would best be in bed, outside the window a late-awake bird is singing his heart out. He's perhaps a mockingbird, as he's working his way through a whole repertoire of musical numbers. Though it's been dark for hours, he's chirping away cheerily, for all the world as if he were in a meadow on a bright sunny day. Odd, but nice.

Mighty, Stunning, and Wondrous

I'm home, foot-weary and salty-skinned, but happy and parcel-laden. Home from the mighty, wondrous Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.

I've lived all my life within striking distance of the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. But I never knew it existed, for years and years. I believe it was through reading knitting blogs that I finally got wind of it. Two years ago, for the first time, I packed up world's most patient husband and went to have a look.

Oh my goodness, what I had been missing. It is a hard-to-believe assemblage of vendors and demonstrations and livestock and events and music and committed knitters, spinners, and weavers. Plus a fair number of families and visitors just enjoying the colorful scene. It is overwhelming and wonderful. I will not miss it again if I can help it. I mark the date on my calendar and wait all year for it now.

That first visit planted the seed that eventually made a spinner out of me. The second one, last year, infected me with an interest in hand-carding that led inexorably later that summer to raw fleece.

As the day for this year's festival approached, I wondered, what more could it do to me? Would I yearn to play the hammered dulcimer? Would I long to repair to the countryside for a life as a dilettante gentlewoman farmer making pets of three or four sheep carefully chosen for their fleece? Would I harbor a burning desire to learn woodworking and carve lovely spinning tools? Well, with this year's festival behind me, I don't seem to be that far gone yet. But one never knows, once the urges have had a little time to ripen.

In any case, yesterday, I grabbed a great big shoulder bag and my tall elegant Mom and headed for the festival. The weather could not have been more perfect, a dazzling sunny day in the mid 70s. It was, alas, a little warm for a hand-knit sweater, but many doughty festival-goers ignored the temperature and adorned themselves in knitting nonetheless.

I had never before gone on Saturday. It's reputed to be more crowded than Sunday, and it certainly was. There were long lines for restrooms, food, and some of the booths. Inside the barns, the aisles were at times impassable, filled with bubbling masses of generally good-tempered celebrants, hard to navigate through, but easy enough to float along with.

I had been a little worried about whether my Mom, not a knitter, would grow bored before I could get my fill. But she was a great sport, with impressive stamina. She dived right in, admiring the fiber, looking through books, enjoying the music, sweet-talking the sheep, visiting crafts booths, helping me choose colors, savoring the whole event.

And there was so much to see and enjoy.

Now, What Was So Scary About That?

I did it! I did it! I took the plunge and knitted some of my own handspun.

I had run out of delaying tactics. The Merino Lace socks were finished, and all the additional wool in the new gray color was spun. I told myself that I was not allowed to start any other knitting or spinning projects until I got started on the handspun sweater I've been sneaking up on all this time. That gave me just the little push I needed to get over the hump. I felt stymied, briefly, bottled up and frustrated. But in a couple of days I gathered my mental energy, got up a head of steam, and got going.

First I needed to get better acquainted with the yarn, which up until then I had only petted and admired. I tried doing the wraps-per-inch test, but I'm not sure I had that right, as it kept coming out as chunky weight, which it assuredly isn't. Next I painstakingly counted all the threads in the skeins to estimate yardage and wound them into balls. It felt alive and resilient in the handling. I carefully weighed each ball and calculated the yards per pound. That didn't really tell me much either. How many yards per pound should there be for a given thickness of yarn? I'm not experienced enough to say. The one thing this exercise did tell me is that, although it looks fairly consistent, the yarn varies quite a bit in thickness from ball to ball.

Finally, there was nothing for it but to actually knit some of the stuff. I took a wild guess and grabbed a pair of US size 7 needles, jumped in and started swatching. It worked up in the neighborhood of a worsted-weight gauge, a little loftier than I realized.

And you know what? It's real yarn. Yarn that you can knit with. Rather nice yarn, in fact. It's crisp and eager to please. It doesn't drape lazily like the Cashmerino; it perches on the edge of its seat, ready to jump up and go, light on its feet. Right then, I told it, let's get to work! I still had some work left to do to sort out the details of the sweater design, but set to it with a will and soon had it done.

I needed something that would use the five different natural colors of Coopworth wool that I had spun. I didn't actually set out, originally, to make a multi-colored project; it just happened. It all started with a half-pound of dark brown Coopworth that I bought to practice on when I first got my spinning wheel. Then, wondering what to do with the yarn, I found other colors to combine with it. Of course, I don't think I'll end up actually using that first bit for the sweater. It's the yarn I learned on, and it shows, though I love it all the same.

I settled on a color-blocked design, with set-in sleeves and a square neck, and swatched to see how the colors would look. The warm tan really seemed to jump out from the other colors. So instead of graduating all the colors from dark to light, I moved the to the bottom as a sort of edge accent. I tried out the cable motif I want to use down the front, to make sure it would work. And since it needed a name, I dubbed it the Cannonball sweater.

So now I'm happily on my way. In fact, I took it with me on yet another trip this week. Normally, I take socks for portability, instead of a bigger project, but I think I've had enough of socks for now. So I packed circular needles for the plane and straight ones for the hotel room and, optimistically, five balls of yarn, one in each color.

I did get quite a bit done by the time I got back, thankful to be home again. Here's most of the back, and I'm partway up the front as well. Of course, stockinette stitch in worsted weight does go quickly -- a welcome change after a stint of lacy patterns in tiny sock yarn. In any event, I'm awfully excited to have this project underway and see how it will turn out. And I'll never again be quite so hesitant to dive in and knit with my handspun.

Thank goodness, the Cannonball sweater is finally rolling!

All Over but the Grafting

Hang on; just give me a minute... fuss, fiddle, pause, squint, grunt, pick, tug, tug. Deep breath, repeat. There! Done.

Yes, I'm happy to report that the Merino Lace socks are finished. They were my travel companions for quite some time. They journeyed on airplanes. They hung around in airports and stayed in hotels. They vacationed at my in-laws' house. But they finally got tired of being neglected between trips and declared they would not put up with being a travel-only project any more. They insisted on going out with us to ballgames. Really, at times they seemed starved for attention. Poor darlings.

Here they are, my version of the Merino Lace socks by Anne Woodbury from the Favorite Socks book. And honestly, the photo in the book, where they look handsome but a little blah, does not do this pattern justice. They are much prettier than that.

I was intrigued enough, though, to want to give them a try with a skein of Schaefer Anne yarn I had on hand, that I bought from Carodan Farm at last year's Fall Fiber Festival. I used one skein and had 37 grams left over. There's a lot of yardage in those skeins.

I knitted them using US size 1 double-pointed needles, although the instructions are actually written for two circular needles. I don't care for all those cables and points whanging around, so I used inoffensive double-points. Bamboo, for airports.

The Anne yarn, a beautiful concoction of merino and mohair, is on the thinner side of sock yarns. It's thinner than the yarn called for, but I thought the relatively low-contrast analogous blues and greens in my skein would look pretty in the lace pattern. I wondered if it would affect the size of the sock, but figured I would risk it.

Well... I had to do a bit of a do-over. When it came to point when I could try it on, the moment of truth, the first sock was so tight you could bounce a nickel off it (that is, if it hadn't had my leg in it and had been stretched over a drum, I guess). Those soft, subtle space-dyed colors had arranged themselves fetchingly into big thick stripes that I had been careful to ignore, rather than get upset. Embrace the pooling! Become one with the pooling!

I ripped out the whole thing and added a couple of ribs symmetrically around the narrow lace pattern on each side to make it 78 stitches instead of 66 stitches around. You can see the little ribs in this picture, coming down the side and splitting to go around the gusset. That worked out a lot better.

The extra stitches solved the size problem nicely. And I think the added ribs sharpen up the look and set off the lace patterns rather well. As an extra bonus, the pooling disappeared (except for the toes where the stitch count decreases.) The distinct colors blend into a soft, heathery effect.

So now I'm very happy and can just admire the pattern. These are really very pretty socks. Look how the petal-y lace runs right down the back of the heel. They're long- stemmed beauties.

I think I'll make a gift of them to my tall, elegant mom, who loves her hand-knitted socks so much that she bought a pair of clogs just to show off my handiwork.

Ahhh. Hear that? It's a deep sigh of satisfaction.

Sticks and Nets

It's been pouring rain here lately, packing an April's-worth of showers into just a couple of days. Everything is in bloom and mistily green.

Earlier in the weekend, though, we had a beautiful soft spring night and went to see the Yarnstruck nephews in their latest sport, one that involves sticks and nets. Boys with sticks and nets make me think of picking fruit, or maybe shaking pecans from the tree. But, of course, they weren't in an orchard. They were playing lacrosse.

I don't really know a lot about lacrosse, I'm afraid. One thing I did observe is that, though its fans are clearly avid, it doesn't pack the stands as football and basketball do. That makes it a perfect place for... an impromptu one-person stitch-and-pitch! Plenty of room and not so many people to think you're strange.

Perhaps I didn't learn as much as I could have, that night, about the sport of lacrosse, had I only watched a little more and knitted a little less. But I made very good progress on the Merino Lace socks.

I did draw a few odd looks. The little red-headed boy there in front of me sat commenting, older than his years, expertly to his father on the game, the coaching, and the calls. He also cast quite a few narrow-eyed sidelong glances over his shoulder at me, obviously wondering what on earth I was doing and what that thing was in my hands. He looked as if he had a pretty fair suspicion that I was up to no good. Eventually, I happened to look up at just the right time -- or just the wrong time, from his perspective -- and caught his eye, whereupon he immediately glued himself face-forward to the action on the field, never to peek again.

Alas, in the end, the Yarnstruck nephews and the rest of their plucky but inexperienced team got a drubbing from their opponents. (Incidentally, out of curiosity, I looked up the word "drub" in the dictionary and was highly entertained to learn that its first definition is "to beat with a stick." Perfect, isn't it; it lacks only a net! Isn't language wonderful?)

No matter, the Yarnstruck nephews took it philosophically. Afterwards, as world's-most- patient-husband and I walked out to the parking lot, a flowery scent filled the air. We looked up, and saw this mature crabapple tree in full bloom, lovely even in the dark with a camera flash.

So there was my orchard after all. Just a little too early in the year for picking fruit.

A Greedy Profusion of Books

I am not one to live on the web alone. I love libraries. I love bookstores. I love overflowing shelves and coffee-tables of books. I love knitting books. Oh, how I love them.

A friend once asked of cookbooks, another all-too-collectible category well represented on my shelves, "but how could anyone use more than ten or twelve?" What could you possibly need from other cooking books that wouldn't be covered in those? Well of course, if it were simply a matter of putting good food on the table, he'd be right.

But there's a lot more than a decent selection of good useful recipes in cookbooks. There's adventure between those covers! There's sociology, and history -- how things came to be the way they are. How and why they're different from place to place. There's international culture. How they fit into the local ways, and celebrations, and traditions. There's emotion. How people feel about foods and dishes and what they have meant in their families, their forebears, their own lives. There's technique. There's science. There's fashion.

Knitting books are the same way. I don't particularly want another dozen how-to-knit books. They cover basic ground I learned many years ago. But there's so much more to know. Knitting traditions in different places, and how they grew from people's commerce, their local resources, their livelihoods. How they were influenced and inspired by their landscapes and their aesthetic sensibilities. What it means to them. The individual voice of the writer. Techniques and refinements won over a lifetime and shared with readers. A special way of explaining something tricky that makes it all clear. The eye of a talented designer or editor. A stitch collection that includes a few things not seen anywhere else. New eye-opening ways of putting a garment together. A lively personality. A time capsule of what was in fashion when the book was published. Exciting patterns that are in style right now. The reassuring timelessness of other patterns.

Do I need all this? No, of course not. But it enriches my own knitting. I love looking through the excellent collection at my local library. It has introduced me to authors and designers and traditions I knew nothing of. (Once, years ago, I lived for a while directly across the street from a library. Heaven.) I love the treasure hunt at a used or new bookstore for something wonderful that I haven't seen before. I can spend a happy evening sitting cross-legged on the floor going through the knitting section a book at a time. (How lucky we are to have such a flowering of knitting books being published these days!) I love having books at home. I love to settle in and browse through the books I have on hand, learning, looking for ideas, finding inspiration.

Does the web provide all that? Not with the quality, depth, and permanence of printed books. On the web, there's some great stuff, but plenty of slush to wade through. There's much that's haphazardly organized or transitory. There's a great generosity of offerings, but not always a surplus of the editorial discipline that helps ensure lasting value.

I'm a happy and grateful tourist on the web. But home is among my books.

How Fleeting Our Shared Memory

Knitters have built community and shared experiences and a deep and rich vein of reference material on web sites. The more we interact, the more information we discover on these sites, the more we contribute ourselves, the more we turn to them as our shared archive, and the more we think of it all as permanent.

Why print out patterns? Why go to the library? we might start to think. After all, there's more on the web than we have room to store. With the enormous resources out on the network and almost supernaturally effective search engines, we begin to feel we can rely on finding anything we need to know, right at our fingertips, right when we need it. But there are times when we see it isn't so.

The sudden shutdown of MagKnits is one of those times. MagKnits was an on-line knitting magazine that published free patterns from many talented knitting designers over the last few years. These patterns included some very famous ones, beloved of bloggers, like Grumperina's Jaywalkers sock pattern. Whether from frustration, financial dead-end, or just plain exhaustion, the maintainer of a formerly reliable web site can just... stop. Knitters who had been intending to knit one of the patterns some day, who counted on being able to go get it when the time came, are left uncertain.

The patterns are not exactly gone. Echoes are everywhere. On the laptops of people who had already downloaded them to knit. In Ravelry, where many had been made available before the shutdown. In the caches of Google. In the giant web archive project known as The Wayback Machine. In the records of the designers, who thankfully still own their own copyrights for these patterns and may publish them again. But the primary lode is gone. The echoes are scattered, some of them denuded of their charts and photos, and many of them evanescent.

The patterns originally published in MagKnits, though, have enough of a following, enough of a magnetic pull, that I believe they will coalesce again. Other losses, not so widely noted, may not.

I've seen cases in which a knitter's blog, an individual on-line personality and all it has shared, has suddenly stopped. Months go by with no new posts. We begin to wonder about the real person behind the on-line identity. We hope boredom, not hardship or tragedy, has caused the outpouring to stop.

I've seen cases in which an E-Bay seller has suddenly stopped. An artist of gorgeous hand-painted spinning fibers, whom I'd bought from more than once, who posted about her farm and the rescue animals who live there. Time wears on and no new items are offered for sale. We begin to wonder why she stopped and if she's OK. We wonder if the animals are being taken care of.

The web sites remain, still there, unchanged, seeming now a little ghostly and sad. Perhaps they'll stay, frozen, until the paid-for term of Internet service expires and they disappear, to be replaced by the commercial sites that crop up to trap the unwary.

But I hope they are only resting.