Category — General

…in life the last weeks. Between Nana’s passing, teen drama, work, and preparations for a “vacation” we’re taking as of Tuesday next, I’ve just been swamped. I haven’t forgotten you, though, O Blog, and I will try to show you my Bacchanalia Cormo handspun finished over the weekend, and the blob of reddish yarn that is progress on the Shetland Shawl.

Is it me, or is Fall coming on FAST this year?

My Nana — my maternal grandmother and my last remaining grandparent — died late Tuesday night. She would have turned 84 on August 12th of this year.

My Nana is the reason I finally learned to knit. My mother simply didn’t have the patience to teach me, although she tried; I tried several times to pick it up on my own and just hadn’t succeeded, until one day while I was pregnant with Sophie, I asked Nana would she show me? So she sat down, and in five minutes, had taught me everything I most needed to know about knitting — and, arguably, about life — “The stitches are all the same stitch — it just depends on how you look at them and where you put them on your needles.”

Nana was a gardener, first and foremost, and many of my memories of her are tied up in that.

I have always loved and admired Katharine Hepburn, and this image made me start a bit when I was sorting through photographs looking for some to post here — because clearly my Nana is the real-world model for my admiration of Ms. Hepburn. (And I mean beyond just the trousers and tall figure. Nana was very like K.H. in personality, as well, except that Nana got married and stayed that way.)

All the gardens you see behind her among the oak trees were planted entirely by her, over years and years of daily work on the property. She was out there nearly every day the weather allowed.

I love the colors in this image — if I ever try my hand at the dyepot, I may have to attempt a Nana-in-the-Garden colorway.

Nana had a life that could easily be termed tragic, but somehow she never came across as a victim. She lost one of her sisters early in her adult life under horrible circumstances, and then she lost her husband and all three of her children within five years. I can’t think of anyone who could handle all of those things, but somehow she did. It aged her terribly, but she was still Nana, still living her life, muddling through as best she could. I believe she’s the strongest woman I’ve ever known.

There was quite a bit of turmoil in my family after my mother died in 2002, culminating in the loss of Nana’s house in Delaware, nearly all the contents of that house, and Nana’s relocation to live near my cousins in Indiana. I haven’t seen her since that time, although I had plans to travel to Indiana in mid-August for her birthday to see her then. Alas, it was not to be. A couple of weeks ago, she took a fall that broke her pelvis; she later contracted septic infection and died on Tuesday night, June 24th.

While to a certain extent having her so far from me in distance was almost like losing her every day for the last years, the reality of it is that I always knew she was *there*. Now that she is truly gone, my heart aches for loss of her.  Isn’t the way the mind works foolish sometimes?

Swift Journey, Nana. I love you. May Heaven have gardening and unlimited chocolate supplies — and tell Mama how much I love and miss her.

If you’re interested, there are some more pictures-of-pictures over on Flickr.

We’ve been all rained-on of late. Gratuitous Happy Hydrangea photo:

I have one more batch of things-I-found-on-Etsy-and-had-to-have to show you, but I interrupt that rediculous blather with some spinning.

I am smitten — SMITTEN, I tell you — with this latest yarn of mine.

I had two braids of merino and silk blend from Cloverleaf Farms, purchased at this most recent MDSW. (You may recall I posted about them in one of the follow-up posts to that event.) One was in a soft yellow, the other in a soft green. When I bought them, there were only the two braids of each color left in the booth, and I thought vaguely at the time that I thought they might be pretty together.

Last weekend, in some of the fastest spinning I’ve ever done, I completed the green and spun three quarters of the yellow bobbin. Both braids kept me totally mesmerized with the very subtle color changes that streaked through the base colors here and there. (It didn’t hurt that the fiber slid right through my fingers in a cloud of pure happiness.)

I am always full of squee when I finish a skein of yarn, but this time I’ve been carrying it around and petting it so much that I haven’t even given it the bath I would normally have done BEFORE taking photos.

When I was getting started with the plying and being giddy over how beautiful it looked as it was plying together, I thought, it looks like sunshine! Like Spring! No, wait, like Cucumber Salad! But finally, seeing it in the afternoon light, all finished and basking on my dining table in the glow — it’s Dappled.

So yes, I have lace progress (hey, look, a blob! A BIGGER blob than before!) and new stitch markers en masse to show you — but this? This totally trumped that plan.

Even more photos (because I love it so much I can’t edit what I took at all) are over on Flickr with some other side notes.

Thanks to Danielle and Laura for relieving the Comments Desert that has sustained for the last month or few — you may not know what it means to me to hear from you, so I’m telling you — it fills my wee heart right up and makes me grin like a fiend. So even if it’s just a hello or a mundane comment having nothing to do with the post at hand — speak up, eh?

I have more things to share from this year’s Maryland Sheep and Wool festival. First of all, Sophie would like you to meet Jacob:

Jacob was sitting inside a tiny wee felted barnyard with some others of his kind, and I must have squee’d when I saw him. There was no question that the little guy needed to come home with me, particularly since I’d purchased three bumps of natural colored jacob wool that day, as well.

Three shades of Jacob wool, probably likely to become the yoke of something. Maybe an EPS.

I braved the bright, hot sun and unholy lines of the schwag department to get this shirt:

Please pardon the chaos of my bathroom, and the eight thousand me that appear due to the odd placement of mirrors across from one another in the same room. I have no idea why our landlords did that. It certainly makes for frequent brutal assessments of one’s appearance post-shower every morning. Oh, and I got the hairsticks I’m wearing in that picture at Sheep and Wool, also.

My trip to California went very well — so well, in fact, that I got nothing other than a couple of camera phone images of the ground from the plane. I got most of another Lizard Ridge block completed on the trip, which I’m sitting here finishing as soon as this post goes live, and I’ve started to jones for some lace knitting.

I have another thing or two from MDSW to share with you, and my dance teacher has commissioned me to spin yarn for and knit her some arm warmers from the wool silk I got in shadowy colors, so I hope to post progress on those, as well.

Anybody still out there?

I went into this year’s trip to Sheep and Wool with very little planning. I had some things I knew I wanted — spinning fibers, to include some silk — and beyond that I figured I would let serendipity reign.

I’ve already  showed you one set of silk caps that I got from Robin Russo, who also showed me how to draft them out and chatted with me about how they’re spun; the yellow “practice” cap she gifted me I already spun into a cobweb-weight yarn, which I washed and balled up and cast on yesterday for a lacy scarf. If it works, I’ll show it to you.

But I also got silk caps from The Good Shepherd, purely because the colors were so stunning I was unable to walk away:

I haven’t decided yet how I want to spin these — I got three caps of this dyelot, and they’re all fairly fat caps. The yellow cap I spun for practice was much lighter, and that yielded a little over 200 yards of cobweb weight, so I may try plying this with something for a laceweight or dk yarn, and make some kind of adornment from that. I know with those colors that I want it to be something that is worn purely because it’s pretty — not because it has any specific purpose.

I also picked up a serious haul from Cloverleaf Farms. The autumnal/harvest colored merino/silk blend I got from them last year has remained one of my most favorite handspun yarns to date, so I got one braid of the merino/silk, and two of the straight merino:

That’s the blend on the top, and the two wool braids on the lower part of the photo. These, combined with the handspun I have from last year’s Cloverleaf Farm haul, I think will become the hexagon portion of Norah Gaughan’s Hex Coat from Knitting Nature:

Photo from Norah’s Flickr via Ravelry, and looks to have been scanned in from the book. The suggested yarn is Reynolds Lite Lopi, and I have an entire fleece from a Navajo Churro lamb in a warm brown that I think will become the body of this sweater, and thus I hope this garment will become my first item ever made entirely from my own  handspun yarn.

I have more to show you, so come see me again soon.

I have some more progress on the Noni tapestry bag than what’s shown here, but while I was taking photos of this project for you guys, I inadvertently got the following image:

Six years ago on May 4th, I was in Millwood, Virginia at Long Branch Estate, where I married my (now known as The) Sainted Husband. I am grateful every day to have found someone who is a true partner for me, and who makes me feel beautiful even when I’m otherwise feeling icky. He gave me my beautiful baby girl, and takes care of both she and me very, very well.

(The diamond in my ring was my mother’s — I had actually asked for a sapphire, both because I prefer them and because we couldn’t have afforded a diamond then or now, but who can argue with a gift like that? Mama passed away four months before we got married, so it now is even more valuable to me. Our rings were made by http://www.raru.com, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.)

So what I was trying to show you when the above picture occurred was some progress on the tapestry bag:

That’s the  bottom of the bag plus a few rows of the body knitted around. I tried to show you some of the patterning, there.

Most of this progress was made at Alexandria Hospital while my husband dealt with a truly ugly first-time bout with a kidney stone. It took a few weeks and some direct intervention to get the stone out of his system, which is partly why I’ve been quiet the last couple weeks.

Today was Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, so I’ve got some loot to share with you in the days ahead! It was, as always, a total madhouse, but this year’s theme seemed to be silk for me. Lots of silk and and silk blends brought home to spin.

I leave on the 13th of May for Sebastapol, California, where I’m attending a tribal belly dance festival/event for a week or so, so it’s just busy-busy-busy around here for a while. I’ve also got some progress on Lizard Ridge to show you. What are you up to lately?

Curtains, part the first, for our front window that has plagued my OMG WE ARE EXPOSED sensibilities for the four years we’ve been living here:

Pardon the light.

I went back to get another three yards of this fabric while it was still on sale and naturally they were out of it. ~headdesk~ So either our back window (that is 180 degrees/immediately across from this one in the same room)  will have to have different fabric, or I will have to see if a different branch of the same fabric store still has this particular colorway. (they still have it in blacks and greys, which is stunning in its own way but not so ideal for this room)

I also picked up some fabric to attempt a One Block Wonder quilt today, although naturally I fouled up and didn’t get enough yardage. Grr. To steal a phrase from some dear friends: Myriad Things That Thwart Me!

Max consents to be the gratuitous cat photo for the day:

So I’ve gotten a little sidetracked since we last chatted; any guesses as to what with?

I’ll have you know that taking photos of your own fingers involves some creative use of Yoga and flexibility. I took several pictures to try and show you the tips of my first two fingers, there. That first image was the best one for showing you the callouses, but then I wanted to put this next one up, too, simply because I liked the composition and was sort of proud of myself that it actually turned out, given the contortions I had to make in order to get the image:

You get on a bloggy roll, post nearly every day for a whole week! Then the weather gets crappy and your stash of photos taken on the last good light day is depleted.

Then you go on a startitis binge and have nothing really to show except MORE Lizard Ridge squares (boring), the rolled-edge beginnings of massive colorwork bag that really is nothing much to look at yet; and no progress on Husband Sox.

Also I was going to have a drawing for commenters on a post a while back — but there were only four comments made! So I am stash-diving to find yarny goodness for those commenters, since it seems silly to choose only one out of four. (I think maybe I waited thinking there might be more peeps than that, since last time I did a giveaway it brought out the lurkers and how. But alas, I really have depleted my readership since going dormant for so much of last year. No one to blame but myself for it, but it does make  me a wee bit sad. I console myself with the fact that some of you are still out there reading! And therefore I must find you yarn. YARN POUR TOUT LE MONDE! /GraceJones)

I did spend all day President’s Day sewing curtains for our big bay window in the great room, which is still in chaos because I chose to sew instead of tidy.

Do posts with no pictures annoy you? Or is SOME rambling better than NO rambling, so long as photos are forthcoming without too much delay?

I am totally cheating with this photo, because I didn’t want to give you all the blather to follow without SOMEthing to look at, even if it’s only an obligatory Lizard Ridge image. (but here’s a hint — that square? DONE.)

So here’s what’s good: WordPress has upgrades to fix some security holes, etcetera, and the latest of these was released about a week ago.

What I did: Upgraded my WordPress. What I did NOT do: Remember to save all my theme information duplicated someplace else BEFORE I upgraded. What’s frustrating? My WordPress admin page STILL says I have an upgrade that needs to get done. ~headdesk~

There was a very scary few minutes there tonight where the whole site was blown away, everything looked like hell, and BOY-HOWDY-I-tell-you-whut*, there were some interesting curse words flowing from this here YarnGeek for a bit. But all now seems to be functioning okay, the headers are still rotating and seem to be the correct images, so let me know if you see something out of whack, but I will call it fixed the noo. (also, I sense A Disturbance In The Force that means there should be new header images getting added in over the next little while, so if you’re the sort who refreshes the page to entertain yourself or to find a header that better matches your mood, have some fun with that sometime after Thursday, won’t you?)

This week’s agenda includes a duvet-making tutorial for Elspeth (now with miniature duvets!), some more information on my local thrift store haunt for Sarah, a finished Lizard Ridge square rectangle, some gifty yarn for my three or four remaining readers who commented on the post in which I begged for comments, and a new project on the needles with some new yarn to go with it. I was on a roll there last week with the blogging, and I MEANT to have a post for you every day, but I fell short of that (somewhat lofty) goal. I’m not making promises because life is bound to interfere, but just check back now and again, as the knitting/blogging mojo has definitely returned, and I hope to have lots more to say and share this year than last.