Lambtown U.S.A.

I spent Saturday at  Lambtown USA, in Dixon, California. Here’s the story in pictures. Lambtown isn’t just a fiber festival – it’s a celebration of sheep and lamb and all their gifts to us. Sheep are shown and judged,

Shetland ram

  

shorn,

shearing contest

and even ridden:

looking for a customer

 

Lamb is cooked

and eaten, with gusto, by both fair attendees and competitive types:

eating contest

  

Last year there were sheepdog trials too, but this year they were unaccountably missing. The fair is pretty fiber-centric, really. There’s fleece judging, and a competition for handspun yarns and garments made from handspun:

fleece judging in progress

I visited with friends while watching the judging – Sarah got some spinning time in and showed us how easily the perfect center-pull ball comes off her adorable Turkish spindle:

Somehow I neglected to take pictures of the rest of the crew of friends I spent the day with – so sorry, folks!

I enjoy the sheep-to-shawl competition. It’s a team event – each team receives a big bag of washed, dyed fleece, and the object is to card it, spin it, and weave it into a shawl by the end of the day. The best shawl wins – and size matters too:

The market  was heavy on spinning fiber and fleece – with mostly smaller vendors, including several with no or minimal Web presence who had wonderful wares, like Gone Batty:

I did not come home empty handed:

merino-alpaca-silk-Shetland-angora batt

Optim from Chameleon Colorworks

And even though it’s called Lambtown, alpacas were in evidence too – look at the beautiful coats on these suris:

and indeed they were judged too:

  
And there you have it – a great day all around.

The Perennial Question

Can she do it?

49 rows to go on Miralda’s Triangular Shawl. It doesn’t look promising, even though they get shorter and shorter. If I run out, here’s my option:

I’m knitting with my handspun for the first time, and that there is the remains (appropriate word) left on the second bobbin after plying all of the first one. I wound it off into a ball thinking I’d ply the rest of it from the two ball ends, but that didn’t go well – you can see why! “Energized” would be a kind word here.

(Furthermore, when I went over to the Ravelry pattern page to get the link for this post, I saw the errata for the first time. I wondered about that bit of asymmetry in the nupp diamond chart, but didn’t wonder hard enough to go looking for corrections.)

Wish me luck.

TGI Sunday

I’m in the home stretch of what’s been a month of difficult, brain-busting book indexing projects – still another week to go, though, and today’s my only day off for the foreseeable future. I started the day with coffee on the porch, listening to the quails talking to each other, and did a little gardening – I can’t stand the idea of spending much time inside, let alone in front of a computer screen, today, so I’m just going to show you the bit of knitting and spinning finished up this week.
First the Brandywine shawl. Rosemary Hill’s design is simple , quick and elegant, and better yet, most of the pattern sales go to Doctors Without Borders for Haiti relief efforts. She’s already sent them $10,500, just from the sales of this one pattern! If you haven’t already done so, go buy it and knit one for yourself or to give away. Our local knit group has finished a dozen or so total – we’re hoping to enter them to be displayed en masse in our county fair.

Mine is knitted in Habu Tsumugi silk – a laceweight tweedy raw silk. I have no other shawls in this kind of texture – love the way it looks and feels. The shawl is knitted from the lower point up and out to the top edge. It’s finished with an interesting purled i-cord bindoff that perfectly matches the weight of the slanting decrease lines and the K2tog that forms the last stitch of the side edgings:

Last night I finished plying the Corriedale wool I’ve been spinning this last couple of weeks – after coffee this morning I wound it off and washed the skein. It’s by far the most evenly spun and plied yarn I’ve managed to produce – I’m thrilled. The colors are gorgeous (the fiber was bought from Royale Hare). And I’ve got about 300 yards/150grams of nice worsted weight for some small project. Because it’s 3 colors, one after the other, I’m thinking I’ll wind it into a center-pull ball and knit stripes, alternating ends as the whim takes me.
What should I knit with it – got a brilliant idea for me? ETA: Ilga Leja's Haiti Scarf might be just the thing. Or how about a BSJ? I haven't knit one yet - is 300 yards enough?
Signing off to head back outdoors – with tea and knitting.

Retreat, and the lure of spinning

My knit group retreat last weekend was short, but idyllic. There was a foot of snow on the ground in the Sierras, but the weather was sunny and gorgeous. Most of our Saturday was spent on the deck:


Knitting was the excuse for the expedition, but there was also just lots of good company, great conversation – and delicious food and wine. What a blast!

I didn’t do much knitting (although I did finish binding off my Brandywine shawl), but my trusty wheel rode with me and I did do lots of spinning. First some plying to clear my bobbins:

Softly-spun merino-wool in lavender, silver-gray, and sheep’s black. I spun all of each color before going on to the next, then made a two-ply. Where the colors don’t match exactly, there are marled black-gray and gray-lavender transitions. I think it’ll make a nice color-banded hat or mittens.

Then I spun this Corriedale in three coordinating colors the same way (these flash photos are quite accurate):


The fiber is from Royale Hare - a mixture of dyed and natural gray carded together, for a lovely, complex heathered effect. It has yet to be plied, but should make a nice slightly fuzzy worsted-weight 2-ply.

It’s time for me to tell you my spinning story. When I started knitting, I thought I should give spinning a try, and eventually I had a drop-spindle lesson from a friend a couple of years ago. It was a group lesson, and several folks were instant spinners. Not me – hopeless. With some relief, I decided I didn’t need to spin after all. One less enthusiasm to complicate life.

However. I’ve got a great virtual knitting group – we’re friends who’ve been talking knitting, and other things, for years online.  Many of the group are longtime spinning enthusiasts, and enablers par excellence. After that spindling lesson, I told them I’d been there, done that, no thank you very much. But they knew better. Last summer, a great deal on a preowned Matchless cropped up in the discussion. I seem to have expressed some interest, because before I knew it, the wheel was delivered to my door. As a surprise, the whole group got together to make it happen – and over the cliff I went.

Here’s Ms. Matchless on the day she arrived:



I still haven’t figured out what I did to deserve this incredibly generous gift, but it has proven to be the beginning of a love affair.

My day job is serious left-brain work. Indexing is reading, writing, and analyzing; often I’m thinking about abstruse, complicated topics like identity politics in the Caribbean or the emergence of modernity in the Middle East. Knitting is a great complement to the work I do, because it’s about handling real materials and making real objects. But knitting is just a little bit technical. The lure of spinning for me is that it’s so elemental and so different from my paying work.

A long time ago, I baked for a living for a few years. Knitting is like pastry making; spinning is like sourdough bread baking. Oh, I know, I could be a technical spinner – but I prefer to spin intuitively. It’s simple in some ways, but mysterious and complex in others – so there’s always something to learn. And when spinning, I feel connected to a tradition that goes back thousands of years. It’s satisfying in the same way it is to grow food, or make wine. In short, it makes me feel human.  So thank you, dear friends, for making this adventure possible.

Resurfacing

Long time no see! I’ve been mired in book indexing work, and sick, and well…there hasn’t been time to blog.

There hasn’t been much knitting either. The two current shawl projects are both stalled. I started to bind off Brandywine, eager to block and wear it – and discovered an errant yarnover that I can’t live with:



It’s been sitting in time out ever since, but I’ve decided that designer Rosemary Hill is right – don’t ladder back and fix it, just bind off and sew it closed. Actually there’s another mistake you can see in the photo – but that one I’ll just live with.
Then there’s this one:



Miralda’s Triangular shawl, in my own handspun (Targhee from A Verb for Keeping Warm). Love the pattern, but there are some nupps that need repairing, and I don’t have the patience for it right now. Not loving the quality of my yarn – I think it’s overplied – but will stick with it anyway.

There has been a little bit of spinning. I reward myself for finishing work quotas and taxes and the like with spinning time. I recently finished this skein of Lisa Souza BFL (in Aww-tum):


and I’m working on this one:





This is some nameless wool/merino/nylon I was given in small quantities. The colors are related – a bit of the lavender runs through both the gray and the black, so I divided each color in half, and am spinning all of each color in turn. Hoping that they will come close to matching when plied, with some interesting marling at the transitions, and make a nice color-banded hat or something. I’m trying to teach myself to spin (and ply) a bit more softly.

I’ll be belting my wheel into the back seat of the car tomorrow – I’m off for a mini-retreat in the Sierras with a dozen friends from knit group. We’ve never done this before, but it’s going to be a great time!  Here’s what the cabin surroundings looked like a couple of days ago:



Looks like perfect knitting-and-spinning-by-the-fire weather to me - I’ll report next week! [ETA: no cell phone or Internet either. A true vacation!]  I hope to be bringing back the Pattern Roundup soon, and to have some Knitfinder news for you before long too.