More foreign fiber

And you thought you were done with Peru.  But there was more fiber!  And I'm here to tell you now that when other people (read: people who aren't interested and fiber and textiles) ask how we liked Peru and whether we have any pictures, what they want is pictures of Machu Picchu and Colca Canyon, etc etc.  It's amazing how quickly their eyes glaze over when I show them pictures of vicunas.  I don't understand it, but it's true.

We saw other camelids than vicuna, of course - we even got to feed some at a wonderful little camelid farm that had all four of the Peruvian camelids: llamas, guanacos, alpacas, and vicunas.

They were greedy.

So was I.

But the vicuna were too far away to pluck, alas.

There were also a number of women there, spinning and dyeing and weaving.  We got to see one of them grinding cochineal.

She showed us all of the shades of red that can be made with cochineal diluted with various other things.  They also had a lovely display of the colors that Peruvian weavers get from local native plants.

Too cool.  She demonstrated spinning, which didn't seem to entertain the other tourists as much as it did me.

Tucked away in corners were the products of her spinning:

and her tools.

Of course, we did go to the more usual tourist places, like Machu Picchu - where we found llamas.

And took the kind of pictures that all those other non-fiber people expect.

Next time, I'll share a few more of this sort, and then, with luck, I'll actually have achieved something worth sharing in my various knitting and spinning projects.

Meanwhile, I'm trying desperately to catch up on my never ending pre-semester to-do list.  I'm almost looking forward to meetings - at least then, I can knit!

Fiber at home

While there's at least one more post's worth of fibrous content from Peru (not to mention all the non-fiber things we did; patient as my family are with my obsession, I didn't subject them to constant doses of woolly goodness), I have been spinning and knitting here at home, too.

Between Peru and Sock Summit, I had a short period of time at home.  I devoted myself to finishing the Alhambra socks, as I had hopes of wearing them while at Sock Summit; there is something particularly wonderful about wearing socks that took so much effort to knit to a place where I knew I'd be surrounded by people who actually understood how much effort it took to knit them.  So I knitted like the wind.

You can see that poor Tilly is feeling rather left out of the process here.

Believe it or not, these were not knit to be opposites of one another, and I held the same color yarn in the same hands throughout both socks (yellow in the right hand, blue in the left); the relative brightness of the colors seems to be very different between the two socks, though, doesn't it? 

I don't care.  I really, really love these socks.  They fit beautifully, the pattern is gorgeous, the colors are exactly what I would have chosen if I'd been in charge.  The yarns are fine enough that these socks aren't too bulky to wear in clogs (which I did at Sock Summit; this explains the now-no-longer-pristine semi-fuzziness you can see in the pictures).  I will wear these a lot, come winter.

The foot and toe charm me rather unreasonably, even knowing that no-one will see them but me.  I'd knit these again.

To recap, these are Janel Laidman's Alhambra socks (my Rav page here), from this year's Illuminations sock club.  They're knit out of jwrayco handpainted fingering yarn (the kit yarn); the blue color is Lerwick Harbor Purple, but I never got a ball band for the yellow colorway and I don't see its name on the Rav pattern page, alas.

So, I did manage to knit and wear these and my handspun Rivendells at Sock Summit.  Two out of three dreams ain't half bad, right?  (I also managed to show the Alhambras to Janel, and the Rivendells to the folks at the Sincere Sheep booth; that was rather fun.)

What was the third pair I'd wanted to knit and wear, you ask?  These:

You can see I didn't make it, although this sock was my major knitting through Sock Summit.  This is the larger version of my Silk Road socks, knitted for me, this time (note that it fits?  I've been checking...).  I managed to get the heel turn to work in the larger stitch count, and I'm very pleased with that fact.  These go pretty quickly when I work on them, since I don't need a chart to knit them.  So I'll keep plugging away.  I need to decide whether I'm going to write this pattern up or not.  The major hesitation comes from writing up the heel; I may end up writing out the heel turn line by line, and I should take notes on that when I do the second one.  We'll see.

Meanwhile, I have also succumbed to the siren call of the Stripe Study shawl.  I managed to hold off in spite of drooling over Helen's gorgeous versions, until I walked into my LYS and saw one hanging there innocently, right above a display of Zen Garden Serenity Lace (which has cashmere in it, just so you know).  I was lost.

The colors are close there, although imagine that purple a bit more on the burgundy side.  So yummy.  The colorways there are RaspBerry and Grey, and I love this thing unreasonably.  I keep knitting away at it, even though it's only garter stitch, and I keep telling myself to save it for meetings.  I can't seem to put it down - I think things like, "Just one more short row", and then "Just one more gray stripe", and I'm lost.

I'm also playing with fiber.  For example, between trips I finished spinning the absolutely gorgeous fiber that Erica sent me last spring - I need to wash it to set the twist before I take final measurements, but I spun this woollen in hopes of getting a lofty yarn, and I think I've succeeded.  Younger Daughter has already laid claim to it and wants a shawl.

It's really a lipstick red; the color is gorgeously saturated, and the fiber was in amazing condition, not at all compacted or compressed by the dyeing.  For some reason I can't find my notes on what kind of fiber it is (I know I have the ballband stashed away, but if I stop to look for it now I'll never finish this post) - I'll update that soon.  I need to decide on a pattern that will let the color and the handspun-ness of the yarn stand out.  (I also need to know how many yards I have, of course - I think it's about 300?)  Any suggestions? 

And finally, I'm playing with silk hankies for a class I'm teaching at my LYS in September.  I want to have a nice simple pattern for mitts, plus maybe one for a shawlette, by the time of the class.  It's such a hardship to have to play with silk...

I'm not spinning it, although I might with the next one - right now I'm just drafting and knitting straight from the hankies.

So, fiber fun right here at home.  And now, I think I should finish just one more short row before dinner, don't you?

And now it's August

And I'm back from my blog break.  Which means I'm also back from the things that were keeping me from blogging, and I can tell you all about them (lucky you, right?) - to wit, a trip to Peru (!!), and Sock Summit (!!).  Between those two trips, I was out of town for almost all of July, and the brief period that I was home between trips was taken up with things like, oh say, laundry.  And petting Tilly.  And Sock Summit homework.  And laundry. 

I'm still not even close to caught up with the laundry from SS11 (not to mention unpacking the stash enhancement part of my luggage - wait 'til you see it all!).  Instead, I spent yesterday unpacking my office (which has spent the last month in boxes, waiting for our move to our new building).  The girls helped me get books onto bookshelves, and between us we had the whole thing ship-shape and Bristol fashion in a few hours.  This is a good feeling, given how much I need to get done before classes start back at the end of the month.

But Peru!  The four of us headed off on July 2nd, and didn't get back until July 18th.  Peru has always been on my List Of Places To Go Someday (that list is actually rather frighteningly long - I need to start a plan to finance my extensive travel wish list)(note to self: buy lottery tickets today).  This year we looked at our older daughter who will be starting high school next week (which means college in four years), and realized that if we want to take some of these trips as a family, maybe we should just do it.  So we did.

There is so much to tell, but I think that I'll focus on the fiber-related goodness for now - and there was a lot of it.  Peruvian textile traditions are still an ever-present and vibrant part of Peruvian life.  We spent our whole trip in the highlands of Peru, much of it on the altiplano, where women still walk down the road, dressed entirely in handspun and -woven clothes, spinning while herding alpaca.  Having read Abby Franquemont's Respect the Spindle (a book which I cannot recommend highly enough), and having seen videos of her spinning with a Peruvian spindle (she learned to spin as a child in Peru), my big goal for the trip was to find a spindle and learn more about how to spin with it - in particular, I really wanted to master the trick whereby a spinner walks her fingers, butterfly fashion, up the newly-spun yarn.  (If I am being totally honest, I also really wanted to find some vicuna fiber to bring home, but I realized how unlikely that was, and I'd been told by several people that they would not bail me out of Peruvian jail should I be caught chasing Andean camelids across the highlands in hopes of snatching tufts of fiber from their fleeing fannies.)

On Day 1, in Lima (our one day in Lima), we headed to the Museo Larco where I was able to accost my first fiber artist.  Many museums in Peru have a regular rotation of weavers and spinners demonstrating their arts, and the Museo Larco was no exception.  When I came, this woman was weaving, but a few minutes later she picked up her spindle and set to spinning.  Rick and the girls told me I was an idiot not to approach her, so I worked up my courage (and my terrible Spanish) and did just that.  I learned that the word for spindle is (and this is a Quechua word, so my spelling could be completely off - any Quechua scholars out there who can tell me how close I am?) puxka (where the "x" is pronounced "sh").  I also managed to convey the idea that I really wanted to learn that butterfly-finger-walky thing, and she had me sit down to watch (she also offered me her spindle to try it, but I really hated the idea of messing up her work).  Can you tell I'm just not quite getting it?

(The look on my face there says: Seriously?  I don't think so.)  There was also an amazing collection of very old textiles, including a spinner's workbasket.  Look familiar?  Some things don't seem to change much over time, and a fiber artist's workbasket is one of them.

Most of those spindles are for spinning cotton.  All of the ancient textiles I saw had cotton warps and camelid wefts; none of the modern ones did.  The one thing I didn't manage to do was to find an example of one of these spindles; I'm guessing they were used supported, but I could be wrong.  They are all made with a narrow shaft with a bead in the middle, and from what I saw in the museum, the spun fiber was wound around the bead, spreading up and down the spindle shaft as it was wound.  In that basket, in the upper right corner, you can also see a ball of spun singles wound for plying.

(Side note: The Museo Larco has a tremendous pre-Quechua ceramics collection - 40,000 pots strong - with pieces dating back 3,000 years.  It also has a huge collection of ancient erotic pots.  We wandered into that gallery with the girls, oops.  Put another quarter in the therapy jar.)

The next day we were off to the highlands.  We took a bus that went right through one of the camelid preserves, where we saw vicunas (!!).  (Imagine a) a tilde over that "n", and b) that word all in capitals, gleaming gold, and with light streaming from it.  Vicunas are awesome.)

Don't you think that one wanted to come home with me?  We saw quite a few of them, along with alpacas and, later, llamas.  The one camelid we didn't see in Peru was the elusive guanaco (the forebear of the llama; vicunas and alpacas are related) - they are very rare.  At our first rest stop, Younger Daughter even got to pet an alpaca (the first of many).

And I got to watch a woman plying from a ball wound with two singles (no photo, alas), something I'd read about and tried myself, but it was really fun to see it in practice.

The altiplano is astonishingly beautiful, in a sere, spare way.  There was no green anywhere (it was winter, remember), and at the altitudes above 16,000 feet, there was little to be seen but rocks and snow and the occasional vicuna (no wonder their fiber is so warm and fine).

(If you click to embiggen, you might just see the vicuna standing on a rock on the horizon.)

It was so clear that the water really was that lapis blue, reflecting the endless sky.  I could have stayed there the whole time and been happy.

But then I would have missed so many other things, like Lake Titicaca (the highest navigated lake in the world, at something like 12,000 feet, if I remember correctly), where we did many things, including a visit to Llachon, where I was lucky enough to have an amazing conversation with a weaver and spinner there, thanks in no small part to our gracious and multilingual guide (the main languages around the lake are Quechua and Aymara, and most of the people in the villages are more comfortable in one of those languages than Spanish).

I tried my hand at weaving, beating down the wefts with a bone tool (and earning myself a raw knuckle in the process - I was told that this meant that I was doing it correctly; she seemed surprised that I was willing to go that far, heh).  She was also kind enough to instruct me in her spindle technique; she used her spindle supported, spinning a lofty yarn for the weft threads of her textiles.  Thanks to the guide, we were able to have a conversation about the differences between her spindle (a bottom-whorl) and mine (I described a top-whorl spindle to her), and the difference between the uses of the fiber she spins supported (for blankets and clothes), and the more tightly-spun fibers that people use for, say, straps for carrying bags and babies.  She also told him, laughing, that I was the first tourist who had ever produced actual yarn on her spindle.  It wasn't good yarn, but I felt good about it nevertheless.

I think it's safe to say that it was my best textile moment in Peru. 

I'll stop there - there's lots more, but a little at a time does the trick, right?

Some FOs and some new stash

I can't quite seem to keep the inflow/outflow balance even, much as I may try, but two objects rolled off the needles this week; one is a true FO, and the other is the first of a pair of socks.  I stuck to my usual SSS-avoidance tactic, though, and promptly cast on for the second sock, so with luck I'll get those done before next summer's solstice rolls around.

The first FO is the Whippoorwill shawl.

(Modelled here by Younger Daughter.)  This was a fun knit, well-written pattern, gorgeous fiber.  I knitted it out of Frog Tree Pediboo, which has a gorgeous drape and weight, thanks to the bamboo fiber, plus plenty of loft from the merino.  A very nice shawl fiber.

It's a simple pattern, but it definitely does the trick.

This is one I'll wear a lot (and I love the colors!!).

I also finished the first of the Alhambra socks.

I continue to love everything about these - the pattern, the yarn, the combination of colors, everything.  I also continue to find it a challenge, which is why these are taking me so long.  I really, really need to concentrate on the charts as I work, especially the charts for the leg.

It's well worth it, though.  I'm thinking that if I were to go through and put in more of my usual chart landmarks (for example, I tend to draw a vertical line down the chart every five stitches or so, with a very dark one right in the middles, as it helps me to better track where I am), that might help (I don't know why I didn't do that to begin with, but there you have it).  And I really do keep finding myself tripped up by the fact that the dark squares on the chart correspond to the yellow while the lighter squares correspond to the blue.  It's a little mind game to keep that straight somehow.

But so worth it! 

The second sock is on the needles.  This is the second pair of socks (of three) that I was hoping to finish for Sock Summit (the first was the hand-knit socks).  We'll see...

I also got a most lovely and unexpected package in the mail last week, from my sister-in-law (she who gives excellent fiber-related gifts).  She has recently taken up dyeing (for which I am very grateful, as I am still sticking to my guns on the whole not-dyeing thing), and will you look at the fruits of her labors?

Superwash merino.  How gorgeous is that?  The girls have both attempted to lay claim to the one on the left.  I am as yet unsure whether I will let them get away with it.

But I can tell you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this next one is minemineallmine.

Do you see that?  The colors are even richer in person, and I love everything about it.  It's a superwash merino/mulberry silk blend, and it's stunning.  I haven't even come close yet to finding a pattern that's good enough for it, so for now I pet it and love it.  It makes me very happy.

In other news, I'm going to take a bit of a blog-post writing hiatus for the next few weeks.  July is hectic, and I haven't been as good as I ought to be about posting (or about keeping up on blogs in general, although I do try!!), so I figure I'll make it official and say that I'll be back in a few weeks.

But I will leave you with this.  Last weekend, we went to the local Scottish Games, as we are wont to do this time of year.  And, as we are also wont to do, we made sure to wend our way to the beer tent in time to listen to the Wicked Tinkers during one of their sets (if you don't know the Wicked Tinkers and like that sort of thing, I think they're great).  At one point, their cute young drummer hopped up onto a table to play, and Rick caught this little interplay on the camera:

"What does a Scotsman really wear under his kilt?" (says she, the hand there on the left)

"And wouldn't you like to know?"

He was so speedy-quick that I can only assume this has happened before.  And so is mystery (and modesty) preserved.

Knitting in the interstices

I keep waiting for things to slow down, and they keep not slowing down.  The good news is that it's different craziness, instead of more of them same.  (At least, I think that's good news.)  Younger Daughter is still in school - today's her last day - and I've been going in to work to finish packing up my office.  But today is her last day, and as of Tuesday my office is packed (to the tune of six full boxes of shredding, two huge blue recycling bins full of old readers and paper, and twenty boxes of books and files), so things are finally starting to feel like summer.  We're even getting (quiet as it's kept) sun in the afternoon.  Hooray! 

In all of that, there hasn't been as much knitting time as I'd like, but last weekend, on Father's Day, Younger Daughter had a feis to go to, which means plenty of knitting time for me while waiting for her dances to come up.  She has to do some sitting and waiting, too, which is hard when in full regalia, including warm dress and wig.

She concentrating, can you tell?  All in all, though, she's pretty cheerful about it.

And we love getting to watch her dance.

(She's especially cheerful because her hair is now long enough that we can get a ponytail wig for her, instead of always having to wear the full wig - it'll be much lighter and more comfortable.  Question: when did I become the mom who puts a wig on her kid?  Answer: when I became the mom whose kid loves Irish dance.  Life is strange, sometimes.) 

During all the waiting, I finally finished the Rivendell socks, knitted out of my very own handspun, three-ply, sock yarn.  Hooray!

(Note the dog nose in the corner.  Hope springs eternal in the breast of a dog, and when Tilly sees me put my socks on, she becomes convinced that it means a walk for her.)

Here's where Ravelry is so lovely.  By the time these were finished, I'd completely forgotten where I got the fiber for the yarn, or even what kind of fiber it is.  But Ravelry knows all!  It's a superwash Blue-Faced Leister from the Sincere Sheep, bought at the Dixon Fiber Festival last October.  Spun on my Lendrum, three-ply.  Knitted on size one needles, in size small.

I really love these socks.  I loved them the first time I saw the pattern, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to knit a pair.  I'm guessing I'll knit another pair sometime sooner rather than later.  Like the Kimono socks that I so love, it's hard to imagine having too many pairs of these.  I knitted them on the small side, because I'm finding more and more that I like my socks tight - they wear better and feel better in my shoes.  I think I got these just right.

But my favorite part?  It has to be these little droopy leaves, and the way they transition into the little travelling stitch motif.  Love them.

Aw, heck.  I should be honest.  I just love the whole pattern.  And I'm pleased and surprised with how evenly the yarn turned out - it actually felt like sock yarn!  Except more bouncy, somehow, which is nice.  The BFL spun up like a dream, and it's plenty soft on the feet.  I think it'll wear well, too.

I have been spindling plenty (the wheels still sit, sad and lonely, though), and the second round of spinning classes started last night (each round is two sessions).  Everyone was spinning by the end of the night, and I'd bet money that a couple of them will be past the park and draft stage by next week.  The best bit was that a student from the last session dropped off a hat that she'd knitted out of her handspun at the store - it's beautiful!  And I got to show the students in this class what someone can do with two and a half weeks of spinning experience.  I'll try to remember to bring my camera for a picture next week.  Most of what I've been spinning is little bits of things for class, but I have also been working steadily on the silk/cashmere stuff I've had tucked away for ages.  I'm using my new Golding, and getting a very fine singles from it.  I think that as a two-ply, once it's bloomed (and judging by the last batch I spun, this'll bloom a lot in the wash), it's going to be a very nice lace-weight yarn.

Meanwhile, now that school is out and the office is packed, I've been indulging myself in lots of time spent (finally!) learning Spanish with the Rosetta Stone package that we got last year.  We have Level 1, and I'm determined to work my way through it in the next week or so, and then to spend the summer trying to actually use what I've learned.  Meanwhile, I'm talking to myself in "Spanish" as often as I can (I find that I have to use the verb "to drive" quite a lot as I schlep the kids hither and yon); the only way to learn a language is to use it, even if I'm just talking to myself.

Week by week

That's the only way to go right now, it seems: week by week. 

Last week brought Younger Daughter's school's spring concert.  This year they tried something different and did a musical - Seussical, actually (or, to be precise, Seussical Lite; this makes sense, as they make a point of including even the very very little kids in the spring concert).  Younger Daughter was a Bird Girl.

She had a blast, which is the most important thing.  And she was particularly excited this year, since Rick's parents came out to see her musical!  Audience composition is important.

The first spinning class went well last week (I think).  By the end of the class, all of the students were making yarn using the park and draft method.  And one of them had even progressed to trying to draft while the spindle was dangling and spinning; she did pretty darned well, even if she did learn first-hand one of the reasons why the name 'drop spindle' makes so much sense.  We're meeting again tonight for the second half of the class, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how everyone did over the week.

The goal of tonight's class is to learn about plying.  To that end, I decided to show them several different possibilities for plying spindle-spun yarn.

What you see there on the left is two knitting needles with cops (I slid the cops from the spindle shaft onto the knitting needle), ready for plying.  Between them is a ball wound with two plies at the same time, all ready to go (it's wound around a rock, to make starting the ball easier).  And on the right is a center-pull ball, ready for plying from both ends.  In class, I will teach them Andean plying using their spindles full of yarn (and the one that I need to go spin right now).  That should give them four reasonable ways to spin, two of which are limited to making two ply (or cable-plied) yarns, and the other two of which can be used for more than two plies, if desired. 

All of the spindle time (every bit of that yarn was spun between last week's class and last night, on top of all of the usual stuff that goes along with having out-of-town visitors - we went to the Tim Burton exhibit at LACMA, btw, and if you like Tim Burton and live within reach, it's a pretty nifty thing to see! - preparing for Younger Daughter's birthday yesterday, and for Rick's birthday and Father's Day this weekend) means that my poor wheel has been banished to a corner.

It sits there, with the second half of my lovely fiber waiting to be spun and plied (and glowing beautifully in the errand sun - it hasn't gotten much above the mid to high 60s around here lately, with lots of June Gloom in evidence; sun?  we don't need no stinking sun!).  Soon, my precious, soon.

It's June WHAT?!

Honestly.  How does this happen?

Well, I guess I know some of the answer to that.  You'd think that the end of the semester would bring some kind of calm and order to my world, but it rarely works that way.  The only differences, I've found, between summer and not-summer, are that a) I don't have the order of my classes to help me keep track of what day and week it is, and b) I don't get paid to do all the work I do during the summer.  Like packing my entire office up to move to a new building.  (Which is not all bad, of course - new buildings do have some nice features - but in this case, it also means that I will have less than half the amount of filing space I have now, and about 2/3 of the shelf space; you can imagine the flurry of panic and pitching this is causing among the faculty.)

But there are other good things going on.  My parents came down for a visit last week, which was wonderful, and the reason they came was even more wonderful.  Check this out:

That's Older Daughter, in her middle school promotion ceremony.  What does that mean?  That means that my daughter is going to be (already is, she says) a high school freshman.  When did that happen?

She was pretty happy with herself, and with good reason - she graduated with Honors (and only missed High Honors by, I kid you not, 1/100 of a point).  Go, girl!

I have been knitting, too, and while I don't have any good pictures of it, I wore my new tank top in to the office today.

Not too bad for summer, right?  It's cotton, and therefore machine-washable and cool, and it fits beautifully (which you really can't see there, but it does).  I even had to learn to crochet a little bit to get the edging done (and I think I might go back and put an edging around the bottom in the white color, just to help keep it from rolling up).  I can't remember all of the project details right now, but I'll get them into Ravelry.

And I've been spinning out a lot.  My first spindling class is this Thursday, and I have been working on a (brief) handout, as well as a little mini-syllabus (complete with student learning outcomes) to keep me on track.  With only two hours to get folks spinning (the second two-hour class is focused on plying), there's a lot of ground to cover!  Of course, spending this much time spindling means that I have the perfect excuse justification legitimate reason to spend some money on spinning (right?).  For example, minutes after Erica posted her pictures of this, I snagged it.  My pictures of it don't compare to hers, so it's worth checking it out.  It's at my house now, calling my name, but I really want to make sure I get it right, which means contemplating exactly what "right" means in this case.  I have a few thoughts, and I'll get to it soon, I hope.

I also headed over to my LYS today, at my friend the owner's request (it turns out she wanted me to ply her yarn for her, and, me being the sucker that I am, I did - note to self: resist blandishments), and as I was there (plying her yarn, have I mentioned?), a box of books arrived, containing her new order of The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook.  I got one, of course.  Bedtime reading, here I come!