Cold beaches

The weather just can't seem to settle down here.  Last weekend, I spent every minute I could on the back patio, spinning and knitting.  But then, much of the week was gray and stormy - lots of wind and very wet rain (I don't care what anyone says, some rain is just wetter than other rain).  And yesterday, when I went to La Jolla after dropping Older Daughter off at a workshop, it was blustery and cold and the ocean was very big (I don't care what anyone says about that, either - sometimes the ocean is bigger than usual).

See what I mean?  And look at those colors!  Seafoam green, a lovely deep blue-green, froth; all looking ice-cold and whitecaps everywhere.

Those are the colors I'd wear all the time, and surround myself with, if I could.  Cold beaches.  Yup.

It was so cold, even the pelicans weren't doing much in the way of flying.

Look at them all.

So ungainly and dignified at the same time.

So I walked along the shore, watching everyone else, all bundled up, walking along at the same time.  I particularly enjoyed all the parents out with young children, following them along in their boundless energy, heedless of the cold.  I remember exactly what that was like, walking with Older Daughter along the Marina in San Francisco, with Rick's grandmother - as if it were yesterday.  And it struck me suddenly: it does feel like yesterday, but there I was, having just dropped my daughter off at a workshop on seismic engineering at UCSD.  And as inarticulate and dorky as it sounds, all I could think was:

Dude.

When did that happen?  I remember so clearly what it was like when she was barely walking.  Heck, let's be fair - I remember what it was like to be 14, and nervous and scared and doing something new with people I didn't know.  Isn't it odd to carry all of these people inside - each of them an iteration of "me"?

I guess cold ocean air messes with my brain.

Meanwhile, don't those colors look familiar?

The colors in that yarn are actually more saturated than they look in that picture - and are rather like the beach pictures above (the light and dark browns even look like the pelicans).  I think I should call it "cold beach", in fact.  I still don't know what I'm going to make with it, but in the meantime, I did want to show some finished pictures which illustrate that, once dry, it turns out that this yarn did what I'd hoped: the woolen-spun singles puffed out around the worsted-spun singles in quite a nice way.

(The woolen-spun Polwarth singles are the brown-y colors, and the worsted-spun BFL singles are the blue-y ones.)  I'm so pleased that this did what I thought it would do, and did it nicely, to boot.  Overall, the skeins of yarn handle like woolen-spun yarn - very light, and with a lot of bounce and much less drape.  It will be interesting to see how they knit up.

I've been doing some sampling today on my wheel, but I will write more about that next time.  I've also been knitting away on Vitamin D:

I am nearly done with the body.  I just need to cast off, then pick up stitches around the fronts and neck to knit a few garter stitch ridges.  Then it's on to the sleeves.  I'd hoped to knit this as a long-sleeved cardi (it's designed to be 3/4 sleeves), but I'm shorter on yarn than I'd thought.  So now I'm thinking I might do elbow-length sleeves, which could make this a nice transitional piece.  We shall see how it goes.  Once I'm done with the body, I'll weigh the yarn and then see how far that goes on the first sleeve.  I'm not always fond of 3/4 sleeves, so if it looks like I won't make it to my wrists, I'll probably go elbow-length instead.  Ah, the joys of managing yarn supply.

I rather like the radial increases on the yoke; they also are used to make the front panels swingy.  I'm tempted, should I make this an elbow-length sleeve, to do something similar towards the end of the sleeve, to make them a little bell-like.  Again, time will tell.

Meanwhile, dark and stormy seas aside,  I came home to find that Rick had bought these at the farmer's market.  It's clearly spring somewhere!

At last!

I have finished the spinning that has been languishing on my wheel - hooray!  It took a seriously concerted effort (man, those worsted singles were taking forEVer to get through), but it was such a lovely day today that I installed myself on the back patio, audiobook in ear, and got through the rest of the BFL singles, and then plied everything together.

I ended up with two very full bobbins.

Just as a reminder, this is four ounces of Polwarth and four ounces of BFL (the Polwarth is the browny-grey fiber, the BFL is the bluey-greeny fiber), dyed by the inestimable Erica at DesigKnits.  I spun the Polwarth woolen and the BFL worsted, and plied them together.

I like the way these colors came together even more than I'd thought I would.  I knew they'd come over barber-poled, and wasn't sure what I'd think of that, but I think I like it.  I am a bit worried that I may have underplied it, but we'll see how it comes out after its wash.

That's a little bleached out, but it looks like the colors on a cold beach to me, all seafoam green and dark cobbles and bleached wood.

I washed it in hot water, and treated it pretty vigorously: I kneaded it around, squeezed it out, and snapped it with great energy.  Now it just needs to dry.

I ended up with over 600 yards of what I think will turn out to be a heavy fingering weight yarn.  I just need to find exactly the right project for it.  Meanwhile, I will wait with patience for it to dry.

Fiber keeps happening

I have been plugging away at various things here, and actually have something to show for it.   I have been spinning the BFL which I'm planning to ply with my already-spun Polwarth, and I am here to tell you two things.  First, it takes a LOT longer (for me) to spin four ounces worsted than it does to spin four ounces woollen.  A lot.  Second, the worsted-spun fiber takes up MUCH less space.  My four ounces of Polwarth (spun woollen) take up the better part of two bobbins.  I'm two-thirds or so of the way through the four ounces of BFL (spun worsted), and I think it's all going to fit on one bobbin with room to spare.  The wraps per inch look about the same, so it's got to be a function of the amount of air in worsted spun yarn.  I'll be sure to have pictures next time.

While that's been going on, I also pulled out the first of my one-ounce fiber sampler, deciding to start with the Lincoln.  I got out my trusty Pipy to do the spinning.

Lincoln is an incredibly long-staple fiber.  The staple length on this particular sample was somewhere upwards of eight inches.  And it has almost no crimp.  It feels more like holding hair than wool, in many ways; but this particular preparation was clearly wool - it had a lovely lanolin smell, not too strong, that hung about the fiber as it was spun, and my hands afterward.  For the first time, I understood why Clara Parkes describes that scent as "spicy" - it is, in a warm, cooking spices sort of way.

Because Lincoln is a prototypical longwool, and because the preparation of this sample was such a lovely combed top, I spun it worsted.  It came out fuzzier than I'd expected, given the fiber and the preparation and the spinning.  The BFL I'm spinning has less fuzz - weird, no?

I then made both a two-ply and a three-ply yarn out of the singles.

 That's the three-ply on the left, and the two-ply on the right.  The three-ply was (as one might expect) a much rounder yarn; interestingly, it seemed to me that it bloomed more nicely than the two-ply.  I'm not sure why that would be.  It also seemed to me to be more lustrous than the two-ply (luster being another hallmark of the longwools).  I do know that if I were to spin a project out of Lincoln, I would absolutely spin a three-ply.  In fact, I'm rather thinking that I'd love to source some dyed Lincoln to spin a colorwork bag out of.  I imagine that a bag like that would be absolutely stunning, and would wear like steel.  All in all, a successful first sampling session.

I have also been working away at the latest pair of Rick socks, in time for him to go out of town next week.

These are the Blunnie socks from one of last year's Rockin' Sock Club kits.  As soon as I saw them, I knew they were going to be for Rick, as he has a pair of blunnies that he loves.

These fit like a glove.  I really aimed for a tight fit this time (and they are knitted on size 0 needles), to see if that improves the wear of his socks (mainly by preventing the semi-felting of the soles of his socks, which tends to happen after a while).  We'll see.

So that's one project off the needles.  In the meantime, I've cast on for Vitamin D (a cardi), and am plugging away at the yoke.  With luck, I'll have something to show on that next time, plus I might (maybe) have finished the BFL and be ready to ply!

New things

Spring has sprung, and there are new things all over the place around here.  Last Wednesday, Tilly and I went for a walk at one of our local spots.  It's not a huge wilderness; in fact, it's what I might call an urban wilderness, if I lived in the urbs.  But I live in the 'burbs, and maybe I should therefore call it a 'burban wilderness?

You can see there on the horizon - houses.  And there are power lines, and more houses.  But it's a place with its own wholeness, its own integrity.  I have seen blue herons there, and coyotes, and there's a kestrel pair every spring, and I even saw a black-faced weasel there once. 

It has a hill to climb (from which I can see the ocean).

And a body of water to attract coots and ducks and herons.  (I hesitate to call it a lake - because to anyone outside California, it is not - but it feels a bit big to call it a pond in California, even though if I were from Michigan, I'm pretty sure it would be a pond.)

But most importantly, it changes with the changing of the seasons.  And I can get my feet on the dirt, and see those little intimate changes that mean that the year is turning.

Those are purple wild sweet peas there, with the lemonade berries, a mixing of winter and spring that makes me happy.  The monkeyflowers are out, too.

And the willows are starting to leaf out.

I love going on this walk, week after week, year after year, watching the small changes.  It reminds me of some of the essays in The Wild Places, one of the most beautiful books I've ever read (and I say that as a person who doesn't like beautiful books just because the writer can turn a phrase; they also need to say something).  Macfarlane goes looking for the untouched places of Britain, only to find that the most remote places he can get to show the unmistakable marks of the millenia of human habitation of that small island (which in itself I find awesome - in the original meaning of the word); but instead of despairing of ever finding his wild places, he instead describes in loving terms that feeling of deep connection that comes from having one's own small place to be in, season in and season out, as the years turn, whether it's a backcountry preserve, or something like my small 'burban wilderness.

As I walk, I find myself composing little internal paeans to what I could perhaps call grace (I will not subject you to them, I promise); little hymns to that feeling of weighty warmth that is thankfulness - not the weight of burden, but the weight of a supportive hand on the shoulder, or a heavy comforter on a cold night.  And last Wednesday, my little internal songs of praise were for the durability of fragile things.  They go, but they do come back - they really do.

And sometimes they come back brand-new.  Like this little fragile thing - long may she endure.

Isn't she stunning?  I haven't met her yet, but she's our cousin's new baby, and I bet she, too, is a weighty warmth in her parents' arms.  I knitted her a blanket (which is really a much prettier dusty rose color than it looks here, I promise):

But all of those stitches, even the 1200-stitch cast-off row (it had to have ruffles, didn't it?)

can't even come close to encompassing the love I feel for that little girl and her parents and big brother.

I tried, though - in that way that knitters do.  And I even finished it (more or less) in time (I knitted madly for seven days) to be waiting for her at home when she got back from the hospital (thank goodness she was willing to be a little late)(even though I'm pretty darned sure - speaking from experience - that her mother wasn't feeling thankful for her lateness at all, at all - that's a whole different kind of weightiness! and waityness, come to think of it).

I'm a day or so early, but I guess this is all by way of saying, Happy Equinox, everyone - spring is here at last.

Friend, or foe?

I have often had to face the sad realization that technology is a mixed blessing.  I'm pretty sure that everyone in human history has come to the same conclusion since the beginning of technology.  You just know some poor sod stabbed herself in the foot with a digging stick, back in the dawn of history, and entered into a rant on the pitfalls of technology, a rant that probably would sound familiar to anyone today: "F*& gr^$&@!! digging stick.  Was it so bad when we used our hands?  No, no it wasn't.  Could we have gone on just using our hands?  Yes, yes we could have.  Has anybody ever stabbed themselves in the foot with a hand?  I think NOT!  Should have just left well enough alone, shouldn't we, but noooo, some punk had to come along and say, hey, lookit this here sharpened stick!  Saves your nails, saves your back - everyone should use one!  But has anyone ever stabbed themselves in the foot with a hand, I ask?  And I think we all know what the answer is..."  On and on and on.

I am feeling much like my digging-stick wielding foremother today, wondering whether I just should have used my hands.  Except I wasn't digging, I was (attempting to) read.  And I wasn't mining for tubers for the dinner table, I was mining for information to help me finish writing a paper that needed to have been finished (like that past perfect passive conditional, there?) some time ago.  I had a very small hope this afternoon that I would be able to work my way through a few articles while Older Daughter was at her fiddle lesson.  It didn't seem like a lot to ask...

An hour before it was time to leave to get the girls, I could be found sitting at my desk, making my little plan, and thinking about what I would need in order to achieve it.  On my desk was a book of collected articles, loaned from the library at UCSD (through the magic of interlibrary loan, and, to be fair, THERE's a technology I wouldn't give up in a hurry), and therefore not write-on-able.  Out of it, I hoped to read four articles, about which I was going to want to make notes.  And then I had A Thought.

I thought, I could scan these articles, pop them onto the i-gadget, and then use GoodReader to read them, marking them up with my Deep Thoughts as I go along.  All I need to do is to use my printer to scan them, email them to myself, open up the email on the i-gadget, and bob's your uncle, hey-presto, I've got mark-up-able articles!

Rick, I says, says I, our printer, she surely scans, yes?

There was a pregnant pause.  Not so much with the scanning, he replied.  Except!  he added in upbeat tones, except!  You could log onto Older Daughter's computer (the only computer in the house that the printer will listen to, for reasons which surpass understanding), open up a nifty HP scanning app, stick a thumb drive into that baby, and convince the HP scanning app to tell the printer to scan, saving the documents to the thumb drive the while, then stick the thumb drive in your computer, email the documents to yourself, open them up on the i-gadget, put them into GoodReader, and bob's your uncle, hey presto, you're on the road to easy reading.

Hmmm, thought I.  I have the better part of an hour (minus the time it took him to say all of that), I can do it.  How hard could it be? I bet I'll even have time left over to see what's new at Knitty.  (Cue Music of Doom here.)

I went to get the computer belonging to Older Daughter.  It was not plugged in on the office shelf where it belonged.  It was not on her desk.  It was not in the living room.  It was not in her bed (I was getting desperate).  Nor on her bookshelves.  Nor on her desk chair.  It was finally found lying on the floor under a heap of dirty clothes (and you can bet your bottom dollar that Words Were Had about that one).  I logged in, I found a thumb drive, I booted up the program, I convinced the printer and the computer to see each other, and, finally, I scanned.  I merrily scanned away, noting - and thinking it rather odd at the time - that while the documents scanned in right-side-up, there came a time at the end of each scanning cycle when the scanning program, for reasons unfathomable to anyone not working at HP, turned them up-side-down.

Never mind, thought I, I can turn them back right-side-up on my computer, through the magic that is Adobe.  (More technology.  More foreshadowing.)  I scanned, I saved, I moved the thumb drive, and I saved again onto my desktop, feeling increasingly wise and smart and like some kind of technological maven.  (Cue more Music of Doom.)

I opened those documents, rotated as necessary, saved, and closed them.  One by one.  Then I attached them all to an email and hit send, and turned my attention to the i-gadget, which I plugged into my computer.  I think I had some delusional notion that perhaps I'd be able to simply upload the documents without engaging in any email rigamarole.  Really, I don't know why I thought it was a good idea, because it promptly began to sync.  And it turns out that my beloved daughters have downloaded quite a few of the app-thingies to the i-gadget, and as a consequence, there was quite a lot of syncing to be done.  Time passed.

I waited with patience.

Eventually, I noticed that a) this sync thing was taking quite some time, making me wonder if my generous hour (I'll be done with time to spare!) was going to be enough, and b) that my email program had sent me a quiet little notice saying that my email was too big to go through.  So I a) deleted an attachment from my email, and b) looked hard at the sync bar to sort of encourage it along.

Three attachments was still too many.  (I should note here in my defense that my email generally swallows ginormous attachments whole; this was well within its capacity.  Except apparently not today.)   So I deleted one more, re-sent, and sent the other two in a separate email.  That seemed to work.  I started thinking harder at the sync bar.

Finally, it was done.  The i-gadget had sunc, the email went through, and I opened it up.  Then I opened each document (comeoncomeoncomeon), and, lo and behold, there they were in GoodReader.

Upside down.

What the ^%#??!!

Yup, upside down.  I checked on my desktop, and they were upside down there, too.  I re-rotated, re-saved, re-sent.

Still upside down.

Are you %$^ing kidding me?!

And time was up.  So I left.  Without my articles.  Without the i-gadget (which is now sitting on my desk in disgrace).  Without anything to induce in me the sorts of Deep Thoughts that will enable me to finish this article by its (now long past) deadline.

No-one ever stabbed themselves in the foot with paper and a pencil.  And that's all I have to say on the matter.

This and that

I can't believe I'm actually managing to write a quick post on a Wednesday!  I have this theory that twice-weekly posting (Sundays and Wednesdays) would be nice, and keep me on track.  But lately (as I'm sure you've noticed) it's been a miracle to make my Sunday post.  However, I have gotten past three big deadlines this week (just hit "submit" on the third), not to mention scads of grading (including one of those twelve-hour piles - as in, it takes at least twelve actual hours of grading to get through it; I have to spread those out or I find myself getting bitter and failing people just because my butt hurts from sitting too long).  So I figure I can reward myself by thinking about fiber for a few minutes. 

I still don't have any shots of me actually wearing Poplar and Elm (although people have seen me wearing it, so it does exist).  With luck, that will happen this weekend, when Rick is around to take actual pictures.  Having Rick around is also a prerequisite to getting a picture of the first Blunnie Sock, which I have finished (no-one else's feet are even close to big enough to model his socks)(I should also say that I immediately cast on for the second sock in order to ward off the dreaded SSS).  Nevertheless, there are other interesting things to show off. 

I have been spinning, off and on.  Spinning makes me happy.  I got through this:

That is four ounces of Polwarth top, in the Misty Water colorway, handpainted by Erica (whose fiber I adore - every one I've tried has spun up like a dream, and the colors make me very happy).  I'm trying a little experiment here.  I spun that up woollen, fairly fine - Polwarth seems to cry out for woollen spinning, and this turned out light and lofty.

The experiment part comes next.  On her blog, Erica has occasionally shown braids of some of her colorways wound together (that temptress); she made the mistake of showing Misty Water with a braid of BFL in SeaGreen, and I snapped them both up.

The plan is to ply them together, which isn't so experimental.  But the plan is also to spin the BFL worsted, which is the kind of spinning that BFL seems to me to cry out for (all that lovely shine just gets maximized that way).  So the hope is that I'll end up with something that blends the traits of that warm, light, fuzzy Polwarth with the long, strong, shiny BFL.  Stay tuned.

The more I get to try different fibers, the more I'm intrigued by immense range of texture and function that the fiber world offers.  So when I saw that Ellen and Jan had each gotten a sampler of fiber from Woolgatherings, I jumped on the bandwagon (they are kind enough to not seem to mind).

And that's not the half of it!  There's a whole other layer in there - 24 total.

I made Rick stand and feel each one while I told him their names (he, too, is a patient person who humors me).  The names make me so unutterably happy I can't tell you - how can one not be excited about fiber like Shetland Humbug?  I mean, really.  The plan is to choose a couple of these each month to research and spin up, and to compare notes with Jan and Ellen.  I am really looking forward to it.  I'm teaching a class at my LYS on the 17th on getting to know one's fiber, both for making good yarn/project pairings (for knitters) and for spinners who want to think about the range of fiber possibilities available to them.  As an inspiration for me, Erica sent me a huge bag of all kinds of wonderful fibers I'd never seen or touched before, and I'll be showing those off to students (I need to get a picture of that, too).  So while I'm hoping I might inspire some local folks to take an interest in playing with me, I don't have a study group like that yet - I love that I have a long-distance one, with people who are as nuts weird interested in learning new things as I.

And speaking of ranges of possibilities and fabulous names, look at what I'm knitting right now.

That is Rams and Yowes, a lap blanket pattern by Kate Davies, she of the famous Sheepheid (which I also now have yarn to knit).  I love that she wrote both patterns to celebrate the immense diversity of colors of Shetland wool - the blanket has nine different colors.  And oh, the names!  We've got gaulmogot, and mooskit, shaela, and yuglet.  I (naturally) started poking around, looking for etymologies of the names, but only have been able to find information for two: sholmit and moorit (if anyone knows about any of the others, please, please let me know!).  Sholmit comes from a Gaelic word meaning "Having a white face, as of ox or cow"; and moorit comes from a root morand-r, meaning "brown mingled with black and red" - it is cognate with English murrey, and French moree, and comes from an older root mor-.

Wool and language all mixed together.  It just doesn't get much better than that.

Randomness

So.  I actually did finish the sweater last Monday night, in time to wear it to teach on Valentine's Day (one of my regular students, who has taken many of my classes and knows me well, knew me well enough to ask whether I'd knitted it, which was kind of nice).  I have been putting off posting until I could get some pictures of it (and of the new happy project I have OTN, plus the spinning I'm working on), but I have not been able to motivate myself to get my camera out and get cracking.  So I thought I'd better post in any case.

It's been a rough month, frankly.  I lost a friend at the end of January, and very soon after that, another friend became very ill - the kind of ill that sometimes turns out in the worst possible way.  The very good news is that she is recovering, but those things have been on my mind, in unpostable sorts of ways, and it's been making it hard to get myself moving.  It doesn't help that February once again (I seem to remember this happening last year) turned into a month of deadlines, so that what little motivation I have had has been expended on those, and I have been letting everything else fall by the wayside in favor of being at home with my family.

I have been thinking, though, about the role of the internet in both of my friends' illnesses.  In different sorts of ways, their experiences had an online presence, which gave friends and family from near and far the ability to know how they were doing, and to send their loving thoughts.  And now that their illnesses are over, one way or the other, that record of their experience, and of those loving thoughts, remain.  Part of what got me thinking about this is the fact that in both cases, I tended not to log my responses to this online presence through comments - for some reason, when it comes to things like that, I tend to prefer either private email, or real person-to-person contact.

Like many of you, I am old enough to remember clearly a time before the interwebs (I did not invent the world wide web, mind you - I just remember what it was like before it was created, heh).  And, for that matter, before email.  A time when people sent, you know, letters.  Written on paper.  With ink.  And as the use of email expanded, I would occasionally soliloquize mournfully (in my head) about the loss of these artifacts, these letters, and wonder what future generations would think of us, when there was nothing concrete remaining of these quotidian messages, windows into everyday lives?  (Note the irony: I have never been good about writing letters, EVER - I am a much better email correspondent than I am a paper mail correspondent.  The post office gives me hives.)  But honestly, I think I have always thought of electronic media as ephemeral.  (And, in my defense, if you've ever had a hard drive wiped, or lost an entire linguistic database because of a computer upgrade that somehow left it behind because your new Parallels H-drive can't see your old Parallels H-drive - why yes, I am speaking from experience - then you know why I thought of e-media as ephemeral, and in fact, as aggressively and capriciously ephemeral.)

But here's the thing.  Right now, my friend's words live on, even though she can't write any more.  And the love and worry and support that her friends wrote to her also live on.  My other friend regained consciousness to find an entire record of her friends' love and concern for her, all expressed while she didn't even know it was happening.  But there it is, out there in the ether, in little electronic impulses of 1s and 0s (if I understand this right) - ephemeral but somehow, simultaneously, entirely real and enduring.

Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like love itself, doesn't it?  Utterly ephemeral, and entirely real.

That's not where I thought I was going with this, but I think I like it.