DesigKnit

I have a bad habit of showing up at real-life fiber events and taking no pictures. This trip was no exception. I arrived in Minneapolis last Sunday, and Ellen whisked me off to a day of fiber fun at Shepherd’s Harvest, Minnesota’s sheep and wool fair. We had absolutely perfect weather, and spent a good bit of time outside enjoying it while we watched the sheep dog trials. Some of the dogs were very good, many were a little rough, and there was one very cute Samoyed puppy who clearly thought he was out on a play date rather than working a job. He was such a friendly little guy (and so clearly proud of himself) that it was hard not to love him, even if he didn’t seem to know the first thing about sheep herding. I bet he’ll be great next year, but this year it was really funny to watch him trot around the arena making friends with the sheep, completely oblivious to his trainers’ commands.

After the dog trials, we took a walk through the show barns and the fiber market. This is my favorite size of festival; about three barns of fiber. Plenty to look at and enough to keep you busy, but not so much that you slip into fiber overwhelm and miss most of the show. We stopped by the Briar Rose booth, where I picked up a couple of skeins of Sea Pearl for a to-be summer weight work sweater.

Then, Ellen and I cooked up a semi-secret project that allowed us to buy another skein of yarn that we wanted to try. We also managed to do it without adding to either of our stashes, and we co-knit a quick little project that is destined to bring someone a little joy to offset a loss. That project kept us busy for the rest of the two days of my visit, and Ellen continued working away after I’d left. It was one of those projects where everyone wins, and was really fun. If you’re ever in a knitting slump, split a small project with a friend…it just flew off the needles, and it made us both happy.  The yarn was a new Targhee yarn base, and boy was it nice to knit with! I don’t recall the name of it now, but it was super soft, and light with a lot of bounce. As always, the Briar Rose colors were fun to knit with, and we were both pretty enamored with the fabric. In keeping with my trip tradition, I completely failed to take a photo of the project at any stage, so we’ll have to rely on Ellen for the documentation.

Ellen also introduced me to the wonders of sous vide cooking and fresh garden asparagus…it was quite a visit!

On Monday, we made a stop over at Steven Be’s to look at his shop samples and see what was going on. (Steven is one of those people who always has something going on. Going into his shop is a little like playing dress up in Grandma’s attic…except with yarn and feather boas.) I skipped the feather boas, but I did find some beautiful lemon-cream colored top to finish off the colors for the crocus sweater. I’ve managed to wind the first ball of the purple now, and am busily spinning up the yellow yarn for the yoke.

I didn’t manage to make it through Steven’s collection completely unscathed, though. Contrary to all sense and reason, this skein of neon yarn kept shouting out my name. I compromised by toning it down with some dark purple and teal, and I think it will make a nice accent yarn for something special, though I haven’t quite figured out yet what it will be. A shawl or scarf of some kind, I imagine, but I think some serious swatching is required.

From Ellen’s, it was off to the conference that brought me to Minneapolis in the first place, and then home again on Thursday night. I’ve spent a couple of days crashing post-conference, but was back on my feet enough to spend a couple of hours out in the garden this morning. With Branden’s help, we’ve now planted almost all of the new herbs for the summer, with just a few things left here and there. The garden is mostly perennials, so the second year is a lot simpler than the first, though we’re adding in some new groundcover and I had to replace a few herbs that didn’t overwinter well. It’s looking good out there, though, and it’s nice to have a yard we want to spend time in.

Hope you’re all having a good Memorial Day weekend!

It’s hard to photograph black, but the mink scarf is growing rapidly. I’m most of the way through the second ball (of three).

At first, I didn’t really see how the mink yarn was any different than a very fine wool, but as I’ve been carrying it around in my bag it has begun to form quite a lovely halo. I’m glad that I decided to go with a stockinette-based fabric rather than a lace. The staple is quite short (I’d guess about 3/4 of an inch), and the yarn is slightly fragile as a result. (Now I’m hoping that the halo isn’t a sign of it disintegrating completely; I did notice fibers all over my light-colored shirt one night after knitting. The knitting should give it some extra stability, though, and it does make a beautifully soft fabric.) Definitely a sensitive luxury yarn, but overall nice to work with.

Not much else has been happening on the knitting front. Now that finals are over we’re deep into end-of-year evaluations, day-long “retreats,” and course prep for the fall. It’s a different pace of work, but there is still a lot of it to be done! It is nice to switch to a different kind of project for a while, though.

We had an all-day curriculum development meeting on Friday, which got out a little earlier than I generally leave. I didn’t have a brain cell left that was ready to think, so I took myself to the Museum of Fine Arts to check out their current quilt exhibition. I only had my phone camera on me, but it’s enough to give some idea of what was there. I really liked the motion in this one:

And the diagonal border really makes this one pop out:

The light and dark squares-on-squares pattern is interesting in this quilt:

Actually, there were several in the collection where a very simple pattern had been worked in highly contrasting fabrics to make a complicated-looking or visually interesting piece.

(I think that last one is one of my favorites…there are endless patterns within patterns to look at.)

And then there were the quilts with an intentionally less-regular appearance:

I don’t think I’d be inclined to put any of these on my bed, but it was fun to see how simple colors and pieces can be used to make very bold graphic designs. It was also interesting to see how different designers had played with light and dark to compose a more dynamic quilt. In all, it was a nice way to spend an hour at the end of a long day.

Tomorrow, I’ll be flying out to Minneapolis a day or two early for a conference. Ellen lives out there, and we’re going to spend a couple of days playing before I have to get back to work. It just happens that this weekend is their Shepherd’s Harvest festival, too. It was on my list of festivals to attend while I was in Madison, but never quite worked out. I really like the smaller festivals, especially the ones that are equally split between the knitting/crafting  and the farming communities. I hear that there are sheep dog trials at the festival this year, too…those should be fun!

I think this might be my longest blog hiatus ever. The last month of this semester has bogged me down like finishing a thesis or organizing cross country move (on top of a temporary international move) couldn’t. It’s been rough.

But! I finished the grading over the weekend, and minus some decisions that are currently outside of my control, all of my grades are calculated and submitted. Which means that I am now back to the usual level of work that must be done, rather than the craziness of the past few weeks. Thank goodness for summer.

Besides finishing the scarf that I was working on in the last post (which I finished a day or two after I posted about the hat, if I remember right), I have had no knitting on the needles since the last time I posted. That’s at least 3 weeks and possibly 4 with no knitting. At. all.

On Thursday night, a fit of insomnia gave me time to fix that. I cast on for a scarf with some of that mink yarn that I bought at Coveted a couple of months ago.

It’s nothing fancy; just a 4×4 rib on size 0’s, but it should be insurance against empty needles for quite some time. And, of course, it is mink. The yarn is very soft, but hasn’t started to bloom in the knitting yet. If I hadn’t seen this very yarn knit up in person in someone else’s project, I might be wondering what all the fuss is about. As it is, I’m pretty confident that it will bloom beautifully with the washing and wearing.

I wanted to make  a plain stockinette fabric, but settled on a rib pattern instead to reduce curling. I thought about beads, and then decided to just cast on, already, rather than adding extra delays. (I would have to go buy the beads, you see, and right now that level of personal decision-making is just not likely to happen for another week or so.) The scarf is narrower than I’d hoped because I had to reduce the width from my original plans, but I expect that the fabric will relax significantly with blocking, since even on size 0’s I’m knitting it at a pretty loose gauge.  I don’t have a black scarf in my collection, and have wanted one a few times lately. I think this will be just the ticket.

I doubt that I’ll be needing scarves much for a while, though. Spring has definitely come in full force. We drove into Boston for an appointment on the 23rd, and all of the willows on the Esplanade had gone yellow with new leaves. The fruit trees are flowering now, too, and the maple outside my window is unfolding its very first, oh-so-shiny new leaves. The garden has been exploding into life while I’ve been tucked away in my office working.

The hosta are up, and some of them are already half-unfurled.

My peonies are shooting up in the center of the garden bed; we moved them a month ago, and they seem to love their new location. (Hopefully that means that they’ll bloom this year…)

The clematis is greening up nicely, and I’m pretty sure it’s even started to set buds. Last year it barely flowered at all, so that’s exciting.

The bleeding heart all came up this year, even the plants that failed to emerge when we planted them last spring (Home Depot apparently doesn’t temperature-treat its bulbs well, and they probably just needed a real freeze-thaw cycle to wake up). A few of them even have tiny flowers showing up, hidden under the leaves.

The Solomon’s seal was completely invisible on Friday, but it’s off and running now.

And the front yard is a carpet of violets.

Looking at the pictures, it strikes me that the yard needs to be raked yet again, and that some of the beds are in serious need of mulch. There’s always something to be done when it comes to yardwork!

After a solid two weeks of 10-16 hour days and no weekends, I am declaring today a guilt-free day off. (By which I mean I worked from 9 until 12:30, and then decided to knock off and write a blog post…we professors are hopeless work-a-holics).

I’m thinking I might grab the nicer camera and head out into the yard with a macro lens. Or maybe I’ll just sit in the garden and knit. Who knows?