Etherknitter

Meme

Judy tagged me for the ubiquitous meme. 

Four jobs you've had in your life:

1. Secretary
2. Therapist
3. Child-life Program volunteer at Yale New Haven Hospital
4. Cashier
   

Four movies you could watch over and over again:

       1.  Enchanted April
       2.  LOTR
       3.  Shakespeare in Love
       4.  It's a Wonderful Life

Four places you have lived:

1. New Haven, CT
2. Portland, OR
3. Washington, DC
4. Faribault, MN

Four TV shows you love to watch:

1. Survivor
2. I watch no other television.  Embarrassed to even tell you about #1.
   

Four places you've been on vacation:

1. Paris, France
2. Florence, Italy
3. Jackson Hole, WY
4. Davos, Switzerland
   

Four websites you visit daily:

       1.  Bloglines
       2.  gmail
       3.  Typepad
       4.  Amazon.com

Four of your favorite foods:

1. Chicken
2. Duck
3. Nuts
4. Tea (yes, it is a food group)
   

Four places you would rather be right now:

1. Anywhere there is skiable snow
2. Paris, France
3. Lenox, MA
4. Sitting in my knitting chair and knitting
   

Four bloggers you are tagging:

I don't think there is anyone left.  If you are moved to feel tagged, then you are tagged.  And how do I get these italics to leave me alone?
 

 

Bordeaux on my birthday at Blueberry Hill

B is for Bordeaux on my birthday at Blueberry Hill Inn.

We enjoyed a leisurely start.  (That's Etherknitterese for I couldn't blast myself out of bed for love or money.)  The sun was setting when we arrived at Blueberry Hill. 

It had snowed the night before.  A purring fire greeted us in the living room.  The Inn has no liquor license, so that leaves one with the dilemma presented by BYOB, an excellent chef in the kitchen, and four course dinners every evening.  I asked for lamb on my day.

The Bordeaux was a 1982 Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande.  That's a ridiculous name, especially after you have had a glass or two.  She's widely known as Pichon-Lalande, and even the Inn's owner came by for a glass.  (Wine is meant to be shared.)

I will spare you the obligatory pictures of cross-country ski antics.   (We did cull another "B" from the woods, in the form of bark.)  It was the perfect birthday.

 

Let's give Claudia a big hand!

I live my life in anticipation.  It's a habit I'm trying to break.  When it's Tuesday, I'm looking forward to Friday.  Before one FO is done, I'm impatient to choose the next WIP.  When it's summer, I'm wishing for winter.  Some activities call to me because they put me CLEARLY in the moment.  Knitting, yoga, spinning, fiber gatherings.  Claudia makes a party where there is no place and no time I am thinking about arriving at next. 

The chronicles in Other People's Blogs have been accompanied by excellent photodocumentation.  I saw a different angle that made these women special.  Hands.
Subway Knitter, Bookish Girl, and Grumperina (left to right).

Then Mamacate, Moth Heaven, and Obsession du Jour.

In my profession, the practitioners are divided into those who have "good hands" and those who don't.  The good hands people are the ones who are gifted, and seem to do the necessary work with the least amount of fuss and extra motion.   Our roomful of knitters qualified on all counts.  (These pictured knitters didn't flinch when the flash went off.)

I want to be a spinner just like Cate when I grow up.  Martha phrased it best: 

"She makes it look so effortless and comfortable. Just sitting back on the sofa, moving her feet, pulling back with her hand, la di da da.... if only. "  I tried for some shots of this demonstration of flow.  (I had a dialogue running in my mind from stereotypical modeling sessions: "Okay, smile now, *click*, lean a bit to the left, great! *click* pull the yarn back a little *click* now show us some drafting zone *click* yeah baby!")  Mamacate, in her just finished shawl, being Mamacate:

I did promise to flash some llama yarn.  I would have brought it for a group fondle, however, I was desperately afraid someone would mistake it for unloved stash and confiscate it while I was off eating lower fat mac 'n cheese.  This came from Whippletree Yarns in Woodstock, Vermont.  The basket had a sourcing from Danby, Vermont with absolutely no vestige of a web presence.  The hand of the yarn is a cross between cashmere and alpaca.  You will just have to take my word for this.  If it were ordinary llama, it would not have jumped into my life.  As it was, Mr. Etherknitter DID have to push me to buy it.  He pretended that HE wanted it for a scarf for him.  Why did I give in?  Two reasons.  Mr. Etherknitter gets whatever he wants.  I make sure of that.  And I did happen to be in a yarn store on my birthday. 

(Don't wish me happy birthday yet.  That's tomorrow's post.)

 

Loving Llama And Multiple Acquisitions

I thought I was done after Rhinebeck.  (Be quiet, I CAN hear all of you laughing, you know.) My most recent forays into the world of yarn acquisition demonstrates my error.  You knew this, and you weren't going to break it to me.  NOW I understand all those unfinished sentences when I asked how big your stash was.  Or your inability to meet my gaze when I asked about buying yarn on the Web.  It's like wine, where you can delude yourself that you are buying less because you are buying better.  (Yes, I've recently transitioned from Plymouth brushed alpaca to handspun llama.)  Let's take a closer look.

At the idea of stash,  NOT at the llama.  (Yet.)

When I buy yarn and fiber, I am part of a transaction that resonates down to my toes.  When I fall in love with a colorway, a yarn's softness, or a combination of fibers, I'm feeling all the future possibilities of my experiences with that fiber.  It is like falling a little in love each time.  The promise, the potential of our future relationship with that knitted or spun project is a warm and pleasurable seduction each time it happens. 

I have a smaller stash than many, a bigger stash than some.  Talking to my fellow stashers knitters points to the fact that our inner psyche governs how much, and what we collect.  My stash is an archeologic sampling of my needs, insecurities and hopes at different periods of my knitting and spinning career.  There were times of intense need, when I used yarn to salve my psyche.  That surely was the time post0p last spring when I was alone and immobile every day.  There was the time when I happily and gleefully joined in the acquisitive groupthink of Rhinebeck.  That was as much about relationships as it was about fiber purchases.  (Yes, I would do it again exactly the same, and will, in the future.)  The more interesting times (ones I haven't figured out yet) are related to when I DON'T purchase.  Avoidance of guilt, surprisingly, is not the motivator at those times.  It's clear to me that at those times, I have no inner forces pushing me to crush more yarn into my bins and closet.  How we stash reflects our inner selves, our emotional barometers, and how we soothe ourselves when we respond to pain AND pleasure.

I admire the microstashers.  While I don't necessarily aspire to those peaks, I am intrigued by the idea of the psychic weight of stash providing the opposite motivation - that of the antistasher.  That will be the next frontier, I think.

When I googled "pack rat" and "collecting behavior", I found this quiz.  My score was 17.

This young lady from Vermont asked me to relay a message to the knitters and spinners in blogland.  I'll let her speak for herself:

"If you don't buy the yarn my mommy makes from my hair, she threatened to turn me into llamaburgers."

Bring my winter back!

I know I'm alone in this.  I'm happy to see winter back where it belongs.   The winds of change howled through the night and brought this scene in the backyard.

Yesterday, in 60 degree weather, I went outside to see how the garden was faring.  It was an exercise in despair.  The broken stalks conveyed pathetic disarray.  I chose not to capture digital images.  What was there?  Only the evidence of havoc created by a vole population run amok in a mild winter.  The lawn was scattered with serpentine tracks of their foraging hunger, appetites sated under the covering snow.  I don't like lawns.  I keep it in the scene as a bow to the suburban setting of the house.  (Grass is the highest maintenance perennial in existence.  I hire someone else to debug it, feed it, deacidify it, and behead it regularly.  I have no interest.)  The vole damage in the lawn doesn't pique my huntress' passions.  It's what it signifies for the perennial beds that gets to me. 

In addition to providing perfect conditions for vole overpopulation, these warm temperatures cut my vacation short.  We had two good days of cross-country skiing in the Vermont high country.  One bad, icy, minimally covered day followed.  The Vermonters called it the January thaw.  For us?  Meltdown.  There was nothing to be skied.  We amused ourselves in various alternate ways.  The Etherknitter had tried very very hard to commit to unofficial stashalong.  Good thing it was unofficial.  If I had posted the button, it would have been ripped off my sidebar by the Stashalong police.

Beads and Fibers in Middlebury, Vermont was the perfect yarn store.  I found #7 dpns for my first mitten project.  There were beads for stitch markers, yarn of interesting varieties to fondle, and lo! wireless internet access, and a couch for Mr. Etherknitter.   "Take your time,"  he offered.  After three days staying at an Inn with no internet access and no cellphone reception, he was feeling chopped off at the knees. 
Three days at the Inn, and then a brief drive to the Killington area forced us to find amusements other than skiing.  That deserves a post by itself.   

I am completely thrilled and excited by the yarn I skeined up yesterday for the hat project.  The picture speaks the words:

The large skein has 360 yards of almost perfectly balanced 2-ply yarn.  The smaller skein has 120 yards.  When we were in the Frog Hollow crafts store in Middlebury, the inevitable basket of handspun yarn contained alpaca, and wool skeins for sale.  The spinning was frankly young.  Overspun parts, underspun parts, it was not just thick/thin designer intent.  (My memory insists that it was about 110 yds of alpaca priced at $45/skein.  Heh.)

I should go on short-circuited vacations more often.  I have lots of blog fodder.  If I had spent my days skiing, all I would have to flash would have been endless picturesque snow shots.   

We'll get to the knitting soon.  I have an almost-mitten done, progress on Torgeir, and others.

Flashing yarn instead of flashing needles

I only have yarn to flash today.  The needles have been quiet for past few days.  The sound that has replaced their click has been the *whirrrrrrr* of the wheel and the *clack*clank* of the mailbox door opening, then closing.  (While I haven't officially joined the Stashalong, the yarn was ordered in September.)

Mr. Etherknitter's hat yarn is almost done.  I've plyed and plyed and plyed.  I'm gathering the intestinal fortitude to cut the umbilical to the Kate.  That means I have to resign myself to one honking skein, and one very small skein.   I've chosen a gaugeless top-down watchcap pattern for him.  I'm a lazy sl*t and have no interest in a gauge swatch for this project.  I want RESULTS.  NOW.  (I'm also afraid my handspun is fragile and won't survive the ripping out of the swatch for use in the hat.) 
The blue is Polwarth from our Toni "STR" Neil.  The brown is the Coopworth/alpaca mix from Dorchester Farms.  Both were fun to spin...very satisfying.  Mr. Etherknitter approved the color and texture mix. 

The USPS arrival of yarn was also from Toni of The Fold.   Two skeins of Blue Moon Fiber Arts, Rio, in Sapphire.  It's slubby rayon for a summer top.  I normally don't dance with yarn that isn't winter-weight, but this  is an amazing texture, and a stunning blue.  It is the blue of the clearest ocean and sky when you can't tell where one begins and one ends, and the waves lap at the shore. 

I have conjured time to knit this week, and will have more to report.  Kitchener stitch has kicked my buttocks repeatedly.  The concept is simple.  But executing it with the needles in place has more closely resembled the work of a demented, obsessive compulsive spider.  It's been ripped out more times than I'm willing to admit in public.  I'm looking at different reference books, and will get back to you on this.  I WILL master it.
Until then, quiet weeping will be the only sound you will hear from this blog.

Just kidding.  Mostly.

A is for Apprentice

Somewhere between Christmas and New Year's Day, the Knitigator came over to investigate spinning.  The teacher can only look good when the acolyte brings along her intelligence, attention to detail, perfectionism, and experienced fiberholic's eye.  Our Apprentice went from drop spindle to wheel, back to spindle, and produced uncanny singles in a very short time.   

Apprentice is the A of our ABC-along.

Yesterday was my blogiversary.  It has been a wild and wonderful ride.  Thank you!  Because of you, my knitting skills have been broadened, challenged.  My inner world has been splashed with the colors of your personalities.  I am a very lucky knitblogger, to have been able to connect with you this year. 

I have one sock almost done.  The toe requires a touch of kitchener, and then it will be a sock.  I was stunned to find that my foot was 3/8" shorter after surgery.  None of the shoe stores stock that foot measurer anymore.  (A store clerk in NYC looked at me as if I had just time-jumped from 1925 when I asked to be measured.  "Uh, most people just KNOW," she sniffed.)
This is Trekking XXL, color #77, generic pattern for st st sock.

I'm in 2006 startitis mode.  I have placed the afghan into a specific category of WIP.  It's for when the brain isn't there but the fingers need to keep moving.

Torgeir is in progress, but still not photogenic.  Eric's Glovelets have been revived.  I'll get a picture of that up soon.  I ordered Jamieson DK in Highland Mist (#1390) for the Lily of the Valley pullover in Jamieson #3.  There are several sock yarns and scarf yarns calling out for freedom from their bins.  I need to close my eyes and learn to hear which one is screaming loudest.

The snow was too heavy today to be photogenic.  We were slated to get 4-10" (which means they didn't have a clue).  The Kousa dogwood's sturdy branching caught some briefly, and then it was gone.  I don't think we received more than 3".