I’m finding myself more and more pressed for time these days which is putting the blog on the back burner, much to my displeasure. I hope you’ll forgive me while I try and tread water through this last week of SOS (yes, last week, can you believe it?!) and prepare for a coming storm of which I will tell you more soon.

In the meantime, a million thank yous to the incomparable Tina for all of her hard work to make W.O.O.L. 2008 a roaring success! I was lucky enough to be able to participate for about half the time this year at the rustic Wiawaka retreat center and I’m quite glad I made it happen. The grounds were lovely:

And I’m sure for those that enjoy water, that was lovely too. These parasailers must have thought so!

The accommodations were definitely on the rustic side, but I think I’ve been spoiled a bit by Bassoon Camp. Still, they were more than adequate for what we were there for. I was so busy spinning and or knitting most of the time that I didn’t get many pictures, but here is the common room that we all gathered to work in during the evenings from above.

There was show and tell on Friday night which was really fun. Getting to see everyone’s projects and hear the stories behind some of them was really interesting. Saturday we did a silent auction to benefit the retreat center. I offered up a braid from my shop and came away with a huge bag of llama fleece! I was surprised to win. Not sure what I’ll do with it yet as it still needs to be cleaned, but there are ideas percolating. Nearly $200 was raised! Go us!

I was happy to hang out with old friends and meet some new ones while getting some time away. There is talk of something during the winter but if that doesn’t happen I’ll be happy to see you all again next summer!

While I was there I managed to finish this yarn:

Zarzuela’s Fibers BFL Sock - Roses in the Dark Colorway. I’m still deciding if I want to sell it or not. This was for the Ravelympics and is my third and final cross of the finish line (if I can ever get it posted on Ravelry!).

I also finished this:

Zarzuela’s Fibers Merino/Silk - Mint Julep Colorway. This is a new fiber for me to start carrying in the shop and I certainly couldn’t sell any until I tried it out myself! Luckily it was a lovely spin and I’ll be happy to start making it available when I can get it dyed. This skein may go up for sale as well if I can stand to part with it. It’s merino and silk people!! It’s a hard decision!

I was also able to get through another big chunk of spinning but didn’t come out with a finished yarn on the other end so we’ll save that for another day. However, I do want to share my 2nd Ravelympic finish with you although you may have already seen it:

Zarzuela’s Fibers Merino Handspun - DC Sunrise colorway (inspired by daily sunrise pictures posted by Wendy on Plurk), 660 yards, approximately fingering weight. I couldn’t be more proud of this yarn (and considering it took over 2 hours to ply alone I suppose I should be!) and the fact that Wendy is happy with it makes it even better. I can’t wait to see her shawl! Doing custom spinning orders is proving to be quite fun (interested? Leave a comment or convo me on etsy) and I have another in the works right now. It helps me let all the dyeing go out the door to new homes some days.

So for those of you keeping score, that means that I did not make the finish line with the socks. Would you believe that I finished them about 36 hours too late?! Ahhh well… the triumph is in the trying sometimes! Pictures of those soon along with the pair that I finished a mere 24 hours after that! Sheesh.

Tags: SOS'08, Spinning

I am very pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Socks On Vacation contest!!

As I’m sure you saw from the flickr set, there were so many awesome pictures submitted this year. Y’all kept me thoroughly amused as the entries came in. I hope you’ve had as much fun looking at them as I did.

One picture definitely stood out for me though and the voters apparently agreed. So without further ado, the winning photo is:

The Rockin Crustacean!!!

Submitted by Knittinggolfer on Ravelry

The photograph was taken on 08/08/08 at Sampson’s Island, Cotuit, Massachusetts.

Sock pattern is Sweet Tart socks (BMFA Rocking Sock Club July kit)

Yarn: Socks that Rock lightweight

Colorway: goody goody

Congratulations Knittinggolfer!!! You’ve won a prize package of immense proportions which includes the following:

Yarn from:
Rock Creek Yarn
Lovesticks Sock Yarn
Perfect Day Yarns
Damselfly Yarns
Keegan Lane Yarns
Crazy4Dyeing
Farm-witch
Knit Front and Back
Dog Lover’s Yarn
Guernseygal
Nutella Nutterson
Sandrasingh.com
KnitFitKnitter
Diva Knitting
Squoosh

A Modern Yarn T-shirt

A $25 gift certificate from The Painted Sheep

A Della Q Project Bag from Beyond Basic Knits

AND

A $10 Knitspot gift card!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Enjoy your prizes and CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A note to all entrants: Your photos will stay in the flickr set at least until the end of the along, at which time they will be removed. You, of course, retain all rights to your pictures and therefore I will not keep them on my photostream. Go look at your comments while you can!

Regular blog posting will resume just as soon as I recover from a wonderful weekend!

Tags: SOS'08

I think I’ll make it at least twice. Not so sure about the rest. Here’s the first one though!

Morning Surf Scarf

Pattern: Morning Surf Scarf
Yarn: Zarzuela’s Fibers Handspun Merino, Blue Jeans and Leather Shoes colorway, less than 194 yards
Needles: size 8 straights (!)
Knit: 8/8-8/9/2008

First and foremost, if you haven’t knit one of these babies yet you totally should! This is the most non-boring scarf pattern I have knit in a long time. I seriously had to keep referring back to the pattern for a quite a while into it. I loved that part about it so much I would actually think about knitting this again (and I really can’t say that for many patterns).

I really like the way that the colors worked out on this. When I dyed the fiber most of the blue stayed to one end and most of the brown to the other. I split the roving in half along the length and spun the two lengths separately from opposite ends so that, when plied together, the colors would complement each other. I think it worked out pretty well with some of the blues meeting in the middle.

My only complaint is that I wish I had spun the yarn a little thinner so I would have had more yardage. I wanted nice squishy yarn, which I got, but that left me short on length. It’s only about 41 inches long which is just about enough to wrap around your neck and cross in the middle. This definitely isn’t going to be a scarf that will get wrapped around and around, that’s for sure! It figures, the one time I don’t spin something really thin I wish I’d spun it thinner!

Probably the funniest part of the whole project was that I knit it completely on straight needles as the pattern recommends. It says to avoid circs because of the number of YOs and the difficulty one might have getting them over the cable join on a circ. I would certainly have to agree. I *never* use straight needles and had to dig out some of the old aluminum ones I stole from my Mom ages ago. HWJF even noticed! Now that’s saying something when the non-knitter notices a change of equipment!

By the time you read this my little scarf will be on its way to its new home. I’ve hardly got time to stop and think about it leaving the nest though. I’ve still got a pair of socks to finish and over 2.5 *pounds* of fiber to spin before the Olympic flame is extinguished! I’ll definitely cross the finish line on one of the big spinning projects (pics next time), but I’m not so sure about the rest. Stay tuned right here for updates as they happen!

Tags: Ravelympics, Scarves

(Please note: I had to change the voting and posting situation from what was originally planned because of the volume of entries. Please follow these instructions. There will not be anything posted on my blog.)

The voting for the Summer of Socks Socks on Vacation Contest is now open! In order to vote, please follow these steps *very* carefully:

1. To view the photos, go to this flickr set in my photostream. If, for some reason you cannot follow the link you can also find it by going to my photos (summerofsocks2006) and looking for the Socks on Vacation 2008 set.

2. Choose the photo that you wish to vote for and note it’s number which can be found in the title of the photo toward the top of the picture.

3. Send a blank e-mail to summerofsocks [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject containing *only* the number of the photo you want to vote for. Please leave the rest of the e-mail blank. **Please note that this is a different e-mail address than you have been directed to use for other parts of this along**!!

So, for example, if I want to vote for picture 29, I send an e-mail to summerofsocks [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject 29 and nothing else in the e-mail.

4. Please only vote **once**! Votes sent to any other address or not formated properly WILL NOT COUNT! NO EXCEPTIONS!!!

5. Voting will close on Aug. 25th at noon EDT. An announcement of a winner will be made ASAP thereafter.

ETA: Voting is open to anyone, anywhere so tell your friends!!

Please send me an e-mail or leave a comment if you have questions or concerns.

Good luck to all!!

Tags: SOS'08

First, thanks for all the nice birthday wishes for HWJF. Much appreciated! His birthday was less than stellar since he had to work 12 hours the day of, and our dinner plans didn’t quite work out, but we made up for it eventually at Dave and Buster’s on Friday night.

I got a reprieve from working this Saturday (bless you oh carpet cleaning scheduling gods) so I finally got to have a pretty lazy weekend. I did get a bunch of spinning done, some of it on my new drop spindle!

I’ve never been much of a spindler, but I’m finding the love with this baby. It was handmade and sent to me by my dear friend Eklectica. This is one of her fancy wood spindles that are shaped in simple octagons that don’t require a notch to make it easy to spin on. She currently makes spindles made of cocobolo, lacewood, curly oak and purpleheart with shafts of oak, cherry zebrawood and walnut (randomly paired up) and some other woods will be added to the selection soon (bloodwood, canarywood, and bocote among others.) She also makes “pirate” spindles where the whorl is a ship’s helm wheel (!) made by one of her fellow Renaissance faire artists as well as smaller laceweight spindles with beautiful glass whorls. There are lower-cost wooden spindles as well, if desired.

The best part, you can get your hands on one yourself if you’re local! All of these are available for the entirety of the run of The New York Renaissance Festival, which runs Saturdays and Sundays through September 21, 2008 (find coupons at http://www.renfair.com/NY) at the Amano Crafts booth on Tinker’s Trail. They are right by the Turkey Leg/Soup in a Bread Bowl food stand off of Spende Penny Lane. You’ll know them by the golden spinning wheel on the roof and the giant knitting needles with the red & yellow scarf and yarn ball attached!

They also carry a variety of fiber-related items besides the spindles, including lucets (also made by Eklectica), Ashford Knitty Noddys, Ashford Lazy Kates, Rakestraw spindles (really fun to use!), Ashford rovings, our own natural-dyed superwash merinos (using logwood, walnut, cochineal, cutch, madder and weld in various combinations), a limited amount of natural-dyed mohair, natural-dyed merino yarn, just plain natural dyes (for those that want to try it themselves), spindle bags (also made by Eklectica) and a wide variety of handspun yarns (all spun by people in the booth). They also carry some novelty items such as needle felted roses, Sheep! (and other fuzzy characters) mini-glass whorl spindles (mostly decorative, although we have spun on them for fun!) and spindle earrings (with yarn I spun by Eklectika!). Definitely stop by if you get to the faire!!

When I wasn’t playing with my new spindle, I spent some quality time at the wheel working on a special order.

That’s 1/2 lb. of merino in my DC Sunrise colorway. I just need to get it plied and hope to have it in the mail to it’s new home by the end of the week. Something tells me that my other Olympic spinning may not make the finish line, but we’ll see.

In between spinning and general lazing about, it was bunny haircut weekend. Here’s the before:

The during:

And the after:

We must have been inspired by the Olympics because we finished in a record time of a total of two hours. We were all much better off this time although there was a close call with a nipple. I feel like a very bad mama for that one, but they do tend to be in weird places on bunnies so I guess it’s easy to make a mistake there.

The difference in the fiber this time was amazing. So much denser and so much *more* of it. I haven’t weighed it yet, but I definitely think it might be time to start spinning the stuff without worrying where more will be coming from. Stitches is paying her rent quite nicely!!

Tags: Bunnies!, Spinning

It’s my favorite cowboy’s birthday!!

Wish him a good one, will ya?

Tags: HWJF

… how’s about I tell y’all about Maine!

It was awesome!

No wait! There’s more!

Despite leaving after work on Wednesday we didn’t actually get into Maine until Thursday morning. It seems that we must have officially reached “old” or something because the prospect of getting in at 1am or later did not appeal to us this year. We stayed with friends near Boston Wednesday night and were on our way Thursday morning.

First stop was Portland. There’s something so very charming to me about this city. Perhaps it’s the smallness compared to my daily fight with NYC, perhaps it’s the smell of salt on the air that instantly makes me crave steamed clams and lobster, or maybe it’s the people who totally dress like I would want to dress on a daily basis and don’t seem to notice that they’re special. Either way, I just love Portland. And this time around I finally got to go to Tess’ Designer Yarns! Every time we’ve tried before it hasn’t been open but this time we were lucky. I was so excited I didn’t even get a picture, but you better believe I got yarn!

It wasn’t an easy decision, but I ended up with these two skeins of their Superwash Merino. It’s so silky and the colors just imidiately grabbed me when I walked in the door. There is a touch of buyer’s remorse with these only because I probably should have gotten a third skein. Now that I’m back to Ravelry access, I find that the sweaters I had in mind need a touch more yardage. I may just call them to see if I can get more though. I also bought sock yarn for HWJF which has become the yarn of choice for his Ravelympic socks.

I didn’t start them until Saturday because I wanted to work on the Morning Surf Scarf first (more on that another day) and I wasn’t too sure how they were going to work out, but they’re starting to grow on me. I decided to go with this instead of the handspun that I had originally planned when I discovered the gauge was going to be way off otherwise. HWJF seems to like them so far and that’s all that matters to me.

We almost literally tripped over another yarn store while we wandered the city, Central Yarn Shop. This was a really cute store with a wide variety of yarns and some really interesting samples, not the least of which were some with a serious lobster theme that we saw in the window.

We picked up another skein of sock yarn there. This time Berroco Sox.

HWJF says that I “hog all the blues” so this one is for him too.

We made several other stops including a couple of record stores, an asian grocery (hello Pocky!), L.L.Bean outlet and a Stonewall Kitchen to stock up on our favorite Sunday breakfast, but I think HWJF was most happy when we found out we could take a tour here:

While the video was interesting the “tour” was less than stellar. They basically took us into the packaging room to show us all of this:

Which was kind of cool to see all the bottles going around but less than what we were expecting. But hey, it was free and there was a tasting afterward. I’m not a beer girl so I gave the boy my samples. Obviously, we went home with a couple of beverages.

Then it was on to Freeport for lunch at Gritty’s which was Oh.My.God. amazing. Try the lobster bisque if you’re ever there and the pulled pork over sweet potato fries with cheese and maple sour cream. Sounds gross but was amazingly delish! The food was so amazing but we ended up scarfing it down because it was 3pm and we found a brochure for an Alpaca farm nearby that closed at 5pm! Meet the alpacas of Winters Gone Farm!

We only had 30 min. before they closed by the time we made it there (who knew there was traffic in Maine?!?) so I didn’t want to keep the owners, but I did manage to score 8 oz. of the softest spinning fiber ever! Expect to see that spun up sometime soon!

Our day ended by going back for the mandatory stop at L.L.Bean (it’s a state law according to my Dad ) and then heading home.

On another day we also made it to another yarn shop that I hadn’t been able to get into before, Pins and Needles. It was a really lovely little shop with a great selection of different types of yarn, most of it from Cascade. We picked out this skein of Cascade’s new sock yarn, Heritage.

Since this was sort of HWJF’s birthday trip, most of the sock yarns ended up being for him. But one ended up coming home for me:

This time it’s J. Knits which is another yarn I’ve not yet knitted with. We picked this one up at our favorite stop in Waterville, Yardgoods. We also had to visit our favorite lunch place in Waterville, Big G’s. The sandwhiches? Insanely huge!

And totally yummy. Of course no trip to Maine would be complete without a stop at Gifford’s either, especially when our favorite flavor (Pumpkin!) was available.

Yeah. Totally raining and cold. Did we care? No way.

We also managed to take in a concert at the New England Music Camp in between the raindrops.

Note the handknit socks and the new shoes.

There was also a visit with HWJF’s father’s turkeys.

And the hilarity of HWJF trying to find eggs for us for breakfast one morning.

Before we knew it, it was time to head home. Only we decided to make a little detour. HWJF’s parents were nice enough to give us two bikes to bring back to NJ, so we decided to stop and try them out.

I’d never been to Kennebunkport and I must say it is a very cute town with a lovely beach.

Of course, I can only look at the water from a distance, so I made HWJF go find me some sea shells.

Unfortunately it was 5pm before we knew it and we were still in Maine! We didn’t get home until 11pm and well… you know the rest.

Someday I hope we can live in Maine. It just seems like it would be a good fit for us in so many ways. In the meantime, I’ve definitely added to my list of places I want more time to explore!

Did I mention we’re driving up there for Christmas?!

Tags: alpacas, fiber, Maine, Travel, yarn

I am very sorry that I have not paid you a visit in nearly a week. You see, we had this really lovely trip to maine, full of amazing food and Fibery goodness. On the way home we took a little detour and before we knew it we were still in maine and it was 5pm. Then I’ve had these two crazy long training days at work. Yes I know that I was able to plurk during those two days but it is way easier to stealth plurk. Yes I know I’m using the iPhone to blog now but I’m stuck in the train station. It doesn’t mean I love you less than plurk. Really. I promise to update you tomorrow evening. Or Thursday. Well… At least by Friday. Promise!

Love,

Me

At least that’s what I keep thinking after signing up for Team Splurk and the Ravelympics! As if I don’t have enough on my plate lately right? So what do I have planned? First a little bit of knitting.

The Blue Jeans and Leather Shoes yarn is done!

I think it came out quite nicely. There’s about 194 yards and it is destined to become a Morning Surf Scarf (Ravelry link). I may cast on fewer stitches than the standard to make sure I end up with a decent length. That seems to be the consensus from those knitting it so far. This project is also serving triple duty as a KAL for Let’s Knit Together Ravelers and Spin City NYC.

I also have another pair of socks planned. Remember this yarn from earlier this year?

HWJF has a birthday coming up. Need I say more?

The rest of my plans are for spinning. First up will be a special order of some merino yarn in my DC Sunrise colorway.

Next will be some BFL sock yarn in my Roses in the Dark Colorway.

(Both of those colors are still available in the shop as of this writing if you want your own!)

Then I’d really like to do something for myself, so I think I’ll give the Lorna’s fiber I bought in Pittsburgh a try.

I also just got two more pounds of NJ fiber in. That might hit the wheel too.

Think that’s enough? So do I! That all means that despite finishing the first Berlin Muster sock

It will probably get put on hold starting Friday morning. Good thing we are off to Maine for a long weekend after work today! A road trip might help the second sock progress a bit, maybe even finish before Friday if I’m lucky.

It’s also good that the Ladybug is coming with us. I think she’s going to get a work out!

No post from me on Friday but I leave you with a bunny pic to keep you company until Monday.

I can’t believe I got her mid binky! I also can’t believe she’s over 7 lbs. now and just about ready for her second haircut. They grow up way too fast!!

Tags: Ravelympics, Socks, SOS'08, Spinning, Travel