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In honor of Earth Day, and because I hate to let a good marketing opportunity go by, I’ve posted a couple of Earth Day Specials at my Etsy shop.
A bundle of BFL roving, colorway Grass, for $12 instead of $15 until Wednesday,
and a skein of sock yarn with a story that began here, colorway Ivy, only for sale until I log back in on Wednesday, because it’s not on any of my usual base yarns, and if it doesn’t find a nice home quickly, I think I’ll make it into socks.
I’ve also some great new base yarns: BFL superwash, SeaCell/Merino superwash, and Merino laceweight. If you haven’t looked lately, I’ve uploaded a lot of new items, and more to come this week and next.
And the offer regarding the free WrapSack (scroll to the end) is still on!
The Internet is an amazing thing. It has its odder corners, and as the Peter Steiner cartoon in the New Yorker put it, “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog”, so deceptions can occur. But connections with real people do happen, and sometimes you have the treat of meeting in person.
Cathy of Hither and Yarn was in town, on her way to Blue Moon Fiber Arts Sock Camp, on Orcas Isand, and we arranged to get together for some serious eating, sightseeing, and chatting. No yarn shopping, because she’d been on yarn crawl the day before with other sock campers. Greg and I picked her up at her hotel and took her to Top Gun for dim sum, which was fabulous — the best I’ve had in Seattle. Then, on to Bellevue Botanical Garden for some fresh air, scattered sunshine, and flowers.
Here we are on the path below the perennial border. Cathy is on the left, and note the Ravelry scarf peeking out from under her jacket.
The trilliums were blooming in the woods. Cathy said they also grow in Wisconsin, where she is from, but she usually doesn’t get into the woods in the spring, so it was nice to see them here.
We drove into Seattle for a quick peek at the cherry blossoms on the UW campus (a little past their prime, but still nice), then on Pike Place Market browsing and stocking up on used paperbacks for her spare-time reading at Sock Camp, with a stop for coffee and pastries. A stroll down to the waterfront was next, but it started raining, so we didn’t make it to the Olympic Sculpture Garden. As Cathy had knitting homework to complete, we headed back down to her hotel.
Knitting homework? Yes, apparently Sock Camp assigns a task to be completed before you arrive. You would think it would be socks, but no, it’s . . .
What is it exactly?
The assignment was “Make a toilet paper cover”. Cathy knitted and felted the black structure, and was then knitting a lacy outer layer — I think the assignment rules called for using
scrap yarns, so an assortment awaited their fate. I especially liked the
socks on the feet of the base.
That yarn crawl I mentioned — Cathy had bought rather a lot of yarn and asked if I could ship it back to her, so she wouldn’t have to buy another suitcase, pay excess baggage fees, etc. So I got to take it home and fondle it discretely. That lady can shop! Kauni, Socks That Rock, Mountain Colors, Panda Silk . . . and she trusted me to mail it all to her!
Yeah, rather a lot of yarn.
She also gifted me with a rather sumptuous bag o’goodies:
Some handmade soap, a KnitPicks View Sizer, and a skein of the much-sought-after, impossible-to-get Wollmeise Yarn, in the Drachenblut colorway. Wow! Thank you, Cathy! One of your packages has a couple of extras in it that I hope you like half as much as I do these goodies.
Please note the cloth sack that everything came in. It’s a Wrapsack, yet another Internet thing. It has a unique number on the tag, and I’ve logged it in on their website. When another person receives it, they can log it in, and its journey from person to person can be followed if you have its number. I’m giving it to the next blog reader who buys something at my Etsy shop – just put “Wrapsack” in the “comments to seller” box, and it’s yours.
I went down to Seattle today to meet Susan for lunch — she’s a fellow member of The Gunroom, and also a Whipstick Knitter. Having a little time to kill before our lunch, I went over to Pike Place Market, and stopped at Beecher’s Cheese to replenish the larder a bit. It was the first time I’d been there when they were making cheese. The blurry, through the window, picture above shows just a section of a vast oval vat, one of two that was being stirred to create curds. The hip young thing behind the counter asked me what is becoming The Usual Question: “Did you knit that purse?” She went on to explain that she’d just taught herself to knit, but hadn’t tried felting yet. I gave her a couple of tips and told her about Knitty, but she was already in the know.
I met Susan at Wild Ginger, and passed on some yarn for her to use in an ongoing charity project of hers, knitting wee blankets for kittens brought to animal shelters. Appropriately enough, we both ate with chopsticks, expertly wielded.
A quick return to Pike Place Market yielded some roasted fennel ravioli and a sourdough ficelle from DeLaurenti and South African Boerewors from Uli’s Famous Sausage, all of which should make a tasty dinner. The harissa from Market Spice will be for another day.
My husband, Greg, and I were invited to a wine tasting Saturday, a release party for the 2004 vintage from Nota Bene Cellars. Mingling with a roomful of strangers, chatting and sipping very good wine, I spotted a really cool felted purse on the arm of another lady. Eventually the flow of the room brought us together. “Did you make your purse?” I asked. “Why, yes, and did you make yours?” Since I was carrying this, of course the answer was yes. Hers was from a pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting, a nifty little handbag with a very cute rolled edge — perhaps it was the Buttonhole Purse from the blog? Anyway, after marveling about the wonders of the Internet and the ways people can connect, we went for a taste of the 2002 Syrah — great stuff.
My weaving guild (which is really more of a Fiber Arts guild) decided to create small art pages to exchange. The only rules were: the page should be roughly 4×5″, with a 1″ fabric border on the left. Any material, technique, etc. was fair game. The idea is to try out a variety of ideas, but not be tied down by the need for it Be Something. Fiber art doodles, if you will.
Here’s what I made for our first go-round of exchanges, which we had at our March meeting. The pink pages above have a commercial fabric base. Onto that I machine sewed lightly felted pink fleece, which I had needle felted with scrap yarn from my purse, and added buttons. Everyone loves buttons.
These black pages are more commercial fabric for the base, with lightly felted black fleece that also included a little dyed silk — that’s the whispy pale blue-green stuff. The upper left page has a cockade of ribbbon held down by a cowrie shell. The upper right page has a free-motion machine lace leaf –but it blends a bit too much with the background. The bottom left has more machine lace leaves, and the lower right is a scrap of tulle and more cowrie shells, plus some gathered, dyed silk fabric. I love using scraps and odds and ends from other projects!
