Twisp of Fate

Fall is here.  I love this time of year.  We are still having temperatures in the mid-60’s during the day, low 30’s at night.  The trees are starting to turn.  We have been over to the coast twice, each of the last 2 weekends, and the drive over the mountains gets lovelier every time we cross over.  I am actually starting to wear sweaters in the evenings.

I can also tell it is Fall because all of a sudden I want to start knitting projects.  I bought a couple of pattern booklets at Weaving Works when in Seattle and have knit a hat using some of my handspun yarn:

"Quincy" hat by Jared Flood

The pattern is by Jared Flood from his new book called “Made in Brooklyn”.  The yarn was a 3-ply I spun from a Lincoln x Romney cross (brown color) blended with a little mohair dyed orange.  I bought the batts from the breeder at a NW Regional Spinners conference a couple of years back.  My friend Carol fell in love with the hat last weekend so now it is hers!  It was a quick knit and I will definitely do another one, if not several more (p.s. you do need to know how to do a provisional cast on, and garter stitch grafting; the pickup of stitches for the crown, off the continuous edge of a Mobius strip, is a little unusual but not hard once you understand what is going on).

I have also started the classic Elizabeth Zimmerman pattern, Tomten Jacket, for me – also using handspun.  This is a garter stitch jacket with optional hood.  I am using a 3-ply yarn I spun from a “cleaning out the mill at the end of the season” blend I got from Stonehedge Fiber Mill about 4 years ago.  It is a blend of wool, alpaca and silk.  The above-mentioned Jared Flood blogged about his modifications for this jacket back in 2007, and I am going to use some of those suggestions to make it fit better.

And I am planning to start another sweater, Anhinga by Norah Gaughan, after seeing it on Teyani’s blog: Intrepid Fiber Wizard.  Thanks, Teyani!  It’s in Norah’s new book “Fly Away” – Collection No. 5.   I know I have yarn in my stash that will work with this pattern.  Just have to haul out all the boxes and rummage through them this weekend.

Back on the home front, they are starting to put in the fence posts across the back yard.

It’s going to be even taller than we thought, starting out at 7 ft at the roadside and increasing to 9 ft on the right-hand end, due to the slope of the ground.  It will really provide a nice visual barrier, yes?  We also finished creating and mulching down another bed for the future perennial/shrub border to the lawn, and covered the area where we plan to have our vegetable garden next year with black plastic to (hopefully) keep the weeds down.