We’ve been on sick leave around here the past week. Rick came down with it first – congestion, lots of coughing and hacking, then a fever that kept him in bed for a day and a half. I thought I had avoided it, but no – although I seem to have a somewhat milder case of the congestion part. I spent all day yesterday in bed with the fever, chills and achiness, and am still a little wiped out today, but pretty sure I am on the mend at last. Hopefully normal life resumes tomorrow!
I’m in the home stretch on the Lochinver sweater from Alice Starmore’s Fishermen’s Sweaters. Here it is with the body, collar and one sleeve done:
I have modified the sleeve patterning from the pattern as written. In the book version, she alternates pattern bands with plain stockinette stitch sections. After looking at pictures of finished “Lochinvers” on Ravelry, I wasn’t crazy about the look. I also looked in some of my books on traditional fishermen’s sweaters of England and Scotland. They tended to have patterning at the top of the sleeve (ending either above or below the elbow) then finish with plain stockinette stitch before the ribbing. I think this was because they tended to snag and wear more on the lower arm – these were working sweaters, after all. It would be easier to tear out and re-knit the lower part of the sleeve this way, to keep the sweater going.
Anyway, after the first pattern band where you decrease away the underarm gusset, I continued with 3 of the body charts and the same 8 rows between them as in the body, making for double purl bands between patterns. Had to keep track of the decreases every 3 rows but that wasn’t so bad. Then finished with a short section of stockinette and the final ribbing. I was able to try it on to get the sleeve length just right for me, which is always nice.
Hopefully I will be done with this by next week – block and sew on the 3 buttons for the collar – and post one final picture!
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Last week our grand-daughter took a week of her vacation to come up to visit us from Medford, OR. It was her first long road trip by herself but she seemed to enjoy it, and we had a great time. The first 3 days we stayed in the valley and just sort of hung out and visited – but she did tell me she wanted to learn to knit, so I also got her started on that and she was making real progress by the end of the week.
The night before we left for Seattle, we had dinner down at Twisp River Pub:
In Seattle we visited with Rick’s sister and mom (April’s great-aunt and great-grandmother!)
and did touristy stuff, like visit the Space Needle and the Seattle Aquarium. The weather was perfect and it was actually nice to be doing some fun things in Seattle instead of being focused on errands and so forth, like we usually are.
at the Space Needle
We all thought this modified sign in Ballard was pretty funny:
We parted company after 3 days in Seattle, her heading south to Oregon and us heading north to visit my Dad and brother and sister-in-law before coming home over the North Cascades Highway on Sunday morning.
Sunday evening we went to a wonderful outdoor event at Bluebird Grain Farms up in the Rendezvous area. Called the “Feast of Field and Stream”, it was a dinner showcasing the products of Bluebird Grain Farms, Hard Row to Hoe Vineyards in Chelan, and the Okanogan Producers Marketing Association, all of whom had earned their Salmon-Safe certifications. All proceeds went to Trout Unlimited and the Salmon Safe program.
The dinner was catered by Cameron Green and Molly Patterson of Glover Street Market in Twisp, and featured huge pans of farro paella cooked over outdoor fires, quite impressive:
that's a pan full of mussels in the background
cheeses from Glover Street Market
A good time was had by all and we hope they do it again next year!
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So we decided to move the two woodsheds that Rick built late last fall, mainly to get them farther away from the house and propane tank (for fire safety reasons) but also because we thought they would look better in that location from the house and the road, and to allow for an easier way to drive all around the house.
Rick built them as free-standing structures, but they are heavy. What to do? Last week he inquired down at Methow Valley Lumber about their boom truck. Expensive and maybe hard to get into the back yard to even do it. But Larry suggested we just get “peeler logs” which are used for fence posts, and roll it on those. That’s how the Egyptians did it, says he.
Rick actually moved the first one last week all by himself. Worked like a charm! But the other one was partially filled with firewood, so this morning we transferred all that wood to the one in the new location, commingling it with some of the two cords of fir that we had delivered about a month ago. Then we moved the second shed. It was kind of fun and so much easier than I would have thought. Alright, I actually did help – just not when I was taking the pictures!
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As promised, here are pictures of the latest plaited twill scarves in the warp colorway “Sea Scallop”. For those of you who are not weavers, the warp is seen as the threads that run lengthwise through the scarf, and which you see in the twisted fringes at each end. The weft is the thread or yarn that is woven back and forth across the width of the scarf, forming the pattern. All of these were woven using the same tie-up (how the treadles are attached to the harnesses on the loom) but I used two different treadling patterns (the order in which the harnesses are lifted for each shot or pass of the weft) so that’s why you see two different patterns.
SeaScallop with soft pink chenille weft
Sea Scallop with chocolate brown chenille weft
Sea Scallop with eggplant tencel weft
Sea Scallop with Pompeii (rust) tencel weft
Sea Scallop with taupe tencel weft
I’m taking two of these to each gallery tomorrow (see sidebar) and setting one aside for the holiday sales. Which one do you think I will set aside? I haven’t actually decided yet!
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Lots of new projects underway here lately, but the blog has lagged behind. I have had start-itis, wanting to start many things all at once!
I started a new sweater using some yarn that I spun last year. Actually I brought this one along all the way from the fleece, which was from a multicolored Corriedale named “Tsuku”. After washing, I separated the fleece into 3 color groups (gray, white-to-pale gray, and dark-gray-to-black), carded them separately and then put the 3 colors onto the drum carder in layers. The goal was to preserve some color variation in the final yarn, which more or less worked. Spun it up as a 3-ply yarn sometime last winter and wound up with quite a lot, maybe 2800 yards or so. So now I am knitting it up as a traditional gansey style sweater, using the pattern Lochinver from Alice Starmore’s book Fishermen’s Sweaters.
Lochinver sweater completed to the underarm
As of today, I have almost finished the front and back yokes and will be moving on to the collar and sleeves soon. More pictures to come! It’s going amazingly fast and it feels good to be knitting an actual sweater again. I had kind of gotten stuck on hats and small projects there for a while.
I started spinning some merino/cashmere and merino/tencel fiber that I purchased at a conference several years back. Dyed by Chasing Rainbows Dyeworks, both in the same colorway called Copper Slate. Taking an idea from last February’s spinning camp on Orcas, I am alternating the two fiber blends in the spun singles (instead of alternating colorways of the same fiber) and hope to wind up with a 2-ply for a lace project. No pictures yet but I will get some once I actually have produced some yarn.
Started another round of plaited twill scarves down at the weavers’ guild room. I am calling this warp colorway “Sea Scallop.”
Sea Scallop with chocolate chenille weft
Sea Scallop with taupe tencel weft
These are actually off the loom now, fringes braided, washed and pressed and trimmed. I’ll get pictures today or tomorrow and show the finished product. I have wound the next warp and it is ready to tie on, which I may get started on today. I’m on a roll, trying to build up some stock for the galleries and holiday sales.
At home, I have been working on more of the small blankets or lap robes. I have interim pictures only, as I am just concentrating on getting them woven and putting them in a box to be finished up later (twisting the fringes, fulling in the washing machine, etc). It’s been really fun though, sorting through my Shetland yarn stash and coming up with combinations that work together – and getting rid of some stuff kept in storage for way, way too long!
This one used some handspun Romney yarn that was given to me at knitting retreat last November. She dyed it the variegated purple color and then spun it as a 2-ply. I had to use some commercial yarn in the warp as well (Harrisville Shetland) to get the full width, and also for the weft:
# 6 using hand-spun, hand-dyed Romney
This one used up yarn leftover from a fairisle sweater I knit several years ago (Luskentyre by Alice Starmore):
# 7 Luskentyre, on the loom
#7 Luskentyre, off loom but not yet finished/fulled
I finished one 2 days ago in shades of brown, and have a new one on the loom in shades of gray to black:
# 9 underway on the loom
On a completely different note, last Friday we attended the “soft opening” for my friend Sara’s new studio down at the TwispWorks campus in Twisp. She is calling it “Culler Studio”, a play on “color studio” but Culler was her mother’s maiden name. Rick and I had been down there the week before helping her paint the walls, and it was amazing to see it transformed:
Culler Studio at TwispWorks
This will be primarily a work space (Sara is a natural dyer, painter, weaver) but for this event she had a showing of her own work, plus that of her 2 daughters Eva (print-making) and Grace (jewelry). It was certainly well-attended and a good time was had by all!
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This year, for the first time, we have been attending the wonderful Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival. In its 16th year, the festival brings world-class performers from the Pacific Northwest and around the country. Featured this year was the Grammy-award winning Parker String Quartet; they played together, and in various combinations with other musicians. Fabulous!
Two years ago the festival moved to a new location at Signal Hill Ranch in the hills above the valley between Twisp and Winthrop. Owners Howard and Liz Johnson opened their ranch to the festival, and converted their barn to a state-of-the-art 200-seat venue. Howie is an electrical engineer by trade and designed the acoustics for the barn. Here is a short quote from this article about the Johnson’s and Signal Hill Ranch: “Originally built to house show horses, the barn sits high on a pastured, east-facing slope between Winthrop and Twisp with stunning views of mountains and hillsides all around. If the timing and weather are right, audiences can enjoy top-flight chamber musicians while, through an open barn door, they watch the moon rise over the hills – one of those special Methow Magic moments.” Indeed!
We bought two flex-passes, each good for 4 concerts, and have been to every center-stage performance since last Friday, July 22 (there are also a lot of free events during the festival in various locations up and down valley, and a music camp for young musicians, plus you can attend open rehearsal up at the barn in the mornings).
They also have food & beverages available before the concerts, and although we had dinner at home, reports of the catering by Rocking Horse Bakery were quite favorable. All the beer, wine and cider were donated by local businesses with sales to benefit the festival – typical generosity from these folks: Twisp River Pub, Lost River Winery, and the Methow Valley Cider House.
This ranch horse seemed particularly interested in someone’s Asian noodle salad:
It’s been a wonderful experience and we plan to make this a yearly event! I love this valley.
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I have been spinning more lately, and this led to a flurry of drum-carding activity the last week or so. The carder had fallen silent and forlorn for quite some time, so it was nice to get drawn back into it.
It all started when I spun up 4 oz. of a prepared batt from Crosspatch Creations in Montana. This had some of her natural dark brown wool and a lot of dyed mohair – golds and rose tones, mostly. When I had the singles spun, I decided I wanted to ply it with “something else” and not back on itself. I started digging through the stash of washed fleeces looking for something dark, and came upon a dyed Romney fleece I bought a couple of years back from Heidi Dascher of The Artful Ewe in Port Gamble, WA. In her inimitable way, Heidi had dyed the whole fleece rather randomly – a lot of jet black but with lots of red, gold, green etc. mixed in.
So I pulled off about 8 oz of that dyed fleece and carded it into 3 batts, one of which is now spun and plied with the mohair blend as a 3-ply (2 dark brown and 1 of the mohair blend):
Romney batt with final yarn (plied with mohair blend shown on bobbin)
While digging through the fleece stash, I ran across one of the first fleeces I ever bought – back in 2005. It came from Whitehall, MT and was from a sheep named Temptation. She was a Shetland x Corriedale cross “with some minor amounts of Romney, Border Leicester and Cormo thrown in.” Her owner sent me a picture at the time:
Temptation the sheep
Here’s a picture of the fleece, which I then washed and stored away until now. Lovely warm light grey/brown with blonde tips:
Temptation’s fleece before washing
Well now I have a big box of Temptation batts and a 3-ply sample spun up:
But back to the dyed Romney fleece from Heidi Parra. I believe the fleece itself came from The Pines Farm in Maple Valley, WA. It is really lovely stuff, super clean and almost no VM (vegetable matter) or second cuts, nice and crimpy. I had over 3 lbs. of it left after pulling off some for the project mentioned above, and realized that if I just carded it up as before, as completely blended batts, I would lose all the color distinction that Heidi had put into the dyeing. So, what to do?
On Saturday I laid it all out on a table and pulled it apart into 5 color groups, working quickly and trying not to “overthink” the process too much. About a third of it was black (with some color still in some of the locks):
Mostly black
The next biggest group was red – from black with red overtones, to dark red through bright cherry:
Mostly red
There were 2 smaller piles of “gold and oranges” and “olive tones”:
golds and oranges
olive tones
Final and fifth category was “everything else” which wound up a rich brown color when carded.
I spent most of Sunday carding up the 5 color groups. This is when I love, love, love my big electric carder which I bought from Judith MacKenzie (built by her ex, Nick McCuin). It does nice big batts, and leaves my hands free to tease and/or feed on the fiber. I did a first pass with each color group to tease out (loosen) the locks and then re-combined the resulting batts in a second pass to get fairly even color in 3 to 6 batts of each color.
Romney on the carder
The five color groups all carded
These were so pretty that I was tempted to leave them as-is! But I did want a final fiber preparation that would spin up into a yarn that included, but did not completely obscure, each of the colors. So on Monday I went to work on making multicolor batts using ideas from Deb Menz’s excellent book, Color in Spinning. In order to keep colors distinct, she will make separate batts including some of the final colors in each, then stack them on top of each other to be pulled apart for the spinning.
So I made 16 batts, each of which consists of 2 smaller, layered batts. The first one has a “thin layer” of black on each side, with 6 stripes across in the center, alternating gold/orange with warm brown. The second one has a “thin layer” of red on each side, with 5 stripes across in the center, alternating black with olive tones. And here is my lovely big box of 16 batts, each about 2.75 oz., with a little of the initial dyed fleece on top as a garnish:
The final product!
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I finished the 5 scarves on the red perle cotton warp I am calling “Pomegranate”. This time I used tencel for the weft on all of them, but a different color on each. I am really happy with these, and will be taking 2 each to the galleries today for consignment (Confluence Gallery in Twisp, and Winthrop Gallery in Winthrop).
Pomegranate with Black tencel weft
Pomegranate with Eggplant tencel weft
Pomegranate with Taupe tencel weft
Pomegranate with Navy tencel weft
Pomegranate with Shale tencel weft
We just spent 3 days (2 nights) over on the coast – Rick’s birthday, his sister’s birthday, seeing friends, doing errands, etc. It was a beautiful drive in both directions, although a bit cloudy and drippy over there. Good visits with family, although as always we are happy to be home in the valley, where it is forecast to be sunny and in the high 70’s this week – how perfect is that?
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Last week we spent 3 nights out at Lake Quinault at our friends’ cabin resort: Lochaerie Resort on the north shore, in the Olympic National Park (see link in sidebar). The occasion was a fund-raising bike ride around the lake (31 miles if you make it all the way) for the Quinault Cancer Fund. I believe this was the 22nd annual ride! There were 10 of us plus our hosts:
who moved there last year after retirement and spent the wettest winter in recent memory (which is saying a lot, since this is the rainforest we are talking about) tearing down and rebuilding the main house, while living in one of the cabins. But it is substantially done and they are moved in now. It’s a fabulous house:
The bedrooms are on the top floor and Rick and I got to stay in the guest room in the main house. The view is magnificent out to the lake, and down on the cabins below:
On Friday Rick and I drove out to the ocean (only about 45 minutes from Lochaerie). We went for a little beach hike at Beach 4, just north of Kalaloch. It was a beautiful day and we hadn’t been out to the Washington coast for quite a long time. So nice to see and smell the ocean.
trail to Beach 4
looking north up the beach
Tide was low so we had tidepools!
Saturday was the actual bike ride, and we had a perfect day for it – sunny but not hot. We made it about 20 miles, over to the Rainforest Resort on the south shore, lunch on the lawn and the “sag wagon” back to Lochaerie. That’s what we managed last year, as well, and our behinds were just as sore and legs as weary as last year, too. But it was fun!
Here’s some of the group having wine/beer/appetizers after the ride:
They all like to cook, so our potluck meals were delicious and I came home with 2 new recipes.
While there, I finished the shawl I have been knitting out of handspun wool & silk. It’s a pattern from the internet called Bell Pattern Shawl. Just got pictures today:
One of my pet peeves about triangular shawls is that the ends don’t drape nicely but want to head off towards the side. In an attempt to avoid this, I added two extra repeats of the Bell Pattern just at each end, using short rows, so the first repeat spans 8 “Bells” at each end, and the second repeat only the 4 outer “Bells” at each end. Kind of hard to describe, but here is a photo:
short row shaping at end of Bell Pattern Shawl
I think it worked, as you can see in the first photo above. The points hang straight down instead of pointing off to the sides. I am quite pleased with how this turned out, actually. The pattern was suitable for this rather rustic yarn with lots of flecks of silk in it – it didn’t show regular lace patterning well at all (I know, I tried…). It was easy but not boring to knit. The size is just right for wearing over a shirt in the evening. And, I only had about 2 feet of my handspun yarn left when done!
Posted in family & friends, knitting, outdoors | 1 Comment »
Twisp of Fate 