Solstice greetings

I know, I missed it by a day or so, but I like acknowledging that the shortest day has come and gone. There are many, many holidays around this time of year, but I like the solstice best.  I hope you are enjoying/have enjoyed/will enjoy your choice of holidays, and that whatever else goes on you find some time to rest and have some peace with people you love.  And some yarn in your hands.

We've had the last Yarnworks of the year, which we celebrated with cookies (thanks Jean!) and sparkling juice (thanks Andree!) and yarn, of course.  Looking forward to 2016!  I have been unusually amply rewarded for my efforts in the yarn department this year, so I am looking for some way to share that.  I ordered 4 magazines, 2 for knitting and 2 for crochet to share with the group (which for some reason earned me a copy of Kung Fu Panda from Amazon, although I have no idea why they think this is a good idea).  Some will go to buy yarn for future projects, but being frugal is ingrained by now, so I still shop the sales.  Maybe I'll invest in more needles of all sizes to make sure we have whatever is needed.  But I'll check eBay before paying full price...

Do you like untangling yarn?  Probably not, but I actually do, and apparently there is a whole community of people who like it so much they will do it for others.  Check out this article.  There is a group on Ravelry called Knot a Problem who specialize and glory in untangling yarn.

Making cookies at this time of year seems to be mandatory, but since I have been avoiding sugar to keep my heartburn under control, I had put it off.  Finally I made an old recipe for soft orange cookies with orange cream cheese icing, using a commercial gluten-free flour mix.  So I ended up with puffy, biscuity cookies instead of flat, cakey cookies, but they still work to convey the icing to my mouth.  I will suffer, but once a year I'll break my sugar fast.  And spritz cookies!  Sugar, egg yolks, butter, vanilla, and brown rice flour, squashed through a cookie press.  But that leaves egg whites, you say.  Yes, and chocolate meringue cookies need egg whites!  So forgive me stomach and esophagus, I have sinned, but I'll stop soon.  As soon as all of the orange cream cheese icing is gone.

At the other end of the food spectrum, the organic farm from my CSA is selling the excess produce that this warm weather has allowed them to grow, so I'll balance the cookies with some kale and salad greens.

I have finished all of my Christmas gift knitting and crocheting, so now I have choices.  I'm working on the Hue Shift afghan, a boring ribbed hat for myself in alpaca, and I could sew together the finished summer sweater and put on the crocheted edging.  But that seems too self-focused.  I do have some Star Wars figures that were requested, but that won't take long.  So I started going through the projects I looked at but didn't make for this year.  I made a list of what yarn each needed, then went to the Yarn.com year-end blowout sale and started ordering.  Now I'm looking forward to that bag, and have a list to start on.  That's more like it!

I hear cookies calling me, but I'm ignoring them.  It's a fast day until dinner (homemade spaghetti sauce with sausage and chicken).  Take that, sugar.

Warm and Fuzzy

The Warm and Fuzzy fundraiser for 2015 is history now, and very successful!  People had fun (several commented that it was their favorite event at work), $3763 was raised, and all of the items found new homes.  I calculated that 56% of the final total was from bids on my work - the rest was from the bake sale, items donated by other people, and people just giving me more than they owed.  Several people won a bidding war only to turn around and gift the item to someone else who had been bidding.  Top bids were $150 for a painting, a copy of a Monet, by a fellow scientist who also flies his own plane and plays violins in orchestras, a real Renaissance man, and also $150 for the Island Playset (below).  Next was $120 for homebrewed beer (20 bottles of 22 oz of the brew of choice).

When I set up the tables, I couldn't find the zombie, but I had his picture on the bid sheet so he found a home, and eventually I found him under my bed by trying to think like a cat who had found it: where would it end up?  Bed it was.  The Star Wars figures were popular, of course, as were the baby items.  As usual it was impossible to predict what would get the fiercest bidding.  And 4 lots of homemade pierogies got bids of $70 - $80.

Yes, I already started something for next year, because that box of yarn was taunting me.  But I still have Christmas items to make, so I try not to let it hog all of my free time.

I visited my parents in Florida, and worked on a hat, finished a sweater, and did most of a headband during the trip.  The sweater pieces have been blocked and are ready to sew together once Christmas stuff is done, but I have a lot of leftover yarn from it.  It's lovely smooth shiny Cascade Ultra Pima fine, about 500 yards in tan, which is probably enough to make a baby blanket, but tan?  Who makes a tan baby blanket?  I like this pattern, which I have made before with Ultra Pima, but I'm not sure if I have enough yarn or enough interest to do it again.

This is the Gluten-Free Yarn Nerd, and a shout-out to some incredible bread is due.  GF bread basically is miserable stuff texture-wise, and I can pretty much never get through a sandwich without the bread crumbling before I finish, but lo!  Behold the best GF bread ever: Schar (imagine an umlaut over the a) gluten free Artisan Baker Multigrain Bread!  It sits on the store shelf at room temperature.  It's soft and flexible and chewy and non-crumbly when you first open the package, and wonder of wonders, it's still like that several days later at room temperature!  I have been reveling in sandwiches all week.  I almost never eat them because the bread is not worth it, but I nearly swooned with delight eating a grilled sandwich tonight.  You don't even have to toast this bread to make it edible.  Schar, you win the gluten-free universe.  Now if only you could make GF saltines...

Cacti and done

I did it.  I finished the last items I'm making for the 2015 Warm and Fuzzy fundraiser:

Ceramic pots for a buck or two from Goodwill, crocheted "dirt" to fill them, and crocheted cacti from various places on the internet, which took far more hours to construct than I like to admit.  But I know there are people who will like them and hopefully bid high for them.

Now I have to go through the boxes and tag items with care instructions and fiber content, assuming I can remember or find the remains of the yarn with the ball band for most of them.  Wednesday is the auction.  Other people are donating, too: exceedingly well decorated wreaths, homebrew beer, wooden puzzles, pierogies, crocheted stuff (bag, scarf, afghan), oil paintings, photographs, etc, not to mention the bake sale (called the "Sweet and Gooey" fundraiser).  

And of course I was making hats (and a bag that inexplicably wouldn't felt when sent through the washer twice) for my friend's farmer's markets, but we are just about out of the last batch of yarn, so I'm taking a break, even though another batch is done.  Time to work on stuff for my family.

And I rolled up that skein of qiviut and started on a cowl.  For me!

Wool, and what is not wool

Just a few links for your entertainment and enlightenment.

First, this for Wovember, which appears to be a British site slightly fanatical about the misuse of the word "wool" when people mean "yarn".  But it has some fun information about other things that can be made into yarn, like milk, lava, and dog hair (especially as a war effort in the 1940s).

Then this, about people who crochet hats that look like Disney princess hair for pediatric cancer patients.  I think if I was a little kid I would definitely prefer these to real hair wigs.

And this, a short video about how self-striping yarn is dyed.  Ingenious.

I have 51 items (or groups of items) finished for the Warm and Fuzzy fundraiser, with just a few thrift-shop pots of crocheted cacti to complete by Dec. 2.  So I'm going to consider that done - ends are woven in, eyes and mouths embroidered, things are blocked and dried and given buttons - and focus on hats for my friend's farm for a while, then after a quick trip to visit the parents, maybe work on some projects for me.  Or for other people for Christmas, and then for me.  That qiviut is waiting.  I'm pretty proud of my output - I averaged an item a week (not counting the Stony Brook Meadows hats), although some took weeks and some took an evening.  People will be donating other things for the auction: homemade pierogies, holiday wreaths, photos, paintings, homebrew beer, and more.  I work with some great people.  And I already have some yarn and many patterns waiting for next year.

Finish line in sight

I have been madly cranking out items for the Warm and Fuzzy fundraiser, which now finally has a date, December 2nd.  Here's a roundup of the latest, some of which are not really recent, but needed some finishing that I finally made myself do:

 

Except for the Star Wars figures, all of the patterns came from Ravelry.  I have to make a cape and light saber for Darth, make a longer bandolier for Chewie, put buttons on a sweater that is drying along with a hat, wash and dry some stiff mittens and embroider eyes and buttons on the snowmen on them, make some cacti, and finish a few odds and ends.  Probably throw in Yoda as well.  And still making hats from Stony Brook Meadows wool.  Phew!

Rhinebeck!

This weekend I went to the New York Sheep and Wool festival, known on the knitting blogs as just "Rhinebeck".  A 3 hour drive into upstate NY (not improved by a roving pothole repair crew on 287), a stay in a B&B in Saugerties, and $12 got me into the Duchess County Fairgrounds.

If you have been to the NJ Sheep and Fiber festival in Ringoes, it's like that only much, much bigger.  Think a dozen or more buildings, dozens of food vendors, and thousands of people, all proudly wearing handmade stuff.  Crowded!  Think amusement park at lunchtime, and you get the idea.  One building had tables of authors signing books, another had food items (totally unrelated to yarn) for sale from small vendors (like hot sauce, fudge, pickles, cookies, all packaged up), a few housed animals, but most were devoted to vendors.  Yarn, knitting tools, crochet tools, spinning tools, carding tools, weaving tools, felting tools, handmade buttons, mugs, art objects with sheep on them, fleeces, roving, dyes, hand creams, patterns, finished garments, felted things, tote bags made from llama feed bags, etc…  Building after building full of beautiful things to see and feel, and lots and lots of people.  But everyone was polite, and if you took the time to look at the people instead of the things, everyone was adorned with something they had made.  Scarves, shawls, hats, skirts, legwarmers, sweaters, coats - mostly (but not all) beautiful, all proudly declaring "look at my skill!".  Yet I never saw anybody compliment anyone else on their garment - as if the overall sentiment was "I could have made that".  And being that yarn is not the only aim of sheep breeders, there were also lambs roasting on spits and demonstrations of things to make from lamb.  I hate to say I missed out on that, but 5 hours of wandering around to see all of the vendors was enough, especially because it was pretty cold and windy.

I think I showed admirable restraint.  I only bought 4 skeins of yarn that spoke to me and suggested projects.  Overall, I'd say $20-30/skein was about average for the things I looked at, but there were many that were much more (and few that were less).  I petted a skein of a yarn called "Kitten", a blend of cashmere and silk with no price tag (a bad sign), and wondered what I could make from its 400 yards.  Eventually I found a price card, and alas, Kitten was $88 a skein and the card helpfully suggested buying 3 skeins to make a sweater.  I gave Kitten a last pet and backed away, clutching my wallet.  I saw skeins of something made from Alpaca/Vicuna (not sure whether the yarn was a blend or the animals were a hybrid) for large sums of money, and goggled at a finished product made from it - a scarf labeled "machine knitted with hand-crocheted edge", priced at $750.  I'm sorry, unless you plucked the hairs from the critters one at a time with diamond-edged tweezers while fighting off rabid weasels, that's not justified.  I saw yarn so fine that the scarves made from it were like spiderwebs, beautiful and delicate, but my experience working with fine yarn is that you can't recover well from mistakes, so I admired it and moved on.

But now I'm back, and I'm going to bag up each of my new skeins with its pattern so I don't forget what I wanted to do with it.  I still want to crank out more stuff for my fundraiser (I only have 30 totally finished items, about 10 in progress or needing finishing, and I want to have 50 - 60).  And then there's this:

Several pounds of wool from Stonybrook Meadows, with my friend the swift, without which I would not have gotten these into balls.  I'm thinking of not just hats, but maybe some felted items (coasters, potholders, clutch purses) and even scarves made of squares like this one.  At Rhinebeck I looked for things to make with thick, coarse wool, and noted felted dryer balls and felted balls labeled "aromatherapy balls", assuming you douse them with scented oils.  That might be a good use for some of the roving that hasn't been spun yet.  Now that the weather's colder, we'll see how the hats sell.

Today?  Cooking up last week's CSA stuff.  Huge head of lettuce (red oak leaf, perhaps?) for mighty salads is clean, celery tops have been washed and are drying to freeze for future soups while the stems regain turgor in a pot of water, carrots will join chicken in soup, beets and cabbage will join celery and carrots in borscht (with store-bought potatoes and onions, see "Russian Cabbage Borscht" from the Moosewood Cookbook), eggplant and big crinkly cabbage head will sit in the fridge until I come up with ideas.  Carrot tops and trimmings have fed the compost pile and local bunnies.  Stonybrook Meadows kielbasa is thawing for those who need something meaty.  Time to go check my chicken soup stock.

Flying through projects

Flying can be a hassle, but with the right planning you can get a lot of knitting or crocheting done.  From Trenton to Orlando and back, and in between, I got a lot done!

First, this scarf.  I decided 4 feet long was enough, leaving enough yarn for a hat or mitts.  I tried to make a hat with the same stitch, but after 3 tries gave up.  The pattern is too flexible, I think - all my attempts to make the starting circle turn into a hat shape just gave me a bigger flat circle, so I rolled the yarn back up and simply made 2 rectangles to sew into fingerless mitts, leaving a hole for the thumb.

The yarn is merino, colorway Wisteria, from Morehouse Farm.  It wasn't as smooth as most merino, and felt almost like cotton.  I finished these in Florida, except for sewing up and weaving in.  So I patted myself on the back.

Second project for the trip: this cowl.  I had one small skein of brown alpaca that I didn't think was enough for a project, but at $13 a skein I hesitated to buy more, knowing that sometimes the bids for an item don't cover the yarn cost.  But when I saw the same vendor at the NJ Sheep and Fiber Festival, I bought a white skein of the same type to combine with the first.  I like how alpaca farms usually tag each skein with the name of the actual animal from which it came.  Their critters don't get eaten, so they are around long enough to be friends.  I thought maybe I would make something striped, but then I found this pattern.  I finished this after I got home.  I worked until the white ran out and bound off with the brown (loosely - I looked at Jeny's stretchy bind-off, but didn't have the patience to try it).  All done except for the blocking and weaving of the ends, and very soft and thick.  The brown bind-off isn't as neat as the white cast-on, but I needed to make sure it would stretch enough to go over a head.

Trip project #3: these yoga socks.  I was down the cuff, past the opening, and ready to make progress on the foot when I thought to try it on, and dang if it was too small.  I didn't do any gauge testing, and I think the original was made with thicker sock yarn.  So I pulled it all out and started over with more stitches and this is where I am.  It's a little boring, K2P1 ribbing for most of it, but it requires little thinking or extra tools, so a good project for travel.  

Obviously not done yet, and another to go, but a good project for watching TV.

Before I left I started Nessie, so when I got back I finished her body, once I found where I had put the pipe cleaners that needed to go into the neck.  Now I just need to add flippers.  What a cute pattern, and so well designed.  Her head looks like a fruit bat's.

But the rest of today is probably going to be cooking, to use up the CSA from this week.  3 quarts of plum tomatoes, 3 pounds of other tomatoes, a quart of various cherry tomatoes, plus potatoes, eggplant, squash, yellow beans, kale, raspberries, and probably some stuff I forgot.  The potatoes and beans are cooked and cohabiting with pine nuts, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese.  The eggplant and squash are stewing with Amish ground sirloin, garlic, basil, mushrooms, and Ragu (yes, from a jar).  I'm in the middle of skinning the tomatoes to make sauce and thinking it's a good thing I only get a half share.  Later today or tomorrow I'll wash and tear apart and cook the kale for the freezer.  And because I'm delusional about how much we will eat, I picked up a cauliflower and some green beans while I was at the farmer's market for the meat.  Taking a share in a CSA means you have to be ready to process a whole lot of raw vegetables.  And my compost pile feeds a whole bunch of vertebrate and invertebrate critters and countless microorganisms.  But I do my best not to waste anything.  Alas, the chard from 2 weeks ago was not a keeper once I got back from Florida.

Back to skinning tomatoes, and then maybe time for a cup of tea and another flipper.