Knitting Up Rhinebeck 2010: Handpainted Aran Wool

When you're about to wade into an intense shopping experience, it helps to set a few goals first. Budget is one -- meet but don't exceed. When yarn is involved, it's good to allow serendipity to lead you to unexpected treasures, but also having some patterns in mind helps a great deal (Hm, I need 700 yards for that shawl I really want to make, 1300 yards for that lace cardi, etc). 

One of my side goals at Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool in 2010 was to buy a few hanks of wool from outside my usual comfort zone, and from vendors I hadn't fully investigated before. 

Some Rhinebeck vendors do it all: raised the animals, gathered the wool/fiber, spun it and then dyed it. That's real dedication. I paid closer attention to the wider range of their woolly goods in 2010, which I sometimes had dismissed as being "too scratchy" or otherwise not inspired enough for the kinds of projects I had in mind. Turned out that besides the vendors I had already learned to love, I found several more whose yarns were simply yummy.

Hatchtown Farm Handpainted Aran Wool...I likey very much. The hank of yarn I got was 250 yards of firmly spun wool from Coopworth sheep, dyed the most delicious shades of chocolate brown, black and gold. It was fated from the start to become hats. When I finally started on the Not-Cabled-Hat pattern (that I absolutely LOVE for quick gift hats) I discovered that the black and gold sections had the wonderful good sense to arrange themselves into leopard spots! 

I still have half the skein left, and fully intend to do a teeny bit of experimenting to see how to replicate this effect in a different pattern hat or cowl. Because, AWESOME.

Knitting Ambition

Is knitting compatible with laziness? Well, sure...you sit there, you knit. Great lazy way to pass the time, especially if the TV is also on (which automatically adds to the lazy quotient of any household activity, much as adding rocks to a box makes the box dumber and dumber). But finishing what you knit...urk.

I went to the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival last week. Here it is 7 days later, and I've taken no pictures of the new yarns I bought. I didn't have much time, being out late 4 out of the past 7 nights; but I did fondle the stuff, examine it, sort it, dream about what I'll make of it all. I tried to make my purchases with specific ideas in mind...shawl, cardigan, hat. I won't do any winding until I've taken pictures of the entire enormous heap.

But my Ravelry queue shows so many WIPs, so many UFOs, that guilt is starting to cloud my vision. A whole mess of projects I started in the past few years are just sitting there. Some are recent small things that made great carry-around knitting for bus and subway. A hat and a scarf are ready for finishing this weekend; a baby sweater for a friend just needs buttons. Yesterday when I picked up a hibernating project bag, I found a small cowl, nearly done, inexplicably tucked into the bag containing the latest Husband Sweater, utterly forgotten. That has to be a bad sign...I never even added it to my Ravelry project page.

What else lurks in my project bags?! The half-finished black lace alpaca top-down cardigan that I'm afraid to try on, partly for fear of breaking the delicate yarn, partly for fear it doesn't fit right and I've wasted a whole lot of work. Also the brown-and-green Classic Cotton thing I've been struggling with for at least 3 years, frogged and re-did at least once...how hard would it have been to just start with a nice lace cardi pattern? I've got lots! But no, I wanted to do My Own Thing and improvise. Sometimes that works pretty well, but I think I have to face the facts: these days I don't have time to waste trying things and ripping back and re-knitting. I want instant gratification! So after I finish the hat, scarf, cowl and baby sweater, I'll have another look at some of those UFOs and see if they need frogging or finishing too.

Cos then I've got all that fresh shiny uh 2009 and 2010 Rhinebeck yarn to play with...!

Not to mention all the Cephalopod Yarn I've been buying...

Knitting up Rhinebeck 2008: Creatively Dyed Shawl

One-skein projects seem to be my New Thing. I grew up thinking of yarn as Sweaters. Now and then I'd buy a couple of skeins just for a scarf, but mostly I bought 1000+ yards at a time, picturing stacks and stacks of gorgeous cardigans and pullovers. I mostly bought yarn on sale so I could afford to indulge in 10+ skeins at a time -- a big body needs lots of yarn to cover it adequately -- and sometimes ended up scratching my head wondering just exactly what I was thinking, buying so much gray alpaca or so much really hideous lattice ribbon. (Having the Smiley's Yarn sale close by every year, where bags of 10 skeins are all you can buy of the better stuff, wasn't helping.)

It took Ravelry and Rhinebeck to really coax me out of that Sweater mentality, and over into the land of Accessories. It wasn't a difficult transition, really. As an incurable Yarn Magpie, I was completely blown away by the acres of wool at Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool, and I could only afford some of the available yarns in Sweater quantities. Once I realized that, about halfway through my first visit there, I relaxed. I could buy a bigger variety of gorgeous yarns if I bought only a couple of skeins instead of 4 or 6 or 10! Besides, how many Sweaters can one rotund person who dislikes being overly warm wear, realistically?

 Creatively Dyed was one of my very first discoveries at Rhinebeck 2008. I bought lots of that yarn, and didn't worry too much about what I would make of it. Sock yarn is so versatile! I imagined hats and scarves mostly. I had never knitted a shawl then...well, that situation has certainly changed.

I've filled my Ravelry queue with all manner of lace shawls, from dead simple to ridiculously elaborate. So far, I've only made smaller ones, kind of starter shawls, testing my patience for lengthy repeats and ever-changing lace charts. Many simpler ones are perfectly suited to sock yarns, like the Demiluna, which is a half-circle rather than the triangle shape of many shawls. So confronted with a beautiful crazy-colored CD yarn I simply HAD to knit...and still refusing to knit socks...I decided to make a small, simple shawl from the skein of Carnival that I had to had to HAD to have. But now that I've scratched the itch and enjoyed using half the skein to make this awesome thing, I have to do the right thing. That's right. I'm going to give it to the young daughter of a friend. It belongs on a sweet young girl. I can't wait!!

Grilled Calamari and Blueberry Couscous

So I made one of the strangest dinners ever, a couple of weeks ago. Abundant summer produce got the better of me. But it all turned out well. Really well.

Agata and Valentina, our local gourmet market, makes fantastic smoky grilled calamari. We'd already enjoyed it as part of a green salad dinner, tossed with chopped tomatoes, cukes, avocado and a tart vinaigrette. They had it on sale, so I decided to buy it again and build dinner around it -- some kind of chunky summer saute, I reckoned.

I took stock of what was in the fridge, and decided to combine the calamari with sauteed zucchini and purslane, and some thyme and herbs de provence. None of these would smother the taste or texture of the squid. Purslane makes a great green for quick sautes. It hardly has any taste, and melts down very quickly, so it goes with pretty much everything. It's supposed to be highly nutritious raw or cooked, but I prefer the cooked texture -- just not stewed til it's slimy. About 2 minutes max is good: add it as the last thing just as the rest of the vegs are done.

The side dish took only a bit of thought, as I'd been intending to make something similar for days. I sauteed fresh sweet corn cut from the cob and chopped scallions, using a mixture of olive oil and butter. After just a couple of minutes, I added diced fresh apricots, and enough water for 1/2 cup of dry barley couscous to absorb; heat reduced to low. After a couple more minutes, I added a cup of wild blueberries (smaller and less sweet than regular kind) and fluffed the couscous with a fork and turned off the heat with the lid on the pan. The primary seasoning was coriander, which goes great with corn and complimented the fruit. 

The smoky and sweet combo of calamari, corn and fruit was fantastic, with chilled dry Torrontes wine.

Maxillaria schunkeana

I got this plant in February from Ecuagenera -- a nice big healthy bare-root specimen. My previous experience with the species was with a rather smaller one five years ago. Alas, that one barely survived two months in my light garden; I think I rotted it out, after planting it in sphagnum. 

The species comes from relatively low elevations in Brazil, so I reckon my fairly warm conditions suit it fine. I stuck this one into a coconut-fir bark-perlite mix, medium grade plus some finer bits. I placed it on the middle shelf, just past the middle of the 4-foot fluorescent tubes; it's getting some light from the T-12s and some from the T-8s. Plenty of water, since the mix drains well, and it gets fed with MSU fertilizer, along with everything else in active growth, roughly once a week. 

A few weeks ago, I noticed one of the new growths looked a bit peaky, with some browning at the tip of one leaf, so I was preparing to boost the light level a bit by shifting it closer to the T-8s. Surprise! A flower! And evidence of one other dried-up flower that I evidently overlooked because it's DARK and the base of the plant is shadowed by another plant. Well, that flower only lasted a couple of days, but I was over the moon it existed at all! A couple of days ago I realized there were FOUR flowers and three buds -- one ready to open, one still tight, one just emerging.

HAPPY DANCE!!!

Since I actually have to re-arrange the entire middle light garden shelf very soon -- should've done it weeks ago really -- I'll have to be extra attentive to this little darling....

Ponerorchis gramnifolia

I reckon this is my year to be Uber Queen of Terrestrial Orchids. Of the six little Ponerorchis tubers that I bought in late March, four sprouted and grew. Two of them flowered!

Yeah I'm a little disappointed that two made only leaves...yeah I'm really disappointed 2 tubers did nothing at all. I'm a bit jealous of my friends who managed to bloom all six of theirs!

But considering how truly awful my growing area can be -- I mean, I'm lucky sometimes that I remember to water the plants even every 3 days, manage to keep the temperature below 85" in the summer, cure the damn thrips that invaded last year, change the light bulbs and repot anything -- I feel I've done pretty well this year! Frankly, plants that disappear for months each year are a bad use of limited indoor space...but they  can go into those less desirable dark corners of the light garden for part of the year, and take very little tending in the meantime. So not such a bad thing.

I potted the tubers in my "usual" terrestrial mix, which is a bit dense but does drain very well: 1 part Pro-mix, 1 part African violet soil, and 1 part fine bark-based seedling mix (which is whatever I can dig out of the bottom of the bag of mix). Needs more perlite, I think -- maybe less soil too. And I probably used too deep a pot too, but I won't know until the little darlings go dormant and allow me to dig them up to see. Right now all four are still quite green and vigorous...so it'll be awhile.

In other breaking news, Habenaria rhodochilia finally decided to awaken three weeks ago, and I am proud mama to two growths on the plant. Woot! They might finally be getting enough light too, they're not as leggy as in past years. Fingers crossed that the cat doesn't decide the leaves are delicious...

Knitting Up VK Live 2012: Silver Optima

There are more and more places to get awesome limited-edition yarns these days. Sheep and Wool festivals, Stitches events, and Vogue Knitting Live all feature amazing stuff you can't get at most local yarn shops or from most big discount yarn retailers. You can get most of them online, but then you can't experience them before buying. And the experiencing is definitely part of the fun.

I went to VK Live in New York in January, wanting a yarn fix. O did I ever get a yarn fix. And this was one of the first things I found:



Silver Optima "Peacock." 63% Merino, 20% Silk,15% Nylon, with a fine silver thread. Smooshy fluffy shiny sparkly yarn heaven.

I partook of but one skein. I've been doing lots of one-skein things lately. What to make of this one skein? I'm in cowl/neckwarmer mode so that seemed logical. The Enormous Ravelry Queue I've developed yielded many fine project ideas.

The Smoke Ring Cowl won the beauty contest. The flat areas show off the colors of the yarn nicely, the raised cables show off the sparkle, and knitting it in the round was tons of fun because of the cable and lace combo. Alas I have yarn left over! Nearly 1/3 the skein. I guess I'll save it along with all the other leftover handpaints for the future Missoni Scarf project...