Road trip!

Hello blog! I've missed you. Things have been a wee bit nutty around here in the last week, but I'm hoping things have calmed down enough for me to be able to get back to the regular schedule of life. I have at least three long blogposts worth of pictures to share with you, most of which are from our travels around Yorkshire and the Lake District before school started last week. But I want to share a somewhat shorter, less-child-focused road trip that I took over the weekend with Allison up to Toft Alpacas.

Let me just start by saying this post is totally a ploy to be able to post a metric ton of cute alpaca pictures, with a little yarn on the side. You have been warned. If you need more alpaca cuteness, there are more photos over on Flickr.

We pulled in to the car park by these lovely ladies, and then headed inside for a day of playing with colors under the expert tutelage of Debbie Tomkies of DT Craft & Design.

The Toft Studio is a fabulous place, full of their yarn and patterns knitted up, all in a glorious array of natural colors.




Then it was time to get to work. First up were some samples with varying dye concentrations in the same color.


Then some experiments in color blending...

While those samples were cooked and rinsed, we went out for a quick tour of the Toft Alpacas farm. **WARNING: MANY, MANY PICTURES OF ADORABLE FUZZY BEASTIES AHEAD**

There they were, hanging out in a field, minding their own business, when SQUEEEEEE - CRIA!!!!



You can bury me now - I am dead from the adorableness.

Then we went into one of the paddocks (are they called paddocks in the UK? Must investigate...). Our guide said "Alpaca are very inquisitive." Indeed:





Ded. Ded of the cutes. I am now in desperate need of my own herd of alpaca to keep in the back garden. I'm sure Himself and the neighbors, not to mention the Richmond-upon-Thames Borough Council, will totally understand...

After our walk, we moved on to 25 gr skeins of lace weight that had been mis-packaged by the mill (i.e. 25 gr instead of 100 gr).

and eventually to full skeins. That's Allison's skein of Jacob Aran-weight (which came out amazingly - check out her photo!), and I did a skein of BFL sock yarn.


Everyone ended up with gorgeous yarns!



(the two on the right in this picture are mine)

And before we left, I managed to do something I'd wanted to do all day...

It was a fabulous day, and many thanks to Debbie and the folks at Toft for making it happen!

My inner Yankee is curled up in a ball in the corner of a dark room, whimpering

As the days hurtle by towards 21 September, Allison and I have been spending a lot of time trying to pull together some cool schwag for those brave folks who will be joining us on the Great London Yarn Crawl. And as she is currently on the North American continent, much of the recent outreach for donations over the past week has fallen to me.

This is, quite possibly, my worst nightmare. Ask people for things? People I don't know? You mean, send them an email completely out of the blue asking them to give me, some faceless Internet stranger, something for free? It gives me heart palpitations just thinking about it. This is so far outside my comfort zone, that I have managed to procrastinate for a surprising amount of time on some of these emails, only to be goaded on by Alli sending messages saying "Have you heard back from So-and-so yet?"

But here's the very cool thing I'm finding: for the most part, people are happy to help out, and very often quite pleased to be asked. It's such a lovely surprise to email one of my super-dooper fan-girl knitware designer crushes and have her agree to send us a signed book for a door prize. It's fantastic to email a local designer and have her offer to give us pattern coupons for the goody bags AND donate a pattern for a door prize. It's a serious thrill to see people getting excited about the event.

All of this is balm to my wounded knitter/dyer psyche because I've had a bit of a set back on that front of late. I've been working on a sweater, using some lovely Green Mountain Spinnery sock yarn I dyed a while back. At the time, I was paranoid about dyelots, so I did all the skeins at the same time, and felt pretty confident that I'd managed to get them close enough.

Except, well, no:


And in case it isn't glaringly obvious from that shot:


Excuse my French, but fuck me. And having slogged though the entire stockinette back of this project, my enthusiasm for ripping out and alternating rows to blend the yarns, or trying one of the other skeins to see if it works better is non-existent. This puppy is going on the naughty step for the forseeable future, and I'm starting something new. Something reasonable. Like a lace shawl...

Falkland Fiber Friday: BRCA

I was going to blog about some more Hello Yarn Fiber Club that I've spun up, but I'm so in love with this sample of fiber that I listed in the shop today, I had to share it.

This is my test run for the new BRCA colorway, which is available on BFL and humbug BFL. This little sample was done on the last bit of Falkland I had leftover, and it is super soft and bouncy.

The starting fiber looked a bit like this:

I spun this fractally: split the entire top into three pieces, then split each third into 3, 4 and 6 strips respectively. Then plied them up, and I'm in love.

I've got about 50 yds of approximately worsted weight yarn to do something with. What, I have no idea, but something. And even though I'm not really a pink kind of girls, but I love the combinations of dark red, purple, pale pink and bright fuschia in the final yarn. I am really pleased with how the colors blended, and I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with it!

Still here...

I have no pictures for you today, I'm afraid. Events have conspired against me to prevent my being home in the daylight hours with reasonable light. However, Things Are Happening.

• There has been pattern editing. Much editing. Progress is being made.
• There has been dyeing. In fact, there is dyeing right now. All is fun with the pretty colors.
• There has been running. And working. And lunches with departing office mates, etc. Busy work stuff.
• Tonight, there will be swatching. Because, although it's not December (which means I don't actually have to cast on the girls' Christmas sweaters yet), it would probably be a good idea if I figured out what the crap I'm going to do with the stitch counts and such before Saturday. You know, so I can knit them eventually...

That's about it. Maybe pictures on Friday. Keep your fingers crossed.

Remember, remember...

I love Guy Fawkes Day. Not because of the terrorist associations of the holiday, or the burning effigies on a pyre thing, but because who doesn't love standing out in 3 degree weather drinking mulled wine and watching fireworks?

Anyway, the 5th of November seems like a good day to take stock of the state of my knitting world, and consider exactly how crazy the next seven weeks are going to be. I have a wonderful family, and I love knitting them things - we're at a stage now where pretty much everyone lives in a place where wooly goodness is a good thing. But, given the general state of affairs (and my time constraints), last week I decided that I'm not going to try to knit for everyone this Christmas. That's not to say there aren't going to be knitted gifts - I've been doing a bunch of hats recently, you may have noticed, so some of those may find new homes. I've also got a bunch of handspun crying out to be woven, which is way faster then knitting, particularly once the warping is done. So there will be weaving.

Then given all my good intentions and promises to myself of no more late night, panicked knitting sessions, I then promptly turned around and asked the girls what kind of sweaters they wanted for Christmas.



There is dyeing in my future (something new and different...). Boo wants green and purple stripes, and Dev wants colorblock in pink, teal, turquoise, bright blue and fuschia. Ow, my eyes!...I think I'll do Boo's yarn first and hope that Devil has a change of heart. Fingers crossed!