Lemme explain...no, no, is too much, lemme sum up.

Well. When last we spoke, I had just taken delivery of a copious amount of fiber and was preparing to abandon ship for the wildness of Pembrokeshire for the weekend. Having now come out the other side, I have many things to say.

I started my day here, which seemed to be appropriate in the sense that I was embarking on an unknown voyage...sadly, I had no marmelade in my luggage for sustenance.


My train was filled with a disturbing number of men in kilts who were really interested in starting the day with a beer at 10:30 am.

I chose a capuccino...I think I missed a memo or something.

I started a hat, thinking that I would manage to finish it well before the end of the weekend.

I was wrong (although it did get finished in the end!). The kilts seemed to clear off at Cardiff Central, and I continued westward. Next stop Swansea,

and then Whitland, where mostly everyone else had stopped and gotten picked up for the hotel.

Sadly, the necessity of my getting kids to school meant that I arrived last, and had to continue onward on my own to the train station with a taxi rank.

(hello blurry cell phone photo out of the window of a moving car)

There seems to be a generalized assumption that knitters are really just very nice people. Sort of like Minnesotans or Canadians... Nothing I experienced this past weekend at Plug and Play Pembrokeshire (P3) 2012 would argue with that assumption. I have to admit to a bit of trepidation as my cab pulled up to the hotel on Friday afternoon*, particularly as I was about to meet two people who have (unbeknownst to them) played a large role in my knitting life/obsession over the past seven years. However, I walked in just as tea and biscuits were arriving, and was warmly welcomed into the fold. And once I got over the fact that I was listening to Brenda Dayne's voice come out of an actual person instead of from my iPod, the weekend swept me up and away for the next three days.

For the summing up: there was yarn. Lots and lots of yarn. Lots of gorgeous beyond belief yarn.



There was gorgeous, glorious scenery, which I completely failed to photograph because I'm an asshole. Then there were the classes. Classes on shawl design, on top-down raglans, on how to fit small blocks of stitch patterns onto variously shaped canveses. Classes on embracing randomness in your knitting**, classes on knitting with unspun roving pulled from silk hankies. Class after class after class...

There were overwhelming amounts of really good food. And beer. And cider. And (apparantly) Scotch. There were people from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Canadia, the US, and from as far away as New Zealand (I think). There were 29 women and one very, very brave man ("There's always one man..."). There was a completely delicious three month old baby. There were Today's Sweater stories that made me laugh so hard I cried. There was a double barreled ukelele singalong before twenty five people in their PJs gathered around the telly in the hotel pub to knit while watching yelling at Downton Abbey***.

All in all, I'd have to say that the weekend was made of win in every possible way. I'm thrilled to have met so many truly wonderful people. It was amazing to have three days to myself to basically sit around and knit the entire time****. It's taken me a couple of days to come back from that mindset, and it's been rough: the ability to hang out with a group of people who are all interested in the thing that you are interested in and have really cool ideas and projects and plans and suchlike is intoxicating. Strangely enough, my family does not seem to be as enthralled by a debate on the proper kind of increase to use in a top-down triangular shawl or how to keep even tension while grafting. Wierdos...

If anyone reading this evey has a chance to go to West Wales to hang out with Amy and Brenda (and presumably a hotel-full of other amazing fibery people), you should absolutely positively go. It was absolutely fantastic, and I can't wait to go back next year!

* Derek, my cab driver from the train station in Haverfordwest, was vehement in his belief that this whole "knitting retreat weekend" was a cover up for something much more diabolical. I told him we were actually planning on taking over the world. He thought I was kidding.

** My inner scientist is still curled up in a ball in the corner whimpering from that one...

*** The bartender was so far out of his element as to perhaps be the proverbial Anthropologist on Mars.

**** I may or may not have arrived home depleted of any urge to knit one more row.

We interrupt this blogging drought to bring you an important update

I've got buttloads of new design inspiration.

It was a good half-term...

Into the wild

Last weekend we packed up and went off to Yorkshire, just for fun. I was very excited because, after looking at the map, it became quite apparent that we were heading into the mother lode of sheepdom. Masham, Swaledale, Wensleydale..swoon

We drove up on Friday afternoon, and Saturday morning found us out and about wandering in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, a place that has now imprinted itself on my heart because there's a sheep head in their logo.

I found out later that it's a Swaledale sheep head, to be specific. Anyway, there we were, wandering about in the hills, and guess what we found wandering around all on their lonesome?

Sheep, strangely enough. There was something very unexpected (to me) about these sheep.

They've got tails! Long, shaggy, kind of gross tails! Once I got over that excitement, I had a lovely time running down the trail, calling out to the sheep and stopping to take even more crappy mobile phone photos (I dropped my point-and-shoot digital camera a couple of weeks ago, and while it still takes pictures just fine, the display screen doesn't work, so I have no idea what I'm taking pictures of).

My family thinks I'm nuts, but thankfully, they still put up with me. The Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook identifies these babies as the famous Swaledale sheep breed, which is both yay! and boo!, because we were in Wensleydale and I wanted to see some sheep dredlocks.

Sunday dawned (and stayed!) extremely foggy, so we wandered around York, walking along the medieval city wall, disturbing Sunday services at York Minster, and checking out the Vikings at the Jorvik Viking Centre.

These would be the disturbances

Twas a fab trip, and has only instilled a desire to go back and wander the Dales until I find some more sheep. Barring that, I have some pictures of what I've been doing with all the dye and fiber that's been flying around my house of late for the next post. Don't miss the pretties!

Back in Space City and a commission

A week and a half ago I got to resume (for one brief evening) my Thursday knit night. We went back to Houston for a week long holiday*, and I got to visit with the girls over beef and vino. It was a lovely evening, only bringing back to me how much I miss the people in Houston** - there was much good conversation. And good steak. And wine... And then there was some yarn.

I did take orders before I left London, but only one of them took me up on it. I brought this:

Some lovely green Wollmeise in Pesto and an incredibly soft skein of orange alpaca-wool goodness. In return, she gave me this:

and said, in a tone that brooked no argument, "You need to design something with the StR. Because I have another skein in the same color and I want to make something out of it."

Ummm...yes ma'am! *salutes*

Over the course of the evening, we came up with a plan for the yarn that goes something like this:

• a long scarf thing, not a triangular shawl
• some lace is good
• but no more then a couple of charts please
• we'll all wear them to Rhinebeck next year

Because Rhinebeck (aka the NY Sheep and Wool Orgy Festival had been the previous weekend. None of us went. None of us have ever gone. It seems like a good thing to do. And if we make plans this far in advance, it's a bit more likely it might even happen.

So...October 2012...we'll be reuniting in upper New York state to ogle the foliage, eat some appropriate fair food, fondle some wool and generally have a weekend to ourselves. Anyone else in?

* Just long enough for everyone to get adjusted to the time only to turn around and come back!
** Houston itself? Not so much...

Travel knitting again

While I was packing on Friday, I kept thinking of the knitting things I wanted to work on, and try out, and oh maybe I should bring that just in case. By the end of this internal dialogue and random collecting of yarn and needles and patterns, I had a pile of stuff larger then the pile of clothes I was bringing. Ehem. This is what happens when I pack for a trip and Himself isn't around to quell my hoarding impulses.

So I took a biiiiiiiig step back and realized that I really am looking at three major knitting times - two plane rides and knit night on Thursday with the ladeez (which, to be fair, is likely to involve lots of wine and food, and not so much on the knitting). So I whittled the pile down to:

1) the handspun Sprout Tappan Zee for the elder child-demon*
2) a hank of Cascade 220 Heathers and a bunch of charts from BW's books to try out some swatches for a new design

That was it, until I 3) tossed in a couple of balls of grey DK weight superwash merino to try for the Gherkin mittens that should have been released in pattern form almost a year ago...still, three projects isn't so bad, is it?

* so designated because, after arriving at our home for the week at 8:30 pm local time/2:30 am our time, she decided that 2:30 am local time was time to be awake. I managed to keep them corralled with a combination of threats, sheer force and DVDs on my laptop until almost 6:30, but I'm still considering child-icide.