Friday Nights are for Blogging (Apparently)

Another Friday night, another night knitting by the pool, and another blog post. I hope I don’t have the makings of a rut here! It’s winding down to the end of summer. It was a blissfully cool evening by the pool, which is a sure sign that fall is coming. It was the first week of school for my children, which also signaled major change for my daughter, who has started high school.

There will be only one more Friday night before the pool closes for the season. And yes, I do feel a bit cheated of summer still. But at the same time I am looking forward to chilly fall evenings with steaming stew pots and comfy sweaters. I have to remind myself that except for when it is senselessly, bitterly cold, there are good things about every sort of weather, so I shouldn’t really look upon this time as a sad thing. There are many good things yet to come.

So once again, my DH’s camera provided the photo for this entry, as it did last week. But I realize now that I didn’t say why. My camera broke. My beloved, new camera that I just got for my birthday last month. The LCD screen somehow got damaged from the inside, and of course, Canon decided that such damage is not covered under their warranty, so my brand new camera just had a $150 repair, despite being less than two months old. Sigh… I hope I continue to get lots of use out of it and love it as I had so far. It has turned out to be one very expensive camera.

And so I’m knitting. I’m making it a point to knit some on the mystery project every day. But now, I’m getting sorely tempted to take a break and knit at least one pair of funky, wonderful socks. Why? Because I feel like I’ve hit a knitting jackpot, that’s why. I saw an ad recently on Ravelry that Lucy Neatby, yes THE Lucy Neatby, is coming to a shop about an hour from my house for an entire weekend to teach a series of knitting workshops. I had to jump at the chance. So, ok, what did I do? I signed up for a 6-hour sock workshop, so I can learn from the master. “But, wait,” I hear you saying, “You don’t knit socks.” You’ve said it at least a thousand times, right here, on this very blog. What gives?”

Well, I have knit socks, but generally I find them intimidating. So, it’s confession time. I have never felt confident enough to knit socks. So, I am hoping that learning from Lucy Neatby will inspire my courage and inspire me to become a true sock knitter. I have a whole bin full of crazy sock yarns just waiting to be knit up. All I need is a little inspiration and a lot of courage. I can do it. And what better way to get started?

Of course, as luck would have it, this once-in-a-lifetime knitting-Nirvana experience would have to fall on my 18th wedding anniversary. But, I’ll deal with that little issue way later. Right now, I’ve got to keep knitting.

Friday Night Knitting Club of One

What a week this has been. I have been so busy and unable to post yet again. And here we are at the end of the summer, I spent this Friday night at the pool, doing what I usually do on Friday nights at the pool.

Knitting.

Except that I haven’t even done much of it this summer, knitting by the pool, and now the summer is drawing to a close. Too quickly. I am finding myself to be grouchy and said about this. It’s been mostly the weather, this hot, disgusting summer. I feel robbed of summer, and angry that this pleasant evening which was at last not too hot, is one of the few memories I will have of enjoying these last few months.

But, this evening was one of the finest. I got several rows done while listening to a Nora Roberts romance novel from her “Chesapeake Bay” series. It was great. And tomorrow is knit group, and then an evening at the pool again. It’s going to be a good knitting weekend.

The Smithsonian Community Reef

This week at work our workplace knit and crochet group was treated by a visit from a lady with the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef project’s Community Reef at the Smithsonian. The Worldwide project is making a stop at the Museum of Natural History starting in October, and they are working toward having a community reef as part of the exhibit. I’m late in really understanding the project, and now I am fascinated. The project was started by two sisters in Australia who, when one of them crocheted a bunch of hyperbolic shapes and then they decided that as a collection they looked like a coral reef. Living near the Great Barrier Reef they thought that maybe they could call awareness to the health of our environments and the reefs through their love of fiber.

So the exhibit has now been all over the world and is coming to Washington. My co-worker Annette has gotten excited about the project and has begun making pieces for the reef. The Community Reef will showcase three types of reef: Healthy Reef, Bleached Reef (unhealthy) and Toxic Reef, which is reef that has grown up and around trash and other found objects that lurk in our oceans. Annette’s pieces, which I have photographed here, are examples of toxic reef. Water bottles, credit cards, used auto parts… these are all things which ocean animals must contend with and try to survive in spite of. I’m betting Annette’s piece made with the used auto air filter is going to find a prominent place in the exhibit. It’s a strange beauty.

So, if you’d like to participate in the project, and there’s still a little time, you can join the Ravelry Group or by e-mailing the project coordinator at sicommunityreef@yahoo.com for more information. I’m of course busy on my mystery project that I must remain loyal to until it’s done but I’m wondering how I can squeeze at least a couple of corals in. I think I want to be part of it. You should, too.

Yummy Yarn

It’s been a long day and I’m tired, but I am excited and I just have to share this:

My mommy made me a birthday cake in the shape of a yarn ball! How cool is that?

The baker at work:

Eat your heart out, Buddy! Great job, mom! And it was delicious, too!

Seriously, having a birthday on a Wednesday in the middle of a wacky work week is no fun. It was an especially awful day at the office. But, to offset the bad parts I literally had over 100 birthday wishes on Facebook today–overwhelming! I am gobsmacked. Then to come home to a yarn ball cake? Well, is it too corny to say that that was just the icing on the cake?

I feel very loved tonight, even if I feel a little older. So, I guess I’d better sign off and get to bed–the beauty sleep is getting harder to come by at my age.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to drop me a note and think of me today. It was wonderful. I love you all!

Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival 2010: A Year to Remember

Last weekend was the first weekend in May. If you’re a fiber fanatic, and anywhere within driving distance of the state of Maryland, you know what that means. It was the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. Which, for fiber lovers like me, is almost as good as Christmas.

(If I said it was better than Christmas, my family would be even more convinced that I am crazy, so let’s just keep that our little secret, ok?)

So, last Saturday I left the house at about 10 a.m. with my good friend Steve. This trip has become something of an annual event for us. Steve is my best friend from college; we were next-door neighbors at the campus apartment complex and met during a fire drill some 24 years ago. It was a good day. The weather was unseasonably hot, but we considered that a good thing, since the year before I had shorted the electronics of my wheelchair during the previous year’s trip. So, while the heat was a big topic among festival goers, the whole time I kept telling myself that rain would have been much, much worse.

The fairgrounds are about 40 minutes or so from my house, but this year, at about three miles out, we were stopped dead in our tracks. The traffic was truly horrible. But, I was with a good friend and we had Glee going on the iPod, so again, it could have been much worse. Still, it was two and a half hours before we found ourselves walking into the festival gate.

I had been e-mailing my friend Jen all the way, as I knew she had been planning to arrive at the festival much earlier than I was. She reported that she was making a trip to her car just as we were getting onto the grounds, and so we happened to bump into her near the gate.

At the same spot I ran into my friend Karen from work. all before we ever made it inside the grounds! Since we’d been so long in the car, Steve and I arrived at the festival feeling ready for lunch, so we set off looking for food right away.

We found a lamb vendor and someone selling lime fizzes right next to each other. The lines were long, so Steve got in one and I got in the other. The lamb vendor was one I don’t remember seeing before.

I ended up with a beautiful kabob for lunch, and washed it down with a lime fizz, both of which I consider to be a true festival tradition.

Lots of people tell me that they can’t bring themselves to eat lamb at the sheep and wool festival, with all the adorable lambs so close by. I don’t mind eating meat, so long as I don’t have to talk to it first, and the lamb is something that just makes the whole experience unique. I love the aroma of lamb as it is cooking. My kabob was like a whole meal on a stick, including lamb sausage, peppers, onion, tomatoes, mushrooms, and a baby potato. And the lime fizz was the perfect cooler for such a hot day.

One of the things I like best about the festival is the live music that is played in various locations throughout the grounds. When entering the Main Building, where a large number of vendors are located, I heard this:

Very soon I found lots of things to get excited about. One of the things that caught my eye fairly early on was an electronic spinning wheel device that looked so easy, that maybe even I could learn to operate it. I don’t spin, because I can’t treadle with my feet, and drop spindles and I don’t seem to get along, no matter how hard I try. (Emphasis on the “dropping” part of drop spindles, if you know what I mean.)

Turns out that this device has a foot pedal like that which you’d find on a sewing machine, but you can set it to tap once for on, and tap again for off. So, the kind people at the booth set up one of the machines so that it could be within my reach, and off I went!

This is the HansenCrafts miniSpinner, equipped with a Woolee Winder. I fear that I am going to have to get one of these things. I can do it! My first few tries yielded a couple inches of slubby, twisty yarn, but hey, since I’ve never really spun before I still need to get a feel for drafting and holding the yarn. Oh, no! I’m starting to use spinners’ words! I definitely don’t need another thing to be obsessed about, but I feel the bug biting. I figure if stuff a 20 in my sock drawer once a week, it won’t be that long til I’ve saved up, right?

Of course, there are animals everywhere.

And there are lovely examples of what one can make with their wools.

Of course, I did some shopping while at the festival. More about what I bought will be coming in a future post. But what matters to me most, I think, about this festival is the atmosphere. I know there are other fiber festivals around the country. I’ve never been to any of them, but I feel like I’ve got the best there is, right in my own backyard. It’s great for people who want to shop, a wonderful place to see and learn about fiber-producing animals, and a wonderful tradition that I look forward to every year. It’s a great gathering place for fiber friends, and I look forward to seeing people that I know there, year after year. I’m already looking forward to next year. There’s so much to do there, I keep telling myself, that I don’t really need to buy yarn.

Yeah, right. Stay tuned for that part of the story.

Blog Week Day 5: Falling in Love at a Coffee Shop*

(*with apologies to Landon Pigg)

Like most knitters I know, my knitting goes with me everywhere. Long waits in doctor’s offices or traffic jams (I’m not the driver!) are never a problem for me. I knit in the cafeteria at work, in my den in front of the TV, at PTA meetings, family gatherings, you name it. But I do have a favorite place. Except there’s precious little evidence that I’m ever there, because I’m always the one with the camera.
”
My favorite place? My local bookstore coffee shop. Twice a month, I get together with my knit-buds, and we laugh, have coffee and dessert, and knit. Well, some of get some knitting done. Others…well, did I mention the laughing? It’s easy to not knit at knit group, too. But whether you’re a knitter, or a not-knitter, it’s always fun!

(Click to embiggen.)

There is another knit group that meets there, on Wednesday nights, in this very spot. But I can’t make it to that group. With school-age kids I am the homework cop and the shower supervisor and the don’t-forget-to-brush-your-teeth drone. Wednesday nights are a no-go for me. So, I thought, why not make a knit group that I can attend. And so I posted on Ravelry, and people came! It worked! At first, it was just once a month. Recently we expanded to twice a month. For two years now, we’ve been getting together. We have knitters of all skill levels, from beginner to–WOW. And it doesn’t matter how new you are or how long you’ve been knitting, everyone is welcome. We’ve even had people cross our path in the coffee shop, run across the road to buy needles and yarn, and come back and sit down and knit, on the spot.

The best part is that many lasting friendships have been formed. I love the knitters in our little group. The smell of the coffee, especially on a snowy knitting afternoon, is a really nice touch, but it’s the friendships and the mutual love of our craft, that makes me so happy to be there.

Knitting might be a fairly solitary activity, but knitting among friends… that’s the best.

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