Where the Red-Winged Blackbird Flies.

Sunday Fundays: yeah, I missed a couple

2012-02-09T20:18:00.000-08:00

Even though I haven't blogged about them, Sunday Fundays are still a seriously big deal around these parts.

Last week I caught a gorgeous ray of sunshine hanging out on the now-completed back of Ursa, and you can also peek at the progress I had made on the two fronts, which I'm doing simultaneously. I say "had made", because I have a problem. It occurs when I'm not knitting on something every day, and think I'm smarter than I am. I was knitting along and watching the latest episode of Downton Abbey last Sunday (by the way, OMG Downton Abbey), and noticed that I had somehow forgotten to do the decreases on the inside edge of one of the fronts. And, now that I looked at it, I had missed the corresponding decrease on the other edge! How silly of me. Perhaps I can ladder down and fix it, and shift the extra yarn over to the edge where it'll be hidden in the seam? Well, no, now it looks like the dog's been chewing on it. Sigh. Oh well, nothing for it; I suppose I'll start by ripping out the other front. Off the needles it comes!

. . . Seven ripped rows later, I remembered I wasn't supposed to do any decreases on the inside edges.

At least the back's really pretty. :)

Sunday Funday: January 22nd

2012-01-27T19:46:00.000-08:00

This past weekend's Sunday Funday took place at an illustrious and annual event: Pie Day! Check out the run-down of our over-achievement on this post by Leah, who was our wonderful hostess for the afternoon. All I can say is the pies were amazing, and thank goodness we are starting to remember to bring tupperware.

The event started at 1pm, and I worked dutifully until 2 on work projects, then joyfully brought out Ursa.

I'm in the home stretch on the back, with only a few more inches to go before I bind off at the shoulders. I can't wait to work on it this weekend! What did you get up to on Sunday Funday?

2011: The Year in My Knits!

2012-01-19T16:45:00.000-08:00

I didn't want to let 2011 go by without talking about what I managed to work on, as well. Though I was pretty awful at taking pictures of everything, a huge amount of stuff came off the needles and the loom this year. My first FO of the year was the Brachyura Henley, finished in the wee hours of January 1st, and my final FO was my New Year's Eve challenge scarf. At 4:30pm, I wondered if I could weave a scarf from fingering weight yarn from winding the warp to cutting it off the loom, and at 9:30pm, I found out that the answer was, yep, sure can.

1 skein of Noro Kureyon sock yarn each for warp and weft, sleyed at 12 epi in plain tabby. It's a bit bright for my taste, but I wanted to try weaving with Noro and apparently I had chosen the two most obnoxiously bright colorways for my stash. So it might find its way to a new home!

In between those two projects, I finished twenty-three other knitting projects, ranging from a pair of handspun stripey socks for myself, to six samples for other designers (yes, that's five, but number six isn't out yet!), to another seven samples for my own designs, to a long-neglected pair of socks for my brother. I wove a blanket for my friends' wedding and another scarf on a lark. I spun 2,000 yards of hand-dyed silk (let's not talk about the actual knitting yet. . . ) and took some wonderful field trips to Harrisville, SPA, and the Common Ground Fair with my knitting friends. I spent one of the best weeks of my life at Medomak, and another amazing week at SOAR. All in all, a busy, full, and amazing year, and to be sappy for one second, it wouldn't have been half as good without all of you.

Sunday Funday: January 15th

2012-01-15T20:57:00.001-08:00

When I was thinking about what I wanted to do for the new year, one of the big things that was on the list was making a bit more time for me, both in terms of crafting and in terms of life in general. I therefore declared Sundays after 2pm officially off-limits to work or chores, and christened the experience "Sunday Funday" because I'm a huge dork. Today's Sunday Funday haul:

A bobbin and a half of softly spun wool/alpaca batts that I carded from bits and pieces in stash; this is the last of it! I now have a pound of gorgeous dk-weight salt-and-pepper singles that may end up being a Larch Cardigan.

I also swatched and started knitting a cardigan that's been in the plans for almost three years, Ursa. I bought this pattern early in 2009, and then spun the yarn for it (another one carded from bits and pieces; this one containing alpaca, angora, merino, BFL, and cashmere) in the 2009 Tour de Fleece. It's about time I started! I just put it down, but managed to get about ten inches of the back done. It'll be hard to leave this alone until next Sunday!

Winnowing

2012-01-08T16:40:00.000-08:00

So I had a shawl design come out this past week as part of the glorious, I-want-to-knit-everything-in-the-whole-lookbook collection, Wool People Volume 2 by Brooklyn Tweed.

(All photos of Winnowing in Loft copyright Brooklyn Tweed and Jared Flood)

First off, I need to acknowledge how completely humbled and thrilled I am to be among such amazing designers in this issue; I don't think there's ever been a more appropriate time for the immortal words of Wayne and Garth, "I'm not worthy!"

(All photos of Winnowing in Serena copyright Bristol Ivy--yep, talking about myself in the third person)

While I recover from the daze and shock of the whole thing, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the pattern and the path it's taken. Because nothing's ever simple with me, this one had a looooong and interesting evolution (which I will intersperse with pictures, because we're all human). It started when I first got to college in 2003.

I am a Maine girl. I am a child of rocks and oceans, pine trees and autumn leaves as far as the eye can see. However, the college I was determined to attend was in. . . Iowa. Corn fields. Wheat fields. Soybean fields. A disturbing lack of ocean. Oh dear. But one of the things I noticed, and came to watch for on the drives to and from the Des Moines airport over the years, was that sudden moment when a seemingly random field of corn would line up perfectly with my view from the bus. I could see straight down the rows and furrows of the corn, evenly spaced and radiating out like sunrays. Even this past June, going back to Iowa after four years away, I watched for that heartbeat of a moment along the highway. And, me being me, I started scheming about how I could turn this into a knitting design.

Things did not start smoothly, though. The stitch pattern I chose to work with was not playing nicely with traditional shapings. Triangular top down? Nope. Pi shawl? Heck no. A sideways triangle? Absolutely not. I mused about it for a few weeks this summer, trying this many extra repeats of the pattern, then that many more stitches wide, then tore out my hair and put it on the backburner while I went to teach at Medomak. While there, I sat in on Daniel's class on shawl shaping. Timely, right? His discussion spurred some new ideas for me--what if I just said heck with it and see what happens? I knew now that stitches that doubled in stitch count every repeat could work. So I went for it.

The first shawl I knit (after much head-scratching and throwing of the pattern against the wall) was in Manos Del Uruguay Serena, a really gorgeous and interesting combination of baby alpaca and pima cotton. I liked the results, especially after the transformation it went through in the blocking process (because, even though I can do all the math and mentally understand that the shaping will work, it's not until it's finally all pinned out on the blocking board that I can uncross my fingers and take a deep sigh of relief).

(Before blocking, in a strange greyscale that seems to be all I have saved of this picture)

(After blocking! Big difference!)

But then Loft came along. And I swooned. Let's face it--I still swoon. And when I got a sneak peek of the finished and blocked shawl knit up in the wonderfully multi-faceted color Meteorite (which had been knit by a seriously awesome sample knitter), I might have cried a little. The evolution of this little shawl has been an amazing one for me, and I can't wait to see where it goes next!

Winnowing is a top down Faroese-style shawl, knit in twisted rib with an applied knitted edging. It's available at Brooklyn Tweed and Ravelry, and soon in print through Brooklyn Tweed's pattern retailers.

2011: A Year in. . . Other People's Knits

2011-12-31T10:17:00.000-08:00

One of the coolest things about being a designer is seeing how other people interpret your designs. Sure, I'm used to being able to write something down and have it work for me. But it still amazes me that, when someone else knits it, it actually works for them, too. I suppose at some point this will stop being a glee-inducing experience, but man, is it still the coolest now! To that end, I decided to highlight some of my favorite projects from Ravelry from my designs. (All photos are copyright their owners, of course!)

Bristol's Cowl:

Lara's gorgeous version uses one of my favorite Quince colors, Bird's Egg.

And Jenn's elegant version uses another Quince favorite, Frank's Plum.

And I would be remiss if I didn't brag on my students at Medomak, who were all knitting along on their cowls merrily by the end of the week:

Earl Grey Mitts:

Ani and Martha's gently toned and sea-colored versions are both seriously beautiful, and both make use of the luminous and color-shifting qualities of Noro. I want a pair in Noro for myself!

Ness's pair make use of a commercially spun alpaca yarn and a thick and thin handspun in my favorite color; you can read more about them at her blog.

Lida Shawl:

Rachel's beautifully knit, blocked, and photographed version uses the recommended yarn, Quince's Sparrow.

G's Lida uses MadTosh in the color 'Grove', the very name of which would make me swoon even if her knitting hadn't.

Nadia's luscious version was the first completed after the pattern came out, and she knit it out of cashmere/silk. Enough said.

Karen's vivid and summery version was knit in Malabrigo Sock in the colorway "Lettuce" and had me at "chartreuse".

And Taryn's ethereal version made me think of sunbeams and fresh orange juice.

Delius Vest:

Okay, I'm going to cheat a little here, since I technically finished my dad's version of this in February and have to share!

Tricia knit her excellent (and what seems to be well-loved!) version from Peace Fleece, which, of course, I love.

Juliet's sleek and classic version was knit from Quince's Lark in Peacoat; all versions of the pattern that I swatched were in tweed yarns, so I love this different interpretation! Plus, you know, I love Quince yarns.

And Sarah's version isn't quite finished, but I love it already, because it's knit in Brooklyn Tweed's Shelter, another favorite!

Thank you to to everyone who let me show off their projects and their photos here, and thanks to everyone who has knit one of my patterns this year. I am truly blessed to be able to work in this industry, and can only look forward to what 2012 will bring. Happy new year!

The Desperation of a Knitter

2011-12-20T18:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you have grand plans for your knitting. Sometimes there are patterns and charts and carefully wound balls of yarn in exactly the right amount. And sometimes you forget to add that kind of vital next skein of yarn to your knitting bag, leaving you with exactly fifteen minutes worth of viable knitting material on knit night. So, sometimes you make a cup cozy.

Major thanks go out to Karen, whose yarn, needles, and pattern went into this project so that I might keep my sanity.

Introducing Alys

2011-12-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

Designs have a funny way of taking a bunch of different sources and inspirations, stirring them all together, and then coming up with something in a completely different direction. This is nowhere more true for me than the design process of the Alys cardigan (pronounced "Alice"), which started way back in 2005, took a new turn last November, had some tweaking in May, and finally came to fruition this past Tuesday. Never before had I imagined that the Iron Age torcs of the British Museum, an awful movie, and a new idea for a short row neckline would come together in this package. . .

(all well-taken photos of the sweater are by Carrie Bostick Hoge. The bad and blurry ones are all mine.)

Part I: I had finished my sophomore year of college, and my family and I took a vacation to London. As a lifelong Anglophile, this was my idea of heaven. Though we only spent one day in the British Museum, and the photos are lost in a Photobucket account I can't get to or on a computer I no longer have access to, I was obsessed with the torcs. Large, impressive, wrought metal bracelets and necklaces worn in Britain's Iron Age by the women in some stories and the warriors in others--these huge, ornate pieces of jewelry were breathtaking and beautiful. At that point, I was a knitter, but I hadn't started thinking of designing. I resolved to keep these torcs in mind for some purpose in the future.

(This is my favorite picture of the photoshoot. The colors are so wonderful!)

Part II: Last winter, I went down to Boston on the bus for the weekend to visit a friend from college. I make it a habit of watching the movie on the bus, but not listening to the audio; they're typically of such horrid quality that making up my own plots is far more fun. On this occasion, the movie on the way back home was The Back-Up Plan, a maudlin, unfunny, and all around pretty crap film. The plot that I made up for it was much better than the original. But the main character's sister/best friend (never did figure that out) had on a sweater that I loved. From what I could tell from the grainy bus TV screen, it had a stockinette body that pleated at the neckline into a cabled or garter stitch band at the top. Instantly, my mind went back to the torcs in the British Museum--could I bring the two pieces together?

(the original sketch for the sweater. Notice that I change my mind a lot.)

The original plan was for a bottom up, round-yoke cardigan, pleated at the hem, collar, and cuffs, and edged on all parts by a laurel leaf cable. The cable would be knit sideways, and the neckline would use some seriously cool short rows to shape the curve. See?

But when I went to figure out the math for this in May, it soon became clear that wow, would it be easier and less stressful if I worked from the top down, all in one piece. I talked to Pam at Quince, and they were on board. That meant I got to use my favorite color in one of my favorite yarns, Tern.

(edge detailing)

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when I was teaching at Medomak in July; this was the knitting project I brought with me to camp, and in the midst of many classes and lots and lots of porch knitting, I made the final decision to leave out the pleated hem and go for an a-line shape.

(that amorphous blob of chartreuse in my lap is the sweater in progress. Don't mind my clothes--I was mixing dye in them. They don't need to be pretty for that.)

The final sweater, worked from the top down with round yoke increases, has a soft swing shape and bracelet-length sleeves, and is edged with the laurel leaf cable. Through its many iterations, this has been one of my favorite projects, and I couldn't be more happy with how it's turned out. The pattern is sized for busts 31"-61", takes between 1,300 and 2,600 yards of fingering weight yarn, and is available for sale over at Quince and Co. Check it out on Ravelry, too!

Battle Scars

2011-12-03T09:08:00.000-08:00

At every dance studio I went to as a kid, it seemed that this poster hung on the wall in a prominent location. We tried to emulate it, standing underneath and tweaking out our pliable little knees into a perfect 5th position plie, even though our ballet slippers were squeaky clean, baby pink leather and those mustard yellow tights were (sadly!) a thing of the past. But the image of those beat-up, perfectly worn-in shoes stuck with me. Later, as a teenager, I carried around a duffel bag half-full of old pointe shoes that were far past their prime. I mean far. Tips blackened by the marley floors and sticky from rosin, shanks broken by my unwieldy arches, ribbons frayed to the point of non-existence. But I couldn't bear to throw them away! They had molded to fit my feet perfectly, and putting them on for barre warm-ups was like putting on an old friend. It even took me another two years or so after I quit ballet to get rid of them outright. I've stopped dancing now, but I've come to recognize that same sense of history and friendliness in my newer foot-related accessory: handknit socks.

Before:

After:

These socks, first knit in October 2008, were darned in April or May 2010, and haven't been worn since I got back from New Zealand. They still have pride of place in my sock drawer, though.

Before:

After:

Knit in May 2008, these socks still see weekly use (as you can tell by the cat hair), despite having been darned heavily in New Zealand and despite being see-through:

Before:

After:

These socks were a Christmas present to my mom in 2007. I stole them back away from her last year in horror when I saw the balls of the feet. Yet they remain undarned. Mea culpa.

The latest addition to our family of socks whose history is as long and varied as those above, but whose time on feet hasn't really even begun yet.

These socks began as a present for my older brother for Christmas last year. They have traveled around with me in my knitting bag for months, getting shoved perpetually to the backburner when sample knits or designs had earlier deadlines. They were Christmas presents, then birthday presents, and they finally they were plunked unceremoniously down on my brother's bed, with a note of apology, a few weeks ago. They're Malabrigo Sock in the colorway Alaucil, on size 1s, in my typical toe-up sock recipe. I reinforced the heels with reinforcing thread, but neglected to make sure that the spools matched when I grabbed them off the shelf. Oh well. It'll help him tell left from right.

Though I love how pretty they are here, I really hope that, in time, their history will be as long and varied as the ones above, and that they'll look just as decrepit in a few years. Because that's when we know they're loved.

Oh, and you want to know the best bit about the three socks pictured above?

Never even wove in the ends.

The Telemetry Hat

2011-11-18T16:34:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, I think I have the best friends in the world. In this case, my wonderfully willing friends Casey and Dana, both sick with horrid colds, bless them, came out with me on a bright and frosty morning a few weeks ago to Gilsland Farm to shoot the photos for my latest design, the Telemetry Hat. (Which another lovely friend, the wonderful Aimee, named!)

Knit from the bottom up and utilizing SuriPaco's Harmony DK, a 75/25 domestic alpaca/Maine wool yarn spun locally at Bartlett Yarns in Harmony, Maine, this slouchy and comfy hat uses one of the most interesting stitch patterns I've ever come across!

I wanted to find a combination that would utilize the beautiful, creamy natural tones of this yarn, as well as showcase the hand-dyed accent colors. Also, I am coming out of the closet as a stripe addict--this hat is just the tip of the iceberg!

The pattern is available for purchase on Ravelry, and will soon be available on the SuriPaco website!

I also wanted to share with you a sneak peek of another design that we photographed that day, but that's going on hold for a while.

See, as some of you know, I started a new job about a month ago with a really, really cool company. And this shawl might be getting reknitted in some seriously gorgeous new yarn. And it might be heading for publication in a different format than I had originally planned. . .

SOAR--A Week in Fuzzy Pictures and Muddled Thoughts

2011-10-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

Has it been only two and a half weeks since I got home, tired, sore, and covered in little bits of fuzz, from SOAR? It seems like much longer, and even then I haven't even started processing the experience. How do you sum up a week where you do nothing but create and explore and cram as much as you can into the short hours of the day, all surrounded by people whose interests and loves are the exact same as yours? Well, yes, it's summed up as "heaven", but it was more than that. Part of being a SOAR scholarship recipient (an opportunity I was privileged to be chosen for) is that you must present them an essay before the next year, talking about your experiences. I think, perhaps, only by that point will I be able to sum it all up! In the meantime, a pictoral essay will have to do. And, since this is me we're talking about, it'll be a patchy one at best! Did I take pictures of any of my classes? Nope. But I got some shots of the things that inspired me and challenged me, and I can't wait to share them.

A table of samples from Janel Laidman's three day color blending workshop. I got to take her one day ply-blending workshop and her half-day fiber blending workshop, both of which were amazing.

The results of Pat Sparks' three day workshop on pictoral needle-felted "watercolors".

A glorious pile of art yarns, including the cover yarn for the SOAR magazine, from Jacey Boggs' three-day. I took her thick'n'thin'n'coils class on Friday and oh my goodness, she is the most wonderfully technical spinner ever. Such a cool way to learn about art yarns!

There was a gallery of finished items to ogle as well. I caught it as the light was coming in strong and golden from over the river.

The final night was a huge group spin-in in the Armory.

The big things I think I've taken from SOAR are not answers to the questions I had, or the techniques I learned. While I came away with plenty of those, the major thing was that every question answered or technique learned was a hydra--two more "what if?"s sprang up in their wake. What if you combined a gradient-carded series of batts with a handpainted roving fractal? How would you spin silk on a tahkli? How did both Roman sheep and Viking sheep develop single and double-coated breeds? What happened to sheep domestication and breed development when the masses moved from the country to the city in the Black Plague? Could you use a Guatemalan spindle to spin in the Blackfoot tradition? What if, what if, what if, what if--I can't wait to keep exploring these throughout the rest of the year.

The perfect everyday hat

2011-09-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

I am a hat girl. I always was, as this picture from oh, probably around 1987 illustrates:

(trendsetter!)

As I grew up, I had the best series of hats. As a teenager, I had a Paul Frank hat for the wintertime that was barberpole striped in blue and red, and was topped off with a voluminous pom-pom on each corner. I also had a bucket hat made from coiled ribbon, an authentic Donegal fedora, and I stole my dad's broad-brimmed cowboy fedoras with appalling regularity.
My favorite, though, was the one I had in college. It was, frankly, pretty horrid; it was a hand-me-down from a friend, who had bought it at Wal-Mart (I know, I know). It was simple one-by-one rib, marled beige acrylic yarn, and hadn't even been knit in the round--there was a gigantic seam on it that had to be kept in the back. But it was huge, and comfy, and slouchy; I could wear it as a really long beanie, or pull it back further for some slouch. Best of all, it reminded me of my college friends. I will blushingly admit to wearing it all the time after college, too--a work colleague called it my "London slums urchin hat" at one point, which wasn't far off. (I don't have any pictures of this one, thank goodness!) I even brought it with me as a safety blanket to New Zealand, and wore it All. The. Time, especially to sleep when it the temperature in my bedroom didn't make it above 40! But, as part of the whole process of learning and growing in New Zealand, I decided that it was time to surrender it. I left it at my favorite hostel in Wellington for someone else to love.
Since that time, I haven't had a hat to truly live in. I have a Selbu Modern that I love, but it's a bit too fancy to cover up on a bad hair day, you know? So when I went back to Grinnell in June and got a request from my friend Maggie for a hat (in exchange for a kick ass wallet made from an old burlap coffee bag), I knew that this was the perfect opportunity to make my perfect hat.
Knit from one skein of Quince and Co.'s gorgeous aran-weight Osprey, the Eyen Hat was designed to have just the right amount of slouch, enough going on with the cables while knitting to keep it interesting, and the wearability for everyday.

(Quince photos, as always, by the lovely Carrie Bostick Hoge!)

This hat was also part of the downward slide into Chartreuse obsession--I LOVE this color! Quince's Honey just kills me every time. I love how it changes in every light!

All in all, I absolutely cannot wait to have one of these hats for my very own.

And finally, Delius!

2011-09-08T03:06:00.000-07:00

When I woke up this morning, there was a gentle rain pattering down outside my window, and all I wanted was a big mug of Earl Grey tea. Even if the leaves are still green and I'm still running around in flip-flops (let's face it, those stay on until the serious frosts hit), everything around me is whispering "Fall! Fall! Fall!" So I think it's time to talk about my contribution to the wonderful Fall edition of Twist Collective. I am so, so pleased to be a part of this edition; I am an autumn girl through and through, and my design, the Delius vest, is very close to my heart.

This vest originally started as a Christmas present for my eminently knitworthy father. My knitting friends will attest to the fact that, every year in mid-October, I swear up and down that I will NOT be doing any Christmas knitting this year. And, every year in mid-November, I crumble and go buy yarn for far-too-elaborate projects that inevitably get gifted while still on the needles, or still wet from blocking, or not at all. This, um, fashionable lateness was compounded in this case by the fact that the only yarn I liked at my LYS that fit the bill for my dad (navy blue, good for a business formal vest) and mine (mostly wool and tweedy) was Rowan Felted Tweed. Which needed to be knit on size 2s to get the stitch definition I wanted. So yeah, not in time for Christmas.

(the first finished vest, modeled on its wonderful recipient. Both he and my brother, the other obliging model, were bribed with Tony's Donuts for this photoshoot. Thanks, guys!)

However, acknowledging to myself that this was not going to be neatly wrapped up with a bow under the Christmas tree also meant that I could really think about the details of the vest. Dad and I took a trip to Ireland together when I was a teenager, and since then, have shared a love of the cables of the Aran sweaters, both traditional and otherwise. Therefore I had always kept an eye on the cable sections of stitch dictionaries, and when I saw the Windblown Cables in Barbara Walker's third treasury, I had to earmark them for a sweater for him. The cables were delicious in the Felted Tweed, and, amidst a bed of 2x2 ribbing and stockinette, they were perfect.

There were a couple other moments of serendipity in the development of this vest; I spent the last weeks of the year in my family home, and Frederick Delius' gorgeous composition "Summer Night on the River" was often on in the background. This and the constant vest knitting, coupled with the gorgeous mood boards for Twist's Fall submission, came together to create my first design in Twist.

(Goofballs, the lot of them. At Bug Light in South Portland, Maine.)

Very little changed from my original prototype: the gauge (thank goodness), thanks to the substitution of the lovely Imperial Stock Ranch Columbia rather than the Felted Tweed; the shoulders widened slightly (the original was a little narrow in that area); and a design feature that I had planned in the original, but goofed up, was added--a 2x2 cable that flowed from the front cables around the back of the neck and added that little bit of extra length to keep the back from riding up.

I'd love to say that the design process was a long and arduous one with many samples and lots of little tweaks, but it was pretty smooth sailing! (I did have some fun incorporating the increases needed to balance the cable panels after the ribbing. Earth-shattering stuff!) I'm even thinking about a women's version with waist shaping named Delia (bless these Latinate nouns with their easily gendered endings)--I have my eye on the Sap or Hayloft colorways in Shelter. Whether the women's version materializes or not, it was a wonderful experience. Thanks again to Twist for their support and their wonderfully inspiring magazine. Happy knitting!

Picot! Picot! And Sale! Sale!

2011-08-24T11:12:00.001-07:00

We interrupt this irregularly (erratically, even) scheduled broadcast to say that the final pattern of August is out! Meet the Picot! Picot! Cowl:

(modeled by the ever lovely Casey, last seen wearing the Earl Grey Mitts!)

This pattern's genesis came about almost seven months ago, during a coffee date with a friend. After having done the picot edging on the Bristol's Cowl, I was talking about how, once you've done a picot, you suddenly want to put it on everything. Well, the lightbulb went off, and this cowl is the result! It utilizes the typical picot edging, true, but it's also got picots incorporated throughout the whole body of the cowl. So much fun!

(thank goodness for Wharf St. in downtown Portland. It's one of the best locations for a photoshoot ever!)

This cowl also utilizes SuriPaco's gorgeous Katahdin Collection yarn, a 60/40 blend of domestic suri alpaca and domestic merino. Coming in at a lushly spun aran weight, this stuff is fantastic to work with! I can't wait for cooler temperatures so I can snuggle down deep in it.

The other cool thing about this cowl is that it heralds a sale on my self-published patterns on Ravelry. My 26th birthday is on Sunday, and I decided to celebrate my last week of being 25 by having a 25% off sale. Go forth and use the coupon code "birthday"!

A Week in Fiber Heaven

2011-08-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

Skipping back in the order of things, I definitely need to recap my week at Medomak Camp's New England Fiber Arts Retreat. The problem is, I'm having a hard time putting it into words, other than one: bliss. A week in the beautiful Maine countryside, with some of my favorite people in the world as bunkmates and some of the coolest students I could ask for, talking fiber 24/7, eating amazing food, swimming in a gorgeous lake--I can't think of anything better.

(naturally dyed sample skeins)

I taught classes in dyeing and knitting with silk hankies, the Bristol's Cowl pattern from Quince & Co., and drop spindling, and did one-on-one lessons in wheel-spinning.

(the class and results of dyeing silk hankies)

I went on field trips to Hope Spinnery, Nanne Kennedy's Seacolors farm, and Katharine Cobey's studio.

(the teachers hanging out outside Hope Spinnery; Daniel is knitting a hat from Rachel's handspun; Rachel is stripping the plants in the garden to see if they'd work for dye; Dana is embroidering on some adorable vintage fabric; and I'm stripping milkweed to spin the fibers from the stem. All dorks.)

I played lots of Scrabble. I sat on the porch in the rocking chairs and knitted and chatted.

(the ever-shifting arrangement of the rocking chairs)

I laid out and air-dried on the dock by the lake. I had more than a few gin and tonics. I spent half an hour laying back on a wooden platform at midnight, watching the lightning storm play out overhead.
But mostly, I just let go and had fun. It was a week of sheer bliss with new friends and old, and I cannot wait for next summer to roll around so I can do it all over again!

Edie Shawl

2011-08-11T20:03:00.000-07:00

Oh, to hell with chronological order--I want to talk about my design with Quince and Co. that came out today!

The Edie Shawl (and here's a Rav link)is a top-down triangular shawl, started on a small number of stitches and gradually increased at the center spine and edges. It utilizes the bounce and stitch definition and gorgeous, saturated colors of Chickadee--even if that saturated color is pink in this case! (Although my momma says it's raspberry. My momma's always right.)

It was a fun challenge for me! I started it right after I designed the Lida Shawl, and wanted to move in a completely different direction: ribbing instead of stockinette, panel instead of allover pattern, and lifted bar increases rather than yarn-overs. To say it was an interesting process was an understatement!

Even with all that change and shift in direction, I am definitely happy with the finished product. I'm even more happy with Carrie's amazing photography for Quince. I am beyond pleased to have the opportunity to work with such an awesome company. Here's to many future projects!

Tour de Fleece

2011-08-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

Oh man oh man, do I have blog backlog to take care of! That's one of the big problems with working freelance; all the interesting things happen at once. It's either feast or famine! So this week, I will attempt to wrap up:
a--the Tour de Fleece
b--my amazing and wonderful week teaching at the Medomak Fiber Arts Retreat
and c--the privilege and honor of my men's vest design, Delius, appearing in the Fall Twist Collective
(and maybe d--, where there's a chance I have another design coming out this week. Who knows!)

To keep things chronological and preserve my sanity, I'll start with the Tour de Fleece. My plan was to get through three separate projects, but for some reason the first project ended up taking 19 of the 20 days of the Tour. I guess spinning cobweb-weight 100% tussah silk will do that. . .

This isn't even the halfway point. Sigh.

This project was a real test in perseverance for me--I knew I wanted the final product, but goodness, getting to that point was a slog! The sense of accomplishment when it was finally plied and off the bobbin, though, was pretty amazing.

the finished product!

When I finally got it off the bobbin and counted, the realization started to hit me as to why it was taking so long. The final estimate is around 2,000 yds/6 ounces of silk. Whew.

The best part? I get to knit it now! Here's the very squishy, very ripply, very weird-looking beginning of Herbert Niebling's Lyra (rav link).

Wish me luck for the remaining 150 rows. . .

Chartreuse Blues

2011-07-21T17:10:00.001-07:00

Hi, my name is Bristol, and I have a problem. Specifically, a color problem. Here's a quick peek at my favorite necklace, my favorite tank top, and my two recent knitting projects in my favorite yarn:

(tank top from Target a million years ago, necklace from Folly 101 a million years ago, and Osprey in Honey and Tern in Kelp from Quince and Co.)

The bigger problem? Since taking this picture, I've bought another tank top and another shirt in this color. Someone help!

Scenes from the Dye Kitchen

2011-06-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

Lida!

2011-06-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

Man, can we talk about how much I love Quince and Co.'s Sparrow yarn? Gorgeous! Luminous! Effortless! I knit three sample garments in it in quick succession earlier this year, and absolutely jumped at the chance to design with it myself. The fruits of that labor appeared today in the Quince newsletter. Introducing: the Lida Shawl!

(photos by the inimitable Carrie Bostick Hoge, and modeled by the lovely and eponymous Lida. Check it out over on Ravelry!)

I will be knitting this for myself as soon as I can. Maybe multiple times. =)

Unions and Reunions

2011-06-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

I spent this past weekend in one of my favorite places in the entire world, Grinnell College. I spent four incredibly happy years there as an undergrad, and it was a delight to go back and spend time among some of the coolest people ever. I'll spare you most of the reminiscences (both sober and tipsy), but rest assured that it was exactly what I needed.

One of my other reasons for heading back to Iowa was the wedding of two friends, Rachel and Lindsey. I met them while at Grinnell, and in addition to being some of the most amazing people ever, they've been serious advocates for gay marriage rights throughout the states. When Iowa passed legislation legalizing gay marriage, they were the first couple I thought of. And the icing on the cake was getting to attend their beautiful wedding.

But of course you know there has to be a fibery bent to this story! What could it be?!

Yeah, yeah, I wove them a blanket. So far, my marrying friends have been few and far between enough that I can still give them something handmade, but due to the recent spate of engagements going on, this may not last long. . .

You all may have seen hints of this blanket in Aimee and Leah's blog posts about our knitting group's dyeing weekend; it's the turquoise stuff hanging on the fence! While the blanket is all the same base yarn (Jaggerspun's Superlamb 4/8, which takes color well, but was shedding like crazy throughout), the original base colors were wildly different. The warp started out as golden yellow and white, and the weft started as the same bright turquoise seen in the stripes, and white. The yarn was also dyed in two different locations, with two different dye brands. It was a little tricky. =)

The finished blanket measures around 54" by 50", with 8 ends per inch and about 13 picks per inch. This was my first time working with double weave in pattern, but once I wrapped my head around the idea of it, it went pretty smoothly.

It was woven to a background of British period dramas and this year's Eurovision Song Content, which felt appropriate for this couple. Rachel and Lindsey, I hope you cuddle up together under it in cold midwestern nights. Lots of love and mazel tov!

Rainy Days

2011-05-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

Usually, I'm a great person for rainy days. Give me a good book, a big cup of tea, a spinning wheel, and a napping cat, and I'm happy. But we've had a spate of more than a week of grey skies here recently, and yeah, I'm about done. My friend Rachel was feeling the same way this past weekend, so we buzzed down to the last day of the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival on a whim. In a word? Rejuvenation.

Now I just need another fiber festival this weekend to do the same thing!

In the Quiet Times

2011-05-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

I am coming to the tail-end of a two-week knitting moratorium. After having knit two sample garments for Quince and two samples garments for myself in the space of a month and a half, my wrists were in dire need of a break. At first, I was unsure of what to do with myself while watching Netflix at night (by the way, Downton Abbey? Oh my goodness). But my mom reminded me of the hurried and breathless question I got to ask Neil Gaiman in the signing line in Wellington this time last year--if one is working for one's self, what does one do when the phone isn't ringing? What do you do in the down times? He said that that was the best time for exploration, for trying new things, for making messes and not having a deadline to clean them up by. So, in the last two weeks, I have:

made progress on my quilt
finished writing two patterns
listened to good music
hung out with friends
got my hands thoroughly covered in dye with the best knitting group in the world, as wonderfully documented by Leah and Aimee
read some old favorites
spun some frog-hair silk for my knitolution
cooked yummy food
I even made time to detangle skeins of yarn, one of my favorite guilty pleasures
and naps! How could I forget the naps?

So, all in all, it was a good, if knitting-less, couple of weeks! However, duty calls, and there are a few more samples calling my name. How would you spend two weeks without knitting?

Nesting

2011-05-06T06:19:00.000-07:00

The weather is getting warmer here in Maine; the grass is a vivid, emerald green (thanks to the rain of the last few days), the spring flowers are popping up everywhere, and, in hope, I have begun wearing sandals every day (even if I really shouldn't). But, even though we're moving towards spring, my crafting dreams recently have been about the perfect things for a midwinter night: bulky, colorful knit blankets, and jewel-toned handmade quilts.

When the Mitered Cross Blanket pattern came out, I loved it, but was initially dubious about the amount of Noro it needed. While I love Noro, the stuff ain't the cheapest, and a blanket's worth seemed a little extravagant. So the pattern sat on the backburner for a while, until I remembered the yarn I had dyed using Leethal's long-stripe dyeing with recycled yarn idea, where, instead of unraveling the thrifted sweater and then dyeing it, you dye it in stripes while it's still in pieces, like a sock blank.

I'm planning on pairing it with a deep cocoa-colored natural Irish yarn from the erstwhile Irish Ewe. Of course, it may be a long time until I actually get around to knitting it. . .

The other project I'm actually working on is a quilt based on the color scheme and lay-out of this pattern:

(from imagingermonkey on Flickr)

I grew up in a quilter's household, surrounded by my mom's fabric stash and tools, so it was a delight to come back to that world. About half the fabric in my quilt is actually from my mom's stash, and it feels wonderful to put all the eclectic pieces together into something beautiful.

I spent a great day over at Leah's house this past weekend working on it and hogging the ironing board, and while there's still a lot to get done, it's amazing to get back into this world and play.

As for things that I'm actually getting done, rather than just dreaming about, here's a sneak peek of the cowl pattern that will be coming out in September:

Stay tuned! In the meantime, I'll keep nesting and dreaming of chilly days, scented by woodsmoke, where I'll get to wrap up in my cozy quilt and blanket with a cup of tea and daydream.

Back in the Saddle

2011-04-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

(The title is a hopeful reference to my horrid blogging habits, but since there wasn't really a saddle to begin with, the metaphor may not be apropos. Any suggestions?)

We're just going to ignore the fact that I've been gone for two months. The cool things in that time?

there was over $800NZ raised for Red Cross NZ Earthquake Relief through the sales of the Christchurch Shawl. Knitters are awesome.
I have knocked out all but two WIPs on my list--the socks for my Sock of the Month Club that I started in August (oops), and the socks that were one of my brother's Christmas presents (double oops). But! Since the last blog post, I've finished: 2 vests, 1 camisole, 1 shrug, 1 tee, 1 sweater, 1 cowl, 2 warps (1 scarf and 1 couple of rugs) and 1 pair of socks. Fear my productivity!
Unfortunately, most of that knitting is secret. Well, internet secret. So I can show you pictures of. . . the socks! And that's about it.

These socks have been on the backburner forever, which is a shame, since they're awesome and I've rarely taken them off since I finished. My basic sock pattern, knit on size 2s in 4-row stripes (as per usual). I spun the yarn prior to my second Tour de Fleece a couple years ago, and it's amazing what those twenty days of concentrated spinning did to my yarn quality. While this is soft, squishy, and lots of fun, it was pretty underplied and uneven. However, the socks are holding up like steel, so who knows? The fiber was hand-dyed from Fat Cat Knits, in the colorways Brutus and Raja. Ravell'd here. (Incidentally, eagle-eyed readers of the blog will recognize this combination from the first pair of socks finished in New Zealand. I am glad I get to keep these!)

There's lots else going on, but we'll see if I can spread it out and actually have some consistent blog content. Plus, the laptop battery's dying. Priorities!

Christchurch

2011-02-24T08:03:00.001-08:00

Well, I had hoped that my next blog post would be a joyous happy one, but I've been glued to the news for the past few days, watching the crisis in Christchurch unfold. I have never had such feelings of helplessness and sadness, and while I've donated (Red Cross NZ), I wish there was more I could do. So here's what I can do. 90% of sales of my Christchurch Shawl will go to the earthquake relief effort in New Zealand. You can buy the pattern on Ravelry here, Etsy here, or in kit form from Little Country Wools here. Every little bit counts, and hopefully us knitters can do our part!

Looking Back, and Looking Forward

2011-01-02T17:38:00.000-08:00

After coming home in the wee small hours from a lovely New Year's party with wonderful friends, I finished the last few rows of ribbing on a sweater, and thought about what a momentous year 2010 had been for me.

(waist decreases and increases in a pattern modified from a vintage Swedish cross-stitch book, in hand-dyed Brown Sheep Naturespun and a hand-dyed vintage farm yarn. I'm nothing if not an over-achiever.)

From my last six months in New Zealand, to moving into my own place here in Portland, to trying to make a go of it in the fiber and yarn industry, to putting my knitting patterns out there for the first time. . . I've hypothesized that the '0 years (1990, 2000) in my life were the big ones, and this year has definitely lived up to it.

(pre-blocking, mid-snow)

I honestly couldn't tell you what 2011 will bring for me. Rhinebeck? SOAR? Back to Grinnell for Reunion? Saying, "screw it all!" and jumping on a plane to South India to intern at a textile center? Spontaneous dinners with friends, bad movie dates, tons of cooking, baking, knitting, weaving, spinning, making meep noises at the cat, and goodness knows what else? All I know is that 2011 will be a good one. And I hope it's a wonderful one for you, too.

If nothing else, 2011 will definitely be full of me making goofy faces while trying to model a sweater in the middle of a cemetery. (Ravell'd here.)

2010-12-22T19:23:00.000-08:00

It's underground knitting time here right now, as I frantically work on half-finished Christmas presents and try to figure out the most attractive way to package them still on the needles. But one of the cool things I've been working on at the Fiber Gallery is rehabbing an old Macomber 32" loom that my boss picked up a couple weekends ago. She's a beaut! Dark, luminous mahogany wood, quirky brass pivots and fittings, and a great sense of history.

She's also got this one fantastic detail:

Serial number 1. How cool is that?

We're still waiting on a bunch of parts from Macomber, but I jury-rigged it and threaded a simple diagonal twill in merino/tencel, with a hand-dyed cotton warp. The one problem?

Yes, Ms. Cleaver, it's pink. Sigh.

p.s. still looking for a Christmas present for someone obsessed with yarn and fiber? I've put together a collection of my fiber photography into an adorable desktop calendar. It's basically a beefcake calendar, but with fiber instead of naked men. I promise there are no naked men.

Earl Grey

2010-12-09T08:33:00.000-08:00

I spent the Monday after we got back from Rhinebeck not wanting to do anything. (Except perhaps add up the amount of money I spent on pretty, pretty fiber there, and shudder.) My wrists were killing me from some hardcore computer work I had done the week before, and from a nutso idea I had to spin, design, and knit a cabled sweater in what amounted to probably a two week period. I had also just gotten my hands on the DK weight farm yarn we had had spun for SuriPaco, a gorgeous 75/25 blend of domestic alpaca and Maine wool that made me swoon. So, the combination of apathy, hurty wrists, and pretty yarn?

The Earl Grey Mitts. A simple, gentle, comforting knit, with a clean and tailored aesthetic, just like a good cup of tea. (I'm addicted to Earl Grey tea. It's a bit of a problem.)

These are knit in stockinette in the round, then flipped at the end to show off the reverse stockinette side. The yarn, spun on Bartlett Yarns' wonderful old mulespinning machinery, is nubbly and rustic, and works wonderfully with the purl side of the fabric.

Available as a free download over on Ravelry!

Another Introduction!

2010-11-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

Okay, at some point I promise to have actual content on this blog, but, introducing:

Bristol's Cowl! (Note: I promise I am not narcissistic enough to name this after myself! I had called it the Cathedra Cowl in proofs, but I bow to higher judgment.)

(photos by the lovely and wonderful Carrie Bostick Hoge)
This cowl is knit from just one skein of Quince and Co.'s Puffin, a lovely, lightly spun bulky single in the most gorgeous colors. The lace lets you play with a couple different techniques on a large scale for instant gratification! Plus, the one skein requirement lets you try out a great yarn with minimal investment. It would also be awesome for that skein of Lopi kicking around, or that bit of bulky handspun you've not found a use for yet. . .

Check it out at Quince and Co. here, or on Ravelry here.

And up soon on the blog (I promise): can I design and knit an entire Fair Isle sweater in the month of November? Well, not if the yarn's still drying! (Which it is. Eek.)

The Christchurch Shawl

2010-10-10T16:30:00.000-07:00

It's a bad sign when your internet history doesn't even remember your blog's URL. Sigh. But! There is exciting news! I finally have something cool to share!

Introducing the Christchurch Shawl, born of a long day spent wandering the museums and botanical gardens in Christchurch, New Zealand. My head was full of leaves and spear points, and this lace pattern, developed on the road from Christchurch to Queenstown and knit for the first time among quizzical Austrians at the hostel in Queenstown, was the result.
I knit the first version of it for Betty back in February, and the second version this summer.

(modeled by my gorgeous friend Dana, who is a phenomenal weaver to boot)

The pattern is up for sale on Ravelry here!

2010-09-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

Ah, yes. Well. Hi. One month later, and I still apparently fail at the posting frequently thing. I will work on it! But in the meantime?

I'm knitting, and nesting.

It's my two week anniversary in my adorable little apartment, and I'm still trying to put the bits and pieces together. Painting trim, finding frames, hanging pictures, figuring out the oven, trying canning for the first time (apple and pepper chutney!),

dreaming of covering the entire place in textiles. . . I think I'm going to like it here.

I've also been knitting furiously, and have no less than five projects going at the moment, heaven help me, with another in the testing knitting stage and yet two more bubbling away cranially. There's just not enough time in the world! And did I mention Rhinebeck is in a month? Where I will no doubt be acquiring great quantities of fluff and yarn? Oh dear. Still, this is a pretty darn good life, and I could get used to it. I've just got to get better at posting about it.

2010-08-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

Hmm. . . well, there went any semblance of keeping posting in a timely manner! The Tour de Fleece is finished, as of almost a month ago (my bad), I've been knitting:

(Deerpath Socks by Lisa Lloyd in Cherry Tree Hill DK Supersock, my July socks in my self-imposed sock-a-month club, ravelled here)

and even !!crocheting!! (never thought I'd say that!),

(Queen's Anne's Lace by Khebhin Gibbons in my own handspun, ravelled here)

and have been working on finding an apartment in town and generally soaking up as much of the summer as possible. But the two big things that have been taking up most of my time?

Meet Natasha, a 9-10-month-old black and tan coonhound from down South. She may look all sweet and innocent in that picture, and okay, yeah, the sweet bit certainly is true, but the innocent? Nuh-uh. Here she is "helping" me take sock pictures:

Anything not nailed down is totally game for her to chew on. That includes knitting projects, toes, and cats. So we're working on it!

The other big thing involves these lovely creatures:

The baby in that picture is approximately ten hours old. Everybody together: awwwwww. I've started work up at a local alpaca farm as their creative designer. This means I get to play with fiber and yarn. A lot. Occasionally I get to play with the animals. Does this make me the happiest person on the planet? Yeah, pretty much. So, even though I'm not posting too much, life's pretty awesome. On with the adventure!

The Tour de Fleece keeps on trucking. . .

2010-07-23T15:57:00.001-07:00

My hand-dyed roving stash is getting pretty low at this point--lucky Rhinebeck is in 2 1/2 months!

Drifts of Wool in the Summertime

2010-07-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

It seems like forever that I've been home, but it's only been three and a half weeks; it's been time well-spent. While I'm still in the limbo of trying to figure out schedules and jobs and housing, I've also had ample, wonderful hours of knitting and spinning in the sunshine, sitting out on the back porch for hours with NPR or audiobooks on in the background and cats underfoot (or underchair, as is more likely). There's been knitting for me:

Cecily Glowik MacDonald's Goodale (Rav link), a lightweight, quirky sweater in a cashmerino I overdyed. This only gets play at knitting nights at this point, but is about three-quarters done.

Knitting for design publication:

a variation on the shawl I knit for Betty, this time in commercially available yarn.

And knitting for others (no pictures, sorry!), in the most lovely and gorgeous new yarn from Quince and Co. There are big benefits to living in Portland and getting in on the ground floor of this awesome new company!

And there has been spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning: it's the Tour de Fleece again! For those of you that think I'm crazy, it's a spinning event where you spin every day the Tour de France is running. This is my fourth year doing it, and I've scaled it back a bit from last year, where I spun enough for three sweaters. That hurt!

This year, my big goal was just one sweater's worth of light worsted weight 3-ply, out of the most gorgeous moorit Romney that Barb gave me at Tally Ho. And some other stuff, as well, but that was the big project. It's for my Rhinebeck sweater!

1,234 yards, about 20 ounces. Now to design and knit the damn thing. . .

The other yarn I've spun so far (the Romney obviously took me a while) is a softly spun laceweight single, from a merino/cashmere/nylon blend I had dyed for PortFiber and then couldn't bear to part with. 768 yards, 3 1/2 ounces.
I've still got about a pound of wool to spin for various other projects, and more knitting, and more designing, and did I mention the various jobs? Not to mention the music festivals, or the theatre in Deering Oaks, or the walks on the beach, or the. . .

It's going to be a lovely, busy summer.

Last Night's Reflections

2010-06-22T16:39:00.000-07:00

(posted from LAX airport, while enjoying my first meal in the US in eight and a half months. My choice? Nachos and Cherry Coke. God bless America.):

It's my last day in New Zealand. To be totally correct, it's the penultimate hour before my flight leaves for LA. I'm sitting at the window in the Auckland airport, eating mediocre bacon and egg pie (my other option was Burger King, and I am NOT having my last meal on New Zealand soil be American fast food! So Kiwi fast food it is), and people-watching both inside and outside the terminal. Outside, it's drizzling: the slow, insistent, methodical haze that I've become familiar with throughout the New Zealand winter. It never rains, exactly, but everything has this misty halo surrounding it, a perpetual ring around the moon. I have, at times, missed the snow, but I think I can handle this, too.

When I was walking from the domestic terminal to the international one, I spotted, out front of the baggage claim, the bench where I had sat eight and a half months ago, waiting for the bus into Auckland and terrified out of my mind. Eight months seemed to loom in front of me, vast and unfillable, overwhelmingly foreign in its enormity and emptiness. I had people that I had contacted, sure, and a vague idea of where I was going first, but I was, for the most part, rootless. In the past eight months, however, I have put down those tiny little "soul-roots" that Anne talks about in Anne of the Island, those little anchors that have made this voyage utterly unforgettable. Building faery houses with the kids at Mangarara, curling up in an armchair at Betty's and knitting companionably, going for Sunday drives with Barb and Stuart through the mountain passes. There are little bits of me in each of those places, and I couldn't be happier about it.

One of the things that has surprised me most about this trip are those connections, actually; one of my bad habits in life is experiencing the experience, and taking new self-knowledge and ideas away from it, and then, detaching. I am terrible at keeping in touch with people, I usually visit places once, and I let things finish within that bubble. But this time, there is an idea that my time in New Zealand is by no means over. I have made family here, and, as you might have guessed, I am absolutely, hedonistically, head-over-heels in love with the landscape and the lifestyle. I had thought, prior to visiting, that it would be an excursion, and that would be it. Back to normal life. But now I know better, and I am glad to be proven wrong.

I've been saying goodbye to the country in my own way. I left Tally Ho on Thursday and spent the night in Queenstown, and then flew up to spend my last few days in Wellington. I can unabashedly state that I love love love Wellington in winter; it's mellow and quiet, and a heck of a lot warmer than Central Otago. I spent a lot of time reading, eating out at little restaurants on Cuba Street, and (shamefully) shopping, but also had a lot of time to just wander around.

Since it's the off-season for Wellington, there aren't many tourists around, which makes life wonderfully calm. I went to Te Papa again on Monday morning, and had most of the exhibitions to myself--which meant I finally got to try all the interactive games that I couldn't ever get close to before! I also got to curl up and people-watch in the cafe for a couple hours, lazily nibbling on a brownie (couldn't finish it, mom, too chocolaty) and reading the newspaper. Today, I went up in the cable car to the Botanical Gardens, and got as deliberately lost as possible, forgetting the city noise and traffic in a deep gully of native bush. Everyone at the hostel last night was aghast that I was chilling out rather than cramming as much in my last days as possible, but for me? Not seeing it now is just another excuse to make sure I come back later on.

So we're now approaching my final hour in New Zealand. The airport's getting quiet; mine is one of the last flights to go before it shuts down until morning. I have a good book to start, and a bunch of movies on my laptop to wade through as needed. Or, which is most likely, I think I'll just spend my last hour watching the rain fall and continuing to think how incredibly lucky I am to have had this journey. I can only hope that the journey is just beginning!

Winter Days at Tally Ho

2010-06-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

Blogging on dial-up! This is a chancy proposition! But I wanted to check in and give you guys a little glimpse of my life down here. I'm going to have to put my writing skills to the test, since uploading pictures on this internet connection would take longer than I'd like to imagine. So:

Waking up in the mornings here is always a little hard; the hot water bottle that I've gone to sleep snuggling has finally gone cold, and the sun isn't yet sufficiently over the hills to warm the frost from the windowpanes. Looking out my window, still wrapped in as many blankets as I can manage to drag off my bed, I can see the ducks walking unsteadily across the paper-thin layer of ice that's frozen on the pond overnight. Everything is crystalline and fragile; the dogs, wandering across the frozen grass, leave dark footprints against the pale silver. After the first cup of tea of the day, things look a little sunnier, and I head over to the woolshed to either help run the carding machine, or to the cowshed to wash wool prior to carding.
The sun gradually melts all but the most stubborn frost during the day, so that, when I wander up the hill to the chickens or to the foals, I still stumble across patches of crunchy, hard earth amongst the mud. But the best part of the day comes in the late afternoon, when the sun falls behind the far hill and we scramble to finish the afternoon chores before dark. The temperature dips immediately, but the sun stays shining on the mountain range to the east, turning the snow and shadows there into the most delicate shades of pale yellow and lavender. When afternoon chores are done and the fire is lit in the living room, I am armed with yet another cup of tea (probably my fifth or sixth of the day), and I curl up on the couch to knit and watch the sun fade gradually on the mountains. My life revolves around wool, tea, sunlight, and fire, and I'm not sure I would change much of anything.

In the absence of any real content. . .

2010-04-11T00:33:00.001-07:00

Doom-digga-doom, digga-doom, digga-doom, PUPPY TIME!

I'm currently working 60-hour weeks at an apple-packing plant back in Central Otago, so Pip's puppies are about the most interesting thing going in my life right now!

(This is Ellie, who I am planning to smuggle back to the States. For reals.)

The apple season end in the middle to the end of May, and by then, I promise to have a life. And knitting and spinning content! Promise!

Oh, and P.S.

2010-03-13T01:24:00.001-08:00

I forgot to add to the last post: since I'll be home in the coming fall, and therefore within driving distance and among interested parties, who's up for a roadtrip to Rhinebeck? =)

Mid-Term Report and Mountains of FOs

2010-03-11T16:35:00.000-08:00

On the 17th of February, one of my last days at Fleecewood, I hit the halfway point on my time here in New Zealand. It all seems a bit unreal that I'm on the downward slope of my visit, and that it will only be three more months before I'm on that plane back home. But in the meantime, here's the rundown of my time here so far, interspersed with fibery eye candy so no one gets bored.

Places I've WWOOFed: 6, with two visits to Betty in Nelson
Miles traveled around New Zealand: about 2,200 so far, all by bus!
Times ferried across the Cook Strait between the North and the South Island: 4

(Diagonally woven cowl, using leftover Noro Silk Garden Sock yarn.)

Animals I've worked with: sheep, both baby and adult (lots and lots and lots of sheep), cows, goats baby and adult, ducks baby and adult, chickens baby and adult, horses, both full-sized and miniature, dogs, cats, alpacas, and children!

(felted cowl, nuno felted over woven remnants of sari fabric. Done at the Teapot Valley felting weekend.)

Most importantly, sheep and fiber breeds I've worked with: Romney, Suffolk, Perendale, Hokanui, Texel, Gotland, English Leicester, Fleecewood Leicester, NZ Halfbred, Karakul, huacaya alpaca, guanaco llama.

(wet-felted scarf inset with diagonal weaving pieces, woven from more leftover Noro Silk Garden sock yarn.)

Big life decisions made: 1. In the last week or so at Fleecewood, I had a rather big crisis of conscience as to whether my intended path after my return home, namely, a graduate program in anthropology with a focus on non-profits, was the right thing for me. After all the work I've been doing in the fiber community both at home and here in New Zealand, did I really want to put that on the back burner in order to pursue an academic background? Every time I thought about an impending move to Montreal, the location of my chosen grad program, my interests lay more in how to find a place in the fiber community there than in how I would start to fit back in to academia.

("Horizon Line", my favorite of my felted pieces from Teapot Valley. Wet-felted with inset diagonal weaving, and yarns on top ranging from wool boucle to op-shop mohair to my own handspun of the llama fiber I worked on last time I was at Betty's. These are the colors I see in New Zealand: deep, cornflower blue, steely slate grey, and burnished gold. And white sheep, of course!)

So one day at Fleecewood, I wandered up to the top paddock, the only place on the farm with cell phone reception, and spent an hour swatting away sandflies and talking with my parents about my life path. My time in New Zealand had given me so many ideas for where I could take a business in the fiber industry, and made me feel that it was not unrealistic that I could accomplish them. But if McGill said yes, then I would feel obliged to go. But even if I could come to a decision at this point, I wouldn't hear back from McGill for another couple weeks at least. So I had to sit on it and wait. Which I am really, really not good at.

(The last piece I felted during the weekend, when my brain was shot and I was tired of thinking of composition and color. I like to call this one "The Artwork on the Wall at the Motel 6 in Hoboken, Felted".)

So I gritted my teeth, and sat on it, and waited. I went to the felting weekend (which was amazing, by the way), and had some amazing conversations about marketing and distributing spinner's fleeces to the U.S market. I went back to Betty's, and spun my natural-dyed wool like a demon, and ate plums straight off the tree, practiced driving on the wrong side of the road, and watched lots of bad tv. One Saturday, I went downtown to check my e-mail and run errands, and there was a letter from McGill in my inbox. Basically, "thanks, but no thanks." Now, when I had, earlier in the year, imagined getting a rejection letter from them, I had planned gales of tears--this was my life plan! How dare they! But now, I looked at it, went "hmm," finished my tea, and went off the market.

(A shawl, pre-blocking and on the blocking board, handspun from some of Betty's alpaca and llama, blended with wool and silk, and knit from a lace pattern I designed a couple months ago.)

The next day, I called home again and spent about an hour and a half putting together business plans so that I can hit the ground running when I come home to Maine. Because, if there's one thing I've learned in my time down here, it's that I can travel all I want, but Maine will always be the place I have to come back to. It's too much in my blood now for me to stay away. So I'm coming back to Portland to stay, and to keep working in the fiber community. I've got my eye on a couple online master's programs, so that's not completely out of my plans, but I am so, so incredibly happy that I am able to pursue the career of my dreams in a place I love.

(Shawl, now named "Poecilasthena" after a native New Zealand moth, post-blocking. This stayed with Betty, as a thank you for taking such good care of me during my time there. She's made me promise to come back, and, as the rest of my time on this trip is booked, I guess I'll just have to start planning another trip down here!)

And now? I'm in Wellington for the weekend to see an Amanda Palmer concert and a Neil Gaiman talk. I'm off in twenty minutes to see Alice in Wonderland. On Sunday I fly back down to Central Otago to start up work at an apple-packing place while boarding at Tally Ho. Life is really, really good.

Oh, and you remember the fiber I worked on last time I was at Betty's? Pablo, the exquisite llama? It's been blended with wool and silk and spun by Beth, an 85-year-old woman who's been spinning for about twice as long as I've been alive. Take a look:

Oh, baby.

Fleecewood!

2010-02-22T19:25:00.000-08:00

So after three days of all these exciting stops and lots and lots of windy mountain road through the bush, I was more than ready to settle down in one place for a while. I had met Anne, the proprietor of Fleecewood Farm, back in October at a Rural Women's Institute Natural Fiber Expo, where both she and Betty were vendors. I have to admit, my interest definitely rose from seeing her beautiful colored fleeces, most in a breed she's developed herself, called Fleecewood Leicester. It's a cross between an English Leicester and an NZ Halfbred, which is, in turn, a longwool/merino cross (like a Corriedale). This, in turn, leads to a crimpy, soft, and still lustrous fleece in some of the most gorgeous shades of brown and grey. The fleece I ended up with (because, c'mon, let's be serious here, of course I bought a fleece) is this light mocha-grey-brown color that first caught my eye at the Expo and that I've never really seen before. So I was more than happy to go explore the farm and flock!

One of the coolest things about Anne is that she's basically run this farm single-handedly for twenty years, doing all the maintenance and construction herself. Therefore, she didn't blink an eye at assigning me the really physical jobs that other WWOOF farms tend to save for male WWOOFers. So the first couple weeks of my stay, I worked in the paddocks, rebuilding the cold weather sheep shelters, whose original purpose were to contain car parts as they were shipped to New Zealand.

These shelters had first gone up twenty years previous, and hadn't had anything done since then. It was interesting, to say the least! Often, I got to play MacGyver while attempting to cobble together a structure that didn't put weight on the rusted-out bits, or avoided the predominant wind (which changed direction with every paddock), or didn't crowd the manuka tea trees. It was very hot, dirty, sweaty, and frustrating work at times, but you also couldn't beat the sense of accomplishment when all twenty shelters were finally back up and I knew I had done all of it with my own hands. And sure, they weren't the most level or plumb of structures, but I was really proud when I put my tools away for the final time.

Since I was in the paddocks the entire time I was working on these, the sheep on the farm also got used to me, and, in my last couple days there, I often went up to the paddocks in my spare time and just sat down in the grass and chilled out with them. Part of me knows that these sheep were conditioned to associate Human with Bringer of Food, but most of me knows it was also one of the coolest feelings ever to stand in the center of a paddock, the breeze taking away the bite of the sun's heat and drying the sweat on my skin, as about eighty ewes start moseying my way.

I also really love it when sheep are comfortable enough with you that they can turn their back on you:

I also went to visit the lambs to take pictures of my latest pair of knit socks, and had these two lovely helpers:

Don't they just look like they're going to get into some serious trouble?

Anyway, socks:

Noro Silk Garden Sock, two different colorways, four row stripes, my regular sock pattern. Can I just say how much I love Noro, even though the yarn itself is rather crap? These were knit in about a week, since I just wanted to keep seeing how the color would change next!

The final project I worked on at Fleecewood was washing fleeces for processing into batts, and then playing with lichen and onion skins in my first attempt at natural dyeing. What a hard life I lead, eh?

It was a grey, rainy day while I was dyeing these, and it was absolutely wonderful to sit comfortably in the garage, tucking my toes close to the gas rings to keep warm and occasionally stirring these incredibly aromatic pots of wool. After about an hour of simmering, we had:

The peachy-brown was dyed with lichen, with alum and cream of tartar mordant. The acid yellow was onion skins, mordanted with alum, cream of tartar, and ferrous sulfate. Anne and I split these, and I blended my lot together to get this heathery, old gold color that is screaming to be cabled mittens.

I just need to keep spinning it!

So from the sheep shelters, to the sheep themselves, to the fleeces and dyeing, I had a wonderful time at Fleecewood. Seeing Anne, a strong, single woman, doing this on her own, has made my little, farfetched dream of someday owning my own farm seem not that farfetched anymore. I feel like the possibilities are limitless, and I can't wait to keep exploring!

To say goodbye, I give you a quizzical Tweety the sheep and a sullen and rained-on Boy the goat, both of whom I got to know pretty well at Fleecewood. Both had leg injuries in the first week I was there, and so were confined to the race down by the shed so that Anne could keep an eye on them and treat them as needed. I would break branches off the tree lucerne for them whenever I would walk by, and Boy would often come nibble on my ear when I was trying to saw wood for the sheep shelter cross-braces. They always made my day!

Making my winding way back North

2010-02-22T19:10:00.000-08:00

Hello all! Greetings from Nelson, where I am comfortably ensconced back at Betty's, the llama lady I stayed with way back in October and November. We've just wound down from an all-felting, all-the-time weekend up in a little place called Teapot Valley, and I finally found the chance to talk about my trip from the bottom of the South Island to the top, and then my time at my latest farm, a wonderful place called Fleecewood. So here we go!

I decided this time that, since I'd already traveled the East Coast of the South Island, it would be good to head up the West Coast to get back to Nelson. This is the least populated and most forested area of New Zealand, and so the twenty-two plus hours I spent on buses (spread over three days, thank goodness) was mostly shrouded in lush, tall greenery, with occasional glimpses like this:

and stops to see things like this:

Which, for the life of me, I can't remember the name of. I don't know if you've noticed so far, but I'm a pretty bad tourist. I tend to wander off the beaten path, both literally and figuratively, and instead of dutifully reading the info sign about the waterfall or trying to capture its enormity on camera with everyone else, I end up crouched in the bushes on a deer path, getting bitten ferociously by mosquitoes and taking pictures of random bits of river that had an interesting play on color and shadow and light.

So I'll be absolutely no help when you try and plan your own trip to New Zealand ("You need to go see that thing! In the place! With the other thing!"), but darnit if I don't have good adventures along the way.

One of the other places we stopped was the Pancake Rocks, about a kilometer of unusual rock formations on the coast.

One of the other cool things about this area was that the entire pathway around the Pancake Rocks is surrounded by harakeke, or New Zealand native flax.

I've so far been too intimidated by the native bush conservation efforts to filch a leaf off of this to process for spinning, but I might work up the courage soon. Harakeke is used a lot in Maori weaving, but it's used in strips about an inch wide, whereas I want to see if it will strip down and ret into linen. Stay tuned!

Okay, this is getting rather long, so I'd better split this into two blog posts. Stick around for what happened when I finally got off the bus and made it to Fleecewood, the next stop on my WWOOFing tour!

Tally Hoooooo!

2010-02-01T18:57:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the love of my life.

Mr. Peel is fully seventy-five, crotchety, and already married, but he also runs the woolcarding machine at Tally Ho Woolcarding, the next stop on my fibery tour. In this picture he's scraping one of the drums of the machine, pulling off about two years' worth of short fibers, vegetable matter, and dirt. This is one of forty drums on the machine. And you thought your drumcarder was bad-ass.

Tally Ho was absolutely top of my list when I was looking at places to work and stay in New Zealand, and it definitely hasn't disappointed. Besides the obvious draw of the wool (oooooh, the wool!), the people and animals at Tally Ho made it, almost instantly, my New Zealand home. I knew it was the perfect place for me when, whilst in the middle of a playful argument with her husband Stuart (Mr. Peel's son and the current owner of the farm), Barb (one of my favorite people in the world) took out her teeth and threw them at him. How can you not love someone who isn't afraid to use her dentures as a way to prove a point?

I settled into a quick routine at Tally Ho: mornings and afternoons were devoted to Wings-n-Things, otherwise known as the two flocks of baby ducks, one flock of adult ducks, one flock of baby chicks, and one flock of adult chickens. The first week or so of my stay, the first order of the day was to transport the smallest flock of ducks from their inside cage (as they were too little and it was still too cold for them to stay outside overnight) to their outside cage. How does one accomplish this? Through the simple use of a laundry basket, of course! Laundry basket goes inside the inside cage, you grab each duckling (frantically squirming and waving their little stubby wings the while) and deposit them inside, then take the entire wriggling basket out the door to their outside cage and repeat the process. Rinse and repeat in the afternoon. Soon, though, they were deemed big enough to switch over to the cage down by the pond (previous occupied by flock of baby ducks #2, who were now out roaming with adult duck flock #1), where they grew fat and fluffy and too cute for words.
Once these guys were all set, the adult ducks came running to the genteel call of "duck-duck-duck-duck-duck-duck-duck!" (and repeat!), and got their morning feed. The baby chicks were next, and, after scooping up any escape artists and depositing them back in the pen, they got down to eating pretty quick:
The routine was the same in the evening, but you also got to add the adult chickens to the mix, who got handfuls of grain in various places in order to distract them enough for me to collect the eggs:

Oh, by the way, the view up the hill from the chicken coop?
Yeah.

Besides this routine, I spent most of my time bugging Mr. Peel in the woolshed and helping him on the carding machine. Batts, roving, merino, alpaca, mohair, romney, even possum (!)--I was having the time of my life. And, well, I suppose this baby is the true love of my life (sorry, Mr. Peel):

Hubba hubba.

Oh! And ever wondered how they got roving into bumps? (No, Bristol, it would just be you who's that nerdy.)
Once the fiber comes off the machine and through a series of pulleys (if the wool is behaving) or through my hands (if it wasn't), it gets fed into this fantastic contraption, which winds it like a horizontal ballwinder. How cool is that?! I want one!

Regardless of my lust for all things fibery-mechanical, this place truly became home for the short time I was there. Barb, Stuart, and Mr. Peel, not to mention Victoria, the other, long-long-long-term WWOOFer (she's at about four months, with another eleven planned!), were so completely wonderful, welcoming, and funny that it seemed right when they talked about me "coming back home" in mid-March. So I'll be back boarding with them from mid-March while I work on the apple season, and then working on the winter rush in the woolshed with Barb when Mr. Peel heads back to Britain for six months. It's so funny how things pan out sometimes; my notebook where I first made comments on which farms I'd like to stay at has the note, "VERY YES! At least a month" next to these guys, and I couldn't agree more with that. I can't wait to go back!

As an added bonus, Lucy, the donkey on the left here?
Totally due to pop with a baby donkey any time now. Baby donkey! How does life get better? Oh yeah, Pip the farm dog is pregnant, too, and should be giving birth about a week before I get back. Yep, life is good.

A Whirlwind Tour of Wellington, Christchurch, and Queenstown!

2010-01-09T01:25:00.001-08:00

I'm writing from the unbelievably cold and rainy Queenstown, on the night before I head back out to the farm! I've had a lovely three weeks off from WWOOFing, but both my sense of adventure and my bank account are looking forward to getting back down to work. Before heading out, though, I wanted to show you a little of how I've been spending the last few weeks!

I started out in Wellington, which is probably my favorite city in New Zealand. It's full of public art, fabulous museums, small indie boutiques, quirky cafes and restaurants, and a beautiful waterfront--sound familiar? Yeah, it does remind me a heck of a lot of Portland, with much the same energy and vibe to it. I'd go back in a heartbeat (and I will go back mid-March, for a couple concerts/talks during the National Arts Festival)!
One of the big things I loved about Wellington was Te Papa Tongarewa, the national museum of New Zealand. Five stories of exhibits ranging from the original signatures of The Treaty of Waitangi, where Maori chiefs signed with both their written name and a drawing of their moko, or facial tattoos:

To the handwoven feather cloak given to Captain Cook in Hawai'i as a mark of respect (sorry, no pictures allowed, but here's a link): http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/Education/OnlineResources/SGR/Pages/Captaincook.aspx

to a refurbished station wagon celebrating the nation's love for all things corrugated iron:
It was an absolutely fabulous place to hang out, and, since it was free, I took full advantage! Most of my grad school statement of purpose was written while people-watching on the fourth floor and breathing a sigh of relief that they hadn't thought to secure the museum's wireless networks so I could harass Mom with editing questions (thanks, Mom!).

One of the other really cool things about Wellington was that I happened to be there during the 15th Annual Unicycle World Championships! Now, I am unabashedly a sucker for public celebrations of weird habits and activities, so of course I had to go and check it out. One of my friends from the hostel, Stefanie from Germany, was here for the competition, so I tagged along whenever possible. I saw races:
The high-jump competition (the first competitor was the neighborhood cat, who received a thunderous round of applause when he wandered through and jumped the bar at 5 cm):
(the last girl in the competition, who went out at about 70cm, or about 2ft, 4 in.)
(the winner of the competition, who won at an eventual height of 122cm, or 4 feet. 4 feet! On a unicycle! This guy was out on New Year's Eve, doing unicycle tricks on Cuba Street, and I embarrassed myself thoroughly by cheering him on by the wrong name. Loudly. Right on, Bristol. Right on.)
I also was privileged to see the artistic freestyle unicycle, both pairs and individual. I sadly had to leave the day of the group freestyle, but I really wish I had seen that!
(Unicycle pirouettes! In tandem! How cool is that?)

Sadly leaving Wellington the day after New Year's, I made my way back across the water to the South Island and down the East coast to Christchurch for a few days. The road down was spectacular, but the camera didn't have batteries. My apologies. We came down the Kaikoura coast, famous for its seals, penguins, and jaw-droppingly beautiful coastline, in the very teeth of a Southerly gale, and it was one of the most glorious moments of my life. Coming down out of the hills into the decidedly flat Canterbury Plains, the seat of Christchurch, was a bit of a thud. I think it would be lovely to live in Christchurch, but vacationing there was a little ho-hum. There was a fantastic art museum, and really lovely botanical gardens, but all in all, I did a lot of reading and sleeping and was more than glad to head out to Queenstown after a few days.

I had originally written off Queenstown as way too touristy to be worth my while, but had some time to kill, so why not? I found out that the drive alone from Christchurch to Queenstown made the whole thing worth it.

(I have become that tourist that sits in the front seat of the bus in order to see the view better. My apologies again for the through-the-bus-window pictures!)

The lupines are out!

The bus stopped for a break at Lake Tekapo, whose water looks almost like celadon pottery due to minerals deposits in the water stirred up by the glaciers.
And once you get into Queenstown itself, it becomes abundantly clear why it is such a tourist spot. It is, simply, out of this world:

(Three weeks later:)
I started this blog post, got to the Queenstown bit, and realized all my Queenstown pictures were still on the camera, and the camera cord was packed away waaaaaaay down in the bottom of my pack. So I thought I would post the blog as is from my next WWOOF farm, but the dial-up there couldn't handle Blogspot. So, three weeks later, traveling up the West Coast of the South Island to my next farm, I get to finish my thought!
Queenstown was absolutely lovely, even if completely freezing, and it was easy to see why it was so popular. But off I went the next morning to start WWOOFing again, this time on a little farm with its own wool processing facility. And the adventure had just begun. . .

Shearing Day at Mangarara

2009-12-27T00:38:00.001-08:00

It seems so silly that I've left such a gap between entries here, as this next event occurs the day after my hill walk in Otane! The night of the hill walk, I accompanied Sandy and her daughter Ava to the end of year celebration at Elsthorpe School, the three-room primary school that both Ava, and Greg and Rachel's oldest son, George, attended. When I ran into Greg there, he mentioned that the next day was shearing day at Mangarara! So early the next morning, I borrowed a car from Bob and Sandy and headed over to Mangarara (my first time driving on the left--I only went off the road once!) to help out in any way and do some general gawking at this yearly ceremony.

By the time I got there, Greg had already mustered about half the ewes into the paddock by the sheep yards. I got to stand strategically, make Big Scary Noises, and watch Ben and Kaya, the sheepdogs, do their job and get the sheep into the pens:

Watching sheep move like a school of fish really will never get old. (And actually, now that I look at that picture, it looks like Ben's doing all the work; the black spot within the concrete block at the very right of the picture is Kaya having a paddle in the cistern.)

Once we got the ewes in, Greg got to work getting the shearing stations ready and I got to work taking more pictures of sheep.
When the shearers arrived, they started setting up, and Greg and I went back up to the top of the driveway to collect the rams for shearing as well. Greg gave me a four-wheeler and the task of getting the rams back to the sheepyards, which I was more than happy to do. I missed tearing around on four-wheelers!
Look at 'em go! Except, as evidenced by the fact that I could take pictures and drive a four-wheeler at the same time, here's a shot of the spedometer:
Four kilometers an hour. Yeeee haw.
An eternity later, when I finally got the rams out to the sheepyards, the shearers were all set up and ready to go. There were four men and three women, most of them related, and it was amazing to watch them work. They had obviously been working together for a very long time, and seemed almost like a single machine rather than seven different people.
Three of the men were up on the platform, doing the actual shearing, and the three women stood on the floor below, skirting the fleece as it came off, sorting the belly wool, neck wool, and dags into three different piles before taking the remaining fleece to the wool baler, that contraption in the center of the photo there. The sheep on this farm are Romney, Finn, Texel, and Perendale, all varieties that have been bred for meat rather than wool (even though I think the wool is really lovely!). So, rather than selling each fleece individually, the wool gets packed into bales and sent to an auction or an agent who will buy it for carpet wool.
So when each shearer finished with a sheep, the woman on the floor would roll it up and heave it at the wool baler, aiming for either of those two wooden bins. The fourth guy there was in charge of the baler, and would take the fleeces the women threw him and pack them in those bins as tightly as possible. He started with his arms (I got to help with this bit, and my skin up to the elbows was buttery-soft from all the lanolin), but as the bins got more and more full, he just hopped in and stomped on it like he was making wine.

At first, I thought he had made a mistake--there was only a sack in the right-hand bin, and how was he going to get a sack on the left bin? Surely he couldn't pack them in any tighter. Wrong!

Once he had packed in the bins as tightly as possible (probably about 40-50 fleeces in each bin), he put a square of wood and a very heavy metal lid on top of the left bin, then winched the left bin up until it could easily swing over the right bin. Once they were stacked on top of each other, he secured a rather elaborate pulley system to the metal lid, and with a big lever on the backside of the assembly, slowly compacted aaaaall the already-well-packed wool from the left bin into the just-as-already-well-packed bin on the right. I half-feared and half-anticipated what would happen if the pulleys malfunctioned: a wool volcano! Sadly, they never did.

Each bale of wool weighed about 150-200 kilos, and by the end of the day there were about seven of these bales, representing about 250 ewes and about 18 rams. And this was just day one!

The sheep themselves, although sometimes nicked and slightly dazed, seemed little the worse for wear. However, their heads now seemed waaaay too big for their bodies:

The rams, meanwhile, just looked like football players with very short haircuts:

(Not sure what's going on with the shaggy guy in the front there--he may just have been too ornery to sit still for the shearing.)

Ben the sheepdog and I herded the shorn ewes out into one of the far paddocks for the night (or rather, herded them twice, as I got them all in the right spot before realizing that I hadn't opened the gate. Awesome.), and, after stealing a judiciously large handful of wool, I made my dirty, sweaty, and sheep-greasy way back to Bob and Sandy's. All in all, I couldn't have asked for a better shearing day!

Next up: big city living after two months of complete rural immersion. Do I still remember what traffic lights look like?

Hill-Climbing in Otane

2009-12-19T21:33:00.001-08:00

Oh, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner--what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

I'm writing in from Wellington, where I'm already enjoying myself immensely on my Christmas holidays! I have a few things to catch up on, though, and the first of them is my time at Bob and Sandy's in Otane.
Sandy was kind enough to take me on after I finished at Mangarara, and while there wasn't a whole lot of outdoor work to do, I still managed to have a great time. Their property includes a beautiful range of hills, and after getting dared many times by the teenage boys of the household to go for it, I finally managed to go for a walk up the hill a couple days before leaving.
First, to get to the track, you get to clamber down another hill from the house, along a creek, and through a bull paddock. The bulls didn't seem too impressed with my chances of getting down the hill in the first place:

but once I had gamely scrambled my way down, gone the wrong way for a bit, and avoided the bulls, I set off along the track.

Things were your pretty much typical farm track for about forty-five minutes, up until I rounded the curve and started making it up into the foothills. One of the beautiful things about New Zealand (and also pretty horrible, environmentally) is that the hills are all worn away into terraces from the sheep and cattle grazing on them for 150 years. In most places, it looks like overgrown Mayan ruins with high, steep steps. In this case, though, the topsoil was shallow enough that the erosion has brought out the rock formations underneath, so it looks like a massive cairn for a long-dead giant.

The weather broke at this point, and I felt pretty spectacular walking up to the cleft in the hills, the apex of the walk:

To find yet another reason to love this country:

The path started snaking down the backside of the hills, but I was having none of that. Up I went over the tamped-down sheep paths, to find the tops of the hills!

The sheep were still using the sheep paths.

And, just to scare my dad, this is basically looking straight down:

When I got to the top of the hill, among the long grass, thistles, and sheep, I popped my headphones in and had a good, old-fashioned, joyous boogie-down. It doesn't get much better than this.

And finally, back at the bottom of the hill, exhilarated, sun-warm, I managed one of my favorite self-portraits ever (thanks, self-timer):

So there's your moment of New Zealand bliss for the day. Hopefully it'll help melt some of the snow back home!

Mangarara Station

2009-12-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

I have been sitting here for about ten minutes, trying to figure out how to start this blog post! It's been a month and a bit since I first made it to Hawke's Bay, and a week since I've moved off of Mangarara Station to a nearby farm. I know it's a bit early in the game for me to have found a favorite place in this country, but I might just be a tiny bit besotted with this area. Staying at Mangarara Station has definitely helped form that opinion in my mind!

I was trying to figure out how to introduce you to Mangarara, and thought the best way would be to take a little tour. So just imagine these shots from the back of a four-wheeler as Greg, the wonderful, incredibly knowledgeable, and really fun owner, blazes down the dirt road and across the paddocks with you, clinging madly to the scant framework and hoping you don't bounce off!
We start out at the little cabin where I stayed for most of my time at Mangarara. (Okay, so you don't need the four-wheeler for this bit.)

Every morning I would wake up to the birds flitting in and out of their nests in the vents. They liked to wake up much earlier than I did, but I don't think I could have chosen a better way to wake up! So I would stumble out of bed, bleary-eyed, and stand out on the porch to wake up fully.

As you can sort of see there, both the bedroom and the bath have full glass doors looking out into the lake paddock, the view I showed you last time. A couple days before I left, Greg moved a flock of sheep into the paddock, so my morning ablutions were often accompanied by a couple ewes and lambs looking quizzically over the fence.

(The sheep, having grown bored with my toothbrushing antics, head off to try out the kayaks.)
Once I'd woken up and had breakfast with Rachel, Greg's amazing, capable, and friendly wife, George, who had his sixth birthday while I was there, and Bill and Emma, the four-year-old twins, I would wander out to the backyard paddock to bottle-feed Cookies'n'Cream the lamb.

Lambs, like kid goats, wiggle far too much to take good pictures of! There were about six pet lambs in that paddock, including little Cookies here, whose mothers had either died or had abandoned them after birth, and so had needed to be hand-fed. The problem with this is, when you train sheep to be comfortable around humans, you lose any sort of ability to scare them into going where you want them. I was given the job of shifting them across the road to the lake paddock with the rest of that flock at one point, and so I set off with a smile and a borrowed pair of Wellies. How hard could it be? Three-quarters of an hour later, with no smile and lots of blisters from stumping around in those Wellies, I had gotten those lambs no farther than a continual brisk trot up and down the driveway. Finally Rachel got them to go through the gate by walking through it and making mommy-sheep noises. You win some, you lose some.

So once you've fed Cookies'n'Cream and she's wandered off to look pitiful as you cruise by on the four-wheeler:

The lake is on the right as you head down the road, and the pine forest rises on the left, home to the three opinionated chooks (chickens). On either side of the road are lovely, worn, sheep-bent wire fences, often with little clumps of stray wool still clinging to them:

(You better believe I stole some of that stuff.)
Once you make it back up to the Mangarara sign, you take a sharp left and head down the long, tree-lined way to the cattle yards. Here's where you're going to need to squint a bit, as the poplars are pollinating, and their seeds are swirling around like soft, delicate, and always-gets-in-your-eyes-while-you're-trying-to-drive-the-damn-four-wheeler snow. Greg told me that they call it "miff muff moof" after The Lorax, and that makes me very happy.

You'll take a right at the cattle yards, and as Greg shifts the four-wheeler into fifth gear, you'll whizz past the first mob of Wagyu beef cattle.

(I was literally whizzing past on the back of a four-wheeler while taking that photo; see how far I'll go for the sake of realism in this blog?)
Now, I am pretty ambivalent on cows; to be honest, I think they're too big for me to comfortably feel in charge of, so I haven't worked too hard to get to know them. But these guys are unnervingly smart, gorgeously svelte, and way too inquisitive for their own good. They like pulling down the electric fence, and so while Greg was sorting that out at one point, it was my job to keep them contained within one side of the paddock. Usually, cows will just back off, and stay away from you, especially if you're a stranger. But these guys were constantly nudging closer and closer to me to check me out, and even when I made Big Scary Noises (patented) they didn't stay off for long. Likewise, Greg drove me up to the top of one of the rises once, and I stayed with the four-wheeler while he took out some thistles. The entire mob of cattle came up the hill and surrounded me and the four-wheeler, nibbling on the seat and whuffling through the exhaust pipe. Part of me is daunted by their brazenness, and another part is impressed. Plus, I've heard they taste really good. So there you go.

Once you pass that first mob of cattle, the road will twist and wind among the paddocks and hills until you reach the sheep yards. I got to hang out and "help" during lamb drafting and weighing (don't know how much help I actually was, but I was enthusiastic!). The day I was helping, they were taking off the male lambs weighing over 30kg. However, they had a flock encompassing the length and breadth of sheep-kind: big, little, lamb, ewe, male, female. This is where the process of drafting comes in: the sheep get herded from the paddock into a series of ever-shrinking pens, until they are sent through a race that is only wide enough for one at a time:

At the head of that race are, in this case, three different doors to three different pens. As the sheep come up the race (my job was to make sure they kept moving, either by making Big Scary Noises again or by flipping the sheep around who was blocking the way), the person holding the doors will open the appropriate one--all male lambs this way, ewes and female lambs that way. From there, it felt a bit like an ever-more-specific series of Venn diagrams--male lambs definitely over 30kg that way, potentially over 30 that way, and definitely not over 30 that way. Then, after weighing the over 30s and the maybes (another series of pens and a race wide enough for one at a time, culminating in a scale with doors on either side), and tagging those over 30kg (the red paint in the picture above), the process begins again, drafting the tagged ones off from the rest. From there, those who needed to be crutched (shearing the dirty wool from around the bum) were drafted off from the clean ones. Finally, after crutching, all of them were let back into the paddock with their moms, that red tag indicating who would get drafted off when the process happened all over again the next morning when the lambs went off on their way to the works. It is exhausting, dusty, and very, very hot; I now have very silly tan lines on my brow from squinting in the sun all day. But it is also really fun. Once you get a flow going, where everyone from the herding dogs to the hapless WWOOFer to the experienced farmer on the drafting gates is focused, and the sheep are being only a bit recalcitrant, it turns into this lovely dance of dust, hooves, slamming gates, and warm, worn wood under your hands.

Once you've finished your day at the sheep yards, you have a choice of accommodation. You can head back up to the house and the cabin, where the kids will regale you with tales of Legos and Thomas the Tank Engine, you can take a nice soak in the bathtub with that magnificent view and a good book for company, or you can crack open a beer and sit on the porch with Atticus the cat. Or you can climb back on the four-wheeler, take a right out of the sheepyards, head out through two more paddocks, through a couple gates, and down along a ravine to the bush cabin. It's a small bunkroom with outdoor plumbing and no electricity built into one of the preserved sections of native bush at Mangarara:

The bullfrogs are pretty clear that the pond belongs to them, but they're relatively good about sharing. I spent a night out here during my second weekend on the farm, which was one of the busiest I've ever been involved in!

One of the things that Greg and Rachel have done so well on this farm is form partnerships that are mutually beneficial to both parties involved. The second weekend I was there was the fruit of one of those partnerships, this one with Air New Zealand. It apparently started when Greg called up and asked if he couldn't buy some trees with his air miles rather than plane tickets, and ended with Air New Zealand giving them a sizable grant to plant native trees at Mangarara as carbon offset for the airline. They've also been working with the Air New Zealand Green Team to set up "working holiday" corporate retreats for Air New Zealand employees, and this weekend was the very first. Fifty Air NZ employees from Auckland rocked up to the farm on Saturday morning, and they spent the weekend weeding around the sapling trees, grubbing thistles, eating unbelievable amounts of food (I'm now staying on the farm of Sandy, the lovely woman who catered the weekend and sent everyone home at least two kilos heavier), kayaking in the lake, and generally having the time of their lives.

My job for the weekend was General Helper to everyone involved, and I don't think I stopped running for most of the weekend! They had wine tastings, campfire sing-alongs and marshmallow roastings, a wonderful and hilarious storyteller's show (with lots of audience participation and alcohol), and, the culmination of the weekend, an Agri-sports event on Sunday. The events ranged from archery, to putting in a fence-post, to setting up an electric fence, to sheep drafting, to quizzes on native flora and strange farm equipment, to my event, sheep weighing. Now, each team of five was originally supposed to guess a group of five sheep's weight, then put them through the race to the scale to find out the real weight. However, these sheep were straight off the grass, very frisky, and were having none of that. Greg decided it would be best just to have the teams guess the weight, but I thought there needed to be a little more to it than that. So I decided that each team had to herd one of their members through the race and onto the scale! Extra points for acting properly sheep-like. The easy part was getting them through the race and onto the scale; the hard part was getting them out again! I deeply, deeply regret the absence of my camera.

Once the Air NZ people left, things calmed down into a lovely schedule at Mangarara. In addition to working out with the stock, I spent lots of time hanging out with the kids. I've never had a whole lot to do with kids that young, and it was a quick learning process, let me tell you! But we had a great time together, and I taught them to make fairy houses, so there's a little bit of Maine hanging out in that pine wood behind the house. And I know you're not supposed to have favorites, but every time Bill said, very seriously, "oh, crumbs!" with his little Kiwi accent and lisp ("oh, cwumbth!"), my heart melted and I made plans to stash him in my suitcase. I also had a wonderful, wonderful time just chatting with Rachel, as well, whose sense of humor and joie d'vivre was a hell of a lot of fun when we got caught out in a downpour while shifting cattle and repairing an electric fence. Greg continually amazed me with his energy and big plans--not only did he have big plans, but he goes on five hours of sleep to make sure he accomplishes them! He also gave me a fantastic crash course on climate change and world development through the films, The Age of Stupid and Food Inc., and the book, Blessed Unrest, all of which I would recommend highly. Just not all at once, unless you have Ben & Jerry's or alcohol to make you feel less depressed at the end! Both from these sources and from the way they market themselves on this farm, I'm looking at the world through very different eyes after being at Mangarara. And I am liking the view.

So that's a brief glimpse into my time at Mangarara, but nothing can impress just how wonderful and breathtakingly gorgeous it was. I truly am besotted with Hawke's Bay, this region of the country, and was glad of Sandy's offer to take me on for a few weeks. Even better, she also has a beach house about half an hour away at Kairakau Beach, one of the most heart-rendingly beautiful places I've ever been. I promise scads of pictures next time I post! Perhaps if I camp out on the beach, they won't make me ever leave. . .

I will leave you with pictures of a storm coming over the lake during the golden hour before twilight at Mangarara. 'Til next time!

On the Pursuit of Llama Perfection

2009-11-13T19:06:00.000-08:00

(Note: this is going to be a very fibery and yarny blog post. My apologies to those not so inclined.)

Greetings from a moderately warm, deliciously sunny Mangarara Station in Hawkes Bay on the North Island! It's been a week since I left Nelson for the beautiful wiles of the Southeastern coast of the North Island, and I'm slowly settling in to life here at Mangarara. I'll talk more about this place when I leave, but suffice it to say that there are sheep everywhere, the farm is amazing, and my bathtub looks out onto this view:

But we'll get back to that in a couple weeks. I want to tell you about my llama fiber adventure in Nelson! The basic gist of my work while at Betty's house was de-hairing llama fiber. Now, when I heard about this for the first time, I was a little skeptical. Most llama fiber I had come in contact with was pretty short, coarse, and interspersed with tons of wiry and irremovable guard hairs. So I couldn't exactly imagine why Betty wanted to take the trouble, until I saw:
Guh. 'Scuse me while I wipe the drool off the keyboard.
Betty has about seven or eight llamas and a couple alpacas, the fleece of which she primarily uses for felted garments and accessories. The first grade of this fleece, however, she saves, has blended with the highest quality silk and wool, then gives it to an 85-year-old spinner named Beth (who I want to be when I grow up), who spins it and passes it along to a couple really amazing knitters named Helen and Linda, who knit unbelievably beautiful sweaters out of it. These garments sell for about $400 NZ, which seems like a lot until you think about the time involved in just cleaning the fiber! Let me demonstrate:

Here's what the fleece looks like after it comes off the animal. This is from a llama named Pablo, and is the main fleece I worked on while at Betty's.
Typically, one of the reasons I don't like llama is the staple length, which is maybe around 2 or 2 1/2 inches. Betty counters this by shearing every two years, letting the staple length grow to about five or six inches with the highest grade locks. Here's what a lock looks like when separated from the rest of the blanket (with my very dirty and tan hand for scale):
See the trailing bits off to the right? Those are the tips of the guard hairs. The first step is to grab a hold of those and and haul them out:
You're left with the down fiber, and also all the guard hairs that didn't come out in the first pull:
The next step is to flick-card the butts and tips of the lock to get the VM and any dirt out, as well as second cuts, short fibers, and as many guard hairs as you can.
Looks miles different, right? Well, there are still probably about sixty guard hairs in that little clump. So all of that was just preamble to the next bit, where I slowly fan out all the fiber, and individually pluck out as many remaining guard hairs as I can. Depending on where the lock came from on the animal and therefore how many guard hairs it had in that spot, this bit can take anywhere from five minutes to twenty.
During the first day or two, you can imagine that this was absolute agony. The minutes ticked by so slowly I swore that the clock must be wrong, or going backwards, or was possessed by something hideous and evil that was sucking hours of my life away and not giving them back. (I found out about halfway through the week that the clock was wrong, which made me feel better.)
But after a couple days, I got obsessed. "Good enough" totally wasn't. I was going to make damn sure that there wasn't a single guard hair in there. I kept telling myself "one more lock, just one more, just one more". Thank god Betty got me obsessed with an Australian reality tv cooking show, so I had a reason I had to quit every evening! But the strictures Betty puts on her animals and her fiber processing really do create such an amazing product (seriously, comparable in softness and lightness to qiviut, but waaaay longer staple) that it was hard not to get emotionally invested.
The funniest bit was weighing the first grade of fiber at the end of my time there--I had been working about six hours a day for about eight days total, working mostly with the first grade fiber (although, to be fair, also adding to the second and the third grade piles occasionally too--shorter, coarser fiber, less nitpicky about guard hairs). Betty had said that she was able, usually, when she was being finicky, to get about 100 grams (less than 4 ounces) done in 3 hours. Now, we had been extra, extra, extra finicky with Pablo, since the final product was hopefully going in a country-wide exhibition in April. So we worked very hard to get a perfect fiber in the finest grade, and I was confident that we'd done at least 300 grams. After all, all those hours! The final weight?
81 grams.
A little more than 2 ounces.
Granted, yes, the shopping bag of fiber was completely stuffed full and llama fiber is very light and the other two grades weighed about 400 grams total, but it took a couple hours to come to grips. Betty was very happy, though, and we'd made it through most of the fleece, so that's what counts!
Plus, here's what my hands looked like at the end of the day (and I'd washed my hands three times already that day):
I'm headed back to stay with Betty in February, to do some more work with her fiber and also go hang out at a felting workshop mid-February. She's also taking me around to a couple great sheep places, where they think a lot about breeding and genetics to create the perfect fleece. I'm also looking forward to the opportunity to meet and goggle at one of her close fiber friend, Nola Fournier, who co-wrote In Sheep's Clothing, one of my favorite fiber books in the whole world. I might have squealed just a little when I found out she lived in the area!

One of my other actions while still in the Nelson area was knitting my remaining sock yarn in a trade for yet another painting!

The Colinette Jitterbug I brought got knitted up with helical stripes and my typical sock pattern into:
I dropped these off the day before I left to travel north. It was close!

So that's what I've been up to since the last post. My camera is being a bit of a diva, but hopefully I'll be able to take some more pictures of here at Mangarara Station (give it a quick Google; they've got a website that talks about their mission and some of the really neat partnerships they've got going). Right now, Atticus the cat has left me my third kind present of a half-eaten rabbit (he's so thoughtful), so I'd better go take care of that.
Thanks to everyone for their kind comments on my posts so far; I've not yet figured out how to reply to comments individually (anyone know how to do that on blogspot?), but it really means a lot to know that you're all out there and sharing this adventure with me!

(Written on Tuesday earlier this week!)

2009-10-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

So my next blog post was going to be a proper photoshoot with the handspun socks so charmingly modeled under my Chaco's in the last post. But, as you do, I traded them to an artist for a painting. The artist is a former weaver and a friend of my WWOOF host, Susie, who recently put up an art exhibition around a "trading table". Susie had gone in to trade a weaving for a triptych, and I just couldn't handle leaving this painting behind! She had painted it during a period where she explored the idea of "shelter", but, to me, it's just the rocks on the coast of Maine. Which is my own form of comfort and shelter, I suppose. So I scuttled off home, collected my socks, and offered them up. Hence, now I have a painting, and no socks. Such is life.

Today is my last day here at the farm in Upper Moutere (which, I only learned about three days ago, is pronounces "Moo-tree". No wonder everyone looked at me funny when I told them where I was going). I have gone out with a bang, getting my first, rather spectacular, New Zealand sunburn while planting corn. I'm headed into Nelson for the llama sorting job tomorrow--things got complicated last week, so I just stuck around at the farm for another week. When we got home Saturday from the market, I found three little reasons to be glad I did:

Left to right: Giselle (the lighter tall doe), Naomi (the darker tall doe), and Spud (the little short, stubby boy) were born on Saturday morning.

Spud is obviously my favorite, as he's built like a tank and has a bleat like a squeaky toy getting stepped on. He also eats like it's going out of style, his tail wagging fiercely the entire time.

Giselle (or Gizzy, as she's better known at this point) is a little finicky about eating from the feeder, and so I get to bottle-feed her about four times a day. I try not to plotz from the cute every time!

Besides the baby goats, I've been having a wonderful time on this farm. There are some standards that happen every day, like mixing goat food (you add about a kilo of molasses and hot water, which leaves the most delicious smell throughout the house for the rest of the day), milking goats, and bottling the milk. Then some days I make the tramp down the hill, through the creek, to feed Bucky the buck and Chalky, his wether boyfriend:

(check out Bucky's fierce topknot.)

Other days we move the sheep from paddock to paddock, or chase down a cow, or separate off the yearlings and six-month calves for sale. There's always weeding, composting, and planting to do, and the everpresent bleat of baby goats (both the batch from Saturday and the older bunch I mentioned earlier) to remind you that you might have forgotten them and they haven't eaten for a whole fifteen minutes. Fridays are picking days for the Saturday market, so I spend the day cutting lettuce, picking arugula, parsley, and spinach, and washing the lot for sale the next day. I've come at the dead time of year, where all the root vegetables are done, and the spring stuff hasn't quite come up yet, but the salads--oh, the salads. I could happily live the rest of my life eating just these salads.

Both Susie and Kevin, my two hosts, are immensely knowledgeable about both the day-to-day life of farming, as well as the business statistics of making this farm both sustainable and profitable. I really enjoy the conversations over tea (oh, the endless, wonderful cups of tea!) about what the profit differential would be between an autumn calf and a spring calf--I guess you can take the girl out of nerd territory, but you can't take the nerd out of the girl!

Mostly, though, it's the little things that get me about this place: the cheesecloths air-drying out on the line, wafting in and out of prayer flags so old all the color has faded:

The sight of a storm coming up over the hills, fighting against the light of the golden hour before twilight; the sad, annoyed bleat of Panda, the Hokanui sheep who thinks she's a goat, as she gets left behind with those other sheep again; Kevin singing every variety of English folk song as he walks over the hills to the cows; playing cards and drinking wine during a power outage. It's been a truly wonderful starting point for my New Zealand adventure.

I'll be in Nelson until the 7th of November, and then I'll be heading back up to the North Island to work on a 2,000 head sheep farm in Hawkes Bay. After that, who knows? On with the adventure!

(I'm finally uploading this on Saturday, the 31st. I've been working in Nelson for the last couple days, de-hairing the most magnificent llama fiber by hand. The fiber is amazing, and I love the woman I'm working for, but there is definitely a reason they invented a de-hairing machine!)

2009-10-16T12:06:00.001-07:00

A quick pictoral explanation of my trip south from Auckland, near the midpoint of the North Island, to a farm in Upper Moutere, near the North coast of the South Island:

The rather astonishing range of mountains we went through about three hours south of Auckland:

The bus driver pulled over for about ten minutes to let us have, as he put it, "a biff in the snow". I remained nonplussed.

(And here comes the requisite Mastercard commercial):Superwash merino fiber, from Fat Cat Knits on Etsy: $20

Spinning and plying to a fingering/sport weight: about 10 hours

Finishing knitting a pair of lovely, warm, squishy socks just in time for really cold feet on the bus ride: pretty darn good

Being That Kid who attempts to take pictures of her besocked and besandaled feet against the New Zealand backdrop on a very crowded double-decker bus: priceless.

The next morning, after a quick overnight in Wellington, I got up disgustingly early and hopped on the Interislander Ferry to Picton on the South Island. I was lucky enough to catch the sun breaking up the mist and the clouds over the sea:

After finally arriving in Upper Moutere, the view from my bedroom window:

(The little white things on the hill? Totally sheep. I am surrounded by sheep. I might be in heaven.)

And one of my favorite bits about this farm:

Baby goats!

This is Peony. She's trouble.

So, all in all, I am having a lovely time! I'll be out here in Upper Moutere until either Wednesday or Saturday, then I'm moving into Nelson proper for a while to work sorting and grading llama fiber for a felter. After that, who knows? It's all a big adventure!

And more baby goats, because I just can't help myself.

Southward Ho I Go!

2009-10-10T12:01:00.000-07:00

My body is still, unfortunately, running on my leisurely home wake-up schedule, which means that a lovely 11 am wake-up at home is 4 am here. Oh well! It means I get to see the city wake up and play lots of games on my iPod, so we're all good.

I've had an absolutely wonderful time in the city--I am really not a city girl, but this is a good 'un. We lucked out on timing somewhat, since this weekend is the Diwali festival on the harbor here. Last night after dinner we walked down there and people-watched for a couple hours, cheering on the Bollywood dance competition and drooling over all the amazing food. Auckland has a much more diverse and much more populous Asian community, both East and South Asian, than I expected. All the little alleyways are crammed with some seriously amazing little shops and restaurants, and I am proud to say that I managed to secure myself a bubble tea on my first night in town! It's like I've got bubble tea radar!

I'm headed out in about an hour with a friend to catch a bus down to Wellington, where she'll stick around and where I'll hop on another ferry and two more buses tomorrow to get to my first farm in Upper Moutere, near Nelson on the South Island. I'm really looking forward to the drive: Auckland is the population center of the country, with over a million people in the metropolitan area. The entire country, on the other hand, only has *four* million people. So once I hit those city limits, I'm looking forward to farmland! And once I hit the South Island, it should be even better--they only have a million people total! Total isolation in a beautiful landscape, here I come.

Well, I'm off to make sure I've packed everything up and to see if I can't rustle up something interesting to eat for breakfast. See you on the South Island!

2009-10-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

Well, after about twenty hours in the air, I am in New Zealand! I am currently hogging a corner of a couch at Auckland Backpacker's Hostel, a massive, 500-bed hostel in the center of the city. I'm torn between using my internet time responsibly, and eavesdropping on all the conversations and all the different languages going on.
I'll be laying pretty low here in Auckland--I'm not a very good big city tourist! I'll probably just find a coffee shop and camp out and look mysterious and aloof. Or, you know, trip over my own feet on the way in. Whichever.

2009-09-03T16:39:00.001-07:00

Test!