The Christchurch Shawl

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!

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.

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. . .

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

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

(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

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.