When people ask what my favorite yarn is, I have a very, VERY hard time narrowing it down.  I am a wooly girl for sure, but surprisingly, over the last few years, among the raves about Shelter and Puffin and Noro, a little linen birdie has flown into the mix.  Sparrow, the fingering weight linen from Quince, is a seriously wonderful yarn.  Which is why, when I talked to Pam at Quince about designing some shawls for the spring, it was at the very top of my list.
One of those shawls came out a few weeks ago--meet Rue!



I started working on this shawl design right as winter was turning into spring here in Portland.  In my walks around my neighborhood, the sidewalks were starting to show through the dirt and sand of the winter and the new grasses were starting to come up through the old, frost-bleached ones.  Later, as time went on and I was knitting the sample, the tiniest of the early spring flowers started appearing.



The shawl was designed to mimic those seasonal changes--the transition from cold to warm, season to season, linear to organic.



And let me gush about this yarn a bit further: holy GOODNESS does it hold a block beautifully.  The crispness and the drape of the lace pattern wouldn't be possible without the wonderful staying power of the linen.  I can't wait to work with it further!



Rue is knit in a traditional top-down triangular shape, and calls for 5 skeins of Sparrow in sans.  You can find it at Quince here, and on Ravelry here!

Sunday Funday Silence

I know I've been pretty quiet over here for a couple weeks.  Things have been busy at Chez Blackbird, but they only reached fever pitch two Sundays ago.  Want to hear the story?

So, I have this cat, Jashu.  He is, 98% of the time, a wonderful, magnificent, goofy beast.  I have conversations with him more than I'd like to admit.  And he'd never really shown an interest in my knitting! I counted myself lucky that I was able to knit with him next to me or on my lap, and he'd never try to catch the yarn or get in the way.

 

The not-so-wee beastie in question.

So, the Saturday of the 14th, I finished a sweater that had a deadline of May 1st for pattern and sample.  No sweat! I thought, merrily got it blocking on the blocking mats on my floor, warned Jashu off the pins until at least a day had gone by (he likes pulling them out), and ignored it for the rest of the weekend.  I've blocked tons of things there, never had a problem except for the aforementioned pins.  Tra la, I thought, I have plenty of time!

Fast forward to Sunday afternoon, when I am working away on the loom on my project of many (chartreuse) hues, when I saw Jashu make a beeline to lie down on the sweater.  Not good, I say to myself and head over to shoo him off.  When. . . I see it.  Them.

The holes.

The large, shredded, gaping holes.

 

Any shaky camera work is entirely due to the "oh my god what have you done" adrenaline running through me at that moment.

Jashu apparently really liked this sweater.  Enough to use it as a scratching board.  Upon closer inspection, it turned out that all the holes were above the armhole split, but that still meant about thirty hours of knitting gone in the swipe of a tiny claw.  After copious wailing and some choice words and maybe a stiff drink or two, there was nothing for it but to r-r-r-rip!

 

Evidence.  I hope this cat knows how lucky he is to be alive.

All other plans for the week were abandoned, and every waking moment was devoted to re-knitting this sweater.  It came back off the needles this past Saturday, and, after a trip to Home Depot for some wire shelving, went straight on the blocking boards.  It is covered by wire grid and a towel and I am thinking of investing in an air horn for when the cat gets within two feet of it.  But it's done, and after this coming weekend, I may have some Sunday Fundays to myself again!

And the cat?

 

Try as I might, he's just too cute to stay mad at.  But just don't let him near my knitting again.

I May Have a Problem

So in the course of prepping for today's Sunday Funday, for which I am very excited (and will be revealing more about later), I compiled a few yarns in similar tones of my favorite color.  I had put a bag of leftover scraps together a while ago, and then ransacked my sock yarn stash for a few more.  And then my normal stash.  And then the back-up stash (don't ask).  And. . . well.

 

This may come back to haunt me at some point.

After doing some deep breathing, and a tiny bit of hand wringing, I stuffed most of it back into its respective cabinets and was left with the bag of remnants from the very beginning:

There are bits in there from two different dyelots of Kelp in Quince and Co's Tern, from my swatching and knitting of Alys.  There's a partial ball of Buoy in Tern, from another project I'm working on.  There are handspun scraps from a goof-off project I don't think I ever posted here (oops).  There's a couple bits of hand-dyed Brown Sheep Naturespun that I dyed for my Fair Isle Knitolution two years ago.  And there's a full skein of the most gorgeous handspun from my friend Jan, who I taught to spin and dye as an intern at the Fiber Gallery back in 2008.  I've got some pretty big plans for this stuff, which will involve the lovely piece of equipment in the background of the picture above!

The other thing I've been working on for the past few Sunday Fundays came about, spur of the moment, when we got a freak heat wave here in Maine.  I even had my window open! And you know what that means--suddenly, it's fleece washing season.  The problem I realized as I spun the excess water out of the washed fleece: this is the first time I've washed a fleece in my apartment.  This became painfully clear when I couldn't find a darn place to put it to dry!  I became very thankful that I had done dishes earlier that day.

 

 (the house was built in 1805, and has settled to a point where the cabinet doors don't shut there.  I hate this; my cat loves it.)

On the right is a fleece from Fleecewood Farm, and on the left is a CVM lamb fleece I bought at Rhinebeck back in 2008.  The first washed beautifully; the second I'm waving the white flag on and sending out to get commercially processed.  But last Sunday I got started on combing up the Fleecewood fleece!

 

I'm already dreaming about the Tour de Fleece when these are going to be my go-to.  And yes, I haven't forgotten about my Ursa--she's getting a dutiful few sleeve rows every Sunday.  But there are some other exciting things going on!

Sunday Funday: Of Matching Missteps and Magical Merino

Today's Sunday Funday is apparently brought to you by the letter "M".

I've been bouncing back and forth between projects all day today--the time shift has me all discombobulated, and I've been hopping around, running errands, doing chores, and cooking on a whim all afternoon. (By the way, pizza with sun-dried tomato feta, caramelized onions, peppers, and bacon? Well worth the fact that I ate dinner at 9:00 this evening.) Today's crafty projects have been the same: I've knit a few rows on a work project, spun a little bit, prepped some other fiber for spinning for a sweater, knit, then un-knit, then re-knit, then un-knit a few rows of the sleeves on my Ursa sweater. I can't seem to settle, and I'm starting to guess at the reasons.

(The offending sleeves think about the consequences of their actions.)

The big one is that for Lent this year, inspired by Leah's yearly escapades, I gave up video. I don't own a TV, so everything I watch is computer-based, and that can often lead me down a path of watching random crap just because it's there. So until Easter, there's no Netflix, no Youtube, no Hulu, no DVDs. My one out is that I can go see a movie, but I've been content so far with listening to audiobooks and reading on my Kindle while knitting. I hit a snag today, though--both projects I'm knitting at the moment are a wee bit too complex to work on while reading (hence the Matching Missteps of the title: it took me seriously an hour to sort out my sleeves and get them back to the same length), but the book I'm reading is an old favorite and I can't bear to put it down! So I waffled, putting this project down and picking that one up, finishing up some loose ends and contemplating new ones.

One of the nice things is I actually finished a tiny spinning project (the Magical Merino) while the onions and peppers were caramelizing and while I was trying to keep myself away from the last little bit of banana date bread in the kitchen. This was leftover from a PortFiber batt I had bought to try corespinning, and I had started spindle spinning it a few months ago on a whim. The funny thing happened when I started wandering back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen as I wound the yarn for Andean plying; unless I was hallucinating, I had some very different yarn on my hands depending on what room I was in. You know those times you try to photograph something, and the color in the photo is completely different depending on the lighting? Typically that color change will show up in the photo, but not necessarily in person. This yarn, however, was plain as day different from room to room.

Here's the dining room:

And the kitchen:

Wild, right? I have no idea how this happened! The best part was Andean plying on the threshold between the two rooms; the yarn on the palm of my hand was lit by the dining room and was pure olive green, while the yarn on the back of my hand was lit by the kitchen, and was pure orange!

So even if I didn't make huge progress on any one project today, I at least amused the neighbors by running back and forth between my kitchen and my dining room, staring at yarn. As you do.

(The other thing giving me ants in my pants? Spring's on its way. I can feel it!)

I Made a Bowl!

First off, thank you all for your kind words about my last post. Hearing about Betty's passing was a big blow, but I know she's proud of what she's helped me accomplish. One of the projects I worked on (on Sunday Funday!) while the shawl winged its way across the ocean to me was wetfelting around a resist to create a vase or bowl, a technique I learned at the Teapot Valley felting weekend that Betty brought me to back in February of 2010. It's a class I'm planning on teaching at Medomak, and I wanted to play with different resists to see what shapes I could achieve.

The fiber is carded Polwarth roving from Gnomespun in the colorway "Deciduous" that I bought at Rhinebeck 2010.

I didn't have a washboard at the time, so the sides are less felted than I'd like, but it's definitely a starting place!

Changes

I got some sad news in an email a few weeks ago. Betty, one of the wonderful women who shaped my trip to New Zealand a few years ago, passed away on January 23rd. The friend that emailed told me that she had been out at her family's camp in the backcountry when things took a turn for the worse. Susie said that she had been doing some amazing work with her felting and her fiber, and had been really happy. And for that, I am incredibly grateful and proud. To be able to go surrounded by people you love, and knowing that the work you're doing is fulfilling and right--that makes it all worthwhile.

The friend also asked if I would like the shawl back that I knit for Betty while I was staying with her. It arrived on my doorstep earlier this week, and it was . . . it's hard to describe what that piece of knitting means to me. It was the first lace pattern that I'd ever designed, and I spent many hours on the couch at Fleecewood and in the huge, comfy recliner at Betty's wrestling with the pattern. It's knit in yarn that I spun while at Betty's, from roving made from her own alpacas (and from her llamas and some nondescript wool where I ran out of the original yarn on the last few inches of the border). I spent five minutes when I opened the package searching out the mistake in the lace I knew was there. It even smells like the perfume that Betty loved.

But even more than all of that, it signifies a big step into the unknown for the me of a few years ago. I had been surrounded by strong women who were doing what they loved and making it work. They weren't playing by the rules. They helped me realize that I didn't need to, either, that it wasn't necessary for me to be a good girl, go to grad school, and get a nice, inside-the-lines non-profit desk job, especially since that's not what I wanted. Betty and this shawl helped me see that making my own path was worth a shot. So thank you, Betty, for everything.

Sunday Fundays: yeah, I missed a couple

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. :)