Filling the Gap

It feels like this has been a super-productive weekend. Besides teaching a spinning class at L'Ourse Qui Danse ranch, I managed to finish off and deliver two fairly large projects. The first was a sweater going to a client of the ranch, so she will get it in time for her birthday next week.

Pattern base was Pioneer from Knitty, with mods to account for different gauge, stitch pattern, and sleeve length. It makes life so much easier when the client has measurements close to my own - so easy to try on and check things. Especially when it's a large, fitted item like said sweater.

Came home from the ranch yesterday and knitted all evening, and finished off the second project, a lace shawl (#28 lace shawl from Vogue Knitting Early Fall 2012). Yarn, an alpaca/silk laceweight dyed with blackberry canes. Blocked it before bed, and it was dry in the morning, photographed after breakfast, and delivered this afternoon.

I normally block lace on the bed or the carpet at the apartment, but since I was out at the parents', it wasn't an option. Beds were all in use overnight, and there's no carpeting. Mom had the brilliant idea, though, to block on the TV room rug. Not only is it the only rug in the place large enough for a shawl, but the TV room is right above the kitchen and the woodstove, and heat rises. It's the warmest room in the house, so the shawl dried quickly, even sandwiched between towels and flannel sheets (I covered it to prevent any feline 'help' overnight, especially since Gail has taken to misbehaving in baskets in the TV room).

Now I have a few days' gap to poke at projects that are not commissions, and it feels a little peculiar. First time since early November I haven't been knitting a commission. Thursday I'm meeting with someone to choose patterns and colours for a couple pairs of mittens. Until then there will be spinning, and some work on a pattern I've been promising myself will get done soon, especially since I have a couple test knitters lined up already. And I want to start this year's quilt square for the fair - Mom and I chose fabrics this afternoon, and I think I know the pattern I want.

Eye Candy From The Country

Wild and wooly, warm and wet. That pretty much describes my Saturday this week. I'm out at the parents' for the weekend, and it's been a hot, sunny, breezy day - to me, that makes it a good day for fibre, since things will dry well. So laundry and dyeing and fleece washing have been most of the day.

 I started the day with a quick blocking of the hat I finished last night. Ribbed, in a cushy handspun Jacob wool I had a few partial balls of to use up. A post on the little porch proved a great place to put the hat to dry, and incidentally, provided a nice background for the photo.

In between loads of laundry, staying with the Jacob breed, I washed about a fleece and a half that I had gotten a while back and not done anything with yet. This is where the wet and wooly part comes in, since I wash stuff outside, which means hauling hot water in buckets from indoors to fill my tubs. A few old sheets went in a sunny spot for drying, and Mom said it looked like I was working with skunk pelts. Definitely smells nicer than skunk, though!

Cooled wash water from tubs was re-bucketed out and onto a bunch of plants that needed a water and fertilizer shot. More buckets of water came outside in the meantime for the next project, which is a batch of mordanting and dyeing. At this point the clothesline was full of laundry, so I hauled out a big wooden clothes-dryer, because something like 30 skeins got mordanted today.

In the little gaps between waiting for a mordant batch or a fleece batch to be ready for the next step, I got to shell peas. Result, a true green thumb (or at least thumbnail) and a lovely bowl of fresh peas.

Only had time to start one batch of dye after that - greenweed yellow, which will sit overnight - but there will be more dyeing tomorrow, and hopefully pretty pictures of the results. Although I'm planning mostly solid colours, a few of the skeins to be dyed will be multi-coloured, using different techniques, so I can show them as samples for a class I will be teaching at L'Ourse Qui Danse in a couple months. Ran over to the OQD ranch this afternoon to borrow some thiox for tomorrow's indigo dyeing and talk to Johanne about the date for the class - tentatively Sept 19 or 20 at this point. The road going to Johanne's is lovely; gravel road with maple bush along part of it, opening to fields of corn and soy, dark-green and silvery against the late-summer olive of the trees, with the Adirondack mountains misty-blue to the south.

Barbecued local sausages and homemade strawberry shortcake for dinner, and now the last thing before bed will be to go outside to turn off the burner under my dye-pot for the night, watch the fireflies winking for a few minutes, and smell the scent of the lilies in the air. Life doesn't get much better than this.

Olympic Socks, Alpaca Mittens

Ah, yes, the Olympics. I freely admit that didn't watch much of it, except for the opening ceremonies and the semifinal Canada vs USA mens' hockey game, and those were because it was Fridays and I was at my Friday fiber group get-together. Of course during the opening ceremonies we all ogled the various mittens, hats, and other knits the athletes were sporting. I'm just mildly annoyed that I couldn't find a decent picture of the Estonian team's mittens online afterwards, since they looked very nice...

But I did make an effort for the concurrent Ravellenic Games, and polished off not only that baby sweater with alpacas on the yoke, but my Alpha Socks. It was about time - my Rav page listed them as having been cast on just over 2 years previously!

Now I have to be heroic and not wear them until next fall, since I want to save them to enter in the local fair next August.

The other project which has gotten finished this week is this pair of mittens. These are the ones I've been designing as a counterpart to the dyeing classes I taught last summer at L'Ourse Qui Danse. Chantal of OQD has been testing the pattern, and I think it's about ready to go. So with any luck it will be up on Rav as well as available at L'Ourse Qui Danse in the next week or so.

I have to say they're a great knit to use up small amounts of yarn - I knit them in 5 colours because that's the number of samples each dye class produces, but you could technically use up to 20 colours if you felt inclined to. The only drawback is - you guessed it - weaving in ends. Whether it's 5 or 20 colours, you will still have something like 80 ends to deal with. Ah, well. Cuppa tea and something on the telly, and it goes pretty fast!

Busman's Holiday

After a week of cold and wet, it's nice to have a change in the weather. As it is, I spent part of yesterday at work moving flats stored under tables, because they were going moldy from the cold wet conditions.

Monday and Tuesday, however, were just about perfect - dry and sunny and not too hot. I had the two days off, by request, because Monday was the annual shearing day at L'Ourse Qui Danse. Busman's holiday indeed - I traded in a job where I'm on my feet all day for a shearing bee where I'm...on my feet all day. It makes for a long day (8 am when we arrived, and dusk when we left) but it's great fun, great people - and great food, as it's a potluck lunch and supper. (Wish I'd taken a picture of the spread). Most of the team has been at shearing before, so it goes smoothly. A whole system in place and a (superhuman) shearer, and all 21 animals got shorn and skirted before supper.

A couple of the younger guys were in charge of catching and moving alpacas. For the ones in the further barn, they have an enclosure of scaffold and snow fence which gets pulled to the shearing site, and works very well. We stopped skirting to watch the parade go by.

They use the same contraption to bring them back again - except this year, one of the alpacas, Cayenne, refused to wait, and bolted back to her barn the minute she was done being shorn. All we saw was a streak of brown, followed a minute afterwards by a guy in hot pursuit.

The boys turn the alpaca over to Tom the shearer and his team. They strap and hold the alpacas in position on the table, while Tom shears and calls the rough grade (quality) of each section. While the animals are down, they also get pedicures and shots.

One person is in charge of collecting the shorn fleece, and turning it and its rough grade over to Johanne (the boss) and her sister. They sort and pack it into bags labeled with the animal's name, grade, and the year, plus keep samples out for their records, and the mill.

The bagged fleece comes to the skirting team (that's my group!), who have lots to do:
weigh and record quantity of each grade, and record color, texture, staple length, lustre, crimp, and guard hair presence in the first-quality fleece,

then pick hay, second cuts, and off-texture bits out of the fleece. (And ooh and aah over the texture, of course).

We get supervised, because sorting's an important job, and because there's a lot of temptation to just take the fleece home and roll in it. Chantal's dog and Johanne's cat are on duty here. 

And at the end of the day, we had a studio filled with bags of fibre!

Brin de Culture

This post's pictures are coming to you via my Dad's camera. Mine decided on a murder-suicide this weekend - first it screwed up my card, and then it died. I'm not terribly pleased about it, you may imagine.

Anyway, I spent Sunday afternoon with my borrowed camera at the vernissage for the show Johanne and Chantal put together, called Un Brin de Culture / A Strand of Culture. Object being to celebrate the alpaca and its fibre, and show the steps involved between the animal and the finished product. I got to spend the afternoon demo-ing spinning and chatting with people - there was quite a good turnout, for sure! And they did a great job of setting up the show.

It always looks so much more impressive with a fancy invite, and a write-up in the gallery pamphlet. The alpaca who modelled was apparently Pivoine Jolie (Pretty Poppy), who has a gorgeous, fine black fleece.

The Salle Alfred Langevin, where the show was held, is in The Chateau in my hometown. Back when train travel was a big thing, this was a fancy hotel. After standing derelict for a while, it now houses the municipal offices, a cafe, and the gallery space.

Entry to the Salle Alfred Langevin

A huge old barn loom dominated the center front. I do not envy anyone the job of set-up and take-down for that. It's taller than most people, pegged-together timber, with a back beam the size of a telephone pole, and string heddles.

My spot was just near the entrance, on a bit of a stage.

Around the perimeter of the room, different stations showed fibre, tools old and new, a weaving project in progress, natural dyes and the alpacas' colour range, finished products and yarn, and a slideshow of the alpacas and last year's shearing.

If this is the newest trend in modern art, I'm all for it.

Studio Opening

Well, Johanne's opening for the studio and store at her L'Ourse Qui Danse ranch went wonderfully. It looked a bit like rain, but ended up being great weather - very important for anyone wanting to go say hi to the alpacas!

I hadn't seen the studio since before they started fixing it up, so I remembered it as a cement-floored, ladder-to-the-loft, cobwebby outbuilding. I got updates on the progress of the renovations, but still, you never know quite what to expect until you see the results. Let me show you the new look!

You drive up or walk up, and see the front of the studio.

Then you get to the honey brick doorstep, and open the door. The main floor is divided into two parts, with the store area right in front of you as you walk in. Racks and antique cupboards hold alpaca yarn and products from the ranch.

As you walk in to see the things at the back, the space opens out on your left into another room with stairs against the back wall. This is the workshop/social sort of space - cozy, furnished with chairs, a table if needed, and the makings of tea on the antique stove at the corner, and two windows, one looking out onto an alpaca pasture. I spent the day spinning in the corner by the window, where you see my wheel.

Up the stairs there are more alpaca things on the wall and on the landing, then you enter the studio space, with looms and equipment.

It's a super cozy, homey space, and I think a lot of the people who came felt that also. Granted, quite a few people knew either one of the ranch team or other visitors, but it really seemed more like a party than a store opening. There were snacks and drinks, and people chatted and admired, and signed up for classes - and I don't think anyone just came, toured, and left. I swear most of them stayed for at least 2 hours.

The only drawback to the day was my cold. 7 or 8 hours of talking - or croaking -  to people (mostly in French) and spinning proved to be tiring, and by the time the guests were cleared out and we all had a chat about the day, I was definitely not up for my cousin's reception. Mom and I went home and had tea and supper, and I tried knitting a bit, but I was falling asleep. So, rather amusingly, the parents got dressed up and went out to party, and I said goodnight, have fun, and rolled into bed at 9. It proved a good call - I was able to garden all day Sunday!