Backlog - Rhinebeck

Right, so the outdoor work season is just about over for me, and I'm preparing to curl up and hibernate in the yarn and fiber until April. It's bloody gusty out today, and supposed to be flurries later this week, so I think that's good timing.

Only just got around to moving the pictures of my Rhinebeck goodies and our visit to the Vanderbilt Mansion. We had a lovely time (who could help it?) Friday turned out to be the nicest weather of the weekend, warm and sunny enough for us to have a picnic on the grounds of the Vanderbilt Mansion after we went on our tour. Behind the house is a pretty sheer drop-off (wooded, but still, you would probably want to keep drunken guests indoors) and a lovely view across the river.

The parterre gardens were probably less effective than they would have been earlier in the season, but the pool is alway pretty even without the water lilies in bloom, and some roses were still out (one with a bee in headfirst, trying to get in to the nectar.

Indoors we weren't allowed to take pictures with flash, so most of mine didn't turn out well, but the entryway wasn't bad.

At supper that evening, it turned out the person at the next table was a Gotland sheep breeder. Not a breed I was familiar with, but when we went to see the fleece and yarn samples...dudes, it's lovely. I am so getting a fleece next year - I know I saw some at the fleece sale, but I was hunting mohair for someone, and that was before I went to the barns. Silver-greys, soft and drapey like alpaca, and curly like a mohair or something. Anyway, both River Bend Gotlands and Quinta Melo Gotlands (can't find a website for them) had cards there, and I am hanging on to those.

We all did some spending, of course. I think our newbie, Francine was the worst...she went home with an inkle loom, and if her budget wasn't already gone, I think there was half a chance she would have bought a mohair sheep. She certainly fell in love with their cuteness. My budget went pretty fast, but I got lots of pretties. Admittedly, half the pile will be leaving me as gifts, but there are some things for me. I was eyeing some gradient rovings last time, and spent 20 minutes deciding on one from Loop, in mostly reds. I also got a couple skeins of sock yarn, one in periwinkle from Hudson Valley Sheep and Wool Co in Red Hook, and one of Fleece Artist BFL sock. Because I do have a couple pair of socks that I'm about to give up mending.

Then there were a couple skeins of alpaca and silk, one in sea-green for a friend's Christmas gift (scandinavianweaveknit.com), and one in olive (Tess' Designer Yarns) for my mother, along with a tin of Heal My Hands (oh yeah, I got one of those for me too, figured it would help with the gardening dryness.) And a few bundles of multicolored roving for spinning friends (Wellspring Farm).

I can never leave Rhinebeck without books...didn't find everything I wanted, but came home with a history of the Hudson Valley, and a stack of Piecework back issues. One of them has a lovely afghan pattern, which I'm going to have to make sometime. There's no pic of it on Ravelry, but it looks like this.

And I can totally see it in a palette of the natural-dyed colours. Sheep's-black or darkest walnut for the trim, and a range of corals and golds and greens for the panels, or cooler tones of rose and mint and periwinkle...one day. There has been and is a lot of other knitting going on, though, and tomorrow I should get around to showing off all that!

Pretty Braids

I've always liked the way roving looks, put up in those pretty braids, each one continuous length of roving. So finished. I received one as a gift a few years ago, and looked at how it was done. Yesterday and this morning I braided up the rovings I dyed this summer. And I think I could do a four-strand version as well. I'm afraid it may be addictive.

Kool-Aid and Food Coloring

I finished my 4^th square for a project one of the Sunday knitters has going. She got the JK kids at her daughters’ school to do some Kool-Aid dyeing, with the idea to felt knitted squares of this yarn and make it into pads for the kids to sit on. They are to go into the school library, which is getting revamped this summer, and each grade is contributing something. There was supposed to be a knitting machine involved, but when that fell through she recruited us. Well, garter stitch rectangles are sufficiently mindless to qualify us as machines, I suppose.

I haven’t done any kool-aid dyeing myself, but I spent one afternoon last week doing a little dyeing with food coloring at a neighbor’s. She had a special project on the go, to celebrate her black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and I was playing with some roving bought last fall. Because of the tendency of food coloring dyes to ‘break’ or separate, it is a bit of an art. So my roving doesn’t look quite how I envisioned, but it’s pretty, and not felted, which is the other big worry with roving, depending on how you treat it and set the colors.

Seeing as how the batches ended up a little different, I suspect they will get spun separately and plied together, to maximize uniformity while keeping the color variegation.