Rhinebeck 2015

Rhinebeck 2015 was Rhinebeck round two and it was everything I remembered and more. We arrived to our hotel late on Friday night and got to the festival early Saturday morning just in time to see a line 100 people long! The madness continued all day long, a dizzying frenzy of people everywhere, lines everywhere, yarn everywhere EVERYWHERE and wind so strong I was happy I had my hat this year for sure. The five in our party ran to tents we wanted to make sure we got to, and then mosied all over the whole place. We made it to every barn, which compared to last year was an amazing accomplishment. We saw sheep, goats, alpaca, and angora rabbits. We met farmers and dyers and authors and donut purveyors. We sipped on cider and ate falafel. It was one of the most perfect days I have had in forever. 

A highlight of this wonderful day was getting to go to a talk put on by Kristine Vejar of A Verb for Keeping Warm about natural dyeing and her new natural dye book, The Modern Natural Dyer. She had beautiful samples and answered a ton of questions from the crowd about mushrooms, iron, ph, foraging, and knitting. You could so hear the passion in her voice when she spoke about the process. I bought the book and devoured it on the plane ride home - it is gorgeous and now I am totally inspired. 

If you have any doubts about whether Rhinebeck Sheep & Wool is worth it, be assured that it is. This year I came back as a knitter and spinner, and it totally changed my perspective on the whole festival, and I actually only bought one type of yarn, my favorite, O-Wash Fingering. On the other hand, I spent about 30 minutes ogling and feeling all of the raw fleece for sale, I even found an NC Rambouillet that was being judged! It was gorgeous, and I wanted to box them all up and take them home. I had a feeling my sweet Mr. would have a few things to say about that, though. :) In the end I probably brough home half a sheeps' worth of roving. I can't wait to dig in. 

And to top it all off, it snowed. In October! At the festival and while we were driving home on Sunday. Beautiful, fluffy snow. Everything was perfect. And Christmas-like, which is the best type of day. There is talk of Maryland Sheep & Wool in our future in the spring, but in my heart my first love will always be Rhinebeck. 

Hudson Valley, I'll see you next year!

natural dyes: goldenrod & harvesting color

The past few months I have really been loving our local library. Not only is it beautiful, with whole walls full of windows and perfectly positioned armchairs and self-check out, it is full of the most amazing knitting/weaving/crochet/craft books you could think of. It has been a source of much inspiration, especially following my somewhat failed dyeing experiment.

One of my favorite books that I have read is Harvesting Color by Rebecca Burgess. I love it because it not only has simple-to-execute recipes and gorgeous pictures, but it gives great references and maps of where to go to harvest the materials included in the book. A lot of them were based out of California and the west, where the author lives, but quite a few were spread over the east coast up to Vermont and down through Florida. Success! 

In late September around here driving through country roads I kept seeing fields and fields of goldenrod. They showed up for about two weeks, and last weekend when we got buckets of rain across the state thanks to Joaquin, they just as quickly made their exit. Luckily, in that window I had some free time to go and cut a large pile of these lovely fronds from the farm, and that evening, we dyed! 

The night before I dyed, I soaked these two sad non-mushroom skeins in water and mordanted in alum. I boiled the goldenrod for about an hour in my dye pot, extracted all of the plant material, re-wet the yarn in warm water and let the yarn sit in the dye pot for another hour at around 180 degrees. It was raining that night, so when I took it out of the pot I just let it sit on my porch for an hour to rinse. :) 

I could tell within 10 minutes of the yarn sitting in the dye that it was going to take, which was so exciting. And in addition to the most vibrant yellow it has lovely undertones of green as well. 

I have a few powdered natural dyes that I've purchased, but the thought of going out into the neighborhood that I live and work in, collecting these natural materials and extracting their beauty for yarn was such a cool feeling. I see many more experiments in my future. 

handspun: "aztec" BFL/silk

Back a few months ago after I had devoured my Hey Lady Hey fiber I had purchased and was on a major color kick, I purchased this beautiful combed top from Walnut Farms on Etsy. Located up in Pennsylvania, Walnut Farms has a great selection of spindles and spinning accessories as well as all of their beautiful fiber. I gravitated to the "Aztec" colorway and the results are what you see here! (For a before picture, you can see part of the combed top here.) 

Originally, my spinning plan was to spin some 2-ply fingering weight yarn for some fun socks for the Mr., but it came out closer to a 2-ply sport weight/DK weight. I didn't measure the WPI yet, but it's at about 230 yards. It's been so humid and rainy here this week that it took forever to dry after washing! 

I thought about listing this on my online shop for a hot second, but the BFL is just so soft, and the smallest amount of silk makes this shiny and gorgeous, and I couldn't let go. I already cast on for the Sweet Magnolia cowl for it and can't wait to see how it turns out! Every other fiber I have bought to spin since this one has been white or cream, so I think it's fair to say that this was a blip in my typical color habits. :) 

This was so fun to spin, and I'd love to see if handspun yarns would be something that people would be interested in seeing in the shop as well? 

Happy Monday, and I hope everyone is off to a great start of the week!

Slow Fashion October: You

Hey friends! This month, in addition to all of my normal postings, I'm going to be doing something a little bit different added to the mix. Karen Templer of Fringe Association had this great idea a couple of months ago to have a whole month dedicated to slow fashion - the idea that the clothes that we wear can be made intentionally, beautifully, ethically and sustainably. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably have picked up that this idea is one that really resonates with me (and you can read a much more eloquent explanation of this whole idea here.). 

So it's the first day of October (yay!) and so about once every week or so I'll be posting a new post around the general template that Karen has laid out.  This should be fun!

So, a little more background on me as a maker. I've been a crafty-type person pretty much my whole life, starting from a young age when my family would take extensive car trips across the country. My parents, desperate to entertain us four kids for several days in the car, equipped us with every sort of kit and activity you could imagine. For me, that meant everything from crochet to knitting with this strange round circular contraption, to needlepoint and cross stitch and latch-hooking and many others. My mother and I also used to sew clothes for my American girl dolls, and I got my first sewing machine when I was 13. Sewing kind of came in and out of my life through high school and out for a while in college, and I have just recently started sewing my own garments as well as a few random household objects. 

My knitting journey started in high school in Florida when a friend of mine in my IB program taught me how to knit. I loved it so much, I knit and eventually started to crochet all through high school and college. But it wasn't until I moved to North Carolina two and a half years ago that my fiber obsession really began and my queue of projects really developed into a full-blown lifestyle. In that time I was introduced to wool in all of its beauty, attended the NY Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, NY (and am going back this year!) and started to learn about the process of making yarn. My eyes were opened to the environmental impacts that superwash yarns have, as well as the carbon footprint of most commercially made yarns traveling from South America, Australia, China and all over to get to my local craft store. This knowledge, paired with the gristly reality of dye houses and garment factories in Southeast Asia created a real conviction to change the way that I think about my wardrobe and my fiber pursuits, as well as a real love and passion for fibers that are not only beautiful and soft and strong, but are made locally and encourage a newly awakened fiber industry in the U.S. again. 

This month, my goals are less about making and more about being intentional about my current state and where I want to go. I am a big thrifter and lover of secondhand, and while wonderful, this has led me to a place in my wardrobe where I find myself looking into my closet and feeling like my style is all over the place. I would love to find some time to pare down, eliminate items I never wear and really think carefully about what I WANT to wear - and how to make that happen. Whether that be knitting, sewing, mending and altering, spinning yarn I want to knit with, or buying sustainably. I will likely also be knitting lots of bowties for my online shop and starting to knit Timberline for my husband's fall and winter wardrobe. 

So there you have it! If you have any goals or thoughts about Slow Fashion October I would love to hear them. October is already my favorite month and I'm so excited that this project is now a part of it!

natural dyes: mushrooms take 1

Last week I had an unexpected opportunity from a farm nearby, and I came to be the owner of some aged shitake mushrooms. They were past the point that they could be eaten, which would have definitely been my first choice (mushrooms forever), so I thought I'd finallytry my hand at some natural dyeing. Home they came and in the dye pot they went. 

I didn't use a mordant, but did soak the yarn (Moeke yarns Elena) in hot water before dropping in the dye pot. I boiled the mushrooms for about an hour and the water turned this really lovely mahogany color that the photographs didn't quite capture. I was so excited! I put the yarn in the pot at about 170 degrees for around 45 minutes, swirling occasionally, and then let the yarn sit in the pot overnight with the heat off and the lid on. 

My results were less than stellar, to be sure. The yarn basically didn't change color from its original shade, which was crazy with the water color being such a deep brown. It seemed like it had gone down a shade or so towards brown, but it turned out that was just the color change from the wool being wet. Ha! 

The next day I went to my public library and picked out about 6 books on natural dyeing, so I think my future attempts will go much better. This was just a shot-in-the-dark, I-randomly-decided-to-do-this sort of activity (and I have frozen some additional mushrooms to try again later), so I'm not too disappointed. Sometimes it's just fun to try new things and see where it will take you.