Vermont trails

We are enjoying Vermont. It is a lovely state. Much of our poking through corners of central Vermont was in search of the perfect wedding site. Let me just say that Vermont is much smaller than the west and there are not huge expanses of public land where someone might have a ceremony un-molested by mosquitos, traffic, or tourists. (In case you are worried, we did find a place this morning and will be eternally grateful to the lovely rangers at Coolidge State Park in Plymouth, VT.  Thanks Tammy and Bill!!)

I have continued my yarn store search and now believe that the yarn-store-per-capita statistic must be much higher for Vermont than New Mexico or Colorado. And the stores are pretty good also. I will put the yarn stores in another post so those of you who just don't care can skip right over it.

We visited Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock, VT which had some amazing animals, people, and exhibits related to farming. There weren't any old looms though I am sure the people here in the 1800s must have woven. There was this modern LeClerc with a sign saying "No Weaving Today" which I will admit was slightly disappointing.

The sheep at the farms had names (as did the jersey cows and the oxen). I chased Grace around awhile before I got this photo with her name tag (one of my new sister-in-law's names is Grace. Grace the person is much prettier than Grace the sheep).

We climbed Pico Peak which is 3,900+ feet. The hiking was awesome and the views of the Green Mountains were so beautiful. I hope to come back and hike the whole Long Trail one day soon (and perhaps even the AT). I will say that hiking in New England involves steep trails, lots of rocks, mud, and roots everywhere. I now believe it when they say that of the three long trails (AT, PCT, CDT), the AT is the most physically demanding.

We went up to Burlington for a day and I loved walking on the boardwalk and watching the boats on Lake Champlain.

Both gay people and dogs are welcome in Burlington. At least I'm pretty sure this doesn't just mean gay dogs...

And lastly, there are many cemeteries in Vermont. They are old and lovely and nothing like cemeteries in the west (except for the dead people of course)... and sometimes the headstones are somewhat amusing...

We did stumble across Robert Frost's grave at First Church in Bennington.

A double yarn store day

It was a double yarn store day yesterday and for that I have to thank Emily.
Firstly, there do seem to be more yarn stores up in Vermont than in the parts of the USA that I frequent. For this I am grateful. I like yarn.

The first store was an accident. We were on our way from Emerald Lake State Park (fantastic camping!  Thanks State of Vermont!) to Rutland and we passed this store:

This store did seem to have a thing about these big yarn balls. I suppose it is one way to "use up" extra yarn.

I admit that I picked up some new soy yarn for a little baby project... I might have also bought a pattern to go with it. It was one of those silky fantastic yarns that I'd never seen anywhere before and I took it home with me. They did not have blocking wires for the Pagona. This will be an ongoing issue.

We picked up a free phone book at the tourist information place in Rutland, VT and I quickly turned to the "Yarn" entry in the yellow pages. I wanted to visit Six Loose Ladies in Procterville. I steered us expertly with the use of 6 different maps miles north of Rutland to this city:

There was a street name vaguely similar to the one listed in the phone book for the yarn shop and off we went. After driving through a very not-yarn-shop neighborhood on the edge of Proctor, Emily suggested that perhaps Proctor was not indeed the same place as Proctorville and maybe I should check the map index. She was correct. There was an entirely different city called:

And perhaps I should have realized that Proctor and ProctorSville were not the same place at all.

Fortunately for me and for those of you on the virtual yarn shop tour, ProctorSville was close to where we are camping last night and we were able to visit this yarn shop:

I do wish I had asked who the six loose ladies were though. The shop was lovely. They didn't have blocking wires for Pagona but they did have little bottles of Eucalan that were small enough to carry along.

We will see how long Emily participates in the yarn shop tour. So far she has been quite the trooper. If she gets tired of it I may have to find yarn shops next to bookshops, disaster museums, or at least a coffee shop with wi-fi.

We also stopped at the Calvin Coolidge Museum near Plymouth today as well as seeing damage from last year's hurricane Irene and a great deal of marble. Even the fence posts are made of marble. I'm not kidding.

Also there is cheese and a few mosquitos in Vermont. The few mosquitos that I saw must have actually bitten me and it will add a nice decoration to my wedding attire I'm sure.

In search of red

This was last week's project which I am just getting around to posting.
I am conducting a dye experiment in search of red. Red is a very hard color to dye, at least I have found it to be so. I need to find my own red formula as I don't like the ones other people have provided. So I am returning to the practices of class back at fiber arts college and dying 10g skeins of yarn in glass jars. This allows me to dye more colors at once to test the formulas.

The jars get filled with a regular mix of leveling agent, dye, yarn, and citric acid and then multiples of them are put in each dye pot with a water bath around them. It works fairly well for sampling though you are limited by the amount of yarn you can get in each jar (10-20g).

This is some of the Vevgarn I mentioned in THIS post which dyes so well.

I haven't found the color I am looking for yet, but I'll keep looking. I will have to put off the resolution of this question until I return to Colorado in a few weeks.

When I find it I suspect it will go well with my sister's strawberries.

The big road trip begins...

If you haven't heard, July is a month of travel for me. We are on our way... a big circumnavigation of the middle and eastern part of the US as well as a big chunk of Canada.  Here is some of what I have seen in the last four days.

Small town Colorado... you can get your booze, power tools, and your pain killers in one stop.

As well as the first yarn store sighting of the trip in Walsenburg, CO just over the hill from the town I currently call home...

And then there was the corn. Hundreds of miles of corn. The horizon broken now and then by wind turbines. We spent a lot of time on I-80 and let me tell you, in the middle of the country it is 14 hours of corn. I like to think we eat it from the cob, but I strongly suspect it becomes corn syrup rather quickly.

Another yarn shop search in Benton Harbor, MI, brought me to Ivelise's Yarn Shop after several calls to a very helpful woman named Maggie who was tending the shop that day.

After several wrong turns and a tour of a neighboring city, we found the place and I did buy some yarn for another Stephen West Pagona. I was addicted to the first one and now I'm doing one in green (Madelinetosh Sock). It is the perfect travel knitting. Maggie told me as she was balling my yarn for me that Ivelise is 87 years old, has owned the shop for over 40 years, and still comes down every day. I was sorry that I missed her. I suspect that Ivelise has some personal investment in this quote on the wall at this point:

Pagona was quickly underway... (when I wasn't driving!)

I did wish I had time for a dip in Lake Michigan here though:

Today we got to spend a little time in Canada. We visited family in Detroit last night (Petunia the Rottweiler gave me more slobbery toilet-water kisses than I could every possibly need, but the hugs from her kid-friends were priceless) and decided to take Lake Erie to the north instead of visiting Ohio.

So far I love Canada. I have only have limited experience thus far as I was in the country approximately 5 hours today and haven't been there previously since I was 18 months old. I have this to say about Canadians so far: they are much more courteous on the highway than Americans. I was driving and we hit a huge rain squall. It was sunny one moment and then it was raining so hard I literally couldn't see the lines on the pavement for what felt like forever but was probably only a few seconds. What I noticed immediately was that everyone around me slowed down drastically and within seconds EVERY CAR on the interstate (do they call them that in Canada?) had their hazard lights on and was driving a very sane speed considering the very poor visibility and the dizzying rate my windshield wipers were waving. If I had been on I-80 in the USA there would have been people whizzing by me at 80 miles an hour (apparently some Americans don't think they need to actually see the road to drive the car).

This faucet was in the women's room at a rest stop bathroom on the tollway. I'm not quite sure why it is there, but Canadians are even nice to pets.

So far I love Canadians. And I love the coins I got in change for my french fries--all with Elizabeth II on them. (Do the coins always have the queen on them? And what happens when she dies? That is a lot of coins to re-issue.)

We crossed into NY and stopped to see Niagara Falls. I felt it was necessary as I've never seen them and who knows when I'll be there again. I was dismayed at Disney feel of the place, but awed by the water.

It hasn't all been roses (or corn) and watching people in orange hats.
There was that first night camping in a state park in NE with the heat and the fireworks until midnight...
The brain fog from hours of driving...
The lack of good gluten free food options at the moment I am hungry...
The toll roads that discourage me even further in a search for something to curb the lack of food-induced grumpiness...
The town we stopped at first tonight where every hotel room was full and there was no convenient campground and we had to keep driving...
Road trips.

Yarn bombed

I have happily found myself in the middle of piles of yarn. I am dyeing yarn for classes I am teaching later in the summer and fall and for a very exciting workshop I am taking later this summer and am generally feeling that some yarn management strategies are needed. I suspect that my partner would agree with that assessment.

Yarn Bombing is a term I learned from The Yarn Harlot. Apparently at knitting conferences (and I have never been to a knitting conference, but I would consider it as a recreational endeavor) people actually knit little things that they spread around the facility. Knitted wraps for trees and banisters, little knitted creations hanging from lamp pulls, socks on table legs... yarn bombing. My house wasn't so much bombed by finished items as by piles of dyed and undyed yarn. I will probably never dig my way out. Just warning you. (This would be why my partner is strongly advocating I have my own studio which is separate from the rest of the house. Yarn has a way of creeping out of it's room into all other corners of the place.)

(6/29/12: Here is an even better post about yarn bombing by The Yarn Harlot: http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2012/06/29/site_specific_art_installation.html)

The practice of dyeing my own yarn seems to increase the general yarn clutter. I have run through all the undyed student yarn I have here (don't worry, there is more in storage which will be coming back to the dye pots soon) and have moved on to dyeing experiments (more on this in a future post). The dyeing process itself adds to the yarn chaos. It needs to be prepped and then it gets dyed and then it sits around drying and then it has to be balled up and readied for classes. During all of this I get interrupted by work and babies and my general distractedness and thus, yarn bomb.

This yarn is gorgeous. It is Vevgarn from Norway. I bought it from Noel at Norsk Fjord Fiber who was infinitely helpful and had every color I wanted in stock. It comes in hundreds of colors, though I dyed some myself and found that is dyes amazingly well. I haven't woven a tapestry with this yarn yet, but I believe Tommye Scanlin uses it a lot and her tapestries are gorgeous... which seems a good recommendation for the basic materials.

My father has always been an apron advocate. This (dye-spattered clothes) is what happens when you dye without using one (plus it is probably safer to wear long pants and covered shoes and wear an apron as the boiling acid-water is not the greatest thing to spill on yourself).

Personal Protective Equipment. Use it. Do not follow my example (despite it being 95 degrees outside and over 100 in the dye shed). I do wear my respirator and goggles Dad... and I will buy an apron the next time I'm shopping the online chemistry store (do they have brick and mortar chemistry stores? I was in an old dusty one in Albuquerque at least a decade ago, but I don't think it is there anymore. I need a new thermometer because I keep breaking mine and I think those glass pipets are really very cool.) Most of the dye comes out of my clothes as it hasn't been set with an acidic pH, but they are ever quite the same again once exposed to a dye day.

This is what Cassy thinks about yarn:

An open letter to the Symbols of the Southwest EVFAC 2012 students...

Dear Symbols of the Southwest students,
You rock. You did an awesome job this week. Thanks for being my guinea pigs on this class. I have a pile of new ideas of how to make the class better thanks to you.
Despite being stuffed into a hot room with a thousand looms, not enough space, not enough Pepsi, too much noise from the fans, and too much La Cocina, we had a great time--at least I did!
Despite the exact colors you needed not being among the stash of yarn I brought (this is always the case no matter what), you made some beautiful things.

As always there wasn't enough time to practice design and weave a piece. Tapestry is such a slow practice that finishing anything in a workshop is a challenge. Next time this class will be three weeks long (just kidding--maybe one week). And despite my best intentions, I failed at forcing you to spend more time designing than weaving. I guess we all want to weave more than anything.

A special thank you to Mary Cost for allowing us to view and discuss her work.

And finally thanks to Leslie for being my pace car from Ojo Caliente to Antonito on the way home Sunday. You probably didn't know I was behind you, but it helps me drive better when I'm working out problems in my head to have someone driving a constant pace in front of me. I had some new tapestries to design and sometimes that happens while I'm driving.

And in case you didn't get enough suggestions of what to use for design, here is a symbol the Colorado contingent saw on their way home: Mt. Blanca. She is one of the four corners of the Navajo world, White Shell Mountain, the eastern boundary of Dinetah. I particularly respect this mountain from a climber's perspective. I used to live at the base near the "town" of Blanca at 8200 feet elevation. To climb to her summit at 14,345 feet is no walk in the park and people die on her just about every year (jeeps roll, they get lost, they get caught in avalanches, they fall down the scree slopes, they try to make it to Little Bear Peak despite lacking climbing skills... things happen.)

And don't forget to find your creative space... (I just hope it isn't as hot as this one was!)

Happy Weaving,
Rebecca

A dye shed at last

I have never had a dye shed. I have lived in several different houses since I started dyeing my own yarn and always I have crouched in carports, kneeled on porches, struggled with the wind blowing out my burners, dropped yarn in the dirt, frozen in blizzards, carted heavy buckets of water for hundreds of miles... But THIS particular rental house had this little building at the back of the yard. I thought nothing of it when we moved here as it was stuffed with trash.

...including the storm windows for every window in this house, every single one broken. (Just as an aside now that is summer and hot, not a single window in this house opens. They are all painted shut.) The entire property was full of junk actually. Emily worked for days to get it all out of the yard.  She cleaned out all that broken glass as well as piles of broken bits of this and that... bird feeders, rake heads, an old dog bed peed upon by many mice, pain buckets half full of hardened paint in an assortment of colors (our landlord is a house painter which might explain why the windows are all painted shut), a variety of dead bugs and other critters, and some sort of mid-sized animal trap (perhaps related to the skunks--see prior skunk blog posts referenced HERE). Emily cleaned it all out (after the yard unfroze--the detritus came to light in layers as the snow melted, the last being a generous covering of cigarette butts) and quickly proved that her desire for weekly trash pick-up was warranted.

This is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received--and I didn't realize it until today when I got out all my dye stuff to get some yarn ready for a workshop next month. Here is the inside of my new little paradise. Yes, that is an old propane stove riddled with bullet holes. Though it is still hooked up to a propane tank which may or may not contain propane, I will not be using it.

Here is my new dye stove which is significantly beefier than my old one which is languishing somewhere in a storage locker. After multiple attempts to find it somewhere between the loom parts and the piano, I gave up and bought this one. It has legs. I don't have to bend over so much. This is good as the 11th anniversary of my 29th birthday is coming up in a couple months and sometimes parts get creaky.

I couldn't be more thrilled.  Every time I go out there to stir a pot or shift them around I giggle a little bit and skip over the grass. A dye shed! Imagine.