Road Trip

Last week my mother asked me if I wanted to go to the Covered Bridge Festival in Parke County, Indiana, for a long weekend. We used to do this every year with a group of women, including some of her high school girlfriends and their daughters. In recent years, what with mom's health concerns and my travel schedule, we haven't been able to manage it.

Anyway, it sounded like a fine idea to me, so away we went for a long sunny weekend of shopping, eating, chattering --

-- and driving. We put 600 miles on the car, about 200 of which was at night. But the daylight drive time was sufficient for me to finish the HPYC socks pictured above. My feelings about this yarn haven't changed. Great dye job, lousy base. The finished socks feel a bit flimsy.



























Luckily, I brought another ball of sock yarn just in case I finished the HPYC socks. This is Alpaca Sox on size 1 needles. This yarn is lovely to knit, soft and springy and responsive to the touch. It's fuzzing a little already from the alpaca content. We'll see how they wear over the long run. Using size 1s instead of my ubiquitous 1.5s ought to minimize any pilling.

The editor in me is compelled to say this....
As you're listening to the news these days, regardless of your political slant, try to keep one thing in mind. The difference between "voter fraud" and "voter registration fraud" is much like the difference between "lightning" and "lightning bug." Get upset if you want to, but know what it is you're getting upset about.

(apologies to Mark Twain for that one)

Status: HPYC Socks

I can't believe I got a decent photo of this yarn. On my monitor, the colors in the photo are an almost perfect match for the colors in the yarn in person. Every other time I've tried to photograph this sock, I've ended up with a muddle that obscured the brightness of the barberpole stripes.

Anyway. Just had to share it.

I'm going to post some in-progress pictures this week so that I can track how far I get over the course of my four week cast-on ban. These socks are the most recent new things I've started, and they were cast on for the trip to San Francisco a month ago. That means I went all of August without giving in to that startitis itch. That gives me confidence for the next four weeks! I can do it! I already have. :)

And, well, now that we're in election season, politics is on my mind these days. I watched the Dems last week, and I'll watch the Rs this week when they start broadcasting anything real. Yesterday, because they pulled George Bush off the speaker platform, we were left with coverage of an anti-war demonstration (on C-Span) or heavy loop coverage of the hurricane and Bristol's pregnancy on the news affiliates. Tonight should be better. I found yesterday hard to take, though Sunday afternoon's C-Span coverage of a convention focus group was fascinating.

One idea I can't dislodge from my mind -- I personally don't care what Bristol does with her coochie, but I must say that if I had come home pregnant at 17, my mother's response absolutely would NOT have included the words "proud" or "excited to be grandparents." Nope. Not a chance of that. Try "mortified" and "you're grounded until you die from old age, missy."

But whatever. As long as Bristol was 17 on the date of conception, her babydaddy didn't break any laws, so ::shrug:: A teenager used bad judgment. News at 11.

I'm far more concerned about the story that isn't getting much press, the one about Palin trying to get her brother-in-law fired. That one tells us more what kind of official she is. The unwed teen mother story? Well, I already knew Palin was an indifferent mother -- she is, after all, abandoning a special needs infant for the campaign trail -- so that doesn't tell me anything new. But the brother-in-law thing, that deserves a bit more scrutiny. I used to defend cases like this at the state level, so I will be watching this one unfold with interest.

Good Excuses

Above is all the knitting I accomplished on my journey through NorCal. Actually, that's a bit of a lie. I knit the last half-inch of the heel flap and turned the heel last night.

The yarn is from HPYC (Hand Painted Yarn Co.) and I have mixed emotions about it. The colorwork is stunning, but the base yarn is a bit underspun and springless. I suspect they're using a knitpicks base. Which is okay, but not optimal. Dye work this good deserves a topnotch base.

But I like the yarn well enough, and it has been a pleasure to knit. It kept me entertained in the airport and on the long flight from O'Scare to SFO, and then it went back in my bag, where it remained for most of the week.

I didn't expect to knit much at the conference because I had meetings stacked to the rafters. We literally had a 14-hour stretch without time to duck into the ladies' room. That's how packed my schedule was, and it was doled out in 8-minute increments.

But, you know, it's worth it. Publishing is a largely outsourced industry, and big conferences like these give us the opportunity to deal face-to-face with people we usually only "see" online or over the phone. I had the chance for face time with booksellers, other publishers and editors, agents, and of course, lots and lots of authors. I knew there would be no knitting at any of those.

I thought I might knit during the sightseeing portion of the trip, though. But Oh. My. God. As much as I love yarn, even I won't knit instead of catching sights like these.



















This is the view from one of the decks of our house in Sonoma County. If you look closely, above and to the right of the smokestack in the center, you will see a thin ribbon of the Pacific Coast Highway. The close water is the Russian River. Beyond that is a sandbar, and beyond that, the ocean. If you travel a quarter-mile around the bend of the highway, you would see the mouth of the Russian River. There was never a moment when the river was completely empty of kayaks. Apparently, this is a big thing to do here. I was content to watch them from my lofty perch.


















Even driving in the car from SF to Jenner was stunning. We started off by traveling over the Golden Gate Bridge, which was more entertaining than I thought it would be. I mean, it's a bridge. Big deal, right? Except, for some reason, it really is a big deal. You see the bay and the skyline and umpty-eleven sailboats and hikers and bikers and those big red wires, and it just seems special somehow.





















So you get over the bridge and through the more populated parts of Marin County, and then all of a sudden, the land is empty and the views are spectacular. I didn't want to stop looking out the window even for a second. Above is a picture of Blind Beach, which was perhaps a half mile from our cottage. Pretty much all of coastal Sonoma County looks like this.



















Even stopping for lunch in a crummy sandwich joint turned out to be a feast for the eyes. Aside from the quaint boats and piers, this bay was full of sea lions who popped up and down from the water at regular intervals. We sat at a table next to the water and played "spot the mammal" while nibbling omelettes.

So there you have it. It's so beautiful there that not even this hardcore knitter can turn her eyes to the needles. Plus, oh yes, they have wine. Lots and lots of good wine. I highly recommend a visit to this part of the country, if ever you are able.

There Ought to Be a 12-Step Program For This

This is all I can think about today. I mean, just look at it.

No, really. Look closer.













This is sock yarn from the Hand Painted Yarn Company. I'm so sick of knitting socks that I'm casting on anything and everything just to avoid knitting socks.

But everytime I walk past my sock yarn stash, I have to pause, open the closet door, and stare through the clear plastic bin at this beautiful yarn. I have to force myself not to cast it on by reminding myself how much I loathe sock knitting at the moment. Can you blame me for this bit of schizophrenia? The yarn is so incredibly soft. And colorful. And flecky -- I adore the primary flecks against the teal and purple and periwinkle. Adore.

This yarn was the first purchase at Stitches Midwest this year. It occurs to me that I never finished telling the Stitches story -- with my precision laser-beam focus (ha!), I keep drifting from topic to topic and never really finishing anything. Story of my knitting life these days. Which I blame on socks. As we all know by now.

Anyway.

At Stitches in 2006, the first thing I understood -- when I walked in that market and smelled the wool and silk and, OMG, you could almost swim laps in the fumes because they were that dense -- was that I hadn't brought enough cash. I'd brought $200, which would be more than ample to go yarn shopping on any other day. But in the Stitches market, it was just enough to tease me and make me a little crazy.

I mean, come on. Mill packs for half price as far as the eye could see. One of a kind, never to be seen again, gourmet hand dyed yarns from indie farms who actually name their sheep. I mean, these people have relationships with their wool because it's that special. How do you begin to decide which to buy? It was torture.

I started saving for this year's Stitches right then and there. I came up with a plan. I would give myself a once-in-a-lifetime total yarn shopping spree. No guilt, no limits. I would take more cash than I could ever reasonably spend on yarn, and I would spend as much of it as my heart desired.

We should all have a day like that some day.

When Red and I walked into the market this year, the first thing I saw was a chicken wire fence surrounding mill packs of Noro for half price. I almost hopped the little fence and rolled around in that big fluffy bin, but luckily came to my senses. Good thing. It would have sucked to get arrested and hauled out of the market in handcuffs before even making my first purchase.

We spent a good ten minutes wading through that bin of yarn before realizing that this was only the tip of the iceberg. We were getting sucked into a yarn sale vortex before we'd made it past the first stall! We needed a plan, or we would never see everything the market had to offer. Shoot, even with a plan, we'd probably never see everything the market had to offer.

We started on the far end and wound our way up and down the aisles. It was perhaps the fourth booth where we found this very unique flecky sock yarn from the Hand Painted Yarn Company.

Bjorn and his partner (I think the partner's name was Mark, but could have that wrong), have started this lovely little cottage shop somewhere in Missouri. They don't usually sell direct to the public, but do wholesale only. They'd never been to a fiber show before. I felt like I was discovering a major new talent, standing there at that booth and chatting with Bjorn about his process. He does all the dying himself, you see, in bins and vats, patiently squeezing every skein by hand. He started to explain the process -- the flecky bits are dyed first and somehow never get overdyed -- but we were interrupted. A shame, because I really enjoyed meeting these two fine craftsmen and could have happily chattered away with them for half the day.

Plus, now I'll never know how he dyes his yarn.

Red managed to pull me out of their booth at last -- I hardly wept at all, and the giant sucking sound only echoed a little bit -- and we wandered into that greatest of all vortexes, that paradise for knitters, that pinnacle of splurgosity...

Webs.

Everything gets a little blurry after that. The only thing I know for sure is that 70 minutes after the market opened, I couldn't carry my bags anymore and had to walk back to the hotel to drop them off. Because, you know, it's darn hard to fondle yarn when you're carrying three hugely overstuffed bags. And I had to keep shopping!

After Webs, I focused on finding special things. Yarns I couldn't buy elsewhere, or artisan yarns, or other unique purchases. I bought some iridescent beads for a beaded scarf, and some beautiful vintage buttons. But mostly, I bought more yarn.

And by 2:30, I was bushed. Totally shopped out. I had planned on spending the entire day in the market, but as it turns out, I just don't have the stamina for it.

That's probably not a bad thing. I came home with money left over, and more yarn than I can knit in a year. Everything I bought fit into existing storage bins, but still, Stitches was definitely my tipping point. I have enough yarn now, and that's a very happy feeling.

And I think it's also why I have such wicked startitis right now. Time to stop shopping and start knitting! Whee!