Yorkies and Mittens and Steeks, Oh My!

Last weekend I was invited over to Yorkshire Yarns to play.  Here are the Lakewood, WA knitters in their living room class area, working on some mittens.  

Note the smooshy chairs, delicious snacks, and big screen TV for our class slide show:  These people know how to rock a knitting class!  I wanted to stay all night.  I came back the next day and we steeked like maniacs.  Maniacs in extremely comfy chairs.

Sonya (third from the left, in the back) is the store owner and ring leader.  She raises Yorkshire Terriers.  Since I am also owned by a terrier (Scottish), we had a few notes to compare.

I have a cunning plan to invent a new design just for Yorkshire Yarns, and you can bet dogs will be featured.  Especially when the dogs are this kind of cute:

Stop it or I'll die from your adorablity.  I mean it.  Quit looking at me like that or I'll be forced to rub your belly.

After the yarn party in Lakewood, I dashed on up to Whidbey Island, then back down to Seattle, where I visited with my family, and even procured the perfect charcoal gray shoes to wear with my new Knot Garden cardigan (whose sleeves I am really going to sew on.  Really.)

While I was on the road, I made a bunch more swatches; only something like 10 more to go!  And just because I've never tried before, I started my first pair of knee socks.  What a rush!  They look huge, but we'll see...pics to follow, provided I don't frog them.

Note to the Mad Hatters of Wild Purls:  I am really looking forward to calling in to your Mad Tea Party on the 15th - knit on, because I'm dying to see the pictures!

For my Madrona Wisteria knitters, I've been checking in on you on Ravelry and I'm amazed by your progress - I can't wait to see all those Wisterias!  Can you believe it's almost finally here?

I've been promising myself some spinning time, so I think I'll use it as a reward for getting those sleeves sewn in.  What could possibly go wrong?
 

For The Birds

Piggybacking onto the momentum of having finished Catkins (did I mention that I finished Catkins?), I finished the second sleeve of the Knot Garden.  Just a couple of weeks short of a YEAR since starting it, for the record.  Smug dance of completion to follow, as soon as they dry and get sewn into the body...

So smug am I (and un-anxious to return to the swatchapalooza that is my other concern this week) that I went completely batshit and conceived a cunning backdrop for the Knot Garden. 

I seem to have remembered that in a previous life I used to sew things sometimes.  I have no memory of consciously stopping all sewing activity, but I think it must have been around the same time I stopped a bunch of other stuff I like, in the hopes of getting a book written on time.  Not that I'm complaining, you understand -  it's good to rest some muscles in favor of others from time to time.

Now that I'm gainfully unemployed, all sorts of stuff I used to like doing is popping back into my conciousness.  Stuff like hearing music, and digging in the dirt (garden dirt, not kitchen floor dirt), reading books.  And my old friend, sewing.

And sewing, you may know, is just like falling off a bicycle - once you've learned how to properly screw up a sewing project, you never forget.

It actually started with a conversation I had with my friend Jill (non-knitter, for the record, but still completely lovable).  She asked me what kind of bird I was, and I didn't know.  I know for sure that she's a Great Blue Heron - (leggy, graceful, eats a fair amount of fish) but I was unable to locate my own inner bird.  Jill thinks I might be a robin, which notion I sort of like. 

So the bird thing has been with me, and I got it in my head that I must need a dress with birds on it to go with my finally-finished Knot Garden.  I waltzed into the fabric store, and there it was:  Exactly what I would have made if I had set out to design fabric with birds on it:  

I cut out the dress last night, and I sewed it today.  And in a turn of fate which is nothing like knitting (and nothing like sewing, for that matter), it fits just right and I completely love it.  Too weird.  That is just not the way it works - no drama, no odyssey, no falling out of hair clumps.  Just found it, made it, love it.  Interesting how easy it is when there's nothing at stake.  Wonder where that magic goes when someone inserts a deadline?

And now there must be shoes.  We're not savages here, after all.
 

More Things I Know About Billings, Montana

So there I was in a snow storm:

So there I was in a snow storm:

* A Brief Sidebar Regarding Footwear:  Even someone like me, from the west coast, knows that it is want to snow from time to time in Montana.  So much so that I actually purchased snow boots in anticipation of my visit there.  The thing is, my snow boots, cute and furry though they were, cost $80.  $80, where I come from, could almost buy a month of ice skating lessons for a Smally.  $80 represents the electricity for a month's worth of assaults on Mount Washmore.  $80, as it happens, is the exact amount required for Phillip's latest grad school textbook.  So, it occurred to me that as cute and fuzzy as my new Montana snow boots were, they had the rotten luck to be made of suede, which in Portland, where it rains 300 days a year, is an unrealistic choice for footwear.  I decided that my old clogs could handle whatever Billings had to dish out for a couple of days - after all - it's not like they were going to make me teach classes in the parking lot.  I returned the sassy fuzzy snow boots unworn, congratulating myself on my responsible stewardship of resources. 

Second thing my host said after meeting me at the airport: "Are those the only shoes you brought?" 

And then, she graciously loaned me the real snow boots pictured above.  That's just how they roll in Billings.  *

Let me be clear:  The Knitters of Wild Purls are Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know.  They listened attentively while I told them what I know about making stranded colorwork.  And they gamely played along during an exercise calculated to help them handle two strands of yarn at the same time.  Hardly anyone got poked in the eye, and those who did were made of stout stuff, and didn't complain.

I know this also:  The knitters of Billings know a thing or two about Stash Management.  Lack those fancy-schmancy store fixtures to hold the bounty of your yarn collection?  No problem.  Use what is at hand:  Notably, buckets from the feed store.  Not only are they beautiful, they are functional.  They have even become something of an icon that describes the spirit of Wild Purls.  And yes, I got to touch ALL of That Yarn.

I told the Knitters lot of my secrets, and they told me a lot of theirs.  We made hats, and mittens, and I'm pretty sure that this was only the beginning of our adventures together.

They were such good sports that they even posed for the following picture:

Julia Warmer is the owner of Wild Purls.  She's down front with the apron on and my head in her lap.  And for the record, she is an instigator of Many Silly Things.  I hardly started any trouble at all.  Okay, there may have been one little incident involving a hotel bed sheet.  But mostly, I was the picture of restraint that you, Gentle Readers, all know me to be.  I was so good that I'm almost sure they will invite me back, with appropriate supervision.  One more thing I now know that you should too:

Billings Rocks.