A Traveling Rug

My brainstorm to repurpose the 10 year old Jill Draper yarn, as reported in my last post,  for a new sweater for NY Sheep & Wool  as part of the Rhinebeck Sweaters for Good came together fabulously when I emailed Jill and discovered only two options for a contrast color: dust (shown, when it arrived) or polar white. I went with Dust,  above. It's a  hard-to-pin-down neautral; slightly pink/lavendar/grey, sort of like lint.  Both the main color and the contrast color are now odd murky shades and I am loving them together!

 e

The last couple of weeks have been full of travel and activity, and the yarn came along for the rides.  First it went with me  on my annual camping trip with Zoe. We started camping together when she was 8 and we found a small tent in the basement during the pandemic. No one else in the family was game for camping that year so just the two of us headed to the woods in Vermont.  And we kept returning there. Now it's an annual tradition. This year, though, we went to Lake Damariscotta in Maine. 

We upgraded the tent quite a bit this year. 

 

And I cast on by the campfire. No notes! 

 

A bougie lobster roll at a shack near Boothbay. No notes on this either! It's Shannon Unshelled , we've been there before and if you're in that area you won't regret eating there. 

 

 Some years we do mostly nature activities and lots of campfire cooking. Some years we head out and adventure around the area, eat out, explore towns and either way, we love it. This year we went to Popham Beach, another Maine fave of ours. When the tide is out you can walkwaaaay out to  sand bars.

The colors are weird, right? The main color reminds me of a copper penny with green patina. Except fuzzy. I am super happy with my Rug so far. 

A day or or two after I came back from Maine I went to Montana for a photo shoot. It needs it's own post--amazing adventures, sheep, yarn, everything and knitting progress too, as the yarn came along. A sweater on size 9 US needles isfun, I forgot how fast it goes!

  

And since this is Unraveled  (a day late) I'll share  my reading. I am halfway through Kin by Tayari Jones and recommend it. No notes again! This is quite the 10:10:10 post. 

 

The other book I read...not so enthusiastic about it!  On the camping trip drive I listened to the book  96 Miles by JL Esplin,. Zoe had been avoiding it as her assigned summer reading  for school:  it's YA survivalist vaguely dystopian suspense... meh. Neither of us loved it but it got the job done.  Survivalists and dystopian novels for any level reader are not my jam!  I guess I'd say it's Ok roadtrip listening. 

Sweater for Good Unraveled

 Today we have some Unravel for real! A failed sweater from 2017 ish was returned to yarn balls, 1200+ yards of chunky weight yarn.

It's got a lot of variation in it and is sort of copper/chestnut/green brown/warm shades.....

Have you heard about Sweaters for Good, the initiative of the Hudson Valley Textile Project that asked knitters coming to Rhinebeck for NY Sheep and Wool to commit to knitting their "Rhinebeck Sweater"  out of yarn with roots in NY State and/or the Northeast US.  The word went out about this last year at the festival and has been bubbling along just below the surface all year. It's a lovely idea to support local fiber  farms, wool producers, dyers and mills. And really the point is not about making a new sweater in order to attend the festival- the point is celebrating local yarn, which is itself the point of sheep and wool festivals in the first place.

All of which is to say I took the pledge and now the clock is ticking! IAlthough I have plenty of great local yarn, none seems to be in a sweater quantity unless I want multicolored stripes.   I saw Kay's post on Modern Daily Knitting about her Sweater for Good considering  Rug, I remembered that this sweater has been in my queue forever, would be a quick knit (chunky yarn ftw) and I had a failed sweater knit in Jill Draper Makes Stuff yarn,at exactly the right weight and vibe, and it is about as local to Rhinebeck as one can get!

 That's what it looked like knit up, pre unraveling the failed pullover.  Color more accurate here than at top.

Anyway, a quick check with Jill Draper for a skein of CC for the Rug yoke found me discovering she'd discontinued this yarn  (Middlefield, its' a wool alpaca blend) but had a skein left that could work for me.. It's one the way.  I am kind of excited to cast on. Let's ignore the fact that it has been pretty warm at the annual Rhinebeck sheep festival in recent years so knitting this may be more of an act of faith than a fashion statement in October! 

 

READING: Kin by Tayari Jones.  Wonderful characters, enjoying and recommend so far! It's a good follow up from Whistler by Ann Patchett .  I am not the only one feeling this way: these two authors are speaking together (!!) at the  National Book Festival in DC next weekend , wish I could attend! (aug 22nd) .

 

Folded crane covered wall!At a health center  I was photographing at for a client earlier this week.

keeping on keeping on

 This simple sweater that simply needs sleeves completed is moving along ever so subtly.I get a kick out of random stuff accumulating on my kitchen table. Are you a clear it all off all the time person? I am not. And so you can see the sweater in question (left there so I'll knit a little while I have coffee), a long ago kid's penguin that resurfaced yesterday , it tickled me, my coffee mug, my new project bag from Yarn and Whiskey and two random vintage postcards promoting the "beauty" of modern wall-to-wall carpets.Here's a better look at them:  I have an extensive old postcard collection, thanks to myself as a kid but mostly to my Uncle Jerry. I inherited his VERY robust collection about 30 years ago.  He traveled all over the US picking up postcards new and old, and clearly anyone who knew him handed off their postcards, too. Sometimes I'll pull out a bunch to admire and get lost in time--yesterday I read one that a young girl sent in rural Maine in 1911, assuring her Grammie she'd "made it and only fell off once and wasnt hurt". (presumably a horseback ride to another town). The card was addressed to a name, and the name of a town..that's it!

I was looking through old cards as candidates  for Zoe to bedazzle--here's a vintage easter card she did up as a gift for a neighbor.

 

And a glimpse at the impeccable penmanship on the back . Is there anything as bored and aimless as a 14 year old with nothing to do mid summer and noone to hang with ? She got a bug to bedazzle last week and who am I not to jump on that? 

 Reading: Kin  by Tayari Jones, I liked her last book , this was recommended to me twice recently, and I'd forgotten that I already downloaded it. So far so good!  Thanks to the  Unravel reviews linked to Kat's blog, my reading queue is getting better every week..

In storytelling of the non-fiction kind: I've been getting notes from my KnitStars production team asking me for still images to intersperse with my video. I am very curious to see how they present me! Shelley Brander, KnitStars owner and lead creative  wrote a lovely and lively substack post about her visit  Meanwhile they keep on releasing single classes from past years to watch, they are so good! You may want to check some of them out, here is a link Look under the Masterclass Singles. 

Please do use my link if you feel like buying a class, anyone who is a KnitStar subject gets royalties when any sale is made from their link, no matter what class or season you are buying. It's actually a good deal for creatives all around:-) and I appreciate the support!____________________