seasonally affected. again.

 

See that yarn on top? A skein of Schaefer Nichole in Thistle, left over from a test knit for the new book project. I know. I can't believe the knitter returned it, either. I might have been gracious and insist she keep it, there was enough left to knit a small shawl. Except... I didn't. A lot of yarn passed through here this year, a lot of very, very, lovely yarn.  But this particular skein was one I coveted.

Since I've been on a run of scarfy/shawly things, I chose Roma as my pattern for it. Then, I skidded like a ouija board at a pre-teen sleepover to the golden straw skein of Classic Elite Soft Linen for the contrast. Not really my color, why was I choosing it? this is going to look amazing after blocking. trust me.

It took me only a day to realize I'd done it again. Chosen colors that are all around me as the leaves change, shadows deepen  and the marsh grasses turn golden. I am so. freakin'. predictable.

 

And then I reached for my mug, on the table in the family room this week.

what color scarf are you casting on?

 Fremont Solstice Festival Seattle

Quick! What color comes to mind?

Randolph Vermont general store

How about now?

 

Fremont Solstice Festival Seattle naked cyclists parade kickoff *

Ok do I have your attention? (I should have left the patch off, right? )

So. You should be just about ready to cast on a red scarf for the Orphan Foundation of America's Red Scarf project. Knit a red (or non-gender-specific) color scarf, approx  5-8" wide and around 60" or so long, to be included in a care package to a college kid who aged out of foster care and is going it on their own.  Send it in by December 15th.  The address, and more info about this wonderful effort here.

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* When I asked my 16yo son Gabe if he'd come out to Seattle and work for me on a series of photo shoots right after school ended this past June, he surprised me by asking if we'd be there for Solstice. He's not usually much of an earthy-crunchy-granola guy. I asked why he cared.  The Fremont festival, said he. Naked bicyclists. Like, hundreds of them.

You know what? It was a fabulous parade and party. The naked cyclists were just the kickoff. In fact the whole week was full of fabulous.  We might just go back in 2011. Gabe says he's going to be in the parade. On a bicycle.

that slippery granny slope

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

I know. You just glanced at the photo and thought "whoa, whose blog am I on, anyway?"

It all started in April, I was with the Empress of Granny Square, Ellen Bloom,  in LA. You can't hang with Ellen without  a hook somehow finding its way into your hands, and a granny square springing forth.  At least I couldn't.

Last weekend, my friend Julie asked for a lesson. Since my granny square before the three in April was, like, in my teens, I thought I'd practice a little.

And one thing led to another. I'm thinking granny square scarf. These are 5 inches across.

Truth: I was also thinking afghan. But I realized 15 squares = a pretty decent scarf, 99= a decent afghan.....yeah. Scarf it is.

• • • • • • • • • • • • •

Thanks for entering the caption contest, that was great, you need to go read the captions in comments on the last post- so clever and funny. And punny, too. (winners have been notified).

fall ahead, caption contest, & lotsa links

Don't you love how Labor Day Weekend shakes your sheets into autumn with a crisp snap? Make  plans  now  or suddenly you're neck deep in pumpkin, cooking Thanksgiving dinner and wondering what happened to fall. First up for me: 

Photo Workshop Weekend in St Paul MN at The Yarnery September 25 &  26th
scroll down fr the Yarnery link, or click here for details

If you have a passion for photography,  join us for 2 days of hands-on digital camera workshop. Pixels, fiber, FO's..what more could you want?

 

This needs a good caption, doesn't it?  Contest below.

We'll be taking a field trip to a historic farmstead on the Saturday afternoon of the workshop. I'm thrilled to have that setting for teaching about shooting FO's on real people, for showing how you can work with different  light situations,  on a porch, in open sun, in shade, and also have all the textures & colors and props to use as backgrounds. And, sheep. Not promising any will have mad modeling skillz. This cutie was from the photo workshop weekend at Juniper Moon Farm, click here to see some of the workshop in action. The class is half full so go guilt a friend or loved one into coming along and call The Yarnery to sign up. *

Caption contest/ book & yarn giveaway

Leave  a comment on this post with a caption for the photo above, and you're entered to win a copy of the book Shear Spirit: Ten Fiber Farms, Twenty Patterns and Miles of Yarn, or  yarn.

Mention the contest and link to this post  from your blog your Facebook or Twitter,  and you get an extra entry for each mention.  Deadline for captions is September 10th.

Two  winners: one drawn randomly, to win the book. The second, for the best caption, gets 3 skeins of Brown Sheep Lambs Pride yarn (appropriate, no?)

* the Twin Cities are a terrific place to visit for a weekend, if you're not from the area.  And you can't do better than The Yarnery folks as hosts, they're the ones who serenaded  the Yarn Harlot and Mason Dixon Knitting Ann & Kay. Talent and senses of humor, plus they can knit like nobody's business. btw, those are links to posts with YouTubes of the Yarnery Singers in action, you really should view them.

gale goes goat geeking

 

When my just turning 20 (today! and, really?) son Leo came home for a month this summer, he reprised his role as traveling photo assistant. We had great adventures shooting for the book Shear Spirit four years ago (Texas, fr'instance, here).  Since I can barely stand to pass up a field trip enroute to a job, and we were heading up to Montpelier VT for a corporate shoot,  I found the.perfect. sidetrip. Goats! Goat cheese ! Open to visitors any time, and they are one of the only places in the northeast that make cajeta- goat caramel- which really piqued our curiousity.

Leo's in culinary college and  cooks passionately for work, so, you combine my appreciation of goat farms with love of artisanal foods and we are so there.

It's a self-touring kinda deal. If you're a photographer, this joint is hog heaven.  

The resident pigs seemed to agree.

First stop : the tasting room/shop with a refrigerated tray and do-it-yourself instructions. Some of this came home with us.  I doubt I can make it last til Ice Cream for Breakfast Day. It goes very well with ice cream. Just saying.

We hiked the rest of the farm in scorching heat, if for nothing else than to thank the goats for their labors. 

Freshly harvested garlic & onions drying. 

Taking a breather by the chicken coop. We tease him that he's gone Mr. Miami on us. 

It's my continuing disappointment that you don't get fiber from dairy goats, nor chevre from an angora. But if you did? wow.

 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 

 

We were at Fat Toad Farm.  There is an official VT CheeseTrail, so you can find other Vt cheese farms, too. Seriously! Get the map from  Vt Cheesemakers

the moral of the story is

 

Storm Cloud Shawlette by Hanna Breetz. I confess I bought Urban Silk while enchanted at  Loop & Leaf  when I was in Santa Barbara. Silk & cotton is perfect, just perfect for that charmingly temperate city, and this is my favorite shade of green. And, it was spring! Who needs wool in a world like that?  It's like buying kickass cowboy boots in Texas, they are so right when you're  there. Or big chunky turquoise & silver necklaces in New Mexico. Or shirts with flamingos on them in Florida.  Then you get home to your east coast beach neighborhood and natural toned wrinkly linen clothes and say, huh, what was I thinking?

 In this case, I was thinking I'd use it to knit Saroyan. Within a few inches I knew it wasn't working. With all the sheen and texture in the Urban Silk, the leaves disappeared into little crinkly sneezes along the edge.

So, I shifted over to the Storm Cloud, a simple semi-circle shawl.

yarn: urban Silk - 3 skeins

needles: size 9 us

modifications:  I changed it up a little, increased sooner than suggested, threw in two bands of stockinette. All good, it's a rock solid design structure and you can't really mess it up by improvising on the stitches.

my thoughts: Lovely yarn, wonderful simple pattern. But I was not truly feeling it. I'm an animal fiber kinda gal. I like wooliness. A short way in I realized it was, in essence, going to look similar to my Clapotis .  That is:  green,non-woolly, voluminous neck wrap, open stitch pattern. I lost my zip.  Until on a photo shoot for a dear friend. She loved it halfway done. I mean EL-OH-VEEE luuvvvved it and I am always thrilled to make something for her. I sped through the second half. So, happy ending, the Storm Cloud has been sent to New Jersey.  And if I can remember NO MORE shopping under the influence of geography, I'll be A-OK.

 

Although this example of shopping locally? No problem!13 pounds of August tomatoes etc bubbling away right now, to be frozen as summer sauce.

she knits seashell at the seashore

Coquille (rav) on the needles on a cloudy beach day

I'm tickled by the colors echoing the sand, seaweed, driftwood, and coastal water. Do you know how happy this will make me this winter? Designer Mary Lou Egan nailed this fun project. Which explains why it's a hit since it came out in Knitty . Mine's more of a scarfy shawl, I snagged 4 skeins of Noro Chirimen while dashing through the Webs backroom a couple of weeks ago. I neglected to check yarn weight for the Coquille  pattern (um, fingering!) , so my interpretation is heavier in this worsted weight cotton, silk & wool blend. To love. If you click the Noro link, you'll see it's still on sale, btw. ( you're welcome).

So, speaking of Mary Lou (smooth segue, eh?), she and the Yarnery in St Paul have arranged for me to return to Minnesota for a Photography for Knitters workshop weekend. So psyched! It'll be Sept 25 & 26th, 2 days split between the store classroom, Grand Ave and a field trip to a historic farmstead to use as a setting for shooting FO's, fiber, sheep, the farmhouse, fall crops, and anything else we aim our lenses at. A 2 day workshop gives us time to really get a lot of work done, you will leave with new skills. And tons of images.  I promise.

Info is up here and also  at The Yarnery Visiting Teacher page.

I hate to have beach season end, but knowing we have the workshop in St. Paul to look forward to makes it a lot easier.

and the seasons they go round & round...

Taking the day off to enjoy a bigbigbig anniversary with Dave. It's not the endlessly sunny beach day we planned, but we're going to enjoy it anyway. 

(I swear, that's not supposed to be a metaphor about marriage.  Just a weather report).

Watch Hill, here we come.

all we are saying

Give toast a chance?  At the Gathering of the Vibes last weekend, in an unusually idyllic Bridgeport CT.

 

Like a Grateful Dead concert circa 1979,  add many hula hoops. It was a rare family outing, which was both very wonderful and slightly weird. I mean, we used to go to lots of music festivals before we were parents, and here we are, years later, finding Sunday's lineup of Little Feat, Martin Sexton, Jimmy Cliff and Damien Marley+Nas as common ground for all four of us, and off we went. Don't get me wrong, we are not so groovy as to have a 16 & 19 yo who hung out with us there. They met friends, we created a small force field of uncoolness right near the stage for most of Sunday,  they'd stop by and visit once in a while. (I brought these socks to work on. Cause every time I look at them I think "the only place these belong are at a Dead concert.)

 

You could sit on the seawall to cool off and admire many Goldsworthy-esque cairns and a dude selling seashells by the seashore. But I think he was mostly giving them away.

There's nothing like live music.We kind of forgot the magic of listening in the sun with thousands of people, all in the moment. Our son is turning the same age we were when we met, the week of our 20th birthdays and here we are 3 freakin' decades later  enjoying  the same things together. (Big anniversary making us maudlin? I think so!). At one point, Jimmy Cliff was playing Cat Stevens,  all were grooving along. It's true. Baby baby it's a wild world.

my crazy long to-do list

shot on the fly while passing through Day Moon Press in Seattle

Not that I'll get to it all but I'll be here trying. Meanwhile, acoupla links till I can put together a real post 

• a blog post over on Two Shear Spirits, my joint blog with writer Joan Tapper

• Caro's fab new Tshirt. I ordered one for me and one for my mom.  I hope you get it. 
  And, also, get one.

on home turf

Traveling Woman, designed by Liz Abinante, in a tomato-y red Lisa Souza Merino Sock. 

My idea was to knit this in March when I started a series of trips to shoot the new book project, and by April-June I'd be wearing it on chilly planes, and on cool nights on the west coast, in the NW, everywhere I went,  and I would look tres chic.

Plus the nerdy satisfaction of the pattern name matching my life. Like so many of my good intentions , it didn't spool out as planned. Instead I traveled like crazy and now, back at the ranch, finished it in time for a July heat wave.

 

To underline that sometimes the payoff comes when you're  close to home, here's one of the best locations I've shot at in a flurry of interesting and odd  locations. It's the mammal archives at the natural history museum at Yale. Above, the view before we set up to shoot a researcher working in this room.

How great to have this lineup watching us work. Every few minutes I looked up, and there they were, staring. Most were on display when my sons were little and we were regulars in the exhibit rooms. It was a reunion with old friends. A lucky one; I doubt they are meant to stay in a jumbled lineup in an otherwise sealed & controlled storage facility.

 

As for my travels, I'm not exactly staying put.  New Jersey for a shoot  Tuesday & Wednesday.

contrarian views

There I was, in the lush green of the Pacific NW, after a day of photographing in a riotously colorful artist's studio. And I went crazy, couldn't stop shooting these walls at Ft. Worden.

 

Maybe it's the quilter I spent some time photographing in Ohio, earlier in June, and some talk we had about composition & color and space.

 

Wouldn't it be cool to make a knit or sewn or crocheted version of this?

 

and the colors. Love them.

Another quilt or blanket?

 I admit I've been admiring the anti-graffiti paint smears in a New Haven underpass for months but never photographed  them, so I was  ready to love these.

 

I know, some of you are thinking, what is wrong with her? Go shoot some summer blooms!

Sorry, can't help it.  A graphics professor once told me I zigged instead of zagged.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

If you're missing the juicy color, don't worry, it'll be back verrry soon. I finished my tomato red shawl and am ready to show it

blogging most fowl

A month? It's been a month? Traveling like a mad woman and working hard to finish shooting the new book has kept me away.

There're over 12,000 images to edit. There have been  heroic efforts from friends in binding off tonnage of wool, mohair, and silk blends. There are the vicissitudes of location photography in steamy weather, or endless sun when you want some light shade.  I've got volumes to share on the subject of recent adventures in quirky craft/knitting/community book production.

 

However, these charming ladies and their knitwear will not be in the book. To paraphrase something I read in this NY Times article about people making art to protect abandoned houses in Detroit,:  sometimes the power of an object isn't in its duplication, but in its ability to inspire.

So go design your own birdwear . And be sure to show me.