Road trip!

Hello blog! I've missed you. Things have been a wee bit nutty around here in the last week, but I'm hoping things have calmed down enough for me to be able to get back to the regular schedule of life. I have at least three long blogposts worth of pictures to share with you, most of which are from our travels around Yorkshire and the Lake District before school started last week. But I want to share a somewhat shorter, less-child-focused road trip that I took over the weekend with Allison up to Toft Alpacas.

Let me just start by saying this post is totally a ploy to be able to post a metric ton of cute alpaca pictures, with a little yarn on the side. You have been warned. If you need more alpaca cuteness, there are more photos over on Flickr.

We pulled in to the car park by these lovely ladies, and then headed inside for a day of playing with colors under the expert tutelage of Debbie Tomkies of DT Craft & Design.

The Toft Studio is a fabulous place, full of their yarn and patterns knitted up, all in a glorious array of natural colors.




Then it was time to get to work. First up were some samples with varying dye concentrations in the same color.


Then some experiments in color blending...

While those samples were cooked and rinsed, we went out for a quick tour of the Toft Alpacas farm. **WARNING: MANY, MANY PICTURES OF ADORABLE FUZZY BEASTIES AHEAD**

There they were, hanging out in a field, minding their own business, when SQUEEEEEE - CRIA!!!!



You can bury me now - I am dead from the adorableness.

Then we went into one of the paddocks (are they called paddocks in the UK? Must investigate...). Our guide said "Alpaca are very inquisitive." Indeed:





Ded. Ded of the cutes. I am now in desperate need of my own herd of alpaca to keep in the back garden. I'm sure Himself and the neighbors, not to mention the Richmond-upon-Thames Borough Council, will totally understand...

After our walk, we moved on to 25 gr skeins of lace weight that had been mis-packaged by the mill (i.e. 25 gr instead of 100 gr).

and eventually to full skeins. That's Allison's skein of Jacob Aran-weight (which came out amazingly - check out her photo!), and I did a skein of BFL sock yarn.


Everyone ended up with gorgeous yarns!



(the two on the right in this picture are mine)

And before we left, I managed to do something I'd wanted to do all day...

It was a fabulous day, and many thanks to Debbie and the folks at Toft for making it happen!

Random bits for Labor Day

Right. I'm just back from 10 days in the northern climes of England, and have waaaay too much energy to sit still and blog in a useful manner. However, I have several items of interest that are time sensitive, so here they are, for your edification:

Number 1: The Great London Yarn Crawl

This is the last week of ticket sales, so if you are intending to come and join us on our wild and wooly tour of London's LYS scene, you need to get your tickets before midnight London time on Saturday, 7th September 2013. Three of the routes are almost completely full (i.e. only 2-3 spaces left), so hurry over to the registration page to get yourself booked in.

Number 2: The Small Wool Gathering

After the fabulous P3 retreat last autumn (and spring, for that matter), it was with much sadness that the attendees learned that this year's event was canceled. Some enterprising P3 alumnae and their compatriot have taken it upon themselves to organise a smaller, simpler retreat occurring the same weekend (11-14th October 2013), featuring Amy Singer as the guest instructor for the weekend. Although all the residential spaces are filled, there are some day tickets available, so if you are interested in joining us, we'd love to have you!

Number 3: Because I need another project

One of the organisers of Number 2 and another P3 alumna have been clogging my Twitter feed with jabberings about a baby sweater knitalong. Because I do not have enough on my plate at the moment (see Number 1), I have succumbed to their entreaties. I do not have the correct yarn. I have not swatched. The knitalong starts on Wednesday. I do, however, have a wee nephew who will need a Christmas sweater. Right?

OK. Time to go for a run. The next post will feature updates on my wooly adventures in Yorkshire/Northumberland/Cumbria and far too many sheep pictures.



(told you so...)

Why late night trans-Atlantic lace knitting is a problem

Because, if you're me, it ends a week later in muttered curses and wool/silk spaghetti. Bah!

Hopefully I am now back on the right track, as this design needs to be done soon!

Some things are just made for each other

Like this lovely Romney Ridge Farm yarn in "Cranberry Bog" and entrelac. I've got deadline knitting to do (laceweight, cables, a big boo boo to go back and fix - ugh), but I can't put this down. My other entrelac projects have been terribly fiddley, but worsted weight yarn is so much faster and more satisfying! The plan is to keep going until I run out of yarn, and then do a three-needle bind off to turn this long strip into a cowl. And these colors are going to be the perfect Christmas present for someone.

In other news: I am completely swamped by GLYC organisational stuff/another impending trip/the start of school/general life. So things are going to be a bit sparse on the virtual ground around here for a bit. I'll be Tweeting and updating Ravelry fairly regularly though, so you can always find me there. Ta!

Mother-enabled stash enhancement

My mom knits. Kind of. She likes to get some yarn and start up on a project, or plan for a project, but then she tends to run out of steam. I arrived in Maine to find her eager to get rid of some stash that she had acquired by wasn't going to use any time soon. She used to live around the corner from Windsor Button, which recently closed down, so she had a bunch of yarn that she'd picked up from their going out of business sale.

Noro Kochoran,

and Ella Rae Lace Merino - this is going to become a sweater for the purchaser.


She also had a couple of cones of mystery yarn lying around that she donated to the Cause of Enhancing My Daughter's Yarn Collection.

These have since been determined to be acrylic (hello melting burn test results!), but I plan to weave a table runner or something with them for her.

So herein ends the stash enhancement portion of the US visit. I'm going to ignore the fact that I am glossing over the pound and a half of Hello Yarn fiber that I had sent here so I could save on postage because really, there's no reason to over do it. But the new possibilities are very enticing - it's going to be a fun autumn!