cwBlog

So it's been an eventful past few weeks, and I haven't blogged. Bad me.

The Webs Tent Sale

The weekend after the New Hampshire Sheep & Wool Festival was the Webs annual Tent Sale. Years ago, in May, an optimistic woman started a yarn store in Amherst, and the endeavor that grew into celebrates each year in April and May. The high point is the Tent Sale, where they have a tent with six or seven long tables of yarn that's even cheaper than their usual closeout prices.

My acquisitions were many. It turns out that the Cascade mill misspun two huge batches of yarn: one, a rich dark charcoal grey, was meant to be Cascade 220 but was spun at a DK weight instead of a worsted weight, and another, a beautiful natural-colored yarn with Donegal flecks, was meant to be Cascade 128 but was spun at a worsted weight instead of a bulky weight. One of them -- I'd have to dig out the receipt to be sure, and I'd rather not do that because then I'd remember just how much I spent, was $15 for a bag, and the other was $20. So I got three bags of the tweedy Donegal and two bags of the charcoal, figuring that at $40-$45, I could worry about precisely what it would be later.

They also had this beautiful Ironstone yarn on sale, worsted weight, 95ish percent wool and 5ish percent acrylic. I got a bag each of two colors, one a nice patriot blue, one a naturalish white. I figured they'd make a good colorwork sweater or two, plus possibly gloves or some such. (Selbuvotter!)

Beyond that, I got two spools (totalling a kilogram) of 40/2 linen for the Rose of England tablecloth and a half-dozen balls of sock yarn.

With me that day was my friend and fraternity brother Lynne from college, a crocheter. She actually got to the sale a little bit earlier than I did, and she found a box of yarn before I showed up. She summarized the day beautifully with her description of the yarn: "It's a beautiful color, and there's a lot of it. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it, but it's 80% off."

Halcyon Yarn

So on Memorial Day weekend we went to visit Lynne and her fiancé Mark. On Friday, Mark was still at work, so Lynne, Jason, and I went off to Halcyon Yarn, which is an old yarn store in Bath, Maine. It turns out that when I was living in Bath, I drove by Halcyon twice a day, but never realized it. It's a fairly unremarkable building.

But it's full of yarn, with a warehousey area of sport and fingering weight yarn (obviously aimed at weavers, but they didn't ask what I was doing with it when they sold it to me), spinning fiber, and knitting yarns. They also had an extensive book section: they do a lot of mailorder, and so all their books are right out there on display where they can find them to ship out.

In the end, I wound up with a one-pound cone of Jaggerspun Maine Line 3-ply in a beautiful red, two two-ounce cones of Jaggerspun Maine Line 3-ply in white and navy blue, a cone of Harrisville Shetland 2-ply (which is a good fingering weight), and a one-pound batt of beautiful green wool.

Then on the way back to Lisbon, Lynne wanted to go to Staples in Brunswick, and we noticed a yarn store on the other side of the parking lot. It was a small shop, but well-stocked, and I found the old Harmony Guides 2, 3, 6, and 7 there. There was a lot of beautiful sock yarn, but the Little Voice had recovered (it apparently had laryngitis for the Tent Sale, and got lost in the complicated intersection in Bath that's around Halcyon Yarn) and said, "but we just bought sock yarn!" Still, it was a charming little shop, and I'm glad we found it.

Then there was a weekend off, and then....

Knit Camp

One of the lists I'm on tried a Knit Camp last year in Bennington, VT, and it was so much fun that they decided to do it again this year. The two hosts, Sadia and Ann, live near a hotel that has conference facilities, and they're friendly with the owners. So they get an event rate for a block of rooms, and they pay the fee to use the conference rooms, and people congregate.

This year, there was a field trip on Friday: a trip to the Green Mountain Spinnery, in Putney, VT, for a tour; to Golding Fiber Tools in Saxton's River, VT; and to Webs, in Northampton, MA. (Some of the knit campers came from Montreal and northern Vermont, and so for them Webs was not on the way to knit camp.) I fell down hard in each place; the Green Mountain Spinnery had some beautiful hanks of wool-mohair blend, in rich washed-out blues and reds (this was the theme for the day), and tweedy wool in deep rich navy blue, forest green, and cranberry red. I had looked at the spindles online -- after the impulse buy of a spindle and some fiber at New Hampshire Sheep & Wool, I was a lost cause -- but while the hand-carved and custom-painted spindles were more striking online, the solid wood spindles were more appealing in their minimalism. I bought three, in different weights and woods. Then, to Webs. Remember that I was there just three weeks ago? They had some new sock yarn, Valley Yarns Huntington, and it seemed to me like it would be perfect for a project I have in mind. And right next to it they cunningly placed some Louet Gems in sport and fingering weights, and some Trekking Pro Natura bamboo blend yarn in beautiful washed-out reds and teals. (Some of this may have been there before, but I did not see it because I was buying other stuff.)

Then I spent two days knitting and learning, but this post is long enough that I'm going to save that for another post, probably tomorrow. I've also got a few interesting things in the works that I want to blog about too....

Today was the New Hampshire Sheep & Wool Festival. After spending what I did a couple weeks back at Gore Place and the Yarn Harlot's event at Webs, I didn't think it would be wise to risk being that close to that much fiber. But then yesterday I figured - hey, I just had a birthday, I can buy myself yarn as a present!

Oddly enough -- well, perhaps not oddly, as it started a couple weeks back at Webs -- I didn't really feel like buying yarn. Don't get me wrong -- there was a lot of beautiful yarn at the festival. But when I looked at a beautiful handpainted sock yarn, the Little Voice said, "But you already have all that yarn from Knitivity that you haven't knit yet." When I looked at some lovely lace yarn, the Little Voice said, "What about all that 16/2 alpaca/silk you have from Webs that you need to knit this summer?" When I looked at some beautiful Irish yarn from The Irish Ewe, the Little Voice said, "OMG ARAN WEIGHT IRISH WOOL 8 OUNCES FOR $12," and then took a deep breath, and continued, "but we already have enough wool stashed for five sweaters, and it doesn't make sense to stash more." I did run into a vendor selling Bartlett Sport for $15 per cone, and the Little Voice started to comment that we bought 5 pounds of Bartlett Sport at Gore Place. At that point I told the Little Voice to get stuffed, because $15 a cone is more than 50% off, and 50% off is enough to rationalize the purchase even of yarns I don't like. I got a nice rich heathered mulberry purple cone and (finally, you think this would be a staple color) a beautiful rich dark not-quite-navy blue.

Oh, and I got two books. First, I saw a book specifically about knitting ganseys, one that I hadn't seen before. (Of course, once I bought it, I saw it at every vendor, though it wasn't on sale anywhere so I didn't need to kick myself.) And, in an amazing bit of serendipity, this week, someone on Ravelry recommended The Sweater Workshop by Jacqueline Fee. (I can't be more specific than that, because the only record I have is in my little black book, the notation "Sweater Workshop, J. Fee.") Well, in one of the booths, I came face to face with Jacqueline Fee herself, who cheerfully sold me an autographed copy of her book.

But neither of those is risky, or at least it isn't a new risk. I've been known to lose my sense of budget in yarn stores and bookstores before; with yarn in particular, making sure I see my stash at least once a day tends to mitigate meltdowns. There was a lot of beautiful fiber there, in the form of raw fleeces, cleaned and dyed fiber, and roving. And then it jumped out at me: the Learn to Spin Kit from Nancy's Knit Knacks. And whoops! just like that, there was a guardrail near the slippery slope, and I just vaulted over it.

So far I've produced about four yards of yarn. It's nothing to write home about, but the fourth yard is much more even than the first three, so I'm making progress. But I get the scary feeling that by the time Rhinebeck comes around, I'll be shopping for a spinning wheel. But please, no matter how rational I sound -- someone, please, stop me before I buy a sheep, OK?