This Saturday was World Wide Knit in Public Day. The Berkley Knitters made a good show of it and we headed out to a local park to enjoy the sunshine (although we all forgot sunscreen and ended up a bit pink).

There was a great spread with chocolate chip cookies, couscous salad, brie, baguette, tomatoes, cherries, mini-pitas, hummus, veggie spears and crackers.

The youngest attending member was very kean on the pitas and hummus.

We can’t wait till next year, we really must have another knitting picnic soon.

I finally got some of the photos off the of camera! Here are some of the things I have been working on:

The Sidelines Top saga continues, I am working on the front and am at the decreases for the waist. Now that I can work the cable pattern by site rather then having to check each row of the pattern it should go a little faster.

This is a hat I impetuously made two weeks ago when a colorway of Noro jumped off the shelf at the yarn store into my hands, I swear it is not my fault! I had to put a flower on it because Will wanted to wear it and I knew I would never get it back if that happend.

This is the Silk Garden Lattice Edge Scarf I have been working on, I think it is almost ready for the other side of treble lattice, then I’ll block it and put some fringe on it. Normally I am not big on fringe but this scarf seems to want some.

This is the landscape of a new scarf I started this week, it is the brown Jacobs Wool I got on shearing day at Meridian Jacobs Farm. The pattern is just simple moss stitch, the yarn is so dark it is hard to see any pattern in it but I wanted it to have some texture. This yarn is a dream to knit with, so soft and very bouncy. I am going to have to pay the farm another visit for some more.

I know it is a bit ADD but I can’t seem to keep to just one project at a time so I have pretty much given up on trying to.

A little while back, the same day in fact as the making of the stockings, my friend Libby and I decided we needed to to try a little experiment with some wool yarn I had gotten in a yarn swap. The yarn we wanted to dye is wound in those little pats that aren’t really a ball and don’t pull from the center well, I like to call them cow pie balls because that is what they look like when squashed a bit. Kind of like this.

The thing about this that intrigued us is that because it is loosely wound, dye would travel through the ball, making a kind of gradation, the question was, how good a gradation. So we popped a ball into my smallest stainless steel sauce pan with just enough water, heated it up and injected red and yellow acid dye into the outer layer of the ball. After a minute or so we added the vinegar, turned down the heat to let it set and Libby went home. The next day, when it was cool I rinsed the ball, let it dry and then kind of forgot about it.

Then last month Libby came over again and demanded to see the ball, she hadn’t forgotten! So we pulled it out and re-skeined it on my niddy noddy. Libby took it home to play with and took some photos.

Re-skeined

Of course we wanted to know what it looked like made up into something so she whipped up a quick Calorimetry headband.

Red Hot!!!

We where both very pleased with how the gradation worked out and that the speckled effect of the colors didn’t create any blocky color patterns. Libby is not in love with the colors we used but I am so I will probably end up wearing this one and we will just “have” to dye up another ball for Libby in a color she likes. All in all we agree that our hypothesis was confirmed.

It is cold outside, but that is ok because I have a big cup of hot tea. January has been dubed Hot Tea Month by the Tea Association of the United States of America.

The gals over at Knit One, Tea Too have purposed some topics to blog about over this month and I couldn’t pass up a chance to talk about tea, I have even thought about starting a tea blog but the Cuppa’ Tea Group on Ravelry pretty much uses up most of my tea mojo.

The topic for this week is tea memories, I have a lot of great memories that include a hot cup of tea, here are a few of my favorites:

When I was a very young lady my father and I would have tea parties while we watched Masterpiece Theater. I had one of those blue edged playschool tables and we would cover it with a crocheted acrylic blanket that was really too thick to be a table cloth but it just the right size for the table (it also absorbed spills really well!). We made Lipton tea and Dad would get Raspberry Coffe Cake, the Enteman’s boxed kind. I would add milk and honey to my tea and alwasy try to wrangle the biggest piece of coffe cake. Once everything was ready we would settle in on the sofa and watch all the wonderful BBC shows on Masterpiece Theater and sometimes Are You Being Served. I am sure all those years of British Humor have made what I am today and layed the foundation for my tea guzzeling tendancies.

There has always been tea around when I was growing up, my mother and her best friend (aka my other mum) both believe anything can be fixed if mulled over long enough with a hot cup of tea. Many evenings have been, are and will be spent around one of their kitchen tables with hot cuppa’s and homemade cookies.

The year I went off to college at UCD my mother got me my own china teapot with matching mugs and a hotpot so I wouldn’t have to make tea by the cup in the microwave (ick!). I soon found the local yarn shop and made friends with Becca and Claire who also shared my love of tea, I’ll never forget the night we had tea and pizza in my dorm suite common room or all the peanut butter pancakes Becca tried to feed me.  Tea makes friends.

There are lots more stories but these are the ones that come to mind most often.

What are your favorite memories about tea?

So do you remember that yummy looking yak and merino roving that I got at Color from  A Verb for Keeping Warm?  Well I have been busy on the wheel lately and it is now a lovely fingering/lace weight yarn.

50/50 Yak and Merino

I also finally got the last bit of the Plumber plyed and am now trying to decide what to spin next out of the stash. While the spinning bug has been great, the Sidlelines Top kind of got put on well, the sideline for a bit but I am determind to get back to it tonight as the spinning urg seems to be wanning  a little.

I have also been working on another Noro scarf, just something for mindless craft moments, like on the drive to SoCal and breaks at work when I can’t get enough of a patterned something done. This one is in Silk Garden and is just single crochet with a treble crochet lattice edge.

Noro Silk Garden Scarf

What have you been working on lately?

Surface Scales of Wool Fibers

Thanks to Dan over at the Roving Gnome and a thread on the Love to Dye group over on Ravlery I feel a need to get my geek on in some way. So I decided that I should start providing links to things that are more on the sciencey side.

Today I offer you a link to a great PDF file on the Macro and Micro sturcuture of Wool.

This weekend was a fun tea things filled weekend. On Saturday my friend Nita (SpitSplice to any Ravelers out there) came and dropped off two boxes full of crochet and knitting patterns for me to go through (more on these later) and then we and her hubbie went to my local tea bar, L’amyx, for a nice cuppa and chat before wandering around the shops (more on that later too).

Saturday also found Will and I up on Piedmont Ave poking around the shops after breakfast and I gave into a bit of temptation and got these:

Click Me!

And……

Click Me!

There is a whole series of these mugs by Mud Pie Collections and I must say I had a hard time picking just one mug to get.

The tea deck is great fun. There is a card for all the basic kinds of tea, such as matcha, Assam, green, white, etc as well as some herbals and blending tips. And there are recipes of tasty treats such as scones, Buckingham Palace Shortbread, and more. It is great if you are just learning about teas because each card talks about how to brew the specific tea, a little info on how it is processed, the region is originates from, etc. I can’t wait to try the shortbread recipe!

Anyway, more to come on the treasures from Nita and other fun things, afraid my flash drive with photos is being sat on by a cat at home.

About two weeks ago I went to a little fiber festival in Berkeley. The festival is aptly named Color and this was the second one this year. At this point it is a very small festival, about 5 vendors, about 6 small classes and an area for folks to bring their wheels, spindles, knitting, etc. and hangout for a while. But I would say its size is part of what I liked about it, it wasn’t so crowded that you couldn’t get into booths to touch and see all the yarns and fibers, you could sit down, get to know folks and there where not a lot of “tourists.”

The best thing was that all the vendors where local, including two of my favorites, Tactile and A Verb for Keeping Warm. A few yarn stores carry some of their roving but it is so nice to see all of the things they offer and get to fondle it too. Both vendors use natural dyes from Earth Hues to get wonderfuly soft but vibrant colors.

CMV Locks

I got a fun bag of CMV locks from Tactile with a hodgepodge of colors that I am going to blend into a fun heathered/tweedy batt once I can borrow my mom’s drum carder ( I think she has used it twice, maybe). The deep colors are made by overdyeing a darker fleece, which is a niffty way of not haveing to use as concentrated a dye bath as you would with white fleece to get dark colors.

50/50 Yak and Merino

Of course I also had to get something from A Verb for Keeping Warm and there is no other word to describe how wonderful this roving feels but sensuous. It is a blend of 50/50 yak and merino wool, it is like butter and the blend of the natural colors of each fiber will make a wonderful grey heather yarn that will be great as is or to over dye once I decide what to do with the yarn once I spin it up. I just have to finish the last little bit of the roveing from Plumber.

I can’t wait for the next Color festival but in the mean time there will be the Spin-In at Knit-One-One on Nov. 12 and the Meridian Farm Shearing on Nov. 16th so I guess I’ll survive till then.

When I first got on to Ravelry one of the first things I did was to check out the groups, much to my dismay there was no group for tea lovers, so of course I started one. Now the group is HUGE and many wonderful moderators help to answer questions, run swaps, and keep the project pages tidy, we have a lot of fun.

Part of the fun are the constant swaps that folks participate it, trading yarn, tea, and other goodies. The latest swap was, as the title says, our Be Excellent to Each Other Swap. Everyone that wanted to play signed up and was given a partner. My swap buddy was Andi over at Knitbrit. We sent our boxes out to each other last week and on Friday I came home to a great box on the mail table. Here is what the wonderful Andi sent me!

Swap Goodies!

I love the wonderful doily that she made me (obviously someone checked out my projects page!)

Pineapple Doily

I am afraid I don’t have any pictures of the things that I sent Andi, I don’t want to spoil it for her and I am sure she will want to post them up herself. Let’s just say there is definitly tea.

Well, I had thought I would be able to post about my progress on a few projects but the photos for those did not seem to make it onto the jump drive so instead I have photos of some old projects that I have been meaning to gets pictures taken of. Enjoy.

Blueberry Handspun

Plumber Roving

Ravelry Stash Project

Shameless Pet Plug