A Long Day

I woke up very early this morning -- alarmingly so, even -- to make a 7AM bus. (When I left the house this morning, it was still as much dark as it was light. In October. In New York City.) The bus was heading up to the fiber festival up in Rhinebeck, a good two and a half hours from here. I got back at 8:30 or so, and if I was a little tired then, I'm that much more so now that I'm off my feet and am no longer running on excitement and fiber fumes.

I fully intend to write up a longer post tomorrow, but in the meantime, two photos. First, there's a picture of yarn (in small form to hide the vague blurriness):


And second, a much better picture of some of the foliage up there, which is beginning to seriously turn:

This one is better viewed large and on black.

Photo: two sheep

I went to a fleece festival in Ringoes, New Jersey, earlier this month, and have been too lazy to post about it until now -- now that I'm heading off to the huge festival tomorrow, that is. Here's one of the pictures that turned out well:


With the prospect of my first trip to Rhinebeck, I kept my purchases to what I think of as a minimum, buying two skeins of yarn (a worsted-weight ringspun and a laceweight, both hand-dyed), a blue roving, some mohair to blend with something, and a pair of spinning magazines. But more on that will have to wait until my computer figures itself out and starts behaving itself again.

News off the Blogs: This can't be good.

I've been cleaning up my feed reader lately, and found an unlikely item in a Gowanus Lounge post from Monday. A Dutch sub was spotted off Bay Ridge.

The Dutch did manage to reclaim New York/New Amsterdam for a while not long after they first lost it to the British back in the 17th century, but it didn't stick. I can't imagine they think they'd be getting back at the Brits now though. (We took care of that ourselves with a revolution. And if memory serves, the Dutch were, along with the French and Spanish, quick to recognize us as a separate entity.)

Link: Things Are Bad: Dutch Submarine Stalking Bay Ridge

Yarn Harlot on Tour!

The Yarn Harlot (Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) is currently on a tour which tonight brought her to my neighborhood Barnes and Noble. She spoke, and read a little from her most recent book, Free Range Knitter.



Really, she talked as much about publishing as she did about knitting, often sticking to the overlap of knitting and publishing/blogging. Things like she's learned not to say that she writes/blogs about knitting if she can at all avoid it: somehow writing/blogging about knitting is automatically not a "real" book/blog to many. (I think people who think a book/blog about knitting isn't a "real" book/blog need to be stabbed repeatedly with sock needles, cut up, carded and spun.)

The whole thing had a vaguely This American Life sensibility to it. I wonder if Ira Glass would be willing to extend the "American" part to include Canadians.

And there were the obligatory photos-of-crowd-with-Sock she posts on her blog -- and, apparently, sends to her mom. I'll come back with the link to her post when she gets it up. And if you're familiar with her blog, you'll know she posts sometimes posts pictures of people with their knitting. Quite a few people tonight took pictures of her with our knitting. I offered her a choice of two projects and she suggested both:



One's a scarf, using the "Ostrich Plumes" pattern from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. The other is the "Silk Purse" pattern (in wool) from Véronik Avery's Knitting Classic Style. And the junk stuff on the left's mine, but I was practically tied to it and couldn't put it anywhere.

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UPDATE:
Pearl-McPhee's blog post about this stop is up. It can be found here.

News off the Blogs: Parrot Residency Expands

According to a Gowanus Lounge post today, the famous wild-parrot population has expanded recently -- into new territory and new kinds of parrots in one fell swoop. I concur that the new parrot does not look like the pictures I've seen of monk parrots (the kind that have been building nests near Brooklyn College). And this is the first I've heard of parrots loose in Carroll Gardens.