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.

Video: Shakespeare's Who's On First

This funny video is a Shakespearean edition of the Abbot and Costello routine "Who's On First".

Extreme Plying

This weekend, with the help of a Google search and some how-tos, I picked up a new skill: Andean plying. For those who don't spin, Andean plying is a neat way to turn a single skein of handspun into a single skein of two-ply handspun, using nothing more than a drop spindle and your left hand. The problem happens when you've got more than a little yardage to ply. There are some pictures in this post from the Bumbling Bees blog illustrating what happened to someone else with a yardage problem. By the time I got finished winding my singles around my hand, it was damn near impossible to see the finger I looped them around -- even on the neater second skein I plied yesterday. That finger still hurts.

The upside is that I have a 60-odd-yard skein on my niddy-noddy, and a second skein on my plying spindle, still waiting to be wound off.

Duly Noted: The Battle of Brooklyn

Today is the 232nd anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, also called the Battle of Long Island. (It's a little busy here at the office today so I won't go into detail, but I bookmarked the following a while ago.)

Further Reading:
Barnet Schecter, The Battle for New York, and
David McCullough, 1776.

Links:
"Battle of Long Island" on Wikipedia
Articles can also be found here and here.

Sidebar:
Gowanus Lounge reports on a possible location of a burial ground from this battle. See post for details.

News: Madrid plane crash kills nearly 150

A plane crashed during takeoff at Madrid's international airport. Of more than 170 passengers and crew, only about 28 have survived. The death toll still varies by source, but most put the number at around 150.

Links:
New York Times: Nearly 150 Are Dead in Madrid Plane Crash
CNN: Madrid plane crash kills dozens, and Plane in Madrid crash a 'workhorse'
AP: 149 dead in plane crash at Madrid airport
BBC: Many dead in Madrid plane crash
International Herald Tribune: About 150 killed leaving Madrid on Spanair flight

News off the Blogs: Battle of Brooklyn stuff

Gowanus Lounge has a pair of posts about events to commemorate the Battle of Brooklyn (also called the Battle of Long Island). One post lists a bunch of events; a second post appeared this week with information about further events at The Old Stone House.

More information about the Battle of Brooklyn/Long Island can be found on Wikipedia, GL's post the first also posted this link about the battle.

Duly Noted: the Wonder Wheel and another pair of 8's

According to a post on the Gowanus Lounge, the Wonder Wheel, the famous ferris wheel in Coney Island, turns 88. This double-8 day is in addition to that other event of the day -- the start of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.