Sighted in Savannah

Last week, H and I were desperate to leave the New England winter behind, so we betook ourselves to Savannah, Georgia, where spring was well underway.

Oh, what a beautiful city! And quite pedestrian-friendly, too.

Luckily, on one of our rambles, we happened upon this wonderful LYS, The Frayed Knot, which I noticed immediately because of the amazing yarn-bombed bike in the window.

The bike's adorners were Jennifer Bagwell-Harvey, who owns The Frayed Knot, and Jami and Marianne, the owners of Perlina, a bead store that cohabits with the LYS. They are all lovely gals and the shop is well-stocked, so if you happen to be nearby, a visit would be in order.

***

When we returned to Rhode Island, spring had finally gotten its act together!

Sprung!

Last week at this time I was in NYC, tanking up on the usual mélange of music, art, comestibles, and social visitations, including a meeting at Lion Brand Yarns, for whom I'm now writing knitting-based fiction. Talk about a dream come true! Here's the first installment, called "Patterns of Change," published online yesterday in Lion Brand's Pattern Journal. (You can subscribe on the website, to get every installment delivered to your email box!) To prepare for the assignment, I actually began knitting the afghan on which the story focuses.

It was a great meeting, and afterwards I was delighted to tour the adjacent Lion Brand Yarn Studio, the company's retail shop on West 15th Street. It's a visual feast-- bright, light, extremely well stocked--and the staff runs a great variety of knitting opportunities, ranging from classes and workshops to a free knitting-themed film festival called "Flicks with Sticks." Neuroknitter and I are planning a private yarn crawl of the Big Apple in a couple of months, and this shop will definitely be on our list of Must Visits.

Customers can help themselves to yarn for swatches, enabling informed decision-making!

This long view of the Lion Brand Studio gives a general sense of its depth and breadth.

***

Now I'm back home, trying to catch my breath. Here in New England, spring's emerging in its typically ambivalent way, bringing snow and snowdrops (and crocuses) simultaneously.

As I'm currently knitting a hat out of assorted green yarn oddments, 

my thoughts have naturally run to the bottomless topic of stashbusting, and that made me think I should also stashbust the freezers. (We have, um, more than one. Would you believe... four?) So yesterday I made thirty-six jars of raspberry-gooseberry jam. This made about as much of a dent in the collective freezer contents as the green hat will make in the G section of my stash-a-teria, a.k.a. the store-room that moonlights as my creative unconscious. But the jam turned out really well, and I give you the recipe on the off chance that you've got ten quarts of frozen raspberries and one quart of frozen ripe gooseberries that you're desperately wanting to use. You do, right?

A sight for sore eyes.

SMW's Raspberry-Gooseberry Jam, for about eleven quarts of berries

 (results may vary, but it generally tastes like summer)

Cook your gooseberries (I used one quart), fresh or frozen, in their own juices in a covered pot over a low heat. When they burst and exude their inner gunk, remove from stove and cool. Then run them through a food mill twice, the first time with the coarse disk, the second time with the medium disk, to remove skins, seeds, and tails.

Put all your frozen raspberries (ca. 10 quarts) into a very large heavy pot (non-aluminum; Le Creuset or similar recommended), put the heat on low, and when they're all melted, soupy, and slightly bubbling add about one cup of sugar per quart. Then add the pureed gooseberries, mix well, and add more sugar if you want. (I prefer tangy.) Bring the mixture to a simmer, and while bubbling, stir in and completely dissolve one or two packages of pectin that you happen to have lying around. (I used 1/2 package of granular regular pectin, and one entire package of low-sugar pectin. Check the instructions on the box(es) in the canning section of your local hardware store to see what kind of pectin is best for you (liquid, granular, regular, low-sugar), then buy at least double the quantity.) Keep stirring, and when the fruit mixture starts to look slightly glossy on top, you can start canning. I use a variety of canning jars, but I never make jam in containers larger than six ounces, because once opened, large quantities of home-made jam have a way of mouldering in the fridge.

Sound and fury before the storm. A contest.

Sky Scarf, begun 2-23-13, showing only one day of blue sky since.

The current New England winter has organized life into milestones not dissimilar from Kübler-Ross's Stages of Grief and Dying: the Anticipation of Storms, the Fearful (and sometimes Angry/Fed Up/Curmudgeonly) Anticipation of storms (fomented and abetted by the Culture of Fear media, including and especially The Weather Channel and its team of storm-a-holic reporters), the Stoic Preparation for Storms (Bread? Check.  Milk? Check. Gasoline? Check.), the Experience of the Storm Itself, and the Passing of the Storm, when we all emerge from our hidey-holes and trade tales of what we endured during the storm.

Currently New England is in the Fearful Anticipation Stage, as the weather brewing is supposed to dump snow and freezing rain on us ferociously, starting any minute now or maybe tonight or maybe early in the morning; the tides are high and already eroding the beaches with surge; the northeast winds are gusting up to sixty+ miles per hour.

The wind-whipped Wood River, Woodville, RI, in Fearful Anticipation Mode.

So, to take our minds away from all the ominous, foreboding, depressing etc. of winter's last gasps (note to self:  Daylight Savings Time begins at 2 a.m. on Sunday March 10), I will draw your attention to a cute little book recently sent me by its publisher:

You might be wondering why I'm touting this, since this blog's focus is on New England--but, gentle knitters, I must confess that I was born and raised in New York City, and return there often. (In fact, I'm going to the Big Apple next week.)  And given that I'll be sitting around a lot during the next bout of Awful Weather, I'll at least start working on one of the clever designs in Knit New York.

British designer Emma King's patterns are all witty, but what really tickled me is a knitted Staten Island Ferry. It was my sad fate to spend my formative years on Staten Island, but my luck to commute from SI to New York on the ferry twice daily, whilst I attended Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts. Sailing past the Statue of Liberty every morning and afternoon, and Ellis Island, Governor's Island, and viewing the Verrazano Bridge in the distance, on the bright orange ferry with dark blue letters--there are many happy memories for me clustered around those commutes.

Furby's on the same page with me.  We will be knitting a ferry during the impending storm.

Other KIY NYC icons in the book are the Empire State Building, the Walk/Don't Walk street-crossing sign that all dyed-in-the-wool jaywalking New Yorkers ignore, and a red fire hydrant, etc.

The publisher, Collins and Brown, has kindly made a free copy of Knit New York available as a giveaway.  If you, dear readers, will post a brief comment here explaining why you'd like the book, I'll choose a winner--contest closes on Sunday the 10th at midnight! (Please note:  the contest is limited to people with mailing addresses in the US.)

O.k., time to batten down the hatches!

Sky in a basket, sky in a scarf

Well, here's the view from the second floor of my house. A few things might jump out at you, like the fallen tree that (sob) used to tether my beloved clotheslines. The tree was a casualty of the blizzard oddly called Nemo (Latin:  no one).  And you might also notice the dregs of snow on either side of the Wood River. What you probably haven't thought much about, though, is the sky. In the photo it's relatively flat and seems unimportant. The color is that of skim milk--kind of white with sickly blue-grey around the edges. The sky has been this color, or much greyer, for most of February. It is a February New England sky.

I've been thinking a lot about the sky because I'm making a Sky Scarf. I suppose you could call this project conceptual knitting and maybe aleatory knitting, too, since random factors come into play. (For more information about this see the charming website called Leaf Cutter Designs.) The color of the scarf depends on the color of the sky wherever you happen to be. Every day for a year the knitter looks at the sky and knits a stripe representing the sky's color.

I began knitting on 23 February, my birthday, and will conclude on the eve of my next birthday. Let's hope I get to use some of the bluer colors in the foreseeable future!

Balmy, palmy, yarn-bomby

Whilst my immediate family was huddled around the wood-stove, in an east coast house devoid of electricity and battered by the wrath of Blizzard Nemo , I was blithely communing with nature in Los Angeles, where it was, um, relatively vernal.

In fact, marching around Elysian Park with my sister and her dogs,

L-R:  Dorrie, unidentified woman belonging to Clyde, Theo, Clyde, sister.

I discovered an exotic bloom, Yarnbombia Acrylicana, adorning a tree in a small arboretum:

Most of my knitting happened aboard Southwest Air, as I traveled between the coasts. I find solitary travel to be the best way to knit lace, for obvious reasons.

Solid-color socks knit from Swans Island lovely ultra-fine merino fingering yarn.  Printed yarn is Marathon.

Here are some additional postcards:

Double rainbow over Echo Park.

Venice

Someone's garden in Venice.

A perfect camellia.

A camellia tree in Descanso Gardens

But all good things must come to an end.  I'm sorry to report that this tree destroyed my beloved clotheslines.

Meanwhile, back in Rhode Island, quod Nemo non fecit.

Stumbling around at Slater Mill

Today ends the Slater Mill Knitting Guild Knitting Weekend and I was damned if I was going to miss it, especially since I'd signed up for Helen Bingham's simultaneous socks workshop on Saturday. Small detail:  I've had a grotesque cold for the past week....Nonetheless I turned on the Stoic Resolve, swallowed a whole lot of OTC cold-nuking drugs, and I can tell you that for me, the entire five hours I spent there, was a total blur. Possibly the drug cocktail had something to do with this? The drive home was equally loopy. I seemed to be in the thrall of Solar Slowdowns, and expected to see ETs among the space alien corn as I reached the top of every hill with its reward of instantaneous blindness from glaring rays of the setting sun.

Helen Bingham teaches simultaneous socks.

After two hours of intense concentration whilst my brain moved in slow motion and enjoyed minor hallucinations, I determined it was time to press Reset --> Delay [48 hours] --> Start; so I packed up my sad attempt at two simultaneous socks

and wandered around the yarn artisans' marketplace for a while, running into my friends from North Light Fibers,

my neighbor, Linda Perry, the dynamo behind Thistledown Knitting,

Linda's beauteous hand-dyed worsteds

and discovered the fabulous sock yarn of Play at Life Fiber Arts, located on Etsy and in Fall River, MA.

Here the yarn stands in for H, who will wear sox knitted therefrom.

Was the jaunt worth it, given my subpar health?  What kind of question is that???

The ever-perfectible Piet

A trip to Free Pattern Land acquainted me with the Berocco design called Piet and I began knitting him around 9.30 pm on the evening of November 12, 2012, when I had to visit the ER at Westerly (RI) hospital and figured (correctly) that I'd be sitting around in an examination cubicle for a while so I needed something to occupy my always frantic hands. On the way out of the house, I grabbed yarn, pattern, and needles, et sic Piet nascitur. By the time I left the ER (around midnight) Piet's feet and waist were complete.

Then a hiatus. But recently, in the interest of fulfillment, I picked Piet up again, and today, as Neuroknitter and I knitted and exchanged bons mots before the cozy wood-stove,

Neuro's hard at work on her beauteous fair-isle vest.

I finished Piet and saw that he was good.

It's my sense that Piet's name and color-blocked composition are in homage to the Dutch painter, Piet Mondrian.

***

At first I thought I was making Piet as a baby gift, but as he emerged I realized it would be hard to sacrifice him to the ravages of baby love. Moreover, as I moved through the knitting pattern I saw that certain adjustments had to be made to accommodate the wear-and-tear inflicted by children...so I determined that this Piet is a prototype, and Piet II will be birthed in the not-too-distant future.

Is it not serendipitous that Piet is two-faced, like Janus, the Roman god after whom this month is named? Respice prospice, etc. Implicitly, then, Piet is of variable mood, a character of depth.

Check out the Ravelry page featuring many different iterations of Piet. You will enjoy the creativity of his knitting progenitors.

Alfie graciously shares his bed with Piet.