A View from Sierra County

Interlude with a Hat

I have been crazy busy getting all of the plants gathered, dried and packaged for my dye plant CSA, and just finished boxing up Shipment #2!  There are still more plants to be gathered before the snow flies, and cuts off my access to the high country, but I have been on vacation from my 'regular' job this week - fall break in our district at the end of the first quarter.  That has helped me get many small steps accomplished, so DH and I took off Tuesday afternoon and headed to our Forest City cabin.  25 miles can be a world away!

Autumn is definitely present there, with black locust and aspen leaves in various shades of yellows, though the black oaks haven't turned color yet.  The weather has warmed back up during the day, but is chilly at night.  I decided it was time to make a new hat for the coming cold season, and spent much of my time knitting.

I finished my hat by midafternoon yesterday, tried it on and then didn't want to take it off!  It was just the extra warmth I needed while still getting to wear my crop pants and short sleeved shirt.  I am especially pleased with this hat, an adaptation of the Slouchy Hat pattern in Harvesting Color.  The yarn is some of the wonderfully squooshy Rambouillet I have been spinning at many public spin-ins for the past few years.  I used a lot of my yarns to dye with this summer, and ended up with plenty of colors for the striping.  The orange is from madder roots, the blue is indigo-dyed, the purple from logwood, and the gold is from a boiled-up pomegranate someone threw in a dyepot while we were working at Anni Redding's back in May. 

The light olive color is a bit more complicated... I wanted to be able to demonstrate some dye processes while giving a talk at Ridgestock in August, so I set up a jar of zinnias and black-eyed susans in my solar oven.  Meanwhile, I had yarn soaking in my rusty-object mordant jar.  Later, when I got back home, I simmered the sun-mordanted yarn in the flower water.

As you can tell, my pre-dawn photo taken by myself with my phone won't win any photography awards, but you can see a detail I decided to add to the original pattern.  I have been admiring the hats in the knitting mags that are trimmed with cute little buttons, and as I was knitting, I made a reverse stockinette placket for the buttons.  This hat is worn inside-out, so that portion is flat stockinette.  When we got home last night, I had a pot of elderberry dye to simmer and time to paw through my button collection and find five small wood buttons.  Then, I used a nickel as a template and cut five circles from some felted wool that I threw into the last of the pokeberry dye baths a few weeks ago.  The berry red is a bit different from the rest of the hat, but looks good against the light olive and with the wood.  I am so delighted with this local hat, made by me from start to finish!

Now, to head off for a quickie vacation visiting the in-laws in Lake Tahoe for a few days... I've earned the rest and have a cozy, stylin' hat to wear too.  Happy autumn weekend, dear ones!

Moving Into Fall

  I have had a very hard time letting go of summer.  All September, I kept pretending it was still August, even as we restarted our early childhood program and the school was full of people.  I watched my tomatoes ripen and ate them.  I cut my plants for the natural dye CSA and dried them.  I even took a small rainstorm in mid-September in stride, hurrying off to harvest sage, lichen and lodgepole pine bark in the high country on a damp day, knowing that vacationers were all back home and winter was coming. But look... it warmed back up!  I was happy.

However, this week just ending brought an early but cold and very wet storm system through, and I finally had to concede defeat.  Now, I am searching out the best place to go in search of glorious color in mid-October, when we have fall break.

The highlight of the past few weeks has been spinning all of last weekend at the annual Celtic Festival put on by my favorite public radio station, KVMR. 

This photo was taken from the grand parade that officially opens the fair each day.

The music is grand, there's a wide variety of yummy food, and we all end up seeing old friends and wondering how another year snuck by.

 

I particularly liked listening to Molly's Revenge, Old Blind Dogs and The Young Dubliners this year.  If you haven't heard any of them, be prepared for traditional tunes that have been electrified and make you want to get up and dance.  Celtic music just warms my heart!

 

Our fiber guild sets up a double booth, dons our Renaissance-era costumes and talks fiber to the public. We also get a lot of yarn out of it!

This next photo shows Susan on the left and Mardi on the right... happily spinning away.  I delight in the interest that spinning at the wheel generates.  Young children come running up and have to be warned off sticking their fingers right into the spokes (ouch!), then stay and beg for a bit of soft roving to carry around with them, or ask if they can give it a try.  We are on the lookout for a 'learner's wheel' that we can set up at such demonstrations, one that nobody minds if a beginner works on with instruction, as frequently a spinner is right in the middle of something and doesn't feel comfortable having a novice fiddle with their wheel.

We are also researching buying our own pop-ups so that we don't need to beg and borrow in the future.  We make more public contacts at this event than all others combined, even our County Fair, where there are so many things to see that many pass us by.

I did take some time to work on my current favorite bit of knitting, And So Are You.  Mine is made from Wooly Wonka Celestial (a blend of 60%alpaca, 30% wool and 10% silk) in Milky Way, a silvery-grey, that I overdyed with lodgepole pine bark.  The photo doesn't quite capture the silvery-green of pine needles that resulted, but I was awestruck (expecting a deeper brown than if dyeing on white), and everyone that saw my project loved that it still smelled like the piney woods.!

 

I only have four more rows to complete before starting the lovely pleated section, and just got an update notice from Rose, ahead of tackling that section, which makes some corrections. Before I started tearing my hair out! Life is sweet, even if summer is behind us.