I have felted the second teal bag. It is entirely different from what I expected. And it is good. Rather than a column, it morphed into . . . well . . . roundness. 

It’s like one of those egg baskets, except if this were full of eggs, it would be really really heavy. I think Kayo would fit in it, but he is too tired to loll about in a wool bag.

Kayo has been fetching mohair, since there are no ducks about, and we seem uninterested in taking him hunting. So he busied himself. He is a good retreiver.

All right, all right. I got the yarn at Dancing Leaf Farm in Maryland. They’re on the Countryside Artisan’s Tour. Mom, Talia and I had a wonderful time there–two lovely dogs, many lovely sheep, and some fantastic fowl. And then there was the yarn. The yarn I ended up choosing is a combination of lush blue mohair yarns. Their color is much more intense than it seems in the photo. It is destined for lacey things.

Before there was yarn, there were pots and amber and Amber and Mary and Lucy and Barnaby, the latter being canines. Talia was in animal loving heaven all day long. Sadly, she seems to have no interest in yarn or pottery or jewelry. Yikes.

I will go back up to Dancing Pig tomorrow to work on some stuff for Tuatha and laze amidst the fine pots and the fine folks. And I will go knowing that my needles are safe and proud in their new home. Virginia and Morna are too talented for words.

In other news, I am suddenly spinning wool yarn into thread. Her is my newest yarn next to a size one needle:

It’s not the finest handspun thread I’ve ever seen, but I’m very glad to have developed this skill, particularly since I’ve been reading so much about the string revolution lately. I just hope I can remember how to spin yarn I want to knit. This is hella skinny.

My friend Tara loaned me this book: Fifty Acres and a Poodle. Jeanne Marie Laskas writes a weekly column for the Washington Post, so I was familiar with her voice before opening the book. Books like this are dangerous for me, because I so desperately want to buy some property on a hillside in Appalachia. Books like this make my yearning stronger.

In the book, Laskas outlines the process of moving from her beloved Pittsburg (yes, some of us really love Pittsburg) to a farm in the rural area south of the city. Pittsburg has yet to sprawl as badly as DC, which makes me jealous enough. Laskas moves with her fellah and they start collecting pets. Can you hear my jealousy growing. And they begin planning for livestock. And gardening. And they have a pond and a great view.

Of course, they also have the financial burden of a farm and the heartaches associated with aging friends and pets and loves. The author experiences some real heartache living in the country, and undergoes some of the difficulties of releasing her urban communities and convenience. Throughout, she remains an honest, interesting person with a charming voice. I burned through the book, and am likely to read her later works on parenting and farming.

I’m about 50 pages into one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read: Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. I’ve tip-toed around this book for ages. I got it as a present, and I’ve been trying to read it slowly, like an Encyclopedia, so I don’t use it up too quickly. Well, time to break this puppy. So far, Barber’s scholarship seems to be impeccable. Reading about fiber-arts archaeology is almost as fun as actually participating in experimental archaeology. It made me want to finish my string-skirt (you know our ancestors started making those things since 20,000 BC, and they were apparently worn by pregnant women through childbirth to celebrate their fecundity? Woot!). And to keep it when it’s done. Even though it will require at least $20 in yarn and won’t really be wearable. That’s a fine book.

I magically got better at spinning over the last month by . . . .this is too good to be true . . . not practicing. Love it. Maybe I can play magically play the hurdy gurdy now, too.

I am mostly through knitting up a green bag that will have the Uffington Horse needle-felted onto it when it’s done. Wanna bet one of my pals tries to snag it immediamente? I have started felting the humongo-bag, but I think it needs a good stomping in the bathtub to whip it into shape. Which is a good idea, because I’ve been gardening like mad so my feet are already wrecked and it’s not quite mid-April yet. Time to paint the toenails to cover up the clay-stains.

Friday, I’m taking Talia and my Mom on the Countryside Artisans’ Tour. Well, I’m taking them to two sheep farms and Dancing Pig. We all have priorities: Mom wants pots, Talia wants sheep, and I want yarn, roving, pots, and sheep.

I finished the largest thing I’ve ever knit last night. It’s the second of two (eventually) felted bags knitted out of some Annabel Fox yarn that I got as a gift but didn’t want to wear. I know, I’m felting rare yarn. I forgot it was rare until the first bag was felted and the cobwebs cleared, and then I proceeded to use it all up. Hah! The felting Gods demand supplication, and I oblige them. I can’t wait to felt this thing. It is currently big enough to turn it into a couch cushion. I want to make it downright dainty. I want the felting to defy laws of physics.

I felted my little Legs-like rabbit, and he’s pretty cute. I’ll give him to my niece Talia for her birthday–I hope she likes him. You can never tell with three year olds. My husband swears it belongs on Newspaper Rock, because the rabbit prefers to have its arms straight up in the air, and its belly is a bit overstuffed. He’s a plump stick figure. I must embroider a bit of a face on him, though. Or maybe on her? I guess it’s up to Talia to decide. What I know for sure is that Kayo wants to eat this rabbit and keeps looking at it longingly, wishing we’d give it to them. I think I’ve accidentally raised a dog with no respect for stuffed animals.

And I’m going to test this fantastic pattern for the folks at Figheadh Yarnworks. I was looking at yarn in my stash last night, but I’m very tempted to use the pattern as an excuse to buy some new yarn. There is a particular color of Cascade 220 that literally makes me drool. I think I have some weird form of synesthesia that connects inedibly-colored things and my saliva ducts. Strange but true.

So, here are some stash photos. I’m using our old camera, and I hate it. Sorry for the bad photo quality–it’s the best I could get late at night with the old camera. I am petulant.
Here is my fabric closet. The colors are much more beautiful in real life:

So, huge handmade broom hanging off the door waiting to move to the kitchen when we replace the floor in there; quilting cottons and a bin full of blocks and cut pieces on the top shelf; wool and apparel cottons on the next shelf; silk and linen on the next shelf with my really good iron in between (I have an auxiliary iron behind it); and on the floor the actual "Crazy Lanea’s," a basket full of handmade historically accurate Celtic and Viking costuming I will sell to pals, covered up with felted sweaters I will turn into art and/or dedicate to the hat mafia, and some plastic drawers full of odds and ends. I cannot close the door to this closet–doing so makes me very very sad, as if my lovely fabric stash has left me for another. There are currently about 60 yards of fabric in the closet. That is far too little fabric to make what I need to make by August and to appease my worried mind.

Most of my wool yarn:

In handmade bags. The huge bag is the first thing I ever crocheted, is of very strange proportions, and I never bothered to work the ends in. I am not likely to crochet much in the future. The smaller bags are a hand-knotted hemp bags some fine woman in Thailand made for Ten Thousand Villages. They are superior. The bag I made holds yarn for felting, the larger hemp bag holds yarn that has been assigned to projects, the smaller hemp bag holds unclaimed yarn, and the rings above it are integral to making the slings that hold my friends’ lovely babies. These new rings can go in the dryer without making tons of noise. I am guessing that they are an improvement.

The rest of the wool:

Cotton yarn and inkle loom in one very dark picture:

The silk:

Prized Peruvian Alpacas are being kid-napped (cria-napped?) and smuggled into other countries left and right: Let my cria go!  I hope they can get this trade under control before the Peruvian highlanders end up so dismantling and diluting their Alpaca herds that they lose alpaca wool as a source of income.

In other (grossly out of date) Camelid news, one fine Lake District llama fled his herd last summer for a fine looking flock. I guess he didn’t feel needed at home. And another fine Llama found employment protecting the lambs in a Welsh park. And, fine upstanding llamas protected their master for a bit of an early birthday present to me in 2003.

Can you tell I’m catching up on the BBC site? Who knew that the UK produced so much Llama-news? All of this is making me really miss the Rosebud llamas.

I’m nearly done with the second huge teal felted bag. And, of course, it turns out that it’s made from some Annabel Fox yarn, which I apparently could have auctioned for a small fortune. Whoops. Oh well, it was free and I didn’t want to wear it, and it is so beautiful once felted!

I’m off to a lecture on Poetry and the Troubles at CUA tonight given by Gerald Dawe , my lit prof from Dublin who is now teaching at Boston College. I’d better leave work early and cast on some socks or I’ll have nothing to knit on the metro. I hope to convince some of the CUA grad students to apply for our scholarship. Who knew it would be so hard to give away free money, eh?

So, uh, on the business front. How does "Lanea’s Needles" sound to all y’all? I just can’t quite bring myself to incorporate under the name "Crazy Lanea’s." Oh, and don’t steal my name or I’ll make a voodoo doll of you or something.

Netflix brought me the first season of Carnivale right when I needed it.  Oh, how I needed this gorgeous work of art.  The story takes place in dustbowl, depression USA in the mid-1930s.  We follow a traveling carnival as its workers and performers attempt to make a living in a broke, choking country.  Along the way, there is a fair amount of magical realism.  To my mind, magical realism makes the world go round.  I won’t spoil the plot, because I am not that cruel. 

The cast includes Amy Madigan, Adrienne Barbeau, Nick Stahl, Clancy Brown, Clea Duvall, Michael J. Anderson, Tim Dekay, and many other really talented folks who, until now, haven’t had the screen time they deserved.  The art direction is heart-breakingly good, the cinematography harkens back to an earlier time in film, the costumes are spot on, and the writing is shatteringly good.  I can’t wait to see the second season.

Jon Katz’s Running to the Mountain is the book that got him really talking about dogs. The autobiographical piece explains his impulsive purchase of a cabin in upstate New York, his attempts at establishing a new literary career, and his quest for spirituality. I read the book to meet his Labrador retrievers, and to get the back story on the man who wrote A Dog Year and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm. I read Katz’s books out of order, having learned of him first from his columns about dogs that appear in Slate. Like Katz, I disdain the ridiculous notion that our dogs are surrogate children or replacement children, or, frankly, anyone’s children other than their dams’. I love dogs for their dog-ness, and I won’t ask them to be furry people. They are fine the way they are. It soothes me to immerse myself in a book that accepts that important fact.

This is a good book, but is much more about Thomas Merton than it is about Julius and Stanley the labs. I can accept that. I like Merton. I did find it hard to accept that Katz would so clearly risk his family’s financial situation by purchasing a cabin they couldn’t afford. Except that I wish I would do the same, only long before I’m 50.

Saturday, several of the Knitters Review folks from Virginia converged in lovely Amissville, VA to wallow in
a) the cuteness of new lambs and other livestock
b) knitterly chatter
c) fantastic yarn and spinning fibers
d) dreams of owning bigger better looms, spinning wheels, and/or whole yarn shops
e) lovely cookies
f) the majesty that is Jordan (edited–thanks Lissa) the Newfoundland
g) all of the above

We met at Misty Mountain Farm, the home of the livestock and of our first lovely hostess. The shop itself held more temptations than I can handle, and the livestock, well, it was enough to be a danger to both my marriage and to my legal standing in suburban VA. But I refrained from actually consorting with the four-leggers and got out without any legal infractions or new pets. It was hard. But really, Kayo is not a shepherd, Scott is not convinced that we are destined to own flocks of anything, and our vet bills are high enough as is. I did buy a lovely spindle and some Finn roving for one lucky recipient and some needles and roving for myself.

And then we went to Spirit Trail Fiberworks, aka Jen’s house in lovely Sperryville. And she brought out the trunks of yarn. Is it rude to actually swim in someone’s stock bins? I hope not. I got away with most of my mortgage money in place and with four skeins of the green yarn here. Oh, how I love this yarn. And I fell in love with Jordan, Jen’s fantastically placid, friendly Newfoundland.

I’ve passed the mid-point on my ruana, and it’s shaping up nicely. I’m looking forward to knitting in the neck shaping. But I need to start something–anything–new to work on. The green yarn is either going to grow up to be a lace shawl, which would show off its sheen and color beautifully but wouldn’t be terribly practical–or some sort of shell or short-sleeved sweater. Pattern searching must commence. And I’m going to buy Lissa’s knitting machine, which means I can make felted bags much more quickly sometime in the near future. Which means I can sell them at a more affordable price and make other things without falling short on stock when Sheep and Wool rolls around. Good good.

Sunday, I wallowed in kidlets. We all gathered at Mom’s to eat and watch the cute-lympics. Max and Talia are getting along famously, though Talia isn’t so sure about sharing her Grandfather with her cousins. She wasn’t consulted, and she may need to speak to her lawyer and negotiate some sort of settlement. Perhaps increased chocolate cake rations would lessen the pain of the transition.