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June 29, 2009: Finally Got That Perch Dinner My mother, sister, and the girls and I spent last Thursday at Soak City, the waterpark at Cedar Point. It was a hot day and it felt really good to spend it sliding down waterslides, cruising the lazy river, and playing in the wave pool. We left around 4:30 p.m. and got back to the hotel just in time to watch the huge squall line of storms roll in over Lake Erie from Detroit. I couldn't believe the amount of lightning—nor the people strolling around outside during the storm. We found out later that a big tree my mother's yard blew down, too. It took us a while to find a restaurant that had power, but eventually we did and I had a fabulous perch dinner. Yum. We did Cedar Point rides on Friday, although I left just after lunch to drive up to Lansing, MI, where I taught at Threadbear Fiber Arts. Matt and Rob are great fun and have a wonderful store, complete with two darling dogs (I was really missing Chester and Rusty). On Friday night I got to meet Sarah Peasley, whose blog I've been reading for years, and Lynn Hershberger, another designer I've known for a long time but never met. All of my classes were full of terrific students. So I am back at my mother's house for one day—laundry day, because I am out of clean clothes—and tomorrow DD#1 and I will head for Columbus. I'm teaching two classes at A Tangled Tale in West Liberty, after which it's three days at the big Mennonite General Assembly meeting at the Convention Center. I'm a delegate, so I'll have plenty of time to knit while I am in delegate sessions. I think it will feel good to have all my teaching gigs behind me and have an opportunity to stop moving for a while. Oh, and I caved in and got a Twitter account, so you can follow me there @JanetSzabo.
June 24, 2009: This Visit is All About the Food I am now back in Ohio. I enjoyed my two days of solitude on the Eastern Shore and got the new sweater design well underway. And I am recharged and ready to teach again this weekend at Threadbear in Lansing, after we visit Cedar Point and Soak City. The girls had a wonderful time in New York City with their grandparents, although DD#1's assessment of "Wicked" was that the Broadway version wasn't as good as the show we saw in Portland. But they enjoyed the whole experience anyway. They are great travelers. They don't whine (much) and mostly just roll with it. DD#2 is the only kid her age I know who's willing to try new foods, including mussels and calimari. Speaking of food, we pulled in tired and hungry last night, and my mother had chicken paprikas waiting for us. And she makes it the way I like, leaving the skin on and using boned thighs for lots of flavor (it just isn't the same made with boneless, skinless breasts). Tonight we are going to my grandmother's house for dinner. She is making us pieroghis. No one makes pieroghis like my grandmother. Even the ones we had in Poland weren't as good as my grandmother's. All I need now is a perch dinner and I will have completed my gastronomic requirements for visiting the east coast
I'm off to retrieve my sister from the airport, and then I need to get my teaching stuff organized for this weekend. Tomorrow we go to Cedar Point and then it's off to Lansing from there (for me—everyone else is coming back to Cleveland).
June 22, 2009: Heat and Humidity It is indeed hot here on the east coast, and I am not a hot-weather person. The husband likes to say, "Janet's favorite season is the one she's not in," which is true—I like diversity in my weather—but given the choice, I'd rather have it cooler than hotter. I slept in (for me that means getting up at 6 a.m. instead of 5 a.m.), made some breakfast, did a couple of loads of laundry, and worked for a few hours on a new sweater design. I am contributing a design to a forthcoming book, and it took about 2 months to get the yarn because it's from a small farm. In fact, the farm shipped it directly to my mother's house so it would be there when I arrived last week. I brought some of it with me so I could get started on it today. Designing "on the road" is quite different from designing at home. At home, I have access to dozens of stitch dictionaries. On the road I have to rely on what's in my head (which, when it comes to cables, is actually quite a lot) and the swatch collection I have with me for teaching. Last night after dinner, I went through my swatch collection and picked out some potential cable candidates. This morning, I swatched up a combination of cables. I like it a lot. It needs a bit of tweaking, which I'll do when I cast on the back this afternoon and get it underway. After I finished the swatch this morning, I treated myself to a stroll to downtown St. Michael's—roughly a three-mile walk round-trip. I love to walk. I didn't have a car in college and came to rely on my legs to get me wherever I needed to go, and in the process developed a real appreciation for the advantages of not taking a car. It felt good to walk around DC yesterday and great to walk again today. It's too bad I now live somewhere where walking is really impractical, unless it's on a hike. If I lived here, I would walk every day. I stopped in at one store and bought a couple of bottles of Pub Sauce, an Eastern Shore specialty that I really love on grilled pork chops. I always get some when I am here. I also found Frivolous Fibers, a cute little yarn store, where I picked up a skein of Blue Heron yarn. Blue Heron is a local Easton, MD company, although I've seen their yarns at stores all over the country. I bought some of the rayon metallic in a navy blue color shot through with gold. And now it's after lunch and I need to get back to work. I wish I had pics for you but the kids have the digital camera.
June 21, 2009: Notes From the East No, I have not dropped off the face of the earth, simply traveled to another part of it. At the moment I am in Maryland. Here's what we've been doing since last week:
Today, I left my friend's house and drove to the Metro station, where I took a train into Washington, DC for the day. My first destination was the Holocaust Museum. I have been wanting to visit ever since we went to Auschwitz on the Europe trip. It just seemed necessary to me. Like going to Auschwitz itself, this was an emotionally draining trip, but one I was glad I took. My friends recommended the cafeteria at the American Indian Musuem for lunch, so that's where I ate. It wasn't cheap ($20 for lunch just for me), but worth it. The cafeteria serves cuisine from many different American Indian geographic areas. I went to the South American Indian section and had shrimp and calimari salad (amazing) and giant lima bean and avocado salad (also amazing). Then I walked through someof the exhibits. I also stopped at the Museum of Natural History to see the "Bones of the Chesapeake" exhibit. By then I was tired, so I took the Metro back, got in my car, and drove back over the bridge to the Eastern Shore, where I am back at my in law's house. I am here until Tuesday morning when I will meet them in Baltimore, pick up the girls and drive back to Cleveland. The last knitting I did was on the plane last week, so my plan for tomorrow is to hang out, knit, relax, and watch TV. I will probably walk into town and get some crab to make myself crab imperial for dinner. And now I'm off to bed.
June 15, 2009: More On the Fiber Fest I really like the Big Sky Fiber Fest, where I taught this past weekend. It's held in Hamilton, Montana. Hamilton is about 40 miles south of Missoula, which makes it a very pleasant three-hour drive from my house. Driving around Montana is one of the secret joys of my life. I love driving anyway, and driving through scenery like the kind we have here is a real treat. Like all fiber festivals, this one has been through some growing pains. It was held annually when it first started, but went to a bi-annual schedule a few years ago (they alternate with the Montana Association of Weavers and Spinners conference). I think that makes it a lot easier on the organizers. There was a good slate of workshops on sheep breeding, dyeing, weaving, spinning, and knitting. All of my classes were held at The Yarn Center, a wonderful yarn store in downtown Hamilton. The conference organizers put me up in a hotel in Hamilton, which I greatly appreciated. I don't mind staying with a host to help groups save some money, but I find teaching very draining and it's nice to be able to go back to a hotel room by myself and recharge my batteries. I got quite a bit done on the lace scarf I am reknitting. And Saturday morning I shared my breakfast table with an retired couple from Helena who were in Hamilton for the big Mule Days festival. I love talking to Montana natives. They always have such interesting stories to tell. We talked about how the scientists think there is less wind now in the midwest states and concluded that it must all have moved to Montana, because it's so much windier here than it used to be. On Saturday after my classes I went to dinner with two of my friends from the spinning and weaving guild here in Kalispell who were also at the festival. We ended up at a restaurant south of town where I had the most amazing elk/buffalo burger and sweet potato fries. So now it's time to unpack from one trip and pack for another. I said to the husband that for the first time in my life, I am wishing for a Blackberry or an iPhone or some other handheld device, because this is such an incredibly complicated trip: three week, three states, three college visits, eight classes at four different yarn stores, one church conference, one visit to Cedar Point, twenty-five new numbers plugged into my cell phone—and it occurred to me the other day that I will not spend more than three consecutive nights at any one location on this whole trip. Yikes. I will have my laptop with me, but having all of this information at my fingertips would be much handier. I am looking forward to July, when I finally get to stop moving for a while.
June 14, 2009: Rest in Peace While I was at the Big Sky Fiber Festival this weekend, I discovered that Susanna Springer, owner of the yarn store Joseph's Coat in Missoula, passed away this week. A short obit from the Missoulian:
I was sorry to have missed the gathering this afternoon. Susanna was a wonderful person, full of life and enthusiasm. I got to know her not long after we moved here. Kalispell didn't have any yarn stores sixteen years ago, so DD#1 and I would make fairly regular trips to shop in Missoula, have lunch, ride the carousel, and visit Susanna. I remember going to see her with a very little DD#2—she couldn't have been more than a few months old—who was hungry and needed to nurse. Susanna pointed to a comfortable couch and said, "Sit," and brought me a stepstool for my feet and a pitcher of ice water, then proceeded to entertain DD#1 while I attended to DD#2. As the girls got older, she would always make sure they went home from their visits with a large bag of candy. We last saw her about six weeks ago. We stopped in for a visit, and she took a couple dollars from the till, handed the money to my girls, and told them to walk down the block to the bakery and buy themselves some cookies. That was just how she was, and I will miss seeing her when I go to Missoula. My classes at the Fiber Festival were wonderful. I had lots of great students who asked lots of great questions. The whole weekend reminded me why it is I love to teach knitting.
June 12, 2009: Confined Spaces After our fire department business meeting last night, our firefighters spent a bit of time working with the confined spaces training tralier. The Montana Fire Services Training School sends it around the state and once a year or so it lands in our district for a few days. It's set up so that the firefighters crawl in through one opening, find their way through a small, dark maze fraught with hazards like hanging wires, debris, etc., and come out another opening. Here is one of our guys heading in:
And another one coming out:
Some people will argue that this isn't very realistic training, but since houses on fire aren't readily available for regular practice, I think this helps a lot. I've begun the process of re-knitting some of the samples from patterns I published in the early issues of the newsletter, starting with a lace-and-cable scarf from the Spring 2002 issue. My test-knitter kept the sample as part of her compensation, so I don't have it anymore. I've stopped the practice of allowing my test-knitters to keep samples. In fact, I've also stopped giving away or selling any of my samples, because invariably I need them back at some point. Fiber Trends is now carrying the Naturally Yarns from New Zealand, so Bev provided me with some Dawn to re-knit this scarf. It's absolutely gorgeous. The pattern is a leaf lace stitch. I am doing it in the dark green color. I have mixed feelings about reknitting some of my older designs. I'm not the same designer I was ten years ago, so I find myself wanting to make changes. Sometimes the changes are necessary: this Dawn yarns knits up at a slightly different gauge, for instance, so I have to change some of the numbers. But I've decided that I will strive to keep the bones of the design intact, even if I have to tweak a few of the details. It's kind of funny that I am working with the Naturally yarns again. Before we had any yarn stores here in the valley, the only place to buy yarn was the local Ben Franklin. Naturally was one of the lines they carried, which is why I have eight or nine designs in those yarns. I've always been partial to their Perendale yarn, and the new Harmony yarn is also really nice. Both are great for showing off stitch patterning.
June 11, 2009: Rhubarb Season I had plans to visit the Holocaust Museum while I am in Maryland, because our visit to Auschwitz in February made such an impact. Yesterday's shooting makes me wonder again what goes on in people's heads. I still plan to go. There are plenty of weirdos with guns here in Montana and that doesn't keep me from my daily rounds. I came home from the neighbors' with an armful of rhubarb the other day, so I made a rhubarb crisp yesterday afternoon and froze four big bags of chopped rhubarb for later use. Let me just say that this is an unusual activity for me because the thrill of cooking went out of my life a long time ago. It's something I have to do to keep the people here happy and healthy, but we all have such vastly different food preferences that most days I feel like a short-order cook. I'd really rather be knitting anyway. But I had the rhubarb and the husband likes goodies like that, so I made one. One of my go-to cookbooks is one my sister got me for Christmas one year not long after the husband and I got married. It's called The American Country Inn Bed and Breakfast Cookbook. I use it a lot.
I decided yesterday that the reason I like this cookbook so much is because most of the recipes in it suit my cooking style perfectly: quick and easy to prepare in large quantities and not requiring any exotic ingredients. And really, when you think about it, what I'm doing most days is running a bed and breakfast, just with the same people who never leave. I used a rhubarb crisp recipe out of this book and I think it turned out pretty well. I did have a big patch of rhubarb when we moved here, but it was the victim of an industrial accident with an excavator (the same kind of industrial "accident" that results in the garden being set on fire with a propane torch, in case you were wondering). I've thought about replanting some, but the neighbors have so much that it's really not necessary. I'm still thinking through the pricing issue, with lots of helpful input from Bev at Fiber Trends and some of my designer friends, as well as all of your comments. I do kind of wish I could be at TNNA this weekend to get a sense of what's happening in the industry, but I have been promised a full recap next week. Tomorrow afternoon I am off to the Big Sky Fiber Fest in Hamilton, MT. This is such a great little fiber fest—I've been going since DD#1 was only a couple of years old. Now I attend as a teacher. I've got four classes over the weekend at the Yarn Center in Hamilton and it should be great fun.
June 9, 2009: Last Day of School Yesterday was DD#1's last day of school; today and tomorrow she has to take finals. This is the first time since she started high school (she's just finishing her junior year) that she's had to take finals. The high school has a policy that if you miss fewer than two days of school, finals are optional. She hardly ever gets sick and usually has perfect attendance. She missed three days to go to my sister's wedding last month, though, so she's taking her finals this semester. I don't think it will hurt her. It's DD#2's last day of school in name only; the kids will clean out their desks and lockers and then there is a hot dog picnic lunch for everyone. No finals for her—she's only in 6th grade. I'm still working my way through patterns and class handouts, and keeping track of how many copies I get out of the ink cartridges in my color laser printer. I just replaced them two weeks ago to the tune of $400. They don't seem very cost-effective to me. I talked to someone at Staples about it, and he told me that the "industry standard" for the number of pages printed by a particular ink catridge is based on 5% coverage of the page. So the manufacturer may say that you'll get 4000 pages from one ink cartridge, but that's at 5% coverage (what is that, one line of text on an 8.5" x 11" page?) I know I am not getting 4000 pages from these cartridges. You'd think the driver software would tell me, but for this particular machine it doesn't. Maybe that's deliberate. Depending on exactly how many pages I do get, I will have to decide if I want to replace the machine with something more cost-effective, or have my patterns printed elsewhere in larger runs. Something else to think about. Today's paper has a story about the first grizzly bear attack of the season up in Glacier Park. I haven't seen or heard any more about bears in our neighborhood, so perhaps all the bears decided to go up to the park where the tourist pickings are a lot better than they are down here. Honestly. The guy who was attacked was running on a trail alone (a practice discouraged by park rangers for precisely this reason) and didn't have bear spray with him. He's lucky that the bears (there were two) just knocked him around a little bit and didn't have him for breakfast. DD#2's current reading selection is a book about bear attacks in Montana. The weatherman said last night that we are "on the fence" with regard to fire season, and June will determine if it's going to be bad or not. We had so little rain in May that we're 2" under our normal precipitation level for this time of year, AND it's been windy, which dries out the fuels even faster. I'm sure we'll get an update from the chief at our fire department meeting Thursday night. A few more gratuitous garden pics for you:
We should have quite a bumper crop of strawberries this year. Chester will be thrilled. He loves strawberries. He will go in there and put his snout in the bed and eat his way through it if we don't keep an eye on him.
And the peas are doing much better than last year, because I remembered to put inoculant on them before I planted them. The lettuce is up and the zucchini is zooming right along. I'll have to replace the two Roma tomato plants and one of the Sweet 100's, but the new variety called Glacier that's supposed to very cold-hardy is doing really well. All in all I think it will be a good harvest come August and September.
June 8, 2009: Seeking Consistency I've got a bit of a sticky wicket and I spent most of the weekend mulling over how to address it. Each of my designs is listed in the Ravelry pattern database, with a link to the webpage where people can buy the back issue of the newsletter in which it appears. I went to my Ravelry store where I intended to put my individual patterns up for sale, and realized that each design is already linked for purchase to the corresponding web page for the back issue of the newsletter in which it appears. In and of itself, that's not a huge problem. I talked to one of the lovely volunteer editors at Ravelry just to make sure that I wasn't going to do anything to screw up the system on their end, and she assured me I wouldn't. I'm simply going to change over each design so it's available as a Ravelry download, with some wording in the pattern notes indicating that it originally appeared in the newsletter, and a link to the website in case people want to subscribe to the newsletter. However, adding individual patterns to my Ravelry store has unleashed a cascade of new considerations. First, it affects my pricing structure. I need to give you a little bit of backstory here. Pricing is one of the minefields indie knitting designers have had to traverse in the past 12 years. When I started designing and publishing my work, it was an unspoken (okay, sometimes it was shouted) rule that if you sold your product through a distributor or a yarn store, you would NOT also sell retail yourself—it was unfair competition to the distributor and yarn store. You either did retail or wholesale, not both. However, that was in the days before e-commerce and the Internet. As soon as I put up a website for Big Sky Knitting Designs, I ran right smack into the retail vs. wholesale problem. For a while I only sold newsletter subscriptions through my website, and directed people to their local yarn stores to purchase my books. I was trying NOT to compete with my distributors by not selling books retail from my website. Alas, that didn't work so well. I had lots of annoyed customers who said, "We're coming to your website to purchase the newsletter—why can't we get the books at the same time?" Eventually, the "no retail if you do wholesale" rule morphed into "you can sell retail as long as you don't undercut your distributors or yarn stores," meaning I can't set the retail price of one of my books at $24.95 but sell it from my website at $22.95. That is probably a blog post for another day, but let's just say that Amazon.com has pretty much killed all direct sales of my books from my website (from which I would make the most profit), because why would a knitter pay $24.95 for my Aran book when he or she can buy it from Amazon for $16.47 (I still make a profit on those sales, but it's much less than what I make selling directly). But such is the nature of the business. Anyway, back to the patterns. Because of recent developments, I'm setting up a scenario in which I've got individual downloadable patterns available for sale through Ravelry at $6.50 or $7.00 (which would be the same as or slightly higher than the retail price for patterns sold through my distributor), but which can be had—if the knitter is willing to pop over to my website and purchase there instead—for a lower price by buying the back issue of the newsletter. I have no way of knowing how many knitters would click to purchase one of my designs as a downloadable pattern from Ravelry and read far enough down the page to realize that they could get that back issue for less money than they are shelling out for the individual download. Perhaps the convenience of buying from Ravelry and having that pattern in their personal Ravelry database would override all other considerations. But perhaps it wouldn't. The bottom line is that I just don't feel right about the possibilty of undercutting my distributor—albeit in a fairly convoluted fashion—like that. It also means I have a more complicated pricing structure for my products than I would like. Another consideration is the fact that right now, a knitter who wants to purchase one of my designs HAS to purchase the back issue of the newsletter in which it appears, which may generate an additional sale in the form of a newsletter subscription. If they buy the individual pattern from my Ravelry store, though, they may never get to my website and that pattern may be the only purchase they make from me. Newsletter subscriptions have been dropping off in the past year. The rate of new subscriptions actually has increased a bit—I keep track of who buys the new issue each time one comes out and if they come back later to purchase a subscription. I always get a bump in new subscriptions as soon as I post the projects from the current issue of the newsletter on Ravelry. Will that bump in susbcriptions go away when I start selling individual patterns in my Ravelry store because customers will no longer have to come to my website? All of this is to say that I find myself at a place where my business model needs to be re-evaluated and possibly changed. I'm trying to be deliberate about this and not make any rash changes, while at the same time trying to see all the possible paths down which my business might go if I do make a change. I've been bitten by the law of unintended consequences before and I'd like to avoid that if at all possible. It's just so hard to stay ahead of all the upheaval that is taking place. Five years ago probably none of us would have predicted Ravelry, and yet look at what changes it's brought to the knitting world in just two short years. And while the newsletter has a been a great thing for almost 10 years, perhaps it has outlived its usefulness. So here is my brainstorming list—and it's just that, a list. It's a list of all the possible things I could do and the pros and cons of each. I throw it out there because it's entirely possible I am too close and can't see everything, and one of my blog readers might have a better idea. Also—as you can see—I'm really good at thinking up the cons.
If I had to make a choice right now, I'd say I am leaning toward option #3. However, I'd like to hold off making a decision until mid-summer. I might come up with another idea in the meantime.
You get two blog posts today. I have lots of news. June 7, 2009: Fiber Trends Now Distributing Big Sky Knitting Designs Patterns! Fiber Trends—the company which brought you those fabulous patterns for felted clogs and hedgehogs and all manner of other fun things—is now the exclusive distributor for Big Sky Knitting Designs patterns. Patterns from back issues of the newsletter—as well as brand new patterns never before published—will be available to yarn stores through Fiber Trends. Please let your local yarn store know that you would love to see them carry Big Sky Knitting Designs Patterns for their customers. Visit the Big Sky Knitting Designs page at the Fiber Trends website to see what's currently available. More designs (many more) will be added in the coming weeks. This is going to be a great collaboration. Bev is incredibly knowledgeable about the world of knitting—especially retail knitting—and a terrific person to boot. I've long understood that the newsletter just doesn't sell as well as individual patterns in stores, but I lacked the time and energy to find a way to market individual patterns. Having a distributor will help with that. Bev will have a portfolio of my current pattern offerings available at TNNA this weekend, so if you're going to be there and have a chance, please stop by her booths (447 and 546) and take a look. She may also have some of the models on display (she has the original Mystery Afghan—now called the Fireside Aran Afghan—as well as the Plain Vanilla Aran and the Cozy Shawl Collar Aran). I didn't realize (until I began working on this project) just how many designs are in the back catalog. I've got 85 patterns on my master pattern list (all designed by me), and roughly two-thirds of them are re-formatted and ready for sale. The light was perfect yesterday, so I shot new pics for several of the patterns. DD#1 was a willing model who also happens to be the perfect size for many of the designs. I still have to have about 8 or 10 designs re-knitted, either because the original yarn is no longer available or because the test knitter kept the piece. And the older patterns are taking me a while to reformat due to some software and style changes along the way. But Bev and I are planning to have most of the catalog of patterns available in time for fall knitting.
June 7, 2009: The First Annual Camas Creek Summer Retreat and Workshop! From the Camas Creek Newsletter:
I can assure you that JC is a fabulous teacher and got many rave reviews at the Knit and Crochet Show in Portland last month. She's also my favorite person to go and explore ethnic restaurants with (not that we have many in Kalispell . . . ). Take advantage of this opportunity to take a class with her here in town and enjoy the scenery of western Montana at the same time.
June 6, 2009: An Anniversary I Forgot I missed an anniversary this week, and that's really not a bad thing, considering. Fifteen years ago, on June 3, I went to my family doctor here in Kalispell to find out why I was so tired, couldn't get rid of a persistent sinus infection, and had an enlarged lymph node the size of a golf ball on my neck. The diagnosis? Acute myelgenous leukemia. His exact words to me: "We can't do anything for you here. You need to be on the next plane out of here to Seattle or Houston or another cancer center." And so I got on a plane the following morning and somehow managed to make two connecting flights and end up in Cleveland, where they took me off the plane in a wheelchair to meet my mother. She took me straight to the Cleveland Clinic where they did a battery of tests and wasted no time in getting me started on a course of chemo. I was really sick. And that's about all I want to say about it right now. Maybe one of these days I'll write a book, but honestly?—it's six months of my life that I prefer not to dwell on too much if I can help it (obviously, if I forget that it's been fifteen years since I was diagnosed). It feels good to be crossing things off the to-do list. I got the handout done for the Inside-Out Cables class yesterday, and it made me realize that the subject of inside-out cables needs to be its own chapter in Cables 2. I'm so afraid I am going to forget to include something in these Cables books—there is just so much to talk about! I ordered Firefly from Netflix, so the husband and I sat after dinner and watched the disc that came yesterday. He's not what I would call a sci-fi buff but he really likes that show. I think what appeals to him are the interesting plotlines and excellent dialogue (which, of course, are the reasons the show got cancelled—TV isn't supposed to appeal to intelligent people). I watch it for all the cool textile items the characters wear. I got half a sleeve knocked out while we were sitting there. It's for a design out of the Rowan Purelife Bluefaced Leicester, although I've only worked on it halfheartedly for a couple of reasons. If it were a design for the Fall or Winter issues, I probably would have cranked it out by now. However, I have plenty of material for each of those issues, so I am not feeling my normal deadline pressure. I'm also kind of disappointed in the yarn. This is the second or third time I've tried a Rowan yarn and had it just disintegrate while knitting it. Bluefaced Leicester sheep produce wool that—if it's spun correctly—should be strong and durable. This sweater already looks like it is a year old and it's not even finished yet. Bleh. I'll finish it the sweater, but I am not in love with it. Give me some Alice Starmore Bainin any day. What I'd love to be working on is a design I am contributing to a forthcoming book. A few months ago the author and I settled on a yarn, and waited, and waited, and waited for the yarn to come from the supplier, a small sheep farm here in Montana. I got a call last week that the yarn was on its way, and it arrived mid-week. However, it was the last of a dyeing batch from this supplier, and there just isn't enough of it to do the kind of design that the author wants. We can't wait another two months for yarn from this supplier (the design is due the first of August), so the author chose a different supplier. They are supposed to ship yarn this week. It's a good thing I don't have anything else in the queue, because this is going to be my trip knitting. The husband and I will be children-less this afternoon. DD#1 has to play in the band at graduation, and DD#2 is going on an overnight Girl Scout camping trip with her other mother. I told him I would like to go for a hike, but we'll have to see if the weather cooperates. It rained hard and steadily last night and we needed it. If June turns out to be as dry as May was, we might be looking at another bad fire season. Our chief says they seem to come every six years, and the last bad year was 2003, the year of the Robert Fire up in Glacier Park. I'm inclined to believe the chief. He's a wise man when it comes to fires.
June 5, 2009: Maryland Class Info Okay, here's what I've got set up for Maryland: On Friday, June 19th at Crazy for Ewe in La Plata, MD, I will be teaching one or two classes—we're still working on details. The class will probably be the Let Them Knit Cake class, on Brioche ribbing patterns. On Saturday, June 20th, at Woolstock Yarn Shop in Glyndon, MD, I will be teaching my Colorizing Cables class and my Inside-Out Cables class. Please contact either of these stores directly to sign up for a class. And just as a reminder, I'll be teaching at Threadbear Fiber Arts in Lansing, MI the weekend of June 26-28 (Fit Your Knits, Aran Sweater Design, and Cables and Beyond), and at A Tangled Tale in Powell, OH (outside of Columbus) on June 30 and July 1 (Inside-Out Cables and Faggoting and Cables). It's a busy trip east, but I feel like I should teach in these places when I am there, which isn't often. I've got another full day in my office today. I've knocked about a third of the items off my to-do list, but some biggies remain. My stitch dictionaries have little sticky flags on the stitch patterns I want to include in the handouts for my two new classes. I'll make up the handouts, knit my swatches from the instructions to double-check them, then scan the swatches into the layout. My faith in humanity was restored a bit yesterday. I went to town to get a haircut, get my eyebrows waxed, and run a few errands. Everywhere I went, people were friendly and helpful, even in situations where they could easily have been otherwise. I really enjoyed everyone I interacted with yesterday. The salon I go to hired a new aesthetician and she kept me quite entertained while she waxed my eyebrows. My hair desperately needed to be cut. I've been getting minimal trims in an attempt to grow out layers and my bangs, and my hair was the longest it's been since I was a little girl. I like it long, but during the summer I don't have the patience for my normal hair routine. I said something to the husband a few days ago about getting a couple of inches taken off, and he got this look on his face like he had swallowed a bug. Seems he was nervous that I would get it cut shorter than he likes it. I pointed out to him that he shaves his head every couple of weeks and I've never complained, even though he's got a gorgeous full head of hair and I like it when his hair is more than an eighth of an inch long. Men. I think they've retained more cavemen characteristics over the millenia than they like to admit. We need some gratuitous garden pictures. As usual, the columbines are the first to bloom:
I like the darker-colored ones better, for some reason:
They've been quite promiscuous and have seeded themselves all over the garden. I don't know exactly what colors I've got anymore until they start to open. Everything else looks really good despite the lack of rain.
June 3, 2009: On Being Excellent to Each Other I have to write this post and get it out of my system so I can go on to other, more knitterly things. May was an incredibly difficult month—and not just for me. I've heard from a whole bunch of people who felt like the universe was takings its wrath out upon them. I was never so happy to see a month end. It felt like I was in a meat grinder. If you haven't read Stephanie's post on the aftermath of Sock Summit registration, please go there now and take a look (it's the May 29th entry). I hope you're as horrified as I am that people (knitters!) who didn't get into Sock Summit would actually send threatening hate mail to Stephanie and Tina. I read that post the day it came out and thought to myself, "That sums up the entire month perfectly." I have no idea whether it's the economy, the weather, the alignment of the stars, or what, but May was chock full of examples of people being mean, hateful, spiteful, selfish, and just downright not excellent to each other. The kids at my daughter's elementary school behave better than I saw some adults behaving last month. What's going on? I'm not suggesting that we all be Stepford wives and be superficially nice to each other. Conflict happens and needs to be resolved. The point is that conflict can be resolved without taking each others' heads off and being unnecessarily nasty. Or sending hate mail to the organizers of an incredibly popular conference because you were one of 30,000 people who were unsuccessful in registering for one of 4000 spots. Okay, I feel better now, and ready to attack my to-do list. Thanks for listening.
June 2, 2009: Happy Computer, Happy Me My computer guy called this morning to tell me everything was ready to go, so I ran into town, picked up my Mac, and came home and got it up and running again. While I can work on my laptop for short periods of time, it's not the ideal situation. I have a screaming fast desktop computer and a laptop that's not quite so screaming fast. It's kinda like when I have to drive DD#1's truck instead of mine—they both get me where I want to go, but getting there in her truck is a I should have some final Maryland class information in another day or so. Stay tuned. I really wish the wind would stop blowing. Every so often a pressure gradient parks itself on the Continental Divide and causes the wind to come howling back down the mountains from east to west. And we're not talking gentle breeze. I know for a fact that some of those wind gusts have to be pushing 40 mph. Trees fall over. Power lines come down. We went to bed Sunday night with our bedroom window (which faces east) wide open. I wondered why I was dreaming about camping in Glacier Park until I woke up and realized I wasn't sleeping in a rated-to-minus-20 mummy bag. Normally these windstorms are over within 12 hours or so. This one has been blowing for almost 48 hours straight. To say that my teeth are on edge is an understatement. I hope it blows itself out and moves on, and soon. I've got three full days of office work ahead of me (which was part of the reason I wanted the computer repairs done). I'm teaching twelve classes this month. Only three of them are being taught more than once, which means getting handouts for nine different classes copied and ready either to take with me (for the classes here in Montana) or ship east. And two of those classes are brand spanking new and need to have the handouts made up. This is a list of stuff I need to do before we leave for the east coast:
And that list doesn't even include the non-knitting stuff I have to do, too, like making sure the pantry and freezer are well-stocked for the husband, and arranging all of DD#1's college visits in Ohio and Maryland. This trip is scheduled down to the last second, but we have a lot of ground to cover.
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