Mad Hair Day

Just in case anyone passes by and wonders if I’ve fallen down a well or into a passing crocodile, I thought I’d post a quick note to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye for now’.

I’ve been dealing with some health issues over the last few months and, as you might notice, my blog posts have dried up somewhat. This blog is positively crispy, in fact!

So, for the time being, the blog is going to have a hiatus and with any luck I shall be back once normal activities are resumed. I’m still lurking around Ravelry (although that is a tad neglected too!) as eclair. I shall leave the comments enabled too, just in case anyone needs to be in touch.

Thanks for stopping by!

We’re going to skip the usual preamble about what a crap blogger I am. I’ve said it before, you can all read the dates and it’s going to be no surprise to anyone that I haven’t posted in ages. Because that’s what I do.

To fill you in on the minutae of my riveting life (it’s all go here folks!) I’ve been a little unwell. Those of you with good reading skills and excellent memories might have noticed my earlier mention of a slight fever. Well, that wasn’t the half of it. Actually, it turns out I had bacterial gastro-enteritis. Salmonella to be exact, and it was even less fun than you’d imagine. It really hit in the early hours of the morning the day after I arrived home and I spent a week or two convalescing. Since then I’ve not been quite right and now we (that’s me and the doctor) think that the tummy bug has exacerbated an underlying condition. No idea what yet, but with my luck it isn’t going to be anything glamorous.

In the meantime I’ve not done much knitting although I am churning out a sock-yarn strapless dress for Barbie (that would be my daughter’s Barbie. My Barbie would never wear anything so gauche. She prefers her knitted evening gowns to have sleeves, dontchaknow?) and I’m knitting on the pink socks featured a few posts ago and predictably neglected.

It is summer here now, you see, and the weather is getting hotter. My chickens (we have four now) have stopped laying in protest at the inadequate leisure facilities. I think they require sun-loungers and popsicles at regular intervals, if not scantily clad waiters with umbrella-d cocktails.

We also have the builders in. I’d like to say it’s because we believe in supporting local tradesmen through economic hard times. But actually it’s because we also have a hole in our bathrom wall  as my daughter slipped and put her foot through it. This was because the original owner put wall tiles on the floor (slippy!) and the shower cubicles leaks water from around the door. On the bright side, if she hadn’t bounced on her bum and stuck a leg in the plaster we wouldn’t know that the shower cubicle has in fact been leaking around the bottom for what looks like a decade and that the wall behind is rotten. And the floor. Yep, that was lucky, wasn’t it?

We decided to not fix it up half-arsed but to rip out the entire bathroom and start again once the new wall and floor is done. Our en-suite bathroom also has killer floor tiles so that will need doing too so we’ll put in a new shower cubicle there at the same time (are you noticing a hint of the snowball effect here?) as it was designed as a ‘wet room’ which was apparently trendy a few years ago. Bloody stupid idea, to my mind. More of a wet towel/ floor/ loo roll/ corpse-with-a-cracked-skull room, if you ask me.

And right after that we’ll put on a new bedroom for the builder (he’s been here for ages mending the roof and guttering. A word to the wise: never leave your man alone for two weeks with his new chainsaw if you have trees near your house), as I think he might as well just move in as he spends so much time here. It pretty much feels like it already. You forget how much you take privacy for granted until the day you meet the new plumber while prancing about the house straight from the shower while looking for fresh underwear in the oh-my-god-it’s-the-size-of-Everest laundry pile that now fills the previously open-plan lounge-diner. Yep, he’s not going to forget me in a hurry.

I’m off to Auckland this weekend for the annual girly weekend with my nearest and dearest female relatives. We shall be finishing the Christmas shopping and drinking wine. I have Christmas down pat this year, I’m pretty much all organized for it now and I’ll be droning on about how efficient I am in the next post coming up in the near future.

Or not. It might be Easter by then.

So I never finished blogging about Rhinebeck, did I? Sunday was much like Saturday for me, more frenzied yarn purchases, more batt fondling, more shawl stalking. Also a touch of the gushing groupie when I finally met the Yarn Harlot herself and she kindly signed her latest book for me and admired my shawl. Jet lag and a slight fever were making me a little unhinged by this point but she remained calm and held the sock, probably thinking it wise that she had control of the pointy sticks instead of me. Look:

I left her in peace and tottered off to score some more roving. And a spindle. Or two…

All in all, a good haul was had. I even photographed it all back at the hotel before falling unconscious onto my pillows with some suitably heavy duty medication.

I made some wonderful friends who kindly took care of me and had a great time. I even went to the Ravelry party but my camera battery died and I didn’t get any live action shots of the knitterati who were thick underfoot at this wild shindig. This weekend was fantastic and it wouldn’t have been a fraction of the fabulous without the Ravelers. Thanks guys!

I’ve been having trouble logging into my blog for the last few days which is why this blog post is a little late. Sorry about that folks!

Picking up from where I left off, I got up bright and early on Saturday morning and made my way to Rhinenbeck Sheep and Wool fairgrounds ready for the gates to open. The trees continued to be gorgeous, the weather was bright and sunny and I had a shopping list as long as my arm.

Once through the gates I resisted the temptation to trample on slower visitors and made my way to the barns. I wanted to fondle the spindles at the Golding booth and see what all the Socks That Rock fuss was about. Despite being an early arriver, there was a bit of a queue!

I decided to take my chances on there being some left later and the queues maybe subsiding later in the day. Happily, there was no shortage of yarn booths and I started finding yarn that I just couldn’t leave behind. The fairgrounds were starting to fill up and the food stalls were opening for business.

I wandered around the sheds picking up some divine fibre and yarns and then almost stumbled across the Creatively Dyed booth, run by Dianne with whom I’d had dinner the night before. I can only assume all those people stuck in the STR queue hadn’t made it this far or they wouldn’t have been wasting valuable shopping time when there was yarn like Dianne’s to be had. I bought a load of roving and sock yarn, in the most fabulous colours, and then went in search of spindles with which to spin them. I wish I’d remembered to take a photo of Dianne’s booth, it was like all the colours were having a party in one place!

I made it to the Ravelry meetup and found Francee and Ann who had also been at dinner on Friday night. I met Jess and Casey and Mary Heather there and kinneared the crowd, stalking the knits and showing off my fibre.

Inside the sheds I found the spindles I’d been searching for: a pretty ceramic supported spindle

  

along with a Jenkin’s 2.5oz turkish spindle. The sheds were wonderful, packd with small booths each filled with more and more wonderful things to tempt. I treated myself to three skeins of Decadent Fibres Creme Brulee with the intention of knitting myself a jumper. I’ll have to draft the pattern myself, I think. I know exactly what I want but haven’t been able to find it in my size.

By mid afternoon I was utterly knackered. The fairgrounds were even more busy than they had been at lunch time and I decided to head back to the hotel . My boot (that’s trunk to the non-brits!) was full although not as full as the car in front:

And don’t think I wasn’t tempted to get one myself. But I’d have trouble fitting it in the handluggage.

I went to the Ravelry party on Saturday night and wild with excitement, was about to kinnear all the knitterati but my camera battery crapped out on me and I had to satisfy myself with beer, snacks and good company.

More later once my photos have uploaded!

Last year I sat at my computer, pea-green with envy at all those lucky sods at Rhinebeck. And I remember being particularly annoyed because they didn’t take a moment from their wild fibre-bingeing and partying to blog and tell the rest of us all about what a wonderful time they were having.

Well, this year I’m going to put that right. With excruciating detail, here is Rhinebeck 2008. I can’t promise that I won’t get all James Joyce on you, the jet lag is still pretty bad, but I’ll try and give you reasonably coherent and comprehensive account of what it is like to be at Rhinebeck, on your own, having travelled 8800-odd miles a couple of days beforehand.

I picked up the hire car from the Hoboken depot where they were amazingly blase about letting a foreigner with duffle-bags under her eyes drive off with one of their cars. I’d pre-booked a GPS with the car which was comfortingly called NeverLost. This turned out to be somewhat optimistic. I drove around New Jersey, swearing at the GPS and wondering why the hell the road is called by two different names when one would do. Motorways are called I-something and also have names like Garden State Parkway. Only the signs show one name and the GPS calls out another. And gives helpful hints like “Keep left in 0.5 miles” – miles? How far is a mile? And why am I keeping left? There’s nothing on the right. What does the GPS know that I don’t? Landslide ahead? Collapsed mineshaft?

So, clenched to the wheel, muttering “drive on the right, drive on the right, drive on the right” I finally made it out of the city and onto the highway to the Catskills (at least, I assume they are the Catskills. Whatever they are, they are pretty.) Look:

I managed to prise my fingers off the steering wheel for a split second to grab a shot of the trees. The hills are covered with autumnal forests which stretch off into the distance in a leafy bronze haze.

About an hour and a half after leaving the city, I reached Kingston and checked into the hotel. I had finished my Meandering Vines Shawl last night and needed to block it. I had pins at the ready and went to soak the shawl in the bathroom sink. Unfortunately it had one of those annoying plugs which don’t quite fit the plughole and the water kept draining away. Being amazingly resourceful (as well as clever, glamorous and staggeringly athletic and all-round wonderful) I used the wastepaper bin lined with a clean plastic bag which did the job rather well

After about an hour I squeezed it out, rolled it in a towel and trampled on it and then pinned it out on the hotel’s lovely white fluffy towels.

 

It’s over six feet long and 20″ wide! Those are two bath towels laid end to end! The colour is more raspberry than my photos show and the lace pattern shows up beautifully now that it is blocked. It is utterly gorgeous and I’m so pleased with it!

And now it is nearly 6pm and I’m going to have dinner with some Ravelers at the restaurant across the road. But first I have to trowel on some concealer and make-up or they’ll think I’m already dressed for Halloween. I have black rings under my eyes like Uncle Fester.

I am prostrate with jet lag. Seriously. Flat out on the sofa, groaning pitifully, bug-eyed with knackeredness.
 
I’ve done nothing of note today apart from knitting all night long, after it became painfully obvious that there was no sleep to be had. Then, when daylight finally came and just as I was getting ready to go out I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion and sat down on the comfy couch till my head stopped spinning.

And then I woke up three hours later.

I’m writing off today, devoting myself to knitting the Rhinebeck wrap which is is made from Posh Yarn’s Lei, a everlasting yarn whose skeins know no bounds. It’s bloody lucky that it is as luscious and wonderful as it is or I’d have buried it in a fit of pique by now. Especially as I’m a tad befuddled and spent as much time tinking as I did knitting this afternoon.

Come hell or high water, I’m casting off tonight. And I’ll be blocking it at the hotel. Hmmm… pink yarn, white hotel towels… anybody else experiencing an impending sense of doom?

Things people have said to me today:

“Paper or plastic?” (I thought she was talking about the carrier bags)

“Yo yo, what’s going ooooon” (I have no idea what is going on or, indeed, what to respond to this. I was briefly tempted to say “WhatsUuuuup” but am entirely aware that it sounds bloody silly with a british accent)

“You tryin’a get run over?” (I forgot which way the traffic was coming from. Reminder to self: look BOTH ways and remember that the “Walk” sign is a suggestion to the pedestrians and a joke to the drivers)

Have a nice day! (a man who sounded like he was in the Sopranos, standing outside a cafe with red and green awning and neon pizza signs flashing)

So so far I have made it to the shops and back, learnt to cross the road (follow someone with no visible tyre tracks across their body) and avoided being sold a puppy by a man who lived in a shopping trolley. New Jersey is fun!

You see, I left home at 4pm on Tuesday. I flew out of New Zealand at 8pm and it was a twelve hour flight. Then a four hour layover in San Francisco then another 5 hour flight. Somehow, in my mind, this meant that (as it was dark outside that window) it must be late Wednesday night and, as we landed in New York just after midnight, it must be the wee small hours of Thursday. Yes?

No, somehow we managed to travel back in time. Like when Superman spins the earth backwards to save Lois. We flew in to yesterday and arrived today, which should have been tomorrow.

What this all means is that instead of having just Thursday to finish my Rhinebeck knitting before hiring a car to drive to Kingston, NY on Friday (New Yorkers might want to stay off the roads that day, don’t say you weren’t warned!) I have an extra day! This is a great relief as even with the most barbaric blocking I don’t think my wrap is going to wrap me anytime soon.

Well hello there! It’s been ages since I’ve posted. I ran out of photo storage space in my free account on blog.co.nz and I’ve been trying for ages to give them some money to upgrade my account. It seems they don’t want my cash as I never got an answer, no matter how much I pestered. So, in a forlorn hope that this will work, I’m going to try to attach some photos from flickr. If it works then we can carry on as normal (sporadic drivel with out of focus photographs) and if it doesn’t then you can crack open a cold one and thank your lucky stars for the reprieve!

Mostly we’ve been hibernating from the cold and the rain. As much as it pains me to conform to a cliche, I’m becoming terribly British about the weather (meaning that I talk about it to complete strangers in supermarkets – I’m uncomfortably aware that this means I’m only one short step from turning into my mother who happily gives strangers the benefit of her opinion in department store changing rooms). It don’t half rain a lot here, doesn’t it?

We were given the opportunity to take a week off and ditch the kids with their doting (and now demented) grandparents and skip the country. We immediately hit Google and looked up the nearest drought zone and found ourselves on a plane to Queensland within the week. It was awesome. Brisbane is lovely and, despite being their winter, we thought the weather was super. We spent a couple of days on the Gold Coast and a couple more in Surfers Paradise and drove through the Glass Mountains. There was even a spot of knitting on a beach near Noosa:

The photo was taken in the late afternoon and shortly after we left the beach and were driving towards Buderim (I saw real live wild kangaroos in the fields and a koala in a tree!) we saw that the sky matched my yarn. Bliss.

You could be forgiven for thinking that I am going to start this post with the usual “sorry for not posting” blurb. So I’ll flout convention and skip that bit. There’s been all sorts of stuff going on but I’m only going to tell you about the knitting and spare you the minutae of my humdrum days.

I’ve finally found success with the Cover colourway of my Lucia Posh Yarn. After several horrific attempts at socks (this yarn clearly did not want to be a sock) I cast on a pair of gloves and made up the pattern as I went along. I have ludicrously long fingers and shopbought gloves never fit me. And they never allow enough room for my fingernails, which I like to grow long (never let it be said that I do not delude myself. The chances of having long, manicured elegant nails is pretty much nil, what with the working, hoards of children and chickens and stuff). The arthritis has been pretty bad of late and as the temperature gets lower my hands suffer badly. So, first up, my evolving gloves:

I can’t begin to tell you how much I love this yarn. In fact, people stop by when I knit in public to say how much they love the yarn. And most of them don’t even knit! I wish I could get my hands on a few more skeins. The chances of these gloves being kidnapped is quite high. Perhaps I should keep my hands in my pockets when I wear them!

I’ve also cast on the Charm Wrap which I have been coveting for a while now. I’m knitting this in Merino & Possum and so far the knitting is going well and it’s a surprise how quickly it is coming along after spending so long with teeny 2.5mm dpns. The Denise needles are fabulous for cardigans, just swap the tips for the next size up or pop on the ends to hold the stitches. I don’t know how I ever managed without them. 

 

One of the many things I’ve been doing (apart from hanging out in Ravelry – come say hello, I’m there as “eclair”) is booking a trip to New York. I’m going to be there over the Rhinebeck weekend (no coincidence!) and I’m wildly excited about it. As part of my preparations I’m knitting something to wear and, in the interests of luggage-optimization, working out the best yarn/clothes ratio I can get in my suitcase while not actually going naked. I’m also working on a new treatment plan for the arthritis so I don’t get off the plane looking like Mrs Overall and hobbling my way around the fairgrounds like an old crone. I’ll bore you all later with that once the results are in.

And now I’m off to do a little shopping. Mel over at South Seas Knitting has her website up and running (Koigu! Yippee!) and Vintage Purls is also dealing yarn crack in the form of hand-dyed sock yarn. Mother’s Day is coming up and my family have long since become accustomed to being presented with things to giftwrap for me, saving me from being given another mug or bottle of bubblebath and saving them from agonizing hours trying to find me a gift. Internet shopping, we loves it.