It's Fall!

Certainly took long enough. We're in for a few freakishly high highs before Halloween, but the mornings are cool, and on days when the clouds are obliging, one can get up at a reasonable hour and bike to the park for lunch and a new-shawl photo shoot.

Pattern: Shetland Triangle, by Evelyn Clark.
Yarn: Mountain Colors Twizzle in Ruby River

Grand Excitement

I have this very sweet, courteous coworker. We only work together on Sundays, and every Sunday, he asks if I did anything exciting that week. Considering I'm in classes 40+ out of 52 weeks every year, my response usually requires a pretty liberal interpretation of "exciting." And yet he still asks--that is dedicated belief in the existence of exciting.

This past week, what passed for exciting was taking the car and driving out to The Hinterlands to the only independent fabric store around, which is also just about as far as the nearest big-box fabric store (just in the totally opposite direction).

Technically, the Hinterlands is a rawther large city. It sprawls like no other, though, so it's more like several different cities, the closest rubbing right up against where I live, the farthest touching the mountains rimming the valley. I think of it as The Hinterlands because it takes so long to get to the downtown, unless, of course, you have a death wish and want to take the freeway out.

Anyways--the excitement of driving to the Hinterlands is the signage. Somehow, they have managed to retain more of their old signs than any other city around, so as you drive in, you get a peek of what Arizona was like before the masses of people washed in, making tiny one-road downtowns explode into big sprawling cities. Driving by, looking at signs for motels, little florists, car repair places, and the fabric shop above, you almost feel like it would be possible to pull off all the 21st century grunge like an old carpet and reveal the city as it was, filled with cars the size of ocean liners and men in crisp chinos opening doors for women in full skirts and poufy hair-dos.

Also exciting was that this trip ended with me hitting the button jackpot. You wouldn't think finding buttons for a sweater is all that hard--after all, most LYSs have their own little button corner, and then there's the venerable Button Tin in my closet. Au contraire. I've been on the lookout for buttons for Monita's Christmas sweater since January, and it took me until last weekend to find The Buttons. 8 months later, Christmas gifts are officially, unquestionably done.

Now that's exciting.

The Decency of Snails

Well, summer is still hanging on for dear life here, but fall has reclaimed the early mornings. The end must be near...



I have not given in to the wooly shawl yet. Instead, inspired by the a) amigurumi of a crocheting classmate on Ravelry and b) a long-abiding desire to use up the last of the Rowan Calmer that gave me such trouble in Christmas 2007, I pulled out my copy of Amigurumi Knits and knit a snail. Hansi is a knitter after my own heart in her unwavering dedication to grafting and picking up stitches rather than seaming. That whole snail has one seam that is not kitchener--where the shell attaches to the mantle. Genius.



When I started the project, I thought I could make it just a slug. It would be a sort of knitting therapy to get over the plague of slugs that coated the walkway to Dalkeith Estate. And the fields surrounding the estate, and the forest surrounding the fields. As a general rule, I'm ok with gross, but these slugs were too large, too slimy, and too numerous to be viewed with anything but a sort of horrified fascination. Seriously, there were so many slugs you had to keep your eyes on the ground walking in, out, and around the estate. Unless you happened to be ok with the thought of stepping on multiple slugs in the course of your walk, which I was absolutely not.



I got the slug part done and discovered that it looked quite indecently naked. How that is possible with a knitted toy, I'm not sure, but it was undeniably indecent. So it had to become a snail. There were some snails at Dalkeith, too. They were far fewer and farther in between, and somehow, less ugh-worthy than their shell-less cousins. Maybe I just like my gastropods clothed. Whatever the reason, it was a small matter to whip up the shell, and voilà--snail.

Pinky the Snail has quite happily taken up residence on my nightstand beside the Hansigurumi Loch Ness Monster, and I'm even thinking I could round out my collection of strange knitted toys--and use up the last of that Calmer--by knitting a little pink nautilus, or perhaps a go traditional with a chubby pink mouse. The possibilities!

Overpreparedness

It's that time of year again--while the rest of the country is savoring the last lingering days of their summer, I'm counting the hours until summer is over, done, and gone.

School has started, and darkness is falling noticeably earlier, both of which are counts in fall's favor.

But our cold water is still running lukewarm (from sitting in pipes outside), butter can be softened in an hour at room temperature, and the noonday sun is still enough to bake your laundry in, if you so desire. Three counts for fall.



But look! The hesperaloe pods are going from glaucous green to brown and brittle! (I love bending the stalks so they sproing back and scatter the seeds)

This is also the time of year I start to feel it would be prudent to start stocking up on warm things for fall or winter.



First item to go in this year's stockpile: Gudrun Johnson's Crofter's Cowl. The yarn is Noro Taiyo, which I'd bought in Tucson last year and have been saving up for a Special Project. Taiyo, I discovered, is a single ply with little rough bits of fiber in it, so I modified the pattern by working from bottom to top rather than from both ends to the middle to eliminate the need for grafting. The horseshoe lace only has those nice points on the cast on edge, which means my BO edge is pretty straight and boring, but I was worried that the nature of the color changes and the texture of the yarn would make for a bad grafting experience. And I can live with only having a nice pointy edge on one side of my cowl ; )

The neon yellow and lime green in this colorway had worried me a little bit when I started knitting, but the pinks and browns balance that out nicely. I used exactly half the skein, so I'm tempted to use the other half (which has a great bubblegum pink and carnation red along with a shell gray) for another crofter's cowl, just to see how the colors come out.

Yes, I am modeling my cowl in a tank top. So I may be jumping the gun a bit if I start a big wooly shawl next. It's tempting, though.

Crossing Paths

One of the many things I love about blogging is the way you can cross paths with other bloggers in another state or another country without even meaning to.

This summer, I became intrigued by the flora of the UK. As my springtime forays indicate, I am reasonably familiar with the plants that grow here in the Sonoran Desert, but most of the plants I saw in gardens and fields in the UK were total strangers.

I like to know things, just for the sake of knowing, so not knowing the names of the plants all around was driving me nuts. This was especially the case with those tall, spiky plants with the purply-pink flowers. We saw them all over--on the embankments on the side of the road, in the waste beside the train tracks, and cutting purple swaths through fields around Dalkeith.



My first thought was that they were thistle (perhaps the one UK flower I can identify), but getting a good look at some real thistles (picture taken at Dalkeith Park) proved they were not. I had resigned myself to shelving them at the back of my mind with the UK hills, monuments, and villages I had seen but whose names I would never know.

Then I read Kate Davies' post about the Braids.



There the flowers were! And Kate knew their name: rosebay willowherb! (Her pictures are much nicer, too)

So utterly random, so utterly unessential, finding that name totally made my day. Now I know. I can go back to all my pictures of those swaths of purple and add the tag: rosebay willowherb.

Resurfacing

Originally, I'd intended to do a proper summary of the rest of my month in the UK, but there was simply Too Much, all of which defies description. It was a month in another world entirely, and if it weren't for the scads of pictures I took, I'd be tempted to say it was all a dream. The best evidence of the sheer amount of living that was crammed into last month is in the pictures of the *two* pairs of socks I knitted while I was away. Even though the last sock was finished at home, I have never managed so great a feat (feat, feet...giggle)--my previous sock-knitting "record" was a pair in a month.

Here they are:






I don't think I can do socks for a long while now. Cowls, however, are an entirely different matter...

Did the Vacation End?

Back in the Valley of the Sun. I was gone so long, I feel like a tourist gawking at the wide streets, low buildings, and skinny palm trees for the first time.