Sycamore Grove

My girls and I went to the < href="http://www.ewetopia.net/UpperValleyFiberFestival.htm" target="new">Upper Valley Fiber Festival on May tenth. I brought my yummy camera and took lots of pictures.

This is Jen, getting us lost. Well, it was more of a little detour, really. We got back on track.

This was what I was knitting on the way there. I love my husband, but seriously? No more ribbed socks for a while. They take forever.

This was a restaurant or store or something, with a giant freaking bronze buffalo out front.

Seriously. Experiment Farm Road. No lie.

Hippie sheep! They didn't smell like patchouli, though.

This one was so pretty, I love that black nose.

These are the wool/seacell rovings from Creatively Dyed Yarns. I got some, it's really pretty.

This little angora goat was playing peek-a-boo with me. Only the hypothetical wrath of Nick stopped me from goat-napping him.

This lady was carding and spinning cotton from vitamin and medicine bottles. She had the most beautifully woven cotton place mats. They felt like silk.

This would be the 'after' shot of that adorable brown sheep above.

And the sheep shearing. This guy took fifteen minutes to shear the sheep from start to finish. It was crazy.

(This one's my favorite shot.)

And that's the brutal aftermath. A whole lotta wool.

There were Border Collies, too, that were herding ducks. I love Border Collies, they're so awesome.

And then we came home.

As promised, here are some shots of the SeaWool I bought from Creatively Dyed Yarn. First of all, it is so soft. Seriously, it's the softest stuff I've ever worked with, except maybe silk, and it practically spins itself.

And a close up of the singles:

There's eight ounces there, and I'm spindle spinning it up into something that'll be laceweight when plied (two strand; three's a little thick for what I want). For all that there's some really saturated bits, most of the fiber is light enough that when I spin it, it comes out this lovely opal-ish color. I think when I ply it up and knit it into some shawl or another (I haven't decided yet which one), it's going to be freaking gorgeous.

There was knitting this week, too. Sort of. See, there was a disastrous occurrence. That I documented in gruesome detail so as to be able to share it with you. Let me preface this by saying that I finished the back of the Chocolate Twist a while ago.

I was knitting on the fronts (both of them together, to prevent total nervous breakdown later when trying to match not only the fronts to the back, but also to each other) and things were going swimmingly. And really fast. To get up to the armscye bind-offs, I needed to finish three cable repeats plus a little bit.

I got to that point and thought, 'Wow, that went awesomely fast. I should probably check to make sure the fronts and the backs match. I'm not so worried about it, since I've been slavishly following my notes and everything, but sill. Just in case.'

So I did. The fronts were a good inch and a half shorter than the back. When I started breathing again, I tried to figure out why. As a fun exercise, I'm going to put it to you, gentle readers; what did I do wrong?

Didn't get it? Look again:

That's right. Those bits where there's two cable side by side, they're meant to have two twists each. Not one. About three minutes after I stopped beating my head against the wall for being such an idiot, my poor sweater looked more like this:

And now that I'm seeing these pictures, it looks like I'll have to rip back to the ribbing, as the cables there should have an extra twist, too.

Sigh.

So. Convention season is coming around. GenCon Indy is obviously the biggest one, but we're also going to InConJunction this year. Con season means costumes, and I need to get off my ass if I'm going to get any done this year.

I'm being pretty ambitious this year; just take a look at my line-up:
*Sabriel from the Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix.
*Lucy Pevensie, the rust-red dress from Prince Caspian.
*Lisa Hayes from Robotech. I want to make a Rick Hunter costume for Nick, too.

I've started gathering everything I need for the first two costumes, as they are the most important to me. I'd like to get Sabriel done for InCon, which is the first weekend in July, and then have Lucy for GenCon.

I bought some 100% cotton velveteen for Sabriel:

and have started embroidering it:

You can see a close-up of one of the keys here:

Sabriel Costume rundown:
*White Linen shirt
*Scalemaille armor (I'll be faking this with muslin and paillettes)
*Black Breeches
*Leather lag armor with riveted plates (I'll be skipping this, thanks)
*Leather bandolier with bells (I'm not sure how I'll take care of this one)
*Sword belt with sword (I'll probably skip the weaponry, but wear the belt)