The Independent Stitch

Gordon's Rules of Legislative Conduct

Colorado state senator Ken Gordon doesn't represent my part of the state, but I've subscribed to his newsletter for several years because it's so informative and interesting to read.

Yesterday evening, at the end of his term limits, he sent the following message. It seems timely to share with people of all political persuasions, within and beyond Colorado. I'd link to the text on his page, but it's not posted there yet and he has given permission to publish.

From Ken Gordon:

Dear Friends and Neighbors:

Today is the last day of my last session in the Colorado General Assembly. I actually can't find words to describe the experience except to say that it was [an] honor to be chosen by the people of my district to represent them and an honor to be chosen by other Senators to be the Majority Leader. I don't know what I am going to do next. Below is something I passed out to Senators today. If anyone wants to forward these Rules of Legislative Conduct or publish them you have my permission. I will continue to write as events occur. Thanks for all of your support over the years. I am not retiring. I will still be involved in public affairs. I just don't know the form that will take.

Sincerely,

Ken Gordon

Majority Leader, Colorado State Senate

Gordon's Rules of Legislative Conduct

(Suggestions for future legislators)

1. Think for yourself. If you don't have any internal values that inform your conduct here, find another occupation.
2. Leadership: You can't always be liked and always do the right thing. If you don't have the courage to sometimes do the right thing even though it will anger some person or support group, you should find another occupation. If you don't have courage, you may be an elected official, but you are not a leader.
3. If you are in the majority and you can’t pass a bill that you want to pass without abusing the process, then you shouldn’t pass the bill. If you can’t kill a bill that you want to kill without abusing the process, then you shouldn’t kill the bill.
4. If you abuse the process in order to prevent minority party members from accomplishing anything that reflects the values of their constituents, then you create a deep and bitter resentment. This resentment will come back to haunt you in myriad ways. Abuse of the process does not show strength. It shows weakness.
5. Respect the minority party members. There are a large number of people who voted for them. When you disrespect the minority party members you disrespect many of the people of Colorado. And their ideas are not always wrong.
6. Think of the other members of the Senate as team members—even members of the other party. The goal is not to be in the majority. If that were the goal, then the other party would be the enemy. The goal is to make Colorado the best state in the country, or in any country for that matter. To do this we need everyone’s help. If we don’t do this we will be at a competitive disadvantage with states or countries that learn how to work better together.
7. Some people think there is a distinction between how you act in a campaign and how you act at the legislature. If you lie during a political campaign, that makes you a liar, and you will be treated that way in the legislature as well.
8. Respect the people who put you in office. You might think that you do that, but every time you commit your vote to a lobbyist or even another member before you have heard committee testimony or debate, you have disrespected the people who wish to voice their opinion.
9. Don't let conflict escalate. Be the one who deescalates. Be the bigger person. Be the person who acknowledges error. If you have to, go outside and take a walk.
10. Have pride in what you are doing. You stand on the shoulders of many thousands who have worked or shed blood for our rights and our democracy. Fewer than 2% of the people who have ever lived have lived in a democracy. Don’t take it for granted. By your conduct here, honor those people who fought for this democracy.

Senator Ken Gordon

District 35–Denver

Sunday at Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival

Sunday at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival is always quieter than Saturday. It's still plenty busy and crowded. A lot of people who did their reconnaissance on Saturday are making final evaluations for (and completing) major purchases. I'd guess that more spinning wheels depart the site on Sunday than on Saturday, although I saw a lot of demos and test runs going on yesterday.

But on Sunday it's easier to choose where to go, rather than being pushed by the crowds or—my choice—retreating to the location of least population density.

Today I went to a few more short classes on specific aspects of wool, but the highlight of the day was the annual Parade of Breeds. As one of the handouts for one of the classes pointed out, "there are more breeds, types, and varieties of sheep than of any other domesticated livestock." This year's parade included significantly more breeds than the last time I was here in 2000—I'd guess somewhere between thirty and forty.

It's really hard to take photos at the parade. Lots of people want to see the animals, and there are lots of critters and people to coordinate to pull off this event. I got a few photos, mostly of the breeds in the earlier part of the alphabet. I caught the best photos while several of the sheep were waiting their turn in the ring. My camera has a delay between when I click the button and when the photo is snapped, so lots of other images that should have been sheep-heading-into-ring ended up as sheep-butt-moving-away-from-me.

Here, however, are a few of the photos that worked (more or less). If I've misidentified any breed and someone else knows what it is instead, please drop me a line. When the sheep have been shorn—which is true of almost all the animals at a show in early May—I, as a spinner, have lost access to one of my primary clues to identity: the fleece. (Yes, of course they announced the breeds as they went into the ring, but I was hunkered down in a corner, poking my camera in between people, mostly avoiding getting stepped on by sheep, and did not quite manage to write down legible reminder notes as I grabbed shots.)

This is a Black Welsh Mountain, ready to be first into the ring. It took me a number of years before I realized that the sheep paraded in alphabetical order.

I caught this Border Cheviot while it was waiting its turn:

Here's a California Red:

And a Clun Forest:

And the Columbias are always so massive . . . they look like ponies, especially next to the Black Welsh Mountains, the Icelandics, the Shetlands, the smaller Jacobs. . . . This guy'll gain another several inches in height when his wool grows in:

And a Cotswold, one of my favorite faces, with the start of a lovely fleece to go with it:

I wish I hadn't missed the white Icelandic ewe and her two spring-loaded tiny black lambs. Well, I got a photo, but it wasn't very good. They were so wonderful I'll put it here anyway. The mom still has some fleece on her.

And I caught the Merino rep within the ring:

Again, the wool's just starting to grow in for this year.

The thing about these sheep is that as varied as their appearance and personalities are, their fleeces are equally diverse. That continues to fascinate me. That and the fact that a number of these breeds embody a cultural treasure that is, in many ways, at risk of being lost. So I especially love seeing individuals from the rare breeds come into the ring.

Later in the day, I went over to the breed showcase barn and visited the Hog Island sheep that came to the festival from George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Garden. They'd been in the parade, but about at the point that I lost my photo vantage point entirely.

Even among the rare breeds, Hog Island sheep are especially uncommon; there may be two hundred of them. Here are two, one of whom has been newly shorn and one of whom still has her coat:

The dark one enjoyed having her head scratched, right between the horns, please.

At the end of the day, she and her buddy headed home in a truck with this license plate:

Anybody who feels inclined toward a good cause: if you can't conserve some of these animals by keeping them yourself, find a place like Mount Vernon that's doing the crucial work of being sure that these living resources stick around and earmark a contribution for the livestock program.

Maryland Sheep and Wool, Saturday

Yesterday was the first day of the full Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.

Here's what the parking lot looked like at 8:15 in the morning, about forty-five minutes before the festival officially began:

As I thought, the rabbit building's overflow area was put to good use for the Ravelry gathering:

It was packed inside. I didn't even get in there.

Here's the aisle where I took the photo of the truck parked in the main building on Friday:

And here's the area outside that building:

Those are food lines, early in the day, at a twenty- to thirty-minute wait length. Later they got longer. In the way background is the area with the sheepdog demos.

At mid-afternoon, there's a sheep-and-wool tradition:

It's made with real lemons, right there. There's also a booth that has real, old-fashioned carbonated beverages, like birch beer and cream sodas. (You can also get the standard stuff.)

Toward the end of the day, I was able to catch up with one of Bryan Bowers' performances. He's one of my favorite musicians, and was cultivating a few new fans at the festival:

I'd hoped to be able to ask him if he'd consider playing "The View from Home," which is one of my all-time favorite songs, but it was a short concert and I was feeling lazy enough just to listen to whatever he felt like playing.

There's really good music at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. Maggie Sansone is a regular. She often plays at the end of the main building, so while I'd spin in the Interweave Press booth she'd be providing music to the whole place. It was lovely. Over the years I've brought home a number of CDs, as well as fiber and tools.

And here's the end of the day:

I've got two ounces of fleece (two different kinds) and three skeins of a yarn that I'd been looking for since last October. The two ounces doesn't seem like much, but it's special stuff that you can't get just anywhere and it's got immediate uses in my life.

I didn't get to the big Ravelry party at the Sheraton in Columbia, although I'd intended to. I went to supper with a small group of friends. By the time we actually ate and then I drove one of them back to the farm where she's staying, the Ravelry party was almost over (it was nearly 11), and I went back to the hotel to gather my forces for the next day.

My way of navigating the festival is to avoid crowds, so there's a lot I didn't see yesterday. Also, I was showing a friend around, which affected where I went and what I saw.

Sunday is traditionally quieter. I've got several things in mind to accomplish today, and I'll have time for some browsing.

Warming up for Maryland

Travel: a shift in environments

Yesterday as we prepared to leave Colorado for Maryland, we drove toward the airport in quite a May Day snowstorm. This is what it looked like through the window of the van that took us from off-airport parking to the terminal:

Our flight was delayed by an on-ground detour to the de-icing area.

The rest of the journey went well, and by supper time we were on the ground in Baltimore.

This morning's class on some technicalities of wool

This morning, after (free, hot) breakfast in the hotel lounge area, I headed over to the fairgrounds for a morning class called Wool Science 201, taught by Robert Padula, who's a Wool Quality Improvement Consultant. He works with the American Sheep Industry Association, which is the commercially oriented advocate of sheep-raising in the United States. (He personally raises Targhees, with an emphasis on . . . wool quality.)

The class was taught primarily from the perspective of the wool industry's, rather than handspinners', needs, a difference that was acknowledged and interesting to observe. Handspinners have a lot to learn from industry, although the information we need is usually buried in masses of data. One of the things I like to do is find the spinner-useful bits and pull them out and play with them, or to act as a kind of translator between the sides. This morning was extremely valuable from that perspective. It's going to take some time to digest all that I got introduced to or, in several cases, finally found answers to . . . data that resolved several questions I've been researching with only moderate success got laid out right in front of me.

My trip's already been 100 percent wortwhile, and I haven't been here twenty-four hours yet.

(While looking for links for Bob Padula, I found a nifty article in the New York Times about Morehouse Farm, where they understand both sides of the equation—industry's and spinners'—and have found their own unique way to balance in between.)

The festival prepares

Backing up a bit to before the class: I arrived a little early at the fairgrounds and took photos of the "before-festival" atmosphere.

This morning, there was lots of parking available:

I parked about fifty feet past the truck and the bus, maybe five cars from the main gate. I briefly pondered what it would be like if I could reserve my parking space for tomorrow as well (maybe leave the car here and hitchhike back to the hotel, and get here the same way in the morning?). Exhibitors' parking is great. But the exhibitors need it a lot more than the visitors do, no matter what we visitors may think from time to time.

Here's the rabbit building, just inside the main gate, where the two fairgrounds-based Ravelry gatherings will take place (11:30 to 1 on Saturday, 1 to 2:30 on Sunday) . . . apparently a thousand people are in the Ravelry MD S&W group. I'm sure that a bunch of folks who participate in Ravelry will be at the festival but have not joined that group, and there are also the Ravelry-interested. The space could end up pretty crowded, but it looks like it's semi-expandable and won't be overly claustrophobic.

Here's the lawn outside building V (now Main), where the Save the Sheep project idea began in 1998:

Here's what the inside of building V (Main) looked like this morning at about 8:45:

The Interweave space that I spent so much time in between 1993 and 1999 is halfway down the lefthand outside wall. Amy Clarke Moore, who's now the editor of Spin-Off, will be spending her weekend there again this year. It's really a nice home base.

Those who have been at the festival know that this space will be crammed by the same time tomorrow . . . with exhibitors . . . and about 15 minutes later it will also be crammed with visitors.

Right now, it's open enough to fit big trucks in the aisles. As I was walking around today, I was reminded of how well the companies that rent cars, trucks, and trailers must like the festival, if they know enough about to realize why their business is looking so good this week:

That's looking down just one of the two aisles of the main building.

And something new since the last time I was here:

There was another ATM unit by the main gate, with two terminals, in a mobile trailer. There may be more scattered around. I'll bet they see even more use than the porta-potties.

Some of the vendors stay in local motels, but others vendors and shepherds camp out in the vendor-specific parking area. As I walked by this morning, a parent was getting three kids breakfast. So this, like the other parking areas within the gated area adjacent to the buildings, is also a type of home base for the exhibitors:

There were two people putting up a banner that said "Welcome to the 35th anniversary Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival":

I love that there are both black and white sheep on the banner. The presence of the black sheep reflects the handspinners' presence and influence in the mix, although this festival has an equally strong industry focus. Black sheep aren't of much use to industrial producers of wool. Black fibers (or fibers of any color other than white), prized by handspinners, are classified as contaminants when wool is bulk-processed. If industry wants black or another color, it can dye white wool to get it; colored fibers, on the other hand, mar whites and pastels and brights, also dyed.

Here's another pre-festival sight—no lines for the bathrooms:

And here's a ram getting its pre-show grooming. The judging he'll face will be on factors other than the fleece, which is trimmed to make the animal as a whole look great, by industry standards, and he does indeed look so fine:

Lots of the exhibitors know each other, both from connections outside the festival and from coming here year after year. I miss the pre-opening (and post-festival) camaraderie as much as anything.

And I miss the sheep, so I went to visit a few:

And that lovely face (a colored Lincoln) represents the spinners' side of the sheep world at Maryland.

Whenever I'd get a break from the booth, I'd go recharge my batteries by taking a stroll through the barns. I saw about twenty different breeds this morning, and only a quarter to a third of the stalls were occupied.

By noon, the booth set-up had proceeded significantly, a few of the food vendors had opened up to serve the exhibitors and workshop attendees, and the working folk had begun to walk around the grounds a bit:

It's all getting ready. . . .

Coals to Newcastle, or a spinning kit for Maryland

So I'm about to leave for the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, where there will be an abundance of tools and fiber, and I need to pack . . . some tools and fiber. I'll be leaving home a good 50 hours before the festival opens, and my budget also is both slim and dedicated to specific items that I need to locate, not including materials to work with during this weekend.

Here's my minimal travel spinning kit:

It's not much of a photo because the sun's not up yet.

The kit includes:

• a plastic tool container from the hardware store, just right to fit
• a specific Magpie spindle
• a comb from the pet supplies store, which is the smallest fiber prep tool I've got right now
• a sample-sized niddy-noddy that also comes apart into pieces and can fit in the tube
• a packet of Polwarth wool
• a packet of Borderdale wool

I have no projects in mind for the wools; they're just a couple of New Zealand-origin fibers I'd like to play with en route. I'd rather card the Polwarth than use the grooming comb on it, but even a small pair of carders exceeds what I want to carry.

• Polwarth: Merino X Lincoln origins, ending up 3 parts Merino to 1 part Lincoln
  
• Borderdale: Border Leicester X Corriedale origins
  

There's a bandanna that gets wrapped around the spindle in the tube. I can also fold prepared-but-unspun fiber into it to keep the locks in order until they get spun. The comb doesn't fit into the tube or my kit would be even more compact. It's that handle. And I don't have time to find something smaller.

In addition, for times when spinning doesn't fit the mood, I have two small packets of knitting:

• the final swatches for the upcoming Nomad Press book
• the sleeves for my Aran-style cardigan, plus paper to start designing the body

That should hold me through the flights and other waiting times.

Going "home" to Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival

Warning: Long post, with a walk through past calendars, and a bit of spinning/knitting content toward the end.

Going back to Maryland

It's hard to believe that a week from today I'm scheduled to be at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival for the first time since 2000. On Thursday morning, I'll pick up Sharon, another former Interweave Press employee with whom I've almost always attended the festival, and we'll head for the airport.

In past years, Sharon and I have gone to Maryland because Interweave sent us. We had a great time, in addition to working really hard. This year, neither of us is an Official Presence any longer (me since 2000, Sharon since 2007). We're just going to Maryland because . . . we had a great time, and we miss the folks we regularly saw there. Not everyone we'd like to see is attending, but enough people we know will be there to make it worth the travel and the time. Because most of the people we know work the festival, as we did, we'll probably mostly just get to say hello, but still. And we never know who we'll meet that we don't know yet and will be keeping up with for years to come. Plus we both could use a short break from our respective "normal" lives.

It says a lot that . . . given all the possibilities of where we could go and what we could do, either separately or as a tag-team like we used to be . . . we've chosen to head for a fairgrounds in West Friendship, Maryland, on the first weekend in May.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've wondered how many times I've been to the Maryland festival before (nine) and what year I first went (1992). In going through my calendars, I discovered a few things. One of them is how tightly we had to work the publication schedule out a year in advance just so we could handle the logistics of being out of town right then. Another is . . . well, I'll wait for 1998 to talk about that realization, which ties to 2008 in ways I hadn't put together.

Going to the festival for the first time

Not in the calendars but in memory: Linda Berry Walker first suggested that Spin-Off magazine should be represented at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival and urged us to get there. (This was before the World Wide Web, which wasn't created until 1989, and Linda's farm was as fine as it is now, but smaller!)

This goes back a way. I think I first met Linda at a weekend conference at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. The topic was "Wool as a Second Crop." I've never owned sheep, but I'm the sort of spinner who has always been interested in them (at least in wool-growing sheep . . . not all sheep do grow wool) so whenever possible I've attended workshops about the economics of wool, wool-grading, and the like. I already knew who Linda was, in part because she had written some articles for the early issues of Spin-Off, which I'd subscribed to since it started up in 1977 when I still lived in Washington state, but I don't think we'd met face-to-face.

That workshop took place some time between 1983 and 1986. I think my daughter had been born by then and that we had probably moved into town (early 1982), but we definitely had not yet moved from Massachusetts to Colorado. That move happened in 1986, when I started at Interweave as book editor. A year later I was asked to take on the editing of Spin-Off as well, which I did, starting with the Spring 1988 issue (my tenure ended with the Spring 2000 issue).

From Spring 1988 until mid-1991, Linda wrote terrific columns on specific sheep breeds for Spin-Off: Border Cheviot, Border Leicester, Coopworth, Corriedale, Jacob, Karakul, Lincoln, Merino, Rambouillet, Romney, Scottish Blackface. Plus an article called "To Save a Sheep, Spin Its Fleece."

In part because of the complications of publication schedules and budgets, Linda had to drop loud hints about Maryland for several years before we got the go-ahead to check out the festival.

• 1992 Went to Maryland to see what all the fuss was about. Came back registered for a booth for the next year.
  Friday, 5/1: 8:10a pick up Sharon. United 468 DEN-IAD, 10:41a-4:02p.
  Monday, 5/4: United 127 IAD-DEN, 9:15a-11:01a.
  Friday, 5/8: Spin-Off to press.

So in 1993, we were there officially for the first time. I spent my weekends demonstrating spinning in the booth. We didn't sell things. We just spun and chatted up spinning, and sent people off to the other booths to buy Interweave's books and magazines. I met a bunch of folks whom I only knew from online connections, through CompuServe's fiber forum.

Because demonstrations need to attract people's attention, for the first several years I did my weekend's work with a Navajo spindle. Most people hadn't seen one in action, and I enjoy spinning with this type of tool. It's both eye-catching and efficient. Here's a YouTube demo of the technique.

As the years went on, I made a tradition of buying something fun at the festival to spin up before I got home. Because of the circumstances, it was usually prepared fiber, dyed in a color that would catch people's attention as they walked by. By the end of the weekend, after between fourteen and sixteen hours of spinning, the bones of my right hand were usually pretty sore but I'd had a fine time and produced several random skeins of yarn.

• 1993 First year with a booth. Well, half-booth. Building V, booth 18B. It was a narrower-than-standard space in front of the utility closet, which fairgrounds staff needs to get into from time to time. That was fine for us, because we could just step aside from our chatting and demonstration and let them through. Building V is now called Main.
  Friday, 4/30: Summer Spin-Off to press
  Friday, 4/30 (same day): 8:15a pick up Sharon. United 348 DEN-IAD, 10:36a-4:04p.
  Monday, 5/3: United 126 IAD-DEN, 9:05a-10:50a.
  Tuesday, 5/11: Spin-Off blueline (final review of printer's proof before magazine goes on press).

Maryland becomes a regular event

For the first several years, we flew into Dulles. Later we sometimes went into Baltimore; everything depended on which was least expensive. We'd generally arrive on Friday, set up that evening (the other booths where people actually sell things spend all day Friday setting up), and then do the demo work all day Saturday and Sunday.

Sometimes it was hot, and a few times it rained prodigiously. Mostly the weather was great and the fresh lemonade tasted fantastic. We generally didn't have time to leave the booth to stand in line for food at regular lunch time, so we'd stock up with healthy snacks at a grocery store, stash them under the table in the booth, and nibble our way through the days.

• 1994
  Friday, 4/29: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/6: United FNL-DEN-IAD.
  Monday, 5/9: United return.
  Flew to Maryland out of the local small airport, which had a connector flight to Denver for a few years; there was no extra cost on our tickets, but usually much extra turbulence on the short flights along the foothills; sometimes the connector flights were canceled.
  Tuesday, 5/10: Spin-Off blueline.
  
  
• 1995 My daughter went along to Maryland one of these years; neither of us can remember exactly which year, but it was between 1994 and 1997.
  Friday, 4/28: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/5: Continental 1817 & 225 DEN to either IAD or BWI, via somewhere else, 10:10a-?p.
  Monday, 5/8: Continental 220 & 1804, 8:45a-3:09p.
  Tuesday, 5/9: Spin-Off blueline.

• 1996
  Friday, 4/26: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/3: American 424 DEN to IAD or BWI, 8:49a-6:30p.
  Monday, 5/6: American 1677 & 419, IAD or BWI to DEN via DFW, 7:53a-11:53a.
  Tuesday, 5/7: Spin-Off blueline.

• 1997
  Wednesday, 4/30: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/2: 7:15a pick up Sharon. United 296 DEN-IAD, 10:40a-3:47p.
  We almost never did anything but go to the festival, work, and come home (note pattern of to-press and blueline dates tucked around the festival; this wasn't easy, because every magazine's schedule affects every other magazine's schedule, and we were dodging around multiple publications to make this happen). Sometimes there was a contradance at Glen Echo Park on Sunday evening, after we got the booth packed up, and we'd stop and check it out. In 1997, however, Sharon and I stayed an extra day and took public transportation into D.C. and went to The Textile Museum to see two exhibits, one of very fine knitting and one about netted structures. They were fantastic.
  Tuesday, 5/6: United 1821 IAD-DEN, 8:55a-10:35a.
  Wednesday, 5/7: Spin-Off blueline.

A pivotal year: 1998

Trudy and Jan Van Stralen of Louet offered to stop on their way from Canada and bring my daughter to Maryland for the weekend from the school she attended for two years in New York. The scheduling didn't work out, but it would have been great fun all around!

The big deal that did happen, though: 1998 was the year that Don Bixby, the director of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, and I sat on the grass outside building V and had a conversation that led to the Save the Sheep Project.

Judy also came along to Maryland. (She was getting interested in spinning. The spacious room you see in the photos on that last link was made available to us for the final judging of the Save the Sheep entries because of Judy's efforts. But none of us could foresee that, of course.)

• 1998
  Wednesday, 4/29: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Friday, 5/1: 6a pick up Judy. United 276 DEN-IAD or BWI, 8:32a-1:33p. We didn't have to get to the airport two hours ahead in those days, or I would have had to pick up Judy before 5a.
  Monday, 5/4: United 1227 IAD or BWI-DEN, noon-1:38p.
  Tuesday, 5/5: Spin-Off blueline.

Here's what a few of my DayTimer notes look like from my meeting with Don:

I'd been interested in sheep, especially rare-breed sheep, for years. I'd first become aware of the rare-breeds issue when I edited Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot for the Handweavers Guild of America and published an article on the Navajo Sheep Project.

My fascination had continued to grow, and a few years before my conversation with Don at Maryland, I'd had a jolt when I looked over the list of endangered sheep breeds and realized how many of the names on the list corresponded to classic handspinning fibers that I'd hate to do without. Lincoln is a rare breed? Yikes! Leicester Longwool, that glorious, shiny, exquisite stuff? Jacob? Shetland, with its incomparable colors and textures??? Cotswolds? Oh, my.

And I hadn't even encountered yet some of the almost magical island breeds, remarkable for their tenacity as well as their wool quality.

Over the next two years, in addition to my regular work, the Save the Sheep project came into being. I'd initially thought that I'd simply gather existing research to provide the background for the project. As it turned out, nobody'd looked at sheep from this perspective before. Oops. I spent my evenings and weekends putting together the resources we needed to form the project's foundation.

One last official trip to Maryland, and one on my own

In 1999, the budget was a little tight and there was some talk about canceling the trip to Maryland. Those of us who had been attending said we would cut expenses as far as we could, but we thought it was important to be there. We stayed at a different motel (an inexpensive one that usually is booked up a year in advance . . . we lucked out); I slept on a rollaway. My daughter graduated from high school the next month.

• 1999
  Wednesday, 4/28: Summer Spin-Off to press.
  Thursday, 4/29: United 1618 DEN-IAD or BWI, 12:45p-5:38p.
  Monday, 5/3: United 1641 IAD or BWI-DEN, 3:10p-4:52p.
  Tuesday, 5/4: Spin-Off blueline scheduled; actually arrived Wednesday, 5/5.

My last day as an Interweave employee was Wednesday, 5/31/2000, a few weeks after that year's Maryland festival. Amy Clarke (now Moore) had stepped up from assistant editor to editor and the Summer 2000 issue of Spin-Off was her first.

I spent my last weeks on staff finishing off the book that went along with the Save the Sheep project, which had come into being because of that conversation Don Bixby and I had sitting on the grass outside building V at the festival in 1998. So in 2000, I went to Maryland as "just me," not as a representative of Interweave. I shared a motel room with friends I'd met through the years at Maryland.

• 2000
  Friday, 5/5: United 250 DEN-IAD or BWI, 12:39p-7:53p.
  Monday, 5/8: United 1507 IAD or BWI-DEN, 5:15p-6:53p.
  Thursday, 5/11: daughter home from college (freshman year).
  Friday, 5/12: Handspun Treasures from Rare Wools to press.

• 2001 Maryland festival dates marked in calendar but X'd out; unable to attend.
• 2002 Maryland festival dates marked in calendar but lined through; unable to attend.
• 2003 Maryland festival dates not marked in calendar.

Maryland: reminders

On one of the Maryland weekends, I bought a cherry lap spindle from Noel Thurner at Norsk Fjord Fibers. And another year the weekend-spinning fiber I bought was a mix of blues, greens, and purples with some flash in it.

I spun all of the yarn for this vest (except the trim around the edges) while talking to people at the festival. I started the spinning after I got to the festival and I finished it before I got on the plane back to Denver. That's the spindle that I bought from Noel, which I used to make this yarn (and a lot of other yarn at other times):

. . . along with the book that wouldn't have happened without Maryland. The yarn is two-ply, sportweight (6 stitches to the inch in stockinette).

This vest reminds me: I've been talking about the cabled sweater I'm knitting, and have mentioned the way that I like the ribbings to flow into the patterns above them. Here, from the back of the vest, is an example of that idea in action:

The vest appeared in an early issue of Interweave Knits as part of a staff-knitted collection of vests, but when the pattern appeared it called for a regular 2/2 ribbing. For written-out patterns, that's the easiest solution because describing in line-by-line instructions what I actually did was a bit complicated. For charted patterns, you can easily put in (and knit) what's really there!

From 1998 to 2008

The rare breeds are still endangered, although some are in much better shape than they used to be (and some are just as vulnerable as they were).

And that's the connection to 2008. I'm still here, doing many of the same things to raise spinners' and knitters' awareness of where our materials come from (and that the best of them will disappear if we don't take at least some action), although under very different circumstances. I hadn't realized how much the Save the Sheep Project marked the close of my time with Interweave, nor the symmetry between that time and some of the major endeavors I've got underway for the next couple of years. I still want very much to do everything I can to keep the materials and the skills to use them alive and available, as part of our everyday lives as well as our human heritage. They can enhance our contemporary lives wonderfully, both in the doing and when we use the items that we make.

If we humans lose the skills of making things from scratch (like growing food, building canoes, spinning yarn for fabrics)—and we will lose the skills if the materials are not available to us—we will have lost something that is thousands of years old and of inestimable value, not just historically but spiritually. And that doesn't even get into the individual characters of the creatures and what they can teach us. . . .

A few days ago I got a lovely packet of Soay ram's wool that I'm looking forward to spinning, and—thanks to Donna Druchunas—twice last week I met with June Hall, who's been working on sheep conservation in the British Isles and Lithuania. June has written and published a delightful little book about Herdwick sheep called Henrietta Herdwick that is illustrated with charming felted images, and she keeps Soays herself (although my Soay packet came from a U.S. flock).

I'm unaccustomed to meeting other people who are interested in rare-breed sheep. It was quite astonishing to meet June, and I hope I can get to Woolfest some time!

Spring in Maryland and spring in Colorado

Usually when we have gone to the Maryland festival, we've been able to catch what is for us an early spring, with the dogwoods blooming. Here in Colorado, the crabapple blossoms began to open yesterday, and this morning we had both bright blooms and a light snowstorm:

• 2008
  Thursday, 5/1: 8:15a pick up Sharon. . . .

How I managed NOT to get myself into knitting trouble

Well, this is a minor miracle. I managed not to over-modify the Must Have Cardigan in making my adjustments. Once I dig into modifying a pattern I often almost completely revamp it: gauge, size, patterning, neckline, sleeves, closure. . . .

Because I haven't done that this time, the design looks like it will end up doing exactly what I want it to: being a good carry-around, ongoing project, just challenging enough to be interesting but not requiring too much attention. I wanted something that feels like doing musical scales and chord progressions for the pleasure of hearing the sounds, not practicing a symphony for a concert. 

My primary motivation was to put in a different primary cable because I definitely need to lengthen the body (I always have to lengthen the body) and I wanted a pattern that would intersect nicely with the decreases of the V neckline, no matter where in the repeat sequence that intersection occurred.

(The design is also a bit of a warm-up and test case for the book I'm editing, when the computers work as they should, which is Donna Druchunas' Ethnic Knitting Exploration, which looks in part at cabled Irish-inspired sweaters and at cardigan structures . . . and is due out in October 2008, which will happen if the computers continue to cooperate. And I'm in trouble if they don't, so they'd better. And that was more than enough "whiches" for one sentence back there.)

One of the most unusual aspects of my modification process this time is that I'm still at the original gauge, so I can use the pattern's numbers (except for lengths). That almost never happens.

I found a few cables that I liked by browsing around in Janet Szabo's Cables, Volume 1 and put them together in a sequence I thought I might enjoy. The patterns are repeats of 4, 6, and 8 rows, so the overall repeat is 24 rows but within that sequence the variations are simple. The primary cable, which I found in Janet's book, also appears as "Shadow Plaited Stitch" in Mary Thomas's Book of Knitting Patterns (1943), and long ago I'd marked it in that book to try some day. Having it show up here was like finally scheduling time to have tea with someone I wanted to get to know better.

For my swatch, I used some of the yarn left over from the Norsk Strikkedesign sweater (which, by the way, I wear frequently and happily). The swatch is the green in the photo below. If you look at the Norsk Strikkedesign sweater, it's obvious why there's leftover green. I've made some of Jared Flood's Koolhaas hats with some of the extra yarn from that sweater, but I didn't get around to using the two greens.

The green swatch, next to the blue starts of the real sleeves, provides a really good demo of the advantage of working cables (or other textured stitches) in light-colored yarns. They show up a lot better. The blue I'm using for the sweater itself is not so dark it completely wipes out the cables, but they're definitely more subtle than they would be in a lighter shade.

However, there's a plus in that walking-the-dark-side choice of mine for this garment. It comes in design-thought-process Note 7, below.

• Note 1. I had planned to have the first cable-crossings on the second row, which tucks them in nicely next to the ribbing but puts them past the increases that need to occur between ribbing and main pattern area (because of cable draw-in, there are more increases than for an un-cabled sweater).
• Note 2. I like my ribbings to flow into my cable patterns, knits to knits and purls to purls, as much as possible.
• Note 3. In order to have the cable-crossings occur on the right-side rows, a row-2 cable crossing means that row 1 is a set-up row worked from the back side.
• Note 4. For completely obscure reasons pertaining to how my brain works, I had the darnedest time getting my set-up row to work correctly.

The observation in Note 4 is one of the reasons I am grateful for swatches. They can make life lots simpler by bringing potential problems to my attention.

It's not complicated to do a set-up row and I've done it more times than I would want to try to remember, but it wasn't working. Nor were the following rows falling into a rhythm the first time I knitted the swatch. Or the second time. I was concerned that I'd need to revamp the patterning, because I didn't want to feel like I was fighting the pattern the whole way. That would have defeated the purpose of this project.

So I decided to try working my first set of cable crossings on the FIRST row, instead of the second. No set-up row.

I ripped the swatch and started again. For whatever reason . . . nothing at all changed except the set-up, so the fact that this shift succeeded is almost totally illogical, but I don't argue with results . . . this went fine and produced the green swatch you see.

• Note 5. BUT, looking ahead, I could see some challenges in the sequence moving from the ribbing to the transitional increases (which I'd normally work on the set-up row) to the main pattern area. If I worked the increases on the last row of ribbing, I'd have to cross the cables directly above the increases. That would be a little awkward to maneuver, especially since one of the cables is a 2-over-3 cross that's tighter and more fiddly than the predominant 2-over-2s.
• Note 6. I thought: What if I worked the increases in the second and final rows of ribbing? I've never seen this done (it probably has been) but I didn't see why it wouldn't work. I tried it, using lifted increases between the two stitches in a pair of knit ribs and keeping them within that rib (which became a k3 instead of a k2) for the couple of rows until the ribbing was done. I worked most of the increases (10) on the right-side, second-to-last row and some (just 3) on the reverse-side last row (which, worked on that side's knit ribs, produced p3 ribs when seen from the front). That way the stitch count for the main pattern area was well established before I hit the first pattern row with its cable crossings. (By the way, the reason for doing initial cable crossings on the first or second row is well explained in Janet's book.)
• Note 7. Here's the plus of working in a darker-than-average yarn: I blew off my own preference for knit-to-knit and purl-to-purl flow from ribbing to main patterns, in part because in the medium-dark yarn that transition wouldn't be very obvious anyway.

My new primary cable is the 2-over-2 alternating pattern that shows up pretty well in the center of the green swatch. I was afraid that it might be a bit undefined at its edges, so on either side of the swatch I worked a narrow section of that pattern with a regular 2-over-2 rope cable running up its sides. As it turns out, I like the plain version so well that I thought about taking out the rope cables, but ended up going with the sequence exactly as it is on my swatch, using both variations.

• Note 8. I made the decision to use the underarm and side-edge texture pattern specified on the original pattern to make increasing in pattern relatively easy. I'm keeping the outside stitch at each sleeve edge in stockinette, to simplify later seaming (I'm knitting the sleeves flat, and haven't decided yet about the body).
• Note 9. And I decided to work the sleeve-edge increases every 6 rows, to correspond with the 2-over-3 cable crossings, instead of every 8 rows, as specified in the pattern, just to make it easier to remember when to do them: Time for the fanciest cable? Increase at the edges, too! The sleeves get a little wider a little faster and reach their full width just below the elbow. That reflects one of my preferences for sweaters anyway: I move around a lot, and more ease at the elbow is beneficial.

Here's the proof that my decisions were the right ones:

The sleeves are coming right along, and I'm enjoying knitting them. I've knitted during a lecture, while watching a bit of television with my daughter, and elsewhere. And I am knitting a row or two when I need a break from computer work, or just to think a bit about how to solve a problem. The project is doing exactly what it was meant to do.

• Note 10. Interestingly, there's a nice symmetry in the way the cables flow out of the ribbing. In spite of the fact that I let go of that part of my intention in its strictest form.

I do keep my chart handy, and it's got sticky notes on it, but I can tell what happens in the next right-side row with a quick glance and then just do it. Even though there's a bit of pattern fiddling on the return (reverse-side) rows, what needs to happen on them is always obvious from looking at the work, rather than the chart. Before I'm done with the sleeves, I'll have the whole sequence memorized so I can work without the chart, although I'm not there yet (mostly because I'm not paying enough attention).

Since I took the second photo, the sleeves have gotten noticeably longer.

In fact, the only problem with this project is that I'm enjoying it so much, and making such good progress, that I'll need another project to fill the same knitting role a bit sooner than I might ideally want.

Then again, I think I'll like wearing this sweater, so that's a reason to be okay with finishing it sooner than I intend.

Finished: The chenille sweater

The chenille sweater! Finished!

A lot of constraints guided the design and construction of this sweater, which is for my acupuncturist. She has trouble with most protein fibers (wool, alpaca, and so on); she's either allergic to them or more sensitive than most people to the prickle-factor, even (as it turned out after many swatches) on the finer varieties of the more luxury fibers. Yet because of her preference for natural materials, I didn't want to head for the synthetics.

We finally decided on this old-gold color of Crystal Palace Cotton Chenille—not a color I would ever knit for myself (except as an accent ), and therefore a new experience for me.

She knew she wanted a cardigan; she's quite small and has trouble finding sweaters that fit. She doesn't like ribbing, especially at the waist. She wanted a V neckline.

She wanted quite a simple shape, so I started with a modified drop-shoulder (there are some stitches bound off at the underarm, so the top of the sleeve is closer to the actual shoulder . . . it doesn't "drop" as far onto the upper arm area, which was my decision because she is small and might have looked "swamped" in a regular drop-shoulder design). She also thought stockinette was dandy, so I needed to think of other ways to make this an interesting project for me to work up.

Playing with Korsnas sweater construction gave me an idea for finishing the edges without ribbing. I worked the lower edge of the body (A) back-and-forth in single crochet (Korsnas sweaters are worked in the round; the effect is slightly different) and then picked up loops along the top edge (B) and knitted up from there (C).

(These drawings are in no way to scale or proportionally correct. They're just sketches.)

When the body was complete, I worked the front bands in single crochet, putting in four buttonholes on one band; there would be five buttons, but the fifth would go close to the neck. I normally would have worked the edging all the way around the front opening and the neckline, but I wanted to take the finishing process in stages because I was making it up as I went along and there'd be less ripping if I did it incrementally. I actually ended up doing no ripping at all on the finishing, probably because I did it in stages!

Then I sewed the shoulders together and worked single crochet around the neckline, with decreases at points 1, 2, 3, and 4, and the fifth buttonhole at the top of the appropriate band. The sweater is shown as if it were worked in pieces, in order to show the whole neckline, but there weren't side seams.  The body was worked all-in-one, as it's shown in the first sketch.

Here's a drawing that shows the sequence of the bands (unshaded in this version) and the way I set the sleeves into the armholes. Each sleeve also started with a lower band worked in single crochet, with loops picked up for knitting. I worked the sleeves flat (and both at once). There's an underarm seam on each sleeve, but not on the body.

I hope she likes it!

P.S. She loves it. It looks both a bit elegant and quite a lot comfortable, and it's cozy. Not wool-cozy, but still. . . .

Around the neighborhood: bursting with color, if not yet much spring

While walking our dogs the other day, we saw this:

All of the notes say "yes," in several languages and many different ways. The front of the car looks like this:

There are also stickies on the hubcaps, door handles, and other places.

Sometimes the place where we live seems a little staid and over-engineer-influenced (there are a lot of high-tech companies here). Now and then it pleasantly surprises us. SOMEONE is saying YES! in response to a question that appears to have been (1) anticipated (it took a while to make, let alone apply, all those notes) and (2) welcome.

We chose the neighborhood we live in partly because it does not have covenants that dictate what color you can paint your house. A lot of neighborhoods in this city do have restrictions of that type, and the houses tend to be beige, sand, tan, and maybe light gray, with trim that is white, beige, or sand. It's all very tasteful. The truly risqué might use a light sage green.

When we were looking at houses, there was a house that was painted bright purple a couple of blocks from the one that we bought. While I like my own house's exterior colors a little less strong, every time I drove past that house I was reminded of a trip I took with my grandparents through the Gaspé Peninsula when I was thirteen. I still vividly remember Percé Rock, people selling handmade toy wooden boats by the side of the road (Grampa didn't stop, but I still hold one in my memory), and the brightly colored houses that were probably even more cheerful during the winter.

That house has since been painted a calmer color, but recently this appeared on the other end of our dogleg street:

Even the steel railing attached to the concrete front step is bright blue.

The color seemed a little shocking the first time I caught sight of it, but I'm getting used to it and I am glad the people who live there are free to use the color they like. It's intense. It's also very cheerful. And when I see it, I know exactly where I am: almost home.

How I get myself into knitting trouble (again)

I'm mostly knitting swatches for publication illustrations except that I've just finished two larger (and more complex) projects that will be given to other people (more on those soon, I hope). While attempting to knit one colorwork swatch as I was watching a video, I had to rip three times. Obviously, that swatch required more attention and I needed a knitting project that I could work on during movies.

I have several projects going, but none of them feels appealing.

In February, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, of Yarn Harlot fame, finished a Must Have Cardigan from a Paton's book. She liked it. So I ordered the pattern book to take a closer look. I liked what I saw. And I've been pondering making one.

But as I pondered, I realized I'd have to lengthen the body by about 2 inches (5 cm). I always have to lengthen the body. And as I thought about that, I realized that the way the primary cable interacts with the neckline might end up disturbing me. It would change, of course, from the way it works in the design.

Instead of neatly paralleling the front opening, the cable would probably turn a corner and dead-end into it. I could, of course, adjust where I started the cable above the ribbing to compensate, but frankly I don't like to pay that much attention to row gauge and I don't like to engineer things that closely (although when I follow my thought process, I realize that statement seems totally bizarre).

So I plotted out the basic structure of the sweater . . . noting how the patterns work together and how they fit into the shapes of the pieces . . . thought about just finding another 23-stitch cable panel to substitute for pattern B, one that would not have such neat diagonals and so wouldn't care how it intersected with the V neckline.

And I also thought about how I like my cable patterns to flow out of the ribbing, even if that means my ribbing is irregular (i.e., mixes k2s and p2s and k3s, plotted to be in locations where they'll flow into the pattern above).

All this was looking like more time and planning than I had in mind, but this is how I get myself into knitting trouble. Something that was supposed to be simple ends up being a bit more complicated.

I also thought that with all the cable knitting I've done, I don't own any of it myself. I've given it all away. What I knew at this point was that I wanted a V-neck Aran cardigan for me, in worsted weight, with some combination of patterns resembling, but not identical to, those in the Paton's design.

So I went to a couple of local yarn stores in search of a nice worsted-weight wool that was light enough to show texture patterns and dark enough to be practical in my life. There's a skein of what I ended up with in that photo. It's Cascade 220 (again), color 9336. Brown Sheep's worsted was a close contender, and might have come out in first place if the shop had had enough skeins of any of the colors I wanted to use; someone else had gotten there ahead of me on the blues, purples, and greens and the shop hadn't had time to restock.

Good sign: I didn't get a bag for my purchases. I just carried my skeins (and the buttons for another garment) in my arms. As I was just outside the door of the shop, two people I didn't know at all asked if the yarn was going to be turned into something for me, because, as they said, "It's a great color for you."

Next I needed to wind the skeins into balls (I let the shop wind the first one for me, and I'll do the rest during family-and-friends visiting times). And I needed to look for a substitute cable.

I pulled out a bunch of my standard pattern references and my sticky notes.

I wanted a cable panel that felt as classic as the original, and that wasn't going to be boring (I have to watch out for this "not boring" inclination: my "carryaround, easy" knitting projects can too readily become "need to pay attention all the time" endeavors . . . there's a fine line between not-boring and much-brain-required).

Several of the books offered promising alternatives, but nothing felt right. I'm going to be working with some Elsebeth Lavold ideas for the embellishment of my daughter's (first) sweater and there's another Lavold design that I bought the pattern for last week . . . but I want to spin the yarn for that one, which means it probably won't get done for at least a year. So, in the interest of variety, I leaned away from Lavold-inspired options. I've been wanting to work a bunch of the patterns from the Japanese book, but the ones that I found most appealing kept pushing me in the direction of a totally different sweater concept. Some of the stuff in Barbara Walker's compendium (cable-specific volume rather than design collections, because I wanted the hunt to be easy) was nice but. . . .

AH! Where's my brain? I have two of Janet Szabo's books right here, and if there's anyone who knows cables, and knows how they can be both classic and contemporary, it's Janet. So I pulled her books off the shelf and brewed a cup of tea.

Fast Lane, from Celestial Seasonings, because I've been feeling kind of dragged out lately (computer problems and more). Since my acupuncturist said "no coffee" (to a serious coffee lover), I've come to appreciate the return of Fast Lane. At certain moments, it's medicinal. (It's not the caffeine she wants me to avoid but the coffee oils, also found in decafs.)

Meanwhile, I had knitted a first swatch and it's lying there drying. I knitted most of it in a darkened Cinema Savers theater while watching a bit of amusing fluff called Penelope with my daughter and some family friends. The swatch was simple enough. Stockinette.

Janet's Cables, Volume 1: The Basics is more comprehensive than the title sounds. There's lots of very cool stuff in it about how cables work. I'm looking forward to seeing what Janet comes up with in the next volume, although there's plenty here to keep me busy until she has it ready. And I'm looking through her Aran Sweater Design to see what kinds of ideas it gives me as well.

I had thought I would just replace the main cable, but now I'm thinking of that whole canvas of front cable panels . . . and I thought I'd keep the side edges of the cardigan in Irish moss stitch, but Janet's got some neat texture patterns that I'd like to try. . . .

In order to maintain this project's "carryaround, easy" status, I'll need to be really careful about which components I choose to combine. I'll be especially vigilant (I hope!) about being sure that the cable crossings occur on similar rows (or rounds, if I decide to steek, although I may not . . . this shows that I am already thinking of working the body all in one, instead of in three pieces; now, exactly what parts of the Must Have Cardigan am I using? . . . to be determined).

No, I wasn't born knowing how to do all this pattern modification. I learned it largely by trial and error over a number of years, but the thinking process that leads to my ability to make small (or large) modifications to patterns (or to launch into a design without them) comes directly from the lineage of traditional or ethnic knitting.

My strong belief in the power of the skills that come from understanding traditional and ethnic knitting is the reason that I publish the books that I do.

And where the path on this particular sweater will come out is anybody's guess right now. But I know I'll end up with a sweater that isn't just half-right. It'll be all the way right (or close enough to all the way right . . . I aim for perfection, but often take some risks that keep me from achieving it). And I'll undoubtedly learn something I didn't know before I started down this path. Which was supposed to be simple. And will undoubtedly be interesting. And may take a while.

• Aran-style.
• V-neck.
• Cardigan.
• Worsted-weight yarn.
• Similar combination of panels.
• Set-in sleeves.
• Bike.