The Independent Stitch

Seattle's new Link Light (light rail)

In 1996, a ballot measure set in motion a regional light-rail transportation system. On December 19—last Saturday—the portion connecting SeaTac airport with downtown Seattle opened up. Just in time for my sister to suggest that my daughter and I try it out.

The system is new enough that at the SeaTac end there are staff members on the platform helping riders figure the system out, including the need to buy a ticket from a kiosk on the floor below.

And the train was fairly empty at that end of the run.

As we moved toward the center of the city, and the more established rapid transportation routes, the passenger load increased.

There are bike racks, and additional spaces that accommodate bikes, in each car. This one's hanging in one of the racks.

The access door closest to the hanging bike rack has a bike decal on it. Even when the bike racks are full, there's space for bikes.

There's a great diversity of riders.

I'm from a part of the country where mass rapid transit is still a dream.

My daughter and I got distracted by the typeface used on the stations in the new part of the route. (The stations in the central part of the city have different typography, as do most of the Link Light materials.) We thought it was unusually graceful, as well as clear.

So we took a number of photos (to give ourselves a variety of characters with which to identify it).

By happenstance, the four of us who ended up eating at the card table in my sister's study for dinner last night all like type, so we got to talk about it at length! (Daughter, niece, me, and the graphic artist who is a neighbor of my sister and brother-in-law.) When you say a font is a "semi serif," that's a vague classification, although it's the one that applies in this case: it's neither a sans serif nor a traditional serif font. I learned, from my niece, about Typedia, a new-to-me resource that I look forward to exploring. My daughter, who designs websites, learned about Typekit, which I'd known about in theory but not practice.

Summary: Seattle's Link Light connection between SeaTac and downtown—easy, comfortable, and inexpensive.

Plus far more interesting type than is usual in wayfinding signage.

The signs above were all shot through the open doors while we were at the stops. This one was caught through the glass:

Later, cousins who haven't seen each other since last year spent some time getting reacquainted.

The cousin in the middle was using Photoshop to straighten and resize the snapshot of the Rainier Beach sign so we could work on identifying it. Font identification tools tend to expect that the mystery font will be a classic serif or sans serif face, or a display face. Semi-serif fonts tend to fall through the cracks of the systems. We fed it into WhatTheFont first. We couldn't get an i.d. there, and left the "submit it to humans for input" option as a backup if we couldn't put a name on it by another method. By going through the letters' idiosyncracies on Identifont, we did locate something close enough—Rotis Semi Serif Regular—which led us to the real thing: Rotis Semi Serif Bold.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate that holiday in any form, and happy upcoming new year to all.

Keeping the wools organized, part 1

A couple of days ago, someone asked me how on earth I am keeping all of the wools for The Project organized. It's a great question, and although I gave her an overview I thought others might be interested. The answer will involve two posts.

When I began The Project of researching and writing the next phase of what I want to learn (and share) about wools from different breeds of sheep, I knew that keeping the fiber samples organized and identified throughout the long process would be crucial. There's not much point in having demonstration locks and skeins of specific fibers if you don't know which is which. While I can't do anything to guarantee that fibers are correctly labeled when they reach me, I can control what happens after they're in my hands. For that, I needed a system and I have needed to follow it. Always.

With years of experience working on books and magazines behind me, I knew where and how things could go wrong. The system I set up at the very beginning of The Project took into account my vision of what resources I wanted to have while I was doing the thinking-and-spinning part of the work and also what we'd need to have when we reached the point of taking the final photographs. I know how hard it can be to remember which piece of white fluff is which. It's even worse to have to try to figure out which photograph of a piece of white fluff is which. Especially when you took the photos months earlier.

Here's how I keep track of things.

When I receive a package of fiber, I hope it comes with identification. Usually there's at least a solid clue. If not (because the sender thinks I have only ordered one type of fiber at a time from one source, like a normal person would, and that I will, of course, remember what it was that I ordered), I track down that information as quickly as I can and tape a temporary label on the box or envelope.

Then I log its arrival in three electronic databases (kept in OpenOffice, Excel, or Numbers, depending on whether I am, or was, using Linux, Windows XP, or the Mac . . . The Project has been going on for a while) :

• the master list of fibers and their sources (including name, address, phone, e-mail, and website of the supplier)
• the list of missing fibers (the arrival gets logged here by removing its name from the list)
• the processing status list (each breed is at this point marked "received and in processing"; other phases include "missing," "spun and ready to be written up," and "spun and written up")

I send updated copies of these electronic files to my co-author, Carol Ekarius, who is doing most of the fiber acquisition while I'm labeling, washing, and spinning. This Project is not a one-person job.

I also print out two sizes of address labels, ten each, that show the name of the fiber, whether it was received raw (in the grease) or processed, its color, and the source. If I have five colors of a single breed, or even same-color samples from different sheep, each gets processed as a unique item from this stage on (the electronic databases are not as fine-tuned).

One of the large labels goes on an index card that is kept in a small plastic box, which has turned out to be the easiest way to keep track of exactly what I have received and whether it has been spun or not:

Inside that box are 5x8 index cards cut in half. I was keeping this file in a small, open cardboard box. Then I found the more protective box, in a perfect size, at the Container Store on one of my trips to the city.

Sometimes I have notes on the cards, but mostly I take notes directly into my writing files on the computer. (I'm using Scrivener since I moved to Mac. Scrivener has saved my sanity, and likely the entire Project, many times over.) The simple existence of the labeled card means I have the fiber available. The big green dots mean I've spun samples. No dots? Still to be spun. The file box works much better for these two tracking tasks than any electronic database. Plus if I have any computer problems, I still have these baseline records.

Here's the organizing set-up for a new fiber arrival:

The only difference from reality here is that I do all but the clean-lock portion of this labeling and packaging with the grease wool, and the photo shows the materials with a wool that's been washed.

1. Fiber - the point of it all
   
2. Large labels - start with 10 (breed, raw or clean when received, color, source)
   
3. Small labels - start with 10 (same info)
4. Two large bags (gallon-size) with large labels, one for the working fiber and one with SAMPLES for the materials that will travel to photography
5. Two small bags (either sandwich or, for the long wools, quart size) with large labels, one for the RAW lock samples and one for the CLEAN lock samples
6. One card with a large label: this card travels with the wool whenever it is away from its bags—for example, during the washing sequences and when it's on the drying rack (these are old business cards)
7. One hang tag and one small card, with small labels: the hang tag is labeled on both sides (so it won't need to be flipped over when we are handling hundreds of samples during photography), and the small card goes in the corner of a photo to be cropped out before final printing; if I spin more than one sample, I use some of the extra small labels to make hang tags for the extra skeins

I use clear packaging tape over the labels on the bags. Otherwise the labels don't stick to the plastic long enough to do any good.

Here's a demo of how the small cards in 7 are used. Although this is just a reference photo for my working files, it's the same idea that will be used in the final photographs. The identifying info is in the frame but can easily be cropped out.

One more small label goes on a post-it note that is used to catalog what's in the main working file boxes, which are white:

A blue background means the fiber came in processed (top or roving). A green background means it arrived raw. Bright pink with a red dot means for some reason the sample is not adequate (there's also a red dot on the corresponding card in the small file box). There's extra tape holding the stickies in place because they take a beating when the boxes are moved around.

Handwritten yellow stickies help me see from across the room what breeds are in a box and handwritten pink stickies help me keep groups of breeds organized (these are longwools in the two top boxes—there are more than two longwool boxes!—and Cheviots in the bottom one). The big black checkmarks mean the fiber is clean (either was received that way or I've washed it). While it doesn't seem to make much sense to mark the blue-background items as "washed," because they're clean by definition, I found that it was easier to skim for to-be-washed items if I put a check on everything that is clean. Yes, the blue-background (clean) items have light yellow labels and the green-background (raw) items have bright yellow labels. I use all the color-coding I can get. The blue dots on the upper box indicate items that we wrote up as sample chapters, before we really got down to business.

[part 2 just before this—I managed to post these out of order]

Keeping the wools organized, part 2

[part 1 is adjacent but following; I managed to post these out of order]

All the labeling and packaging preparation happens as soon as the fiber enters the house. Then the system starts being put to work.

When I pull wools for washing, the materials related to them go into holding containers. The wools that are next in line to be washed go into a special file box. The bags for the wools that are either being washed or are drying go into another container (here I'm using a white plastic waste basket).

The fibers come in different quantities, and I have several sizes of washing containers. I have four sets of colander-plus-bowl (two larger, two smaller), gleaned from secondhand stores and a friend's kitchen, and two rectangular washing sets, which were manufactured as cat litter boxes (in each set, one tray has a perforated bottom and the other has a solid bottom).

The business-card labels follow the wools through the washing sequence. They just sit on the floor next to the working area, because I combine wools that are not too similar in each batch. I pick by color and texture, mostly, because apparent staple length frequently changes in washing. The more dramatic the differences the better, of course. The perfect set is a white longwool, a brown double-coated, a gray medium wool, and a dark Soay. It doesn't always work that way.

I wash the wools loose, rather than in mesh or net bags, because I like to be able to see what's happening, especially if I need to give extra attention to getting dirt out of the tips of the locks. Once they're clean, I do put the wools into mesh bags so I can run them through the spin-only cycle of the washing machine and get the extra water out so they'll dry faster. Fast drying matters when you're doing, say, 25 batches in three days, as I did this past week.

I carry the cards to the basement along with the dripping mesh bags (kept under control in one of the larger washing containers). If I have two wools that I may confuse, one goes into a marked mesh bag and I set its card in a special place while the washer does its thing. One of the bags below has a red string tied to it.

As soon as the water has been spun out, I spread out each wool on a drying rack next to its card. In the photo below it's easiest to see the cards on the lower two levels, but every one of these piles of fluff has a card.

I usually flip the masses of wool over at least once while they're drying. When I clear the racks, I use a strip of package-sealing tape to pick up any stray fibers, so they won't mix into the next wools that come along (this is most crucial with the coarse black fleeces, which tend to stick to the nylon of the racks and become a nuisance when the next wool to use the space is, say, a nice white Polwarth).

Clean wools go back into the organizing bags. Then I spin samples, working on the fibers in related groups, whenever possible. Sample skeins, after being washed, get hung over doorknobs upstairs to dry. Again, I work on samples that will be easy to distinguish from each other or I bring the cards upstairs and set them by the appropriate doors. Descriptions within the Scrivener files also help me keep the skeins correctly identified, if I need a backup technique, although they are mostly intended to make it easy to write captions later.

Here's a set of finished samples: raw locks, clean locks, labeled skein, and photo identifier. All of this gets tucked into the SAMPLES bag.

I squish out as much air as possible from all the bags, which can then usually be folded over:

This bag goes into a labeled file folder in a green file box, which will travel to photography (any extra fiber and labels stay in the white working boxes).

When I have too many samples to fit into a single file folder (often), the breed gets a larger box-end jacket, like the one with the black clip on it.

And that's how on earth I keep the samples from getting mixed up.

Comfort and joy: Lots of wool, and Clara Parkes' new book

I have here Clara Parkes' new The Knitter's Book of Wool: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding, Using, and Loving This Most Fabulous Fiber. I've been wanting to write about it for weeks—and actually have been making notes in this file for that long—but life got in the way. This is not a book I wanted to do a quick mention-and-run on (I've already mentioned it, because of my delay). Now I have the pleasure of sharing some of my thoughts.

Short take: Thanks, Clara, for explaining so clearly and well a lot of wool-geeky topics that knitters will find essential to their happy and effective use of this amazing fiber. And for the great collection of patterns. Readers, it's a treat. If someone doesn't give it to you in the next couple of weeks, treat yourself in January. It'll cheer you through the sloggy part of winter and get you ready for shearing season—oh, I mean festival time.

[FTC disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the author because she asked me some questions about a few tricky matters as she was writing it and I gave her the best answers I could come up with. She asked very good questions that required me to put some interesting thoughts together. It was fun. I also have a bias in favor of Clara's writing. She's smart. She's clear. She's witty. I say those things not because she sent me a book but because they're true.]

Chapter 5, Patterns

Being somewhat contrarian, I began my excursion into the book's pages with chapter 5, the patterns. I have been digging into the qualities and varieties of wools for a very long time, and I skipped to the hands-on portion before I eased into the technical material.

There are 23 patterns, and if that's all you buy the book for you'll get your money's worth. The designs have been planned to offer opportunities for experimenting with the varying qualities of wool yarns—at least, of those wool yarns that knitters are likely to find most appealing (weavers are another story, and another book). The projects are mostly at the easy to intermediate skill levels, with a handful at the experienced end.

Contributing designers include Pam Allen, Cat Bordhi, M. Diane Brown, Nancy Bush, Evelyn Clark, Jane Cochran, Sivia Harding, Jennifer Tepper Heverly, Shelia January, Ilga Leja, Clara Parkes, and Sandi Rosner. All of these people understand their craft very well. They can devise inriguing-to-knit concepts capable of showcasing, instead of upstaging, the materials. Yet even the simplest projects contain nice, knitterly details that add a lot of appeal without unnecessary complication.

The items offered as templates for discovery are hats, sweaters, and shawls, fingerless mitts and mittens, socks, a shell, a baby set, a pillow, and a felted bag. I can't pick a favorite, because most could become standby patterns, knitted repeatedly for the simplicity and pleasure of working the design in different wools. In addition to being great in the making phase, the finished objects are the sort that will end up being used a lot. For example, the Three Bears family sweaters are perfect for playing with yarns and I could see them being worn for a very long time (made with good wools, that could be decades, possibly a couple of generations).

Of course, even though the idea is to experiment, the instructions do specify which yarns were used to knit the samples. Those yarns include solid, reliable mid-range 100% wools, interesting blends (mostly of fine fibers, which is where blending usually occurs in handknitting yarns), and some breed-specific wools, including a Perendale and a Bluefaced Leicester for socks, a couple of Cormo projects, a cardigan in Columbia, an Icelandic shawl, and Shetland for the felted bag.

There is enough information in the front of the book (about which I'll say more in a moment) to help readers select substitutes.

Chapter 1—What Is Wool?

Chapter 2—From Pasture to Pullover—Turning Wool into Yarn, and

Chapter 4—Plays Well with Others (blending)

Next I looked into the chapters on the technical aspects of wool fibers—what makes wools different from other fibers, and how we can have such a wide variety of wools, and what each of them is good for—and on wool processing and blending.

Clara has a remarkable ability to find effective explanatory metaphors for complex concepts. I admire this aptitude she has. It's in full force in these chapters, and if you want to you can even come away with an understanding of what the orthocortex and paracortex have to do with crimp (everything), in addition to, of course, what the heck crimp is and why it matters (spinners will know, but this knowledge has not been frequently offered to knitters).

My pencil came out at a few points in these chapters, in response to a mental "yes, but . . . " reaction (where the core statement was correct and I wanted to explore or refine a detail), but I'm a fiber nut and these reactions pertained to excruciatingly fine points that don't matter in the lively and engaging view that this book offers. (Example: a bit about standard deviations and wool grades. Really. The basic concept presented is correct. Only people like me will care that the SD varies for each grade in the USDA—not traditional—scale of grades, and if you care that much you probably already have the detailed info and/or have been carted off to a wool-padded cell.)

I'm especially fond of Clara's "quick tips for reading a generic wool yarn" (chapter 2), in which she tells how to evaluate by looking, shaking, tugging, smelling (yup—serious wool aficionados say "of course"), and twisting (or, rather, untwisting) a sample.

You'll gather here, appropriately, that wool is a sensual material. That's a good part of the delight in getting to know the wools, one that Clara understands thoroughly and presents well. As she points out repeatedly, getting to know a yarn is key to success in using it, and there's so much variety in wools that ultimately you have to educate yourself and then depend on your own thoughts about what a yarn will be good for.

Chapter 3: Meet the Breeds

Finally, I dug into what is for me the greatest fascination of wools: how the many different breeds offer a banquet of delights for fiber artisans. Clara talks about some of the basics of how wools differ from each other—fineness, staple length, crimp, luster, what the wool is suitable for, and felting qualities—and then divides the breeds she presents, which focus on those likely to come between knitters' fingers, into five categories: finewools, mediumwools, Down and Down-type wools, longwools, and dual-coated and primitive breeds. Wools don't always separate neatly into categories, but she offers good working clusters.

She presents a couple of descriptive paragraphs on each breed, and a box that ballparks facts about the wool. There are frequently photos of clean locks and of yarn spun from the wool. One difficulty (not under Clara's control) is that the book's design calls for the same size photo for each lock, so the Leicester Longwool and Teeswater, for example, appear to be the same length as the Merino and the Southdown. The layout is pretty and the length info is available in the "facts" box, so I'm just being picky about this.

Here are the breeds Clara covers—an excellent selection for the space available (and they're alphabetically arranged within each group):

Finewools:

• California Variegated Mutant (CVM)
• Cormo
• Merino
• Polwarth
• Rambouillet
• Romeldale
• Targhee

Mediumwools:

• California Red
• Columbia
• Corriedale
• Finnish Landrace (Finn)
• Montadale
• Tunis

Down and Down-type wools:

• Cheviot
• Clun Forest
• Dorset Down
• Dorset Horn and Poll Dorset
• Oxford
• Ryeland
• Shropshire
• Southdown
• Suffolk

Longwools:

• Bluefaced Leicester
• Border Leicester
• Coopworth
• Cotswold
• Leicester Longwool
• Lincoln
• Perendale
• Romney
• Teeswater
• Wensleydale

Dual-coated and primitives:

• Icelandic
• Jacob
• Navajo-Churro
• Scottish Blackface
• Shetland

When reading any information on wools, it's important to remember the vast diversity of fibers that are grown by different types of sheep (the variety continues to blow my mind, after all these years) and that wool is a natural substance, not one manufactured to specs. The guidelines are just that: an idea of what to expect, not rigid parameters from which the actual fibers never stray. (They do stray. It's wonderful.) The only way to tell what a wool is really like is to begin to play and experiment with it . . . which brings us back to the patterns. The book is organized logically and appropriately. I'm just an out-of-order reader.

Clara's book left me both satisfied and wanting more (more breeds; more info on the individual breeds). Which is good. Because it sends me back, energized, to The Project. EXCEPT that I want to be both spinning and ordering yarn and knitting up some of these patterns. That'll have to wait a bit. I hope not too long.

Those wools on the second drying rack from the top would make good Three Bears sweaters (Kerry Hill and I think that's the Devon Closewool, I've just got the photo here at the library, not the wool itself). Top right is too soft for the durability I'd want (Polwarth). Top left would be too heavy (Dartmoor). Take a look at that bottom right: neat-o! But not sweater wool (Rough Fell). (The dark ones are Polwarth, very soft, and Balwen, this sample quite coarse. On the right on the second from bottom is Gritstone.)

Bonus

Hungry for wonderful wool yarns? Clara has a nice resource list, also worth getting the book for. Here's a taster of sources, three of which are in Clara's list and four of which aren't. On the farm yarns, note that they do sell out. They are limited-growth-and-production items. If what you thought you wanted is gone, there will be something equally appealing in its place. That's part of the fun.

In alpha order, here are a few places to get started:

Bear Farm Yarns

Farm Wool Shop

Juniper Moon Farm

Marr Haven

Solitude

Spirit Trail Fiberworks

Sweet Grass

Tip of the iceberg. Many, many more. Some growers sell (out) at festivals and don't have websites. Others sell through etsy or web-based farm coops.

Happy hunting, happy knitting. Happy reading. Let Clara show the way.

Comfort and crimp

When life gets rocky, as it has been around here lately, balance and a sense of safe harbor for me can come from friends (two-footed, four-footed, and other), fibers (especially wool), and good books.

Tussah Redfurr has been doing her best to fill the hole in our lives that remains following the death of Ariel, our fifteen-year-old Border collie-ish.

It's amazing how many household habits revolved around our newly missing member.

I've greatly appreciated the comments and notes that have come in from friends, especially while our family has also been caring for a few human members with acute ailments. Those folks are on the mend now, and we are all, I hope, taking care of ourselves in the ways that work best for us.

For me, that often means wrapping myself in wool, both physically and mentally. For the former, I have sweaters, shawls, hats, and more (a nice woolly afghan I knitted more than a year ago is still at the publisher's for photography: I look forward to having it back! and I will be showing it here on a blog tour early in 2010).

For mental comfort and joy, I'm working on The Project. I also have a couple of nearly complete book reviews and some knitting updates that I hope to get posted in the near future.

Which brings me to the woolly photo of the day, about the importance of crimp. Put simply, crimp is waviness in a fiber. If there's lots of it, the fiber coils a bit like a spring. Crimp forms as part of the growth process of the fiber. Fibers can have more, less, or no crimp.

Here are two small sample skeins for The Project. They were wound on the same sample niddy-noddy, so if crimp were not a factor they would have identical circumference measurements.

The longer skein on the left is Optim^TM Fine, which is wool that has been processed in ways that reduce the individual fibers' micron counts (make them finer and softer), increase their length, and remove their crimp. Optim^TM still has many of wool's qualities (breathability, moisture-handling, and so on) but in many other ways it has become more silk-like (elasticity disappears and draping qualities increase). While the process can be applied to other wools, it's pretty much focused on use with 19-micron Merinos, turning them into 15.5- to 16-micron Optim fibers. (The micron counts refer to average fiber diameters: under Optim processing, the fibers get skinnier and longer.)

The shorter skein on the right is Polwarth, which by breeding is about 75% Merino and 25% Lincoln (details in The Project's book). I'd compare the Optim to Merino, but Polwarth was what was on the drying rack when I realized the value of a photo comparison. Same basic idea. The Polwarth skein can be stretched to extend as far as the Optim skein does, but when the Polwarth is relaxed it bounces back, while the Optim skein stays put.

For some applications, Optim (less crimp) is a better choice. Crimp-free fibers are more elegant. For drape that doesn't cling (at least in a low-static environment), crimp-free fibers will work better.

For other purposes, Polwarth or another crimpy fiber will excel. Crimpy fibers are cosier than crimp-free ones. For a fabric where elasticity and body-hugging qualities are important, crimp wins. For example, it makes socks that will pull over the heel easily yet won't fall down (at least if they're sized correctly!). Crimp also increases warmth: all those trapped air spaces increase the fabric's insulating qualities.

The person selecting the yarn for an envisioned purpose is the one who decides what matters.

Does all this mean crimp = comfort? It might.

Over the past few days, I've been enjoying the power of crimp, spinning samples of Merino (including its Optim variant), Polwarth, Rambouillet, and Île de France. This afternoon, I plan to begin on Corriedale and Bond. Later this week, I've got Cormo, Romeldale, CVM, and Targhee. All fine wools, each with an individual array of qualities.

We have some brushings from Ariel, saved over the last year or so. A lot got tossed (Ariel grew, and shed, fiber generously), but we have a nice small box full. My daughter asked last week whether I thought we could make some wrist warmers from the collected fiber. This seems like a perfect way to remember a pup who collected the nickname Snow-nose because she adored playing in the snow.

Ariel's fur is a lot like angora. It's fine, exceptionally soft, and has almost no crimp. It's warm. A little Ari-fur will have a big effect on a yarn (as the dog herself had a big effect in our lives), but it could use an infusion of crimp to give it enough elasticity to make good wrist warmers or fingerless gloves.

While I'm working up my samples, I'll be looking for the right match. A good fiber match takes into account fineness, color, and fiber length, in addition to the behavioral qualities (like crimp) that are desired in the finished yarn. Any of the fibers I'm spinning now would be a good match in fineness. The overall effect of Ari's fur spun by itself is a light gray. The colored Merinos and Rambouillets I'm using have shorter staple lengths than Ari's fiber. I have some exquisite colored Bonds here, but they're longer. I'm guessing one of the CVMs or the colored Romeldales will pair with the fur best. As a plus, they're rare wools. That bit of wool will also give the yarn some of the bounce that Ariel herself contributed to our lives.

Comfort and crimp.