In which I am ridiculous and perhaps alarming to a guest

Yesterday evening while doing my rounds I noticed a guest wearing a very lovely version of Mary Jane Mucklestone’s Stopover Icelandic sweater.  Being the overenthusiastic knitter that I am I stopped her and without any lead-in said, “That-is-a-lovely-Mary-Jane-Muckleston-Stopover!!” 

The guest looked very confused and a little bit alarmed (I was in my engineering uniform of crew coveralls, which I’m sure only added to the non sequitur of the thing).  So I tried again, but more slowly. “Your sweater, that is a lovely Mary Jane Mucklestone Stopover”.  To which she still looked confused, but less alarmed.   As it turns out, the guest is not a knitter, but her daughter is, and so knowing that her mother was planning to head to Alaska the daughter joined in the #bangoutasweater Instagram knit-along in February.   

 I asked her to send my complements to her daughter on her knitting, apologized profusely for being alarming and weird about her sweater, and feeling quite embarrassed about the whole thing, went on about my business. 

And now I’m not even sure why I’m blogging this story except that I am still excited to have come across a sweater from the #bangoutasweater knit-along in the wild. 

One new dye lot

3 Ply Romney > Cotswold fingering weight, Northern Forest

As a bit of an experiment I am listing the above yarn from now until Friday morning (10:00 am Friady May 20 to be exact).  I'm heading back to the boat on Saturday, so all packages will be mailed out Friday afternoon.  The long story is that I spent my of my time home dyeing more yarn for the Cordova Gansey Project or on other projects, which means that after six weeks home this dye lot is the sole thing I have for direct sale through the website.   There are 28 skeins in this dye lot. Skeins are 105 yards, dyed with natural indigo and weld.   I'm eyeing it thinking of knitting Kate Davies Fantoosh  or maybe a cardigan, which is half of why I am listing it now - I can only keep so much yarn for myself, and this is a dye lot I could very much talk myself into keeping!

On Gray Whales; or, my favorite part of my boat year

This post is a bit after the fact, because as slow and expensive as our ship's internet is normally, for reasons never fully explained it is even slower and therefore more expensive in Baja California.  I feel sure that it was laughing at me on several occasions as I tried to convince it to let me see my email. 

I am home now, bracing myself to open the door of my yarn room but excited to start working with yarn again.  I made a farm visit up to Buckwheat Blossom Farm in Wiscasset last week, had a lovely time catching up with Amy, and bought lots of her gorgeous coopworth fleece.  Photos and the full story to follow.  In the mean time, gray whales: 

The Sea Lion spends most of the winter going back and forth between Costa Rica and Panama, and most of the summer in Alaska, but in between the two seasons we have a magical three weeks in Baja California.  My favorite trip of the entire year is the two week photo trip, marketed under the name “A Remarkable Journey” in our literature, but known to all of us as “the trip when we get to visit the baby gray whales”.   (Our sister ship the Sea Bird spends their entire winter in Baja, and no, I am not at all jealous of them at all… really….civilized weather, whales, never once having to be at the mercy of the Panama Canal Authority, why would I be jealous?). 

After a little over a week’s travel from Costa Rica without guests, we stopped in the fishing town of San Carlos in Magdalena Bay on the Pacific side of Baja to meet the guests and naturalists for the two week trip.  Then we moved up the coast a bit to Laguno San Ignacio, one of the shallow lagoons where gray whales go to give birth and let their calves grow a little before making the long migration up to Alaska.

Like many species of whales, gray whales were hunted nearly to extinction.  The whalers would often kill the calves first.  This makes the current behavior of the gray whales in San Ignacio even more puzzling.  In the early 1970’s mother whales began approaching the small open fishing boats (known as pangas, the panga drivers are pangueros) and encouraging their calves to interact with the them.  This is not a subtle behavior; the mother whale gently t’s the calf up towards the panga with her nose.  In the version of this story told to me by a panguero last year, the first few times this happened the panguero was rightly confused and scared by the encounter.  Gray whales had a reputation among whalers as “devil fish” because they defend their young quite vigorously.  Accounts from whaling ships in the 1880’s in San Ignacio liken them to “hospital ships” because so many crew were injured by mother gray whales (which seems only fair).  

Eventually an eco-tourism industry formed around the lagoons, and access to the lagoons when whales are present is limited.   In 1979 the Mexican government established by decree a "marine refuge zone" for whales in San Ignacio Lagoon.   In 1988 the larger area of El Vizcaino was created as a biosphere preserve, which was then recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in  1993.  This has not stopped attempts at development.  In the 1990's there was an attempt by a multi-national company to build a salt production facility in San Ignacio, which was thankfully defeated. 

But still, no one knows why the gray whales are friendly.  Gray whales are baleen whales, which means that even if we wanted to there is no way that we could offer them food treats (their idea of a food treat would be hundreds of gallons of very small shrimp, which is impractical). They are not spending time with us because they hope we’ll feed them.  If they aren’t in the mood for our company they can, and do, easily swim away from the pongas.   

And yet they come up and say hello. 

Photo credit Millie Clarke

photo credit Millie Clark,  astute observers will notice the Engineer's Armwarmer keeping my camera hand warm.  

Maggie figured out that she could hook her heels under the bench seats of the pangas to keep herself steady and increase her reach when she leaned out.  Her enthusiasm seemed to call the whales, or perhaps they were just as worried as the rest of us that she was going to go overboard. 

We have decided that gray whales feel a bit like eggplants, and that like most baby mammals baby gray whales are just a little bit softer and floppier than their adult counterparts.  None of us managed it this time, but apparently baby gray whales are a bit mouthy and like to have their baleen plates rubbed.  They are so well insulated that their skin temperature is barely warmer than the surrounding water, which makes intellectual sense but still feels weird.  For people used to touching fish, marine mammals don’t have a slime layer, though they are constantly shedding the outer layer of their skin, which is one of the reason they are covered in whale lice (which are not lice at all, but rather a type of amphipod - the relationship is considered commensal).

At one point we had three mother/calf pairs hanging out around our pangas, playing with us and each other.  The babies like to gently bump up under the pongas, which is a bit disconcerting given that they are bigger than the boats, but in that that gently bumping against each other seems to be how whales show each other affection it’s possible that this is the babies’ version of patting us back.  So perhaps I can say that I have patted a wild baby gray whale, and also been patted by a baby gray whale. 

photo credit goes to a generous guest on the trip who put this photo on the shared drive.   I am the idiot standing up in the panga to get a better view.  In my defense, I am also trying to balance the boat out a little, despite Maggie's best effort to join the whales. 

The preceding bit is me trying to put the experience into words, but word are utterly inadequate to describe the experience.  “Magical” is such an overused and ultimately meaningless descriptor, but it is really the only thing that fits.  Friendly gray whales belong to the mythical realm of selkies and sea monsters, and yet I have scritched the nose of a wild baby whale (actually I have scritched the nose of several baby whales, and also several mother whales, and I have had several baby whales hold their breath until I was very near their blow hole, at which point they exhaled forcefully, which feels too deliberate to be anything but a baby whale joke, at which point you can almost feel them go “tee-hee-hee” as they duck below the water).

Their tales look like the sea monsters on old charts. 

and sometimes they exhale rainbows

The whales will hang out in the lagoons a little longer while the calves gain strength and size for the long migration to Alaska.  It's a scary journey.  Along the way there will be fishing nets and large ships and killer whales, who drown the babies (an episode of the documentary Planet Earth includes an instance of this).  Some of them won’t make it, but most of them will.  Gray whales are one of the rare success stories; humans drove them to near extinction, and now the population size is approaching our best guess for what is was pre-whaling.   I wish them all the best on their travels. 

I don't know who to credit for this photo

While I am home working with yarn the Sea Lion will be making her own migration up to Alaska.  I will meet back up with the boat in Juneau at the end of May. 

A view of the Sea Lion from my hotel room in La Paz.  Shortly after this was taken she headed out for another week long trip. Very very early the next morning I found my own way to the airport, and four flights later I was home. 

And now to yarn. 

What I Got Up To Whilst Home Part 2: scads of gansey yarn

I have been looking forward to this project all year.  First, if you haven’t yet read Dotty’s amazing posts about her Cordova Gansey Project and all that inspired it, you should go to her blog post haste.    Cordova, Alaska,  is a fishing town, and Dotty and her family are fisherfolk.  To very briefly summarize her wonderful eleven part series of posts; while attending Shetland Wool Week she was drawn to the knitting traditions of a culture of fishermen and inspired to bring them to her modern day (though not that different) fishing village in Alaska.  To that end she has created the Cordova Gansey Project, bringing together people interested in all aspects of gansey study, design, creation, and wear.  This June (date) she will be hosting a week of classes and yarn adventure in Cordova in celebration of ganseys and fisherfolk.  The list of teachers reads like a who’s who of the knitters and dyers I am in awe of.

I love everything about this project (history! boats! complicated forms of traditional knitting!) but the bit that I am personally honored by is that a special batch of my gansey yarn will be at the Netloft for this event.  The fleece for this gansey yarn comes from Straw’s Farm, in Newcastle, Maine.  Or rather, the farm is in Newcastle, but the sheep themselves live year round on an Island in Penobscot Bay.  The island has been occupied by sheep for the last two hundred years or so; whatever breed they started as has been lost to time (hence the unwieldy yarn name, “Straw’s Farm Island Sheep”).  The moment I learned about this flock I knew that I had to use their fleece in some project, and when Dotty got in touch about her Gansey Project I knew that it was the perfect match - heritage island wool from Maine going to a gansey project in Alaska.

There are a variety of different fleece and yarn buying models for small yarn producers. Some have their own flocks and sell yarn only derived from that flock, some buy fleece from wool brokers or wool pools, some buy base yarns from a third party, and some, like me, buy fleeces directly from small farmers.  The time needed to get from fleece to yarn to finished yarn varies, as one might imagine, depending on the source of the fleece and the mill that does the spinning.  I tend to start planning my fleece buy in February, buying fleece as the sheep are sheared (the timing of which depends on the farm in question).  Then it’s a matter of getting fleece to the mill, and the mill getting the yarn back to me.  If I send fleece in June I sometimes get it back in August, or sometimes I get it back in January: a lot depends on the size of the job and complexity of the yarn.  This is a long way of saying that I have been planning my part of this project since last February, and finally during my last rotation home I got to work with the yarn.  

Last June Sarah of FiberTrek was good enough to help me pick up 172 lbs of island wool from Straw’s Farm (contributing her Subaru to the cause).

(For anyone who has ever been curious about what 172 lbs of fleece packed into the back of a station wagon looks like.)

Shortly thereafter it was off to the mill, and then all I could do was wait. And wait. And wonder. And plot.

And then in January the boxes started arriving back from the mill.

And I started turning coned yarn into skeins for scouring and dyeing.  And once I had enough yarn ready, my world become all indigo all the time.

(The pot on the left is for scouring. The shorter pot on the right is my indigo pot.)

For all of my plotting and planning, once I started dyeing I left a lot of room for serendipity.  Natural indigo is a funny thing.  Sometimes a certain batch is just a little more gray or a little more blue than the preceding batch, and sometimes really amazing colors just appear for no predictable reason.  So when I was lucky enough to get a really unique batch I let it stand rather than continuing to dye it to a dark blue.

I let the batch on the left stay as it was.  Ultimately I ended up with a few more lots this color - Child’s Glacier

And the finished yarn started piling up;

And piling up;

And eventually I had five colors.

And then it all went out to the Netloft.  Anyone interested in this yarn, or in the Cordova Gansey Project, should get in touch with Dotty.  

And then waaaaay too quickly my rotation home was over and it was back to the Sea Lion for me, but I took a bit of my gansey yarn with me to swatch.  

I swatched without any project in mind, just trying out motifs that I’ve been curious to see in person. I need to tuck ends and block it a bit harder (this yarn has spirit!) but already I am in love with the result.

I have always thought of my ganseys as armor against bad weather and the world; portable, fitted, security blankets for adventure (because in my experience Adventure! is generally cold and wet).  My ganseys are not for wearing indoors when the heat could be turned up a few degrees; I bring them out when I am working outdoors or doing slightly scary things in cold weather.  In my earlier life that meant sanding and painting small boats in a barn heated just enough so the paint would kick, or sailing a schooner in bad weather, or parking cars on the deck of a ferry in a Maine winter, or chopping firewood; now that I am a bit more domesticated these days they come out for cold mornings on deck in Alaska and winter walks with the dog.  The Straw’s Farm Island Sheep gansey yarn is perfect for this sort of gansey, dense and tough, but with a little bit of elasticity.  From an artistic standpoint, the spinning is ever so slightly irregular which combined with the slightly uneven dyeing lends a depth and texture and personality to the stitches.  There are occasional small bits of kemp, which I was at first a little surprised and annoyed by (I didn’t even notice the kemp in the fleece!) but I have come to love, because it is a reminder of island sheep turning their backs to a cold Gulf of Maine wind and just going on about their sheepy business because there’s no point in getting upset about the weather.  Which is exactly how I feel wearing a gansey.
 
And for those on the Coopworth Gansey yarn wait list, the Coopworth sheep of Buckwheat Blossom Farm have been shorn.  As soon as I get home from this rotation on the Sea Lion (middle of April) I will be visiting the farm, catching up with Amy, and selecting fleeces.  

What I Got Up To Whilst Home Part I

As usual, despite my firm resolve to do better this time, I failed to keep up with blogging while I was home, so here are a few catch up posts, and then (fingers crossed) I resolve to continue with my series about natural dyes and history (thank you for the encouragement on that front M.)

I spent my entire rotation home working with indigo to fill an order for the Netloft in Cordova, Alaska.  More on that next post, but for those wanting a preview, the yarn in question is in honor on the Netloft Fiber&Friends: Fisherfolk gathering this summer. 

On the personal knitting front, I was inspired by Kay Gardiner’s Instagram #bangoutasweater knit-along to knit another Icelandic sweater.  The knit-along focused on Mary Jane Mucklestone’s Stop Over, which I love (especially seeing so many of the completed sweaters in so many different color combinations) but I have long been looking for an excuse to knit Ysolda Teague’s Strokkur, so I seized this as my excuse and ran with it.  

In catching up with the Fridge Association blog during my last rotation on the boat I found myself agreeing with Karen’s love of dark icelandic sweaters with light yokes.    And then I took this photo of a sunset off the coast of the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica and thought about what a lovely dramatic sweater those colors would make. 

The yoke Ysolda devised for Strokkur already captured some of the feeling of light on the ocean, so all I needed to do was chose a darker yarn for the main color. 

I love everything about this sweater.  On the creative front I feel like it translated the color and texture of the sunset on water, and more importantly I love everything about how the sweater itself fits.  Ysolda is the queen of sneaky waist shaping and short rows to make finished garment fit the contours of the wearer in a way that is flattering but more importantly, more comfortable.   I could not be more pleased with the resulting sweater (though reading about everyone’s Stop Overs and the beauty that is Lettlopi yarn knit on size US 10s I may have to knit myself one next time I’m home).

The #bangoutasweater along was a wonderful and much needed pallet cleanser after the fine color work of Kate Davies Machrihanish, .  A ridiculously over the top Fair Isle vest has been on my dream to-knit list for years but for one reason or another I always found myself working on something else instead. But something about the Machrihanish pattern struck me and I felt the immediate “must knit” response drives us all to feats of knitterly exuberance. Luckily Sam and I share a similar taste, and he was equally struck by the need to wear such a gem.   I chose to knit the vest in exactly the same colors and yarn that Kate designed it with, because it was the colors and texture that drew me to the vest in the first place, and also because part of the beauty of Fair Isle vests (I have discovered) is the way the colors play against each other when the same motif is knit using different color combinations.   (There is a musical allusion to be made here, but the correct words are escaping me at the moment - please insert the obvious clever allusion here). 

When Sam was a sailor and sailmaker ganseys were obviously the necessary thing to keep him supplied with, but now that he is a grad student, a smart Fair Isle vest is clearly required.  We’re both quite pleased with the result.  And now having tackled one, I am very much itching to knit another for myself. 

While home I also managed to steek my Epistrophy, knit in my DK Weight Bluefaced Leicester, but I chose the wrong ribbon to sew over the steeked edges (not quite enough body) and ended up being too busy (and at one point too sick - wretched colds) to make the much discussed foray into Boston in search of good fabric (for different projects) and ribbon, and so the whole project has been sent to the time out corner until I get home.  Sigh.  I’m looking forward to picking it up again.

Fringe Association, Cowichan-inspired Vests, and the Shackleton-along

During my brief window of free and relatively fast internet I discovered the Fridge Association Blog (I suspect that I am late in my discovery, but I effectively live under an internet free rock for half of the year) and now I have a bit of a blog crush.   I am generally a bit more interested in the “tradition” side of the knitting world than the “fashion” side, but I have definitely been won over by some of her sense of style.  And by her photos.  For a myriad of reasons I have been wanting to learn how to sew for a long time, and scrolling back through her posts about Slow Fashion October (link) I have been inspired to finally take the leap when I get home, starting with the Stowe Bag and then the Gallery Dress (her blog post here, pattern here).  We’ll see if I manage to maintain this new resolve in the face of actually sewing.  I tend to feel about sewing machines and cutting fabric the same way I feel about a blank page, both engender a similar overwhelming sense of potential and fear which generally results in a sudden need to do absolutely anything else (and which can ultimately be quite productive, but not in terms of sewing or writing).

On a slightly different topic, I think I have mentioned FiberTrek’s fantastic Shackleton-along (Ravelry group here).  The basic idea is to work outside of your comfort zone and tackle that huge intimidating project that you have always wanted to do but maybe haven’t quite yet had the courage to start, be it knitting your first sweater or hand-spinning enough yarn for a shawl or learning a new technique.    I have been pondering my project for about six months now, meaning that I am about six months behind.  I am hampered a bit by my work and travel schedule (there is no room on the boat or in my luggage for my spinning wheel or a sweater-in-progress) and by my lack of reasonable internet on the boat (I thought about researching the knitwear worn by the Endurance crew, and replicating some of it) but I think I finally have a workable idea. 

It’s a long story, but one of the chief mates (we have two, they rotate the same way that I do) spent part of his break on the National Geographic Explorer,  which is the Lindblad boat that does the Antartica trips.  He brought me back 200 grams of bulky weight hand spun Falkland. 

The gift yarn in question, looking quite lovely against the backdrop of Manuel Antonio beach, Costa Rica.  I didn't really how tropical the color way was until I started photographing it with palm trees in the background. 

Inspired by the Fringe Association KAL Cowichan style vest I’m thinking of something Cowichan inspired, which given the bulky yarn and large needles is not something I would normally knit, but given how much time we spend in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska it’s oddly appropriate.  It also ties neatly into a number of traditions and topics that I’ve been wanting to explore for a while, starting with the ways that traditional societies adapted and created craft "traditions" for the tourist trade.  The development and popularity of Cowichan sweaters is also probably roughly contemporaneous with Shackleton’s voyage (I think….). To match the yarn the chief mate brought me I plan to hand spin enough yarn for the rest of the vest, though I haven’t yet decided what fleece to use.  Like most spinners I have one style of yarn that I tend to create on autopilot (worsted, very fine) and I would like to branch out.  Creating woolen spun bulky weight is about as far as one can get from my normal spinning style, and I can (in theory) work it on a drop spindle, meaning that as projects go it should travel well. 

I just flew home the day before yesterday and am still very much in my readjustment period (my plans for the afternoon include knitting and catching up on Top Chef).  I shall think more on this next week. 

And the World is Green

Our internet has been so bad of late that for the last two weeks we have been given free shipboard internet (which, when we've had it, has been faster than our normal expensive internet - which is weird).  I'm worried that this may be coming to an end, so I'm posting as many photos as I can before we return to slow, bad, expensive, internet. 

This Wednesday we made our weekly stop at my favorite botanical garden.  I was caught up on sleep and the morning was quiet so I put on my favorite blue dress, grabbed my camera and a mug of iced coffee, and spent the morning in a world of green. 

This Venezuelan Rose is actually the height of an apple tree.  The flower is the size of a hat.  I would actually like to wear this flower as a hat. I shall have to learn to make hats. 

A decorative pineapple.  I never realized that the body of the pineapple had blossoms, though in retrospect it makes sense. 

True to the name, there were orchids.  I love how alien this one looks.

And I love this very frilly frill.  Before this garden I was never all that fond of orchids, but seeing them in their native setting has won me over. 

And there were mushrooms!

I love this texture. 

And also slime molds (or maybe sill mushrooms?).  This is one of the many little bamboo bridges that dot the garden.  

And butterflies

And several wild toucans.  I sat on a conveniently placed bench and watched this one for a while.  There are usually scarlet macaws around the place as well, though there were apparently elsewhere that morning. 

And then (far too soon) it was time to head back to the boat and to start my workday. 

A Longer Note About Indigo

My Short Note About Indigo leaves a lot of questions unanswered: what is “crocking”?  how will it affect the finished piece? is there anything one can do to reduce it? why does it happen in the first place? and etc.  This will hopefully answer some of those questions, but I suspect there will be a follow up piece to this piece at some point because I can be a wicked over-explainer. Also because indigo is honestly magic. 

To understand crocking it helps to understand the basics of dyeing with natural indigo. 

To use most natural dyes one basically makes a broth using plants or plant extracts.  The process of dyeing with natural dyes, after scouring and mordanting the yarn, is not actually that much more complicated than the process of making good soup, though it is more time consuming.  (I dye in stock pots and canning pots on my kitchen stove, so the comparisons to cooking may come more easily than they otherwise should).  There are certain variables that need to be kept track of (pH, heat, time, pre-mordants or after-baths) but they are no more complicated that making sure that the soup is seasoned correctly and has enough rosemary.  The yarn will dry a few shades lighter than whatever color it achieves in the dyepot, but like soup making, one can easily “taste” it along the way, and with experience be able to modify it to achieve a desired result.  

Natural indigo is not at all like that. 

Natural indigo is a vat dye, an un-helpful descriptor (can’t vats be used in most dyeing?) that to a dyer means that a complicated chemical reaction must first take place in order to achieve the desired result.  

The colorant in natural indigo, indigotin,  is not water soluble and will not stick to fiber.  To make natural indigo work as a dye, one must first make it change into a slightly different chemical by making the dye bath very alkali and then removing oxygen from the bath.  Doing this will change the dye bath into a form generally referred to as “indigo white” (even through the bath itself is actually a sickly yellow/green when properly reduced).  Once the bath is the proper pH and weird yellow/green color, the fiber may be added and allowed to sit for a short period of time.  When the fiber is removed from the dye and exposed to air it will be that same weird yellow as the dye bath but then as the dye reacts with oxygen and transforms back to indigotin (now stuck to fibers) it magically becomes blue again.  

Photo credit Deb Cunningham - this is the same skein of indigo over the course of about ten seconds as the reduced indigo reacts to the presence of oxygen and turns blue again. 

Depth of color is developed through multiple dips in the indigo vat. 

Sometimes the indigo doesn’t fully adhere to the fiber.  Because indigo isn’t water soluble, washing and rinsing will only convince the most unadhered indigo particles to wash out of the fiber, which leave the particles that are hanging on but just a little.  These are the particles that can break free and stain you hands and needles when the yarn is subjected to the mechanical action of knitting.  But, because these are particles of indigo, not indigo white, they still don’t really want to stick to anything.  I tend to think of indigo particles in this form as being more like chalk dust than dye.  It will stick to your hands and needles and if you are doing color work it may temporarily discolor the other yarns you are working with, but because you haven’t gone through the process of transforming indigotin into indigo white, you are basically dealing with very fine colorful dust.  Once the particles have broken free enough to discolor things, they are usually easily washed away.  The only exception to this is the fine pores of bamboo needles, which tend to trap indigo particles.  

Some of you may have come across photos of natural indigo dyers with very blue hands

Indigo dyes fingernails especially well.

For instance, this is my hand after a round of indigo dyeing before I found a pair of gloves that I liked.  In this case the indigo in the dyepot is treating the proteins in my skin the same way it treats the proteins in wool, and sticking accordingly.  As noted, this is very different from crocking.  When I knit with crocking yarn I will often get a blue ring around the back of my middle finger where I tension the yarn, and the palms of may hands will become a little blue from where they come in contact with my knitting. 

Some batches of indigo dyed yarn do not crock at all.  Some batches of yarn crock quite a bit.  Sometimes one or two skeins in a dye lot will crock but the others won't.  I do everything I can to reduce crocking, but there is no way for me to eliminate it completely, or predict with batches will and won’t crock.   Generally the mechanical action of knitting knocks the last few clinging particles free, and then with a final soak and rinse during blocking it will be done. 

Color: A mini-rant there-on (and possibly the beginning of a series).

I am taking advantage of my mornings on the boat to read my favorite natural dying text book, Natural Dyes; Sources, Tradition, Technology, and Science by Dominique Cardon.  As always, reading about the history and chemistry of natural dyes has me pondering how much we take colorful garments for granted today, so much so that we seem to have collectively forgotten that dye stuffs were ever even a consideration or that color itself was valuable.  Most potted history of the middle ages will at least mention how expensive spices were, pepper in particular (and the naming of whole island groups still reflects this) but no one seems to remember that dyestuffs were an equal or greater driver of commerce.  When the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, in addition to requiring an annual supply of gold, the Aztecs were also required to supply large amounts of cochineal (an insect that lives on cactus and creates a very bright red dyed) which was considered second only to ships full of gold in terms of value.   We remember and romanticize the pirates that hunted the Caribbean attacking ships full of gold bound for Europe, but just as often those pirates were after ships full of logwood (which produces a deep purple dye, or black when used with tannin and iron) cut from the forests of Central and South America. 

The need for mordants (mental salts that help the colorants in dye plants “stick” to the dyed fibers, and which greatly affect the color and color-fastness of the finished product) shaped history too.  In her encylopedic textbook on natural dyes, Cardon compares the importance of alum (the most commonly used mordant)  and alum producing areas in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe to our modern need for oil.  

I majored in archaeology (or as close as I could come - there was no “archaeology” major offered at my school at the time I graduated - it’s a long story) and sat through endless hours about ceramics and flaked stone tools and food procurement/production and post-hole remnants and hearth remains and metal production and etc.  and quite a lot of that is preservation bias (ceramics and stone tools are often all that remain) and quite a lot of that is male European archaeology bias (in which high status tools and weapons and status symbols play a very strong role - in some ways archaeology is still very much stuck in the Victorian era - hopefully that has changed a bit in the last fifteen years) and some of that may very well just have been the interests of the professors who taught the classes, but in all of that, even when the topic was pollen analysis or analysis of residues scraped from inside all that ceramic, no one mentioned dyes, dye plants, or mordants.   Looking at the many photos of the archaeological traces of dye works in Dominique Cardon’s book it makes me want to bang my head against the wall in frustration that I twice got to help excavate at a major Andean temple complex and no one mentioned dye plants or fiber production, even though we know from skeletal remains that when the site was in use there were very, very large llamas living there (though we don’t know what the site residents were doing with those very large llamas).

I have long wanted to include more information on the history and chemistry of the dyes I regularly use on my website.  I may finally be getting around to it.  Stay tuned.

Engineer’s Armwarmers Kits and DK weight BFL, or: What I Got Up To During My Last Rotation Home.

Now that we are in Costa Rica for the winter and the engine room thermometer measures 100 degrees it seems impossible that only during my last rotation (when the boat was in Alaska) I was thinking about what to layer under my coveralls to stay warm, but I really was, and my solution was a pair of armwarmers in a random rib inspired by the geological formations of the Endicott Arm in Southeast Alaska.  

With a little bit of shaping for the forearm and the simplest of holes for the thumb they are lovely and simple to knit.  When I wrote up the pattern I realized how little yarn the three accent colors actually required and so I decided to make up a few kits.  And once I decided to make kits, I got a little carried away, but in a good way.  

I talked Sam into drawing a crossed pipe wrench and set of knitting needles, which I then turned into a block print. 

And on a lazy Sunday morning printed flour-sack muslin bags.  

And once there were bags, there had to be stitch markers.  So I got in touch with Wendy at Blue Dog Workshop (a fellow Mainer) who has made lovely stitch markers for me in the past, to see if she might have any charms that fit the emerging theme.  She had the perfect charm in mind, and was happy to pair it with a light blue bead the color of glacier ice.   (I wish I had taken a better photo of just the stitch marker before I left - I could not be more pleased).

All in all, I had a lovely time putting the kits together and am really pleased with the results.  

In addition to working with my Romney > Cotswold fingering weight yarn for the kits, I also got to dye this year’s worsted spun DK weight Bluefaced Leicester from Two Sisters Farm in Woolwich, Maine (I feel like I earlier mis-identified the farm as being in Waldoboro, which is one town over).  

The yarn is lovely and lustrous and soft and also the perfect weight for knitting Kate Davie’s Epistrophy, which has been on my “to knit” list ever since Yokes was released.  I will admit that I dyed the Aspen and Tongas color ways with my Epistrophy in mind. 

Sadly, I had to return to the boat before I gathered my courage to cut the steek, but it is almost finished, and I really enjoyed the pattern and am very happy with how it is turning out. 

The remaining BFL (that I didn't hoard for myself) is currently listed for sale here. 

I will be on the boat in the sweltering heat until mid-January, dreaming of colder climes and knitting. 

The sunsets are lovely here though.

Flamenco Anchorage, waiting to head into the Panama Canal, Caribbean bound. 

Recipe - Digestive Biscuits

I received a very lovely request for the recipe for the digestive biscuits I find myself recently addicted to baking.  Just in case others are interested as well...

I found the original recipe on the King Arthur Flour website.  The resulting biscuit was lovely, but a bit sweeter and less wheat-y than I usually expect a digestive biscuit to be - it fell more in the realm of wheat-y shortbread, so I modified it a bit. 

My variation: 

• 1/2 C King Arthur White Wheat
• 1 1/2 C Whole Wheat
• 1 t baking powder
• 1 stick (8 oz) butter (the original recipe called for unsalted butter but I only had salted on-hand, which tastes fine)
• 1/3 ish cup packed dark brown sugar
• 1/4 C milk
• 1 t caraway seeds (optional and entirely my own whim - I find myself wanted to add caraway seeds to everything lately)

Pre-heat the oven to 350.

Put both flours and baking powder into bowl.  Cut the cold butter into the flours, then rub through your fingers until butter is mostly incorporated and the texture is something like rough cornmeal.  Mix in sugar.  Add enough milk to make a very stiff crumbly dough (you may not need all the milk, I add it one tablespoon at a time).  Roll out the dough until it is about 1/8 thick.  Cut into 2 1/2 inch rounds.  Prick with a fork. The original instructions say to bake on a greased cookie sheet for fifteen to twenty minutes, but I have found that my oven requires twenty-five minutes.  

Now to go brave my yarn room...

Sitka to Seattle

Another summer is over and like many creatures the Sea Lion has begun her long migration south for the winter.  I met the boat a little over two weeks ago in Sitka and over the course of a two week trip with guests we worked our way down to Seattle.  The weather was generally proper Alaska late summer, which is to say cold and always somewhere between fog and rain.  

Going though my photos just now I am amazed by how many of them I took (or rather, “made” according to the current lingo of our photo instructors, nothing has been “taken” when one “makes” a photo - I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that usage) though I do remember feeling like every time I poked my head up on deck I was struck by the need to photograph something. I am still relying on our ship’s slow and expensive internet system, so I can only post a few at the moment, but here are some of my favorites. 

Steller Sea Lions

And bubble netting humpback whales (working very close to shore)

But even more than the wildlife, I found myself drawn to the colors: 

Icebergs calved from Dawes Glacier

And what I came to think of as “tree portraits”. 

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And finally I got to take myself for a morning walk in Alert Bay, and fell in love with the green of the waterfront. 

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Conrad and Cramer

Not at all yarn related, but I was very pleased to discover a very sweet article about two of my favorite subjects in today’s New York Times.  

One of my favorite non-yarn-related authors is Joseph Conrad.  Most people know him, if they know of him at all, because of Heart of Darkness, which they were often forced to read in high school, thus leading them to heartily resent Joseph Conrad.  This is a shame.  Much as I love Mr. Conrad, Heart of Darkness is not my favorite work, and in any case it is mostly wasted on high school students.    Joseph Conrad was a sea captan for years before he started writing, and he manages to convey, more than any other author I have ever read, the joys and frustrations and intimacies and terror of working on boats. During his working life the age of sail was coming to a close, and while he often worked on steamers, his heart belonged to tall ships.  I love my current job but my sailing life began on tall ships, and like Mr. Conrad in his day, if there was any way I could afford to, I would still be working on tall ships. 

The article that so pleased me in today’s Times was written by a from Harvard history professor who is writing a book about Conrad and who sailed aboard the Corwith Cramer from Cork to Brittany.  This connection was especially lovely for me as I spent a season working on the Cramer (my first trip was this one). 

At Sea with Joseph Conrad  - 

I am home.

By which I now mean “I am in Worcester”.  We are still opening boxes and debating where to put various pieces of furniture, and we have another load to bring down from our storage unit in Portland, but; Sam baked bread this afternoon and our dishes are in the cupboard, so we are more moved in than not. 

I have many yarn-ish thoughts, and have much yarn news to share, but before I get completely sidetracked by thoughts of knitting and dyeing I wanted to share a few photos from my last week in Alaska.  

Dawes Glacier, Endicott Arm Alaska

Buoy coming into Petersburg Alaska, a favorite place for napping. 

Mamma brown bear and three cubs, Glacier Bay, Alaska. July 2015

The face of Johns Hopkins glacier, Glacier Bay, Alaska. (The blobs on the icebergs are seals)

Calving......

Glacier Bay was Friday.  On Saturday I got to go diving again, and amongst many other wondrous things I finally got to see a Giant Pacific Octopus in her den.  I suspect that she was much less excited to see us. 

Whales.

One of my favorite things about the Alaska season (aside from the weather, and the mountains, and the marine mammals, and the ravens, and the glaciers - really I just like Alaska) is getting to hear Andy Szabo from the Alaska Whale Foundation do his talk.   His talks each week have the same outline, but like most very smart enthusiastic people he is easily persuaded by guest questions to go on tangents about killer whales (not his area of research, but clearly something he knows quite a bit about) and fishing techniques and random stories of human whale interactions up here. I try to listen to his talk every week, because every week I am reminded of something, or learn something, that totally reshapes my view of whales.

For example:  There are two distinct populations of killer whales up here, fish eaters and mammal eaters.  Despite looking basically identical to us, they have completely different social structure, “speak” totally different dialects, and have not interbred in a very very long time.  (To go an a tangent of my own, in the traditions of Pacific Northwest peoples there is an “killer whale - wolf” creature distinct from the killer whale, that is generally taken by modern folk to be mythical, but hearing about the two populations of killer whales I have begun to wonder if the folk up here had noticed the same behavioral differences in their killer whale population and named them accordingly).

Killers whales, July 2015, Southeast Alaska.  I'm not sure where we were (Kelp Bay?) but we spent a lovely evening watching this pod go about their business.  

And; Humpback whales up here cooperatively bubble net for herring in groups of eight to twelve.  The members of each group are no more related to each other than to any other whales in the area, which makes their cooperative feeding a bit of an anomaly in the animal world.  The members of the group seem to be task specialists, with one member of the group acting as the “caller” who, through making a very distinctive noise at just the pitch that herring will apparently do anything to get away from, drive the ball of herring up into the net of bubbles blown by a different task specialist in the group.  The bubble net itself, being something deliberately shaped and external to the body, meets the definition of “tool”, which makes the humpback whales up here task-specialist cooperative tool users.  Which is just cool.  (Also, only a very small percentage of the whales up here cooperatively bubble net - most of them feed by themselves on krill, which is actually a better calorie source than herring). 

Bubble netting humpback whales, Wrangell Narrows, Alaska,  September 2014.   -   

When the herring are in season we often get to watch this group bubble netting behavior.   The group of whales dive in a specific order, do their flipper-flashing bubble-net creating thing, and then appear as a mass, all eight or ten at once inside the boundaries of the net they created, mouths agape and then quickly closed to expel the extra water with their tongues, straining out the herring.  They are so close together when they do this that from the surface it can be difficult to sort out one whale from the next.  They pause for a moment or two on the surface, then re-line up to do it all again.  Apparently when they are done for the evening, or when the fishing just isn’t that good, one of them will breach, then the rest will breach a few times, and everyone will go on their way.  Andy refers to this as a “disassociation ritual” in his talk. 

The Alaska Whale Foundation relies on college and grad students to collect a lot of the observational data they use.  They have just acquired land up here to create more of a permanent center for field schools.  I am very much wishing that they had been around when I was still college student.  

So, anyone with a college student who is interested in Marine Biology should maybe check them out.  (High school and college students interested in Marine Biology or Marine Ecology should also check into Sea Education Association - I worked for them for a bit and their programs are amazing). 

In other news, while I was home I got certified in dry-suit diving.  I am not a natural at dry suit diving, but I am practicing and getting better at it and I have now been diving twice up here.  

In a dry suit.  

In Alaska.  

About two years ago now, during my job interview for this position, the port-engineer asked me if I was a diver, and over the course of the conversation it became apparent that what he actually wanted to know was whether I was dry-suit certified so that I could dive in Alaska.  I managed not to say what I was actually thinking, which ran along the lines of “no, of course I’m not certified to dry-suit dive, and only really crazy people dry-suit dive in Alaska, I’m also not a certified pilot of float planes”. And yet here I am.  (And it was seeing the footage brought back by the undersea specialist last year in Alaska that convinced me to get my scuba certification to begin with - I am not thinking about what that implies).   

So here I am.  The gnome was brought along by some of our guests, who very nicely asked if we could get photos of the gnome with undersea creatures on our dive.  For some reason Ashely (our current undersea specialist) decided to take my photo with the gnome too.  The photo was taken at the end  of our dive, and I am very very very cold.  (And very happy).

Gloomy Knob

I am back on the Sea Lion, and we are back to our summer season in Alaska.   On Wednesday we motored slowly through Glacier Bay, spending the morning along the aptly named “Gloomy Knob” looking for mountain goats.  We came up very slowly on this one, 

who I was worried might be dead, given how still she was. 

And then she lifted her face.

She was unimpressed by our presence, and decided to continue her nap.

n Which I have been Home for Five Weeks and Many Things Happened, or, New Yarn and a New Apartment!

First, the big news:  my husband has been accepted into a graduate program at Clark University in GIS.  On the positive side, the program is one of the best in the country in this field, employment potential post graduation is very high, and he is genuinely interested in the subject and the actual work.  On the down side, Clark is in Massachusetts, and so I spent much of my time home anxiously refreshing Craigslist Worcester trying to find the elusive perfect apartment that is near Clark and also accepts dogs (of the two of us, I am far pickier about where we live, so the apartment hunting falls to me).  We finally succeeded in finding the right apartment, though I am superstitious enough about such things that until we have actually moved in I will not say for sure that we have the apartment, and I will not fully relax about it.  Neither one of us want to leave Maine, but it will only be for a few years, and then we will be back (fingers crossed).  In the mean time I will continue to buy fleece from the same Maine farmers who have supplied me with such lovely fleece in the past, and explore the potential of flocks in western Massachusetts, of which I hope there are many.   Astute observers will notice that I no longer list “Maine” after “Natural Dyes, New England wool” on my yarn tags.  I have left that space blank, because I can’t bring myself to list “Massachusetts”.  I mean no offense to folks who are from Massachusetts (my dad grew up outside of Boston) but New England is full of regional chauvinism, and folks from Massachusetts are the first to understand that to other New Englanders “Massachusetts” carries a certain something.  That said, I am looking forward to getting to know a new city. 

3 Ply Coopworth Sportweight 

Astute observers will also notice that I mentioned new yarn tags, because while have been home I have also been dyeing up a storm.  My 2015  3-Ply Coopworth Sportweight is available in a very purposeful looking color run, which is one of those happy accidents of natural dyes since the only color I actually planned was the deep red Pomegranate, and everything else followed.   This batch of yarn was spun to a slightly lighter weight than my previous 3-Ply sport weight which was itself on the heavy end of the spectrum for sport weight, so people who have worked with my 3-Ply sport weight previously may want to swatch again.  The yarn is available here.   

Spring is also the time to pick up fleeces.  This year I am exploring fleeces from a couple of new farms (to me).  Currently at the mill is Blue Faces Leicester from Two Sisters Farm in Waldoboro, Maine, which is being worsted spun into a light Aran weight yarn, and on Sunday the intrepid Sarah Hunt (of Fiber Trek) was good enough to lend me her time and her Subaru to transport 172 pounds of Straw’s Farm Island fleece from Straw’s Farm in Damariscotta, Maine to my workspace, from where it will be picked up on Wednesday (hopefully) to go to the mill.  The island wool will be spun into a 5-Ply Gansey yarn in support of the Cordova Gansey Project, masterminded by Dotty of the Netloft in Cordova, Alaska.  I will make a proper post about it in the future (because it deserves its own post - or series of posts) but for now, please go check out Dotty’s amazing posts of the subject.  She has managed to put so many of my very inchoate feeling about knitting and history and ganseys and the  sea into very eloquent words, and she has done in so well that the next time someone asks me about my feelings of connention to gansey knitting I may just point them to her posts. 

I return to the boat this Saturday.  I will be meeting the Sea Lion in Sitka, Alaska.  As always my time home has passed way too quickly, but I am looking forward to our Alaska season.  

In Which I Admit that Yet Again I was Wrong.

If you had asked me about my opinion of boats and/or SCUBA diving when I was 26, I would have said that boats involved too many people living too closely together and anyway I get ragingly sea sick and taken all together boats were the worst idea ever and if I never went out it one again it would be okay.  I would have been likewise (though less passionately) negative about SCUBA diving; I probably would have said that the very idea of being under all of that water made my breath shorten and my adrenaline spike and it all seems like a Very Bad Idea.  

By the time I turned 27 I was madly in love with a fully rigged ship in New York harbor.

By my 28th birthday I was working full time on a traditionally rigged schooner and living on said fully rigged ship.  

It has taken me a little longer to come around to SCUBA diving, but because we carry an Undersea Specialist who takes underwater footage every trip, and because said Undersea Specialist needs a dive buddy, getting certified to SCUBA dive is encouraged and the cost of classes is reimbursed, and being able to dive on the hull is a useful skill for an engineer and another skill to add to my resume.  So finally and with much grumbling I went ahead and took the classes to become certified in basic open water diving.   

I actually ended up doing the required open water dives to complete my certificate in Maine in November, because sometimes I am terrible at planning.  This occasioned much more grumbling, nay whining, on my part.  The water was 47 degrees. 

But, we are in the Sea of Cortez, and I have come up twice in the roster to be the Undersea Specialist’s dive buddy, and yet again I must admit to being utterly wrong.  I am now 37 and a few months old, and last week I was fifty feet down (after a small panic attack at the surface) looking for interesting sea life for Paul to film, being watched in turn by a curious and bored sea lion who occasionally entertained herself by nipping at my fins. 

Diving is the best thing since boats, which is to say, absolutely magical.  

photo credit - Billy O'Brian

Shop Update!

New yarn posted! 

After several delays due to weather and/or life events, the yarn hand-off between Sam and my mum has finally occurred (in a parking lot in Portsmouth NH near a large mural of a whale, which has become our traditional meeting place for yarn hand-offs). I have two new yarns listed, a 3-Ply Cotswold light fingering weight, designed to replace my 3-Ply Cotswold x Romney fingering weight, and a 3-Ply Romney > Cotswold fingering weight.  

Life on the Sea Lion continues to be lovely and uneventful.  We are in the midst of moving the boat, without guests, up to Baja California where we will have a short spring season. The weather has been perfect and calm (not always a given on these positioning trips - there is a reason we don’t have guests) and the dolphins have been plentiful.  The dolphins are clearly doing their own thing this time of year, which seems to involve lots of very high leaping and splashing, but every now and again a group will take a break from whatever it is they are doing and come ride our bow.  

And, a reader, M., has very kindly identified the moth in my previous blog post. It is a lovely Urania fulgens known more commonly as a swallowtail moth. These day-flying moths live as far south as Bolivia and migrate at seemingly random intervals.  I did a bit of research in our shipboard library (I should have just asked a naturalist, but we work opposite schedules and I always hate to bug them when they are off work) and found a journal article, sadly from 1983, about them.  As of 1983 the best guess as to the random timing of their migrations had to do with the plants they lay their eggs on.  Apparently  they only lay their eggs on one kind of plant, and over the course of successive groups of urania fulgens caterpillars eating its leaves the plant increases the level of toxins in its leaves, until it no longer tastes good/is good for the caterpillars, at which point the moths decamp for someplace where their preferred brood plant isn’t producing quite so much of the toxin. But again, this was published in 1983.  We may now have a more nuanced understanding of their reasons for migration. 

Back to the Day Job, New Yarn will be Listed Soon (thank you for your patience)

As advertised, I am back in my blue coveralls, at work aboard the Sea Lion.  Returning to the boat requires just as much of a mental shift as returning home does.  I’ve spend the last week pausing every so often to wonder if that thing has always made that sound, and is that rattle new, and does this space normally smell like that?  

Just as I apparently lose the first week home to the couch and my dog, no matter how well I plan or how strong my resolve to do better this time, I lose the last week at home to last minute dyeing/preparing to leave home for six weeks (or eight weeks this time).   This time I lost a whole day during my last week home to a week-earlier-than-I-expected shearing at Buckwheat Blossom Farm, which led to a lovely farm visit and a lot of fleece off to the mill (for my 2015 gansey yarn, and the return of my 3-Ply Coopworth Sport-weight) but also meant that I did not have time to meet up with my mom to give her my new inventory.  So, until my husband can coordinate a trip to Portsmouth,  which will hopefully happen soon, new yarn will remain unlisted.  This is probably a good thing, as the other item on my “to-do” list that I failed to tick off was the whole posting-new-items/newsletter business. I will now be designing a newsletter and posting yarn via the ship’s satellite internet system, which is a bit slow for photos.  I apologize for the delay, and am grateful for your patience. 

To offer a preview: 

I will be offering two yarns, one fingering weight and one slightly lighter fingering weight, both spun from mixed flock of Cotswold and Romney at Liberty Wool Farm in Palermo Maine.  My 3-Ply Cotswold fingering weight yarn is meant to replace the 3-Ply Cotswold x Romney fingering weight yarn of previous years.  I have dyed it two shades of blue, lots of pine green, and a dark gray, as well as leaving a fair amount an undyed natural cream color.  The second yarn is from a group of sheep with slightly more Romney than Cotswold in their lineage (hence the name “Romney > Cotswold” - naming yarns is difficult).  The fleece is a bit shorter and a bit crimpier than the more even Cotswold x Romney fleece, and the resulting yarn has a pleasing smoothness and bounce.  The yarn is spun to a more traditional fingering weight.  These fleeces were mainly mid-brown, and they blended to a dark gray/brown color that I am calling Bark.  Because the undyed yarn is dark, I could only create darker colors when dyeing, but using a darker yarn as my base added quite a bit of depth to the resulting color. I am quite happy with the forest green, dark indigo, deep brown, and oxblood red that the yarn achieved. 

On a slightly more boat related note - while fixing the hinge on the door to the laundry storeroom I noticed this lovely creature keeping one of the stews company.