Natural dyes; New England wool.
After a complicated series of connecting flights, and nearly getting lost in the Orlando Airport, I eventually arrived in Panama City, and a bit longer after that, at the boat I work on, which was docked in Colon. Our trip so far has taken us through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific coast bound for Costa Rica.
I woke to find us here this morning. 
The day before yesterday we were in the Panama Canal:
In between we were a useful platform from which boobies hunted fish.
It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that I am terrible at writing up event in a reasonable time frame.
Several Fridays ago (more Fridays than I am comfortable admitting- or even able to name without resorting to the weekly planner that now rules my life) the weather and the schedules of all concerned parties converged, and the sheep of Buckwheat Blossom Farm were shorn of their winter growth.
While Jeff sheared Amy, Amy's friend Jackie, and I skirted fleeces and plotted which would be bought by whom and turned into what. My workroom is now filled with gorgeous fleece and in between stints away working on assorted ferries (I have spent more of April working on the Vinalhaven, Islesboro and Swans Island ferries than I have at home) I find myself losing hours pondering which will be combined with which and spun how, and then, content that I have worked it all out and will send the fleeces out for spinning after my next hitch, return to find that I have changed my mind. The potential represented by those lovely, lovely fleeces is a bit overwhelming and I am terrible at making decisions. I am planning to have some of it spun up as gansey yarn, and some as sanquhar yarn (also suitable for socks) and a bit done up as a three ply sport weight. The question is which fleeces will work best as what, and, as they are colored fleeces, which are best grouped together. I go up to my work space for an entirely unrelated reason and find myself instead moving individual fleeces around the room grouping them together in different ways, patting them and studying individual locks, all the while muttering to myself. I suspect that I sound a bit too much like Gollum for comfort in these instances (no my precious, I shall not put you with that fleece, I shall put you with this fleece and make gansey yarn of you my precious...). I need to send them out to be spun, if only to get a bit of my sanity back.
On a related note, Sam and I had our own opportunity to shear last weekend during a class in beginning sheep shearing held through the University of Maine Cooperative Extension Program at North Star Farm. Lessons learned: Jeff makes shearing sheep look easy, but it really really isn't.
After a bit of instruction about the shears themselves, we divided into smaller groups to work more closely with individual shearers. Jeff happened to be one of the instructors and so Sam and I found ourselves naturally in his group as he sheared a sheep very slowly, talking us through the bits we needed to be extra careful with and showing us the shearing pattern. And then it was our turn. Somehow, and I'm still not sure how this happened as generally I ascribe to the stand-at-the-back-until-enough-people-have-tried-something-that-the-novelty-has-worn-off-and-the-group-is-no-longer-paying-attention school of thought regarding activities that involve and audience, I ended up going first. North Star Farm raises Hampshires, which, from some brief googling should apparently weigh 200 pounds (the rams should weigh 275 pounds). On the one hand, they were great beginning shearing sheep as their fleece is not particularly valuable, so if a bunch of utter novices butchered the shearing (which we did) we were not causing any real harm. On the other hand, shearing is awkward enough without also having to wrestle what Sam described as "the biggest g*d d*** sheep I ever saw".
The theory of shearing makes perfect sense: shear in a specific order, keeping the tips of the shears against the skin of the sheep, following the sheep's contours and doing your best not to cut a few very anatomically important bits. I went into the stall, grabbed the closest sheep, brought it to the cutting floor ( a large piece of plywood) wrestled it down so that it was sitting on its haunches on my feet, and then realized that the rest was far more complicated than I had suspected.
Confronted with an actual sheep with four inches of fleece I realized that I couldn't remember any part of the shearing pattern and I couldn't find its skin, let alone follow the contour of its body. I am generally very comfortable using a wide variety of hand and power tools, but the clippers were enormous and awkward in my hand (much like an angle grinder in terms of size and ease of handling) and the sheep was not entirely on board with the proceedings. Also, Jeff is very very tall (6'4"? 6'5'?) and I am not (5'5" when I am remembering to maintain good posture) so there were many instances in which Jeff comfortably straddled the sheep to cut a specific area and I found myself riding the sheep when trying to do the same. But in the end (much, much, later) I prevailed, and even managed to get a feel for when the clippers were following the curve of the sheep's body and when they were haring off too far into the fleece. While Jeff encouraged the sheep to stand and return to the stall, I stood up straight and focused on breathing, with what I suspect was a very dazed expression on my face. As the day progressed it became easy to tell who had sheared, and who was still waiting for a turn by the slightly loopy glazed look of those who had sheared, a mix of shock and exhaustion and triumph.
A bit later it was Sam's turn, and I managed to get photos.
For many years I worked on traditionally rigged schooners (mostly the schooners used for experiential education programs, though I've also done tall ship festivals and dock tours) boats which, except for a few differences (electricity, refrigeration, engines, student crews) were constructed, rigged, and operated exactly as they would have been a hundred years ago. Actually, several of the boats I worked on were build over a hundred years ago, and while they move students and passengers these days rather than fish and sand, the sailing is the same. I started knitting my gansey (the second gansey I knit, the first was for my husband, knit years before I was to find boats) while living aboard the Ship Wavertree (built in 1885, now docked in the East River at what used to be Pier 15) and working aboard the Schooner Pioneer (also build in 1885, and now taking passengers on two hour sails around New York Harbor – look her up if you find yourself with a spare summer evening in NYC). I continued to knit my gansey while working on Highlander Sea, ex Pilot (built in 1924 for the Boston Pilots Association) tearing out and re-knitting sleeves now a bit too tight, and I finally finished it while sailing north from Belize on the Harvey Gamage, three months into a four month semester at sea program for high school students.
I have since worn that gansey while doing a thousand things that would be utterly familiar to most men who wore them back in the day, furling sails, hauling lines, flaking out anchor chain, climbing aloft far too early in the morning (swearing all the while) to unfrig a fouled topsail sheet, scraping sanding and painting some bit of the boat for the nth time, carrying heavy things onto the boat, carrying heavy things off of the boat, standing at the helm at two in the morning steering by a star, fixing a bilge pump worn out from overuse for the nth time, and curled up in my bunk fully dressed and soaking wet. At times schooner life is impossibly, romantically amazing, but more often it is cold and wet and kind of gross.
I am one of what I suspect is a small number of people currently alive who have extensively worn a gansey knit from gansey yarn in the work environment for which they were created (except for the fishing bit) and I have reached a few conclusions that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere.
Firstly, the armpit gusset really is genius: they really do give a lovely freedom of movement. I can work with my arms above my head (a frequent occurrence on boats, especially given that I am not tall) without my gansey rutching up. And the gussets also have a practical effect on the longevity of the gansey: every other sweater that I have worn for work ultimately tears at the underarm. When I reach above my head most of the weight of the sweater rests on the seam where the front and back of the sweater meet the sleeve, and those few stitches will inevitably give way. A gansey, being constructed in one piece, distributes the weight of itself far more evenly across a far greater number of stitches, and the gusset removed the weak point at the underarm entirely.
Secondly, one of the things that I have seen commonly written about ganseys, that they are “knit so tightly as to be wind and water proof” is just silly. I knit incredibly tightly, even when I am trying to do the opposite, and my gansey is neither wind nor waterproof, even after I have dipped it in a solution of wool fat, but being wind and waterproof is not all that important: wind and waterproofness is the purview of foully jackets, these day usually coated vinyl (oilskins back in the day) but what they do do is far more important: ganseys hold their shape when wet (which on a boat is most of the time). They neither sag, nor bag, or impede movement; wearing a sopping wet gansey is not that different from wearing a dry gansey. Before you dismiss this, think of your favorite sweater or sweatshirt. Now think about how it bags and hangs and sticks to you weirdly and snags on everything once it gets wet. Now imagine climbing a very narrow ladder that is moving erratically, and at the top wriggling yourself through an opening barely larger than yourself, and all this just to get to the place you need to be so you can start your real work (which is generally much scarier than the climb itself). Even modern fleece is unpleasant in this situation (actually, I’m biased, I dislike modern fleece in any situation) but I’ve done something very similar in my gansey on many occasions, and have never had cause to note that my gansey was in any way making the situation more difficult – which may seem like faint praise, but it really really isn’t.
And finally, knitting the sleeves from the top down is brilliant. Not only does is prevent the heartbreaking moment when you realize that because of gauge differences the shoulder on your sleeve does not match the shoulder on the body of the sweater, but when the cuffs wear through, which they will, it make the repairs the work of a lazy evening. I have re-knit the last few inches of both sleeve several times with no fuss or annoyance.
Or: I didn't get around to blogging this winter, and now I must sum up because spring is here and shearing is around the corner (possibly even this Friday!) and like the Icelandic Sagas, I feel that blogs should be kept in relatively chronological order.
Yarnish things happened: I began another gansey (this one for myself) to be blogged about more fully in the future, and I knit these whimsically awesome mittens for my sister-in-law (and business buddy - for those of you trying to navigate the world of baby equipment who may be looking for gear that one can actually live with, check how her blog at citybabyliving.com).
Dumb persistence has paid off! Thumbnails link to pages like they should, thus enabling this whole enterprise to look a little more grown-up, and now that I"ve crossed most web site improvements off of my list, allowing me to stop blogging about the behind the scenes nonsense and move on to the bits that are actually of interest, like: I have finally posted my two mittlet patterns! They are both fun and simple to knit, designed for use with my 3-Ply Coopworth, and depending on your color choice, the Basic Ribbed Mittlets make you look like you might be a super hero in your spare time. Which in my opinion helps to combat late winter blahs. Patterns are free with yarn purchase.
Apologies for the ever changing mess that is currently my website. In celebration of the attendance of my first craft fair, and my ads currently running on Ravelry, I thought that it might be time to take my website through a second draft. I am finding that all the little things that I skipped doing on the first run-through, I skipped for a reason, i.e. that I couldn't figure out how to do them then, and after a month I still don't know how to do them. This is Nell.
After the fifty-seventh iteration of me trying and failing to make thumbnails on one page link to products on another, she bumped me in the leg very firmly with her nose. This translates roughly as, "Baboon, it is time to take me for a walk", when she is feeling polite, or more often in the imperative, "Baboon! Walk!". And as usual she was right. Nell is of a herding breed, and absent sheep she has become quite adept at ordering my life.
So Nell and I took our usual evening walk, and then, still unable to face the computer, I stacked the half cord of wood that has been sitting, unstacked, in the middle of the walkway for the last month, and now we have what looks like a little wood fort in front of the driveway. This makes me happy, though not as happy as I would be if those thumbnails would link to products on another page.
As I struggle through the process of listing my yarn for sale in various places (Ravelry at the moment) I find that I am stumbling when it comes to describing what exactly it is that I do. Most dyers buy their yarn pre-spun in bulk from somewhere, generally larger spinneries, though there are several yarn wholesalers who sell yarn ready for dying in various blends and weights. They essentially buy commodity yarn, and their artistry is in the creation of color. This is all well and good, but in addition to dyeing my yarn, I also source the fleeces, which is an essential part of what I am trying to do with Upton Yarns. Most people who start with individual fleeces seem to be hand spinners, which, while I do hand spin small batches to experiment with the fleece, I am not doing on any sort of scale, and the yarn I have for sale is not hand spun, though it is spun in very small spinneries. The yarn is spun to my specifications, so I could say that it was "designed by me" but I am also a firm believer that the people who operate the machines and make the thousands of tiny well informed decisions are the ones who actually created the yarn. The stages of making yarn can be broken down in A)choose fleece, B)spin fleece, C)dye fleece. Most dyers do C, leaving A and B up to others. Spinners do A and B, and sometimes C though not in any quantity. I do A and C and pay someone to do B to my specifications, what is the word for this? Seriously, what do I call myself? And how do I sum it up in 10 words or less?
The Big Chill was lovely! The Mayo Street Art Center is a lovey venue, Audrey did a fantastic job organizing it all, and the other vendors could not have been nicer. On the downside, while well attended, most of the attendees were not knitters. Such is life. I had more interest in my knit samples then in my yarn. "No, those mittlets are not for sale, but the pattern is free with yarn purchase, and then you can make your own, and how much cooler is that?" The fun part is the knitting, people! (No, I did not actually say that, though I really wanted to.)
Still, it was wonderful to bring my yarn out into the world, and to see it all displayed together. I've been dyeing it in batches, and storing it in batches, and photographing it in batches, so I haven't really ever looked at in all together at one time. The effect is pretty cool.
I also could not be more grateful for the help of my friends and family in this whole endeavor. My awesome friend Shelly painted the above sign, by hand, because, as mentioned, she is awesome, and very good at stuff like that. My sister baked me cookies, and kept me company, and watched the booth so I could go check out the other vendors. And Sam put together a thousand yarns tags, and helped me set up and break down the booth, and rented a table for me, and patiently put up with a thousand moments of "does it look better this way? or this way? or, wait, what if we try this?" until a saner man would have broken and told me that he really didn't care that much about yarn, because no sane person does.
Patterns will be posted later this week.
As the title says, my yarn and I will be at The Big Chill tomorrow in Portland (Maine). I am putting the finishing touches on my booth, and feeling a sort of nervous excitement about the whole thing. My awesome friend Shelly has even made me a sign (and done a far better job promoting the fair on her Facebook account then I have). Audrey has been doing a great job introducing the vendors through her blog, and I am honestly really excited to see their work in person. In honor of my first craft fair I have put together two fairly simple mittlet patterns. They will be available free with a yarn purchase at my booth, and next week I will be putting them up on this site (knock on wood - or whatever one does to appease the spirits of Wordpress).
These are the Dyer Neck Mittlets (in honor of the river down the hill from my house).
And these are my Basic Mittlets.
If you will be in the Portland Maine area tomorrow, stop by, and see the yarn in person.
And if you're not in Portland, wish me luck!
Sarah.
This, frankly seasonable, weather has gotten me back into dyeing with madder (orange to red) and weld (bright bright yellow) in the hopes that their brightness will lift me out of the blahs. And so, here we are: two new colors that I love.
New colors make me ponder the issue of naming. Like many folk, I often mock the color names in clothing catalogues. For this winter for example, JCrew (always a font of mockable color names) is offering a sweater in "retro orange" and "roasted cider", leading one to ponder which shade of orange is "retro" and how on earth one can "roast cider" (this is more evocative of a cooking accident then a color). But now that I am on the other side, I find myself feeling a bit more sympathetic to whichever poor person came up with "spiced chartreuse" (again with the cooking accidents). On the one hand, I could avoid the whole thing by just giving my colors numbers, which I was thinking may become an organizational nightmare due to my poor organizational skills, but if I assign each color a number, and then give each variation I end up with a second number, than it actually won't be that complicated. On the other hand, it is much harder to get excited about "3-01" than "retro orange", which isn't all that far off from my new orange, which I think I'm going to call "tiger lily" even though the tiger lilies that grow outside my window have a slightly pinker cast than my yarn.
Mock away.
As for my new red color, I'm going basic, and calling it "vermillion", because it is.
Firstly; This site "went live" last week, and people amazing about forwarding it along to friends and family and facebook pages, and have just been generally amazing and supportive about the whole endeavor. I have been remiss in thanking everyone for that, for which I apologize. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Secondly, exciting news: My yarn and I will be heading down to Portland Maine on December 3 to take part in The Big Chill craft fair at the Mayo Street Arts Center! I am incredibly excited about this, both for the opportunity to sell my yarn, and to get a chance meet the other vendors, all of whom seem amazing. I am also incredibly honored that Upton Yarns was featured on the Big Chill blog yesterday in a really lovely article. The whole thing is just charming. So, if anyone reading this happens to be in Portland Maine on December 3, please come by and have a look.
Thirdly, the ever awesome Kate Davies apparently shares one of my pet peeves, the problem of clothing companies marketing items as "wool" when in fact they contain very little to none, and has written about it far more eloquently then I ever could here. Even better, she has created a web site devoted to encouraging a more honest use of the term "wool", including a petition and a wall of shame for those of us who need to vent our frustration at the egregious mis-use of terminology. And, as a follow up to the debate about whether "wool" can also be used to refer to the fiber from alpaca and such, she did a bit of research on the history of the term "wool" and wrote a fascinating, here.
Fourthly: My first pattern is in the works. I am hoping to have a couple of knitting patterns for the Big Chill. Having a dead line is just the kick I need to actually sit down and write out the patterns. I have found that designing and knitting is the fun part, and that actually writing the thing down is something on par with web site design in terms of my interests. But, I do really love this hat, and the pattern for it really will be available by December third.
- Sarah
There is a wonderful E.B. White essay (actually, most of E. B. White's essays are wonderful - and if you have not read them I suggest that you remedy this post haste) about his farm in Brooklin Maine, and about his many chickens, upon which he doted, producing so many eggs that he had no choice but to sell them wholesale to the local general store, and the resulting embarrassment he felt each time he brought more eggs to the store which the owner in turn was then forced to pay for a sell on to the public. I often feel this way about the things that I make. I like making stuff, but then, once the fun part is over, I have stuff. I like finding gorgeous fleeces, sending them out to be spun up, and dyeing them; I love the magic and anticipation of it all, but then I have yarn and I can only knit so much, and my weaving room only has so much storage and anyway the whole point of this exercise was to make yarn and sell it. It's the "and sell it" part that I've never been good at. But I love making yarn, and I love making yarn that I want to buy, and so with some trepidation and embarrassment, I am setting this site lose in the hopes that you will buy yarn, thus enabling me (with the worst connotations of that word) to make more. So here it is. Please check back often. In addition to what is already here, I have patterns to post, and more colors of yarns, and dyed wool for felting, all of which will be making their way onto the site shortly.
Sarah
Because all the cool kids are doing it, Upton Yarns now has a twitter feed (@UptonYarns) and a facebook page (also under uptonyarns, or just click the facebook link in the handy bunch of glyphs that now appear after every post). I have no idea what to do with either account, although I'm probably not supposed to admit that.
No more helvetica! And I have managed to make the shipping calculator admit that I am indeed able to ship to Maine! (It turns out that one needs to set up a whole other account with USPS to get their shipping calculator to work properly - who knew?) And if you live in Maine and order my yarn, I will be able to charge you Maine sales tax! (Sorry about that....) Basically, after too many days sitting here begging this thing to work, it appears to be working. I never thought that starting a yarn business would involve so much time at the computer.
And so, in celebration of all of having a working website, and because it has been far too long since I played with yarn-
I made a lot of yarn very purple.
Well, here I am. Finally with a blog, and struggling over the rest of the site. Someday soon (hopefully by the end of the week) I will have filled this site with amazing photos and entertaining, informative text. Until then, stand by.