Other Places to Find Upton Yarns, a Snow Day, and Hello!

The response to the recent article about Upton Yarns in the spring issue of Interweave Knits has been amazing! (And a bit overwhelming!).  So, hello new readers.  The concept of "working wool" is one I would love to continue to explore, and it is gratifying to discover how many others have similar interests.  I have plans for all sorts of yarn, and while I love the winter, spring cannot come soon enough.  I am working away in my dye space (when I can get to it - thank you snow storms) and will be sending out a newsletter announcing my new yarns during the first week of March (I return to the boat on March 6).  If you would like to be included in the list for the newsletter, please send me an email at UptonYarns@gmail.com with "newsletter" or similar in the subject. 

For those of you interested in traditional knitting, and better yet traditional gloves, Beth Brown Reinsel is selling many of her wonderful patterns as kits at her site here, including two designed featuring yarns from Upton Yarns.  Last years she designed her Winter: A Sanquhar Glove Pattern which she used in her DVD about Sanquhar knitting.  She is including the DVD and my yarn in a kit here.  She is also using my yarn for her Compass Rose pattern here.  I have just finally finished tucking ends on her Winter pattern, and I could not be happier with the pattern or the results.  I am working away on her Compass Rose Pattern, and am equally pleased with how it is going. 

My pair of Beth Brown Reinsel's Winter: A Sanquhar Glove Pattern

I spent the week skeining and skeining, but I also managed to get an indigo vat going to give my 3-Ply Cotswold skeins, dyed with weld last week, their first dip towards my Pine Green Color.   

This will be Pine Green after 4 or 5 more dips.

For once a winter storm seems to have given us a miss, but we planned for a snow day, and I am using the time to catch up on Fiber Trek podcasts.  Sarah Hunt envisioned a travel show based around fiber and fiber producers.  Her first full episodes can be seen here.  When she is not filming for the proposed show, she podcasts. I have been especially enjoying her discussion of "slow knitting" and a "soulful stash" in episode 26, posted on January 8th.  She also has a great discussion about what goes into a good sock yarn, which has me plotting sock yarns for the future, though I'm not really a sock knitter.  So, to all sock knitters  I would love to hear what you look for in a yarn.  I am thinking of using the fleece from this flock (once things warm up and they don't need their fleece anymore).

And the Dyeing Commences (also, Hello)

Hello to all of the new folks who read about my yarn in the recent Interweave Knits article!  I had a wonderful two days talking about yarn and dyeing with the author of the article (Selma, who in turn keeps a great blog here) but I must admit that it is a little surreal seeing what otherwise felt like a lovely visit with a fellow fiber enthusiast written up in a major knitting publication. 

To all of you stopping by for the first time, I work with small batches of yarns spun from local fleeces.  My stock is a little low at the moment, due in part to the time of year and also because I just recently came home from working on the boat.  I have some dyeing to catch up on.  I have been home for two weeks now, but as I always do (and always tell myself I won't do this time) I lost a week sitting on the couch catching up on dumb TV and knitting (and cuddling with Nell).

This is Nell.  She wishes the snow would go away and the squirrels would come back. In the meantime she wishes that I would stop bugging her with my camera and go back to rubbing her ears. 

But, this last week I braved the snow (and there has been lots of it) to start working with my new 3-Ply Cotswold fingering weight yarn, which very conveniently returned from the spinning mill a little before I returned from the boat. 

The fleece for this yarn comes from Liberty Wool Farm in Palermo Maine.  This is the same flock that in years past provided a lovely group of fleeces from Cotswold Romney crosses.   Last spring there were fewer fleeces from Cotswold Romney crosses, but a lovely group of pure Cotswold fleeces, so, anyone who has been knitting with my 3-Ply Cotswold x Romney fingering weight, please consider using the pure Cotswold version instead.  Hopefully I will have a new batch dyed up in the next week or two. 

Yarn comes from the mill on cones - therefore the first step of dyeing is skeining, and skeining, and skeining, and then building a fort with all of the piles of skeined yarn. 

I am always adding new colors and yarns.  One day I am going to be truly organized and start sending out an email newsletter.  In the meantime, If you would like to be added to my hypothetical email newsletter list, please send me an email at uptonyarns@gmail.com with "newsletter" or similar in the subject line.   I am "uptonyarns" on Instagram, and "puffling" on Ravelry.  Upton Yarns also has a Facebook page, which I am terrible at updating but always resolving to be better about.  I am not terribly consistent in my social media presence, but I am trying to be better about that, and I love hearing about what other people are up to knitting wise. And I love photos!

Happy Knitting,

Sarah 

My Day Job - Tuesday

I had a lovely idea of writing a serious of posts about a whole week in my day job, and all of the silliness therein, but clearly I write too slowly to carry that off, and anyway I’m home now (I arrived home on the evening of January 25th, just in time for the blizzard) but I managed to write most of the next post before I left the boat, and so I am going to post it anyway.  And even better, now that I am back in the land of reasonable internet, I can include photos. 

Tuesday. 

Still cranky about the previous day, and finding myself with a free few hours in the evening (I usually make repairs to guest cabins during guest mealtimes, but this evening there were no repairs to be made) I decided to rebuild a spare generator raw water pump, at least in part because the “stupid naturalist jerk can’t rebuild a raw water pump” (to put into words the amorphous annoyance that I was still in the grips of). Which is not the most grown-up reaction I will admit, but it was also work that needed to happen, and work that I really enjoy, so I told the deckhands that I’d be down in the engine room in case anyone needed me (deckhands, officers, and engineers all carry hand-held radios with us when we’re working, but I can never hear mine when I’m in the engine room) and set to it. 

This is a raw water pump for one of our generators

So, what on earth is a raw water pump? (Feel free to scroll past this bit)

Your car’s engine is cooled by via the circulation of coolant.  The coolant must in turn be cooled, otherwise it would get hotter and hotter until it was no longer able to cool your engine and your engine would then overheat.  In your car this is done by sending coolant to the radiator, basically a big flat plane that exposes as much coolant at a time to as much air as possible.  For reasons of stability and propulsion, engines rooms on boats are generally as low in the boat as possible and fairly contained.  There is no way to get enough air circulation in most engine rooms to cool the coolant from one engine, let alone the four that we have (two main propulsion engines and two generators).  So instead most marine systems use sea water to cool their coolant.  There are two general ways to do this.  The first involves piping sea water to the marine version of a radiator, referred to as the “heat exchanger”, which is basically a big tank filled with little tubes.  The coolant flows through the little tubes, which are immersed in sea water that is constantly being pumped through before being pumped overboard again, a few degrees warmer than when in started.  The second involves putting a network of little tubes into a protective housing on the outside of the hull, through which the coolant can then be circulated, and cooled as the boat moves through the water.  Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages, and I’m sure there are whole forums devoted to arguing over which system is better for which circumstance, but that is a much longer post.   We have heat exchangers, which means that we also have a pump that pumps sea water past the coolant. When sea water is used for cooling it is often referred to as “raw water”, hence the “raw water pump”.  In our particular situation, the drive shaft of the raw water pump slots into a set of teeth on the coolant pump, and from time to time the teeth on the coolant pump wear down a bit and grind the shaft of the raw water pump smooth, and eventually the raw water pump stops turning, and then the generator engine overheats and shuts down (and then an alarm goes off, the emergency generator kicks on, and the nearest engineer dashes down to the engine room to very quickly start whichever generator was offline at the moment). 

tldr: the drive shaft on our raw water pumps wears down and sometimes needs to be replaced. 

Raw water pump drive shafts, bad and new.  Note how worn the teeth are on the one on the left.  This is not good. 

Rebuilding a raw water pump for a generator is one of those rare utterly satisfying engineering projects, being right in the sweet spot of complicated-but-not-too-complicated, and a-little-messy-but-not-too-messy, and heavy-but-not-too-heavy.  The pump housing is about the size of a cantaloupe, and bronze.  The whole thing weighs about twenty pounds, which is heavy enough to feel like a real project, but not so heavy as to be really annoying.  Replacing the shaft requires also removing the impeller, shaft seal, slinger, lip seal, and the bearing, which in turn is held in place by two snap rings.  Strange tools are required, like snap ring pliers, and a large impeller puller.  And to remove or replace the bearing one must employ a mallet.  

The grabby claw looking thing is an impeller puller.  As I tighten it, I am slowly forcing the shaft to slide out of the bearing. 

In short, rebuilding the raw water pump is as pleasing a craft project as anything I get up to at home.  On a boat it is made even better by the fact that the work bench is on the other side of the water-tight door, in a section of the boat that only engineers, and once an hour during their engine rounds the deckhands, ever enter.  True privacy is almost impossible to find on the boat and the spot by the workbench is the closest to real privacy that I have found on board.  Which meant that while I worked away with my obscure tools, listening to music that I chose, I also danced like a loon.  And sang along.  Loudly (because engines were running, and who was going to hear?).  

And at the end of the evening I had a rebuilt raw water pump, one more item completed on my ever growing ‘to-do’ list, and a restored sense of humor.  I feel incredibly lucky for my day job. 

My Day Job - Monday

Up late the night before (I didn’t get back to bed until 0330) I was already in a somewhat cranky mood by the time the wrong person called me the wrong thing while I was drinking my first cup of coffee up on the sun deck and pondering my life choices in that slow sleepy way that happens when one really wants to go back to bed.   With the distance of time, and a lot of coffee, I know that he meant nothing by it other than the vague friendliness that all people who deal in customer service routinely express to those around them, and yet.  And yet.  And yes, in retrospect I let it bother me more than I should, because it was a little thing, but it was also just one little moment in a constant stream of little moments, and any woman who has ever worked in a mainly male field will know exactly what I am talking about, and will also understand the subsequent stages of righteous anger, then minimizing, then feeling silly, then defensive, and ultimately resigned, because seriously, it’s not as bad as it could be, and what else can one expect? 

One of the naturalists* has taken to calling me “Sarita linda”. For those unfamiliar with the diminutive in Spanish, “Sarita” is the diminutive form of Sarah, basically “little Sarah”.  A college friend’s Colombian born mother used to call me “Sarita” and I felt honored, because she was one of my favorite people, and coming from her it conveyed a level of care and closeness. It is utterly inappropriate coming from a male not-quite-coworker who is maybe ten years older than me.   And “linda” (pretty) has nothing to do with me, my position on this boat, or my relationship to him.  I am the assistant engineer.  Though I never make a point of it, I hold a rank equivalent to the Chief Mate.  There are only two people on this boat who can order me to do anything and make it stick, everyone else has to ask.  We are a friendly bunch, not the kind of boat where anyone orders anyone to do anything,  but it still means something that I have three stripes on my epaulets (worn once a week during officer introduction, then quickly put away in favor of my coveralls).  And what really makes me angry is that this guy (and the Panamanian line handlers we bring on in the canal who flirt and call me “Princessa”, and the refrigeration tech in Alaska and a host of others) see me first and foremost as just some chick to be talked down to.  It’s exhausting.  And I find myself thinking about what I’m wearing (full coveralls if I’m working, long loose canvas pants and a t-shirt when I’m just waking up) and how any of that could possibly make it seem like I would take well to being called “pretty little Sarah”, and then I get angry because that way lies victim blaming a burqas and if these guys are going to see me as less than fully human why can’t they see me as merely an extension of the boat, which is how I feel when I’m feeling less than fully human. 

I long for a book written by a woman in a similar position.  I long for the voice of the slightly older, slightly wiser woman who knows what it feels like to be the only woman holding a position of authority amongst a group of men.  There seems to be a flourishing lately of books written by women who head out somewhere, alone, to find themselves.  This is great, as far as it goes, but I have gone out, alone, to find myself and I find that my problems these days lie mainly in other people. 

So I lost the rest of the day, and much of the next, in rumbly grouchy thoughts about such things.  One of the things I love most about working on boats is that one quickly becomes one’s position, and that eventually one’s gender becomes as relevant as one’s hair color, nothing more than a descriptor.   It never fully goes away, but I can be “Assistant Engineer”, “Sarah”, “Female” as opposed to “Female”, “Sarah”.  Luckily, the second mate who is on at the moment is also female, and also worked her way up on tall ships, and also very much understands the feeling of being female in a mainly male environment, so I vented a bit to her in the slightly coded language** that women use when they are angry about endemic low level sexism, but also can’t come out and make a big deal about it, and it didn’t make me feel better exactly, but it made me feel less alone, and very grateful for it.*** 

*In addition to “crew” (the people necessary to take care of the boat and physical needs of the guests - mates, engineers, hotel manager, purser, cooks, deckhands, stews) we carry also carry “staff”, a group of naturalists, photo instructors, and a wellness specialist, who take care of the entertainment and education of the guests.  The relationship between staff and crew is generally cordial, but an essay unto itself. 

** And that’s the other maddening thing about endemic low level sexism - no one wants to be seen as a whiner, or as someone who can’t take a joke, and no one wants to hurt the feelings of their male co-workers, and so even to other women in private conversation we use coded language that can be quickly walked back.  It’s one thing if the problem is from people outside the boat - it is understood that the stews and (female) bartender will take bags full of trash to the aft companionway rather than all the way to the trash locker when we are in the Canal because going to the trash locker means walking past, and maybe through, the group of Panamanian line-handlers on the fantail, but when the problem is a co-worker things become far more complicated.  

*** I very nearly did not post this, because now that my temper has cooled a bit I find myself in the stage of “minimizing/denial” and don’t want to sound like I’m whining or turning a few offhand comments into a bigger problem then they are, because hey, it could be way worse.  And I’m disappointed in myself for that reaction.  So I’m posting it. 

My Day Job - Sunday

At some point very early on Sunday morning we hauled back the anchor and made our way to an anchorage off of Barro Colorado Island in Lake Gatun, where we anchored again.  Before the creation of the locks the area that became Barro Colorado Island was just a patch of anonymous high ground. As the waters rose after the locks were built various animals fled higher, and in 1920’s the Smithsonian built a research station there to study the newly isolated flora and fauna of the island.  We stop by whenever we are in the canal so that guests can go for hikes or take zodiac cruises around the island.  On Sunday mornings I take the opportunity for quiet and semi-decent internet to call home before work.  According to Sam, if one looks at Barro Colorado Island on Google Earth and zooms in a bit, one can see the Sea Lion at anchor.  We are the blue hulled mid-sized cruise ship with racks of yellow kayaks on the lido deck. 

To back up a little bit, because until I started traversing it once a week I only had the vaguest idea of what the canal actually was, a brief explication of the structure of the Panama Canal: 

There are two ways to make a canal.  The first is to basically dig a big ditch to connect two bodies of water, so that boats may traverse it basically at sea level - this is how the Suez Canal was originally built, and this is what everyone was hoping could also be done in Panama.  The problem down here is that the spine of mountains that start down in Tierra Del Fuego and end somewhere in northern Alaska continue, though much much lower, through Panama.  In the area where the canal was built they are more like medium sized hills, but they were enough of an impediment to building a sea level canal that for a while it looked impossible that a canal would ever be built.  Enter plan B, a system of locks that would raise boats 90 ft to save having to dig down as far.  

On the Caribbean side heading south one encounters the Gatun locks; basically a set of three steps to bring the boat up to level of the canal.  Then there is a large lake (Gatun) created by the building of the canal, then a very narrow ditch, which despite being deep enough for containers ships to traverse is still small enough that in Maine it would probably be one of those rivers no one could remember the name of (though if it were in Colorado it would be a major named geographical feature that would provide water for every state around it - the importance of rivers is relative).  Eventually one arrives at Pedro Miguel Lock, which is a single step down, since we are traveling south, then the relatively small Miraflores Lake (it normally takes us about fifteen minutes to travel through this bit) and then Miraflores Lock, which has two steps down, and then we are back at sea level on the Pacific side.   In order to stop at Barro Colorado Island we cross the canal is two days, though given how short it is (about 50 miles) we could easily do it in one.  

So, on Sunday morning we were anchored off of Barro Colorado Island.  Once I came on watch I attended to various small problems (I think I fixed the shower mixer and drip in 304 for instance) and preventative maintenance items (I have a weekly checklist) and then at some point we hauled back the anchor, tucked ourself in behind the boat we would be sharing locks with, and began making our way down towards Pedro Miguel Locks. 

Once we arrived at the lock I was once again on standby. I used the time to take a few photos of the container ship that was next to us, and once again marvel at the impossible scale of things. 

The main limiting factor to the size of modern container ships are the dimensions of locks built in 1914.   A ship can either be called  “Panamax” for measuring either the maximum length or width that will fit inside a lock in the Panama Canal.  The locks are 1050 feet long and 110 feet wide, so a ship can get away with being 973-ish feet long and  and 106 feet wide (the math is a bit fuzzy, because ships are not square, and the actual space inside the locks is not square, and the need to be able to use one’s propellers also confuse things and there are also problems with how deep a ship rides, but how much of a problem this is depends on the current water depth in the canal and how recently things have been dredged - apparently a few weeks ago a ship was stuck on one of the small sandbars that can form just outside of the locks and required the help of many tugs boats to get free).  The Dublin Express is Panamax in all dimensions.  Currently the canal is in the midst of an expansion project, with new sets of locks at both sides that will be able to accommodate much larger ships.  The new locks were supposed to be completed for the hundredth anniversary of the opening of the canal, i.e. 2014, but as usual with large construction projects there were delays and etc. and now no one is really sure when they will be completed, other than “next year?”.   The old locks will continue to handle all of the normal traffic, and the new locks will handle the “Post Panamax” traffic.

Once we were through the canal we anchored in the Flamenco anchorage in the harbor off of Panama City.   The chief engineer used the time to dash to shore to pick up a small part we needed to fix the galley air conditioner, and I attended to my evening chores (transferring fuel, running the O.W.S., topping up oil, checking bilge levels, peering suspiciously at various gauges).   The plan for the night involved getting underway at 0230, so I again knocked off a bit early, this time to take a nap before waking up at 0215, lighting off the main engines, and then waiting until we were three miles offshore to dump our slops tank. 

My Day Job - Saturday

I find myself somewhat reluctant to blog about the specifics of my day job.  We have enough of a PR department that the office may well be watching, and as the bulk of my job involves fixing things that break, a list of my daily activities, when read from afar and without context, may well make it sound like the boat is in a constant state of breaking (which is sort of true, in the sense that to work on a boat is to be in a constant battle with entropy, but we are also a well maintained boat, and if something is not broken I do not generally get to interact with it, aside from an occasional quick to make sure that it is still not broken).  But my day job is also a bit unusual, so absent the ability to upload all of the photos I have been taking of late, I thought that I might try to capture what a week out here is actually like. 

Saturday was turn day in Colòn.  Guests depart in the morning and controlled chaos ensues.  Stores arrive, cabins are turned inside out to clean, decks are scrubbed down, I try to attend to engineering issues in that cannot be easily attended to with guests on board.  Each of these activities gets in the way of other activities and generally all of this happens at once.  On this particular Saturday my work-list included: fixing this dripping faucet in cabin 301, opening the collision compartment to check on the gear oil for the bow thruster (the annual oil change was done before I came back onboard, and we’re still working air out of the system, so the tank needs to be topped up from time to time) running the emergency generator to make sure that all was well with it, restarting the walk-in freezer after it had been secured by some refrigeration techs, helping to bunker lube oil and offload waste oil, and a number of other small projects that I have already forgotten.   New guests were supposed to arrive starting at 1645, but this being Panama, none of them did up 1715, when they all arrived at once.  We needed to be off the dock at 1800, but we were unable to start bunkering water under 1700 because the boat down the dock was using the hose, and then the valve on the dock could not be opened, and then there was a long conversation between the chief engineer and the guard on the dock and various tools were employed and it was decided that we probably had enough water on board already but it would be nice to top up the tank and because I wasn’t necessary to any part of this conversation I helped bring luggage to guest cabins.   And then in very quick succession, the water was turned on, the tanks were topped up, the pilot arrived, potable water hoses were disconnected and stowed, I fired up the main engines and the forward generator for the bow thruster, the deck crew lifted the gangway and we were off.   After that it was fairly quiet until we arrived at the first lock in the canal (Gatun Locks, heading south - because we all think of the canal as running east-west, but really because of the shape of Panama it runs more north-south).  Our bow thruster is powered by our forward generator and can only be engaged or secured in the engine room (once it’s running it is controlled by a switch in the bridge).  For various reasons it can’t be left to run too long, but we need it to get into the locks and then to move between locks, and so for me the canal involves standing by, waiting for the order to engage or secure the bow thruster.  The second mate is a knitter, and was also spending our lock time standing by, so I decided that I could stand by just as well whilst knitting, and we had a lovely evening of knitting punctuated by quick dashes to the engine room (me) and answering the occasional operational question (her).  

After we cleared the locks, and I was cleared from standby, I went about my normal evening routine of transferring fuel (we have a fuel centrifuge to clean the fuel before it goes into our day tank) running the Oily Water Separator, and attending to any small issues that cropped up, including a condensation drip in 304.  The guests in 304 turned out to be from very nearby Portland, Maine,  and as we chatted we discovered many other points of contact in common, so while I couldn’t fix the condensation drip that night (it involved taking down a ceiling panel) we had a really lovely visit. 

There was nothing else terribly pressing that evening, so I knocked off a little early and made use of the exercise bike on the sundeck. By this point we were at anchor amongst a field of tankers and freighters and massive container ships, and as I peddled away in the still night air I pondered their contents and nationality and where they might be going and global trade generally, as one does.  I failed to come to any conclusions on the subject, beyond the obvious wonder at how much stuff gets moved about the globe. 

And that was Saturday. 

Bound for Costa Rica

We are through the Panama Canal (for this week at least, we’ll be back through at the end of next week) and bound for the cooler climbs of Costa Rica. 

The canal is just as surreal this year as it was last year. On each side there are the famous locks, but in between are miles of very narrow waterway, punctuated by wider lakes which seem like they could be anyway in the tropical world, until two very large freighters come around the corner and find themselves in a passing situation in a channel less than a boat length wide.  (It is very hard to judge scale in this photo, but trust me, these ships are HUGE). 

The locks have two lanes.  Part of the fun of the canal is watching the traffic in the other lane, taking photos, waving to their crew, or just marveling at how big a “Panamax” ship really is, and how entirely a ship can fill a lock chamber and still move.  

I have yet to figure out how to properly photograph at night, and the lighting at the locks provides its own challenges, plus the scale of things is always impossible to convey, but this stack of shipping containers is actually the stern of our lock buddy, the Panamax freighter Tokyo Express.  In the photos one can just make out the row of lights to the left of the lock house and stacks upon stacks of shipping containers - that is the rest of the ship. 

I have found myself lost in the maw of end of year inventory, in which I count every spare part and random fastener and provide a list to the office, carefully organized by account code.  Between four engines (two mains, two generators) and a myriad of other equipment, never mind the whole hotel department, we have a lot of spare parts, and a lot of fasteners, and a lot of random plumbing bits.  The end is not yet in sight, but it is giving me a chance to organize things a bit more around shipyard. 

At some point I will decide that I don’t care that it is too hot to knit down here and go back to working on a pair of gloves that I am designing using my 5-Ply gansey yarn, but for the moment I am getting my knitting fix by reading knitting blogs and sighing at patterns on Ravelry.  Two of my favorite bloggers recently posted about Sanquhar knitting, Kate Davies here, and TomofHolland here.  I am not quite brave enough to try my hand at designing my own Sanquhar gloves yet, but I am incorporating the genius little finger gussets into my next gansey glove pattern.

Wishing you all the happiest of holidays. 

***Our satellite internet is currently declining to allow me to upload my photos.  For those of you who follow me on Instagram, this is why I have stopped posting of late - our internet does not generally move quickly enough to upload photos, no matter how small, but sometimes I catch it on a good day.  I will try again in a day or so. 

Back to my Boat

I am back to my “day job”.  I’ll be on board the National Geographic Sea Lion until the end of January.  (Yarn orders will be mailed in my absence by my wonderfully supportive mother, who very much wishes that I would stop working on boats).

My last rotation aboard ended in the Port of LA, at the Al Larson Boat Shop.  Every year the boat spends about a month in yard where we can do more extensive maintenance and also refurbish guest cabins and other projects (like installing new carpet) that take time and can’t take place with guests on board.  Last year I was aboard for the entire time we were in shipyard; this year I skipped out pretty much the moment we got in.  Most people have a love/hate relationship with yard.  On the one hand, we can do all kinds of work without worrying about the impact it will have on guests and address problems that have been bugging us all year, on the other hand shipyards are dirty and noisy and disruptive to our daily lives.  I happen to like yard.  It is also incredibly strange to come back to a boat after it has been through yard.  We have new stuff. All kinds of new stuff.  And some things that were supposed to happen didn’t because of lack of time or money or enthusiasm for the project, and other things that were not planned for became necessary due to other unexpected events.   So I have spent the last few days trying to catch up and get to know my boat again. 

I met the Sea Lion in Costa Rica.  We will spend the winter traveling between Herradura, Costa Rica and Colon Panama, taking a week to make our way between, stopping off at various points of interests along the way, and transiting the Panama Canal once a week.  It's too hot to knit down here, but I still dream about yarn.

Salt Bay Mittlet Kits!

I am very pleased to announce that I've put together kits for my Salt Bay Mittlet pattern! Kits contain 3 skeins of my 3 Ply Coopworth, pattern, and a mini kit of stitch markers from BlueDogWorkshop.  At the moment they are available in very limited number, but I had so much fun putting them together that I hope to create more kits in the future.

A Belated Thank You

Thank you to all the folks who made the Highlands on the Fly knitting retreat so much fun!  I had a truly lovely time meeting so many enthusiastic fiber folk.  This was my first fiber retreat, and I can't wait for my next one.

During my Friday indigo dyeing demonstration, Deb Cunningham managed to capture the magical moments of transformation, when lueco indigo becomes indigotin as yarn is removed from the dye bath and exposed to oxygen.  

The white skein comes out of the dye bath a weird yellow green.  Over the course of the next 30 seconds or so as the indigotin reforms it darkens to a sky blue. Photo Credit Deb Cunningham.

And on Saturday vendors set up shop.  

I realized, as I attempting to creatively display my many yarns, that I have never actually seen all of my yarns in one place before.  I come home, dye a variety of colors and yarns, tag skeins, carefully bundle them into bags when they are dry, and then disappear back to the boat.  Sometimes I get a glimpse of the range of colors I work with when yarn is drying on the rack, but that is nothing compared to seeing yarn carefully laid out for display. 

A rainbow of 3-Ply Cotswold x Romney fingering weight.  I took this photo rather late in the day.  By this point I had sold out of at least four colors. 

I was very pleased to see how well my various colors work with each other.  It was truly wonderful to watch complete strangers poke through my yarn and play with color combinations.

I genuinely had a wonderful time!  Thank you. 

Also, at the behest of the far more socially savvy Sarah Hunt, Upton Yarns is now on Instagram (as Upton Yarns). d

Come See Upton Yarns (and many others) at Highlands on the Fly – October 24-25th

Upton Yarns will be hitting the road and heading up to the New England Outdoor Center in Millinocket, Maine on October 24th for the Highlands on the Fly knitting retreat, hosted by the wonderful Sarah Hunt of Fiber Trek (Swenstea on Ravelry).  In addition to vending, I will be doing a sort of rotating indigo dyeing demonstration, by which I mean that I will be working with my indigo pot for an hour or two, while hopefully having interesting conversations about indigo dyeing with anyone who stops by to watch (I get really excited about indigo).  It may end up blurring the line between “demonstration” and “performance art”, but then, what doesn’t?

In addition to my normal yarn inventory, I will be bringing along a number of never-before-offered-for-sale small batches of yarns, including:

Worsted weight Corriedale x Montedale

Fingering weight Corriedale

And swatched

And some of the mountain of Romney > Cotswold fingering weight yarn that I dyed the last time I was home.

It's somewhere in this mess of yarn...

For more information, check out the Highlands on the Fly website, or if you are on Ravelry (and if you are a knitter with a computer, why are aren’t you on Ravelry?) join the Highlands on the Fly group. 

And I Have Circumnavigated the Lindblad Year

On September 16, 2013 I boarded a plane for the west coast.  On September 18, 2013, after a mad whirl through the Seattle office to sort out paperwork and uniforms and a last minute US Coast Guard required drug test, I woke up in a hotel room in Clarkston, Washington, looked out my window, and saw the National Geographic Sea Lion in person for the first time.  One year later we are back on the Columbia River (we spent a little longer in Alaska this year) and I have officially completed a year with the Sea Lion.  Back in the day when a sailor circumnavigated the globe they tattooed a rope and knot around their waists (this is part of a separate rant, once upon a time sailor tattoos had actually meaning, so that you could read a sailor’s career by their tattoos).  I haven’t circumnavigated by any stretch, but my year with Lindblad has taken me from Clarkston, Washington to Colon, Panama to Glacier Bay Alaska, now back to Clarkston, which should be worth something.

My first view of the National Geographic Sea Lion, seen from my hotel room in Clarkston, Washington.  

I took lots of photos of water

In dry-dock. Not her most flattering angle.

The view from Terminal Island, California.

Panama Canal

I saw bats with striped faces who make their own tents. 

And pepper - a spice that arguably changed the world.

Hermit crab

on a beach in Panama

trying to pretend it was just a shell

before it scampered away

There are lagoons in Baja, Mexico, where gray whales go to have their calves.  They were hunted there until 1966, and yet now, for reasons no one understands, some mother and calf pairs will come right up to small boats and the baby will play with the boats and the humans inside.  This is the first calf to approach us.  (I am in the red bandana.  The company arranged for a boat so the crew could go pat baby gray whales too.  And I have patted a baby gray whale, because the baby gray whale was interested in me.  Several of the crew kissed the baby gray whale, but that seemed a bit forward). 

And up to Alaska:

South Sawyer Glacier

A humpback whale skeleton, Bartlett Cove, Alaska (she was hit by a cruise ship - a cause of death for many humpbacks, though still not as big of a problem as fishing gear).

Steller Sea Lions

Heading south again:

A memorial post from Sgang Gwaii depicting a supernatural being that is a combination of killer whale and a wolf.  After a year of being cared for by a shaman, the skeleton of a high status person was put in a cedar box at the top of a memorial pole.  Most Haida villages were surrounded by memorial poles,  with ancestors keeping watch.  

The same hotel I stayed in last year, this time photographed from the upper deck of the National Geographic Sea Lion.

The Sea Lion has become a second home.  The various crews have become my boat family (as they say here).

I am incredibly lucky in my day job.  Thank you for a great year.

New Yarns, New Dye-space, Back in Alaska

Once again I have been home (for a full six weeks no less – though the time passed so quickly that I’m not sure I believe it) and now I am back on the boat, in Southeast Alaska – Misty Fjords National Monument to be exact. 

Back in June Sam and I moved from Newcastle Maine down to the comparatively big city of Portland Maine.  Our move from a house to a small apartment meant that dyeing in the kitchen, and worse setting up yarn drying racks everywhere, was no longer an option.  Luckily Portland has a vibrant fiber scene, and even better, a whole maker space devoted entirely to textiles and textile arts.  So, the Upton Yarns workspace has moved from my kitchen to a lovely bench and common work space at A Gathering of Stitches.  (And for anyone in the Portland area, A Gathering a Stitches also hosts a variety of classes in everything from dyeing to dressmaking – I want to take all of them).   I do not miss dyeing out of my kitchen one bit.  Not only is in the community at A Gathering of Stitches lovely and supportive, but at the end of the day I can walk away from my workspace in whatever state it happens to be in, rather than tidying it all away so it can go back to being a kitchen. 

My bench, before the dyeing began.

And by the end of my time home I had literally dyed up a mess of yarn.

A litteral mess of yarn.

As per usual, I completely underestimated the amount of time it takes to turn a finished skein of yarn into something I can actually post for sale (tagging yarn always takes longer than I remember) so some of the yarn in the above photo won’t be officially available until October.  But, I also have a number of new yarns which are currently available.

Gansey yarn spun from 2014 Buckwheat Blossom Farm Coopworth Fleece is available in two colors, Pomegranate (dye lot of 20 skeins) and Frederick Sound (two nearly identical dye lots of 20 skein each).

5 - Ply Coopworth Gansey Yarn in Frederick Sound

5 Ply Coopworth Gansey Yarn in Pomegranate

3-Ply Cotswold x Romney fingering weight yarns in Pine green, Natural white, and Pomegranate are back in stock.

And I have a new base yarn.  There are four light gray Cotswold x Romney crosses at Liberty Wool farm.  I had their fleeces spun to the same fingering weight yarn as my other 3-Ply Cotwsold x Romney yarn, but due to the differences in exact cross, or just individual variation in sheep, this yarn is a little bit loftier and a little bit softer than my other 3-Ply Cotswold x Romney yarn.  When dyed, the darker grays in the yarn produce a slightly heathered effect.  I’m calling the yarn by the descriptive but clumsy “3-Ply Cotswold x Romney Silver Base: fingering weight”.  It is currently available in Granite (undyed), Garnet (red) and Dark Indigo (yup, dark blue).

Garnet

Granite

Dark Indigo

I am currently knitting up a pair of Beth Brown Reinsel’s Compass Rose Sanquhar gloves using Granite and Dark Indigo.  I could not be happier with the pattern or with the yarn.

Beth Brown Reinsel's Compass Rose Sanquhar gloves in 3-Ply Cotswold x Romney Silver Base fingering weight in Granite and Dark Indigo

And in other news, on my last rotation to Alaska I foolishly failed to pack my zoom lens.  Thankfully this rotation I remembered it.  A few days ago we were in Glacier Bay, just off the aptly named “Gloom Knob” spying on mountain goats. 

A mountain goat on Gloomy Knob

Scenes from Alaska

As it turns out (and I’m sure this will surprise no one) South East Alaska is beautiful beyond words.  I have never been to Alaska before, and had no real notions of what to expend beyond “kind of like Maine but bigger, and no lobsters”, which is fair, though a bit of an understatement.  South East Alaska is a temperate rainforest, with snow-capped mountains continuing to the waters edge.  And there are glaciers. And icebergs.  And sea otters - a group of which is properly called a “raft” and when they are not in a hurry their preferred mode of locomotion is to roll on their backs and paddle with their hind feet while they rest their front paws on their chests to better watch whatever they are twiddling away from.  Thanks to the sea otters, there are also giant kelp forests (because the sea otters eat sea urchin and sea stars, both of which are such aggressive eaters of sea weeds that without the sea otters to keep their population in check, they eat the sea floor clean).  The giant kelp occasionally breaks free of the bottom, floating free in giant rafts of its own, parts of which occasionally get sucked into our various sea water systems (for flushing the toilets, or cooling the engines) which means that I am cleaning sea strainers more often than I would like, so in a grand, ecologically connected way, the presence of sea otters is actually making my life a little more difficult, but I love them anyway.

Once a week we motor up into Glacier Bay to spy on mountain goats and glaciers.  Yesterday was Glacier Bay Day.  In the afternoon, whilst fixing a door handle, I was nearly overwhelmed by a perfect moment of really loving my day job.

I had all the parts I needed to fix the door (not always the case on a boat with a zillion different parts, potentially sourced from hardware stores in five countries).

And when I peered around the door, this was my view.

Now this is a lovely view, but it pails in comparison to where we had been earlier in the day.

After lunch we noodled up to Johns Hopkins Glacier.

In the ice fields at the base of the glacier we saw seals sunning themselves on the icebergs (in a stunning show of poor decision making, I failed to pack my zoom lens on this rotation – so you have to squint a bit, and trust me that those darker blobs are indeed a large number of seals).

Sea birds (I think these might be kittywakes) also took advantage of the icebergs.

And then closer to the glacier we had a stunning view of this fine mountain, sporting its own fine glacier.

And on a very silly note, last week the Stews (short for “stewards” or more often “stewardesses”, they wait tables and clean guest cabins, and in the absence of ships officers, are in charge of life rafts) had a girl night (invitation not exclusive to girls - basically the idea was mud mask, nail painting, and giggling over attractive members of one's preferred gender).  One of them painted my nails.  I think they came out quite well. 

Scenes from Two Days of Travel

I am roughly here at the moment, here being somewhere north of Sitka, Alaska.

I am huddling on the upper deck in the companionway between a couple of cabins because it is the only outdoor space that is currently dry enough for me to have a computer out.  We are anchored in a small bay, and when I look up I see a small spit of tree covered land, mostly lost in fog.  I can hear a bald eagle or two out there somewhere.  The fog is making our satellite internet connection unhappy, so by the time I post this, we will probably be elsewhere.

Many years ago I came across a proverb in a book about traveling in Afghanistan: “the soul can only move as fast as a camel walks”.  I have no idea what culture the proverb properly belongs to, but the sentiment fits my understanding of travel, and that weird numb feeling that comes from too much time on airplanes.

I left from Fort Meyers on Friday (we were on a family vacation).

And took a flight from there to Atlanta,

The inevitable sprint through the Atlanta airport due to a late arrival meant that I missed the chance for a photograph.

Then to Seattle

Then Juneau

Then finally into Sitka (by then is was actually mostly dark – we’re still far enough south and early enough in June that that the sun does set, but the glow never leaves the horizon) and the boat.  I meant to get a lovely photo of the boat alongside the dock, but was in enough of a rush here that I only got a photo of the fuel dock from the boat instead. 

This is really a more accurate view of my life aboard anyway.  I am trying to be better about it, but I very rarely leave the boat during my time working on it, so I actually very rarely get to see what she looks like from land. 

Leaving Sitka

And finally, last night.  We spotted a small pod of whales, and spent a lovely evening bobbing slowly about the bay trying to get a better view of them, but really just enjoying the view.  My soul, confused by the fast pace of the travel from Florida to Alaska, is slowly catching up now that we are moving at a more civilized ten knots, interspersed with long afternoons at anchor while the guests kayak.

Winter: A Sanquhar Glove Pattern

I was planning a cool, professional,  grown-up blog post in my head, but the thing is BETH BROWN REINSEL designed a glove patter using my yarn, and IT WAS PUBLISHED IN THE LATEST ISSUE OF KNITTING TRADITIONS MAGAZINE (sorry for the yelling - this is exciting).

Let me try again.

I always look forward to the latest issue of Knitting Traditions magazine, but this spring, in amongst the usual, interesting, assortment of articles about the kind of obscure  knitting traditions that fill my heart with geekish knitterly joy, and patterns that have me plotting new types of yarn that I will someday produce, there is a pattern designed by Beth Brown Reinsel using my yarn.  Beth designed a charming pair of Sanquhar gloves, complete with finger gussets, using my 3-Ply Cotswold x Romney fingering weight yarn.

I was anxious to begin knitting my own pair, but I was unprepared for how addictive this pattern is.  I started knitting them during my last rotation on the Sea Lion, and during our positioning trip from Costa Rica to Baja (no guests) a co-worker (who crochets) and I decided that when other crew members took smoking breaks, we were entitled to take crafting breaks.  I knit most of the left glove in cigarette-break-length bursts, sometimes during rough weather.  There are a few mistakes (knitting on the sly does not encourage great care, never mind rough seas) but I am thrilled with the pattern and the gloves.  As always with Beth's patterns, the directions are clear and informative.

For those interested in learning Sanquhar knitting from a DVD, Beth has created a DVD available at her etsy shop here.  

Beth designed the pattern using pine green and white.   I happened to have had a couple off-length evergreen skeins saved for my own use, so I went ahead and used evergreen instead, and I quite like how they are turning out.   The effect is a bit more spruce trees in winter than white pines in winter, but I am already looking forward to wearing them next winter (a ridiculous thought, given that I'm not even sure that we've really had spring up here yet).

Fiber Trek

I have always been a fairly solitary person, and a fairly solitary knitter, so one of my favorite things about this whole “starting a yarn business” adventure is discovering the wider community of knitters, and the myriad of ways they engage with their craft. Sarah Hunt, in addition to starting and hosting a yarn retreat (at which I will be vending and perhaps even teaching this fall) is filming a travel show about the larger fiber community, showcasing every aspect of fiber production and use, from farmers to owners of small spinning mills to designers and knitters.  At the moment she is focusing on the fiber scene in Maine, though I suspect as her project grows she will branch out to other states (though the Maine fiber scene is large and varied, so it may take a while).  Check out her buzzreal here, and her blog here.  I am very much looking forward to getting back to the land of fast internet so that I can catch up on her latest posts!

The Knitting Museum

Marsha White of the Knitting Museum has listed Upton Yarns as a resource! My yarn is sharing the same page as un-spun Icelandic from Schoolhouse Press! Seriously, for a knitting geek in love with traditional and obscure forms of knitting, there is no higher honor.  I am giddy!  Marsha also put together a really nice page about my yarn. The Knitting Museum is a wonderful website devoted to traditional knitting in all its forms, including links to museum collections, designers, teachers, and others in the traditional knitting world.  If you have a few hours to spare (or days) it is very much worth poking around.  Marsha is doing a really great service for the traditional knitting world!

Yarn! Lots of New Yarn (and now I am back on a boat).

My time at home was lovely and cold and way too short.  It was also very productive (on the yarn front, though not on the blogging front…). I returned home to find the fleeces I sent off to the mill in the fall returned to me in the form of lovely yarn on cones.  A storm of dyeing ensued.  Yarn took over every available surface in the house, the bathtub was pressed into service for drip-drying, and a giant drying rack took up the prime space in front of the woodstove (much to Nell’s annoyance).

I experimented with new colors and dyed new lots of older colors (which sometimes resulted in new colors).

Above, “Light Butternut”, “Rosewood”, and “70% Cacao”.   70% Cacao is actually a fleece from one of Liberty Wool Farm’s Romney rams (he is or will be responsible for the “Romney” portion of the “Cotswold x Romney” yarn).  I had his fleece spun to the same weight as my other 3-Ply fingering weight yarn.

This is “Aspen”, a lovely, lively green, but not quite the “Cress” that I was aiming for. (Natural Dyeing is not an exact science).

I am back at my “day job” on the boat.  Last night we finished our transit of the Panama Canal and currently we are bound for Isla Iguana for a bit of snorkeling.  As my very slow internet connection allows I will be updating the “yarn” section of this site to reflect the work of the last few weeks.  In the meantime, if you would like to order any yarn, please email me at uptonyarns (at) gmail.com.  My internet connection is sometimes a bit spotty on the boat, but I can usually check it at least once a day.  Yarn is being shipped out in my absence.

Scenes from life aboard.

Christmas and New Years were working holidays for the crew of the Sea Lion.   Some of the stews tried to make things a little more festive around the crew spaces by making and hanging traditional Christmas decorations.  I wanted to hug them all for it, especially for the gem they hung outside the door to the engine room.

Just in case it isn't quite clear, they used paper from the office recycling bin to make paper snowflakes.  I think this is the perfect metaphor for our Christmas.

Not quite two weeks later we are just beginning our second round trip from Colón, Panama to Herradura, Costa Rica and return.  This is beginning to feel oddly similar to the ferries in Maine, with no cars and a strangely long run.

Two days ago we docked at a container dock in Colón.  Between Colón and the Port of LA where we spent our annual yard period I feel like I am becoming more acquainted with industrial marine infrastructure than I ever expected to be.

But it has not all been work.  Most mornings I have managed to spend a little time up on the sundeck with my first cup of coffee and my tahkli, much to the fascination/consternation of guests and crew.  I spend most of my free time immersed in the world of fiber arts/crafts, and I forget that the rest of the world does not do the same.