A Few Photos from Southeast Alaska

We are alongside in Prince Rupert BC this morning to clear customs and let our guests explore.  I ran away for a few minutes to make use of the (much faster) internet on the dock. 

We were in Tracy Arm on Thursday and I got a few last iceberg shots (I'll probably post more from my "real camera" when I get home at the end of September).  

When I was home  splurged on a camera with a dive housing.  I need a bit more practice, but I'm hooked. 

This sea pen is sadly not quite in focuse, but the shape is so lovely that I had to post it anyway. 

And Now for a Bit of Catching Up (or, another round up) - Also, Coopworth Gansey Yarn Update.

FIrstly; because I have been arguing with my newsletter software, for those of you who expressed interest in the 2016 Coopworth Gansey yarn, I am pleased to report that it is back from the mill and sitting in my yarn room waiting for me to come home (which I shall do at the end of September).  I will be sending out individual emails to people on the Coopworth Gansey yarn wait list before I start dyeing to clarify orders and etc, so start thinking about yardage.  Hopefully I will eventually managed to send out a newsletter to folks on the wait list.

I have been back on the Sea Lion for two weeks now, which means it is just about time to write the round-up of what I got up to whilst on my last rotation home.  But first, while my internet remains somewhat limited, I have been doing my best to regularly post to Instagram, where I go by @uptonyarns.  My photos from my time on the boat are generally travel related more than yarn related, but I will admit that I've become a bit addicted to the ease of Instagram, and have taken to using it to showcase that one new dyelot of yarn that I dyed just before I left for the boat that doesn't warrant a whole newsletter (for instance).

While I was home this time I had the good fortune to be invited to vend at the the second session of the Tidal Tours Retreat in Machaisport Maine hosted by Jodi of One Lupine Fiber Arts and Sarah of the FiberTrek podcast.  The retreat was based out of a house with one of the loveliest views I have seen in a while, and I admit that I got a bit sidetracked (and then totally failed to photograph it, because yarn-ish things were also happening). 

I am looking forward to vending at the Highlands on the Fly retreat at the New England Outdoor Center in October. 

After the Tidal Tours Retreat I followed Sarah back up to her lovely cottage on the pond in for a long weekend of catching up and making things.  Sarah mainly sewed, and I took over part of her kitchen and yard to dye indigo. 

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She also filmed a segment with me for a further episode of her podcast, but I am much happier behind the camera and I fear I may have rambled unto incoherence.  Hopefully she got something useable, but I may ask for a second try.

From there it was back to Worcester, where it was so hot that even the candle in candle holder above our mantle seemed to give up.

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But I braved the warm temperatures and kept my dye pot anyway, dyeing quite a bit of my 3 Ply Cotswold fingering weight (suitable for Sanquhar) for Beth Brown Reinsel. 

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I believe that she is turning some of it into kits, so, if you are interested, please get in touch with her.  You will also be able to find her this winter at the Spa yarn retreat in Freeport, Maine.  I hope to have Cotswold back in stock for my own purposes sometime this winter.

And without triggering my superstitions by saying too much, I am very excited about a couple of things happening this fall.  Very excited.  Fingers crossed.

Back from a very lovely knitting retreat

I had a lovely time at the Tidal Tours 2016 knitting retreat!  

My shop inventory is up to date.   

My computer alas did not enjoy the travels as much as I did, and until I can make a run to the computer doctor on Saturday I am reduced to trying to manage the website from my phone, which is about as frustrating as one might expect.  

Sigh.  

Selling yarn in person 7/22/16

I will be vending yarn at the Tidal Tours Island of Wool yarn retreat on Friday, July 22.  I'm bringing most of my inventory including knitting kits and BFL DK weight, so if you've been eyeing any particular color way just a heads up that it may not be available after Friday morning.   (The lovely BFL fleeces from Two Sisters farm are off to the mill, and 2016 BFL should be arriving by the fall, so if you do miss out on a colorway  let me know and I'll make sure to dye more once I get the base yarn back). 

Home!

Much as I love my job, there is nothing quite as wonderful as my first week home.

This time, amongst many other things, I slept late (okay, as late as Nell would let me) took long walks (starting later than Nell would have liked, but far earlier than I would have liked) and raided my inventory for more 3 Ply Romney > Cotswold so that I could keep working on Fantoosh.

I love the color of milkweed flowers, and the smell is intoxicating,  but I never realized until I looked at this photo how much they resemble something a special effects department for a creepy sci-fi movie would create.  Huh.  Let's just enjoy the color and move on. 

Nell, patiently waiting while I photographed the now-creepy-seeming milkweed flowers.

I have been living the life of six weeks on the boat, six weeks home for nearly three years now, and one would think that I would have packing down to a science by this point, but one would be wrong.  Packing for the boat generally involves me semi-resentfully throwing things at the last possible moment into luggage that I never quite managed to unpack, pausing only to consider whether I am going to Alaska (and will therefore need sweaters and long underwear) or Costa Rica (shorts).  My knitting gets a little more consideration, but only a little.  I have several project bags that contain short skeins of cone-ends and yarn seconds and gloves that I will someday (maybe this rotation on the boat?) type up the patterns for.  Into those project bags I will generally throw yet more yarn seconds and cone ends from whatever batch of yarn I was working with during my time home, with the intention that I will swatch and maybe design (and write up) another glove/mittlet pattern.  (I am coming to resent gloves and mittlets). This system has worked okay so far, though I wish I could be more organized about the whole thing. 

Except. 

I left for my last rotation on the boat thinking that I had about three skeins worth of 3 Ply Romney > Cotswold in Sitka squirreled away in my project bags.  Believing this to be true, I started my Fantoosh knowing that I probably wouldn't have enough knitting time to get though more than two-ish skeins. For my first three weeks aboard I merrily worked through my first Fantoosh skein, enjoying the pattern and the result greatly.  And then, down to my last nubbin of yarn I calmly searched through my project bags, looking for the next skein of yarn that I knew was there. 

That little nubbin of yarn was the end of what I had on board

It was not there. 

Instead, I found a complete-but-for-the-last-two-rows-of-the-thumb mittlet based on the original gates of one of the locks in  the Panama Canal, knit out of the yarn I was looking for. I remember knitting the thing, but I really thought I had only gotten halfway up the palm.  Apparently there was some fugue state knitting in Panama (which happens - I am a stress knitter). 

And then I remembered what happened to the other skein. 

Somewhere off the coast of Costa Rica. 

Not visible in the above photo: the carefully wound ball of 3 Ply Romney > Cotswold in Sitka bobbing somewhere in our wake.  

I was sitting on the fantail taking a break after dinner, preparing to cast-on for the afore mentioned mittlet based on the lock gates, and I just dropped it. I dropped my perfectly wound ball of yarn onto the deck, and we were in just enough of a seaway that rather then stop, it rolled right under the rail and off the side of the boat.  I did not expect that to happen, but I should have known that losing a skein of yarn overboard at some point in my boat career was inevitable. 

I mourned my inability to continue Fantoosh  for a few days, and then I began a glove/swatch in honor of the Cordova Gansey Project. 

I very much enjoyed working on my little gansey glove, but at times I felt like the landscape was mocking my poor yarn planning.

I Wish I Was in Cordova, Alaska.

We are alongside in Petersburg, Alaska today and I have taken advantage of my morning off to run to a coffee shop and catch up a bit on all the Instagram postings from participants in the Net Loft's Fiber & Friends: Fisherfolk 2016 gathering . Much as I love Petersburg, and my job, I am so very bummed that I am not in Cordova this week sharing in all the gansey knitting, indigo dyeing, and general crafting. 

So, hello to all of you in Cordova at the moment.  For those of you on Instagram #cordovaganseyproject is full of gorgeous ganseys, and #fiberandfriends2016fisherfolk is likewise a tag to check out. 

The Net Loft commissioned a run of my Straw's Farm Island Sheep Gansey yarn.  If you are interested in working with gansey yarn spun from Maine island sheep, please buy through the Net Loft first, but if you have a color way in mind, or the color you want is sold through, please get in touch - I have a bit more of undyed yarn at home, which I will begin working with again during the middle of July. 

A Very Overdue Craft Roundup

In amongst all the farm visits I actually managed to get a fair bit of crafting done, though as usual I let myself be lazy about blogging. 

First up, I worked up a few more dye lots of my Straws Farm Island Sheep gansey yarn for the Netloft’s Cordova Gansey Project.  For this batch I experimented with larger skeins, and found that I actually quite enjoy working with them.  Anyone interested in this yarn should contact Dotty at the Netloft (and anyone interested in knitting ganseys should check out her site and the Cordova Gansey Project on principle).  

I let myself play with the darker blue end of the spectrum

While my indigo vat was in use anyway I decided to start messing around a bit with shibori.  I’ve only dyed the one piece so far, but I am very pleased with the result.  I will definitely be exploring this a bit more. 

 Next, for Christmas this year we received a generous Amazon gift certificate from a family member and with that in hand we decided to finally buy the sewing machine that we had been eyeing for months.  It arrived somewhere around the middle of my break, when the piles of indigo dyed gansey yarn were taking over every available craft space (and crafting moment) so it sat in its box, abandoned, until I returned home in April, at which point I very bravely opened it up and set to re-learning how to use a sewing machine.  

I have can’t explain why exactly, given that I was a fairly competent user of sewing machines in high school, but for some reason I find myself intimidated by sewing and sewing machines.  It may have something to do with all the beautiful handmade clothes on my Instagram feed: something that I used to do for a lark now comes with Standards, and The Right Way to Do Things, which always piques the interest of my internal, merciless, Editor of All Things Craft.  Once she starts paying attention, seemingly simple tasks become fraught with Great Import and I find myself ripping back rows and rows to address mistakes that only I can see.  My internal editor does make me better at craft generally, but she also kind of sucks the fun out of doing them.  I am working at achieving a balance, wherein I let her know that I appreciate her critical eye, but could she please just shut up sometimes and let me have fun.  We’ll see how that goes…. 

Anyway, I began to reacquaint myself with the sewing arts by tackling Grainline Studio’s Stow Bag.   My internal editor would like to point out a few wonky seams and some less than skillful use of bias tape, but I am overall quite pleased by the results. (I’ve also never sewn with bias tape before, so yay new skill!).  As a project bag the Stow Bag is everything I could want - simple, easy to knit out of, with just enough pockets to hide the fiddly little notions that tend to collect in the bottom of my project bags.  I am planning to make quite a few more when I get home this time, to keep practicing those new skills before I move on to clothing (gulp! maybe even involving fabric that I have dyed!). 

And then, as noted in my last post, I finally made my peace with the slightly rumpled ribbon on the button band of my Epistrophy by Kate Davies, which I then wore quite proudly to the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival.

As always my rotation home went waaayy too quickly.  I am already plotting all the crafty things I want to try when I get home in July.  

Spring is for Farm Visits

I spend much of my winter in Central America (very warm, when my New England raised self should be cold) and much of my summer in Southeast Alaska (requiring long underwear and wool hats in July) and every six weeks I get to go home and experience the seasons in the order I expect them to be in, before six weeks later I head back to the opposite climate.  The effect is a disorienting strobe light of seasons.   I leave home when the leaves have fallen and the first snows are nigh, spend six weeks with near constant sun, ninety per cent humidity, and an oppressive heat, then return home to find feet of snow.  Later I will leave home just as the leaves are spreading new green in the first breath of summer, only to work in a place where my knitwear will find heavy use, and return to find the leaves exhausted in the heat of high summer.   I never realized how much I was conscious of the turning of the seasons until I stopped being subject to them.  My major seasons are not longer “fall, winter, spring, summer” but “Columbia River, Central America, Baja, Alaska”.  The Maine farm calendar acts as counter point to the rhythm of my new style of year, at least as it pertains to sheep and wool.  Spring and early summer is the time for shearing, and therefore the time farm visits and wool buying.  

Because of my boat schedule I often miss the actual shearing day, but as soon thereafter as I can manage I appear on the farm, shipping boxes in hand.  ‘

This most recent rotation home I visited two farms.  Next rotation home I will visit two, or possibly three, more (and maybe even more than that, depending on how ambitious I feel and how much money I have left in the fleece buying/yarn processing account after the second two visits). 

First up, mere days after I arrived home, were the luminous Coopworth fleeces of Buckwheat Blossom farm.  In a very real way I owe the existence of Upton Yarns to Amy and her fleeces.  Years ago, when I was just settling back onto land (for the first time, or possibly the second depending on how one counts these things) and proudly joined the Buckwheat Blossom Farm Winter CSA (because that is the kind of thing people who live on land get to do) I came across a skein of Amy’s two ply Aran weight Coopworth yarn, in natural gray, sitting on the CSA pick-up table between jars of her home made kim chi and jars of whole milk yogurt from a nearby small dairy herd.  The yarn had a texture and color unlike anything I had ever seen, luminous and silky, with a strength in the hand. It was so unlike anything that I had ever seen before that I couldn’t even immediately identify it as wool.  Eventually I bought enough to knit myself an aran which has only improved with age and wear (original photos on Ravelry, where I go by “puffling”).  Her yarn inspired me to throw myself into researching breed specific yarns, which led quite naturally to natural dyes, which led to a crankiness as the dearth of local yarn (much easier to find now - I think a lot of us in Mid-Coast Maine were feeling a similar frustration at the time, and reacted in similar ways) which led me to experiment a bit, and then buy a couple of fleeces from Amy and start Upton Yarns.   

So it is with a sense of gratitude and pride that I return every year to buy her fleeces, which I then send off to Stonehedge Fiber Mill to be spun into gransey yarn, and occasionally a 3 Ply DK weight.  Every year I find her flock a little larger, and her fleeces even more beautiful.   

Each of these bundles contains an individual, magical, fleece. Amy usually includes the name of the sheep that grew the fleece somewhere in the bundle as well, but most of the time Amy doesn't have to look at the name tag to recognize the former wearer. 

I went to the farm intending to photograph the whole fleece choosing process, but I was quickly overwhelmed by fiber enthusiasm and completely failed to be a proper photographer.  I arrived to find that Amy had already set out a selection of fleeces she thought might interest me, which of course they did.  

I managed one photo for Instagram purposes, which I also then sent to a friend of mine (Sarah of FiberTrek) to see if she wanted to share a fleece for handspinning, which we almost did before both of us remembered the size of our respective stashes.  (I added the fleece to the darker brown gansey yarn pile).  

Once the fleece had all been weighed and boxed up I went to meet her flock, who were clearly enjoying their summer hair cuts.

Amy still makes her own incredible aran weight yarn, which she sells at the winter farmers market in Brunswick.

photo credit - Sam Upton  Willy of Two Sisters Farm (on the right) and myself with a stack of boxes soon to be filled with fleece (on the left). 

Wise to my own failings as a photographer when fleece is involved, I brought Sam with me on my visit to Two Sisters Farm.   Willy keeps a large (by small farm standards) mixed flock of BFL, Northern Cheviot, and Scottish Blackface on one of the most quintessentially beautiful Maine farms I have ever had the pleasure of exploring.  I learned about her Scottish Blackface through the Maine Fiber grapevine, and initially approached her last year hoping to make use (somehow) of such interesting fleece.   I still haven’t quite figured out the best use for her Scottish Blackface (I’m working on a second experiment this year) but while I was looking at the Scottish Blackface I fell in love with her BFL, which makes a really lovely 3-ply DK weight.  

photo credit - Sam Upton

photo credit - Sam Upton

photo credit - Sam Upton - Not all the fleece makes it to the wool boxes - sometimes the sheep can't wait until shearing day to start getting rid of their winter coats. 

Kate Davie’s Epistrophy, knit with the BFL DK weight yarn spun from 2015 fleece,  in Aspen (lighter green) and Tongas (at the yoke). Buttons from Fringe Supply Company

I'm looking forward to my next most favorite time of the year, when all the fleece that I mailed out to Deb at the mill comes back to me as yarn.  I'm already dreaming of the colors I will get to play with. 

edited because I am "puffling" on Revelry, not "puffing" as autocorrect would have it. 

A Bit About Killer Whales (because we've been seeing quite a few of late)

I’m working on a roundup post about the farm visits/fleece buying, indigo dyeing, and general craftiness that I got up to whilst home on my last break from the boat, but when I sat down to start writing I found myself thinking about killer whales instead (probably because we’ve been seeing so many of them later).  

One of my favorite things about working on the Sea Lion is that on quiet days I can listen in on the talks given by our shipboard naturalists.   The naturalists rotate through according to their own irregular schedules, sometimes staying from two weeks, sometimes for six, and they often get to work on the other Lindblad boats as well, meaning that they also spend a lot of time on the Explorer (which travels to Antartica and Greenland amongst other places) working with other scientists and naturalists. This makes for a very free exchange of research and information mixed with experience, depending on the interests of the naturalists in question; a sort of ongoing informal conference. 

It feels like every time a new naturalist gives a talk some piece of my world changes just a bit.  We have been seeing lots of killer whales in the last few days, so I thought I would share what amounts to my notes from a talk given a few days ago. Apologies to Mike G. if I get anything wrong.

In addition various scars and life wear, individual killer whales can be identified by the saddle patch just behind their dorsal fin.  Researchers have been using this ability to recognize individuals and figure out who is related to who and where they go, in addition to all the other useful things one can do once one can track individuals.   For instance, on Tuesday as we left Petersburg we came across a group of killer whales that, using photos of saddle patches and a couple of whale indexes available on-line, Mike identified as belonging to the AG Pod.  In Puget Sound where researchers are watching killer whales every day, the life history of the three pods, J, K, and L, is quite well known.  Up in Alaska the information about individual whales is a bit spottier, but Mike was able to identify one male who was born in 1994 and last photographed in 2010. 

There appear to be as many as eight different species of killer whales world wide, three of which have ranges in Alaska.  To an untrained eye the different species look identical (which begs the question, how the whales tell each other apart? and how is “species” defined if the different killer whale species probably could interbreed if pressed, but apparently haven’t in tens if not hundreds of thousands of years for what amounts to cultural reasons?).  Of the species present in Alaska, one group eats mainly fish (“fish eaters” or “resident” whales) one group eats mainly marine mammals (“mammal eaters” or “transient” whales)  and one group hangs out mainly off-shore and eats sharks(off-shore killer whales).  

The existence of the off-shore, shark eating killer whales up-ends my mental image of the world.  Yes, killer whales are highly social, intelligent, mammals, but sharks are sharks are the nightmare of my childhood (I watched Jaws waaay to young) and finding out that they are eaten by killer whales should make me feel like the killer whales are eating the bogey man, but instead it only serves to make me more scared of killer whales

This may be the last thing many a harbor seal ever sees. 

But I am wandering. 

Of the three, fish-eating whales have been the most studied, because the pods in Puget Sound are fish-eaters.  The J, K, and L pods each “speak” different dialects, but when the pods are “speaking” to each other they use a fourth common dialect.  The dialects are all different enough that researchers in the Puget Sound can leave a hydrophone in the water and get a pretty good idea of who is coming and going and which pods are interacting even when they can’t see the whales themselves. 

A fish-eating pod consists of a matriarch and all of her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, both male and female.  Pods break up into smaller groups to feed, so you don’t always see the entire group. Females can live up to 80 years old, and go through menopause (!!!!!!!).  Males appear to only live to 40 or so, and the oldest male will often die within a year of the matriarch passing.  One theory for this is that males may actually be too big to be very efficient hunters.  Males don’t seem to fight each other for mating rights, but the females may find larger males more attractive, and so ungainly large males may be the result of sexual selection.  Without the matriarch to help them hunt, large males may not be able to to keep themselves going. 

(Related to this, killer whales will catch food for pod members who are heavily pregnant or have newly given birth). 

Mammal-eating whales tend to hunt in much smaller groups (the better to sneak up on their prey).  There is apparently a killer whale in Glacier Bay,  nicknamed T2 by the researcher who has been following him, who eats on average two harbor seals a day. 

Mammal-eating whales, in addition to killing gray whales and humpbacks, will also kill sperm whales and apparently even blue whales.   In Alaska they will also kill swimming moose (but generally not sea otters, because sea otters lack a blubber layer and are actually 80 lbs of fur, gristle, and spite). 

Humpback whales feed in Alaska, but migrate to give birth (the humpback whales we see in Southeast Alaska go to Hawaii, other groups got to Mexico and Japan).  One theory for this migration is that they are trying to avoid killer whales when the calves are the most vulnerable.  

(Complete speculation on my part: According to Andy Szabo of the Alaska Whale Foundation, the humpback whales who engage in cooperative bubble netting behavior between groups of unrelated individuals do not seem to have greater reproductive success as measured by number of live births relative to other humpback whales, but I don’t think anyone has looked at how many of those calves survive to reproduce themselves.  I’m wondering if groups of bubble netting whales continue to associate socially in Hawaii or during migration in a way that might offer defense against killer whales.  Someone should look into this…)Killer whales can easily travel over a hundred miles a day.  

When we see them, fish eating killer whales are almost always swimming with two or three other whales in very close formation, close enough to touch each other.  Often one of them in these small swimming groups will be doing something goofy, swimming on their back, slapping the water with their fluke,  or generally lolling about like a little kid walking between adults.  

This whale from the AG pod that we watched the other day for instance is swimming on her back, slapping her tail.  

And this whale (perhaps the same whale?) is swimming on her back. 

Naturalists try to stay apolitical during their talks, but when you think about a creature who spends much of their life within touching distance of their family, who can easily cover a hundred miles a day, and then you think about putting that animal into a twenty meter tank, alone, it makes your heart hurt.   We need ambassadors from the wild, because people don’t protect what they don’t know and love, and between global warming and habitat destruction (never mind continued whaling) they need our protection now more than ever, but maybe we need to allow them to be ambassadors on their own terms, instead of forcing them to do tricks for us.  Because all other considerations aside, the stuff they do on their own is way cooler. 

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...