Natural dyes; New England wool.
Come find Upton Yarns and a whole host of other creative fiber types at the York Harbor Inn in York Maine on April 6th for the 6th Annual Fiber Marketplace!
I have been hard at work at the dye studio working with Coopworth Gansey Yarn and Straw’s Farm Island Sheep fingering weight. Today: gradient dips and a deep blue indigo! (Not yet photographed)
Sometimes things that seem like mistakes actually just give you permission to play.
This Cotswold yarn was meant to be perfectly smooth, perfectly tensioned, perfectly plied yarn for knitting Sanquhar gloves. Instead, the moment I dunked it into its post skeining bath, it twisted and shrank as slightly incorrect tension reasserted itself. Little loops appeared at unpredictable intervals. Everyone has an off day, and this yarn appeared to have been the result.
Luckily this was a small run of yarn, and I had sent of a run of experimental Scottish Blackface x BFL that came back perfect (find this yarn in kits put together by Beth Brown Reinsel here) so not much was lost.
And once the pressure of needing to meet someone else’s needs was lifted (Beth had been waiting patiently for more Sanquhar yarn for longer than I care to admit) I could admit that I really liked this yarn in all of it’s wonkiness.
As a knitter I tend to think of function first. However intricate the knitting, I want to produce garments that I never have to think twice about wearing in an engine room, or on the deck of a schooner or (more realistically these days) wearing on long walks in the woods, or around the farm on sheering days, and these kinds of garments start with solid yarn. And now, instead of the solid yarn I was expecting, I have slightly airy, whimsical yarn.
So I decided to play.
I wound off large skeins, and worked out how to dye a variegated melding of blues into greens.
I absurdly pleased with the result.
I sold through most of the original dye lot at the New England Farm & Fiber Marketplace, but more is in the making (and I’m plotting more color ways). Watch this space.
April 2019: A few skeins are now listed on the page for my fingering weight yarns (scroll to the bottom) or here.
Watercolor of Belle Vue Sheep Farm by Richard Schlecht, National Park Service collection
Watercolor of Belle Vue Sheep Farm by Richard Schlecht, National Park Service collection
I have been trying to find the words to explain how and why I love this post (hopefully to become a series) over a Whistling Girl Knits, but I keep coming up short.
The Podcast 99% Invisible as described on Stitcher:
“Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we’ve just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture.”
As summaries go, this one is a bit dry, but it’s probably impossible to summarize the joy of a podcast devoted to delving into all the random elements of our world that are so taken for granted that most of us never even think to ask about how they came to be, if we notice their existence at all.
Last week’s episode, and the prompt that got me to finally write the recommendation that I’ve been meaning to write for years, was an interview with Kassia St. Clair, about her book The Secret Lives of Color. The book is a collection of essays, each about a given color, from ones that I have previously never heard of (isebelline - a light dun) to the ubiquitous (a history of beige). Sometimes she writes about the historical cultural associations of a color; sometimes she writes about the chemistry of a pigment or the history of its use. Whatever she chooses to focus on, the results are fascinating.
Working with natural dyes (spending two to three days to produce a green yarn, never mind the time required for scouring and mordanting before dyeing, and rinsing and drying afterwards) has given me much time to meditate on how I, and most of the modern world, take the easy availability of color for granted. The price of dyeing or coloring an item is so minimal relative to the cost of production, or so much considered to be part of the production process itself, that the cost and time required disappears entirely into the final price. Dark blue items do not cost more than light blue items. Undyed items are rarely cheaper (if they are available at all) than their dyed counterparts. We still have strong cultural associations with different colors (national flags, sports teams, high school colors etc) but unless we work in specialized fields, we rarely think about what is required to produce the color in question, or how amazing it is that we can so easily create it.
So we forget how much the quest for color has changed human history. As the host of 99% Invisible summarized in what has become one of my favorite quotes, our love of color is a “...real human pursuit: basically food, shelter, and the brightest color imaginable seem to be ingrained in our DNA”. Or, as Kassia St. Clair puts it, “We love shiny bright colors and we are prepared to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to have them.”
Listen to it here, or on your favorite podcasting service.
Toppers for Tall Boots - Sea colorway
Since I first started bundling together a few of my favorite colors into mini-skein sets, people have been asking me what they should do with them. Which is a fair question. To me they are prompts to creativity and an excuse to try to use more color in my knitting, but as someone who often has a hard time making decisions I can see how having more color options could also be overwhelming.
So, spurred on by the knowledge that people would again be asking, “what should I do with these?” at the recent Boston Farm and Fiber Festival, I put together a couple of pattern suggestions. (Disclaimer: these have not been test knit by anyone other than me).
A set of high or low boot toppers can be knit with one of my mini-skein sets, though you won’t have much yarn left over, so if you increase the number of pattern repeats you may want to shorten them by a row of each color to avoid yarn chicken.
I’ve included a chart in each color way (Land and Sea) for each boot topper. This may or may not make them easier to follow…
Toppers for Short Boots - Land colorway (these would also make good arm warmers).
But if you like, these patterns are just a starting point for your own creativity. I use Stitch Fiddle (available in a free version) to “sketch” patterns. With this fairly intuitive program you can easily make graphs, which, when combined with a book of pattern motifs (like Mary Jane Mucklestone’s 150 Scandinavian Motifs) makes for a fun afternoon of color exploration.
And for those of you intimidated by stranded color work, while writing this post it occurred to me that I really should have swatched boot toppers that used stripes rather than small repeated stranded color work motifs. Which I shall now do…
As of this writing I have three mini-skein sets in the Land color way available in the shop, but last week the yarn spun from the 2018 Straw’s Farm Island fleeces returned from the mill, and I can’t wait to start playing with it! (That said, it could be a little while before mini-skein sets are restocked, for which I apologize).
A huge thank you to all the folks who ventured out to the Boston Public Market on Sunday for the 2nd Annual Boston Farm & Fiber Festival! The day was one big blur of old friends and new, catching up and sharing our love of wool, yarn, and knitting.
And the knitwear! I so wish that I had had the presence of mind to take photos! The Market was an informal fashion show of people in their fiber festival best. It was so inspiring to see the range of patterns and colors and yarn choices, never mind all the hours of work and devotion that each piece represents. Like many knitters, I mainly interact with others knitters via email or social media, and while photos and written words are nice, it was so refreshing to see knitwear in person and have face to face conversations.
As always, at the same time that I am honored to get to be a vendor I’m also a little bummed that I didn’t have time to explore the market as a knitter myself, or take time in the Taproot Knitting Lounge, or listen in on the talks and speakers.
A million thank yous to the sponsors, host, and volunteers who made the day possible! I can’t wait until next year!
I am thrilled to be heading back into Boston on February 10 to vend at the 2nd Annual Boston Farm & Fiber event at the Boston Public Market! Last year was a wild and wooly day, and this year looks like it might be even more exciting!
In addition to all the wooly wonders, the Boston Public market will be operating as it normally does, which means that you can browse the yarn with a latte in hand, and then peruse a range of other local products.
Clearly posting every day is not going to happen. But this way I get to make Wovember stretch through the winter?
This one seemed to be asking how many wool items of you are wearing at the moment, though I’ve seen other people interpret it differently.
My answer is that aside from commercially produced socks, I don’t wear wool that much these days, because I wear a baby who’s going through a blurpy phase.
Researching baby goods has led me to a new (to me) use for wool: mattress protectors. Green Mountain Diapers carries them, or you can find organic wool felt by the yard and do the same (which is what I did).
So far so good.
And, anthropological musing of the day:
One of the great mysteries of (pre-) human history is why we became bipedal in the first place. Sure bipedalism is efficient and we are fantastic pursuit predators, but all the intermediate stages that come before full bipedalism are wildly inefficient, or rather, it is hard to see what made being semi-bipedal worth the bother. There are and have been many theories proposed over the years, some more sensible than others, but I’ve always wondered if the whole point was actually that bipedal travel leaves you with two hands to carry things, and if you protect your increasingly dexterous hands you can start to create cord and proto-textiles to help you carry more food more easily. One thing that is frequently mentioned in discussions of human evolution is that at about the time our early ancestors became bipedal the environment was changing and what had been jungle was replaced by savana (one of the theories for the development of bipedalism is that our early ancestors stood up on their legs a lot to see over the tall grass - which seems like a bit of a Just So Story to me). This led me to wonder about distance between water sources and food, and how much of an advantage carrying things long distance might create. I will admit that until the other day when I found myself walking back and forth between the tomatoes on the front porch and the kitchen sink carrying a pitcher of water in one hand and my increasingly heavy baby in the other arm, I had never considered how important being able to carry a baby might be, or better yet, how important being able to carry a baby in sling or wrap might be.
So after I finished watering the tomatoes, I googled. It turns out that anthropologists have finally wondered about the same thing. (The author, Timothy Tailor, seems to think that these early slings would have been made out of animal hide, but I feel like this could be yet another instance of anthropological bias towards activities seen as traditionally male. He also makes the same tired “man the hunter” arguments about hunting leading to more protien leading to bigger brains. My feeling, admittedly based on nothing more than making a bit of cord from the inner bark of a willow myself, and watching film of chimpanzees making elaborate nests, is that our ancestors figured out how to make cordage or something like it very early - which will never show up archaeologically).
If any potential anthro grad students ever accidentally stumble upon this blog - will you please look into this for me?
In which I am already a day behind. Sigh.
For several years now I have seen the Wovember posts on my Instagram feed, celebrating all things wool and wool related. I love reading about other people’s relationship to sheep, wool, and wool craft, and I love the writing prompts that make me examine my own relationship to wool, yarn, and sheep. I’ve never actually done the actual writing part before though. This is going to be the year!
Wool means too many things to me to encapsulate it all in an Instagram post. To the archaeologist I meant to be, wool is probably the result of a random mutation in the genome of feral sheep and became one of the major (often overlooked) elements in the toolkit that got us to where we are today. Wool is wealth and trade routes, an economically valuable crop that changed the landscape of Europe (literally, among other places, I‘m just most familiar with the European context). Wool is a display of wealth and prestige, but also a utilitarian comfort. Personally wool is a feeling of connection to the six or seven or eight millennia of wool workers, and also a feeling of home and safely.
Which doesn’t really capture it all. Hmm.
Anyway, my inner archaeologist found this fascinating paper about the history and development of wool, published on eTopoi:Journal for Ancient Studies. The Textile Revolution. Reasearch into the Origin and Spread of Wool Production between the Near East and Central Europe
For the archaeology/history of wool production and craft I also reccomend many of the books by Elizabeth Wayland Barber , Women’s Work- the First 20,000 Years especially.
Early voting has already started in many states, and from now until November 12 as a small thank you to those who vote in the Midterms I’m offering a 5% discount on all orders (use the code IVOTED at checkout). Obviously I have no way of knowing if you actually voted, but knitters by and large are honest folks.
Like many people I have been fighting a grinding sense of doom when it comes to current events. Scrolling through my Instagram feed a few weeks ago I came across Thea Colman’s post about writing postcards for postcardstovoters.com . The traditional forms of political engagement are either ill-suited to my personality (like most people I hate getting political phone calls; phone banking is not for me) or just impractical given my current situation (door to door canvassing is a lot harder with an infant) so finding something that I could actually do in my spare moments made me really happy. I like having a way to quietly remind people to vote without interrupting their dinner. And who doesn’t like getting handwritten mail? So I signed up to volunteer and set to carving a simple block print for faster postcard production.
Via Instagram I’ve been offering to send postcard writers sets of my postcards, and the response has been heartening. Sending out my neat little packets of postcards feels like send out bundles of hope; a visible reminder that I a not alone in my fears, that other people care too.
And when I read something in the news that makes me think grim thoughts I can sit down and convert that feeling to ink. In my experience, the salve for anxiety is action, however small.
I am addicted to the simplicity of Instagram, while my blog has become the thing I hide from in shame for not writing all the things I should have written by now, so I’ve been remiss in not making the same offer of postcards to my blog readers. If you would like a batch of my postcards please send me an email. The “price” is that you will promise to use them to remind others to vote.
I’m spending this week getting ready for my first ever trunk show! As part of the Greater Boston Yarn Crawl, New England Farm to Fiber invited me and my yarns to come hang out at their stall, Sunday October 14, from 1:00 to 4:00-ish at the Boston Public Market. I am really excited (and flattered!). If you are in the area, drop in and say hi. In addition to great yarn, the Boston Public Market is home to great coffee, baked goods, a vendor of local cheese, and all manner of other New England products.
I fell in love with ganseys and gansey knitting (and gansey yarn) fifteen years ago, and in the superstitious way of the sailor I became, I feel that my love for ganseys eventually led to my career at sea. For many years now my copy of Beth Brown-Reinsel’s book Knitting Ganseys has accompanied me, often a bit optimistically, on most of my travels. My copy of this book probably has been underway at sea almost as much as I’ve been.
And it has a tattered cover to show for it.
Beth’s knitting retreat
In mid-August the newest Upton finally arrived.
In other news, I am doing my best to get ready for the Squam Art Fair on September 15, but someone may not be making that easy...
Against my best plans, I may have let the blogging/social media slip a bit in June and July.
Before the excuses, a quick and very exciting note: I will be vending at the Squam Art Fair on September 15, from 7:30 to 10:00. I am so excited to be included in such an amazing group of vendors! (And I really hope that I’ll be able to pull together a few new kits I’ve been planning in time, which brings me back to the excuses).
Back to the excuses:
Unexpected pregnancy induced exhaustion limited my work time this summer and what energy I had often went to baby centric things - baby shower, painting baby things, and the part time job that is meeting all the doctors appointments scheduled as part of a “geriatric pregnancy” (and aside from being “elderly”, both I and the as-yet-unborn-baby are thankfully in perfect health - I cannot imagine how much more medically intense things must become if there are issues).
Pregnancy induced exhaustion recently morphed into pregnancy induced insomnia, which has at least given me the time to sew crib sheets for the fancy oval crib inherited from my sister-in-law. When passing along the crib she mentioned the difficulty of getting a new sheet in the correct orientation on the oval mattress during the inevitable three AM accident clean-ups, to which I sensibly thought “oh-ho, I shall just embroider a french knot or something so that I can line the sheet up along the long ends by feel”. And then somehow I decided a french knot was boring, and given that I wasn’t sleeping and it was too hot to knit…
I can now sew fitted sheets and embroider sheets but I still cannot fold fitted sheets.
So now I have four home sewn sheets with hand-embroidered whales.
A few days ago we discovered that my sister-in-law had also given us several crib sheets, which somehow got mixed in with a box of baby clothes. So the home sewn sheet part was probably completely unnecessary. Still, it was a fun project.
Not being able to carry the buckets and pots of water necessary for dyeing has led me to catching up on other projects, most too boring and administrative to bother describing, but amongst the other chores I finally downloaded the photos that have been accruing on my working SSD card, and came across this gem of an outtake from a mid-February photo session. Note my hand settled gently and proudly atop my (invisible) belly. I am fairly sure the impetus for this photo session, aside from the desire to document the progress of my heavily modified Solbien cardigan turned dress, was the discovery that my vague feelings of becoming a little thick around the middle had solidified into an actual baby bump (which again, I cannot see in this photo, though I remember running downstairs to show Sam the moment I noticed it, who was equally excited).
Also the Socialist Realist pose - I look like I’m about to do something epic for the glory of the fatherland.
Yup, at 40 weeks, 6 days pregnant I have settled into the game familiar to every person who has ever been pregnant - “remember when I thought that was a belly?”
To be fair, this Alabama Chanin A-Line dress is somehow magically also minimizing my belly, or maybe I just feel like I should be a foot or two wider.
Back to a semi-business related note: Any moment now (really, any moment now kiddo, but hopefully soon - I get that you are comfy in there, but you’ve had your full run and it’s time to come out and start exploring the world) we will be heading off to the Birth Center for a hopefully short stay. There may be some delay in shipping orders and responding to emails as we all adjust to our new life. Thank you for understanding.
Or rather April and May roundup (somehow the time got away from me). Much of my energy during early May went towards re-painting part of the kitchen, which was both very necessary (it had all faded to a muddled sadness gray) and very satisfying. I really love our house, even the bits that were sadness gray, and after years of putting my heart into making other people's boats beautiful it felt really good to put that energy towards our own living space. Next up - painting my dye shop!
And many yarnish goals were also achieved - but event news first: the yarn and I will be heading up to Wing & a Prayer Farm on Saturday, June 2 for the Taproot Makers Market!
I will be bringing new dye lots of several favorites, along with my new 3-Ply DK weight Gotland yarns, and maybe even some gansey yarn.
In related news, Ingeborg Slipper Kits are back in stock!
And, fresh from the dyepot, I have a very limited run (six skeins!) of DK Weight BFL in this lovely green (New Leaf? Cress? color name tbd).
April is a month for farm visits, resulting in lovely days of catching up with shepherds and gorgeous piles of fleece carefully boxed and sent off to the mill. I am looking forward to LOTS of yarn back from the mill sometime this fall, but in the meantime I am enjoying my moments in the dyespace.
This (annoyingly out of focus) photo is really a photograph of potential. In the photo I am standing in my future dye space, wearing a future dress (a heavily modified take on Mary Jane Mucklestone's Solbein) and most importantly, I am seventeen weeks pregnant.
As my friend Sarah said, here's hoping the kid looks good in blue (given that I am already plotting indigo dyed everything).
I am still working through all the changes the last few months have brought, which is perhaps why it has taken me so long to write this post. I am currently 22 weeks pregnant, and looking at my (relatively) flat stomach in a photo taken so recently I am amazed to remember how ungainly I felt at the time (it's hard to see in this photo, but I definitely had the beginnings of a bump). My midsection has changed significantly since then, and I my feelings of constantly catching up with a new body shape have not diminished.
Needless to say, I will not be heading back to Antartica any time soon. I will however have more time to devote to the fiber side of my life, and to vending more often in person.
This upcoming weekend in fact (April 7) I will be vending in person at the Yarn Sellar’s Fiber Marketplace & Retreat in York, Maine from 10 am to 3 pm. With any luck (stand by for steeking) I will be wearing that knit dress.
For those of you interested in my travels, I have lots and lots of photos that I never got around to posting, and subjects that I always meant to write posts about but never had the time for. I am hoping to actually write some of those posts. Stay tuned, and feel free to email me with prompts and questions.
Speaking of travel, I am very sorry to say that I will not be able to attend this year’s Wool Scouts knitting retreat. The retreat was honestly one of the highlights of last summer and I really would love to be able to head back up to Bradford Camps, but my due date is August 2 and “advanced maternal age" and absolute faith in Sarah and Rob's ability to handle medical emergencies aside it just feels like poor planning and bad manners to head into the Maine woods at 38 weeks pregnant. Hopefully I'll be able to return next summer.
My new project bag (and new favorite pin).
My new project bag (and new favorite pin).
The First Annual Boston Farm & Fiber Event was a raging success!!! A million thank you's to all the folks who braved a cold rainy Sunday to come out and geek out over yarns and fiber goodies. I had no idea what to expect, but the crowd size was beyond my wildest hopes! I got to meet so many creative, passionate knitters on Sunday!
I made the rookie mistake of not bringing a booth helper, which both meant that conversations were sometimes cut short (which I regret and apologize for) and also that I was unable to explore all the other amazing booths and goings on. I heard great things about the knitting lounge (which I very much wanted to hang out in) and about the other vendors there. A big thank you to everyone who put up with me asking about the other goodies in their knitting bags, so I could at least live vicariously. And a huge thank you as well to all the folks, including my vending neighbors, my sister-in-law, a representative of the Boston Public Market, and at one point a Woolscout Knitting Retreat participant, who realized that I was solo and very kindly offered to watch my booth for me for water/food/restroom breaks. It's a little thing, but it underscores for me how caring and supportive knitters/crafters are as a group.
On Monday I woke up feeling like I had spent Sunday taking part in some sort of obscure endurance event, exhausted, but still on a bit of runners high. It will take me a little while to survey the remains of my inventory, update my website, and catch up on my dyeing (see previous post about the state of my future dyespace) so I thank you all for your patience. And as always, if you have any questions, or would like to make sure that a specific color/yarn kit returns, feel free to email me at uptonyarns@gmail.com
Many big changes afoot here at Upton Yarns HQ, but first:
This Sunday I will be vending at the first (annual, I have been assured) Boston Farm & Fiber Festival held at the Boston Public Market (!!!!!!! I am very excited about this). The show is being hosted by the good folks of New England Farm to Fiber, on Sunday, February 11, from 10am to 5 pm.
For those of you who may not be familiar with it, the Boston Public Market hosts a collection of local artisan producers of everything from pasta to honey, and of course New England sourced yarns. It has long been a favorite stop of mine on our "civilized" weekend strolls through Boston. I'm already plotting my (non yarn related) buy list.
But back to the fiber event: the vendor list, available here, is full of people I can't wait to meet in person. (The fiber related buy list may very quickly overwhelm the non-fiber related buy list...)
In other news, late this fall we officially became first time home buyers, and as of last week we have moved in (sort of, everything is still in boxes and we have not yet sorted out a reasonable internet connection, but all of our stuff is here, and things are mostly set up enough that it doesn't quite feel like we're camping anymore, which I'll take). One of the many things that I love about our new house is the workspace off the kitchen that will soon become the new Upton Yarns HQ.
(Yes, that is an industrial sewing machine under the dust cover in the corner).
But then the movers came and very efficiently moved everything from the old Upton Yarns HQ to the new space.
Dyeing may be a bit delayed while I make sense of all of this chaos......
The weather outside is frightful, but I am warm inside playing with yarn. I hope you are all likewise somewhere warm and yarn filled.
Fresh from the drying rack: two lovely neutral grays, one light (Woodsmoke) and one dark (Slate). Both colors are actually based on logwood (purple) heavily "saddened" with a mix of tannin and iron which gives them a faint purple undertone in the right light - I can't help but think of the "violet" sheep of the Odyssey (the dyeing is admitedly a bit of a cheat).
I couldn't help but take photos of some of my favorite color combinations:
With Tiger Lily
With Lichen
With Cress
With Zucchini
The view from my desk. Reginald the kaffir lime tree was not meant to see such weather.
Like many other knitters, I fell in love with Kristin Drysdale's Ingeborg Slippers the moment I first saw them on my Instagram feed. It turns out they are as fun to knit as they are to pad about in. So I put together kits.
For my slippers I used Upton Yarns DK Weight Bluefaced Leicester spun from the wonderful fleece of the flock at Two Sisters Farm. The pattern calls for size 3 needles, but I found that to get the correct gauge I had to go up to size 6s (I tend to be a tight knitter). I used light blue Glacier Bay, dark blue Delft, and for a blaze of contrast, bright orange Tiger Lily to finish the edges.
The kit includes those three colorways, and of course, one of my very happy hand printed project bags.
Any orders placed between now and Friday will go in the mail the day they are ordered (as long as the order is placed before 3:00 - I still need time to pack them up and get to the Post Office - but I will do my best!).
And don't forget the Moth Discouraging Sachets!
Happy knitting, and Happy Holidays!
