What are the odds?

What are the odds that I sat up late last night and tested out the merino/tencel?


Yeah...

And also? Laceweight?

Yeah...

Vermont Sheep and Wool 09

AnnaMarie and I set out early this morning in search of Tunbridge, the new central location for Vt Sheep and Wool. Now, she may have an unerring sense of direction, but she was operating under the handicap of having me for a navigator, so it's probably a miracle we found the place. (Even though I have been to Tunbridge many times. That has no influence on the odds of me finding a place again. I'm famous for logically considering all my choices at an intersection, and then turning in exactly the wrong direction.)
We're lucky we went as early as we did, as the weather got progressively worse as the day went on. We spent a good part of the day ducking out of the drizzle, then out of the rain. The fairgrounds got squishier and squishier by the hour. But there were smiles under the umbrellas as we looked at the crowd. Just normal Vermont fall weather...


We looked at every fleece, every batt, every yarn, every color, every spindle, wheel, and swift. We paused for lunch (during one of the downpours) to plan which booths we were going back to. Now, I'd seriously just come to the festival to look. At most, I planned to buy another bobbin for my spinning wheel. I have more fleece and roving than I could spin in a year, even if I quit my job and gave up sleep. But I mentioned that I'd been seeing the merino/tencel roving at The Sheep Shed at Mountain View Farm booth every festival for the last 3 years, loving the colors, and had always kicked myself for not buying - I've never spun tencel before and wanted to give it a try, and this time I was actually going to buy some.
Well, we got back to the booth, I drooled, and finally made up my mind which colors to get (there are too many pretty ones. It was hard.) I actually had 2 of the beauties in my hand, when I spied a gorgeous merino/silk blend that called to me. I held up the tencel blend next to the silk blend. "Oh, I wouldn't ply those together" said AM. "Oh, no," I answered, "I'm just trying to decide which I'd rather have..." To which she replied "Girl, if you don't buy that tencel, I will kick your ass." I laughed and bought the tencel, remarking to the bemused vendor "Now that's the sign of a true friend!"
That's my merino/tencel. I love it. Truly and wholeheartedly. I have 4 ounces of it, thanks to my dear friend, AnnaMarie. I just have to keep remembering that I need to get some knitting done...
We ran into Norma and Joansie - neither AM nor I had met Joansie in person yet, so that was wonderful. And seeing Norma always makes a great day even better. Norma and I had brought along our red-scarves-in-progress, so there was a quick show and tell.
I only took one picture, unfortunately, and sadly the flash took so long to charge that the smiles ran out... The picture came out looking like Norma had just said something shocking to AnnaMarie - and I'm having a good time trying to imagine what could possibly shock AM.
Though Norma would be the one who could do it...

There's a word for that in German

Looky!Two and a half repeats! With no major errors!
Well, I did have to rip 2 rows and reknit. It was a Hubris Error. I thought I had the pattern down, and didn't look at the book.
You know that feeling of supreme-confidence-of-"I-know-exactly-what-I'm-doing"-that-suddenly-plummets-as-you-look-down-and-realize-you've-royally-screwed-up.
Yeah, there's gotta be a word for that...

Wine, Knittin', and Wrong (Only because that one was easier to come up with something than Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax, Cabbages and Kings)

The elderberry wine is happily bubbling away in its carboy. When a sufficiency of sediment has settled out, we'll re-rack it, then re-rack again if more sediment presents. Then into bottles it will go, corking will commence, and the wine will be laid down to age. Sometime around this time next year, we'll be tasting it. Then, and only then, will we know if we screwed it up or if we produced a wonder.

The ugly pillowcase that was sacrificed is now a new and terribly interesting color. It's still ugly, but it's now a prettier ugly.

Madman decided to re-pitch yeast in the mead and add some honey. (His avocation is beermaking, so I defer to him in all things brew-y. We are both masters of yeast - I bake, he brews, and life is eternally good.)
(Just as an aside, we hauled out the mead carboy at around 9am yesterday. After looking, and smelling, we decided to taste. He siphoned out a good sample, we tasted and tasted. "Hmmm... Not bad..." "Much better than the last time we tasted it." "Is there alcohol left in here, ya think?" "I think there is! Here, have another taste." Is it decadent to be sampling mead at 9oclock of a Sunday morning?)

I ripped out the failed swatch, shifted down a needle size, and cast on again, with one less repeat of the pattern stitch. I've got this much done. Help me now pretend I don't see a rather large mistake on the left side...

I said, we're ignoring that...
*Sigh*
So, if for every repeat of a diamond, I have to rip back half a diamond, how many repeats will I have to knit before
a) I finish the scarf, or
b) I commit hara-kiri with a set of size 00 dpns.

.

Sundays are for Busy

It's a typical fall day in Vermont - cold and rainy, wet and miserable.
So Madman and I played indoors instead of outside.
Today was the day for straining off the gooshy fruit from the elderberry wine.
We sacrificed an ugly pillowcase to the cause.
We used it to line another 5gallon bucket, dumped in the elderberry goosh, and tied it up.


Then we hung it high:
It took a little adjusting to get the string length just right. Too long, and the bag dipped into the surface of the wine. Too short, and the corners of the pillowcase stuck out and dripped on the outside of the bucket. (Note to self: next time sew the corners to box up the bottom of the pillowcase. No corners = no problem.)
It was fun for the next few hours, listening to the dripping. At times it was playing a merry little tune that made us both smile.
We dragged out a glass carboy that held a long neglected batch of Apple Ginger Honey Mead that I had made a zillion or so years ago, that we thought had failed. We figured we'd dump it so we could use the carboy for our new efforts.

But it looks good... And it smells good (not so listerine-y as it did when it was younger.) As an experiment, Madman put a fresh airlock on it and actually got a bubble.
Scratch the plan to dump it. We might re-pitch yeast, add a little more honey, and give it another shot. Or, if the jostling around re-activated what yeast was in there, we might just go ahead and bottle it...
We used our only remaining carboy to rack the elderberry when the dripping stopped.


But soon, we'll be needing something to put this in:


It's a combination of blackberries and our own concord grapes. It smells divine. Madman's turning into quite the winemaker.

In between all that alcoholic goodness, I used up some apples to make a nice apple gallette:
And there's currently a loaf of bread baking. I think we have the best-smelling kitchen in Vermont today.

And in knitting news,
There actually is knitting news. (Hey, look! I remembered how!) I finished this hat. Just have to tuck in the ends and block it, then it goes in the For-Christmas-Gifts pile.
And I have a lovely failed swatch. Wicked Good Stepmother wants a scarf made from the gray and black alpaca. I found a stitch pattern I loved in Barbara Walker's The Craft of Multi-Color Knitting and cast on.
Too wide. And too loose. So I'm going to eliminate a repeat, and go down a needle size. I love ripping out failed swatches. Truly I do...

The Big Toast

Last night was the second hard frost in a row. Things that had survived the first night, didn't survive the second one.
The squash is toast. Madman was pulling vines when I got home from work. Here's the heap:Hello, compost...

We'd picked some of the squash earlier. Here are some of the delicatas we grew, and a butternut, just for fun. We loved the delicata we grew last year so much, that we planted lots of them this year, from seed we'd saved. These delicatas grew true-to-type:

But a funny thing had happened to our squash seed. These squash are apparently a cross between delicata and acorn. The shape is acorn, but those are unmistakable delicata markings. (The delicata-coloring gene is apparently a force to be reckoned with.)

And things got weirder yet. This is the big haul - all the squash from the deceased vines.


In the foreground, you can see even more of the acorn/delicatas, with a few delicata mixed in. At center left is a Jarrahdale (the blue-green thing) - the only one we got. Immediately behind the Jarrahdale are some buttercups (dark green) and some butternuts. So far, so good. But the very back couple of rows is apparently a cross between delicata and pumpkin. We didn't grow any pumpkins last year, so that cross means pollen-on-the-wind, or far-ranging bees. They've got the delicata markings, but definitely are pumpkin shaped and sized.
I sure hope they taste good, because we've got a lot of them.
Though with enough butter and brown sugar, even sawdust would taste good...

In the Land of Purple Fingers...

Madman got a line on some free elderberries. A woman we know, mother of a friend, said she had tons of them, and he was welcome to come pick as much as he wanted. (Her late husband had cultivated them. Word is, he would make wine out of anything. Literally anything. The results were generally excellent, though there was once an unfortunate experiment with tomatoes...)
Madman joyfully went over this morning and picked elderberries. And picked. And picked.
He came home with three grocery bags full. Woohoo!In an effort to avoid those previously mentioned purple fingers, we used forks to strip the berries from the stems.


We filled three 4-qt bowls. Three gallons of elderberries!! What bounty!

There were a few hitchhikers...

Several of those caterpillars turned up. And there was a Japanese beetle.


We mashed the berries. (The Japanese beetle was mashed separately.) Because what would be a better thing to make from elderberries than elderberry wine?


We used about half the berries to start a 4-gallon batch of wine. We won't be able to truly enjoy it until at least a year from now. Long range planning at its best.

I also made a batch of elderberry cough syrup for the coming winter. It smells so good, I can hardly wait to get sick...