Green mountain spinnery

found wonderful pale gray green wool/cotton blend at Green Mountain Spinnery for a short sleeved cardigan and shell twin set

Naulakha

Eight of us. We have been friends for almost 40 years. Of late we have been doing more and more things together and one of our party was fascinated by Rudyard Kipling's house in Vermont, Naulakha, just north of Brattleboro. It has been restored and is available for rental, and we just spent a long weekend there. It is a beautiful building, on a hillside from which Mount Monadnock is visible. It is at the center of a number of bookstores, fiber studios, yarn shops, restaurants and touristy places. We never stopped talking all weekend, as usual, and we cooked and ate and visited like we can't do while we are trying to work and live our normal lives. It amazes me that we can work so well together on the mechanics of living. We joke about the Old Fans' Home, and living together when we retire, but to me this is not a joke.

caramel cashmere

Early this fall a colleague gave me part of her mother's knitting stash. I was thrilled to get a bag of laceweight cashmere the color of good caramel, dating, I am guessing from the typography on the band, from the late forties or early 1950s. It's been sitting in a box all that time, waiting to clothe something else after being parted from its original goat. I've started a notched shawl in a lotus-flower patterned lace, from a collection of shawls published by Knitter's Magazine. It's the cover shawl for that book, and I've previously worked it in the Brown Sheep cotton/wool yarn (a luscious pale yellow) called for in the pattern. This cashmere is finer; I'm working it with a 3mm needle (US#2) and it's working up a treat. The yarn was obviously carefully stored, but it feels a little strange in the hand right now. I did a test swatch and soaked it in wool wash, and it came out well, quite soft and comfortable. It knits up nicely and the pattern stitch comes out well defined, and I think it will make a handsome garment. This is a useful pattern, and I'll probably make it again in a cream colored laceweight for a wedding present for someone special.

Included in the bag with the cashmere (two colors, the caramel and a slightly darker warm brown) were some amazing swatches showing what the original owner had intended to do with it - a complicated two-color basketweave which is way beyond me. I feel an obligation to this skilled knitter whose needles are now still to make something really wonderful from this yarn, and if the shawl comes out right, I'll give it to her daughter - a warm hug from her mother, come to her sideways.

initial post

We pay for lilacs with ice,

for apples with the deaths of old dogs.