How The West Was Spun

Treading water.....

Well, maybe.  Just barely.  I actually have nothing to post about, except that all my dreams are Tupelo Gold-colored and the sound of the printer churning out another order from the onsite store is giving me a little twitch.  (A good twitch, but ya know.... .a twitch.)

The Other Anne and I have been completely flabbergasted by the response to the Bee Fields shawl.  I was thinking maybe 35 or 45......50 if we really got going.  We hit 200 orders this morning and they are still coming in, although the deluge has slowed a bit.

So if you are here to see what's happening, rest assured I am dyeing and skeining and mailing kit packages as fast as I possibly can get them out the door.  New orders are looking at a 2-week wait period or so right now, but I am happy to keep dyeing for as long as y'all keep ordering.  I greatly appreciate everyone's patience and good humor while we are getting the kits out the door.

And extra special thanks to Margene who arrived home from vacation, turned around and drove down here to my place in the semi-boonies and helped me skein not one but TWO nights in a row this week.  She's a trooper.

All for now....

Bee Fields Shawl

So, if you are one of apparently only 3 people on the planet who haven't asked me about Anne's Bee Fields Shawl, which is our kit that we will be selling beginning Sunday, July 15th, here are the details. As always, kits of the month can be purchased through our online store at Wooly Wonka Fibers by clicking on the "Online Store" link and then "Kits".

I originally approached Anne about designing a shawl pattern for me back in April or so.  She said she had an idea percolating for a while, but hadn't been able to find a yarn that suited what she envisioned, so thus began several packages from me to her, filled with samples of different colorways that we thought might suit.  She eventually fell in love with two, and got started on her knitting.  You can visit her blog for more details on the pattern development process - a fascinating one.

Without further ado, then, let me unveil the Bee Fields Shawl pattern and colorways.

First, Anne's beautiful pattern which comes in the kit, printed with her usual great written directions plus charts to duplicate this:

And now for the colorways.  You get 1200 yards of merino laceweight, which is a 2-ply merino wool yarn.  This is a slightly heavier laceweight, almost fingering-weight yarn, which has a nice bounce and blocks out wonderfully, as you can see from the pattern pictures.  You just add needles to suit the gauge you wish to get.

Tupelo Gold:  This is a blend of grass and apple greens with highlights of sunshine yellow.  Anne knit the original shawl (pictured above) in this colorway.

Buckwheat Honey:  A rich golden blend of honey (what else?), pale wheat highlights, and hints of moss.

As always, free shipping for US customers and discounted shipping for Canadian or international/overseas customers for orders placed between July 15th and August 1st.  I will note that because of the high interest in this kit, I am going to do my darnest to have everyone's kit shipped by early August, but there may be a short delay as I'm already hyperventilating a little over the response to Anne's posts about the shawl. I'm off to skein more yarn.

All for now......

Co-Op Creek Trail Ride

Just not being able to stand the heat, we opted to go up into the mountains on Sunday with the horses.  Be assured we kept a wary eye on the sky for the pop-up afternoon thunderstorms and accompanying lightning which have sparked several devastating wildfires here in Utah.

D and I, the horses, plus Pam and John and their crew drove east into the Strawberry River reservoir area and made for a trailhead that would take us along Co-Op Creek in the National Forest.  D and John had plotted out our course on a couple of topos maps and we were not disappointed.  The first 3 or 4 miles of the trail wound along the creek, through huge aspen groves.  Because of the water source, everything up here is lovely and green and (relatively) cool.

D and Hap stopped frequently to double-check the GPS coordinates he had plotted.

After winding through the forest, the trail opened up into a 2-track, accessible to ATVs, although we only saw 2 guys on 4-wheelers.  It wound in and out of small meadows and then back under the trees.

There are tons of flowers out right now - indian paintbrush, wild roses, lupines, wild geraniums - and we enjoyed looking at the brilliant colors as we worked our way up to about 9000 feet. We saw an elk, several deer, lots of birds, and as we finished up the loop, to return back to the trailer, we stopped to admire the handiwork of the beavers in creating log-jams across the creek.

This was a great summer ride (although it would also be beautiful in the fall with the aspens).  It was about 10 degrees cooler up here than in the valley and it is not particularly a technically challenging trail.  There are a couple of spots near the edges of drop-offs, but space is wide enough you can move the horses away from the edge, off the trail, if you need to.

About 2 miles from the trailer, D spotted a folded print-out map on the ground.  I hopped off Diggs to pick it up, thinking one of us had dropped it, but it turned out to be a copy of a map from a recent endurance ride (Strawberry Fields Forever, Day 2) in the area that gave us two MORE local trails to explore.  We might even go back this weekend for another tour.

All for now.... 

Some housekeeping

I think I'm becoming a small-project addict.  Or at least that's what I seem to be gravitating towards.  Maybe it's the heat.  Or my nonexistent attention span.  Or both.  Anyway, I have a bunch of small things on the needles right now.

First up, my Math Whiz socks.  I finished sock #1 sitting upstairs watching the fireworks over the valley last night (and hoping the idjits in the neighborhood would NOT be setting off anything in the street or the fields and causing even more fire hazards - we are under severe drought conditions here right now).

Secondly, I'm working on a Kid Silk scarf out of Victorian Lace Today for an Xmas gift.  I've got somewhere between a third and a half of the body knit up.  I may decide to add some beads when I knit the edging on, but I've got some time to mull that over.  This is a fairly fast knit, and if I devote even 1 night's worth of knitting per week to it, I think it'll move along quite quickly.

Finally, I succumbed to Judy's powers of suggestion and joined up the Mystery Stole 3 KAL.  The numbers are up to something like 4000+ people on this one???!!!  I had some alpaca lace hand-dyed by me in the Mourning Dove colorway (a very pale gray with hints of purple overlay) which will work just fine with the black/white/neutral suggestion for a color choice, and I'm use iridescent purplish beads on it.  Still working on clue #1, but I'm not in it for the race.  (Click on image for slightly bigger - I'm not sure you can see the beads in either shot - they are pretty subtle.)

We may ride this weekend, or may not, as we are forecast three days in a row of temps above 100 and unless we ride very very early, those are some brutal temps to just go out for a joy ride.  I hope everyone had a great 4th of July here in the U.S.!!

All for now.....

American Fork Trail Ride

Saturday was stinkin' hot here.  Okay, who am I kidding?  It's like that all the time around here.  It is bad bad bad when the weatherman says we will be "cooling down" to 95.  We decided to go up into the mountains to try to get away from some of the heat.

We headed out to American Fork canyon, which houses the Timpanogos Cave and is a huge area of national forest/national park lands.  We actually didn't visit the cave, but wound our way up the mountain to the Salamander Flats campground.  The campground was very busy - it being 4th of July week and lots of folks on vacation - but we still found an area to park our trailers.  Here's Diggs modeling the new trailer we just picked up with a view of Mt. Timpanogos in the background.

This is a great little trail that winds through the woods, and then out into open alpine meadows, and back into the woods again.  Here are Pam and Jazz blazing trail through an aspen forest.

And one of the grassy meadows, where we stopped to let the horses drink from a clear-water creek.

Even though the trail was quite busy with hikers and bikers, and motorcycle-type vehicles, I was really amazed (and extremely happy) at how polite everyone was.  The motorcyclists either turned off their bikes completely to let us pass, or, if they were going the same direction we were, let us have time to get off the trail, turn the horses, and then drove past V-E-R-Y slowly.  Diggs was happy with the extra people time, and got a nice head scratch from a young lady who was hiking when we stopped at a crossroads to read the signage.

Lots of scenic vistas along the trail and it was well worth the drive.  There are lots of other trails that criss-cross this area, and D and I want to go back and explore the area some more.  It's only about 50 to 60 minutes of drive-time from our house, including the slow-going on the steep and windy uphill to Salamander Flats.  We are hoping to be able to go back spot a few bighorn sheep, or perhaps some mountain goats, which frequent the watering holes in these mountains.

All for now.......