And yes, that’s DH for scale under the arch.

There’s a colleague down the hall whose laugh is as musical as round-voiced wind chimes, and you can’t help but be drawn toward it. A gal in my knitting group has a laugh that comes from the belly and startles the unsuspecting and more timid around her, and which may not be stereotypically feminine but is wonderfully human. DH has a laugh that always catches my attention, an unpretentious and unplanned bark that rolls into a round, baritone, nearly sensual roll of life, warmth, and genuine amusement.

I fear we don’t laugh as often as we should . . . and I suspect we aren’t as good as finding things to laugh about as we should.

Like this. Click for bigger, but the interesting bit is the For Sale sign in the middle of the photo. Seriously, there are 4.7 (I think) acres up for sale there, and not for the life of me can I figure out why. You know the deep South joke about having some swamp to sell? I’m convinced this is the desert equivalent.

The trip west was a joy. I’d never had the chance to see much of it; airports, USAF bases, and conference centers simply don’t count. And no, mountains are not all alike.

There are lovely scenic views.

And there are stunning panoramas, such as the one you find from the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado. At 14,110 feet, you feel the thinness of the air, and having the temperature drop at least ten degrees is a bit startling. It’s impossible to judge distance . . .

The depth and distance tricks the eye. You find yourself looking out, then beginning again from close up in order to try and make sense of what you’re seeing. Not until you put something (or someone) recognizable in the frame . . .

can you put things into scale. Between the low clouds and the high mountain, you felt as if you could simply reach up and touch the sky.

We met a biker from San Antonio who had made a long journey of his own, and as the three of us stood there looking out over the mountain heights and valley depths, DH laughed and said that in Florida, there are hills (Tallahassee is, after all, built on seven hills), but there are so many trees that you go around the corner and all you see is another tree. He’s right—live oaks, pines, and magnolias dominate my home turf—and being able to stand in a place and see for miles, or to the horizon, tends to make one feel naked and very very exposed.

Going from mountain to desert is a change—particularly when you’re accustomed to seeing trees. Florida has red clay hills, but this . . .

This is definitely not like anything you’ll find in north Florida. It’s impossible to see the scale and distance here, but please click that photo for a larger one. In the lower left quarter, you’ll find a note centered over the head and shoulders of someone standing on the path. Now do you get the idea?

That is the first stop in Arches National Park in Utah. Massive walls of red . . .

with odd holes crafted by wind, water, and time. Long sculpted cliffs that look rather as if someone poured a thick bread dough over a counter top of random shapes . . .

. . . and which provide fascinating keyhole spaces to look out onto the rest of a red, red world . . .

Yet, between those desert spaces, there are wonderful little green spots. Spots of wild grasses, sage, and flowers that thrive in spite of the drought.

There are chubby marmots who aren’t much intimidated by passing cars . . .

and inquisitive little fellows who turn into kamikaze pilots in their mad dashes across the road in front of you, but who don’t mind taking a moment from their frantic scramble to sit on a nearby boulder and consider what in the world you’re doing before their nerve fails them and they dash out of sight again.

All the traveling has cemented one thing for me: Spindles travel in PVC pipe. I don’t bother with dressing it up, but it absolutely does the trick for protecting fragile spinning bits.

In this case, it’s a lovely stone spindle from Running Moon Farm, and some Merino-Tencel blend from Spunky Eclectic in the Aspen colorway, gifted to me by Margaret who decided it just didn’t speak to her. It definitely speaks to me, however, so her thoughtfulness is gratefully appreciated. (And you do need to check out her blog; she’s back, and she’s done a major plunge.)

But now I’m afraid I need to go back to lesson plans and student papers. The next two weeks are full of teaching, commenting, and serving as examiner for oral exams. One set of lesson plans left to go before Monday.

Next update: hopefully next weekend, 28 September.

Hang in there with me; I have lots to share.

First, you’ve seen ONE of the fibery things I worked with this summer:

(Go to the flickr page for bigger if you need the refresher.)

While I’d really intended to get all that into the luggage on the way back, other things had to take priority, so a good portion of it is winging its way over in a couple of very tightly packed boxes. And I’m realizing that I need to come up with an additional shelving unit in the loft to hold it all . . .

However, the first results of that Louet Victoria which is sitting rather cozily in the middle of that heap of now-clean fiber were these:

The big lump to the upper left is Spunky Eclectic’s club fiber for May, a Corriedale dyed in a colorway named “Rosebud.” Amy is brilliant about colors, but the name of this one really nails the colors. It’s got the various roses, but it also has that new-bud green which tempers the pinks exactly like a spring rose garden. To the left, though, is the fiber Terry of Bizyhands on Etsy sent with the Victoria so I’d have something to test the wheel, and I simply cannot get over how closely matched these two colorways are. The photo doesn’t do them justice, and shows Terry’s a bit darker than it really is. But they’re the products of two artists in two comletely different parts of the country. I’m convinced that large portions of the fiber community are psychically connected.

I hate to give you the technicals of these, because they’re absolutely not brilliant spinning. They were the orientation fibers for the Victoria, and they really do show that the spinner was unfamiliar with the wheel she was using.  The little skein was done first, and that one is the more inconsistent of the two and includes a couple or three breaks in its three or four ounces. It’s roughly 18wpi, and I chain plied it in order to get a handle for the wheel—and because I didn’t have my usual handy tools for making a center-pull ball worth working with.

Amy’s fiber benefitted from the other’s lessons, and by the time I finished plying that one as a standard 2-ply, I’d managed to form a fair relationship with Victoria. It’s still irregular and I found a couple of snarly eyelashes when I skeined it, but it’s a decided improvement over its little sister.

Fiber: Corriedale
Weight: 8 oz
WPI / TPI: 16-18 / 7-8
Yardage: 402 yards

It really does amaze me how different wheels have different personalities.  The Victoria is, however, a very cool little wheel. It’s not one I’d want to use for long-term spinning—it’s a sprinter rather than an endurance runner—and I find myself having a more difficult time judging the twist than I do with the Rose. I can’t necesarily explain why that is. You’d think that because the Victoria sits lower and you can see the yarn as it spins, well, that it would be easier to see. But somehow, it’s not. Even though the Rose is nearly level so that I can’t see the single actually on the bobbin, it’s still easier for me to judge the amount of twist I’m actually adding to the yarn.

Other than that, though, the Victoria serves its purpose just beautifully. I’ll admit that the plastic connection on the footman—the one which has to be snapped out of place when you disassemble the wheel—makes me a bit nervous.  It works, but I have a concern that it’s going to break at some point, and it may be that I’m just worrying needlessly. I’ve yet to see a report about anyone actually experiencing that. Once it’s broken down, the wheel is light, compact, and transports very easily. Not an eyebrow was raised on any of the international flights when it went into the overhead bin with room to spare. Nor did Atlanta’s security blink twice when it passed through their scanners. Interestingly enough, it was the Amsterdam security who wanted it unpacked and examined because they couldn’t figure out what it was; I had to explain it. It says something when a wheel’s country of origin knows less about the product than the country to which it is imported.

There was other spinning as well, but I won’t show you that just yet. Let me finish getting it all transcribed and boxed up, and then I’ll share. It is, however, the first level workbook for the Master Spinner program. Aside from transcribing my notes from hieroglyphics into something readable, it’s done. I won’t say that it’s done well, or rather as well as I’d like it to be, but it is done.

And there was a bit of dyeing. The colors aren’t good, and I can’t seem to  get them properly captured, but look at this:

(I’ll try to replace it with a better photo later.) From top to bottom, there’s a very soft camel color from live oak leaves. That surprised me; I expected an olive or sage green. Next is actually a very soft butter yellow, not the ecru you see in the photo. You won’t believe where it comes from; I didn’t: Spanish moss. Seriously. In reality, it’s a lovely, clear, soft butter yellow. The pale kind, like real butter—not margarine. Finally, the bottom skein is actually a sharp lemon yellow, and it’s from kudzu. You know, that plant which is threatening to take over the South? That stuff. So, dyers take note, and harvest to your heart’s content. Maybe the stuff will be good for something.

Like many others at the moment, I turned some of the handspun into a Morning Surf scarf.

I changed the dimensions slightly so that it would actually be more of a rectangular shawl than a scarf, but the fiber is a soft Merino roving, and the yarn was dyed with onion skins to get that color. It’s very vanilla, but it’ll work.

The trip

Spinning and fiber aside, I promised to share a tiny bit of where we were and what we saw. I’ll do more later, but for now, I rather thought you may need to see dimensions, and a very, very rough route.

In 15 days.

We started in Atlanta, jogged a bit north, then took the interstate across to Colorado Springs. Outside Colorado Springs, we went up Pike’s Peak, and I have to tell you that that was very, very cool! It doesn’t seem like much as you’re going up . . .

. . . but once you get there, it’s easy to feel a bit overwhelmed.

Of course, it doesn’t help that at 14,110 feet up in the air, you’re gasping like a fish out of water after a few steps and seriously wishing everyone else would leave so that there would be enough air! For a couple of folks who are accustomed to being pretty much at sea level, it was extreme. That’s when you walk fifteen feet, pause to pretend to catch your breath, look at each other, and have to remind yourself to NOT laugh because laughing uses precious oxygen which seems to be in very short supply at the moment. Sheesh.

The altitude was a serious adjustment for us during the entire trip, and I think we were only starting to get accustomed to things when we returned to Tallahassee. Along the way, however, we did see a few things, and I’ll share some of those photos shortly. For now, though, check this out:

That’s Sheep Rock in Arches National Park in Utah. They believe it’s part of an arch which collapsed ages ago, leaving this very sheepy-looking support rock standing. Is that not just too cool? It’s impossible to get an idea of the sheer size of the thing from this photo, but it’s huge. And I have to laugh: Send a spinner into the desert and see if she doesn’t find something to do with fiber!