Mandy Moore's Blog, page 30
October 25, 2016
Teaching Almost Done for the Year and New Interweave Spinning Batts Kit
The Gathering!
This year has been a whirlwind of teaching. I have met so many wonderful spinners and seen lots of beautiful places. I always get a little sad when my last teaching gig of the year comes up. Early next month Beth and I will both be teaching for The Northeast Handspinners at The Gathering, which means extra silliness since Beth and I are traveling together. My classes are full, but there are still openings in other classes, even the classes I would love to take with Cal Patch, superstar pattern drafting, crochet and embroidery teacher.
Essential Fiber batts
Interweave has just released the How To Spin Batts Kit that I worked on with Michelle from Essential Fiber. We came up with a colorway based on a painting, Red Canna, by Georgia O’Keefe who we both admire.
The kit comes with: 3 batts from Essential Fiber, my DVD, 12 (Plus) Ways to Spin Batts, and a copy of the new Spin and Knit 2017.
I finally updated my teaching calendar for 2017. Will I see you?
I’m spending the winter designing new classes to teach. Let me know if there’s something you’d like me to add to my class list!
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October 20, 2016
Obsession Thursday: Rhinebeck 2016 recap!
As I haven’t been to Rhinebeck in years, this was an exciting trip for me. It’s hard to sum it up in paragraphs of prose, so I’d rather go with photos, and I think you would, too. Enjoy!
I set off very early, in time to drive into the sunrise as I neared the US border.
The first morning was deliciously cold and fog was everywhere.
The fall colors were as beautiful as always.
And then I went into the A and B buildings. The lighting for photography was best in these buildings, and I was able to get in before the crowds came. I loved so much in this year’s show, but couldn’t possibly feature everyone’s work, as much as I wish I could! These are just some delicious highlights.
Into the Whirled.
Into the Whirled
Loop
Loop
Neighborhood Fiber Co.
Neighborhood Fiber Co.
Neighborhood Fiber Co. I loved these swatches in embroidery hoops!
Hansen miniSpinner (now with the new Pro model!)
Look at that sexy wood!
Miss Babs
Miss Babs
This is THE Lisa Souza, freaking out as we finally meet after having worked together online for probably 12 years!
Lisa Souza
Lisa Souza
Windsong Farm Originals
Windsong Farm Originals
Lanart
Lanart and the nice man in their booth
Stephen Willette Fiber Art Tools
Trunk Brooklyn
Trunk Brooklyn (I think)
Wild Fibers Magazine
Wild Fibers Magazine
trying on hats at Sankow’s Beaver Brook Farm
Golding
Golding
a happy spinner trying out a Lendrum wheel
Jillian and our friend Erica check out the fleeces
As always, a crush at The Fold for Socks that Rock
The Fold
Dragonfly Fibers and their Vote! colorway
Sheepses
Knitting Garage
Knitting Garage
The Sheep Shed @ Mountain View Farm
Nicky Epstein! (she gives good hugs)
naturallyinspiredbaskets.com
naturallyinspiredbaskets.com
Katrinkles
Loop of the Loom
wool or maple cotton candy? which is which?
Fiber Optic Yarns
Fiber Optic Yarns
New England Felting Supply
New England Felting Supply
Chameleon Colorworks
And then it was time to go home.
I can’t possibly compute realistic numbers, but what you’ve seen here is just a tiny fraction of what you’d see at Rhinebeck over the weekend. I had proclaimed on Twitter that it wasn’t going to be sweater weather (sweata-weatha!) during the weekend, based on the weather forecasts, and was delighted to find myself completely wrong. It was perfect sweater weather.
Saturday was, as usual, a crazy crowded day with so much browsing, eating and friend-reunioning, and Sunday was quieter and filled with catching up with those we missed the first day, and the booths we wanted to go back to before going home. There is never enough time to see it all, and this year, I was okay with that. I sat in front of the view above Sunday afternoon, and I watched people go by. Saw my first baby-manbun (omg, New Yorkers, you are so silly), met the nicest knitter/gardener (hi, Jane!) and we talked for a long while, and then Jillian and I sauntered back to the car and left before the traffic crush hit.
Not many pics of friends, because I’d rather talk to them than shoot them. But I saw so many, and missed many more. Till next time, Rhinebeck!
October 19, 2016
WWW: Winner of movie tickets; The Great Swatch Experiment
The two winners of our giveaway for tickets to see YARN THE MOVIE when it screens in Toronto are Marina and Claudia! We hope you enjoy it!
And I’m posting one article here this week because of how important I think it is. This week, instead of reading me, you should go read this blog post:
Kelbourne Woolens is running The Great Swatch Experiment, and they’ve posted the data from the first swatch.
Image from The Kelbourne Woolens blog.
This post provides background on the series and the experiment. This is such an important thing to do!
October 18, 2016
Spinzilla 2016 Spins 5 Million Yards and a Rhinebeck Quickie
I’m growing more wool for Spinzilla 2017
Spinzilla Spinners spun 5,507,622 yards of yarn this year!
The top spinner, Monica Bittner of Team Louet North America spun 50,378. Her team, Louet North America took the top team prize with 296,849 yards. Just reading that makes my hands feel crampy!
Top 5 teams for 2016
1. Team Louet North America 296,849
2. Team Knot Another Hat 231,738
3. Team Edgewood Garden Studio 158,459
4. Team Hand Spinning News UK 151,647
5. Team Hilltop Cloud 146,299
Storey Publishing signing table at Rhinebeck
On Thursday Amy is doing a big Rhinebeck recap, but I wanted to say thank you. Thank you to everyone who bought my book, I sold out! And thank you to everyone who told me kind things about my book, it really means a lot to me.
I had so much fun talking to and hugging everyone. I got to see leaves, stay in a fab house with friends, I shopped a little and touched everything. I even manged to make it to the sheep auction this year.
I did not come home with a sheep, but I came home with so many ideas for fun and projects after Rhinebek that the inside of my head sounds a little like the sheep auctioneer.
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October 13, 2016
Obsession Thursday: #rhinebeckpiechart
I haven’t been at Rhinebeck since 2008. Eight years! Until recently, I was in the UK most Octobers, so it just didn’t work out.
This year, my friends got themselves super-organized and rented a house nearby. Which means staying for reasonably cheap with people I love. How could I not go?
So I’m driving 7+ hours to Rhinebeck tomorrow while the housesitter watches the Squeezle again (bless her). I have planned a stop at Sonic for some diet limeade to fuel my drive (i may buy two so I have enough for the whole trip). Have you never had Sonic’s diet limeade? It’s very good.
Twitter user @oharethey started a thing I rather like: the #rhinebeckpiechart. Here’s mine —>
It’s probably more complex than this, but it feels like friends first and everything else is a bonus. That’s worth driving 7+ hours for, right? Hell, yes.
If you’re going to be there, our first-ever Rhinebeck Knitty meetup is on the hill at 2pm on Saturday. I’ll have knittybuttons to give away until I run out. Come give me a hug!
October 12, 2016
WWW: Rhinebeck Week!
Remember, if you’re near Toronto, enter to win a double-pass to see YARN THE MOVIE!
This week it’s THE WEEK. It’s the week of Rhinebeck, properly known as the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival, held in Rhinebeck, NY.
If you’re wondering what the deal is:
Really, Rhinebeck is like San Diego ComicCon for fibre folk. There’s cosplay, celebs, people who are passionate about the same things…
— Karen (@PeopleOfCraft) October 10, 2016
On the newly relaunched Mason Dixon Knitting website, a primer on How To Rhinebeck.
And yes, part of the fun is in knitting yourself a sweater to wear there. Because of a change in my schedule, I was able to plan a last-minute day trip via NYC. With less than two weeks to go, I decided that a bulky lopapeysa was going to be about all I could manage. I’ve been chronicling my progress on my instagram, and I was very happy to finish it up on Monday night. (Well, it still needs buttons but my excuse is that I’ll be shopping for them at the event.)
Amy, Jillian and I will all be there, and we hope to see you!
October 11, 2016
More Fun – A Rhinebeck Knitty Meet Up, A Yarnitecture Giveaway
Knitty meet up!
There is a Rhinebeck Knitty Meet Up, the first one ever! On Saturday at 2pm, on the hill between the sheep dog demos and the petting zoo. Here’s a Rhinebeck map. Amy promises to have new Knitty buttons to share.
Maya Cardigan designed by Kirsten Kapur, photo by Ryann Ford
Kirsten Kapur who designed the glorious Maya Cardigan in my book is doing a giveaway for a copy Yarnitecture. Hop on over there and enter!
Get a signed copy of Yarnitecture at Rhinebeck!
I won’t be at the Knitty meet up, but I will be nearby I’ll be signing copies of my book, Yarnitecture, from 1-5 on Saturday and from 10-2 on Sunday in barn B. On Sunday at 1:30 I’ll be doing a a little talk on how much I love to sample called Sampling Is Not A Dirty Word!, it’s part of the Tales of Yarn series in the author signing area. Come see me!
Now I need to decide what I want to shop for this year, because sadly all the things is not an option!
October 10, 2016
YARN the Movie comes to Toronto; Giveaway!
I’ve written about YARN the Movie before, and I was very pleased to hear that it’s coming to Toronto. It’s playing at the Carlton Cinema October 21st-27th. AND we have two double-passes to give away!
The movie aims to introduce to the broader world the artists who are redefining the tradition of knit and crochet.
Reinventing our relationship with this colorful tradition, YARN weaves together wool graffiti artists, circus performers, and structural designers into a visually-striking look at the women who are making a creative stance while building one of modern art’s hottest trends.
Featuring interviews with fiber artists artists Olek, Tinna Thorudottir Thorvalder, Toshiko Horiuchi Macadam, Tilde Björfors of Cirkus Cikör and Barbara Kingsolver, the film is a visual delight, and an excellent look at our woolly world.
If you’re not in Toronto, it’s playing all over, in North America and Europe. Consult your local listings.
To enter, leave a comment below by midnight Sunday eastern time. We’ll announce the winner next week. The usual rules apply: if you’ve won something from us in the past year, please give others a chance. You’ll be asked to answer a skill-testing question. And remember, this is for Toronto screenings only, so you need to be able to get yourself to Yonge and College.
October 6, 2016
Obsession Thursday: The smell of woodsmoke.
Long beach on Vancouver Island. Photo directly out of my phone, really. No filters or adjustments of any kind. I can’t make this stuff up.
I am in Tofino. I got here by getting on a train in Toronto and riding in my little sleeper bunk all the way to Vancouver, then grabbing a rental car and taking the ferry over to Vancouver Island.
Tofino is a tiny little surfing town that sticks out of the west coast of Vancouver Island all by itself. It’s a 3-hour drive from reasonably urban Nanaimo (home of the bars), going up and down and through wiggly bits, over mountainy terrain, through rainforesty bits that occasionally open up to give you vistas I only wish I had photos of. Diamond-clear lakes that tend more to green than blue, and mountains covered with so very many trees (thankfully, still covered, not clearcut), and fog and little boats and omg I am so much in love with this part of the world. If you want to see what my trip has been like so far, you can find my photos here.
I’ve been lucky enough, thanks to being able to teach knitting, to have travelled to a lot of places. I get this ache often, this I HAVE TO LIVE HERE ache. Sometimes it passes as soon as I get to the next place; sometimes it stays with me long after I’ve returned home. Places that stuck really hard with me are Portland (the Oregon one), Hawaii, Brighton AND Yorkshire, in England, and now here. Tofino. This is the first place I’ve gone to purely as vacation. No work, except blogging. It’s been relaxing, refreshing, enlightening, and so enjoyable. I’ve made myself not be miserly and have booked the Whale Watch, instead of just wishing I had once I got home. I get on the boat in a few hours.
I’m reasonably freshly single after being married a long damned time. I could move anywhere I want, thankfully, as long as there’s a decent internet connection and a good rabbit vet. Every time I walk out of my little inn and smell the woodsmoke, and feel the dampness from the ocean against my skin, I realize that this kind of environment is the one that touches me most deeply. Woods and ocean. So maybe I could move somewhere like this.
Maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll book another trip here or somewhere like here. A longer one.
October 5, 2016
WWW: When yarn and science collide; our very own “Knitting Humourist”
Love love love these: knitterly illustrations from this week’s New Yorker.
Image (c) Pat Ashforth.
Even if you are not mathematically inclined, these projects are absolutely beautiful. And if you ARE, they are also jaw-droppingly clever. Mathematicians Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer create yarny designs to illustrate mathematical concepts.
The blanket pattern on the left is derived from an image of a grid of superimposed sudokus puzzles, where each of the digits represents a different colour Sudoku grid…
Serves him right: a burglar broke into the home of a woman and managed to get away with only a briefcase full of knitting patterns. Although, if it was out-of-print and hard to find issues of the Rowan magazine, it wouldn’t be quite so funny…
Image (c) Allison Meier for Hyperallergic.
I had no idea: how the Pantone color system evolved from a way of categorizing bird colors.
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