PMF website is up!

Two exciting happenings today!

1: I got a riding mower with a 50" deck and have started to hack down the knee-high-in-some-places grass. Its a big scary piece of equipment to this city girl, who formerly used a human powered reel mower. I want to be wearing kevlar and a full-face helmet, but will probably get over that pretty quickly. My neighbor had taken pity and mowed for me with his giant farm tractor, which was really fun to see, and 3 days later, the grass needed mowing again, so I handed over the plastic.


2: the Pocket Meadow Farm website is up! Thanks to the swift work of The Web Wench here in Berkeley Springs, its actually up and working! So please check it out when you can!

excuse me, did I just get drool on you?

My new best friend just arrived. What I'm saying is, the Crystal Palace order just came in and I am in an ecstasy of fiber-passion. Look at this new lace weight yarn! Its called Kid Merino. How mundane. I would call it Lust in a Bun. I want to pull the needles out of that great big honking Koigu and start something immediately with my new best friend! No! look at the Panda Wool sock yarn! the Panda Cotton! Bamboozle! I must lie down now with cold compresses over the brow.

Ahh, that Koigu shawl. Its coming on a little slower than I hoped. I've gotten the worst case of poison ivy on my hands and forearms, and yeah, that's my excuse.

blog inspiration and a story

Somehow I found this blog, A Little Hut recently. I'm really liking the quiet, simple aesthetic of the artist. Just look at the composition, balance and simplicity of her website. It's really just about perfect.

I've gone through an extended "dry period" as an artist, starting from my graphic design burnout of 2002. It's disorienting — and paradoxically freeing — to change directions in late-mid-life. I realized after many years that there was no way I wanted to work in the digital world any more, at least professionally. I've been a graphic designer for a long time, and there are only so many years one can look at a monitor 8 hours a day. It was time for a return to hand skills.

Background: for over 20 years, I had a leaded glass studio, and scratched out a hippie artist's living doing that. I was good at it, but 20 years is a long time to explore one media. Not that you could begin to learn everything about glass in 20 years, but it can be toxic, dirty and hazardous. I remember one installation in a church, installing large panels 40 feet up on a little catwalk around a dome. That was a turning point for me. This is one of my pieces.



That old What are you going to be when you grow up? dilemma. I've always been involved in costume, and recently had a stint at freelance sewing for the Washington Opera. That was the most fun I've had in years, but you can imagine the pay. Actually, it was much better than minimum wage, but not enough to live on. My own work in costume is just for fun; here are a couple of images. The first is my illustration for the character Valvoline Whipple (Texas paper heiress), the next is the finished costume, modeled by my good friend Susan.




In the same illustration series, this is one of the Harry Potter character, Rita Skeeter. I don't have a good photo of the finished costume though.



In the meantime (up to last year), I had also put in five long years in a cubicle, acquired a house in the burbs, a fat mortgage and a lot of depression-time debt. It was time for a radical change, one I had dreamed of for years. Thanks to the insane housing boom in the DC area, I was able to finance my little farm in the country, flock of animals and the yarn shop.

And that's the story about getting from There to Here.

Its partially thanks to bloggers and online artists like Patricia (above) that I've found my creativity, and positive attitude toward being a working artist again reviving.

Shetland 2000

One of the yarns I'm featuring in the shop is Shetland 2000. It was developed way before the current trend for natural and organic yarns, and is imported by my friends and mentors at Yarns International, Betty Lindsay and Bonnie Hassler. I named two of my sheep after them, by the way. It's a totally natural product, free of dyes, and comes in 9 colors. You'll find a sweater made from it, The Shetland Fern, in the new book The Natural Knitter, by Barbara Albright.

The amazingly talented knitting designer Ron Schweitzer has authored a series of books and patterns for Shetland 2000, available mostly in kits from YI. Some of them expand on the color palette, using plant dyed Shetland. This book, Postcards from Shetland, was designed by me (I'm a freelance graphic designer as well as fiber artist/yarn shop owner).




You can see all the colors in use in one sweater in Albright's earlier book Knitter's Stash, in the River Run pullover. I am not a fairisle knitter, but at some point I really want to make that one.

Pocket Meadow Farm — the shop

Thanks for all the nice comments about the shop! I got one anonymously which I'll answer here. I won't be doing online sales, that is, with a website shopping cart, but when I do finally get the site up (which should be soon, now that I've found someone to troubleshoot my coding), I'll have all my yarns listed with photos. I can do mail orders; will have credit card capability in a month or so.

Basically, I'm carrying Plymouth, Brown Sheep, JCA, Louet, Misty Mountain Handpaint, Crystal Palace and Skacel (this encompasses a lot of other brands, ie, Jo Sharp, etc., that are also distributed by these major companies). I am working on my own very small line of handpaint sock and laceweight yarn, and have small quantities of my handspun. My specialty is lace, and the stock reflects this. One of the commerical yarns I can't wait to try out is Louet KidLin. Its a laceweight kid mohair and linen blend, really nice looking and unusual, without being a "novelty yarn". I've got a lot of the Louet Euroflax too. Not too many people knit with linen, but think about the incredible longevity of linen fiber. Machine washable, all season, nice drape, and won't get eaten by moths.

In the handspinning side of things, I've got a ton of breed specific spinning fiber, and this really nice space dyed pencil roving from Louet mentioned earlier on the blog. Bags and bags of the uber-popular Bluefaced Leicester roving.

The fleece from my own sheep (Leicester Longwools) was a mixed success this year. It's a tiny flock — 4 sheep, 2 goats, so far (we'll breed this fall). Three are fabulous, and will be mixed with some absolutely gorgeous Border Leicester that I got at MD Sheep and Wool this year and spun commerically, but that won't be back for a couple of months at least. That will be 2 ply sport weight, with some laceweight if I can get anyone to spin it. I'll have some as roving too, for spinners.

I've got the usual (and some unusual) books and knitting tools (needles, hooks, Turbo's, notions, etc.). No wheels yet. Turbo lace needles, but I haven't tried them yet. Tablet weaving supplies — more on this next post.

Visit us! Come to Berkeley Springs if you are in the area. We are less than 2 hours from DC. Here is why you need to come: this is a cute, historic spa town with a serious arts reputation. What a great little pampering vacation you can give yourself! Check it out here.