And now I'm really in a hurry.
Note: edited March 14, 2010 to remove a dead link. Just sayin'.
So, a couple of weekends ago I headed down to see Alan and John. The drive was nicely relaxed, and included at stop to see Buffy and Don at Shelridge Farm -- and to pick up some yarn they've donated to the Men's Spring Knitting Retreat. Lovely, lovely stuff: the guys will be very pleased, I'm sure.
John and Alan run the shop from their home in Jordan Ontario Canada. It's hard to miss it on the street.
It was really a lovely, lazy weekend. I knitted, and played in the shop. A couple of years back, I bought some roving made from brilliant blue silk and dead white alpaca. The 2 fibers had pretty much just been laid together: there was no blending. (I wish I'd taken a picture. Oh wait: check here and scroll right down to the end of the post. It's a crummy picture, to be sure, but you can see the jumble of roving.) I dunno why I bought it, but, anyway, it surfaced in my stash when I was doing some sorting a few months back. I took it down and blended some of it on a drum carder with indigo blue wool. And now I have a box of batts to spin up.
John rescued a couple of skeins of yarn for me, with some alchemic dye magic. I'd been given a few skeins of yarn that were dyed a solid shade of pink. It's great yarn, but the colour -- sort of a cross between grapefruit pink and salmon pink and dusty rose -- is a solid colour (read: boring) and looks, well, dated. (I'm sure it was once a popular colour. I wish I'd thought to take a picture.))
"John", I said. "Do you think we could tinker with the colour of this yarn? You know: maybe push parts of the skeins closer to being orangier and other parts closer to being pinkier or reddier, or something?"
John got out the pots and the dyes, and the next day I had skeins that look like a bowl of fresh peach slices.
Isn't it beautiful? It hard to believe that it started out pink.
Sunday morning, the shop hosted a spin-in -- which struck me as an incredibly civilized way to spend a few hours on a Sunday morning.
Rusty, the shop mascot and Official Greeter, was quite relaxed about it all.
On Monday, I took a drive to my favourite winery.
Up the drive
to the retail showroom.
It's an octagonally shaped room, and on one side there is a balcony. From that you can look out over the vines. Click to enlarge these pictures.
And on Tuesday, I drove back home.
So...why are you in a hurry?
Because on Wednesday of this week I leave to go to Easton Mountain for the weekend retreat called "FINDING YOUR CALLING: Making Connections Between Spirit and Vocation". Since my job is gone in a couple of months (or maybe sooner) I thought it would be good to use a couple of vacation days to think about my work life and to consider where I'm going. And between now and Wednesday I have to do the homework for the workshop (which is proving to be daunting), the laundry, and organize some stuff that I'm taking down for the Men's Spring Knitting Retreat. And cast on a knitting project.
See you when I'm back.
