Butternut Woolens

There are so very many ways I feel like I'm cracking, but this morning, after weeks of children hunching shirts over bare knees and me warming typing fingers in armpits, I relented and turned on the furnace.

Fall is here. Wool must be harvested from the fields and lovingly turned into something soft and warm. So we went to the Eureka Fiber Festival in Eureka about 45 minutes northwest of the house and about 15 minutes from Canada.

I thought wool would be the big ticket item, but I was mistaken, wool is the sideshow to the Eureka Quilt Show.

This Hawaiian Star quilt won the Viewer's Choice award.

Quilts hung from all the stores and galleries along Main Street, they were displayed on wooden frames in the town park. Eureka was crowded with people wearing fanny packs and driving RV's with Montana Quilter license plates.

The wool show was small, two dozen fleeces being judged by three men in cowboy hats, feed store caps and dusty boots. I spotted a black merino/clun forest fleece a from a lamb named "Not For Profit" and after a great deal of back and forth, I was finally able to buy it. Although the fleeces are marked for sale, the show isn't really set up for people to actually buy the fleeces. I'm guessing nobody else bought a fleece, which is really too bad because there's lovely wool being grown here. Julie was kind enough to let me take her fleece out of the show and take a check for it to boot. I'm tickled.

The Eureka show made my week. I brought the fleece to show my family at dinner that night and people made murmering if slightly perplexed comments.

This lamb is 3/4 merino and I knew I'd have to be really careful with the washing, so I went for long warm soaks and only spun it after the final wash.

Half went in the cooler and half in the bath tub. Both methods worked just fine although Dawn dishwashing liquid didn't cut the grease as much as I wanted. The second soak I used Tide, but that left a sticky residue and strong perfume smell. So I did a third soak on half the fleece to get rid of that and re-upped my Amway membership. Their laundry detergent is the best wool scour I've found. Use 6 of their tiny scoops for about 4-5 lbs of fleece. Wool comes out squeaky clean with no residue or odor.

After working on the Bluefaced Leicester sock yarn, I thought I had the sale page all ready to go live, but then found a big box of 8 oz skeins, so you can expect the BFL to post this week after those big boys are sorted. As always, I'll notify the list and put a notice in the blog. If you want first crack at it, join the notification list in the side bar at the right.

The Falkland yarns have just been listed in the sidebar to the right. All are on sale until they're gone. Enjoy!

If you want to be notified when new yarns are posted, just join the notification list also on the sidebar.

cuz I need to return his stripey pants.

In the last 6 months I've driven through Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California, West Virginia, Kentucky, Iowa, Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois, Wyoming, and South Dakota, some of these multiple times. I've been in airports in Colorado, Utah, Washington DC, and Georgia. I flew for the first time since 9/11 this year and I've been dissed by United, just like musician Dave Carroll and everyone else.

I'm home now, if by home you mean the place where the wool is. Thank you knitters for your patience while life took its twists and turns. I'm back at work on the yarn sale.

My Year of Doing Nothing came to an end two weeks ago and I've been thinking a lot about what this year-long personal experiment has revealed. There's so much I want to tell you that I think I'm going to have to write a book.

*cringe*I can't believe I said that.

THAT is the fruition of taking a year off from my normal life. THAT is what I'm talking about. Before, I was rational and I NEVER would have told anyone I was working on something like a book, especially not a personal one. Now, crazyass ideas seem not only reasonable, but...well, potentially fun, so why not share the love with you all?

See, something as big as writing a book should be kept to oneself, because once you blab something like that out, people will start asking how's the book coming along, a reasonable thing to ask and what if I didn't work on it that day? What if I didn't work on for TWO days, a week, a MONTH? What am I going to say? How am I going to feel OK with those questions when I've judged myself to not be up to the task? I suppose I could just not judge myself.

What if I have been working on it, but it seems all of the work sucks and will probably have to be thrown out? And herein lies one of the things I've learned about myself this year: there is a part of me that wants to look good all of the time, no, she MUST look smart, witty, talented and wise all of the time.

Another thing I learned in this experiment: in order to keep from looking like a fool, I keep my aspirations small, so I can be fairly certain of achieving them. A wise friend once likened this to holding a shallow bowl in the rain of Life's goodness. You get to choose how wide the bowl is. Because holding back like this is so dull, really. Wouldn't it be more fun to really go for something, even if I fail and even if I'm not sure I want it in the end? Besides, playing small really frustrates me.

I can't help comparing myself to Roz Savage a middle management, middle age wife who one day quit her job and her marriage and decided to row a boat across the Atlantic Ocean by herself. At least I'm not as crazy as she is. I wouldn't leave my marriage, quit my job ..... Never mind.

At least I'm not on an OCEAN!

Well, a REAL ocean, a metaphorical ocean is still less crazy than a real ocean.

Sort of.

All big adventures have their difficult moments. Roz had a malfunctioning water filter, I had a crisis while driving somewhere in the Midwest. Some difficult phone calls made everything in my life seemed wrong, wrong, wrong and I couldn't stop crying and I didn't know what to do about all this frightening crazy wrongness so I went into the bathroom of a bookstore to try to calm down. After breathing deeply and washing my face, I sought comfort in the knitting books, but the tears came soundlessly again just as they did at Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival just after I had sold the farm and I found myself back in the bathroom going through my purse looking for sunglasses. At least if I was going to cry in public, again, I'd preserve some dignity and do the celebrity disguise thing while pretending to look at books. But Midwesterners aren't particularly familiar with celebrity disguises and instead even more people were looking at me wondering why a blind girl was crying in a bookstore.

Finally I just grabbed a random book from Pema Chodron, my go-to Buddhist nun for the last year because when I opened it it said, "There's nothing wrong with you" and I felt a tiny bit better.

This is why I like Buddhism, it's simple. No need to try to have a relationship with a dead man, the irony is not lost here. Meditation practice works for me I guess because I was probably skiing on the day they gave out faith and missed the whole ball of wax.

There's nothing wrong with you.

Chodron's book The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness is a compilation of talks she's given to students at meditation retreats at Gampo Abbey. I read it late at night when I feel like I need to hold someone's hand but there's no one here.

Reading a paragraph of Pema's is like having my own Zen master sitting on a cushion on the floor of my bedroom calmly reminding me there is someone I can count on, she's always with me, no matter where I go or what is happening, I just forget sometimes.

I was back East when I heard of Erika's plane going down and began to phone and organize our Wednesday night knitting group to knit a scarf in remembrance for Erika's mother. Everyone wanted to participate and since most of us are new knitters, we decided a garter stitch scarf would be the way to go.

My friend went out of his way to locate a knitting store so I could buy yarn and needles, but we couldn't find it. We phoned twice. We got out of the car and walked the street where the iPhone said it should be. There were no signs. Finally we spotted it in the back of a faded and forgotten strip mall.

Inside the tiny space yarns were piled to the ceiling along all 4 walls. Yarns were stacked to the ceiling in the center, still in boxes and plastic bags. Yarns leered out of crevices. It was a dungeon of yarn.

There was no clear organizing theme to me, but the owner was helpful and seemed to know exactly which pile contained the bulky wool I was looking for. There was no Lamb's Pride or any brands I recognized and I thought I knew them all. The owner argued with my choice of needle size and the only green bulky yarn was a piney green single ply with a wash of ghost-like mohair lending a silvery cast. Not exactly what I was looking for, but it was a start. The owner suggested 2 balls of 60 yds would do the trick. I asked her to ring up 5.

That night I swatched. The resulting fabric was too tight. The next day I found a Ben Franklin store that sold Paton's Classic wool, so I bought 5 skeins of the only green with the needed yardage and larger needles. That night I swatched again. Both the single ply and the Paton's were too firm with the larger needles.

The next day I went back to the Ben Franklin and bought a third set of needles.

That night I swatched. The resulting scarf was too wide. I gave all of the swatches to the cat.

The next day my friend drove me to a larger town and they had a large craft store that sold yarn. I bought some more green wool blend. That night I swatched. The resulting scarf was just too ...somber.

That night I gently asked Erika to let go of the knitting. I asked her to go on to wherever she was going and I told her that we would follow later and in the meanwhile we'd all take care of her mom and each other.

The next day I went back to the Ben Franklin for more Smarties and decided to walk through the yarn section. Surprisingly, they had received a new shipment of yarn and there was the EXACT shade of Erika's eye shadow in Lion Brand Homespun. I bought 2 skeins and didn't bother swatching, I knew it would just be right and it was.

On Sunday a small airplane carrying our Wednesday night knitting group friend Erika Hoefer, age 27 and three of her friends went down in rugged mountainous terrain near Dixon, MT. On Wednesday a search and rescue team confirmed there were no survivors.

Here's a link to the coverage in The Daily Inter Lake. Erika and Melissa Weaver, 23, also a reporter with the Interlake, were accompanying two other friends on a sightseeing tour of the Flathead Valley and surrounding mountains. Their bodies were recovered last night.

Erika and I met earlier this year when she interviewed me for a story on the personal experiment I call My Year of Doing Nothing and she came to the first and every meeting of the Wednesday night knitting group which you can read more about by scrolling back a few stories in the blog. Erika is pictured here in the purple shirt. Amy, Crystal, Erika, Darlene and Julia.

At our last get together, Erika had just come from an economic conference. As the business reporter, she covered everything from the most obscure and unusual small businesses to the local economic forecast. When we asked her what she had learned she said, "It's pretty bad. It's so bad I don't want to talk about it."

I think her response illuminates a part of who Erika was. She cared deeply about the people in our community, the community she was becoming part of by extending herself through her writing and her living. The stories she reported moved her. I think this is remarkable and a testament to her humanity and the largeness of her spirit.

She had only lived here briefly and she had no family here. She didn't come to shred fresh powder, or to hunt and fish. She carried a Kate Spade silver quilted handbag and loved MAC green eyeshadow and bemoaned the lack of a cosmetic store, which made us laugh all the harder. She was a breath of fresh air and funny, too.

Erika joked with her male colleagues about wearing plaid shirts and fleece vests every day and made us laugh, too, when she and her female friends started wearing their own plaid shirts, which of course, the guys didn't notice.

Hadn't the rest of us longed to be sophisticated and stylish only to find our efforts thwarted by nature and a small town's lack of amenities like plowed roads and sidewalks? And who among us didn't feel like we, too, were standing on the side trying to carve a life for ourselves in this beautiful, but somewhat hostile piece of wilderness. Because, like Erika, most of us had lived somewhere else and finding ourselves in this little community snugged up against 5 million acres of wilderness was startling and bewildering. Where would we find our favorite green eyeshadow? Where would we find a man to love? Where could we get the specialized medical care we needed? Erika was an inspiration to me because she just jumped in there with both feet, trying new things like knitting, meeting new people and charming us all.

It had been Erika's plan to knit something for everyone in her family and she started with her grandmother, fearing that she could lose her before much knitting could be accomplished. She was working on a beautiful natural colored scarf for her grandmother at our last meeting.

I think I speak for the group when I say Erika's loss is crushing. She was a beautiful woman with a deep heart and we were all looking forward to getting to know her.

In the knitting tradition that spans all cultures across the globe, we've decided to knit her mother a scarf in Erika's memory. It will be green.