This is a mood shot of the studio, with my latest shawl on the blocking board.  This is hand spun Shetland (breed of sheep) from a sheep of my acquaintance who lives with my friend Beatrice Gilbert.  This moody gray is the actual color of the sheep, the wool has been washed, carded, spun and knit but not otherwise interfered with.  I will be posting the pattern in the next couple of weeks.  But the studio looked so nice this morning after I pinned it out that I wanted to show you.  See the spinning wheel, with the blue wool/alpaca blend that I am spinning up for the next project.  You can glimpse a Hawaiian pillow in the seat beside the spinning wheel, which provoked me to add the orchid on top of the shawl.  It seemed unbalanced to have only one Hawaiian touch in the frame and this orchid reminds me of the wild ones that grew beside the roads in Orchidland where we once had our little homestead on the Big Island.

I love that my work spans influences from Hawaii's orchids to Maine's wool and that both ends of this spectrum are anchored in the natural world that surrounded me in each place.  

This is a detail shot of the lace on the corner of the shawl, which is a  Shetland Hap Shawl.  These were everyday shawls that Shetland women actually wore, not the fancy delicate ones that they sold.  I thought about doing a cable pattern with this yarn, but it seemed to want to be a shawl, so I went with it.  I now have seven shawls, which may seem excessive to anyone who is not me.  That is one for every day of the week.  A friend suggested that I should stop now, since one for every day of the month might seem like overdoing it.  But one for every month of the year perhaps???

Here is Salem, multitasking in the Studio.  She is cleaning the drum carder with that wire brush in her right hand, and she is also graciously modeling Devan's Pink Hat.  Devan is back at Bennington and so her head is unavailable for modeling.  This hat is knit from a blend of alpaca, silk, and Bella's white wool which was dyed a really bright pink.  Blending on the drum carder with the white alpaca/silk and some peachy merino got us this specific color.  Devan was quite particular about the color....a pink that wasn't too purple, nor too peachy.  Also Dev is quite sensitive to scratchiness in wool so the blend with alpaca and silk helped to ameliorate that.   

Once the fiber was all carded together I spun it up at roughly a worsted weight (2 ply) on my trusty Ashford and knit it according to the directions for Ann's Red Hat.  I am including a picture of it before I felted it to give you an idea of how the hat looks at this interim stage.  Not too promising is it?  It is best when you are going to felt, particularly if you are going to felt with handspun, to knit up a swatch and throw it in your washing machine to see what happens.  I got a 20% shrinkage, from 5 sts/inch to 4 sts/inch.  The felting also changed the texture quite a bit, from this really open loose knitting to a lovely thick tweedy felt.  

The felting process also raised the halo of the alpaca which you can glimpse  here at the very top of the hat.  See that fuzziness?  The embroidery is done with left over bits of sock yarn before folding up and sewing down the facing.  I thought you would like to see how fetching the hat is in pink.....I'm seriously thinking about making one in purple for me.  In the meantime I'm shipping it off to Devan today as her early birthday present.  Hopefully she'll be able to wear it a couple of times before spring comes to Vermont.