Rainy Day Blues

It's drippy today. The rains have come early to HumCo this year and that has left me a little grumpy, especially since the weather was wet through June this year. The upshot? We had no Summer on the North Coast.

Add a migraine onto today and I am in the dumps a bit, bored with Facebook, but too fractured to do something useful like housework or knitting or dyeing. I am in the mood to blog though, since it has been 6 weeks since my last post. I don't have much useful to say at the moment, but I have a queue of things coming up.

The first is the upcoming Franklin Habit workshop at Northcoast Knittery. Franklin will be the first bona fide knitterati I have ever met. I have known some fine knitters in my time, but mostly they were "just regular folks" in that they didn't publish, blog or otherwise exist within radar range. I am taking a photography workshop from Mr. Habit with the hope that I can beef up my skills in photographing my own projects for display. Like most famous knitters, Franklin's fame comes in the rarefied small world atmosphere of the knitting world and therefore he has a "day job", so to speak. I am very excited about the workshop, let me tell you! It is going to be a good time. I even bought one of Franklin's books so I can get a signature. I usually confine my autograph seeking to Chris Isaak (I have his signature on 4 CD's, a t-shirt and a ticket stub), but I figure this is a fun opportunity.

Also waiting to be implemented, I finally got a decent bagful of wolf lichen to dye some yarn with. My recent moth problems forced me to organize my stash, and now I know where my dyeable yarn is. The sample from this lichen I saw at last Winter's local Mushroom Fair were a cool lime green, even with varying mordants. I saw thee samples and recognized the lichen right away. It is rampant growing in the Sierra Nevada and California Cascade mountains, usually at higher altitudes. A recent trip to Lassen National Park allowed me to gather a good amount (not IN the park, mind you. I don't think that's legal) near the house I was staying at and at a convenient rest area. I have subsequently learned, however, that wolf lichen is poisonous in quantity, so I will definitely use gloves and caution. I gathered it with bare hands, but if I do so again, I will bring gloves.

I have a lot of other things to dye with as well, when I finally get my act together: re alder bark, dock root an avocado skins. Our buddleia bloomed early and weirdly, so I missed that this year. It is a medium purple and should yield yellows and/or greens. Next year I'll be ready.

My knitting is going forward slowly. I have more UFO's than I can count and they keep piling up. I knit to a stuck point and move on to something easier without finishing the preceding project. Bad me, but it's a hard habit to break. Still, I need to finish something an on that not, I'll close out this post. Ciao!