One of my touchstone books during childhood was Sarah, Plain and Tall. Sarah-in-the-story comes from Maine, has a cat named Seal, and says that her favorite colors are blue and green and gray, the colors of the sea. I grew up tall on a rocky coast on the other side of the country, and I always identified with her. If you were to dye a colorway for my island, it would have to be blue and green and gray, and also dry-grass-and-driftwood, like this:

See the Great Blue Heron on the end of the cannery pier? He’s island colors all over. I was out birding with my parents and some other island folk when I took these. The birds were mostly hunkered down to stay out of the rolling fog and damp, which we sometimes get even on sunny late-summer days. The islands are always cooler than the mainland, which makes them good places for knitters of wool.

And speaking of wool…

Surprise! A finished project! It’s a Fishtrap “swatchcap”, as EZ likes to call them. She’s perfectly right, in this as in nearly everything else: why knit a useless square to test your gauge and materials when you could just dash off a hat?

You’ll notice I camouflage pretty well with the dead grass, too. When I lived in New England and New York I found myself filling my closet with deep reds and pumpkin-y oranges, and spring in Portland made me want pale leafy greens. But when I’m home (and San Juan Island will always be home, no matter where I live), I revert to browns and blues and sandy beige. I’ve only just noticed this impulse to adapt to my landscape, and I’m realizing it affects my knitting, too. Has anyone else experienced this sort of color instinct? I’m not sure if it’s a primitive urge to be unobtrusive or a subliminal form of inspiration from the environment, or maybe both.

At any rate, this visit to the island also made me realize how jarring it is when the colors you see aren’t what your mind expects. We had a potluck party at South Beach, and as the sun went down we got this:

It’s the smoke from the forest fires in the Cascades and on Vancouver Island. That mauve sky and the tinge of cerulean in the water are beautiful, but they don’t look like the San Juans at all. And they made the whole landscape look wrong: the greens were too vivid, parts of the sound looked yellow… I felt like we were all on drugs. (Big props to Mr. Garter for the sunset picture, though.)

All this rambling is leading somewhere, I promise. I’ve been thinking a lot about color and how to make more mindful use of it in things I knit. Thus far, I’ve mostly used solids in my garments, or I’ve let variegated yarns dyed by someone else do all the work. But I want to start doing some dying of my own, and I’ll get my chance in October — no sooner did I post my eagerness for the natural plant dyeing class than Abundant Yarn opened up registration! Huzzah! I also want to start learning colorwork. I’m going to practice on mittens, with Nancy Bush’s Estonian patterns as a guide. Choosing colors I like together was harder than I thought it would be, but next time I’ll show you what I’ve come up with.

In the mean time I want to know: what would a colorway of your home turf look like? And I’ll leave you with these darling girls:

That’s our Selkie on the left and then on the right, in Labrador Heaven at the beach with her friend Lucy.

   
              
At last I can heed the requests for more photographs of the Colorado odyssey. Thanks to Fred Meyer’s one-hour development service, I was able to get these on a CD before we drove up to Friday Harbor. (Easterners: Fred Meyer is like a local version of Wal-mart, only with better quality stuff and fewer lapdances for Satan.)

Anyway, clockwise from top left: 1. Wrangler Jerry, a 17-year-old Amish kid we corrupted, looking over the edge of Black Face Butte. 2. Sandra Lake as seen from the trail up to the saddle between Wilson Peak and Mt. Wilson. 3. The boys stubbornly disregarding the trail we clever girls found and riding across the Meadows in the San Juan National Forest. 4. The view of Vermilion Peak and Gabriel’s Horn from Black Face. 5. Lizard Head from the trail below. 6. The group reaching the remains of my great-aunt and uncle’s 1933 cabin.

And we wouldn’t want to forget the knitting content:

              
This is one rough-riding sock, friends. And Cassidy is a patient pony, little fazed by the antics of his crazy knitter and also unparalled at following deer trails through all kinds of unwelcoming terrain, even when assaulted most cruelly by yellowjackets. The picture on the right not only captures the art of knitting in a hail storm at 12,000 feet (okay, this is just post-hail), but reveals Phase 1 of a fall project I’m cooking up: dyeing with owl clover. I collected a plastic bag full up at Sandra Lake, and you can see it here drying on my laundry line.

I have no idea if I’ve got enough plants to make a reasonable quantity of dye, or if my haphazard drying process was too compromised by damp weather and the necessity of stuffing the plants into a duffle bag on a pack horse every day. They’re in my basement now, sad brown shrivelled husks of their former selves. Will they still yield a pretty red dye? Who knows. I also haven’t the faintest clue what to do to them to extract said color, so obviously a lot more research is necessary. Pat at Abundant Yarn & Dyeworks keeps making noises about offering a plant dyeing class, which I’m panting to join, but hasn’t given any details yet. Anybody have any good plant dyeing resource materials to recommend?

It’s a beautiful sunny day in Friday Harbor, so I’m going to wrest myself away from the computer for a trip up to my parents’ property to give my two cents on architectural and landscape design. It’s terribly odd to imagine my parents in a house other than the one they built before I was born, but change is good for the spirit. And they’ve got an undeniably beautiful site for a smaller place. Stay tuned: you might get to see a picture of it. Yesterday we went out on a birding excursion and I got some photos I think may turn out well, so maybe I’ll put together a little island montage for you.

I’ve got about forty-four hours left until I leave for what may turn out to be one of the adventures of my lifetime. I’m going here:

This is Sandra Lake, twelve thousand feet up in a remote corner of Colorado, ringed by three fourteen thousand foot mountains, including Wilson Peak. Sandra Lake was named for my favorite once-removed cousin by her parents, who prospected for silver and wrote geology theses there as honeymooners in 1932. (Just try to tell me that isn’t the most hardcore honeymoon you ever heard of! And Cousin Sandra wasn’t born at the time, in case you’re thinking unseemly thoughts about my great aunt and uncle. They bought the land and returned there many times over the years with their family.)

Cousin Sandra, called Saucy in the family, died unexpectedly last winter. This is a memorial trip for her and a 70th birthday celebration for her husband Bill. Here’s Bill as I last saw him, on his Virginia farm in March:

We won’t have the baby oxen, Ruff and Reddy, on this trip, but we will have seven or eight horses. We’re renting them from the OK Ranch in Rico, packing up to the lake to stay for three days, and then riding part of the Calico Stock trail. I’ll be gone ten days in all. It will be the longest time I’ve camped, the highest elevation I’ve visited, and probably the widest variation in weather conditions I’ve ever had to prepare for. I’m thrilled, but it’s also a daunting trip. My pack horse will carry my gear for me so I don’t need to worry about weight as much as I would if I were backpacking. But the temperature might range from 75 to 25 degrees, and there could be high winds and rain or even snow. So today I’m piling gear all over the house and decided what to take. I’m considering buying a tent from my neighbor, as the one I was going to borrow from my parents mysteriously disappeared and the one I took from Mr. Garter’s parents’ attic looks doubtful for surviving inclement weather a thousand feet above treeline. And naturally, I have to decide what to knit.

Top candidate? Socks. On two circs, of course. We can’t have dpns poking through my saddle bags and pricking my horse. And on a trip of this magnitude, it hardly seems appropriate to bring anything but Trekking sock yarn. I know I’ve got two balls in the stash, but I’m leaning towards a nice three-ply marled burgundy/russet/gray/black colorway. I started making a Jaywalker out of it when I was driving across the country, but after about four inches I discovered that it was going to be too small. It’s been languishing ever since. So an essential part of today’s packing effort will be swatching for a new pattern. I enjoyed making my one pair of Jaywalkers, but I wasn’t really enthused by the results with this Trekking anyway. It wants to be something else. Stay tuned.

I’ll try to post tomorrow, but then it’ll be silence from this blog for the next ten days. Wish me fair weather, friends. It might be hard to knit by headlamp wearing gloves in a tent in a snowstorm at 12,000 feet. Or it might be really cozy. But hopefully I won’t have to find out.

Tomorrow begins the Prologue of the Tour de France (in Veronique’s hometown!), and I had a spirited post prepared about my enthusiasm for the sport of cycling and my commitment to absurdly early rising in order to watch the television coverage. Then I was blindsided by a shocking headline in this morning’s Oregonian: the elite riders, including my beloved Ivan Basso and everyone’s perennial arch-nemesis Jan Ullrich, have been kicked out of the Tour because of allegations that link them to the big Spanish doping scandal that’s been going down all month. Instead of providing us with what could have been the most exciting Tour in years, they have to go home and try to prove their innocence. I’m distraught. Doping is bad. It’s bad for the sport, and I worry about the health of the riders to succumb to the temptation to elevate their performance by artificial means. And I know it’s widely prevalent in cycling and that the authorities need to crack down. With great competition comes great pressure to deliver results by any means necessary, and cheaters need to be caught and penalized to maintain the integrity of the game. But what poor management of the crisis, to wait until the eleventh hour to name names, to hold a “guilty until proven innocent” policy that denies us the chance to watch the greats go head to head. If they’re guilty, are they still greats? Depends how clean their rivals are, I suppose. If everybody’s doping (and it’s becoming hard to believe otherwise in Pro Tour cycling), obviously people like Armstrong, Basso, and Ullrich are still higher calibre athletes. If, by some miracle, the authorities have really caught all the cheaters in one fell swoop this time, these men didn’t deserve the titles they’ve earned after all.

Either way, it’s a sad day for cycling and I need a new guy to root for over the next 23 days. It’s hard to trust that any of them are riding clean, and I pity the winner who’ll always wonder if he had enough to beat Basso, Ullrich, and Vinokourov (who isn’t implicated in the scandal, but so many of his teammates were that there aren’t enough left to field a team for the Tour). His victory will be cheapened if the heavyweights are found to be innocent after all. I’m almost discouraged enough not to want to watch the Tour at all, but the question of who will rise to the top in this diminished field is pretty intriguing. I think Levi Leipheimer will be my man. He’s got great form this season, and he rides like a gentleman and a champion, whether he’s doing EPO and blood doping or not. And besides, I have a commitment to honor. I pledged to take part in a challenge thought to be free of any scandalous wrong-doing or performance-enhancing drug use:

Because I’m still very new at this spinning stuff, my challenge is just to spin every day. I’ve started a spindle of foxy orange merino roving, and I’m going to finish all that I have. I was also going to try to spin together some black, white, and red mystery roving that the Spiders gave me, to make CSC yarn in honor of Basso. Now that he’s out, I’m not sure my heart’s in it. Instead, I’m going to try to get through a ball of yummy teal merino. Pictures tomorrow, I promise.

I’m a lot less full of joy about the Tour de France than I was when I woke up this morning. It’s something I look forward to all year, so I’m very deflated. But hopefully the prospect of spinning practice can keep me excited to roll out of bed at 5:30 each morning, and I know new stars will emerge and the race will manage to be compelling in new ways. Spin clean, everybody.