Rhinebeck.

But wait! FIRST…! Breaking Tsocky News.

1. We have… a few spots left for the 2012 ART for your FEET TSOCK CLUB, and we are now throwing those open to the public. First come, first served - you know the drill! A year-long subscription; six wild and crazy designs that run the gamut of colors and techniques and themes and styles; plus assorted surprise goodies tailored to your tastes and participation in a cozy free-for-all knit-along group on Ravelry. If you want in, go here and clicky on the buttons. It’s OK, I’ll wait.
2. We have… YARN! Just delivered last week, 500+ beautiful pounds of Tsilk Tstocking, just waiting to be skeined and dyed into wonderful rich colorways.

   

3. We have… OK, we don’t have yet, but we soon will have… Robo-Skeiner! Betty and I are going to NEFF this weekend (as civilians, for once) and we’ll pick up our new little monster from Judy while there. So next week look for us to be skeining fools, getting into serious production.
4. We have… some inventory. Not much, yet - just what’s left from Rhinebeck - but if you’re looking to order Kitri, or Poseidon, or Oktoberfest, or Vintage, you may be in luck. (No Imbas - that baby sold out, as usual. But there’ll be more soon.) Still working on getting the new web site set up, so for now you’ll need to contact me via e-mail (info AT tsocktsarina DOT com) to arrange things. But I must say, it’s nice to have kits in stock! Next up in the Coming-Soon Queue: Seven Chakras, The Nine Tailors, and Golden West.

Now, where was I?

Rhinebeck.

I do have some pictures, but almost all of them are of the booth. Which is appropriate, really, because I hardly got out of the booth all weekend. We were that busy. Busy surpassing my wildest expectations, some of which were pretty wild. (It wasn’t just us, either. In the brief opportunities I had to talk to other vendors they reported much the same thing. This was an EPIC Rhinebeck.) A great beginning for the New Empire.

In one sense, of course, this wasn’t my first Rhinebeck, by any means - the Tsarina saga began at Rhinebeck in 2006, and has continued there ever since. In that sense it always has been home to me - no place like it. But in another sense it was very much my first Rhinebeck - if you put the emphasis on MY. First time out on my own, first time as the Vendor of Record.

On my own, but totally not on my own. Because - well, that’s a story, and this is the place to tell it. Because almost a year ago, when it became clear to me that before long I was going to be out paddling my own solitary canoe, in a no-infrastructure zone, with no really cogent idea what the hell I was going to do with myself and my designs and my plans, I had a small epiphany:

There’s no place like home.

So I clicked my heels together three times and I betook me to my usual Sunday knitting/spinning group, and I took a long close look at them from a whole new angle. I’ve been getting together with these people for nigh on four years now. Every week we take over the local Panera and make a spectator sport of ourselves with the laughing and the talking and the fiber arts; we’ve come to know each other pretty well, and I was already convinced in a general sort of way that there wasn’t much this crowd couldn’t do - or wouldn’t do for each other. But I hadn’t ever had occasion before to break that down into categories and take massive advantage of it. And sure enough, on closer examination it turned out that I had wildly underestimated the richest resource an absolute monarch could hope for.

You already know about Betty, and you’ve seen something of what she can do with color (though actually… you ain’t seen nothin’ yet). I already knew about her too, and she was the first person I talked to about making this thing happen. Because, you know - no dyed yarnz, no tsocks.

After that - OK, I’m still not going to spell out the full dramatis personae yet, because if I start doing that we’ll be here all night. I’m heroically sticking to the overview stage for now, and we’ll get into individual profiles later. Suffice it to say that the New Empire comprises not only designers and dye artists and beading ditto; it also has skilled professionals in marketing, retail, graphics, fulfilment, and logistics. It has editors; it has typographers; it has test knitters; it has many hands making cheerfully light work of the more boring menial tasks. More to the point, or at any rate equally so, these people are my posse, my crew, my support group AND my support staff, they’re my rock, they’re my peeps, they’re my friends… and they are the reason that there is a New Empire at all. So really, not MY Rhinebeck after all. OUR Rhinebeck.

I don’t have pictures of all of them (and as it is I’m indebted to Liz for most of the pictures I do have), but if you look at how this

and this

evolved into this

there’s a pretty fair representative sampling along the way.

Crack-brained plan for gridwall assembly begins to make some sense:

That’s Kelly and Amy pulling the pieces together, and incidentally…?

…you do NOT want to mess with Kelly.

Gridwall? WHAT Gridwall?

It’s still there, actually, but it’s now backed by a huge swath of black Duvetyn - I wish I had video of the deployment of same, because that was an adventure in itself. (There IS video, though, of the disembodied hand demanding gaffer’s tape as the banner is being jury-rigged into place; Kelly and Jenn in foreground, Amy and Claire (I, um… I think) doing their ninja thing behind the masking.)

These should look familiar:

And so should these, as wielded by Claire,

who hasn’t got a leg to stand on.

What Betty is so happy about…

… I don’t remember, unless it is that gradually the walls are being stocked and the displays pulled together.

Amy, Claire, Jenn, me, and a little bit of Dan at far right

We’re just about done at this point, except for some last-minute assembly and the inevitable stashing-away of vast quantities of stuff, so we adjourn to the Holidome for some serious strategizing, with a little work thrown in here and there.

This is us, totally rocking the strategizing:

Claire and Amy sporting Official Headgear

Amy, Claire, and Rena, with the Headgear reshuffled

Actual Work Content: You ever need any collating done, this is the team. That’s Amy, Kelly, and Claire, working so fast that the job was literally finished before I could even ask “Weren’t you guys going to collate those patterns?”

Other than that… well, it’s mostly a blur, really. Here’s the booth Saturday morning before the mob scene began:

(That’s Betty and Ryan making a few minor adjustments to the display of Betty’s Moose Manor wares. BTW… have you perhaps noticed that it is a BIIIIIIIIIIIG booth? Yes, we noticed that too. We didn’t exactly overfill it, this time out, though there was certainly enough stuff to start with, and besides it was plenty full of people having a good time, which always delights me. But there is lots of room to grow, which is good, because grow is exactly what we are planning to do.)

We had Tsock Tsightings in the wild - always a happy thing:

Firebird (AKA the Barbecued Chicken, I was told) at the Holidome:

Seven Chakras in the booth:

Green Fairy in the booth:

To my utter embarrassment, I haven’t yet come up with a workable system for keeping track of who’s who when I take these pictures - especially in the craziness of Rhinebeck, it just didn’t happen. I’m sorry! If this was you, give me a shout in the comments and I will totally come back and edit; meanwhile, I trust you know that I was totally happy to see you even if the details did kind of get swept along by the tide.

We had a Special Guest honoring the Fronkenshteek display:

He’s standing in for the Angry Mob Action Figures Playset, which alas is the one really important display prop I forgot to bring with me (and they were Angry fer realz when I got back, believe me). Note that he is wearing his Miniature Baby Surprise Jacket, as devised by Kate Atherley and knitted by our own Liz. Kate (whom I kept introducing, with good reason, as the Most Patient Tech Editor on the Planet) is just one of the many many imaginary friends who come to to brief and vibrant life on these occasions; friends whom I saw and hugged… but totally failed to drink with and also neglected to photograph. I plead Rhinebeck fumes.

Here’s Betty and me in the booth at some point…

… and do please note which of us is doing the Actual Work and which of us is goofing off and schmoozing with the customers.

Other than that, most of the pictures I took looked similar to this:

(and I have to pause here to sing the delighted praises of Square, truly a vendor’s dream for smooth transaction processing)

So it’s a good thing that Liz was more camera-conscious than I; check out the rest of her Rhinebeck photoset on Flickr for a more complete picture of the, well, bigness of things.

I doubt I’ll ever be able to get the whole Team together in one place for one shot, but here’s a few of us:

From right, that’s Kelly, Liz and Jenn; from left, me and Betty. And in the middle, not part of the Tsarina Team but a friend and fellow-first-time-vendor in her own right, is Tina Martinez of Bittersweet Woolery, whom you last saw in these pages way way way back when - back when she was a spinner and I still wasn’t, and she taunted me with cookies and Cormo. She’s doing some great things with color and fiber and yarn, and there wasn’t much left in her booth by the time this picture was taken on Sunday.

I seem to have barely skimmed the surface of the real story here - there’s all this rich detail floating around the back of my head. Images of the people I saw and played and chatted and ate and drank with; vignettes from Kelly’s birthday party at the Holidome; the recurring theme of the vanishing staples; Amy and Claire doing the Official Happy Dance over the contents of the cash box on Saturday night; drive-by greeting and swaggering with Abby (she was teaching just on the other side of the wall - she threatened to drill holes through the back of my displays; I threatened to drum on the wall during her classes); seeing Jess and Casey and meeting Rav-baby Eloise; some of my not-so-imaginary friends meeting each other for the first time; the bittersweet awareness of all the friends there wouldn’t even be time to say hello to; the usual dizzying arrays of colors and textures and scents; as always the overwhelming cumulative effect of hugs upon hugs.

In other words, Rhinebeck. There’s no place like it.

But speaking of no place like it, there’s a moral to this story, and you already know what it is…

…it’s that - if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with! Is that right?

Yeah, it’s right, all right. It’s very right.

We’re home. Home! And this is my room, and you’re all here. And I’m not gonna leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all, and - oh, Auntie Em - there’s no place like home!

tl;dr: scroll down to skip my introspective blather and cut straight to the EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENTS!

Hey, remember the good old days when I used to be… a blogger? I mean, a blogger who actually BLOGGED now and then? Pretty often, in fact - rather to my own surprise, because I remember thinking when I started out that there might be enough time in the universe to do things, or there might be time enough to write about them, but I couldn’t imagine how there’d be time for both. Which struck me as sad, because both are necessary to me. Over the past couple of years I seem to have turned into a true prophet on that one, alas. But it has to change. It just HAS to, because there is so much to do and so much to say. So I keep getting back on the blogging horse, and every time I promise myself that THIS time I am not going to fall off.

Actually, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I have been blogging continuously during this seemingly fallow period. Seriously! I have been telling you all about my adventures in knitting and spinning. I told you when I got aweaverated; I told you all about how I fell down that rabbit hole, and about the huge loom I acquired that is now waiting for a doorway big enough to let it into the room in the house where… oh yes, and I told you all about the work I’m having done on that house. I told you all about the awesomeness of teaching at Sock Summit. I’ve been keeping you posted on my preparations for Rhinebeck. I told you about my new sock pattern, Glomerata, the moment it was published in the current Knitty. I showed you pictures of the amazingly gorgeous Delphinium colorway Betty dyed for it in my new base yarn, Tsilk Tstocking. (Oh yes, and I announced winners of the naming competition.) In fact, I showed you lots and lots of pretty pictures of dozens of marvelous yarn colors. And just a few days ago I told you all about my whirlwind trip to SOAR.

I did! The only trouble is… I did it all in my head. And now I find they haven’t perfected the plug-in yet, and all those words I wrote, all those pictures I took… somehow they failed to flow out of my head and into the computer, and there they still are, floating around in my head with no obvious mode of egress - and here meanwhile is the actual real-life blog lying dusty and neglected. Sigh. Back when I was a programmer we used to speak of the grail of coding, the two-line program that translated “All bugs off; do what I’m thinking” into living-color real-time action. Apparently that one hasn’t been perfected yet either.

So I actually still have to TYPE to get these things across!

Well, then, type I will. And there will be pictures, eventually. Real ones.

For now, though, time is short, and I need to hit the bullet points.

RHINEBECK!!!!!

It’s THIS WEEKEND! And we will be there, in a big spiffy new booth. Building C, space 9/10. Come and visit! play! hug! (And also, you know, ogle stuff, and buy stuff, and order stuff.)

• We will have the first of the new kits. Mostly fine old wines in brand new bottles - that is, new editions of some of the tried and true classics with gorgeous new yarns in wonderful saturated colors. New colorways for some of them… with much, much more to come along those lines.
• We will be opening sign-ups for the 2012 season of the Tsarina’s Art for your Feet Tsock Club! It’s been a long time coming, and we have some exciting plans. Enrollment is strictly limited (this is the shakedown cruise for the new team, and we don’t want to kill them in the first year), and there’s a special deal if you sign up at Rhinebeck: $25 off the regular subscription price (which is $250, plus the usual increments for large size and/or overseas postage), plus a custom-dyed skein of the new sock yarn and a free pattern download of your choice. (And yes, this is a sideways way of hinting that in the coming months a number of my older designs will become available as standalone patterns. More on that later.)
• Betty has been one busy lady. In addition to the above-mentioned Delphinium and the new colorways for the above-mentioned kits, she will also be there with some of her own Moose Manor Hand Paints colorways.
• We’ll also have some special sock fibers from Gnomespun - including but by no means limited to the colorways associated with Glomerata. If you’ve been watching Dan’s Rhinebeck preview tweets without drooling, there might be something wrong with you.
• Proud to say we will have some of Leslie Wind’s work - shawl pins, knitting tools, and knitters’ jewelry.
• Support spindles from Habetrot.
• Stitch markers from Holda.
• NO batts from Enchanted Knoll, alas, because Josette broke a finger loading out of SOAR. Next time, though!

Because, you mark my words, this is only the beginning. Art for your Feet is BACK, kids!

New web site is teetering on the brink of being ready to launch - not quite in time for Rhinebeck, because life keeps happening, but very soon thereafter. That is where you’ll go, in future, for all things Tsock including actual purchases. (If I weren’t up to my ears in being in four places at once, what with Rhinebeck breathing down my neck, this is where I’d be singing the praises of the wonderful new Tsock Team making all this happen, because you can bet it isn’t going to be ME getting things assembled and packed up and sent out in timely fashion… but all that is going to have to wait for another real-life blog entry - deserves its own, in any case, not just a throwaway mention in a rambly All The Things post like this one).

Meanwhile, though, go HERE to sign up for the mailing list, because I will be sending out announcements every time anything happens - new kits and designs coming out thick and fast as soon as we survive the weekend.

Ack! The weekend! Must go be in four places at once!

See you there.

Whoa! Almost forgot to tell you. Rhinebeck Bingo 2011! I’m a square - so’s Betty. (Note to self: update blog sidebar in Copious Free Time.)

Igor: Dr. Frankenstein…
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: “Frohnckenschteen.”
Igor: You’re putting me on.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: No, it’s pronounced “Frohnckenschteen.”
Igor: Do you also say “Froaderick”?
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: No… “Frederick.”
Igor: Well, why isn’t it “Froaderick Frohnckenschteen”?
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: It isn’t; it’s “Frederick Frohnckenschteen.”
Igor: I see.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: You must be Igor.
Igor: No, it’s pronounced “Eye-gore.”

Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks,
“Young Frankenstein”

 
 
 

If you follow any of the blogs/tweets/othermedia about Sock Summit and the runup thereunto, it won’t be news to you that one of the big new Crazy Knitter Stunts for this year is an event called Fleece to Foot - you know, like Sheep to Shawl for socks - and that the challenge pattern for said event is the result of another competition called Design for Glory. (If you’ve been living under a rock and either of these facts IS news to you… go clicky on the linky and get edumacated. It’s OK - I’ll wait here.)

And once you know those two things I doubt it will come as a shock to you that I submitted an entry in the latter. (I’d be competing in the former, too, but alas it conflicts with my teaching schedule, so instead I’ll be cheering intermittently from the sidelines.)

The design met with some extremely gratifying private praise from the ST folk (actually - not all of it so very private, if you follow them on Twitter), but ultimately… it did not make the cut. (Though in fact it makes eight cuts itself - but oops, I’m getting ahead of myself.) I think I know why. I have to confess I knew all along it was kind of a long shot. It’s - OK, now prepare for a shock, because this is, you know, totally out of character for me - it’s slightly, um, crazy? over the top? maybe even a bit… scary?

Yeah. A bit scary. And it SHOULD be scary, because it is after all a little monster. And now, O intrepid and adventurous knitters, my little monster can be your little monster too: behold my latest mad-scientist creation, Fronkenshteek.

When I read the rules for the Fleece to Foot challenge, the word that leapt out at me in huge flashing neon letters was “PAIR.” (It appears in bold-face. Twice. So somehow I have a feeling this was not a matter of chance.) Now, in my line of work I knit a lot of individual prototype socks, and I can get through one sock pretty quickly. But I am not immune to Second Sock Syndrome. Making the same thing twice over is already a challenging proposition for many knitters; the idea of doing so in the kind of rapid succession called for there is, well, gulp-inducing at best. So I set out to reduce that burden to the degree possible. The result: a PAIR of socks divided into five segments, each of which (except for a little connective tissue here and there) is KNITTED ONLY ONCE. It’s done in five different ways - one for each segment - but in each case each member of the team is working both socks simultaneously.

For maximum speed and efficiency, all segments are worked in the round - even those that will be seamed at the assembly stage.

• Segment 1: Both cuffs are worked together, as one long ribbed cylinder divided by a round of waste yarn.

  

• Segment 2: Both ankles are worked together, as one wide steeked cylinder.

  

• Segment 3: Both insteps (actually not just the instep but the band that goes around both foot and ankle at that point; a piece I think of as the “Ace Bandage”) are worked together in a vaguely Albers-esque center-out squarish configuration. Steeked, of course.

  

• Segment 4: Both feet (from toe to Ace Bandage) are worked together, double-knit one inside the other, in the immortal parlor-trick style of Tolstoy’s Princess Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskaya.

  

• Segment 5: Both toes and both heels are worked together - sideways - in one lumpy steeked piece, vaguely oblate, that looks a bit like a collapsed tennis ball or a deflated starfruit.

  

Then the bits that call for cutting are cut…

… the bits that call for raveling are raveled, the bits that call for joining are joined…

… and finally the Bermuda Triangles that provide ease for the instep are knitted - individually - in situ.

The resulting socks are relatively simple-looking; they derive their chief visual interest from the contrasting lines and angles of the grain of the fabric.

(I also used contrasting yarn for the joins on one of the prototypes, with a satisfyingly Frankensteinian effect.) But they’re a comfortable fit, yea even unto the seams under toe and heel. They are fearfully and wonderfully made; an ode to the Process Knitter, or rather the Team of Process Knitters.

Think of them as Performance Art.

Now… you don’t HAVE to make these babies as a competition event; you don’t even have to make them as a team. It’s perfectly possible for a single knitter to do the whole thing on a normal sort of schedule. But half the fun is in the collaborative choreography - especially when you get to the assembly stage, which is not unlike a knitters’ version of Twister. (Heh… am I dating myself?)

Of course there may be just one problem with that: Who gets to keep the socks? Simple solution: Just do it five times, rotating roles. So every member of the group gets to make all five segments… no member of the group has to repeat a segment… and every member ends up with a pair. Hey, it could happen.

See, this whole thing got me thinking (and you KNOW how dangerous THAT is) about knitting as not just a fiber art but also a social phenomenon. As you may recall, until a few years ago I thought of knitting as a purely solitary pleasure - or near-solitary, anyway, since the only other knitter I knew, and knitted with, was my mother. After her death it was just me, and I still loved knitting, but I didn’t have a whole lot of momentum for it, and it kind of got lost in the shuffle for a while. Until one fine day I stumbled across the Brave New World of knitting on the internet, and suddenly I realized with delight and astonishment that knitting is not solitary AT ALL, not necessarily. No! Knitting is a GROUP activity if you want it to be - both virtually and in meatspace. And… I want it to be. Hey, knitting in the twenty-first century is the personification of the Global Village!

More than ever now, thanks to Ravelry, my S&B is wherever I am - in the sense that anywhere I go I know I can find my people and we can have a great time knitting together. But more literally, my S&B is my weekly meetup - local people whom I first met through Ravelry but who are now my real-life friends, live and in person. More marvelous still, several members of this group are now part of the shiny new Tsock Team, because it turns out that when you need help and support and special skills, all you have to do is click your heels together three times and murmur, “There’s No Place Like Home.”

And get this: members of that same group are teaming up even now and preparing to cast on Fronkenshteek. I’m as psyched about this as if I were up for a Nobel prize, because this design is my CELEBRATION of Social Knitting, and every group that takes it on as such is joining in that celebration. How cool is that? THIS is what it really means to “knit two together.”

So now I’ve put the pattern up as a downloadable PDF in my shiny new Ravelry store (we’re also planning to kit it up at Rhinebeck time, but I just don’t want to wait). Yup, my first (but not my last) pattern for sale via download. See? I’ve got a Buy Now button and everything!

And here’s the deal: I WANT YOU TO SHOW ME YOUR STEEKS!

Bring them to me when I’m at a show - hell, accost me in the street if you happen to run across me - and cut them with me. Cut them in my booth, I dare you. Or hey, if you like I will cut them for you. If you’re too far away for that, send me pictures of steek-cutting in progress. One way or the other, I’ll make it worth your while, see if I don’t.

Why should the sweater knitters have all the fun? Who says they’re the only ones who get to have that little thrill of fear and that big badge of accomplishment? This design includes a whopping EIGHT STEEKS per pair - show me a sweater with that many, right?

So look here: If you’re coming to Sock Summit… and if you cast on now… you can come and find me there (I’ll be all over the map, most of the week) and…

SHOW.ME.YOUR.STEEKS.

I promise not to go anywhere without my scissors.

It’s July 2nd.

The Tour de Fleece kicks off today! I mean… HAS kicked off today!

Am I spinning? You bet. Have I started? Not yet.

I’m on the same three teams as last year: Abby Franquemont’s Team Suck Less, CPaAGg’s Team Bacon Cakewaffle (CPaAGg being, as eny fule kno, Ravelry’s Completely Pointless and Arbitrary Group Group), and of course my own Team Russian Underpants, devoted to Crazy Wheel Tricks and to the love and use of antique spinning wheels with a special side-order of CPWs. (I have some exciting plans for this Tour, too, though “plans” is hardly the mot juste. “Goals” would be more accurate, because at this point I can’t possibly actually plan. Honestly, if I told you which things I’m going to do and when… I’d be lying. I have no idea when they’re going to happen, except that I have the best possible intentions as to fitting them in around all the other more concrete stuff I have to do between now and… then. And you know what they say about good intentions.)

Some of my friends are having a kick-off party today in Connecticut, and I am… not there. Because I didn’t finish my homework in time.

To wit: Handout for Sock Summit class. Supposed to be sent off yesterday (so they can print it ahead of time); but at this writing still in the final stages of brain-marinating and idea-wrangling. I’ve got all the thinky stuff rounded up in my head and scribbled in the bit-bucket document, and I’ve even done all the infrastructure - all the graphical stuff, illustration, etc. - but I’m still struggling to wrestle the sequence to the ground.

There’s something meta about this: Being stuck at the point where I’m writing about stuckness. Here I am consulting and quoting Robert Pirsig (good old Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and at the same time I kinda feel just a leetle bit like giving him a good taint-kicking for telling me that stuckness is actually a GOOD and DESIRABLE state to reach in the course of a creative endeavor. Of course I know from long experience that he’s right - or I wouldn’t be preaching his doctrine to my students, would I. But I’m at exactly the point where that is NOT what I want to hear! Sheesh, I want my one-time exemption, my Get Out of Jail Free card. Let everyone else struggle with this stage of the creative process, and let me for once have the plain sailing: Think it - write it - do it - kthxbai. Hey, come on, Universe! is that really so much to ask?

Oh, right. It is. Sorry - forgot where I was for a moment. It’s way too much to ask.

And I suspect I’m also about at my threshold for cheating by way of displacement activities, too - there’s something amusingly beyond-meta about blogging about the stuckness encountered while trying to write about stuckness, though I note with some irony that the blogging itself flows freely, doesn’t it. Now if I can just get the bit-bucket of thinkyness to do the same.

But I will spin something later, if necessary by moonlight, though hell should bar the way etc. Meanwhile - back to work. Wish me luck.

And now it’s time to play… but wait, first these words from our sponsor.

(OK, so actually they’re from me.)

We haven’t been idle, here at Tsarskoe Tsocko, during these past mumblety-mumble days since I last blogged. As usual (sigh) there are some things I can’t tell you about yet, but… we’ve had meetings - our meetings have meetings - and we’ve been planning things and organizing things and writing things and rewriting things and sketching things and dyeing things and tweaking things and knitting things and spinning things (not necessarily in that order) and taking pictures of things. We’ve applied for some things. We’re buying some things. We’re building some things. And we’ve received some things.

And way up there among the best things we have received would have to be the recent e-mail notifying me that yes! I will have a booth at Rhinebeck this year.

Don’t have the exact location yet, but will announce it here as soon as I know. Anyway, come that third weekend in October… somewhere in Building C is The Place To Be.

That, of course, is where - and that is when - we will officially launch what we’re unofficially referring to as Empire 2.0. Sign-ups will be announced for the 2012 club; new designs will debut; old favorites will come back into circulation, with shiny new colorways and shiny new packaging. There will be partying. There will be solemnity and there will be hilarity.

And speaking of shiny new colorways - NOW it really is time to play…

Name! That! Yarn!

That Yarn being, of course, the new base yarn; the wool-silk blend I showed you a little while back.

You’ve seen what it looks like straight off the cone; you’ve seen what it does by way of swatch and stitch. Now check out what it looks like with some color on it.

I took Betty’s first set of dyed samples with me to Stringtopia, and all I can tell you is I was lucky to bring them back with me. They nearly went walkabout on several occasions. Iza is clearly in love with this intense orange:

See, Iza? I told you I was going to gank those pictures. Iza also took this one of Ercil trying to nom the whole batch:

Those smaller skeins dangling down are control skeins; this run was a test to see how the silk content would affect the process and saturation, so for each shade there was one sample skein in the wool-silk and one in 100% merino in the same dye bath.

Even Abby got a little grabby-hands about a couple of them - which pleased me the more as I had consulted her when we were planning the blend, so her approval felt a little like getting a good mark on my term paper.

Once I was back from Stringtopia the reeling started in earnest. Skeins have gone out in several directions, and pictures from some of them have come home to roost.

Astrid (Damselfly Yarns) took the Go Big Or Go Home approach and used her whole skein for one opulent colorway (which in a tip of the hat to our mutual connection to Patrick O’Brian she’s titled “A Glass of Wine With You”):

Hillary (Jellyfish Knits) went the other route and broke hers down into seven “tsamples,” of which three have been dyed so far:

Still just cell-phone pictures, but so far that’s Companion (dark red), First Prime (gold), and a player to be named later (purple/blues). (And yes, Browncoats and Stargate fans, those references are just what you think they are.)

Looking forward to more to come from that quarter; also from Dan (Gnomespun).

Meanwhile, back on the home front, the serious color-wheeling is going on: Betty has been dyeing up a storm. That’s Betty, of Moose Manor Hand Paints, who is going to be doing most of the heavy lifting in the dye studio for both new designs and old.

After the first batch of test samples, we got a little giddy and went for a few full skeins.

As you can see from this picture taken of the precision equipment used at our Official Meeting Headquarters, this one weighs in at a good 99 grams:

That’s a candidate for some of the olive leaf colors we use in Vintage. It’s part of this batch:

which includes some other Vintage candidates

and some shades-in-progress for other designs-in-progress.

And THEN we got serious. Here’s the spread of new samples from our most recent meeting:

The eagle-eyed will perhaps detect likely candidates here for a number of old friends, including Roxie, Kitri, Seven Chakras, and The Nine Tailors, as well as more of the Vintage colorways.

Oh, and here’s another little something that…

… as usual…

… I’m afraid I can’t tell you about yet. Just as I can’t show you the first sock I’ve knitted in this colorway… not yet.

But there you have it, the Tsarina’s new base yarn, now in bright living color: 70% wool, 30% silk, 100% awesome.

And now that you’ve seen something of what it can do, tell me: WHAT are we going to call this yarn? The yarn BASE, I mean. It’s chewy and shiny and elegant and substantial, and it badly needs a name. Yes, we’ve had some intriguing thoughts on this, and some of them have potential, but I’m not convinced that we’ve struck the right note yet. So I’m asking for your help.

Anyone? Bueller?

If you come up with THE name, there’s yarn in it for you - a skein of this yarn itself, of course, colorway TBD based on your preference. Something you probably will not hate.

I’m starting the clock. Ready?

Name.

That.

Yarn.

Hard to believe that it’s actually almost a week since the end of Stringtopia.

I know, I know - officially it’s slightly more than a week. But for me and at least two other people Stringtopia didn’t end until we got home late on Monday night - just as it began before the beginning, when we hit the road on Friday morning. Foretaste; aftertaste; 11 hours each way, totally part of the fun. It’s almost not surprising any more - almost - that three people who have never actually met in person before can embark on this sort of adventure together without the slightest qualm; almost axiomatic (almost) that they will discover along the way that they have a LOT more in common than a shared love of fiber. (Not that that wouldn’t be enough, if it were all. But it wasn’t.)

We knew we were headed in the right direction when we saw this:

photo courtesy Jenny Sethman

And we knew we were in the right place when we saw this…

… with this parked behind it:

That, in case you have never seen it before (I hadn’t, oddly enough), is the famed YarnVee, legendary home-away-from-home of Morgaine Wilder and a beautiful Siamese cat and, oh yeah, Carolina Homespun - and its contents are a wonder to behold and to wallow in.

A closer look at the outside of the YarnVee, incidentally, reveals a lot about its owner.

Closer look at the individual stickers? Sure:

Looks pretty benign, doesn’t it? But I’m here to tell you, that placid exterior conceals the workings of an evil, evil enabling genius. If you’ve ever had dealings with Morgaine, in her shop or at any of the myriad festivals served by the YarnVee, you already know what a horribly tempting array of merchandise she offers. But get this. Morgaine WAS the market for this event, and what did she do? What, I ask you? This: she kept the shop open all day and late into the evening, and she invited each of us to… wait, I’m not sure I can even say this, it’s so awful… :: deep breath :: …she invited each of us to RUN A TAB for the weekend.

Dastardly. Diabolical.

Effective.

And that is only one reason it’s appropriate that the first picture I actually took at Stringtopia was this one:

That’s the main lobby of the Golden Lamb (for more and better pictures of the hotel itself check out Missy’s blog and also Ercil’s photo album) on the Friday evening before dinner and Kickoff Bash, and no sign was ever more prophetic.

And this is where I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. Because if I tell the truth about just how overwhelmingly awesome Stringtopia was, then EVERYBODY is going to want a piece of it.

So I think I’d better tell the other truth instead; the Dark Side of Stringtopia.

You already know about the brilliantly devious trap Morgaine set for our wallets. (It won’t surprise you, I suspect, to know that mine fell right into it, over and over again.) But what you haven’t heard about yet is Abby’s dreadful behavior.

Has anybody else had THIS PROBLEM with Abby Franquemont? That she begs you to behave all nice and sweet so as not to embarrass her in front of her home town and get her tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail… and then she turns around and mires you in temptations, sets an example of general iniquity that you can’t help following?

Plus there’s something hypnotic going on there, because apparently we all fell for it. Hook. Line. Sinker.

It started with the Bag o’ Swag. I haven’t the heart to show you pictures of all the goodies in there right now, though I have to say the local chamber of commerce obviously fell as hard for Abby’s special line of blarney as all the rest of us did: not an establishment in town that didn’t throw enticements our way. Beads. Cupcakes. These people KNOW what we like. The fiber community was also represented in both the goodie-bags and the door-prizes - hell, I fell for that one myself - there may just be a story here for another time, but if I told you all about all the door-prizes Shelly and Abby kept giving out…

…(two apiece, as it turned out; they just kept coming, and coming, and coming) I’d be here all night on that alone. You’ve never seen such hedonism and general depravity.

To give you just one small taste of the cavalier attitude with which this shindig was organized - well, here, take a look at this:

That’s my name tag, and I would like to draw your particular attention to the string from which it hung:

Yup, you’re seeing that right. That’s not a proper self-respecting lanyard, not at all. That’s yarn. And it’s not just any yarn. I knew it at first glance: it’s Abby’s handspun. See what I mean about her? Instead of going out and buying nice normal dime-a-dozen Walmart lanyards, she actually palmed off a piece of her own leftover yarn on each and every one of us. What a scam. Not only that… she even put the remnant of that ball of yarn in among the door prizes. And when somebody won it… there was cheering. Snake oil, I’m telling you.

Check out the baleful glare. She knows I’m onto her.

It gets worse. A lot worse.

This is the scene after an evening of fibery debauchery among the drum carders.

This is the wreck of a formerly respectable dining room after being populated by spinners for a day or two.

(Standing, to the left of the doorway, is poor dear Josh, the miracle worker who ran interference between us and the bar for three evenings in a row, and who somehow managed to bring the right people together with the right drinks and the right tabs throughout, even though we were constantly moving targets, rampaging - as unruly spinners are wont to do - all over five different rooms, not counting the balcony and the hallways.)

Now… one of the recurring themes of Stringtopia was tiaras. And it all started innocently enough… until Abby’s corrupting influence set in.

See, here’s Lara being crowned by Sandi Wiseheart.

Nice, huh? Sandi makes these amazing sparkly tiaras, and she was wearing one of her own most of the weekend, but this was one she made specially for Stringtopia, as a door prize.

Well, so then there was trying on of tiaras. Here’s Shelly wearing Sandi’s pink-flowers one:

(And incidentally, I would like to mention here that of all the awful goings-on during this dreadful wicked weekend, none of it was in any way Shelly’s fault. Shelly is just as you see her; she was wonderful. If Shelly had been in charge of organizing this thing without any interference from Abby it would have been lovely and nice and respectable and irreproachable, instead of the sinful sojourn it became.)

Well, at dinner on the final evening it was Morgaine’s turn.

Now I know I’ve made it clear that Morgaine was not the most innocent participant in the events of the weekend at large, but in fairness I have to say that at first she did at least display a proper sense of the solemnity of this moment.

Until Abby got ahold of her…

… and started undermining her natural dignity.

See? No respect, that Abby. None.

And Abby’s own Tiara Moment?

Disgraceful.

Now you might be wondering about the classes? There were classes, right? I hear you wondering to yourselves.

Oh yes, there were classes, all right. And some of us actually really learned some stuff - even I did, in the few rare moments when I wasn’t busy being bullied by scapegrace You-Know-Whom.

Of course we did. You wouldn’t dare NOT learn from THIS.

There’s the Authentic Public Long-Draw-Gasm - seeing half a dozen people experience it in unison is a rush that somehow never pales.

And then there’s the more esoteric revelation, the kind of thing you didn’t even know you wanted to learn, but dang, doesn’t it turn out to be cool to know how to do it and understand why it works. Here’s Sandi after a triumphant run of Intentional Structurally Sound Thick and Thin Yarn.

Sandi shd haz a proud.

She does. (Ahem. Hers was way better than mine. I stick my tongue out at her. Here and now.)

So then what happens?

On Sunday afternoon, just as we’re getting lulled into a false sense of security, what with with all the mind-splodey learning and the new ideas and stuff… Abby pulls a fast one.

First she cozies up all nice and friendly-like to Jacey…

And then, instead of spending the afternoon teaching us stuff about plying structures, that slacker Abby brings Jacey into her own class and makes HER take over, giving us a pretty amazing lesson on how to make a proper structured bouclé - under the thin pretext that this too, after all, is all about Plying Structure, right? Uh-huh.

But then a curious thing happens. Because… Jacey is supposed to be teaching this class, right? But look who’s doing the talking.

And look how polite and ladylike Jacey is about it.

Now, of those two, which one would YOU think was known as Insubordiknits?

The rude disruptive one, right? with all her bawdy talk about the shaft sliding in the thumb crotch.

So that’s how it was. All weekend long and then some; Abby poured the KoolAid and we all drank it and kept asking for more. It wasn’t until afterward when I looked at the pictures that I realized how completely we had been duped - hell, on Monday morning, after we’d somehow bamboozled ourselves into helping Morgaine load out before leaving, I had another wallet accident right out on the sidewalk, snapping up two lumps of crack Abby-batts in mid-air as they were about to disappear into the Magic YarnVee. All kinds of scary JuJu going on there.

And that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, and I figure we were all lucky to get out of there with our souls more or less intact.

And I’m not going to tell you about the outrageous quantities/variety of astonishing ice cream from Jeni’s that Iza brought in for us to wallow in.

And I’m not going to tell you about the gorgeous fleeces Nada brought.

Or about the Sekrit Project we did for Shelly right under her nose.

Or about how funny/smart/fascinating/warm/fuzzy everyone was.

Or about how silly we got on Saturday night.

Or about how lovely it was, on a balmy spring evening, to take our wheels and spindles out on the balcony overlooking Lebanon’s pretty Main Street.

Let alone about the outrageous mind-bending eye-opening stuff we actually did learn in the actual classes.

I’m certainly not going to tell you how good the food was, or how well-organized the whole operation was from the standpoint of feeding and housing and herding an hungry horde of spinners.

Remind me, also, not to mention the addictive apple butter.

Or to admit that from soup to nuts it was all-ointment-no-flies.

Because I wouldn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea about this crazy thing that was Stringtopia.

If I’m not careful, however… if I let my guard down for a moment… I might be beguiled into mentioning what I said to Abby (while still under her influence, obviously!) on Monday morning just before we left. Which was something along these lines:

Look, it’s apples and oranges, and I wouldn’t want to have to choose, and I’m lucky not to have to choose - but if I DID have to choose between this and SOAR… or in fact any other fibery event I’ve been to… it would be this.

But don’t tell anybody I said so, ‘K? Because I want that to be our little secret.