What to Do on Lock Down?

What are you doing while on lockdown?  Are you cooking more meals for your family?  Are you pulling out those old WIPs and trying to finish them off?  Are you replenishing your stash through online shopping at your favorite LYS or indie dyer?  Are you just spending more time with your family? I hope you are doing all of the above!  It has been wonderful spending time with the family.  I have been cooking more in the past few weeks than I have cooked in the past year.  I have baked more cakes and pies than I have in the past 5 years and have used eggs right from our coop. The hens have been prolific lately. 

It has been raining here in the DFW area nearly every single day for the past month.  With all the rain, we hadn’t sheared our sheep as their fleece kept getting wet.  So over the past week, we have kept the sheep in the barn so that they can dry out.  We were able to shear them over the weekend.  I caught Phyllis, one of my larger ewes, fussing at me on video and put it on Instagram.  She and Lucy, my two largest ewes, have plenty of personality and boss the rest of the flock.  Lucy, however, is the Queen.  If you follow me on Instagram, you can catch a glimpse of “shade” that I got from Phyllis on video. One of the best parts of “sheltering in place” is sheltering with our furry friends. I have had plenty of fun playing with all of our animals.

One of the things that I have been able to do while sheltering in place is get a lot of knitting done and I’m getting some serious dyeing done as well.  I finished my Seeding Fields sweater that will be a booth sample.  I knit it in one of the colorways from the First Quarter Subscription Box, Au Naturelle, the variegated hank from the collection.  I’m extremely happy with how it turned out.  You can go to the pattern’s Ravelry page and see how each of the test knitters’ versions came out and you can also see my version which is the Au Naturelle.

Well like the best laid plans of mice and men, I had this great master plan for the second quarter subscription box that would have coincided with the Dallas Fort Worth Fiber Fest, but with Covid rearing its ugly head, I decided to up-end that plan and do something appropriate for the times we are living through.

As many of you know, I work a 9-5 day job as well as dye yarn.  With the shelter-in-place orders we, like many others, are working remotely.  Who hasn’t been using Zoom to connect with co-workers, customers, friends and families??  My knitting group meets weekly via Zoom and the knitting guild I belong to, Dallas Hand Knitters Guild, meets via Zoom.  So guess what?  Aretha, always being relevant, has the perfect song for the times.  The theme for the Second Quarter Box is:

This kit will contain a hank of sock yarn in my Foghorn base in the new colorway: Zoom, two color coordinated mini hanks of fingering weight yarn, a project bag and a special gift from me to you.  There will be no pattern in this box as I just had this brilliant idea today and haven’t had the time to reach out to a designer to work with him/her for the box.  So you will get this yarn and figure out exactly what you want to do with it.  Some of you may make socks.  Others may make a cowl.  Still others may make a scarf or shawl.  I can’t wait to see what each of you do with this.

Here are the details of the box:

• 1 hank Foghorn, 463 yards, fingering weight, 75% merino, 25% nylon
• 2 hanks of Yolk, 92 yards, fingering weight, 75% merino, 20% nylon, 5% Stellina
• 1 project bag
• A Surprise (and it ain’t a stitch marker!)
  

The purchase price for this box is $60.00.This box gives few choices, just like Covid.  There will not be a DK version. The box can be found in the shop under kits here: https://coopdye.com/product-category/kits/

Since Covid has me on lock down and I got this announcement out later than I expected, sign up for this box is open until May 16.  The box will go out at the beginning to middle of June.

I hope that each and every one of you is sheltering in place so as not to expose yourself to this horrible virus.  I also hope that you are able to spend meaningful time with your families, that you are able to “slow your roll” and smell some flowers and, of course, enjoy playing with two sticks or a hook and some string.