on saturday Chris, Teresa, Geneva and i drove up to Petaluma to go to the Windrush Farms FiberFest — basically an expo of yarn, spinning, dying, felting — all kinds of fiber arts that start with wool. one could follow the yarn-making process from start to finish in a single afternoon — there were alpaca and sheep on the farm, great piles of greasy, newly-shorn wool, tools for carding and cleaning the wool, spinning wheels and drop spindles, dyeing vats and beautiful skeins of yarn for sale, looms for weaving and knitting swatches.

aside from being really much too hot for late september, it was an awfully pleasant, pastoral scene: everyone was so friendly, sitting in the sun watching kids run around the yard and pet the animals, skin tanned and weathered from spending seasons out in the sun and the wind, trading stories and sharing knowledge of something that, now an art form, was for thousands of years, a basic skill. a pair of golden retrievers trotted around the yard loving up to everybody. there was a wood-fired oven in the yard and a guy making hand-made pizzas and lemonade, to be eaten at folding tables and chairs set up in the shade. the farm animals suffered to be petted on the nose (or fed tasty leaves).

the turn of the fall weather (fall arrived on sunday, by the way, the day after our hot trek up to Petaluma), plus the imminent arrival of several friends’ babies, means that i’m inspired to start crafting again. somehow the direct mail gods know this, as i have received three knitting catalogs this week (and, naturally, have earmarked more patterns that i want to knit than i shall ever have time or funds for). but anyway, getting knitting catalogs lets me play the “who would knit this?” game. see, that’s the tricky thing about knitting. finding nice yarns and patterns. because for every beautiful, modern or classic (classy classic, that is, not “christmas sweater” classic) pattern out there, there are a dozen hideously frumpy things to knit out of terrible, cheap plasticky nasty synthetic yarn. it’s almost too easy to play the WWKT game, especially with the patternworks catalog. so for this week, i submit this, to you, dear readers (knitters and wearers of sweaters and non-knitters or sweater-wearers alike): who would knit this?