For the past few years Deb’s gone to the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival, held every October in Rhinebeck. I usually stay home and go feral — listen to jazz real loud, practice longer, eat stuff that Deb wisely shuns.
This year, however, Rhinebeck (which is what she and apparently all attendees — yarn junkies, wool geeks, sheep enthusiasts, spinners, knitting blog superstars, fiber freaks, Uma Thurman [Deb INSISTS she spotted her there...] and docile spouses who obediently look away every time the credit card is pulled out — call this event) hit the calendar exactly one week after I’d finished recording an upcoming CD.
I thought it might be fun to join Deb and chill out on a road trip after all that intensity, and therefore found myself on the I-90, driving across lovely New York state more or less along the path of the old Erie Canal, taking in the amazing fall colors and the occasional pounding rain, on the way to the Hudson River valley.
Apparently one requirement of making this pilgrimage is that you must sport a “Rhinebeck sweater,” made specifically to show off at the big event. Deb wore hers as a sort of penance: she said it was the sorry outcome of “drunk ordering” skeins of yarn that looked lovely on a web site, but that revealed themselves, once actual knitting took place, to have a color scheme Deb labeled “Clown Barf.” So she wore her Clown Barf Sweater to Rhinebeck as a hairshirt to atone for her sin of ordering the stuff in the first place. (One elegantly-sweatered woman came up to Deb and complemented her on the Clown Barf Sweater, but we’re pretty sure that woman had lost a bet...)
My Rhinebeck sweater, based on a pattern Deb found on the online knitters’ cult/discussion group Ravelry, turned out quite nice, thank you!
Deb made a Rhinebeck shawl for Murley, our trusty sidekick, bon vivant, life coach, and navigator.
