Today we visited some of the neighbor animals including a very snuggly young llama who’s super soft and very kissy. We also went to a cider pressing where the others helped and I was lazy and just watched because my back felt pretty good and I didn’t want to overdo and send it into spasms. I was lucky enough to bring home some of that delicious cider. You can’t tell in the photo but the apple trees are just to the left of the cider press.

On Friday we drove through some pretty nasty rain to Hyde Park, New York for the weekend. We had lunch at the Apple Pie Bakery in the Culinary Institute of America. After that we visited the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library. Not only was it the first presidential library to be established but it was also the only one ever used by an actively sitting president. Both were very interesting. We had a lovely relaxing dinner at Crave in Poughkeepsie.

Yesterday, we spent the morning at the New York Sheep and Wool festival in Rhinebeck and in the afternoon we visited the Vanderbilt mansion and Eleanor Roosevelt’s residence, Val-Kill cottage. We’re making good use of the National Parks Pass we bought for our trip out West this summer and it has probably paid for itself twice over by now.

On my last full day in SF, I was lucky enough to get a tour across the bay from my friend Lori who very kindly rearranged her schedule to make time for me. I managed to take the train in the right direction and get off at the correct stop. Right across the way was craft mecca, Lacis. If you’ve only ever seen the catalog online you have no idea just how much more there is. It’s quite overwhelming but absolutely amazing. After that we went to A Verb for Keeping Warm, an amazing knitting/spinning store run by a woman who learned dye and fiber lore on a Fullbright scholarship. Our last stop was Stonemountain & Daughter Fabrics. I’m fairly certain I have shopped these folks at quilting shows but there’s oh so much more in the shop! I found the perfect raincoat laminated fabric. I’ve been searching for that for 2 years so I was very excited. That meant I couldn’t get much else and in fact, I didn’t even look at the second room other than that laminate right in the doorway- at least double the selection I’ve seen anywhere else. There was tea towel fabric right on the roll and I was tempted to get some for making bread bags. You can see all my San Francisco photos here. At the end of our touring, Lori and I stopped at the original Peet’s and then had a little time to just visit at a lovely Golden Gate overlook before she dropped me back at the hotel in time for me to head out for dinner. I also made a fair bit of progress on my hurricane shawl with all that time on the plane.

We did a bit of shopping in Jackson Hole, I got a new necklace and a pair of boots and Jason got this awesome Diplomystus fossil from the Eocene that was found in the Green River Formation in Wyoming. It’s rare he’ll buy anything for himself so I was glad he got it. The shopkeeper at By Nature explained that darker fossils are thicker and considered higher quality.

The exhibit on perception was probably my favorite. What does it say about me that I usually enjoy the kid’s room the most? These are spools of thread and when you look through the viewing ball they form a picture.

And here we have an ornamental beehive from Korea and a lovely quilt from India. That’s a lot of handquilting!

I brought along a postcard to mail for the Orphaned Postcard Project and we visited some of the sites pictures on it, this statue being one of them. The project is on hold for a bit but I’ve had this for several weeks waiting for an opportunity to visit Salem. I stamped it in the National Park Visitors Center and found a mailbox as we walked around following the red line. I also managed to find some great postcards to add to my little stockpile. 

We ended the afternoon with a visit to the candy shop and the Friendship of Salem. It was a nice day for a visit as attendance at the museum was sparse. The town was not quite overrun with Halloween celebrations though certainly it was quite crowded by 5 pm when we departed. A full set of photos (with a very few costumes) can be found here.

Then there’s the stuff from the sheep and wool fest. The four plastic dealies contain angora which I thought would work well to practice the Russian spindle with- it’s best with short fibers. On the spindle you can see what I spun in class. I really took right to that thing. The white skein on the right is silk to ply against whatever fiber I’ve done on the Russian spindle. 6,000 yards! I really dread making that into cakes. I find I’m not so crazy about spinning braids that have loads of colors mixed in so I picked up some monochromal (or nearly so) braids to play with. Prepping for class really drove home that I didn’t have enough bobbins for the “new” wheel so I remedied that. I found the teeny weeniest crochet hook (size 17!) which I’ll use for adding beads to my knitting. This *might* let me use even smaller beads but I’ll have to try it out first and see if a laceweight yarn will work- it has to fit through the bead doubled. I also snagged a nice mitten book which has loads of great charts (I see socks when I look at those pages) and an excellent book on Portuguese knitting. You can also see my class notes in the back and that little brown and white skein over the bobbins is what I spun during my “don’t spare the air” class on spinning flooffy yarns. The knit to fit class was far and above the best one. It was taught by Nancy of Nancy’s Knit Knacks who has been evolving this class for many years so that the class notes are extremely well developed.

and of course the full set of photos is available on Flickr here for the diehards

We’ve had a lovely 4-day vacation on Cape Cod this week.  We rented a tandem bike and flew kites to our heart’s content. We had loads of wonderful seafood and will go home very relaxed indeed.  There’s a full set of photos over on Flickr here.

Many more photos in the big set here.

In search of the whale we ran across these two kitties, one snuggly and one not so much. Mme Purl said the second one is the one Roy ran into. Sadly, this is the best view of the whale we got due to set up for a concert.

I was excited to see a glass model of Ceratium, familiar to me from my old lab rat days. I still have photos tucked away somewhere of these guys in the middle of cell division. Then we saw something that made us think of Kathy (sorry Kathy, we know you hate beavers but really, we had to have a picture of him). And of course we saw all sorts of bones.

We had been underwhelmed by the Silk Road exhibit, having expected to see more artifacts and fewer staged dioramas but in particular we thought we’d see the spider silk tapestry there. We were delighted when we accidentally stumbled across it as we made our way to the gems and minerals, our last stop of the day.

Diehards can find a full set of photos here.