Open Farm Day and Makers Market at A Wing & a Prayer Farm

I am so excited to be heading north on August 31 for A Wing & a Prayer’s Open Farm Day and Makers Market, hosted by Taproot Magazine! This was a great even last year and promises to be just as wonderful this year.

From the event webpage:

We're so excited for the Open Farm and Taproot Maker Market here on August 31 from 10 - 1. There is free parking in the field and we recommend comfortable, closed toe footwear for walking the farm and touring, observing Natural Dye demos outside the dye garden, being introduced to the animals and shopping our local Farmers' Market and Taproot Magazine's Maker Market in the barn.

Being a production fiber farm means it is not always easy to find time to share with the public, but there is nothing we love being able to do more than introduce our fiber stars to you, their adoring fans. Get your cameras ready, bring your baskets to fill in the marketplace, bring a blanket and a picnic if you like! A local food cart will be here, too, for purchasing delicious, homemade snacks such as crepes or popsicles and we'll have pies for sale in our Farmers' Market, along with other local farm's produce, syrup, honey, dairy and meats.

I’ll have new kits, and a new pattern!

Hope to see you there,

Sarah

Vending: 6th Annual Yarnsellar Fiber Marketplace

Come find Upton Yarns and a whole host of other creative fiber types at the York Harbor Inn in York Maine on April 6th for the 6th Annual Fiber Marketplace!

I have been hard at work at the dye studio working with Coopworth Gansey Yarn and Straw’s Farm Island Sheep fingering weight. Today: gradient dips and a deep blue indigo! (Not yet photographed)

Thank you for a fantastic Farm & Fiber Festival!

A huge thank you to all the folks who ventured out to the Boston Public Market on Sunday for the 2nd Annual Boston Farm & Fiber Festival!   The day was one big blur of old friends and new, catching up and sharing our love of wool, yarn, and knitting.  

And the knitwear! I so wish that I had had the presence of mind to take photos!  The Market was an informal fashion show of people in their fiber festival best.  It was so inspiring to see the range of patterns and colors and yarn choices, never mind all the hours of work and devotion that each piece represents. Like many knitters, I mainly interact with others knitters via email or social media, and while photos and written words are nice, it was so refreshing to see knitwear in person and have face to face conversations. 

As always, at the same time that I am honored to get to be a vendor I’m also a little bummed that I didn’t have time to explore the market as a knitter myself, or take time in the Taproot Knitting Lounge, or listen in on the talks and speakers.  

A million thank yous to the sponsors, host, and volunteers who made the day possible! I can’t wait until next year! 

2nd Annual Boston Farm & Fiber!

I am thrilled to be heading back into Boston on February 10 to vend at the 2nd Annual Boston Farm & Fiber event at the Boston Public Market! Last year was a wild and wooly day, and this year looks like it might be even more exciting!

In addition to all the wooly wonders, the Boston Public market will be operating as it normally does, which means that you can browse the yarn with a latte in hand, and then peruse a range of other local products.

Trunk Show!

I’m spending this week getting ready for my first ever trunk show! As part of the Greater Boston Yarn Crawl, New England Farm to Fiber invited me and my yarns to come hang out at their stall, Sunday October 14, from 1:00 to 4:00-ish at the Boston Public Market. I am really excited (and flattered!). If you are in the area, drop in and say hi. In addition to great yarn, the Boston Public Market is home to great coffee, baked goods, a vendor of local cheese, and all manner of other New England products.

June, July, and Apparently now a bit of August

Against my best plans, I may have let the blogging/social media slip a bit in June and July.  

Before the excuses, a quick and very exciting note:  I will be vending at the Squam Art Fair on September 15, from 7:30 to 10:00.   I am so excited to be included in such an amazing group of vendors!  (And I really hope that I’ll be able to pull together a few new kits I’ve been planning in time, which brings me back to the excuses). 

Back to the excuses:

Unexpected pregnancy induced exhaustion limited my work time this summer and what energy I had often went to baby centric things - baby shower, painting baby things, and the part time job that is meeting all the doctors appointments scheduled as part of a “geriatric pregnancy” (and aside from being “elderly”, both I and the as-yet-unborn-baby are thankfully in perfect health - I cannot imagine how much more medically intense things must become if there are issues).  

Pregnancy induced exhaustion recently morphed into pregnancy induced insomnia, which has at least given me the time to sew crib sheets for the fancy oval crib inherited from my sister-in-law.  When passing along the crib she mentioned the difficulty of getting a new sheet in the correct orientation on the oval mattress during the inevitable three AM  accident clean-ups, to which I sensibly thought “oh-ho, I shall just embroider a french knot or something so that I can line the sheet up along the long ends by feel”.   And then somehow I decided a french knot was boring, and given that I wasn’t sleeping and it was too hot to knit…  

I can now sew fitted sheets and embroider sheets but I still cannot fold fitted sheets.

So now I have four home sewn sheets with hand-embroidered whales. 

 A few days ago we discovered that my sister-in-law had also given us several crib sheets, which somehow got mixed in with a box of baby clothes.  So the home sewn sheet part was probably completely unnecessary.  Still, it was a fun project. 

 Not being able to carry the buckets and pots of water necessary for dyeing has led me to catching up on other projects, most too boring and administrative to bother describing, but amongst the other chores I finally downloaded the photos that have been accruing on my working SSD card, and came across this gem of an outtake from a mid-February photo session.  Note my hand settled gently and proudly atop my (invisible) belly.  I am fairly sure the impetus for this photo session, aside from the desire to document the progress of my heavily modified Solbien cardigan turned dress, was the discovery that my vague feelings of becoming a little thick around the middle had solidified into an actual baby bump (which again, I cannot see in this photo, though I remember running downstairs to show Sam the moment I noticed it, who was equally excited). 

Also the Socialist Realist pose - I look like I’m about to do something epic for the glory of the fatherland.  

Yup, at 40 weeks, 6 days pregnant I have settled into the game familiar to every person who has ever been pregnant - “remember when I thought that was a belly?” 

To be fair, this Alabama Chanin A-Line dress is somehow magically also minimizing my belly, or maybe I just feel like I should be a foot or two wider.  

Back to a semi-business related note:  Any moment now (really, any moment now kiddo, but hopefully soon - I get that you are comfy in there, but you’ve had your full run and it’s time to come out and start exploring the world) we will be heading off to the Birth Center for a hopefully short stay.  There may be some delay in shipping orders and responding to emails as we all adjust to our new life.   Thank you for understanding. 

Thank You Boston Farm & Fiber Supporters, Participants, and Organizers

The First Annual Boston Farm & Fiber Event was a raging success!!! A million thank you's to all the folks who braved a cold rainy Sunday to come out and geek out over yarns and fiber goodies.  I had no idea what to expect, but the crowd size was beyond my wildest hopes!  I got to meet so many creative, passionate knitters on Sunday! 

I made the rookie mistake of not bringing a booth helper, which both meant that conversations were sometimes cut short (which I regret and apologize for) and also that I was unable to explore all the other amazing booths and goings on.  I heard great things about the knitting lounge (which I very much wanted to hang out in) and about the other vendors there.  A big thank you to everyone who put up with me asking about the other goodies in their knitting bags, so I could at least live vicariously.   And a huge thank you as well to all the folks, including my vending neighbors, my sister-in-law, a representative of the Boston Public Market, and at one point a Woolscout Knitting Retreat participant, who realized that I was solo and very kindly offered to watch my booth for me for water/food/restroom breaks.  It's a little thing, but it underscores for me how caring and supportive knitters/crafters are as a group. 

On Monday I woke up feeling like I had spent Sunday taking part in some sort of obscure endurance event, exhausted, but still on a bit of runners high.  It will take me a little while to survey the remains of my inventory, update my website, and catch up on my dyeing (see previous post about the state of my future dyespace) so I thank you all for your patience.  And as always, if you have any questions, or would like to make sure that a specific color/yarn kit returns, feel free to email me at uptonyarns@gmail.com  

Boston Farm & Fiber Festival (also, a new work space!)

Many big changes afoot here at Upton Yarns HQ, but first:

This Sunday I will be vending at the first (annual, I have been assured) Boston Farm & Fiber Festival held at the Boston Public Market (!!!!!!! I am very excited about this).  The show is being hosted by the good folks of New England Farm to Fiber, on Sunday, February 11, from 10am to 5 pm. 

For those of you who may not be familiar with it, the Boston Public Market hosts a collection of local artisan producers of everything from pasta to honey, and of course New England sourced yarns.  It has long been a favorite stop of mine on our "civilized" weekend strolls through Boston.  I'm already plotting my (non yarn related) buy list. 

But back to the fiber event: the vendor list, available here, is full of people I can't wait to meet in person. (The fiber related buy list may very quickly overwhelm the non-fiber related buy list...)

In other news, late this fall we officially became first time home buyers, and as of last week we have moved in (sort of, everything is still in boxes and we have not yet sorted out a reasonable internet connection, but all of our stuff is here, and things are mostly set up enough that it doesn't quite feel like we're camping anymore, which I'll take).  One of the many things that I love about our new house is the workspace off the kitchen that will soon become the new Upton Yarns HQ. 

(Yes, that is an industrial sewing machine under the dust cover in the corner). 

But then the movers came and very efficiently moved everything from the old Upton Yarns HQ to the new space. 

Dyeing may be a bit delayed while I make sense of all of this chaos......