I’m in a Napa vineyard this morning, helping my cousin Kent with his harvest, as I do most years. Normally I wear rubber kitchen gloves out here, and the field hands look at me funny and say what I’m sure are bemused things about me in Spanish. However, sorting grapes is extremely sticky business – literally. And the reason grapes are picked at the crack of dawn is that it’s best if the fruit is still cool when it arrives at the crush pad. At daybreak, during the pick, the grapes — little juice bombs that they are — are actually cold. It’s a lot like having your hands in a half-ton bin of ice cubes all morning. So today, not having any rubber gloves on standby, I decided to sacrifice a pair of woolies to the cause.
These are plain old stockinette tubes with thumbholes, knitted about a year ago out of some trusty, hardworking Cascade 220. Thanks to wool’s warm-even-when-wet properties, they’re doing me a real, albeit fatal, service. They may happen to be purple, but the insidious pinot juice will destroy them in the end.
I spent the last three days immersed in the knitting of mittens and gloves of all varieties. Picking grapes would be a nice change. Hi to Kent!
KB, driving past Luna both days I couldn’t help thinking of you bathing yourself in rosemary. Have you been literally knitting these mittens and gloves, or is that in reference to an editing project? Either way, I’m jealous.
Editing thereof. Specifically, titling videos in which a variety of mitts, mittens and gloves are knitted. I *could* knit them myself, now, if I only had the time! Oh, to be rolling around in some rosemary right now.
My next knitting-editing adventure is brioche knitting, which looks daunting but I’m sure will become clear once I see it done step-by-step. After that, it’s designing cables. Huzzah!
I wish you could be in on all this, but you’d probably have to move to Denver.
If there’s any chance of getting in on it without moving to Denver, please let me know!
Nothing that is you-specific right now, but if you want to throw your resume into the hopper, there’s a tool for that here: http://www.sympoz.com/jobs/
I’ve also shared your blog with the knitting aficionados here.
I love this! It looks like so much fun…..
It’s among my favorite things in the world — I love being out there.