Lost Arts studio

I Don't Know Why This is Harder

2012-01-29T16:00:00.005-05:00

I have lots of good memories of my grama, my dad's mom. For whatever reason, it's been a lot harder to put them into words.

So the heck with trying to get this mess to cohere, I'm just going to put down the bits and pieces that come into my head.

The first handknit socks I remember seeing were knit by her for my dad.

When I was a teenager and she and my grampa started taking their camper out to southern California and Arizona for the winter, they pared down their household possessions, and she gave me some things.

One was the orange lustreware tea set I posted about several Januaries ago.

Another was a set of sterling silverware. Between the two, I could set quite a nice little tea party table, and it drives me wild that the phrase has been taken away from the event where the table is covered with an ironed linen cloth, where there is a bunch of sweet violets in a vase, where the crusts are cut off the triangular sandwiches.

She had the most awesome bubbling chuckling laugh. You could never mistake it for anyone else's.

When I was a little girl, we went out to their house a lot. My dad had a garden in their back lot. I remember the smell of the hot sand and the brambles - my own back lot smells like that.

Another reason we went out there was that my dad's mixed-breed hunting dog, a long-legged hound mix called Zip, lived out there until I was about five. (We were renting a house next to a church, and Zip howled when they sang the hymns, so he had to live at Grama and Grampa's.)

For years their dining room was dominated by a spindly orange tree she told me my dad had grown from a seed. There were two great little kid-sized rocking chairs (I have one of them), and we used to sit in them and drink Sprite while the grown-ups talked, after it got too dark and mosquito-y to play outside.

We used to cram their house at Christmas Eve, until there just got to be too many of us to fit. They always had a live tree, a prickly blue spruce, in a huge pot to plant outdoors after Christmas.

I remember my grama doing the newspaper crossword puzzles in ink. I thought that was amazing.

And I miss them both so much.

Let Me 'Splain

2012-01-27T22:39:00.000-05:00

No, wait, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Oh, what the heck. It's my blog, I'll explain at length if I want!

I am a pretty good chicken photographer, and I can take a decent close-up of knitting or a columbine flower, but it turns out I'm a rotten travel photographer.

And without pictures, I don't have a lot to say.

There have been a bunch of little stumbling blocks keeping me from blogging, little, but one after another, I just don't seem to get to it.

For one thing, what with the home schooling, on weekdays we have a "No computer until afternoon" rule.

However, it turns out my most productive writing time is in the morning, from around 8:30 to about 10:00 am. Pretty much anything I get started in that time slot gets done. But you'll notice that it falls in our "no computer" stretch.

For another, I got this sweet little netbook, and I was thinking that would lead to easier blogging, since I can move it around anywhere.

But the netbook doesn't have all my yummy photo editing software that my PC has, and I haven't figured out yet if it will even work on the netbook.

We bought a new Brother laser printer to replace the horrible old HP inkjet, and the old one is sitting in my computer chair, inconveniencing me and keeping me from using the PC until I woman up and deal with it.

Then there is this mostly snowless winter Michigan has been having - no snow makes our cloudy days all the darker, and I slow down like a chilled lizard.

And! There is FoldIt.

I started playing FoldIt just before we left for the Netherlands. I actually played some of the tutorial puzzles in the airport, then I worked on the science puzzles while we were there.

So I've been playing a lot of that and not blogging.

And to add more weight to the winter darkness, my last living grandmother, my dad's mom, passed away on the 10th of January.

I've written an in memoriam post for her in my head so many times I don't know what I want to say any more.

House Cleaning

2011-11-19T19:24:00.003-05:00

Unlocks door of blog, walks in, throws open the window curtains, blows the worst of the dust off, and gets out the broom

Hi! I aten't dead!

It's been a while, hasn't it - in October, I helped make an SCA event (Vineyard Raids) happen and went to the Netherlands with my husband, son, and mother for two weeks.

Since we got back, I've been getting over six hours' worth of jet lag, catching up on the news, and adjusting to the incredible gray and brown contrast to the green of the Netherlands.

I keep meaning to put up some pictures and things, and seeing we've been back for over two weeks now, maybe I ought to get on that, huh?

What should I blog about?

Spot the Repair

2011-09-13T15:58:00.003-04:00

The horizontal threads are in the same position.

This is the only knitting I touched since I brought it home. I was afraid if I stepped away from it, I would convince myself it was too hard.

It actually got harder as I worked my way up to the top of the hole, when I had to CONNECT ALL THE THINGS, sewing the patch I had created to the unbroken stitches around and above it.

I commented on Facebook, "People who think I'm such a super lace genius are not familiar with my method, which is DO IT EVERY POSSIBLE WRONG WAY FIRST."

That line might make people laugh, but so many times I reached the end of a row, only to realize I had made a mistake two rows back that only became obvious when I tried to go on to the third row, and couldn't.

As a project, this was both satisfying and hair-pulling-outingly frustrating. I am pretty happy with the end result, but wow. Getting there was no picnic. I was happy to do it for a friend, but I would not do this for any amount of money!

Using My Powers for Good

2011-09-01T15:11:00.004-04:00

So what good is marinating my brains in lace knitting, other than turning all evil snark-weasel on badly-knit examples of lovely lace patterns?

We'll see - I'm making an either brave or totally mad attempt to repair a good friend's triangular Orenburg shawl which has a hole chewed in it by her cat.

The yarn is Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk, which makes a nice stable stitch that doesn't run.

The hole runs diagonally, taking three diamonds out of the lace ground section, so it's not a simple matter of picking up at the bottom and knitting straight up.

No, it's a puzzle, this is.

On Following Directions

2011-08-12T07:00:00.004-04:00

As I was looking for something else to knit the other day, I went paging through Andrea Kunststricken Sonderheft, 0802, and I noticed that three of the charts in it were Christine Duchrow charts.

They're very distinctive charts, with their rs for knit stitches (from the German rechts) and IIs for yarnovers.

I hunted through my Christine Duchrow books until I found all three.

Duchrow 81.5:
Duchrow 81.8:
And Duchrow 73.5:But what was the matter with the knitted example in the photo?

The original 73.5 photo showed two large holes at the end of each flower petal, and a border of lacy little holes.

I had to knit and find out.

This pattern has not one, not two, but eight notes relating to different chart lines. Some are obvious things like knitting three plain rows following a pattern row. Others are a lit-tle more involved.

The points of the petals are formed by knitting 16 stitches alternating with 15 triple yarnovers in one row, then in the next row, dropping those yarnovers, elongating the 16 stitches, and knitting all 16 together into one stitch!

Just to make that whole process more fun, before and after the whole dropping-a-triple-yarnover process, you also make two new triple yarnovers before and after the petal point to form the two large holes. Wow.Creating the lacy border involves moving the start of the round by one stitch in three different rows. If you skip those moves, you end up with the laddered border in the Andrea photo.

If you follow the directions, you get the lacy holes that match the original photo. So important sometimes, following directions!

After Glöckchen, What?

2011-08-11T10:12:00.000-04:00

Yes, Glöckchen is finally done and starched and blocked! Ta da!

This is one of those wonderful Niebling patterns, with no mistakes in the chart, no binding or ruffling to block out, just flowers and leaves standing out against a half-acre of hex mesh.
But you gotta admit, Glöckchen is a pretty hard act to follow.

One more glamour shot:

How can you top that?

How about with butterflies?

I was ready to leave for work when I saw these pretty things out nectaring on the swamp milkweed. It was a very hot and humid day, and they fluttered their wings even as they rested on the flowers.

These are Spicebush Swallowtails, Papilio troilus (aka Pterourus troilus). Some days nothing makes me feel older than trying to keep up with current nomenclature.

Flowers and Flowery Lace Knitting

2011-07-23T19:52:00.011-04:00

I have a degree in horticulture, and my area of specialization was floriculture, but I don't have anything like an organized flower garden. I tend to plant things here and there, and because I recognize the seedlings and the early sprouts, mow around them in the grass.

I have flowers all over the place in random clumps. My brain presents me with scientific names memorized decades ago - where does it store all this stuff?I remembered the moth mullein was a Verbascum, but I didn't remember the species, V. blattaria.

My swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, is not growing in a swamp. It is growing out of a crack in a concrete porch slab from the original farmhouse site, about as un-swampy as you could get.

Ever since I noticed a few years back how much the hummingbirds liked the catnip flowers, I've encouraged it, but they aren't the only thing that likes it.

This Silver-spotted Skipper, Epargyreus clarus, likes it, too. The skipper is very territorial, and comes back to the catnip over and over throughout the day. When I went out to take its picture, it flew off, but not very far, and within a minute was back where I could take a close-up.

And here's my White Henryi lily again. I just realized I bought the original bulbs about 25 years ago, and it's come back reliably year after year. 2011 has been a very rainy year, but it made a fine show back in 2008, which was dry.

White Henryi is one of the lilies Donna Lee was talking about in her comment, the ones with a scent that knocks you down and sits on you. Most of the Oriental lilies are like that - the green nectary star in the center is a fairly reliable indicator of strong-scentedness.
Personally, I'm not a fan of scents that knock me down and sit on me, so the majority of my lilies are Asiatics with little or no scent.

The knitting on Glöckchen is done:The casting-off is . . . half done.

Each of the twelve repeats has twenty-two crocheted chains, and I am not a very fast crocheter. I was hoping to finish by Saturday, but along about Thursday afternoon I realized I wouldn't make it. I'm still plugging along, though, because I can hardly wait to block this thing!

Wednesday Bits and Pieces

2011-07-13T13:07:00.014-04:00

First, a little bit of responding to comments.

Becky said, "So *that* is what those kinds of spiders are! We quite frequently have them trying to live in our mailbox."

They get in my mailbox, too! My husband emphatically does NOT like spiders (this t-shirt is just made for him), and when these come in the house in the mail, I'm the one who escorts them back out again.

Cathy-Cate said, "My Asiatic lilies have never looked the same since a friend of ours (who is a landscaper) thinned them three years ago....he said they would bounce back better than ever in a couple years."

I have my suspicions about what he did! The way to thin lilies is to dig up all the bulbs after the stem starts to die and space them out, so each bulb has more growing room. But this takes a lot of time and a lot of labor.

The cheating way is to pull off the stems of some of the lilies in each clump, hoping to starve those bulbs out and let the ones left with their stems take over. This method is obviously a lot faster and easier than all that digging.

But the problem with this method is that if the lily variety is tough, instead of the stemless bulb dying, it just throws up a new stem the following year.

This new stem will be smaller and weaker and less likely to bloom, since it didn't get to store up as much energy when its stem was pulled off.

If this was what happened, I'd either leave them in place (the small stems will probably recover), or else dig them up and space them out in the fall.

Catsmum said, "I don't want to know what the stitch count will be by the final row."

Well, that's the thing about Nieblings, they don't always increase in a strict geometric way. In this particular doily, the stitch count got to 76 stitches per round in Round 139, leaped up to 101 per round in 140 (that make-a-triple-yarnover-into-13 bit), and has been decreasing by two stitches per pattern round ever since.

I just counted out the last chart round, and it has 91 stitches per repeat, so I'll be ending at 1,092 stitches in the final round.

I also stretched it out a little against a ruler, and it's at least two feet in diameter, even knitted in size 30 thread on a 2.0 mm needle.

In other news, we found some more beanie babies for Beanie Baby Wars.

An octopus mounted on an ice dragon.

A turkey mounted on a unicorn.

They're jousting.

Ah! And I finally got a picture of one of the hummingbirds at the feeder this year. I waited so long with the camera all set up that the power saver kept turning it off again.

My camera's preview screen has a speed of 30 frames per second, and when I watch the hummingbird on it, I can see the wings moving! But they were still too fast for the camera and showed up as blurs in the photos.

Glöckchen Progress, Lilies, a SPIDER!

2011-07-09T19:19:00.014-04:00

If you are spider phobic, and don't even like to see pictures of spiders, I'm giving lots and lots of warning so you can look away. There is a spider photo at the end of this post!

One of the knitting projects I took to work on at Origins was Glöckchen, but I had only knitted on it a little bit before I remembered one of the reasons I had put it down.

It was so seriously crowded on the needle at over 900 stitches per round that at one point about 11 stitches oozed off the needle while it was between bouts of knitting!

I twisted my husband's arm and had him take me to Knitters' Mercantile one morning before we headed in to the convention. I bought a second US 0 (2.0 mm) circular, so I could stretch Glöckchen out a bit again.

The stitch count peaked at 1212 in Round 139, where you make a triple yarnover and then knit into it 13 times in the plain row. I am finally out to Round 149 with one more pattern round to go after this.

We came home to lilies in bloom.

I just realized my "Tiger Babies" lilies from The Lily Garden have been in the ground here for 20 years.

They look pretty crowded at this point, but after twenty years in one spot, many lilies would have crowded themselves completely out of bloom.

Okay, is everybody ready for my spider? Spider-phobics safely out of the room?
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Last chance to click away before seeing a close-up of a bold jumping spider, Phidippus audax.

Is that thing cool or what? Eyes, nose, and big white lips!

Summer Adventures

2011-06-30T10:44:00.004-04:00

Our most recent summer adventure was our annual pilgrimage to Origins (Origins Game Fair), but just before that, we had a kitten adventure.

The child and I were getting in the car when we heard a sound: "Mew. Mew. Mew. Mew. Mew," coming from the edge of the driveway.

A pair of catbirds nested in one of the yew bushes by the house this year, and they are incredible mimics, so my first thought was, "Wow, that catbird sounds exactly like a cat!"

But I walked over to the rain-sodden irises anyway, and found this:
A smallish, rain-soaked, hungry and alone kitten, around five or six weeks old.

If it was just up to me, I would be happy to add a kitten to the household. But my husband does not like cats. Not even when they are as cute as this:

I probably wouldn't let that stop me, especially when faced with this,
except . . . Ajax likes cats perhaps altogether too much, but not in a cute-photo-of-kitten-snuggling-under-dog-chin way.

More of a tasty-animated-snack-food-on-legs way.

So we had to find a safer home for the kitten, and quickly! Before we left for Origins.

Luckily for the kitten, one of the first people my husband called to ask if they knew anyone looking for a kitten, was looking for one himself. Wow. That was one lucky little kitten.

Theory of Profanity

2011-06-19T16:19:00.003-04:00

I'm blogging off Julie (Samurai Knitter) today - this started out as a comment, and as I typed, I realized it was so long it might as well be a blog post.

My Theory of Profanity is a little different. I guess it boils down to "Words Have Power," and some words, particularly profanity, acquire more power the less you use them.

I am generally known as a person who doesn't swear, but that's not really true. I don't swear much on my blog, but I'm a person who fixes broken stuff: believe me, nothing gets a stuck bolt unstuck like a fiery blue streak of profanity.

I've said in various places that I swear so seldom, when I do, lightning flashes, the earth trembles, and large men cringe.

My theory is, in order to have power, the words need to build up a charge. If I used them all the time, it would get zapped away in little static-sparks. The long in-between times when I'm not swearing let them build up some hefty voltage. Then when I do - ZAP!

What I See

2011-06-13T13:31:00.005-04:00

This is what I saw:Six little flowers, blossoms towards the center of the snowflake.

I have to say, I don't think I've ever run across a pattern where the flowers (if they were meant to be flowers) were knitted from the flowerhead down to the leaves.

I broke down and ordered the other Marie Niedner book, Knitted Lace (Kunst-Stricken), and Volume I and Volume II of the Christine Duchrow patterns, and spent the weekend after they showed up entering the patterns into a spreadsheet.

My spreadsheets usually have the page number the pattern photo is on, the German title, a rough translation, and the page number of the chart. I print them out and write notes on them, like how many rounds in a doily, or how many stitches wide an insertion is.

But their main purpose is to pick out potential projects - one of my main notes is "pretty!"

I received a question about blocking this doily, and how I cast off to make the edge so smooth.

First off, the pattern ends with a series of yarnovers alternating with single or double decreases. That is, it ends with a nice round of holes, handy for running a nylon blocking cord through.

I followed the cast-off I learned in one of Galina Khmeleva's workshops (purl, wrapping the yarn backwards, put the new stitch back on the left needle, then purl 2 together, continuing to wrap the yarn backwards). This makes the cast-off stitches curl over to the back of the work.I am a very tight knitter, so in order to cast off loosely, I used a much larger (much much larger: a US 8, 5 mm, when this was knitted on a US 2, 2.75mm) needle to do all this purling.

I used a needle to run thin nylon crochet cord through all the holes, eased it out until I liked the looks of it, then tensioned it with 12 rustproof pins. I used nylon cord before, and although it doesn't look right for every pattern, I was really happy with how it worked for this one.

Doily with Sharp Pointy Teef!

2011-06-08T20:57:00.004-04:00

Well, this is verrry interesting!Here is the original photo of Figure 78, a blobby center and rather snowflake-like points.

I used nylon crochet cord and twelve pins to block it out to a similar six-pointed star shape.

And that's when I saw it! Do you see it?Or am I imagining them?

So I Finished Figure 72

2011-06-06T10:44:00.004-04:00

...and went straight on to Figure 78, Sechseckiges Deckchen mit tiefen Zacken (hexagonal doily with sharp teeth).
This one is all nice and organized in the center, and gets a little strange towards the edges. I'll be interested to see how it blocks out.

Once again, I found the chart was cut along the left side and pasted back together missing some stitches. In this case, the first part of the chart was shown twice, and the second part was symmetrical, so I think I have it worked out.

It's like codebreaking, especially since the original instructions are not only in German, which I never studied, but also in the lovely and confusing fraktur.

A complete puzzle from start to finish - I guess only my fellow puzzle fanatics can quite understand the fascination and the satisfaction of wrestling it into submission.

I've gone and ordered the other two Christine Duchrow books published by Lacis, and their somewhat abridged version of Kunst-Stricken. It was the devil to try and find used copies of these books that are still in print and on offer from the publisher - apparently while I wasn't looking, the used book market fell on its head and forgot that "used copy" was supposed to mean "cheaper copy".

One of the great delights of the early internet for me was the sudden access to used book markets. Instead of contracting with a book-finding service, I could go to AbeBooks or BookFinder and poof! find a copy of a great out-of-print book for half the price or less of new.

Now it looks like some of the used booksellers aren't doing their own research and checking for in-print status and new-from-the-publisher price, especially not for niche things like reprints from small publishers like Lacis.

Instead they're checking Amazon, seeing a price of $36, and pricing their copy at $36. Meanwhile, the new price is $22. hmph!

Vignette Out My Window

2011-05-31T15:57:00.003-04:00

Just before 8pm last night, my husband called to me, "There's a deer out there!"We see deer tracks all the time, and often boot them out when we take walks on our nature loop, but we don't generally see them in the daytime.

Then he said, "What is it doing?"It was licking the piece of plywood that my deerhunting relatives put up to hold shooting targets.

It didn't take any notice of me in the house taking pictures at all.But Truffles got a huge thrill out of running out of the house (inside the fence) and chasing it off!

My Historic Doily Kick

2011-05-25T18:23:00.003-04:00

Lately my obsession has been knitting a lot of fairly old doily patterns.

I downloaded a knitting chart font with characters like the charts my Niebling patterns use, and I've been making charts from things like the written instructions in my 1909 copy of de Dillmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework.

Although I know better, I loved this blue-shaded crochet cotton so much that I knitted the de Dillmont doily out of it.I hoped the soft blues would blend better - instead they settled stubbornly into same-color pools.

Another doily I recharted was this one, Duchrow 61.5.I used a ball of vintage thread that turned out to have both white and cream/ecru wound over the same ball. I want to tea-dye this thing to soften that white ring, and then I'll re-block it.

This week I've been working on pattern 72 from the knitted lace section of Das Stricken, as reprinted in Lacis' Knitted Lace II (Kunst-Stricken II).It's a very pretty little thing - the plate from the original hardly does it justice.

Unfortunately the chart in the Lacis book was cut vertically, and starting at Row 28, is missing three stitches from each row.

Fortunately, when I recharted this, I lined up motifs the way the Niebling charts do, and those missing stitches turned that section to instant static.

And after messing about with it a bit, I realized that also starting at Row 28, there were two repeats per row, so all I had to do was work out where the first one ended and knit it again.

We haven't had the severe weather much of the midwest has been suffering, but it's been raining plenty, so I've had lots of time indoors this week to knit!

My Jetsons Moment

2011-05-17T11:52:00.005-04:00

I read Julie's post the other day, and when I turned on some music this morning, I remembered I had a Jetsons moment of my own to share.

My husband got me an mp3 player last November, and very shortly I remembered how much I dislike headphones, earbuds, and every other kind of in or on the ear sound thing. I notice them all the time. They just drive me wild.

So I kept an eye out, and a while ago I bought a pair of capsule speakers for the mp3 player:

This black matte egg separates into two little pop-up speakers that sit by my knitting spot.

I grew up in the Age of Big Stereo: big turntables, big speakers. In my head, a small stereo is a boom box.

To have a stereo sound system that fits on one hand . . . wow. Definitely a Jetsons moment.

URL Alphabet Meme

2011-05-07T14:48:00.002-04:00

URL Alphabet Meme, via Denise at Jejune's Place.

You know how your web browser can auto-fill in a URL for you as you start typing? Here's what comes up in my browser for each letter.

A: Area Forecast Discussion from the local weather service office
B: Google Books, no surprise there!
C: The home page of the aforementioned NWS office
D: Blogger Dashboard
E: US Geological Survey Earthquake page 5.0 and over
F: Facebook
G: Google
H: The page of the local Freecycle group I co-moderate
I: Google Images
J: A local webcam looking out on the channel into Lake Michigan
K: The weather station (are you seeing a pattern here?) of a local airport
L: The Girl Genius livejournal site
M: Yahoo Mail
N: North Central US weather radar
O: Home page of Origins Game Fair
P: Discussion page of a Ravelry group I frequently read
Q: The earthquake page again (see E)
R: Ravelry!
S: The webcam from J
T: Twitter
U: Another Ravelry group page
V: The Vaisala Humidity Calculator
W: Another weather page
X: XKCD
Y: YouTube
Z: A friend of mine on Twitter

Other Things I've Been Playing With

2011-04-07T10:21:00.007-04:00

One of the Ravelry groups I post a lot in had an auction for Japan, and I donated six modular orgami boxes. Five of them are folded in the first photo.
Two of them have twisted flower-like shapes on the outside, but some of them are like that on the inside instead, so I took a picture of the insides of tops and bottoms after I had folded the sixth box.

The Pi shawl that lives on the back of my computer chair needed a good wash, so I soaked it and rinsed and reblocked it. Blocking is a lot easier now I have these mats - each mat is 18 inches square, so you can get an idea how big the shawl is.

And in the spirit of finishing things I've had hanging around for years, I've been working on this spa washcloth I started two years ago.
I am finally to the point of knitting-on the last border. I have one last corner to turn, and then I'll graft the last eight stitches to the edge and it will be DONE.

I might need to knit a couple more little Nieblings to celebrate!

Poem of the Day

2011-04-04T10:58:00.008-04:00

Mud
by Polly Chase Boyden

Mud is very nice to feel
All squishy-squash between the toes!
I'd rather wade in wiggly mud
Than smell a yellow rose.

Nobody else but the rosebush knows
How nice mud feels
Between the toes.

I don't remember the first time I read this poem, but I have the last line thoroughly stuck in my head, and it leaps into my head spontaneously when I see spring mud.

April is indeed the cruelest month for weather. According to the local airport weather station, last night the high temperature hit 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 C) - at 3am! Now that it's daytime, it's only 41 F (5 C). We haven't had our April snow yet, but that would be very typical.

The first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read was Archer's Goon. I can't put my finger on one thing that I enjoyed so much, but it made me search out more of her books, like Dog's Body and Howl's Moving Castle.

I tend to like books with a certain level of complexity and background detail, so that when I re-read them, I pick out things on the second (or third) reading that I missed first time around. Most of her books have that.

I've been paging through old April posts, looking for inspiration. It's hard to believe it's been five years since I first knitted a Pi doily.

Let's see, what else has been happening?

I've been knitting little Niebling patterns from Bande 760.

Fig. 28:
Fig. 17:
Fig. 6:

Crocuses came up:

And snowdrops:

And the snow finally melted away.

RIP Diana Wynne Jones

2011-04-03T21:06:00.004-04:00

I was going to post that April is Poetry Month, and then I heard that author Diana Wynne Jones died last Saturday.

I just re-read Dark Lord of Derkholm in January. When I went online to see what new books of hers I might have missed, I learned of her struggle with cancer.

Gah. I'm going to miss her.

Progress Report

2011-03-15T20:25:00.002-04:00

It's been a while since I took a photo of Glöckchen!

My camera batteries are low, and our battery charger is acting up. We really need a new charger.

Glöckchen is getting bigger than my circular needle, so I can't easily stretch it out to show the leaves and flowers any more.

I am just past the point of endless hex mesh and on to starting the border rows. It's such a beautiful pattern, 564 stitches in a round at this point (row 119, I think this is).

That's mostly what I'm doing when I'm not wasting time on Twitter.

Blog or Blog Not!

2011-03-11T13:15:00.005-05:00

I got tired of waiting around for my blogging mojo to show up and decided to listen to Barbara Sher, who says not to wait until you feel like doing something - either do it or declare you're not doing it.

If you're going to draw, draw every day and don't wait for some magical state of wanting to draw that might never show up.

This is one of those things I remember and forget, remember and forget. Well, I've remembered it again: Do, or do not! Knit, or knit not. Blog, or blog not.

I've been knitting, finishing and working on finishing things I started a long time ago.

If you remember this one, you've been reading the blog for a looooong time. I started it back in August of 2007, after taking Galina Khmeleva's Orenburg class at the Michigan Fiber Festival.

I never really liked this wool: it's scratchy to knit with, and it smells bad. Now it's finally finished and cast off and it's done.

I started another quirky little Niebling doily from Kunststricken: Decken, Garnituren, Spitzen (Bände 408 und 760). This one is on page 9 of Bände 760, on the right in photo 15, chart 17. In the photo below, it's on my red 00 (1.75 mm) needles, and it's binding into a bowl shape.I was hoping it would block out, but off the needles, it still was pretty stubbornly bowl-shaped.

I didn't want a knitted coracle, even a miniature one, so I'm trying again on US 0 (2.0 mm) needles. It's still starting to bind around row 39, but it stretches out more like the photo.

There are a couple of these quirky little patterns, around 50 rounds in size, in Bände 760, and I'm looking forward to knitting and blogging about them.

Knitting Tragedies

2011-02-26T09:08:00.005-05:00

Not the kind involving 500 stitches escaping off a circular needle.

I love lace knitting. But once in a while I run my head painfully hard into the brick wall of how undervalued this particular lacemaking technique is.

Yesterday was one of those days.

I stopped at the Blue Star Antique Pavilion and browsed around until I found these three doilies: Both of these patterns are in Knitted Lace 2 (Kunst-Stricken II).

The two white ones are the cover doily of the first section of the book.

The second one is a very pretty doily called "Anemone", on page 25 (page 17 in the original).

The tragedy?

I paid 88 cents each for the white ones. $1.88 for the colored one.

I ATE'NT DEAD

2011-01-26T22:17:00.002-05:00

I am reliably informed that since my last post was around the beginning of December, and it's nearly the end of January, that I ought to let people know I'm alive and well.

For now I'll just hold up Granny Weatherwax's card:

I ATE'NT DEAD

Reindeer!

2010-12-05T19:26:00.005-05:00

The local library had a visit from a couple of reindeer, but I guess the reindeer didn't fly to the library:

It was a nice day for standing outdoors, 30-ish F (around 0 C) and not windy or snowing. The reindeer were as curious about the people all around as the people were about them.

I guess the library lawn was pretty good, too.

Brown Thumb Gardener

2010-11-17T16:59:00.007-05:00

I always wondered about that expression, "green thumb". In my experience, a real gardener's thumb is a brown thumb, or a black thumb, from digging in the dirt, viz:
My four o'clock roots had a great summer this year, and grew like crazy. My handspan, stretched out like that, is about 8.5 inches (21.5 cm). Look at the size of that root, and the piece of stem still on it. Wow.

When the soil dries and I clean them off, I'll have to weigh that thing. It's heavy!

In warm climates, I'm told four o'clock (Mirabilis jalapa) roots will overwinter in the ground, but here they freeze and die. They usually produce lots of seeds, so if you're pressed for space, you can save the seeds and grow a new batch next year.

But if you want to lift your four o'clock roots and save them, here is how I have done it for quite a few years now.

After the first frost, I dig up the roots and clean them. Some years I've sprayed them off with the hose, other years I've just let my sandy soil dry and brushed it off.

Then I put the clean dry roots in an open plastic bag (that is, not a ziplock type bag), and I set them aside and forget about them until we're past frost danger again. They literally sit on the floor next to my sewing machine all winter, in the room farthest from our soapstone stove, at around 65 degrees F (about 18 C), all winter.

When I plant them, the buds tell me whether the flowers will be pink (the leaf buds are pinkish red) or either yellow or white (green leaf buds).

When I haven't been turning my thumbs black digging in the dirt, I've been watching my parents' greyhound again:Ajax and Kasper were soaking up some late-November sunshine and a run of unseasonably warm days.

I'm still working on Glöckchen:

And!

I actually finished something and cast it off!

The "Lilac Time" (Marianne Kinzel's "Lilac Time") that I started last fall is finally finished. Whew.And now I apparently need to learn a new skill, starching doilies.

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T01:44:00.001-04:00

Time for Tree to Meet Chainsaw

2010-10-26T16:35:00.006-04:00

I hate this tree.

I'm not that fond of wind storms, either.

HIGH WIND WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL 8 PM EDT WEDNESDAY

TONIGHT
SOUTHWEST WINDS 20 TO 30 MPH. GUSTS UP TO 60 MPH DECREASING TO 40 MPH AFTER MIDNIGHT.

WEDNESDAY
VERY WINDY. SOUTHWEST WINDS 20 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS TO AROUND 60 MPH INCREASING TO 30 TO 35 MPH WITH GUSTS TO AROUND 60 MPH LATE IN THE DAY.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT
WINDY. WEST WINDS 25 TO 35 MPH WITH GUSTS TO AROUND 45 MPH.

Pictures by Daylight

2010-10-24T14:21:00.002-04:00

Since the weather is cooperating, I took the tray outdoors to have its picture taken. The diameter of the doily is 11 inches, about 28 centimeters, at the widest point.

I taped some black and white sewing thread to my see-through ruler and tried to get a close-up that showed the fineness of the thread it was knitted with.You can't really tell in the photos, but it's purl side up!

My thanks to Rebecca at Doilies Are Stylish for her instant ID of the pattern. This is Christine Duchrow's 64.1, commonly known as Egeblad. I have the pattern in The Knitted Lace Patterns of Christine Duchrow, Volume 3, but it will have to get in line behind a lot of other patterns!

A Day Off

2010-10-23T20:14:00.004-04:00

The last couple of weeks have been busy.

First, October eleventh I taught a braiding class for my lace group, the West Michigan Lace Group. The Monday holiday meant I had the night off from work, so I taught the class in the afternoon, then attended the meeting in the evening.

Both last week and this week I've been taking our son up to the public school to take the MEAP (Michigan Educational Assessment Program) tests. He was taking them with one of the sixth grade classes, so we had to show up in the morning at the time they were taking them.

The tests took about two hours each, so I brought Glöckchen along each day and worked on it steadily.I've nearly finished the fourth of the seven little bellflowers, and I'm up to round 80-something of about 150.

It's getting bigger and more difficult to stretch it out on the needle without risking pulling stitches off.

Today I took the day off from knitting on it, and went in to town to the antique stores.

I knew I heard something calling my name.

I saw this lazy Susan mirror tray in a booth last summer, and dithered over buying it. But when I went back and didn't find it, I knew by my sinking heart that I had really really wanted it.The doily is not under the glass - it's etched (or something) on the mirror. It's a perfect photo image of a real knitted doily. Isn't it beautiful?

When I spotted it in the booth again I snatched it up.

I will probably take the lazy Susan base off and hang the mirror on the wall, but the other thing I found was the smaller of these two little Delft-style teapots.I bought the bigger one last summer, and I could have sworn I posted about it, but if I did, I can't find it.

The bigger one on the left was very very dirty and had no top, and I soaked it in vinegar and then in bleach water, then in changes of boiling water before I dared make tea in it.

The little one on the right was perfectly clean and came with an unglazed strainer. It holds twelve ounces of water, just enough for a mug of tea plus a little warm-up.

Neither one has anything marked on the bottom, so all I can say for sure is that they are tin-glazed pottery, and very likely painted by the same person.

So a very satisfying expedition!

Can't Talk. Busy Knitting.

2010-10-14T14:13:00.002-04:00

Glöckchen

Since I Last Wrote...

2010-10-10T15:29:00.016-04:00

I saw a bit of the 65th Revival AAA Glidden Tour.

This is the shared parking lot of the Blue Star Antique Pavilion and the Saugatuck Brewing Company just off exit 36 of I-196 on the way to Douglas, Michigan.

My husband's homebrewing club often meets here, and I have spent the odd happy hour wandering up and down the aisles of the antique pavilion and exploring the many many booths.

I just loved the contrast between these two cars and had to get a shot of them together.

I finished the little Niebling I started. The booklet describes the designs on this page as "dreieckiges" (triangular), but this one wanted to be round.To me it looks like something inspired by Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. It's a little thing, 50 rounds or so, under 8 inches across.

Then I started another, Glöckchen, because these things are like Terry Pratchett books: even when I know what happens, I still have to work my way through and see how everything works out.

Friday the weather was beautiful, warm and sunny, so we went to the Frederik Meijer Gardens to see the Chihuly exhibit and the Art Prize pieces.

(And I will stamp my foot here and say this was all built after we moved out of Grand Rapids, otherwise I would probably work there.)

On the way, from the highway we saw a bit of the work being done on St. Adalbert's. We used to live near it, and the copper roofs have always been green, so it felt odd to see them all shiny and coppery.

When you walk into the lobby at the gardens, this is what you see on the floor:

The floor is all covered with these organic-looking bronze shapes embedded in terrazzo. This is the work of Michele Oka Doner, Beneath the Leafy Crown, installed this year.

All three of us have been to the gardens before, but I think it's always been in the spring, for the butterfly exhibit. This was our first fall visit.

My mom took our son to see some of the Art Prize works in Grand Rapids, and we saw some more here at the gardens (scroll down the right sidebar), but I didn't get pictures of any of them!

Instead I got lots of pictures of Chihuly glass and really big plants.

The sun splashed out on the orange glass in this one, but I took it anyway, trying to get the bridge in the background for scale. Then the woman in turquoise walked into the shot, and I took it. Look how HUGE those leaves are.

I love the tropical house, and our son did, too. I had a great time going through there with him, because he kept noticing things like the live finches flying overhead, and asking about different plants.

And then we went to the carnivorous plant house, and the arid plant house, and then outside. It was awesome.

If you've been reading Girl Genius, you'll appreciate my last picture:
Look at the fangs! EEEEEE!

Steam Engines, Chickens, a Band Organ, & Knitting

2010-09-22T14:11:00.015-04:00

If you hadn't figured it out from this post or maybe this one, I love steam engines, and I usually go to the local antique engine and tractor show every year, to see what turns up.

This year, they had a pair of small steam traction engines sawing logs. Here's the first:Here's the second engine:And a view of the sawmill they were running between them:
Later in the day, they had turned the first one around, and I had to take a picture of that shiny blue paint.
Those were the little small engines, but there were bigger ones, too:
I love machinery where I can follow the logic and see how it works. And I love seeing it all so lovingly tended and kept in working order, instead of used and tossed out for next month's model.

A week later, we were off to the county fair, so I could practice my Occupation (see my Profile).

Of course, if there's anything geeky around (more geeky than figuring out the motion controls on the rides), I'll find it. I heard music and followed it to this Stinson Band Organ:Both sides of the trailer were open, so you could see the organ, and in back, the MIDI roll that controls the instruments. It was the coolest thing.

And did I promise knitting? Okay. Knitting.

My order came from Martinas Bastel- & Hobbykiste.I bought Spitzenstrickerei: Schöne Decken, ISBN-13: 978-3-89798-289-5 (five huge charts of seven Herbert Niebling designs) and Kunststricken: Decken, Garnituren, Spitzen (Bände 408 und 760), ISBN-13: 978-3-89798-269-7, reprinted this year by BuchVerlag für die Frau.

If you're not comfortable ordering direct from Germany, sometimes they show up on Powell's Books website. Powell's charges the Euro price at the current exchange rate, plus an import fee, currently $3 plus $4.50 per item.

Either way, the total price including overseas shipping ends up being about half what I've seen on other websites.

Someone reminded me that I had some older cones of size 30 cotton thread, and I pulled those out of the drawer to see what kind of shape they were in.

One was a 3000-yard cone, but it was brownish and spotted on the outside, so I went looking for a little pattern, 50 rounds or so, to use up the icky cotton on the outside and see how it knitted up.

I picked the small one on the upper left. (It's pattern 12, the upper photo on page 8, Fig. 28 if you have Bände 760.)

Nieblings always seem to have something I've never done in each one.This one has twelve yarnovers in a row to make those big holes. Ulp.

I don't know how that's going to block out, but I'll find out soon, as I only have a round or two left.

Summer Summary

2010-09-09T14:01:00.011-04:00

So what did I do this summer, besides a little knit-a-square knitting and hardly posting at all?I worked the Broad Arrow at a little more appropriate gauge for the size of the thread I was using.

I took pictures of a tree frog in the phlox.

We went to the Binder Park Zoo and enjoyed the giraffe overlook again.The animals have so much space here. It's such a relief compared to some beat-up, tired-looking pens I've seen other places.

We dog-sat my parents' retired greyhound, Kasper, over Labor Day weekend.Kasper really enjoyed running in both sections of our fenced yard.
He liked resting on his bed afterwards, too.

On Labor Day, we got up and did the local Bridge Walk. It's nothing like the 5-mile Mackinac Bridge Walk - ours is a tiny 0.19K, led by the town crier with a brass bell and bagpipers, and with many people accompanied by their dogs.

This year as we walked back across the bridge towards our car, we heard a whistle and saw this coming down the river towards Kalamazoo Lake.We see a lot of different boats, from kayaks up to cabin cruisers and ore carriers, but this is the first steam paddleboat I've seen.

Tomorrow I'll be seeing more steam-powered machinery at the Michigan Flywheelers' Antique Engine & Tractor Show, but I'm still betting none of it will be boats!

First Amendment

2010-09-08T22:21:00.003-04:00

I shouldn't have to say this, and I don't like having to say it, because political stuff tends to make me sputter incoherently. I like to write and talk, but I don't argue well.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And yes, "free exercise thereof" does include religions that I personally think were made up by charlatans; and speech that makes me want to administer dope slaps; and assemblies of people with opinions I consider regrettable.

Because the whole freedom thing means not just for me, but also for them.

That's what this country is about.

And tomorrow: Back to knitting. Or netting. Or dog pictures.

I Wish

2010-08-27T22:21:00.001-04:00

I wish Ajax would not eat so many grasshoppers. They give him gas that is so bad, it makes my eyes water and wakes me out of a sound sleep.

There you go. That's another reason I love winter: no grasshoppers.

Catch-Up Post

2010-08-25T15:01:00.004-04:00

Let's see, the month of August in a couple of sentences:

I came home from work Thursday night after I posted to the news that our well pump was not working.

Over the next week and a half, my dad helped me mess around with the cursed thing, buying parts, digging slit trenches in a typical Michigan August heat wave (heat plus high humidity) and eventually replacing both the pressure tank and the pump/motor itself, not to mention a whole lot of old connecting hose in the well pit.

All of this during the latest incredible hatch of mosquitoes.

This has really been a summer for them here, unbelievable numbers of mosquitoes swarming and whining around you so you can literally slap once and kill them five at a time. The ones that really get me are the little ones that fly under my glasses and bite me on the eyelid!

Last week was a week of catching up with mowing, laundry and dishes, and taking blissful hot showers, followed by a weekend at the Michigan Fiber Festival.

Now that I can pretend to have caught up, I'll try to sneak back to more regular posts!

Rest in Peace

2010-08-03T21:28:00.002-04:00

My grandfather, my dad's dad, died last Thursday at the age of 99.

He and my grandmother lived at home together until barely a week before his passing, the same house where my cousins and I played in the yard in the summer, drenched in bug spray, until it got too dark to see, had snowball fights in the yard on Thanksgiving, and crowded into the living room on Christmas eve.

He and his brother owned a lumber company when I was a kid, and the smell of pine lumber still takes me back to the big lumber sheds with the railroad spur that ran right into them for unloading.

I used to walk over there after Girl Scouts, and when they closed up, he and my grama would drive me home. He always let me pick a sucker out of the box behind the counter - always Dum Dum Pops, and I usually picked cream soda or root beer.

When my youngest brother was born when I was thirteen, it was the day before Thanksgiving, and I stayed overnight at their house until the holiday the next day.

When I was fifteen, he gave me a Zane Grey book, The Light of Western Stars, that had been given to him 48 years earlier.

After the lumber company was sold and he retired, he and my grama used to take their camper out to southern California and Arizona for the winter. He was one of those people who liked to drive and not stop, and could tell you to the minute how long a route took - if you did it in a straight shot.

One of my aunts said to me one day, "You're a lot like your grampa." I asked her how. She said, "You have the same dry sense of humor. You say something, and ten minutes later I realize it was funny."

We always got together with them between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my uncles and aunts and their kids, now married, and their kids, some of them now with kids of their own. It was quite a roomful.

We'll miss you, Grampa.

Thorny Post

2010-07-27T14:33:00.012-04:00

Marguerite mentioned blackberries in her last couple of posts, and so did Lucia at Rhymes with Fuchsia. I had been twittering about the large and confusing genus Rubus, so I took the camera out for a walk in search of thorny things.

First off, what is the genus Rubus, anyway?

Rubus is the genus of a large group of plants including raspberries, dewberries, blackberries, and thimbleberries found all over North America.

When we moved to our property, I started noticing all different kinds and went to my Peterson wildflower field guide to sort out the differences.

Peterson, for once, blew me a literary raspberry of its own, saying only

Brambles (Blackberries, etc.)
Most plants of the genus Rubus are woody, prickly, or bristly shrubs, outside the scope of this book; most are problems for the specialist. Gray recognizes 205 species in our area. See A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs for a small selection.

So I suppose as soon as I finish patiently clicking through all 237 species shown at the USDA website, I might know what I have growing here.

This is what I see when I go out walking.These blackberries are my favorite kind for canning. They make a tall, stout cane with wicked thorns, but they also produce lots of fruit.

This is the main difference (in my mind, anyway, or maybe my local dialect) between a blackberry and a black raspberry.When I pick a blackberry, the center stays in. When I pick a raspberry (black, red, or golden/yellow), the center comes out and the edible berry is hollow.

Let's take another look at those thorns:Ouch!

Last year I found a happy hybrid: right down the path from the thorny ones, in the midst of a patch of trailing or sprawling thornless blackberries, a thornless blackberry with stout canes came up.It's in a shady spot, so the fruit is not ripe yet.

Check out the lack of thorns!I want to move them into the sun, but I don't want to kill them. I'll probably bury the leafy tip in a pot of soil and let it root.

I think this one is some kind of dewberry, but it never fruits enough to be sure. It has a fuzz of thorns, but they're bendy.
Then I have Rubus something-or-other with completely different leaves, a palmate leaf like a Virginia creeper.
These are the sprawling brambles I have everywhere, the ones that like to rip my ankles to shreds:The leaves turn an incredibly beautiful deep red in the fall, and in the spring they have such a delicate, crinkly-petalled white flower. Before I found the tall-caned ones, I used to pick and can these guys.

Their thorns don't look like much, but there are plenty of them.

Last of all, here is a black raspberry cane, next year's fruiting cane.I can't show any berries for them, because their season has ended.

(And so has this post.)

the Broad Arrow, and the Diamond

2010-07-21T13:34:00.002-04:00

Preserved for 355 years in the wonderful medium of print, I now present to you

the Broad Arrow, and the Diamond

I knew that I still didn't have that fifth row quite right. This morning one of those rays of light hit me . . . what if the instructions were wrong in this certain particular way . . .?

HA!

By Hannah, I think I've got it!

(Rita, I've sent you an email to the pattern source.)

Nature and Netting

2010-07-19T08:55:00.009-04:00

We had more rain Wednesday night. I took the camera in the morning when I went down to see how the drainage ditch handled it.When the rain filled the ditch the last time, we had gotten about 2.72 inches of rain in just over 24 hours. This time we only had 0.65 inches. I could see where the water had risen and made the mud shiny, but it was already down by 10 am.

Camera in hand, I went walking around to see what I could see.

A while ago I spotted this indigo bunting nest while picking black raspberries. There was one bunting egg in the nest and two cowbird eggs. I identified which was which after a little Googling and removed the cowbird eggs. This morning the parents were feeding their fledgling outside the nest already.

These hot pink flowers are Deptford pinks, Dianthus armeria. They are tiny little things that grow wild in the grass.

I try to mow around moth mullein (Verbascum blattaria) rosettes when I notice them in the grass, and eventually I am rewarded with a spike of flowers. I have both white and yellow ones, but the white made the prettiest picture.I'm always a little bemused to find some of my favorite wild flowers are alien species.

In fibery news, I've been bashing my brains against the netting wall again, trying to figure out a 17th century netting pattern from text directions.

The first four rows are straightforward, and from there it's downhill. I've tried several possibilities for the vague fifth row, and unpicked the knots a number of times..

The directions for the sixth and seventh rows are very plain, and put some constraints on what can have happened in the fifth row, so I drew many diagrams and made some assumptions, and got as far as this.

It's good work for hot humid summer days. Our dew point hasn't dropped below 60 F for days, and I wouldn't be touching thread at all if not for the air conditioner wringing the water out of the air.

Where I've Been, Where I Am

2010-07-13T21:52:00.006-04:00

We went to Origins in Columbus, Ohio, a couple of weeks ago.

This is what we saw when we stopped at the end of the driveway on the morning we left:It, ah, rained a bit in the night.

That brown lake of water is the little drainage ditch that goes through a drainpipe under our driveway. They used a power shovel to straighten and clear it this spring.

Question: did they clear the drainpipe itself?

My husband was impressed enough that he stopped the car so I could take a picture from the road.

Storms chased us clear from Michigan to Ohio, and there was an earthquake in Canada while we were driving that they say was felt back at home.

Ah, but we were at Origins June 23rd to 27th. Where have I been since then?

Sharing a slow dial-up connection plugged into one computer with my husband and our son.

When we got home Sunday night after Origins, we couldn't get a connection with our wireless antenna. Huh. But it was late, and we were tired, so we unloaded the car and didn't worry about it.

However, this turned out not to be a slow and laggy connection, but no connection at all. The ISP said the severe storms we had the week we left (including the one the night before) had taken out about 80 antennas and a couple of broadcast towers.

So we were on the list, but the installer/repair guy could only fix about 4 or 5 antennas a day, depending on how far he had to drive that day.

What to do in the meantime?

My Colourmart order came Tuesday.
The little pointy samples, the ones that look like upside-down houses, are: almost-white 50/50 cashmere/merino, silvery 50/50 wool/silk, light grey 10/90 cashmere/merino, and grey 20/20/60 cashmere/silk/merino.

The half-purled, half-knitted samples above and next to them are the six possible combinations of two.

I knitted the single-strand samples on US 2 needles and the double-strand ones on US 4s.

These come with the spinning oil still on them, so while knitting they look thin and stringy, but they bloom nicely after a wash and rinse. This is the white one before its bath.

Now I have to knit the Last.Two.Rows on the Stargate and block it so I can contemplate what I'm going to knit with 8000+ yards of laceweight cashmere & silk blends.

Lazy Summer Post

2010-06-19T20:18:00.007-04:00

Now that it's high summer here (and I haven't drowned in the night in yet another pouring thunderstorm), here are some pictures I took Sunday.

The grass by the path south into the little maples is getting long. (I went out and mowed after I took pictures.)

Inside the little maples it's cool and shady and absolutely zinging with mosquitoes. I could barely stand still long enough to take two pictures, and then I swatted five in two slaps.This is the kind of deep shade (and mosquito activity) I grew up in. All summer I used to wear jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and Deep Woods Off mosquito repellent. I never came back to school with a tan.

Just past the little maples you pop back out into the bright sun. But there are so many mosquitoes, they don't care. They just keep chasing and biting you.

This picture is looking south, before I get to the loop path.

I can't believe the goldenrod on the loop is this tall already. If you click on the picture to see the large version, the spiky grass bits are reed canarygrass, Phalaris arundinacea. Canarygrass (all one word) likes wet soil and will grow over seven feet tall.I don't really like it when the grass gets that high. I guess I fear lions in the bush or something.

A lot of the loop either has standing water on it, or else is brown squooshy mud covered with deer tracks. Can't stop to take photos! Mosquitoes will eat me! This shot is at the end of the loop looking north towards the third photo.

After I took all these pictures, I went out and mowed the whole path again twice around, as well as the yard around the house. Then I had a shower, drank about nine gallons of lemonade, and complained about my wrists hurting on Twitter.

Now I need to go fling my things into a heap and get ready for Origins.

Egg Shells

2010-06-05T11:56:00.003-04:00

This is what I found when I went outside after the rain stopped: empty egg shell halves.I'm not 100% sure, in that I haven't seen the parent wrens feeding babies off the nest so far, but since I didn't find broken eggs or dead baby birds, I think they had either already left the nest, or were big enough to leave the nest when Mr. Stumpy came squelching down.

The entrance hole was along the curve to the upper right of the first photo. My first fear was that the hole was smack against the grass, but the curve of the tree left it open.

So now my main task is to get a couple of hundred pounds of sodden rotten wood off my grass.

Mr. Stumpy Falls Down

2010-06-04T18:09:00.004-04:00

I haven't posted about Mr. Stumpy, the giant dead stump in our side yard, for a long time. You can see him here and here in November of 2006, again here and here in December of 2006, twice more in 2007, and I haven't posted about him since!

Our son just came out of the bathroom and said, "Did you know half of that big dead tree fell down?"

At that moment, it started to rain really hard. So I couldn't go out and try to see if the nest of house wrens that had been in the side now face down on the grass were okay or not. It's been nearly a week since I first saw the parents feeding them. They might have fledged and left the nest. crosses fingers

A Walk with Panoramic View

2010-05-27T22:09:00.001-04:00

I was reading old posts on Antonia's blog while I was sick, and she mentioned this cool program called Autostitch. It automatically takes your adjacent photos and stitches them together without leaving a messy blur where they overlap.

As soon as I felt a bit better, I took a walk with the camera along the path I keep mowed and took some overlapping pictures.

Here is our son walking south ahead of me, very self-conscious.

If you turn left just past the tree, you come to our fire pit. My husband decided the fire ring was too big and made it smaller, but the extra rocks haven't all been dragged away yet.

This is looking back at the house. No, we can't see the house when we camp out in our back yard.

If you take the path to the left of the fire pit and turn back, this is what you see.

And if you follow that path to the top of the rise and look back again, here is my mossy path I love so much.

When you come out of the trees, you're on a hot, sandy hillside. It was hot dry sand and some moss when we moved here, but slowly the grass is taking hold.

This is the south end of the loop, already looking green and overgrown. I'll have to take a picture later in the summer when the grass and the goldenrod is nearly as high as my head!

The only drawback to these pictures is that Blogger wants to post teeny tiny versions of them, and I had to hink around with Picasa to make them post bigger. But Autostitch sure is a fun way to show a wider-angle view!

Special Delivery

2010-05-26T20:54:00.006-04:00

Last week on Ravelry, I noticed a little conversation on the Michigan Fiber Festival group about whether or not copies of the festival's Fiberline magazine had been taken to the yarn shop near me.

I am about in the middle between Marr Haven Wool Farm, where the magazines were, and Needle in a Haystack down in South Haven, so I volunteered to pick them up and run them into town.

Moments after I parked and got out of my car, Barb and Gene Marr's Merino Rambouillet sheep decided to move from the barn way out into the field. But I zoomed in on them and took their pictures anyway.

Don't they look sleek, all sheared for the summer heat we're having?

And this is the shop, lots of yarn mule-spun from the sheep, locker-hooking kits, felting supplies, and other fiber-y things. The picture is clickable, for a better view.

I had a great time talking with Barb about sheep and the fiber festival and the crazy weather we've been having. Friday was my favorite weather, mostly overcast and not so hot, and the sheep liked it, too.

By Sunday, it was so hot the baby robins were panting.
Monday it hit 89 F (32 C) here. In May. In MAY!

And today, I looked out at the nest and saw this: "Hey! Where'd everybody go?"

I would have posted earlier, but our power was out from 9:30 am until about 2 pm.

Intermittent Net

2010-05-20T10:05:00.004-04:00

What a week!

I've been struggling with an intermittent internet connection (and a cold) most of last week.

So let me do a quick summing-up.

First off, the robin and her nest. We had cold frosty weather much of last week, but by the weekend, she was feeding babies.

I tried and tried to catch her on the nest feeding them, but one baby craning its head up was the best I could get:

And then seconds after I got that picture, two more popped their wobbly little heads up:

It must be spring in Michigan, because while I was lurking at the window trying to take robin photos, a pair of mourning doves and their baby landed on the garden wall:I see mourning doves all the time, but I think this is the first time I've seen one so young.

Ruth in the bath looks like something you might find in a tide pool:

My first pinning attempt used a lot of pins, all my rustproof florist pins, and I still wasn't quite happy with it.This little doily reminds me so much of some of the Niebling designs, where he totally ignores the "increase by X per round per needle to create Y shape" and just blithely creates beautiful floral shapes. Your rigid one-at-the-end-of-each-needle, like Winde, you will not find in Ruth!

I tried a second time to pin out Ruth, this time stringing a nylon thread through the outer round, tying it, and pinning inside the cord.I still used almost all my pins, but I like the smoother sides of the square better.

I found two errors in the chart near the end, detailed in my Ravelry project notes.

Let's see, what else?

I don't have a new photo of the swirl doily, but I soaked it in water and washing soda, rinsed it multiple times, and dried it out in yesterday's sun. That stain lightened considerably, hooray!

Yesterday I went to a local estate sale, and came home with this haul:Several nice sets of dpns, a copy of Emma Brockstedt's 1916 Practical Tatting Book No. 1, a couple sets of straight needles, multiple nylon circular needles, and something new to me called a "condo needle", with a large end and a small end, all for six dollars.

All things taken together, a good week, especially as I shake this cold.

Now to see if I can get this to post!

Creative Avoidance

2010-05-15T11:02:00.002-04:00

Creative avoidance. That's when I'm nearly finished with something, and instead of actually finishing it, I start something else.

I found a doily I really liked in my new book, Knitted Lace II (Kunst-Stricken II):Coincidentally, my great-grandmother's name was Ruth, and her family was German.

It's square and small, only 49 rows. I cast on last night and started knitting. I'm up to row 30-something.

The octopus helps me keep the book open to the chart.It likes the doily because it is on eight 00 needles.

I found this swirl-pattern doily at an estate sale the other day. I soaked most of the yellow out of it, but it has one reddish-brown stain that didn't lighten much. If we get some sun, I might try sun-bleaching it. That works really well on tomato stains, but it doesn't do much versus tea or coffee. I couldn't find an exact match on Ravelry. The edging is a separate garter-stitch lace that has been sewn on.

Anyone recognize it?

Did You Hear That?

2010-05-11T09:35:00.009-04:00

A loud squee! noise coming out of Michigan?
Ordinarily that would be me, coming home Kathy Kirchner's trunk show at the West Michigan Lace Group meeting with a copy of Knitted Lace 2 (Kunst-Stricken II), a hot pink tatting shuttle, and my usual haul of Valdani thread.

(And yes, my mom did send me home with another bottomed-out chair. I swear right here in public that I will finish this one in months instead of years.)

But the squee ended up being over this:

Look! Do you see what I see? To me it looked so familiar!
It's the Gertrud Woywod pattern I knitted from the back of The Knitted Lace Patterns of Christine Duchow Vol 3
.

There can't, there can not be two Gertruds who came up with this exact pattern. Gertrud Woywod must be Gertrud Villforth. (The Lacis book says “Billforth”, a mistake due to the confusing German fraktur alphabet on the cover. German sources say Villforth.)

And if you were intrigued by the flower edging, but put off by the handwritten chart, there it is all charted out in neat symbols, with a matching insertion. Sweeeeeeet!

Now I must go page through the back of the Duchrow book some more and see if I can find any more of these in Kunst-Stricken II.

Knit Like the Winde!

2010-05-05T13:32:00.005-04:00

I was tired of knitting "Tulip Time", so I cast on the very smallest pattern I could find from Kunststricken: Große und kleine Decken.This is "Winde" (convolvulus or morning glory), a square pattern shown on page 12, where nine squares have been knitted and joined together.

I am probably not going to knit eight more, since I find the flower a little stiff or stylized for my taste.

The thread is one of four vintage 100-yard balls of DMC size 8 perle cotton in color 906 "medium parrot green", and the needles are US 1, 2.25 mm.

This morning I tried to knit it onto my size 1 circular. Bleh. My circ. is a little too long, and wow! Is it awkward to knit a square on a circ! But I needed longer dpns...

So I dug into my storage drawer full of single-pointed needles I hardly ever use, and beheaded four 14-inch single points. I filed the former knob ends into blunt rounded points.

And this morning I've used these four single points more than I ever had since I bought them.

The knitting is slowing a little as I get out to the 50+ stitch rows, but a 200-stitch round still goes faster than the 1000 or so I am up to on "Tulip Time."

Random Chair Caning Odds and Ends

2010-05-03T15:48:00.005-04:00

Recaning a chair is both easy and hard.

The individual steps are each pretty easy. The Caner's Handbook has you run in one layer of verticals, then one of horizontals, then verticals again, and then it has you weave in the fourth strand of horizontals, so you don't actually start to weave until the fourth pass.

I was re-reading those directions before I started in on this chair, and I thought, "Wait, this seems familiar . . ." because that's how the Weave-It or Weavette loom directions go! And I just read them in Piecework's March/April 2010 issue.

The hard part about caning is mainly that you have to do so much weaving, all of it by hand, first that layer of horizontals, then a layer of Z (/) diagonals and one of S (\) diagonals.

Once you start to weave the cane, things slow down. I usually only weave over and under three or four times before I pull the whole remaining length of cane through, and I keep the whole seat moist (not soaked) with a dollar store mister/atomizer of water and a couple of wet rags to either side of where I'm weaving. If the cane squeaks while I'm pulling it, I mist it more.

It's easiest to start the strand straight and keep it straight, than to try and undo it if it gets twisted.

You don't need to pull the cane tight while you weave. It will tighten up a bit as it dries, and if it's woven too tight wet, it will crack the frame, handily pre-weakened by all the holes drilled in it.

Cracks in the frame are the bane of chair caning. I caned one chair that had been repaired with L-brackets screwed into each corner underneath, and some of the screws went right through a caning hole.

The holes already end up with as many as six strands of cane going through each one, plus the strand that holds down the binder cane. Getting them past a screw with sharp threads was tough. I had a lot to say about that repair under my breath!

I haven't found caning that hard on my wrists, myself. But I did a lot of data entry at jobs over the years, so I'm used to going easy on my wrists.

My main trick for saving my wrists is, don't do the same thing in the exact same way for too long. Take breaks. Do something else.

If you don't have strong fingernails (I have thumbnails I can use to tighten screws), find something like a guitar pick or a plastic seam turner that you can substitute to straighten woven cane while it's still wet.

For caning, one thing you can hardly get enough of is moisture. Try and keep the weaving strand as damp as the part that's already woven, otherwise it ends up ripply. Damp cane can be tied in knots and bent all around. Dry cane cracks!

Another trick is to straighten the woven strands straight away, while they are still damp. I have a long plastic ruler, and I'll brace it across the chair with a couple of caning pegs at each end, then push the strand straight along the edge of the ruler.

A digital camera is a great tool - for some reason, it's easier for me to spot wiggly strands in the photo than on the chair. Maybe the photo gives me some emotional distance, I don't know.

And then there is perfectionism. Often I have to remind myself that you can still sit on an imperfectly caned seat, even if I didn't run the diagonals perfectly. And that a chair you can sit on is better than a bottomed-out chair that you can't sit on.

Last Week

2010-04-27T10:32:00.005-04:00

I spent most of last week and some of this week recaning this chair of my mom's.

I've had it for, okay! Six years. Sorry, Mom.

I learned to cane chairs from The Caner's Handbook, by Bruce Miller and Jim Widess, back in 2003.

I caned a bunch of chairs for my mom and other people, and I guess I burned out on caning.

It's a lot of hand work. There really aren't any magic shortcuts. Your hands are damp for hours, and sometimes the cane end gives you a good stab under the fingernail.

On the positive side, it's a peaceful, meditative process. It gives me plenty of time to think in a way the internet doesn't. I especially like the way each layer of cane going each different direction supports the other layers.

When I learned to cane, I had an idea of doing it as a part-time business. But after doing it enough, I've learned I'd rather cane for love than money.

I'll never be a master caner, but I can weave a seat you can sit on.

Boy, is my Face Red

2010-04-21T17:58:00.003-04:00

Otherwise known as "birdwatcher fail".

In 2008, we had a couple of pairs of phoebes try to build mud nests over our door, and later, over the window of our bedroom.

I fended them off by stapling paper over the 1-inch ledges, but I also found some plans and built a phoebe nesting platform, which I mounted on the north side of the house.

The way these things seem to work is that if I build it, they go away and never come back. I saw and heard phoebes last year, but nary a one tried to build a nest on the platform.

This year, overnight it seemed, a robin's nest appeared on the platform. Well, robins are quieter than phoebes, at least. But I never saw a bird on or near the nest.

Day after day I watched: no bird, nothing on or in or near the nest.

Finally, after almost a week, I decided to clear the platform. I thought maybe a cat or a hawk or something had gotten the robin that built it, and if the platform was bare another bird might use it.

Um.

This morning I looked out there automatically and there was a robin. Yes! Poor robin, sitting on the bare platform, fluffed up like a broody hen.

I cannot tell you how bad I felt. Bad, bad birdwatcher!

Could I repair my error?

I found the nest. I stood up on a bucket and felt three warm robin eggs in the bare wooden nesting platform. Okay, eggs in nest, nest on platform.

Then I waited.

Bitten by the Domesticity Bug

2010-04-14T20:49:00.003-04:00

This doesn't happen often, this attack of domesticity.

I got up and knitted for an hour before coffee. I'm up to row 93 of chart D on Lilac Time.

Then I made coffee, knitted a bit more, and apparently went into hyperdrive.

The child woke up and ate some breakfast. He is reading Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, and said something about fire lizards. I said, "Ha, for a second I thought you said butter lizards."

Instantly he imagined and began telling me the Natural History of the Butter Lizard, what it looked like, how much butter it ate, and how it got into the butter. Fascinating.

Since he was out of his bed I stripped it and stuffed sheets and light laundry into the washer.

I did a water exchange in the tank of the ailing orange fish and fed both fish. We fed dogs. I put fresh sheets on the bed, carried the clean laundry outside in the sun, and hung it on the clothesline.

I ran the washer through its Clean cycle. I got online and did some moderating on a couple of Yahoo groups. I read Girl Genius.

We had some lunch. I went outside and got the mail and the newspaper, then I ended up pulling myrtle that's trying to take over the lawn for over half an hour. (Really, how does the stuff get everywhere so fast?)

Then I went inside and made a batch of bread. While it rose, I washed and washed and washed dishes.

Oh, yeah. The dishwasher broke a couple of weeks ago. It needs a new drain solenoid. I ordered a new drain solenoid. It hasn't come yet.

Then I baked the bread and read the paper and went for a walk outside with the kid until black flies drove us indoors.

I hate black flies.

The weather is gorgeous. It's gorgeous outside, sunny, with a mild breeze. Flowers are blooming, leaves are just starting to expand, and it's lovely to be outside.

I really hate black flies. Thank goodness for window screens.

I went out and snatched the laundry off the line to fold indoors. Now I am really, really tired, and the house smells great. Fresh bread and clean sheets.

Oh, yeah, and a dog that apparently caught something in the grass right next to the fence and has gas that would fell an ox.

The Blue Cow's Tale

2010-04-07T20:24:00.004-04:00

Everyone seems to like the blue cow, so I thought I'd tell what I know of her story.

She started out as one of those fiberglass art project cows. She might have been one of the Cows on Parade in Chicago back in 1999. The owner of Sherman's Dairy Bar bought her after the show was over, and for years she stood inside the brown garage door next to the entrance to the dairy bar. I remember her as white with flowers and leaves painted on her.

A couple years ago she showed up on the roof, painted blue-moon-ice-cream-blue, with a cowbell around her neck (and chains and a padlock to keep the wind or vandals from carrying her away).

They tell the kids "That's where Blue Moon ice cream comes from!"

She stands up there all year round, and in the winter I've often thought I should get a picture so I could say it was so cold even the cows turned blue.

I just found out that Sherman's has a Facebook page.

Since we're local, we usually go to Sherman's on rainy stormy days. The lines are shorter then, and that's when you'll find old farmers and their wives in there, enjoying a waffle cone and the flowers on the table.

Our Weather, Highs and Lows

2010-04-05T15:20:00.010-04:00

Did I ever mention that our weather is nuts?

I took the blue cow's photo on March 19th, a beautiful sunny day in the 60s F (around 16 or 17 C), when we went out to Sherman's Dairy Bar for our very first ice cream of the season.

I took this one the next morning. It snowed all day.

Two weeks later, look at this: green and sunny!

Okay, green and sunny and purple and scented with violets:

Last week, we had three days in a row at or near 80 F (27 C)! I'm not really a fan of weather this warm in spring, because it speeds it up too much for me. Flowers pop out and wither in a day.

Time sped up enough when our son was born - I don't need the weather to contribute to my feeling of being in a time-lapse film.

Not to mention when it's so seductively warm and gorgeous outdoors, I have a hard time staying inside and knitting, even on pretty things like this.

I'm out to row 91 on chart D, finally, on both versions of Kinzel's Lilac Time. It's pretty hard to show the stargate anymore. It's all crowded on the needle and looks like a fluffy woolly skunk cabbage.

I really should take a picture of how much yarn I have left of the original ball of Daphne, because it's looking more and more like I'll have to use the Jojoland Harmony to finish.

Especially if I knit on a border all the way around!

Little Scraps of Lace

2010-03-25T12:18:00.002-04:00

Somewhat magnified. Okay, greatly magnified - the ruler is in inches.The needle is an Inox 4-0 dpn, 1.25mm, and the thread is DMC 80 Spécial Dentelles.

This is "Point Lace Edging" from Eléonore Riego de la Branchardière's 1846 Knitting, Crochet, and Netting.

I love Google Books, and I have scads of the 19th century knitting and netting books bookmarked in my library.

I have a bunch of these downloaded to my hard drive, and then I have a smaller subset that I've printed out chunks of, mostly the knitting and netting and some of the tatting patterns, to try "someday", that mythical day when I'll have everything else done and read and I can devote to the someday things.

Then the new Knitty came out, and there it was! Point Lace Edging not only knitted by Franklin Habit of the Panopticon, but graphed out.

And there was the error that had stumped me, in the 11th row, where suddenly it called for more stitches than I had, and I had given up.

Riego's 11th row says "Knit 2, (make 1, knit 2 together, make 1, knit 2 together, knit 1, knit 2 together, make 1, knit 1, twice,) knit 2 together, knit 2." (Her make 1 is what I would call a yarnover.)

There it is, that opening parenthesis! It's in the wrong spot. And Franklin had corrected it!

The row should say "Knit 2, make 1, knit 2 together, (make 1, knit 2 together, knit 1, knit 2 together, make 1, knit 1, twice,) knit 2 together, knit 2."

I think these are just the cutest little knitted spots in the history of the wuuurrrrrld.

Random Story From My Colorful Past

2010-03-23T22:57:00.004-04:00

Once upon a time (as all the best stories begin), my husband, an avid roleplaying gamer, and I made friends with a blacksmith.

The blacksmith and some of his friends were also roleplaying gamers, and so every month or so we'd go up to the blacksmith's house and game until I fell asleep on the floor.

(In those days I could and did fall asleep anywhere, including hard floors with dubious carpets. Ah, youth!)

On one of those gaming occasions, we walked down the street to the little grocery store and picked up snacks to sustain us, and as we were all walking back, another friend drove into town and slowed down when she recognized us.

Some of our party decided walking up the little hill and around the corner was too far, so they . . . sat on the hood of her car. And laughing and driving slowly, she drove as far as the railroad crossing.

Where apparently the bumpiness of the crossing and the weight on her hood made some metal bit touch her battery, because there was a flash and a zap and one person leaped off her car, rubbing his rear end.

The car stopped. The people who had been riding all jumped off and started pushing the dead car up the hill and around the corner to the blacksmith's yard.

Someone opened the hood and took out a melted connector. The blacksmith gave it that hmmmm that people who fix stuff recognize. He went in the back yard and fired up the propane forge and waited for it to heat up.

When he put this piece in the coals - it evaporated. More hmmming, a different bit of connective metal, some magic pounding with hammers. A new part.

And the car ran again.

(I get to blame Julie for bringing this one to mind.)

Basking

2010-03-19T09:54:00.014-04:00

The snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) from two weeks ago are in full bloom.Several years ago, my mom gave me a clump of snowdrop bulbs. I planted them in a spot where they are obviously happy, and they have been spreading ever since.Here is the same clump in sunshine. I even saw a honeybee on them yesterday!
We're having a week of lovely warm and sunny weather. Of course, when I say "warm", that's Michigan lakeshore warm. The temperature has crept up to 60 F (about 16 C) a couple of times.

We've been outside in our short sleeves in the sunshine cleaning up the dead raspberry canes and goldenrod stems almost every day.

Tomorrow's forecast is for rain and snow with a high in the 30s (0 C), so now is the time to soak up the warm and sunny.

I love wandering around the yard searching out the early flowers. First sweet violet:
A clump of daffodils that was barely an inch high a week ago:
The very first rosette of columbine leaves:Green everywhere!

One of the wonderful things about being outdoors with the camera is serendipitous pictures. While I was walking around looking for green leaves, I heard the unmistakable rolling kerroooo of the sandhill crane, Grus canadensis, overhead.They were relatively low, and they were circling to wait for a trailing group of five to catch up.I zoomed in as much as I could, and I couldn't resist cropping just one crane all by itself.I've been folding origami since I was about nine or ten, and I always called the back of the origami crane the tail. Most crane-folding instructions call that part the tail also. It wasn't until I started seeing sandhill cranes that I realized those are really their trailing legs!

When it gets dark enough and cool enough to send us back indoors, I've been taking some time to try some of the braiding patterns from Mark Campbell's 1867 Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair-Work, which I downloaded from Google Books.Isn't he great? I love him to pieces. My braiding stand is not half so fancy, though.
I made mine using a sheet of thick white craft foam, a pencil, a compass, and a protractor. But it seems to work as well as Mr. Campbell's.

Now it's time to get outside in more of that sunshine!

Snow Go

2010-03-15T12:37:00.004-04:00

A quick photo essay before I take myself off to my first lace group meeting in months.

We still had a lot of snow last Monday, when I took pictures of the winter aconite in bloom.

You can just see through the trees off to the east that the fields still had patchy snow on them.

The yard and our property off to the south still had a lot of snow.

Then on Tuesday, I saw bluebirds!

By Thursday, the snow was in retreat. Thursday night we had our first hard rain.

And now that the yard is dry, Truffles and Ajax want to know, "Can we go out?"

The Sap is Rising

2010-03-06T14:42:00.007-05:00

We've had about a week of temperatures above freezing during the day. The snow is retreating and today the first snowdrop is allllmost open!

The tough little snowdrops are about the only flowers that bloom for me this early, but spring is coming.

I can ~~tell~~ smell because at night, the skunks are coming out of their winter dens, phewww!

The bark on the willow trees and red osiers is getting brighter, and it's still light in the evening when I leave for work.

That means it's time to tap the sugar maples.

It's a good sign when you start to drill the hole, and sap leaks out with the sawdust on the drill bit. Now I'm sorry I didn't put my tap in five days ago!

Maple sap runs in the spring when the daytime temperature is above freezing and the nighttime temperature is below freezing.

Once the nighttime temperature also rises above freezing, the sap flow will start to dry up, and then it will be time to pull the taps.

As long as we get enough sap to boil down to a pint or two of syrup, we'll be happy!

On the knitting front, I've been turning a Goodwill sweater (too short and too wide to wear) into cakes of yarn.The sweater tag says "100% lambswool". It's very very soft. I'm thinking mittens for next winter.

I've been reading the current issue of Piecework (my mom extended my subscription for Christmas: thanks, Mom!) and the special Knitting Traditions issue that I bought with a gift card.
And I've been knitting a third pair of Wool-Ease-footed socks.

I need to get back to knitting on the Stargate before the weather gets so nice I want to spend all my time outdoors ruining my hands in the garden.

So what have I been doing? Looking through my stash of Valdani crochet thread, thinking about this year's Valdani bag.

I've decided not to cast on for that until I'm casting off on the Stargate. I'm hopeful that having that treat waiting for me will keep me moving toward the final rows.

Short Row Heel with a High Instep

2010-02-24T08:22:00.006-05:00

Every so often, I'll hear "I can't use a short-row heel because my feet have a high instep and they don't fit right."

This picture shows my high instep. The sole of the sock is snug to my foot. If I had a third hand I'd poke my foot in the arch so you could see the sock isn't pulling away.
I steal a bunch of stitches from the instep needle and knit my short-row heel on about 70% of the stitches. This was a 52-stitch sock, and I knitted the heel using 36 stitches. (12 on the bottom and 12 on each of the two sides.)

In order to make the heel round at the back and not mule-eared, I don't wrap and turn every row - as I get to the last few short rows, I skip one stitch. So counting from the outer edges, I wrapped 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9--11--13, stealing 13 from the heel needle.
I don't knit a pattern on the top of the foot any more. A couple of years ago, Ajax went to lay down on my feet, and he thumped the top of one foot hard with his elbow as he came down. I got a bruise and one of those electric-shock zaps on the top of my foot, and it hurt for weeks.

It's still a lot more sensitive than it used to be, so no more ribs over my foot's funny bone.

I guess the way I knitted the bottom gray and the top colored is technically intarsia. The first pair of socks I knitted this way was the pair I call the Hot-Foot socks.

Despite being on four needles, they weren't knitted in the round until I got to the spiral ribbing: they were knitted back and forth, and the two yarns twisted around each other where they met and went back the other way.

They are good socks for weather like this.Monday we woke to more snow, heavy wet sloppy snow that bent the yew bushes and the spruce branches down.

The square thing in the photo is an old railroad freight container, not a full size one, maybe a quarter or a third the length of a freight car. It's our new woodshed and has been doing an excellent job of keeping snow off the wood. It can't blow off like canvas or tarpaulins.

Let me just stitch those two together...In my woolly socks and my boots, I'm all set for another snowy day!

Sunny with Socks On

2010-02-18T12:44:00.004-05:00

We are having a sunny, sunny, sunny day! It's so bright out there, when you come in, everything looks green for a while. But it's nice to see the sun and blue sky again.And it's warm! 35 F (2 C)!

Last January I swore off sock knitting for myself after counting eighteen pairs of handknit socks in my sock drawer. My husband wears Army-issue socks, and our son's feet are growing so fast he can wear my socks right now! (Don't blink.)

But I missed sock knitting. I finally caved and cast on a quick pair of Wool-Ease socks Monday afternoon.These are a lot like the ones in this post (was it really that long ago?), except they have Wool-Ease at the toes and on the sole.

I just started knitting the short-row heel turn this morning. The heel will be all Wool-Ease, then I'll probably alternate yarns until I run out of the colored yarn.

It must be winter: black, white, and knitting in color.

Breaking the Hat Curse

2010-02-13T12:08:00.004-05:00

I have knitted a few hats since I got back into knitting. But each one suffered from the Hat Curse: I could not seem to knit a hat that fit me.

I could knit hats that would fit apples and oranges. I could knit hats that would fit watermelons. I could knit hats that sort of fit me, but made my head look like a mushroom.

So when I started knitting a top-down hat out of the Jo Sharp Silk Road April sent me, it felt like a risk. What if this was yet another cursèd non-fitting hat?

But it looks like this yarn has finally helped me break the hat curse.

It's a plain, ribbed, top-down hat with about three rounds knit plain so the brim turns up automagically and doubles over my ears. I've worn it a couple of times when the temperatures dropped into the teens, and it's just right: not a brain-squeezer, not floppy and loose, just soft and warm and comfortable.

Someone asked me about the weight of the Elegant Yarns' Daphne I'm using to knit the Stargate.

In my project notes on Ravelry, I listed four other yarns that looked to be identical to Daphne.

They said, "Three of the yarns you list say cobweb/1 ply, and the other says lace/2 ply. Can you tell me which it is, please."

From left to right:

white DMC 80 tatting thread
gray Habu 1/12 silk mohair
blue Crystal Palace Kid Merino
Elegant Yarns Daphne (looks gray, but click on the photo: that's the optical blending of a green and a lavender ply)
cream Misti Alpaca Lace
pink DMC 10 Cébélia
bottle green Jaggerspun Zephyr
purple Malabrigo Lace

Both Daphne and the Jojoland Harmony I bought to use when the Daphne runs out are two-ply yarns, but as I hope you can see from my dark-day picture, at 800+ yards per 50 gram ball, they are closer to a cobweb weight.

Yarn weights are confusing! When you enter a fine yarn on Ravelry, your choice is between "thread", "cobweb/1 ply" and "lace/2 ply". But how fine a yarn looks doesn't match up by ply or even by yards/meters per gram. The fiber and how it was spun makes a huge difference.

I put the yarns in the photo in order of how thick they appeared to me. And looking at the photo, I'd probably reverse the Misti Alpaca and the pink Cébélia. But check out the yards/meters per gram:

DMC size 80 tatting thread	21	19
Habu 1/12 silk mohair	13.3	12.1
Crystal Palace Kid Merino	9.6	8.8
Elegant Yarns Daphne	17.5	16
Misti Alpaca Lace	8.7	8
DMC 10 Cébélia	5.7	5.2
Jaggerspun Zephyr	11.1	10.1
Malabrigo Lace	9.4	9.4

Were you surprised? I was!

I won't even put ply in this table, because then it just gets silly. DMC 80 is 6-ply, and Cébélia is 3-ply. I think the Malabrigo is a single, and the rest are 2-ply.

Like I said. Silly.

Now the Birds Enjoy Our Tree

2010-02-10T15:10:00.007-05:00

When I took the Christmas tree outside, I jammed it into the hardened snow pile leftover from raking the roof in December and January, and there it stands, upright. Even though juncoes have been hopping all over it for a week, the needles are still hanging on!

For once we had a winter storm warning and our area of the lakeshore didn't get buried in snow. We got a nice little fall that makes everything look white and fresh again.

My husband took a couple of hours off in the morning and cleared the driveway with the snowblower, especially the drift across the end where the drive crosses the drainage ditch next to the road.

After he went to work, I took the bucket of wood ash and sprinkled it on the driveway to give him more traction when he gets home.

The local webcam has a nice view of the South Haven light today. I grabbed this screen shot at 12:30.
An hour or so later, the wind had picked up, the waves were a bit higher, and the channel was starting to fill with pack ice.
Now the channel is full of slushy ice - not a good day to walk out on the pier!
But a good day to knit away on the Stargate.

Halfway to Spring

2010-02-03T08:32:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I didn't get much knitting done: the child and I took down the Christmas tree.

I figured out a long time ago that there were two extremes of putting up and taking down the tree around Christmas time: at one end, you had the people who put the tree up at the earliest possible moment, say Hallowe'en.
(And I'm ignoring, la la la, the stores that put out Christmas decorations in July. La la la.)

At the other end, you have people who put the tree up and decorate it on Christmas Eve, the "Santa brings the tree and all" people.

But the far end of the season has its own extremes: very often, the same people who put their tree up the earliest are the ones whose front door opens on December 26th so they can pitch the tree into the trash, missed tinsel trailing.

And the ones who waited to put it up later generally also wait and take it down later.

I like to have the tree up about a week before Christmas, so I can enjoy it lighted and decorated in the dark of winter. After Christmas, I like to leave it up because it's a festive green thing in a season when Michigan does not show a lot of green. I figure I'm good if it's down by Valentine's Day, although that depends on the tree.

I try to buy a balsam fir if I can find one for sale. Their needles cling on tightly. But if the tree is dropping needles like crazy, I might draw the line at Twelfth night.

This year, I started wanting the light in the living room, so when we changed calendars and the kid said, "When are we going to take the tree down?" I said, "How about tomorrow?" (Which is now yesterday.)

Coincidentally, yesterday was Groundhog Day or Imbolc, the cross-quarter day halfway between the winter solstice (dark, dark, dark) and the vernal (spring) equinox. Somehow it felt really appropriate to be taking my midwinter symbol of life in the dark down on that day.
So now it's down, and the light of the longer days can shine in and give me more natural light to knit by.

I can't think of a smooth way to segue to this photo, but I'm sharing it anyway.
Ajax's dog chow comes in three-layer bags, and I tear the outer paper layers off for recycling, and throw the inner plastic layer in the trash.

As I was standing by the trash can doing this, Ajax came up and stuck his head in the bag to see if any kibbles were hiding in the bottom. He spent at least a minute trying to force his head and shoulders down to the bottom of the bag, and I had plenty of time to snatch up the camera and take his picture.

Stove Sparks and Other Stories

2010-02-01T15:17:00.005-05:00

Last night my husband poked the burning osage orange wood and annoyed it.

It sparked for about ten minutes straight. It sounded like he was burning sparklers in there!

The sparks shot right out the narrow, half-closed slits of the door damper. Fortunately the stove sits on a concrete floor and they can't reach anything burnable.

Here's another:
(I also enjoy lightning, in case you were wondering.)

Hey, look! The Stargate, aka Soap Bubble Stole, has not been abandoned. I started knitting on it again, ummmmm, a couple of weeks ago.

I was getting nervous that I would run out of yarn before knitting the last couple of charts. I started looking around on Ravelry to find out the status of Elegant Yarn's Daphne and found not one, not two, but four yarns identical to the Daphne.

Three of them I'm pretty sure are identical. The fourth, Jojoland Harmony, is definitely identical.

I ordered it from The Yarn and Fiber Company on Monday and had two out of three balls (the third was back ordered) by Friday. Whew. Now I can knit and not wonder whether the yarn or the pattern will finish first.

Descent from Mount Roofmore (South Elevation)

2010-01-13T12:36:00.003-05:00

The weather forecast for the next couple of days is above freezing, no snow, and today: SUNNY!

That can only mean one thing: time to get the snow off the roof!
A foot of slightly melted and refrozen snow is very heavy. But I wanted to take advantage of the SUNNY! (Can you see the steam rising off the shingles?)

If I can scrape it down to half an inch or so, solar power will take care of the rest.

My arms are tired. I might take another whack at the north elevation later.

In Which the DH Learns About Mice

2010-01-12T12:06:00.004-05:00

Once upon a time, there was a smoked turkey.

The smoked turkey was eaten up, and its carcass put into my big canning pressure cooker and made into soup stock.

But the cook (my dear husband) ran out of time to make soup. The canning pressure cooker was too big to fit into the refrigerator.

So the cook had a bright idea: he would put the kettle of stock outdoors, where it was 14 F (-10 C) and thaw it and make the soup later.

Monday there was a snowstorm, and after driving home from work in the snow, he cleared the driveway with the snowblower and came in too tired to make soup.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday went by.

Thursday I glanced at the top of the canner when I came home from work at night (in another snowstorm) and wondered what those black specks on the top of it were.

Friday morning in daylight I took a good look: a nasty little mouse had climbed on the top and tried to get in by gnawing off tiny bits of the rubber safety seal.

Argh.

Fortunately it didn't get in . . . but I don't guess the canner will get left out in the snow again any time soon.

2009 Year in Review

2010-01-01T15:27:00.003-05:00

The last couple years, I've done a year in review with the first post from the month. This time I thought I'd take either my favorite or a representative post.

January 2009: Catching Up

February 2009: Why I Love it Here. (I snagged this picture from a Lake Michigan webcam that hasn't been updating lately.)

This past winter was so snowy!

March 2009: Stuff I Have Not Shown You

April 2009: The End is Near

May 2009: Dancing Bear Falls Off the Ball
Unfortunately, that was the theme for most of the summer.

June 2009: Aftermath
The June thunderstorms that took down many of our big trees and left us without electricity for almost four days.

July 2009: Stash Enhancement and a Single Perfect Rose
This post title is so characteristic of me, my life, and how my mind works I could almost eat it.

August 2009: Mooshky Madness!

September 2009: A Sampler Post

October 2009: A Puddle of White Lace
(Blogtoberfest made it really hard to choose one post!)

November 2009: Let me 'splain

December 2009: Aliens!

Noooo! Not my Stewart's!

2009-12-21T10:45:00.003-05:00

Thank you for contacting us about Stewart's Ginger Beer. We appreciate your feedback, as your comments provide us with valuable information about our brands.

Unfortunately, Stewart's Ginger Beer is not currently in production.

Stewart's Ginger Beer is (was...) a not-so-sugary, ginger-burn-y ginger beer that I really, really loved. I like Vernor's, but it's so sugary I want to brush my teeth after drinking it. Stewart's is more subtle.

I.Want.Stewart's Ginger Beer.

Dry Wall Dust Again

2009-12-17T15:17:00.002-05:00

Just a couple paragraphs to bring things up to date.

At the end of October, my husband was told that his unit was very likely up for deployment next year.

This threw a lot of schedules into disarray: for example, drill schedules (because lots of extra training would have to happen before deployment), vacation and holiday schedules (no point in buying tickets or reserving hotel rooms for Origins if he was gone), home improvement schedules (he was going to work on the dome windows as his winter project, but that was out if he ended up at training schools for two or three weeks a month).

He decided to schedule the carpenter who boxed in the windows to come back and do the drywall, so all that detail work would get done.

So once again I've been living in a cloud of drywall dust and smutches of drywall mud. Bleh. I'm still knitting, but I feel gritty.

And this morning, he got an email that said this round of troop deployment would be "sourced elsewhere".

My nerves by this time feel like one of those dry rubber bands you find in the back of the kitchen junk drawer.

Young Enough to Learn

2009-12-16T17:55:00.002-05:00

I was reading Donna's post about being fascinated by words, and I thought I'd share a kid story.

The other night I told our son my mom aggro radius increased every time I had to repeat what I told him to do.

He gave me a surprised look. "Do you even know what that means?" he asked.

"Why don't you explain it to me," I said, "and I'll tell you if that's how I meant it."

So he carefully explained a World of Warcraft monster's aggro range, and I agreed that that was how I meant it.

"What's your aggro radius right now?" he asked cautiously.

"About arm's length," I said. "Now GO BRUSH YOUR TEETH!"

Once Upon A Time...

2009-12-07T12:12:00.005-05:00

Once upon a time, there was an awesome blogger who had a drawing on her blog.

And I went there and read this:

" The Random Number Generator ...

... has spoken and the number it chose was 9! Also known as Alwen! Alwen, if you would be so kind as to email me your mailing address I will get your yarn into the mail post haste!"

And I thought I had sent April my mailing address. I really did. After a couple of weeks, when I would drive down my driveway and see my mail box by the road, I would think, "I should check my email sent box and make sure I sent her my mailing address."

I have one of those positional memories: if I'm taking a walk, I notice the grapevines and think, Must remember to bring the pruners down here.

In the house, leaving for the walk, I don't remember the pruners. Only on the walk, when I see the things I want to prune out of my way.

Finally, at the bottom of the driveway one day, I scrawled myself a cryptic note: Check sent email - April - mailing address?

And eventually, after searching through a couple of email addresses and their Sent boxes, I realized that NO, I had never sent her my address. So I sent a very apologetic, hand-over-face embarrassed email and got an immediate response.

And Friday:

Three balls of Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed. The color is called "Cocoa" but to me it's more of an oatmeal or maybe a granola, with tiny bits of burgundy in it.

I think it wants to be a hat.

Thank you so much, April, and I apologize again for taking so long to get back to you.

Meanwhile, those of you who have been waiting for me to have snow: we're getting snow.When I took the photo, brilliant sunshine and snowflakes.

I hope this tufted titmouse soaked it up, because it's overcast and gray now!

Paw Paws and Papayas

2009-12-05T15:36:00.011-05:00

Or, the usefulness of scientific names.

Bells commented, "Oh, I'm confused. That doesn't look anything like the paw paw I know - well not much like it. And a custard apple is a big, misshapen pale lumpy thing with a texture like custard."

That would be because "paw paw" is one of the names for the papaya, Carica papaya, a native of South America, and a plant which definitely does not grow in Michigan.

Bells' paw paw has pale, five-petalled flowers,

deeply cut palmate leaves,

and a palm-like growth habit.

The fruit varies considerably by cultivar.

The plant I call a paw paw is a small cold-hardy tree, related to species like the custard apple, Annona reticulata,

the soursop, Annona muricata,

and the cherimoya, Annona cherimola.

The Annona species all have simple oval leaves

and big brown seeds that closely resemble paw paw (the Asimina species) seeds.

Same common name, entirely different plants.

Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch

2009-12-04T12:07:00.003-05:00

My first encounter with the paw paw, Asimina triloba, was in the kids' song:

Where, oh where is pretty little Susie?
Where, oh where is pretty little Susie?
Where, oh where is pretty little Susie?
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.

Come on, boys [or girls, or kids], let's go find her,
Come on, boys, let's go find her,
Come on, boys, let's go find her,
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.

Pickin' up paw-paws, puttin' 'em in her pockets,
Pickin' up paw-paws, puttin' 'em in her pockets,
Pickin' up paw-paws, puttin' 'em in her pockets,
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.

I didn't encounter a paw paw in the flesh until I was in college.

I went to Michigan State University, and I did a little work for the head of the extension office, who gave me a bag of ripe paw paws.

The extension office was working with growers, selecting for larger, sweeter fruit.

I took that bag of paw paws back to my dorm room and learned how to eat them.

Oh, man, if you get a good one, a ripe paw paw is the tastiest thing. Sweet and smooth, it's sort of like a banana with a much smoother texture. The family name, custard-apple, refers to that smooth texture.

This photo doesn't show the seeds, which are enormous. If you've ever grown scarlet runner beans, they're about that big, often a good inch long, and dark chocolate brown.

I've never been successful in growing a tree from seed, but I have two that we bought from paw paw breeder Corwin Davis years ago. (If you get a paw paw cultivar called the Davis, it's named after him.)

One tree blooms. The other one keeps spreading via root sprouts. I'll have a regular little paw paw grove out there some day, and maybe eventually number two will flower.

The flowers are pollinated by flies. Corwin Davis said he never got very good pollination until he started hanging road kill in the trees. We often note the heaviest fruit set near the latrine along the old railroad grade where we pick ripe paw paws!

They usually fruit around my birthday in early October. If we find some, eating them makes a nice birthday treat.

Aliens!

2009-12-03T10:01:00.004-05:00

Julie made a couple of plant posts that had me thinking about plants and other organisms that are not from around here.

My field guides call these organisms aliens. In the news you'll hear them called invasive species, but you don't hear a lot about species that invaded and naturalized so long ago that people think of them as weeds and not as invaders.

One widespread alien is the dandelion, Taraxacum officiale. The dandelion has been so widespread for so long that its native range is usually described as "Europe and Asia". I don't know about you, but on my globe that's a pretty large area.

The officinale part of the scientific name means that at some point in its past, the plant was included in an herbal that listed its useful properties.

In Joseph Miller's 1722 Botanicum officinale, he says (not sparing you the long s that looks like a letter f)

Dandelion is cooling and aperitive, good to
cleanfe the Reins and Bladder, and to provoke
Urine; it is boyl'd in Poffet-Drink, and frequent-
ly ufed by the Vulgar in all kinds of Fevers;
the Leaves beaten to a Cataplafm, are likewife
applied to the Wrists in the fame Diftempers.

Parkinfon commends a Decoction of the Leaves
and Roots in Wine or Broth for a Confumption,
or any ill Habit of Body. The young Leaves,
when they juft appear above Ground, and are
white and tender, are much coveted by many
as a Sallad, early in the Spring.

Plants like this that were useful or believed to be useful were taken along as people moved around the globe. When they got where they were going, they planted them, and if the plant spread itself, they called it "establishing" rather than invading.

We're all more aware now how this can go wrong: rabbits in Australia, eucalyptus in California.

In Michigan, the zebra mussel showed up in the ballast water of cargo ships, and now when I go to the beach, the sound of the surf has the added clinking, tinkling note of thousands of mussel shells tumbling on the sand in the waves. The sand that used to be mostly a uniform pale brown-sugar color now has a dark-colored note from the dark mussel shells.

There are a lot of species that I grew up with, and was surprised to find listed as aliens: things like weeping willow trees (China) and pheasants (also China) and oxeye daisies (Europe: and I love the scientific name, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, now Leucanthemum vulgare).

Another alien with vulgare in its name is the European starling, Sturnus vulgaris, which I find easy to remember: vulgar starling indeed. And if I'm talking vulgar birds, I have to mention feral rock doves, also known as the common or city pigeon, Columba livia.

Walking around my yard I have quite a few aliens: rhubarb (Asia), lilacs (Europe), asparagus (the Mediterranean), wolfberry (China), yew bushes, and probably a bunch more that will come up in the spring and I'll think, "Whoops, those too!"

One of the aliens people really don't think about in North America is the honey bee, another alien from Asia. We have scads (I'd say swarms, but they are mostly solitary and don't swarm) of native bees, but they don't store up honey.

I guess that's enough aliens for one day!

Green, Red, and Glowing

2009-12-02T16:29:00.004-05:00

Last year we got snowed on early in the season and the snow only melted in between blizzards. This year it hasn't snowed yet. This beautiful green moss is revelling in the mild weather.

The stripe of red in this photo is apples that haven't fallen from the you-pick trees. Michigan had a great apple crop this year, but there are so many apples in storage the farmers can't sell them all.

That bright spot there is our winter sun.

I've been knitting mitered squares to contribute to a blanket. These are cool, since they start from a 3-stitch cast on and then you knit until you get to 3 inches, 6 inches, or however much yarn you have. I'm using up sock yarn leftovers.

I finally worked out some of the netting patterns in the 19th century books I've downloaded from Google.This pattern is called round netting and appears in several books. It's made just like regular netting, but you twist the loop twice before putting the netting needle or shuttle through it.

Once I worked down to a small enough gauge, it made nice neat hexagons.

This one is the Grecian or rose netting. I had started a sample and then quit, thinking I was doing it wrong. Weeks later I stretched it out and saw it was working just like the engraving. There are a lot of variations on this one: it uses two mesh sizes, and the appearance changes a lot depending on the size difference between the two.

There are a lot more of these I haven't tried or haven't worked out yet. I have always had a hard time visualizing things from just words, and these old books are all words.

Give me a diagram and I can work backwards and see how the words apply, and given that the books have some engravings of the end result, at least I know what I'm aiming for.

Often I have to just keep bashing my brains against the words, and then one day I sit down and my educated hands start working away while my brain shuts up and watches in amazement.

For now, I'm mostly still in the bashing stage.

Let me 'splain

2009-11-25T14:33:00.004-05:00

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
We are having damp, gray, overcast and foggy weather. Last year we had lows around 15 F (-9 C) and highs in the 70s (about 21 C). This year November we've stayed a little closer to the average than last year.

Some plants are still in bloom (about six months out of season).

When I was folding a lot of origami, I never tried to fold a goldfinch.

But today I saw a goldfinch fold itself!

Sometimes I am just too slow to catch the birds on the feeder.

I have reached row 71, finally, on both projects.

This has been a month of going to the vet. First we had that growth removed from Ajax's foot.

Then at Truffles' regular visit, some of her teeth had gotten very bad, so we decided to have them cleaned. I took her in on Tuesday. She came home very groggy and minus three of her worst teeth. She felt well enough tonight to eat up all her food again.

Tonight I'm grateful that she'll be well and have shiny teeth for Thanksgiving tomorrow!

Trying to Take Pictures of Drawings When It's Dark

2009-11-15T17:59:00.005-05:00

Oh, No I Don't!

2009-11-13T17:28:00.002-05:00

I was reading an article the other day, and later when I went to work I was still thinking about it.

It doesn't matter what it was about, because basically what it was about was fear. What it boiled down to was the article said, "Here is another thing to be afraid of, here is why it is scary, booga booga booga booga booooooo!"

And why I was still thinking about it is that I don't need any help being afraid. I have one of those five-alarm adrenal systems that goes off with lights and sirens and big red fire engines for any teeny change in my life.

When I was a kid, my heart rate would go up if I had to wait at a different bus stop. I do not need anything new to worry about.

I can already take the stuff that I know about farming and pesticides and herbicides and the water table and soil micro-organisms and fungi and extrapolate, and keep myself up nights.

I read a lot. So with about five minutes' head start, my little rabbity mind can be running zigzags in the brambles about pretty much any subject you can think of, "Oh no oh no oh no oh no!"

A person can go crazy living like that.

Fortunately I discovered walking and meditation and drawing and poetry at an early age.

More on that tomorrow!

True Colors

2009-11-12T17:08:00.003-05:00

I took this photo on my cutting board and realized that if you saw the stargate in person, after only ever seeing it on my blog, you would probably be surprised when you saw the real color.

The first thing I noticed was that my cutting board is much more yellow than it was showing up.

So I sat down with camera and its manual and played around with the settings until I got a little closer to what I was seeing.This picture of the purl side is really close.

If you click for the bigger photo, you'll see some of the barber pole colors that I'm enjoying while I knit. (No) thanks to optical blending that blurs these into duller colors, but at least the knitting never becomes boring while I'm doing it.

The center of the ball has more changes and surprises waiting for me.

"Lilac Time" and Four O'Clocks

2009-11-05T14:38:00.005-05:00

Since my KnitPicks 47-inch circular needles came in the mail, I've been knitting, knitting, knitting. First I knitted the stargate off the 29-inch needles onto the 47-inch ones. Now I can stretch the pattern out a bit so about half of one end shows. (I still can't get a decent picture of these colors, though.)

Then I knitted the string one off a dozen double-pointed needles and onto my 29-inch Susan Bates Silverado circulars. (I can't believe they discontinued these - they are great needles!)

I am three rows into chart C of Marianne Kinzel's "Lilac Time", and you can just start to see the very bottom of the next round of leaves.

The weather was so rainy in October that I never got to dig up my four o'clocks, and they got hit with a frost that made the stems fall off. (They break apart at the joints and at the root.) It was a little harder to find the roots, but today it was sunny and dry and I dug them up. I think I got most of them.They don't look like much, do they? I planted a couple where my rose bush had been, and the hummingbirds loved that. Those three roots really increased in size.

Now I have to go out before it gets too chilly and rub the sand off them so I can put them away for winter. All I do is keep them over the winter is leave them in an open plastic bag, sitting on the cool concrete floor at the far end of the house from the warm woodstove. In the spring when they start to put out shoots (color coded as to flower: pinkish shoots = pink/rose flowers, green shoots = white flowers) I'll plant them out again.

Last Day of Blogtoberfest!

2009-10-31T20:54:00.006-04:00

Tonight was Hallowe'en night, and we have been back from taking our son out trick-or-treating for a while.

Yesterday the weather was warm (66 F), windy, and very very rainy, flood advisory rainy.
Today the temperature dropped to 44 F (about 7 C) and it stayed windy. Brrr! That was some cold trick-or-treating. A lot of people left their porch lights off, and it looked like a lot of people stayed home or went to Halloween parties.

Those of us who trooped from house to house agreed that it was cold!

We left our jack o'lantern burning while we were gone.
It was a little different this year. Actually, it's been a little different ever since our son got old enough to voice an opinion on how it should be carved. (One year we had Godzilla and a lobster!)

This year it was the game character from Fancy Pants Adventure by Brad Borne.

Our son looked at the computer and drew a Fancy Pants guy about two inches tall, and I scanned his drawing, scaled it up, and carved it into this year's pumpkin.

I had never done the shading technique before, but it came out well enough - the kid was happy, so I'm happy.

After I took pictures, I emailed them across the room so our son could send them to Brad Borne.

Technology. It's amazing stuff.

Ajax: No More Failed Self-Cloning Attempt

2009-10-30T09:40:00.004-04:00

For about the last six years, my dog Ajax has had this growth on his front paw.

It started as a little thing. When I first noticed it, I thought he had a tick on his foot, but when I tried to tweeze it off, he yelped. I took a closer look and saw that it was a little black skin tag.

Over the years, the thing slowly grew. At each vet visit, the vet would take a look at it and give me guidelines for when it should be removed.

Last week it finally met those guidelines: so big it was touching the ground when he walked, and he was finally taking notice of it and licking at it. The top picture was about a week before he started fussing at it.

I took that picture because he had collected all of his chew toys from around the house onto his rug. There was a fourth bone just out of camera range.

The bottom picture is Ajax this morning, with bright orange vet wrap around his foot. Yesterday was surgery day.

Because he is so big and has always been sensitive about having his feet touched, they couldn't remove it by just giving him a local anesthetic. (This was one of the reasons we were watching and waiting.) They had to put him under, and at age eight, I spent the day knitting in order not to concentrate on worrying about him.

But now he is home and doing fine. And I am thinking about drawing a jack o'lantern face on the orange vet wrap!

Yeah. Well.

2009-10-27T11:34:00.006-04:00

The thing about not having been deployed over the last eight years is that the deployable pool has gotten shallower over each of those years. By this time, we've been aware that this was going to happen at some point. But the last word was "Probably within the next two years" and "Most likely Afghanistan."

Now it's "Probably within the next six months" and still "Most likely Afghanistan." Which, given the news in the last couple of days, makes me sick to my stomach. Not that it's ever been that safe of a place.

So let's talk about something else, like mushrooms.

I grew up with a shelf of field guides and a mom who knew how to use them. Her interest was mainly trees and wildflowers, so by the third grade I knew trees by sight the way most kids learn the words for chair and table.

When I went to college, I considered getting an English degree. But then I had a flash of myself standing in a school trying to teach English, and the instant I got to college, I changed my major to horticulture.

By the end of my degree studies, I could rattle off the scientific names of a couple of hundred cultivated plants, everything from Asparagus esculentus to Zinnia elegans.

When I got married, I married a guy with a family tradition of foraging for edible mushrooms. Not just the easy obvious morels, which you have to work very hard and delude yourself greatly to get wrong, but the tasty stumpers or honey fungus, Armillaria mellea.

We joined a not-so-local mycological society, with a lot of knowledgeable mushroom experts, and learned more of the edible and yes, deadly species that grew in our often damp and rainy state.

For a while we were on the local hospital's list of people they could call if someone brought in a case of suspected mushroom poisoning.

It was a great group, and we enjoyed their forays (and their potlucks!) greatly. Sad to say, the group disbanded about four years ago.

So it's always interesting to come across a species that we don't immediately recognize.

And oh, yeah, knitting.Almost to the end of chart B. Which is boring. (I can say that now that I am almost done with it.)

And I'm up to a dozen needles in this one. I'm using pieces of wide rubber band on the ends, a tip I learned from knitting designer Diane Willett at our last lace group meeting.

I have longer circ.s on order from Knit Picks. Until they get here, I'll just add needles until I run out.

Back on the Maybe-Deployment Treadmill

2009-10-26T10:30:00.002-04:00

I took the child up for the fourth and last section of the MEAP (science), stopped for gas, and headed home.

And I promptly got a call from my husband saying that once again there's a good chance his unit will get deployed.

*sigh*

We've faced this possibility so many times in the last several years that I think my panic mode is burned out.

Pictures on Overcast Days

2009-10-25T19:33:00.003-04:00

A short progress post.
I've knitted my way out to the last two lines of chart B, and I have 26.4 grams of the 50 gram ball left.

I keep reading in the ads that the full-spectrum bulbs like my Ott Lite are supposed to more closely match natural daylight, but to my eye they make everything look bluish.

What A Week!

2009-10-24T20:56:00.007-04:00

Monday I borrowed my dad to try and help me fix a problem we are having with our well. We have water, but the water pressure in the house is low. Dad says, having gotten an unexpected cold shower, that the pressure in the well pit is great. We still have some more adventures coming with that one.

To brighten the day up, I found that April at The Weaving Inn had drawn my name! Thanks, April!

Tuesday while our homeschooled son was taking the math section of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), the elementary school secretary was counting up absences. She said they had 22% out absent Monday, and if they hit 25% they would have to close the school.

Sure enough, that evening I read on a news website that the school district was closing until Monday the 26th. The public library was also closed, and is supposed to re-open today.

Wednesday my new glasses (my first bifocals) came in. I am getting used to the lenses pretty fast, but I need to get the new frames adjusted, ow ow ow!

Thursday I was woken in the night by Truffles, having one of her periodic spells of midnight anxiety, panting bad dog breath in my face for no reason I could figure out. I ended up dozing on the couch with her until daylight. Later in the day I fixed the kitchen faucet that had been dripping for a while.

Friday we drove up to Grand Rapids in the rain after dropping my husband's car off for maintenance. (I drove, since his car was in the shop.) We did some fun fancy grocery shopping, had brunch, and saw my 14-month-old niece and my parents' recently-adopted grayhound.

On the way home, we picked up the car, and my husband and son went home. I went bookstore-browsing, and after looking through a shelf of mushroom guides, I think our earthstar is most likely Scleroderma polyrhizum, formerly known as Scleroderma geaster. (Better picture here.)

None of the Geastrum spp earthstars are big enough, and I was amused to find this thing in a genus with the poison pigskin puffball, Scleroderma citrinum.

Then I was further amused, after noticing that Scleroderma was in the order Boletales, to read the first part of Michael Kuo's article, The Evolution of a Great-Big Headache: "Understanding" Mushroom Taxonomy and Phylogeny.

You don't have to read the whole thing (although he has some fascinating comments about our old buddies Linnaeus and Fries). I'll quote the best part here:

I understand so little of DNA science that I have no choice but to accept unconditionally what the experts hand down. Last month, I thought that DNA sequencing for mushrooms involved injecting rabbits with something from the mushroom and then sending something else that comes out of the rabbits to a big laboratory somewhere. I told all my friends. This month, reading different articles, the rabbits are gone. ...

I mention this rabbit-thing to emphasize my infantile understanding of molecular biology, but I promise I didn't make it up; see for example Jung et al. (1993), an experiment reaching important conclusions about morel taxonomy, in which methods included the following: "Rabbits were bled from their marginal ear vein [sic] to obtain preimmune sera"; and my personal favorite, "100µl of goat-antirabbit immunoglobulin antiserum coupled to horseradish peroxidase . . . were added to each well and incubated"

That has to be my personal favorite, too.

Today (Saturday) the public library was open, so the child and I went up and got the books we had on hold, and then I finally got my painful frames adjusted.

Then we came home and my copy of Susanna Lewis's Knitting Lace, reprinted by Schoolhouse Press, was in the mailbox!

Oh, yeah. And I finally joined Twitter. Because I must follow CryForByzantium.

It's still raining, so we had gray watery light all day. I'm almost to the end of chart B. Tomorrow I will weigh my ball of yarn and take pictures even if it's still overcast out.

Have a good weekend!

Mostly Pictorial Except When I Can't Shut Up

2009-10-21T17:56:00.009-04:00

Path through the little maples.

Part of the loop through the gone-to-seed goldenrod, blurry where I stitched it.
One of the Chinese chestnut trees we grew from nuts from a tree on the farm next door. I'm not old enough to remember the chestnut blight, but I'm old enough to have grown a tree from a nut!
And now those trees are old enough to be producing spiky chestnut burrs of their own.

Last, a fungus, some kind of earthstar, growing just outside the dripline of a youngish red oak. I'm going to invoke the power of the internet here and ask, "Which the heck earthstar is this?" This one was about 6 inches across, and one of the others was about 8 inches across. They came up in a rough crescent around the oak tree, a couple of dozen of them.

My husband is into mycology, so we have quite a few mushroom field guides, and I haven't found any that really seem to match these.

So if you know any mycology professors who are into earthstars, point them at this one!

Chimney Tales

2009-10-20T20:02:00.002-04:00

The Stargate is still in Chart B, the lace ground bit, where every fourth row is a whole round of YO and a double decrease, quite fiddly in the fine yarn. It's slow knitting and it doesn't look much different from photo to photo.

So I was blanking yet again on any kind of a post topic.

And then! I finally got around to catching up on the blogs I read, and Antonia did a post about chimney sweeps (look at her gorgeous fireplace: I am so jealous), and I started to type a novel in her comments and realized, "Hey! I have a post topic!"

We heat our house with wood and now with the little gas log. When you burn wood, you need to keep the chimney clean.

The first time we started to think about this, we called the only chimney sweep around, and he came in and looked at our short, straight length of chimney.

Then he draped everything lovingly in tarpaulins, took the vent cap off the top on the roof, and swept it from the top down, and came indoors and carefully vacuumed the whole stove as clean as a dinner plate.

Amazing.

And then he said, "Not to shoot myself in the foot or anything, but you could easily clean a nice straight chimney like this yourself." Sweeps really are like Antonia's, even in the wilds of America.

(It is, too, wild here: I saw an owl fly across my driveway this afternoon when we walked down to get the mail.)

Of course, our chimney is just boring black metal, and our chimney pots are soot-blackened shiny galvanized metal, not very photogenic.

The stove itself is pretty, light bluish soapstone with fancy castings. Also in need of a wire-brushing and spray of new high-temperature stovepaint on the cast iron parts.

But!

Last winter the child learned that when the fire had burned down to a nice bed of coals, I would open the stove door and allow the toasting of marshmallows.

Mmmm, marshmallows.

Happy Thought

2009-10-19T22:22:00.002-04:00

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

When I was a little girl, my mom would read to me from a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses. Many of the illustrations were tiny detailed pictures of plants, flowers, leaves, and seedpods.

I still have a head full of those poems, that come to me at odd moments.

The Cow

The friendly cow all red and white
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

Mmmm, apple tart.

Google Books has an 1895 edition with illustrations by Charles Robinson.

We Had SUN Today!

2009-10-17T21:29:00.004-04:00

Sunshine! And blue sky!

And I got to knit in actual daylight.

But, uh, now that it's dark again, I just realized I forgot to take any pictures except this one:

Another introvert shirt. Collect them all!

It's a Stretch

2009-10-16T17:10:00.003-04:00

I have to thank Becky for giving me a post topic for today.

She commented, "I keep staring at the 2 different laces and they look different to me. The white one has the petals arranged in 2 clovers on either end, where the colored one seems to have 2 parallel lines of 3 petals side by side...."

That's mainly me taking the easiest pictures. Here, for example, the white one relaxes on the arm of the loveseat where I often sit and knit. I didn't have to do anything special to take its picture: the cotton and the weight of the dpns hold the lace stretched out enough to see.

Getting a similar picture of the laceweight merino one takes more effort. I have to get out a blocking mat, a piece of white paper to show off the yarn's colors, and pins pins pins pins pins.

I don't have space on my circular needles to stretch it out to full length without one end of the knitting escaping off the ends of the needles. And there is no way I'm trying this thin yarn on multiple dpns, thank you! I might be extreme as far as my knitting, but I'm not that extreme.

"Lilac Time" is a very versatile design with variations right in the book: dinner cloth, tea cloth, runner (the one I'm using), and round doily. I think the one in the book has 8 center repeats. I used one center repeat for the white lace, and either 9 or 10 for the stargate.

If you mentally repeat the bottom two leaves in the colored one and stick another clover leaf on the far end, that is how it's going to look.

We've had a lot of overcast weather, and I still haven't gotten a decent picture of the colors. For example, the outer stripe right now is a deep sage green. Most of the pictures show it as dark gray on my monitor.

Somebody send us some sunshine!

A Puddle of White Lace

2009-10-15T09:13:00.003-04:00

I'm out to round 43 of Chart B, and up to ten needles. I guess I must be over the fear of double-pointed knitting needles that led me to learn to knit socks on a knitting frame.
These two pieces are the same pattern ("Lilac Time" by Marianne Kinzel) and are out to the same chart row, but it's much easier to get a picture of the white one.
Our weather continues overcast and rainy. This has been a very chilly and rainy October so far. I was looking at the weather records, and October is often variable, with highs up in the 80s F and lows down around 20 F. Right now we are hovering on the low edge of normal, with light rain and light snow in tonight's forecast.
Back in September I took a picture of some of the white asters, and the first picture reminded me of it.

Right at the end of September, it started to rain and turned chilly, and we haven't had a day warmer than 62 F (17 C) since!

Where is My Bright Blue Weather?

2009-10-14T22:11:00.003-04:00

October's Bright Blue Weather
by Helen Hunt Jackson

O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather.

Happy Mary Henrietta Kingsley's Birthday

2009-10-13T18:34:00.004-04:00

I think I shall celebrate this as an annual thing, with blockquotes.

Travels in West Africa, by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

Chapter XXIII. Of Leopards.

Thus I once came upon a leopard. I had got caught in a tornado in a dense forest. The massive, mighty trees were waving like a wheat-field in an autumn gale in England, and I dare say a field mouse in a wheat-field in a gale would have heard much the same uproar.

The tornado shrieked like ten thousand vengeful demons. The great trees creaked and groaned and strained against it and their bush-rope cables groaned and smacked like whips, and ever and anon a thundering crash with snaps like pistol shots told that they and their mighty tree had strained and struggled in vain. The fierce rain came in a roar, tearing to shreds the leaves and blossoms and deluging everything.

I was making bad weather of it, and climbing up over a lot of rocks out of a gully bottom where I had been half drowned in a stream, and on getting my head to the level of a block of rock I observed right in front of my eyes, broadside on, maybe a yard off, certainly not more, a big leopard.

He was crouching on the ground, with his magnificent head thrown back and his eyes shut. His fore-paws were spread out in front of him and he lashed the ground with his tail, and I grieve to say, in face of that awful danger—I don't mean me, but the tornado—that depraved creature swore, softly, but repeatedly and profoundly.

I did not get all these facts up in one glance, for no sooner did I see him than I ducked under the rocks, and remembered thankfully that leopards are said to have no power of smell. But I heard his observation on the weather, and the flip-flap of his tail on the ground.

Every now and then I cautiously took a look at him with one eye round a rock-edge, and he remained in the same position. My feelings tell me he remained there twelve months, but my calmer judgment puts the time down at twenty minutes; and at last, on taking another cautious peep, I saw he was gone.

At the time I wished I knew exactly where, but I do not care about that detail now, for I saw no more of him. He had moved off in one of those weird lulls which you get in a tornado, when for a few seconds the wild herd of hurrying winds seem to have lost themselves, and wander round crying and wailing like lost souls, until their common rage seizes them again and they rush back to their work of destruction.

It was an immense pleasure to have seen the great creature like that.

(The above was all one paragraph originally: you don't get paragraphs like that these days. People won't put up with it.)

I got some bad news today.

I'm knitting the soapbubble stole on a lovely pair of 32 inch Silverado circular knitting needles from Susan Bates. I was thinking how nice it would be to have a couple of longer pairs, so I went to Joann.com, where I got these . . . and I didn't find any length of US size 2s.

I wandered all around the internet looking for these things, and finally I sent an email to Coats & Clark asking about them. Guess what I got today?

This:

Thank you for your recent inquiry.

Unfortunately, the product (Silverado Knitting and Crocher [sic] accessories) you requested is no longer available and we regret that we have no remaining inventory.

Thank you for the opportunity to be of service.

(Sarcastic grumbling about their definition of "service" versus my definition.)

Thank goodness KnitPicks offers a fixed-length circ. in 40 and 47 inches. And 2.5 mm and 3.0mm circulars. Hmph.