Not in Kansas anymore

Packed the ark and navigated through 40 days and 40 nights of wind and rain, crammed into a few hours, to reach our destination.




Messy morning, no electricity.



But the textile artists are arriving and there are signs of good things to come.



Some of us don't need electricity for our fun anyway. :-)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

tales from the ark

It's been raining for 40 days and 40 nights, but our ark has proven waterproof, top to bottom. Those of you who remember when we bought this ol' bomb of a house will understand when I say, "We've come a long way, baby." :-)

Along the way, there have been celebrations of Leah's 8th birthday and Mother's Day. There have been visits to the Bushnell for Lion King and Higgins Armory for a Viking Warrior demonstration. There has been reading and Carmen Sandiego geography puzzles and chess and word games and old Time magazines and flight simulator with historic planes and Time Machine book-on-tape and sign language and Nova Scotia information. There has been spinning by Scott...

and spinning by Leah...
and building of multi-featured creations by Jesse.
And now there is a loom. It obviously still needs to be cleaned up (as do the walls of the room), but it's as put together as 4 non-weavers could manage without reference material or Claire. ;-) I stopped at the library last night and picked up some weaving books, so hopefully we can get it working soon. It's funny because all 4 of us seem equally excited about this contraption, for different reasons. For Scott, it's marveling at the complexity, yet simplicity, of this homemade project. For Leah, it's the allure of creating textiles and playing with fibers in a new way. For Jesse, it's all about the knobs and levers and clackety-clack mechanical aspects of weaving. For me, it's all of the above, plus the thrill of having stumbled into this for free and launching us all into an entirely new art/history/skill to explore.

But today there's a big yellow ball in the sky and there will undoubtedly be rollerblading and a picnic! 

saddle up!

Please note: Random crappy pics with poor lighting all 'round, courtesy of something like 30 days of rain out of the past 40 days. I give up on waiting for good natural light.

Sheepy zipper pulls, by customer request. Methinks there will be monster zipper pulls in my own future.

Drag race at Jesse's rocket club yesterday. WooHoo!

After much forward-and-back fiddling, the saddle shoulders of Scott's gansey are underway! Shown on top of one of Scott's favorite sweaters, which I use to know sizing goals. I plan to finish this shoulder at the farmers' market today and expect the other shoulder to be easy because all the decisions have already been made. Darn good thing, too, since two other projects are calling my name, asking me to cast on for them RIGHT NOW.

'Nuf with the chit chat. Back in to the saddle again!

knowing when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em

Even though Leah and I missed the Feb. quilt club meeting because we were away, we got the supplies and were back on track for the meeting on Friday.

Leah's blocks are to the left, with the green-background polka dots. Mine are to the right, with the purple batik. As expected, her blocks are turning out better than mine because we bumble through on mine first, learn from those mistakes, and then do better on hers. That's fine with me. We're being gentle on ourselves with this project because we don't want to get bogged down in the details, just want to keep it moving, knowing we can refine our techniques as we gain experience. We're laughing a lot about how, hopefully, someday we'll look back on this and laugh at how clueless we were and how we went about things, similar to how I cut my first linen threads for a hardanger project using an exacto knife and a cutting board, because I didn't know any better and wouldn't have had the right tools at hand anyway. I can only hope that Leah's love for sewing grows like my love for hardanger did (and still does)!

Anyway, quilt club is fun. There are probably 40 people in the group and we get to see everybody's block for the month, plus ooh and ahh over all the other projects people bring in, as well as all the enticing goodies in the store. It's amazing how different the blocks look. Even though they're all the same pattern, different fabric combinations and borders (which we're not doing yet, but some people are) have a completely different effect.

Last week I also tried my first laceweight knitting with Claudia Hand Painted Yarns' silk laceweight. I was using the Gust pattern from Knitspot. I blocked what I had, so I could get a feel for what it would really be like, because this knitting pre-blocking was a teensy crumpled bit of nothingness. I knew it would behave much better once it was blocked, but I didn't know if that would be improvement enough to forge ahead with it.

You'll notice that the above is all in past tense, because I ended up tearing it out. I wasn't enjoying the laceweight knitting, didn't think the handpainted yarn was working well with this pattern, and decided I wouldn't wear it anyway because I like my scarves to have some heft and really keep my neck warm when I wear them. But the pattern is well-written and the yarn is gorgeous (even though it may not appear so in the above pic), and I did indeed knit lace with laceweight yarn, if only a little bit!

Maybe I'll try this yarn again at another time, maybe another pattern, or maybe I'll try this pattern with the laceweight yarn paired with a strand of some solid yarn.

Someday, but not now, because now we're moving on to some other things.

otherwise

I blog through Picasa, which I like very much, except that it limits me to four pictures per post, so there were four neckwarmers in yesterday's post and one leftover to share today.

This is a pattern of tiny cables, knit by Leah in deep forest green alpaca along with a strand of laceweight variegated tencel that gives just enough of an accent to keep the color from being flat. Feels fantastic around the neck and alpaca is toasty warm.

When we're not slogging through technological/automotive/insurance/financial/political and other grown-up-like cruddy issues and life-suckers in the past week, there has otherwise been a continued bunch of funstuff. For instance, we've discovered the ultra-cool ukelele club in town and are participating in the monthly gatherings for playing uke (Leah's been doing the freebie beginner sessions and her continuing ed uke class will start soon), which are then opened up to the public for the last hour for a big singalong.

There are maybe 30-40 uke players in the club, who are joined by harmonica players and guys on electric bass and sax. A local dermatologist is the leading ukelele enthusiast and he is an awesome combination of great teacher, uke cheerleader, singer, musician, leader of the band, and comedian. We started going to this because Leah loves to sing, but it's actually a crazy lot of fun for anybody and now I wouldn't want to miss it either. Lots of seniors come for the singalong, but plenty of families with kids too. There are leis and Hawaiian shirts galore, ukes available to borrow, and they get you playing about five songs within the first hour of instruction. The thing I like best is that I've seen everybody from a 6-year-old girl to a maybe-90-year-old guy with a walker strumming along, wearing leis, and grinning from ear to ear, having good, old fashioned, low tech fun together. The world needs more of that, don't you think?

During the singing and playing, I get a good bit of knitting done at the uke parties. I'm about 2/3 of the way through the second Edelweiss mitten. I'm running low on red yarn, so they might become fingerless gloves instead, which is just fine with Leah.

There's also been paintball, Airsoft, the Pequot Museum, ice skating, and historic miniature gaming, all with pals, and lots of reading about a remote-controlled underwater vehicle that Scott and Jesse are planning to build. Yup, still plenty of good times to enjoy in this week of challenges.

As has become an annual tradition as soon as those first chilly autumn days arrive, the season's soapmaking is underway. I don't put any effort into selling my soap anymore, but I still have a good number of orders that come through from past years and I'm happy to oblige because I do so enjoy making soap and keeping a good stash around here for little gifts. Luckily, one of my munchkins is also an enthusiastic soapmaker who joins in every time. So nice to have his help for the >100 bars we made last night and to wake up to all the fantastic fragrances this morning.

IB4T!

From top left: me at 9 and 12 months (1968), crocheting in the 70s, wearing my first handknit sweater in the 80s, stitching through the 90s (mine is the sampler in the top right corner), and onward and upward in the 2000s

Today I am celebrating my 40th birthday in the best possible way I can imagine. This includes doing the work I enjoy, for clients I respect; and then turning my attention to stitching, knitting, stained glass, and maybe even a little fun with wood and a lathe (newest obsession-in-progress); punctuated by calls, mail, and visits from people I love. I can't wait to see what fun the next 40 years will bring!

Live as if you were to die tomorrow,
learn as if you were to live forever.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

the blue period

We're no Picasso, but it appears that we too are having a Blue Period. Ours is infinitely happier, though.

When we were rummaging through the spinning stash with our friends last Friday, I came upon some roving and novelty yarn (a.k.a. crazy funky stuff) that had been spun and dyed in indigo at the CT Sheep and Wool Festival last spring. I always intended to make this into a hat and finally set out to do it on Saturday. I wet felted the loose roving into a dome shape over a plastic bowl. Then I punched holes around the edge with an old leather punch and picked up stitches of the novelty yarn (some spun by Scott, some by Leah) to knit the brim. Quick, fun, warm, and one-of-a-kind.
Jesse's main focus of late is his new stash of assorted K'nex motors. Most recently he has come up with this train, where the blue box is the motor and I'm not sure what all the other sticky-outy things do, but I'm sure he could tell you in great detail what every single one represents in the history of trains. He made the track yesterday and needed to redesign his train so the wheels could turn to navigate the curves. Mission accomplished. This and the gatling gun behind it and the Nerf armory in residence provided much entertainment for the boy and a friend he had over today.
Since January 1 has come and everybody in the world is on a diet right now, this is the bakery's slow time, so Scott's making more beads again. When there was a mix-up about who was drinking which of the beer selection on Friday, he decided to make a bunch of beads for us and friends, each with a name written in glass, to prevent any such confusion. Worked well for New Year's Eve too. No, the kids weren't drinking beer; theirs were used for soda bottles. The blue thread made them the right size for the bottles, but they'll double as stitch markers when the blue thread gets snipped off.
And the biggest blue project of all to have been completed here recently is the poncho Leah knit for herself. She used the Very Harlot Poncho pattern and has been knitting it off and on since we were in Nova Scotia this summer. It has some boo-boos in it, but man, that's a lot of knitting for an 8-year-old! She's been working on it like crazy for the past few days, since I told her I'd help her start knitting her Twinkletoes ballet slippers as soon as she finished her poncho. She finished the fringe today and wore it with pride to meet friends at the hockey game tonight.
Do you see what I just wrote? Kids and Scott are at a hockey game tonight?! That means I have the house to myselfffffff! :::happy snoopy dance::: And off I go to work on a super secret project that has proven to me that my eyes turned 40 already, even though the rest of me still has a few days at 39. :-) 

from Zayre's to Auntie Viola

Remember that yarn I mentioned last week, the skeins I'd get on sale at Murphy Mart or Zayre's when I was a kid and I'd make them into toy clowns for sale? Well, some of that yarn has been with me for all these years, and a bunch was added when my Gram cleared stuff out of her big house and moved to her apartment a few years ago. The last time I used it was to make an afghan to donate through a group a couple of years ago. Leah has used lots of it as she became more proficient at crocheting and then knitting. But lately, we've both moved on to different kinds of yarn and the acrylic stash was virtually abandoned.

Then came a post on a Freecycle-like group (swap/sell/barter/borrow/give/request) that I thought of a couple of months ago and has recently gotten underway, thanks to an enthusiastic volunteer who moderates the group. The message was from a local homeschooling family, requesting yarn for their 88-year-old great aunt, who keeps her hands busy with making items to be raffled as fundraisers.

Well, I talked to Leah about it and we agreed that we're happy to send our unused stash to Auntie Viola in Rhode Island. When I originally responded to the person requesting the yarn, I told her I probably had 40+ skeins to offer, but it ended up being much more than that -- two big boxes full to overflowing! Yahoo in so many ways -- cleared out our yarn closet, helped a fellow stitchaholic, and set some good karma in motion so maybe someday when we're in need of yarn, it'll come our way from an unexpected source. :-)

And remember how I said the Goob was all atwitter about the idea of morphing t-shirts, as shown in the Generation T book a friend has and offered to loan to us? Well, sho' 'nuf, when I came home with the book on Friday night, Leah took it into her bedroom to devour. When she emerged in the morning, she had marked her intended projects with paper scraps...
This busy little beaver wasted no time. The very next morning, she chose a project, grabbed the freebie shirt from a baseball game earlier this summer, pulled out the red sleeves we saved from Jesse's Renaissance Faire squire tunic, and set to work. She learned some new sewing terms and techniques along the way, removing the usual t-shirt sleeves and adding some flouncy red ruffled cap sleeves.
Meanwhile, Jesse built a k'nex fishing rod with all the working features of a usual rod, including a trigger release casting mechanism. Not only that, the thing telescopes so it can be collapsed to half its length for easier transport! He and Scott went fishing last night and this rod performed beautifully. Unfortunately, Scott didn't take the camera. I know Jesse was planning to make some modifications to his fishing rod last night, though, so I have a feeling we'll get more opportunities to photograph his creation. And maybe we'll be having fish for dinner!