whoosh

I'm fighting bronchitis and buried in work, so this'll be a quickie, but it keeps popping into my head and makes me smile, so I wanted to share it.

Regarding our adventures with nephew Zach, a trend is emerging: We get blown around together.

Statue of Liberty in a monsoon with winds a'whipping, 4/2/05.

Rose Island Lighthouse in a nor'easter, 12/1/06.

Acropolis, Athens, 3/07.

And somehow, on every occasion, the wind just adds to the fun and the memories.

here comes Peter Cottontail

Happy Easter, everybody!

Looking forward to sunshine daydream kind of day
to top off a refreshing weekend.

hippity hoppity

Well, we've watched videos and we've read library books and we've looked at websites, but there were still a few things that were unclear to us when it comes to warping a loom. But then we headed for Webs yesterday morning for a free loom dressing demonstration held by Barbara Elkins. Seeing somebody warp a loom in real life, from beginning to end, finally filled in the missing pieces of the puzzle!

There were few enough folks in attendance that we each got a chance to try the steps and get comfortable with how things work, but enough of us for there to be a good variety of questions. Barbara is a patient, knowledgeable, and entertainingly opinionated weaver. She is clearly tickled by the opportunity to bring some new weavers into the fold. You can also tell how much she enjoys testing out the newest and most sophisticated computerized looms Webs sells, as well as traveling to install them for customers.

I can't quite believe it myself, but now that the warping board is no longer scary (ha!), we bought some cones of perle cotton (yahoo for the Webs gift certificate in our stash since Christmas) and dove right in when we got home. We didn't get very far with the warping board because it was time for egg dyeing -- artistes at work ;-) -- and this morning's egg hunt was long and challenging, but I'm sure we'll get back to the warping process soon and it'll be full speed ahead because we finally have a clue!

Leah started cross-stitching this sweet bunny over a year ago. She's been working hard on it, hoping to get it finished in time for Easter this year, but all the other good stuff got in the way. Still, it's a cheerful project (more so than would be indicated by this semi-blurry pic taken in incandescent light at night) and I think it's worth putting up here in its current state because she has worked many hours to get it to this point. Maybe it'll be done in time for Peter Cottontail hopping down the bunny trail in 2008!

just add color

Things have been a little dreary around here (too many clouds, too much work, too fast days), but adding some color has helped to perk things up.

These are the temari easter eggs and a couple of tiny spheres I made a few years ago. They're quick and surprisingly easy, and it's always fun to choose floss colors and see how it turns out.

This glass egg is the first thing Scott made at his glassblowing workshop in February. This isn't actually blown, but was a way for the beginner students to get a feel for shaping the glass. The mutant alien thing Scott encased in there has been a source of some good-natured ribbing, but we all still think this egg is pretty cool.

This morning we scurried out for a visit to the sale at Farmhouse Yarns. We were unprepared for the temps (wishful thinking?), but met up with some friends there and had a fun browsing the many, many bins of yarn. The pic above shows about 1/10th of what was available. We even managed to narrow it down and bring a few colorful skeins home with us.

Probably one of the most colorful events of the week was seeing Cirque Dreams' Jungle Fantasy show at the Palace Theater in Waterbury. The recently renovated Palace is absolutely gorgeous and the show was mesmerizing. Brilliant costumes, amazing physical feats. We loved the Cirque du Soleil show, Delirium, that we saw last summer, so we figured Cirque Dreams was worth a look-see, and we're looking forward to Cirque du Soleil's Winter Tale in NYC this T'giving. Guaranteed to add some pizzazz!

News flash: The ship we were on in Greece a few weeks ago ran aground! Oops and ouch!

springtime stitching

It was a whopping 49º here yesterday afternoon, but it was SUNNY. I had my office window open for some of that fresh air and saw more than one person in shorts. My family examined our front slope for young daffodil leaves poking up through the soil, and celebrated when they found some. Although this wasn't a difficult winter, it's clear that everybody's ready for spring.

A few days before Easter, Leah and I did some real life math to calculate how big her piece of evenweave fabric should be for her next project. We pulled a fabric thread to mark the cut line and that was all she needed from me for this project. She grabbed the bead boxes, the floss boxes, the bag of handpainted threads, and a good audiobook from the library basket, and headed for her room.

A few days later, she plopped the finished needlework on my desk, along with a frame from our attic stash, and asked me to help her with the framing process. We had a bit of a crisis when we washed and began to iron the work, only to discover, to our horror, that the handpainted thread was bleeding dye onto the crisp white fabric! After much agonizing over our very limited options, we finally decided the marks weren't too bad and to just let it be as part of the learning process. In the end, she had a very pretty piece of framed needlework that's perfectly suited for this time of year and none too shabby for a 9-year-old needlework enthusiast.

And as I was composing this blog entry, she popped into my office and grabbed the floss boxes out of their storage drawer again, then returned to her room, without a word. Hmmm...

cross and twist

We went to another meeting of the New England Lace Group this weekend. There was a gift exchange, where we gave a spangled bobbin decorated with one of Scott's glass beads, accented with sterling silver and iridescent seed beads. I didn't take a picture of the bobbin we made, but you can see examples of spangled bobbins here. Spangled just means it has a loop of beads on the end, to help keep the bobbins from rolling and getting mixed up. In the gift exchange, Leah received a package of DMC metallic embroidery floss. She is excited about using these pretty colors in shimmering snowflake/star lace or maybe some lace hearts or easter eggs.

The pretty snowflake below was a work in progress by one of the members of the lace group. It's a teensy little project and she said it's challenging to work in such a tight space, but we marveled at the delicate results. The sparkle of the silver and blue metallic threads is lost in this image, but believe me when I tell you it's very, very pretty.

I'm not learning lacemaking with Leah, but I do overhear the discussions and try to help her figure out problems as she's working on her lace. Most interesting to me was the realization that all the lace we've ever seen is made up of two movements, cross and twist, similar to how all knitting is made up of two stitches, knit and purl.

Here's a picture of Leah's most recent lace project. It's a piece of edging lace, which is why the right margin has more of a texture than the left. Used as intended, the straighter edge would be sewn to a piece of fabric and the bumpier edge would be the free edge of the lace.

The blue thing to the left is the pattern she used. The lace is made right on top of this pattern, with each dot in the pattern representing where a pin will need to be placed and each line giving an indication of how the threads of each stitch should travel. There are numbers to help the lacemaker figure out how to tackle the puzzle of where to move next, after each stitch has been completed. The lace needs the support of the pins as it's being made, but once you travel past an area, the crosses and twists provide enough structure to maintain the pattern and the pins can be removed.

Leah decided it would make a nice bookmark too, so it became a gift for her Grammy at yesterday's Christmas celebration on Scott's side of the family. This was her first attempt at ground work, the honeycomb-like sections in between the cloth stitch and half stitch sections. They were challenging, mostly because of their newness, but she did pretty well on them and there's a definite improvement in her cloth stitch and half stitch sections, on which she has had a bit more practice.

We borrowed some books from the lace group's library, so there are lots of fun and interesting options ahead!

time-space romp, part I

We've been zooming through time and space for the past three days and, boy, I'm tired. Before we get to the time romp, though, I wanted to show you a little project that's recently underway.

On the left below, you can see a nice big cone of variegated tencel that I got at Webs last winter. On the right is some burgundy cotton yarn harvested from a sweater from Goodwill.
I'm knitting 2 strands of the cotton with 1 strand of tencel, in the lace rib pattern (#79) in Stitchionary. I did some simple figuring per Jackie Fee's Sweater Workshop to come up with a planned cardigan for Leah. It's super soft and the effect of the blend is exactly what I hoped for: nice bit of sheen from the tencel and subtle variegation, enough to make this clearly not a solid color but not so much variegation that you lose sight of the lace rib pattern. I don't know if I'll have enough of the burgundy to do the whole sweater, but I have some options in mind if I need to go to Plan B.



The blue yarn at the bottom edge of the sleeve is the result of using a provisional cast-on. This is a new technique for me. It will allow me to knit up the sleeve from the cast-on and then go back and pick up those cast-on stitches that are being held temporarily by the blue yarn, remove the blue yarn, and then knit down to add a ruffled edge, without a seam between the two segments.

This weekend's time traveling began with Friday at the Connecticut Renaissance Faire. Besides the rip-roaring nor'easter that passed through midday, we had a fantastic time. We knew lots of people there, so it was a really comfortable environment, seeing friends everywhere we turned.




Many of our friends were wearing costumes, and we were too. We had heard that the participants in the RenFaire really like the contribution to the fun when folks dress up, and I'd have to say that it does add to the experience to join in like that. Leah's fair maiden dress and Jesse's squire tunic began as a a woman's dress and a man's t-shirt at Goodwill, and they were morphed into Ren costumes with supplies from our stash while watching some travel videos earlier this week. Jesse smite a knight, Leah swooned over fancy finery, and a good time was had by all (once the weather stopped threatening to take us to Oz). 

eggs and beans and fish

Scott left Friday to meet up with his buddies for the annual camping trip in celebration of opening day of trout season. Jesse and Leah and Zach dyed eggs together and made some beauties -- drizzled dye delights, masking tape masterpieces, hatching dinosaur egg, and even some that looked like watercolors.

We were out bright and early on Saturday to do the downtown Boston portion of the Freedom Trail. Much, much walking, but we've always meant to do this and I'm psyched that we finally did. The trees were in bloom and the weather was perfect. Surprisingly, the Granary Burying Ground, a mosaic and drawing at the site of the first public school, and the Old South Meeting House were the most interesting locations for us all. Will definitely need to return to Beantown to do the Charlestown portion of the trail.

As always, the kids love-love-loved the eagerly anticipated egg hunt at my mom's on Sunday morning. That Easter Bunny gets more clever every year -- they were busy hunting eggs for well over an hour! Home again to quickly gather up some warm clothes for the kids, then Scott swung by to pick them up. Scott and two of the other guys came back to the campground with their kids to continue camping and fishing and riding bikes and having a BLAST together. They all came home today -- dirty and smelling like campfire and smiling nonstop.