This Post is Not on My To Do List

I'm not supposed to be writing this post.  I also wasn't supposed to spend the first 3.5 hours of my morning poking around the computer and taking pictures of my knitting and spinning and I definitely wasn't supposed to join a blog week.  I was supposed to shuffle my kids off to school and spend the first hour of my personal day plying six bobbins of yarn and then I was supposed to reluctantly transition into my work day, which I would spend alternating between the diligent pursuit of a finished work product and the secret rebellion of playing Angry Birds instead of working.  

It wasn't supposed to snow, either, but it did and are we really surprised that this bizarre winter was going to depart without defying expectations one last time? Now it's a snow day here, even though we are a solid month into spring, and everyone with kids knows that a snow day exerts a mysterious power that wreaks havoc with all prior plans. 

Want proof of the snow?  Take a look:

That's the new barn as it looked this morning when I walked the dog (before that sheet of snow on the roof slid off in a single mass and landed in a heap on the ground).

Here is the chicken coop.  The chickens, as always, were surprised by the snow.

They will be even more surprised (again and again and again) when the blanket of snow/slush that is stuck in their overhead netting starts to fall through the netting one large, wet clump after another.

Unfortunately for my snow deprived children, there will not be enough snow to sled or even play in.  It's mostly poorly disguised slush and not at all fun to be out in.  So this winter still ranks as an abject failure on their Entertaining Weather Scale.

Just in time for this colorless day is the first topic for the Third Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week.  Much to your delight, I have decided to take part in this and I will be spending this week responding to the prompts given at eskimimimakes.com.  Here is the jiggy for today:

Colour is one of our greatest expressions of ourselves when we choose to knit or crochet, so how do you choose what colours you buy and crochet or knit with. Have a look through your stash and see if there is a predominance of one colour. Do the same with your finished projects - do they match? Do you love a rainbow of bright hues, or more subdued tones. How much attention do you pay to the original colour that a garment is knit in when you see a pattern? Tell readers about your love or confusion over colour.

Well, let's see.  Here is a collage of my most recent yarn, either purchased, spun, or knit.

Color choices for me are largely visceral.  I'm lured to intense colors much more than to pastels.  I definitely prefer blues, reds and pinks and the more, the better.  I almost never choose solids.  Even where something I am knitting (like colorwork) really calls for the sharp contrast that solids can provide, I'm much more likely to choose heathered yarns than true solids.  I understand that the final product will show lots of color interest and I love looking at pictures of colorwork done with solids, but I can't stand looking at the solid colors themselves, so they don't make it into my shopping cart unless I'm shopping for a very particular project and I'm being very disciplined.

I am not at all scientific when I choose a "palette" of colors for a project (I can't even call it a palette without using the snarky quotation marks--I'm just not artistic enough for the idea of a "palette" in my "work" to be taken seriously).  I start off meaning to make intelligent color selections, but after a while I get muddled and decide to just knit the damn thing and hope for the best. Even though I spent a lot of years pulling together multiple colors and fabrics for my quilts,  I am not adept at visualizing multi-color combinations, which means that I'm usually surprised by the end products of multicolor rovings spun and plied into yarn or by the overall look of a project like the sleeve of my Serape sweater (row two, extreme left pic), even  when it comes from a yarn combo (row two, pic 3) that I can see perfectly well (I even know to weight the appearance of the yarn pile so the colors are represented in the same proportions that they'll be used in for the project, and I'm still surprised).

Here, of course, is my Nemesis:

Brown. In the right shade (I like to think of it as chocolate, naturally) it's not a bad color for me to wear, but I'm not sure I could knit with it for very long before I started to resent its brown-ness. This is too bad because I have about 5 pounds of hand processed (by me--I'm kind of invested in this pile of fluff) brown fleece that I intend to spin this summer and knit into an extra large sweater for El Husbando. My feelings about brown* are one of the reasons that I have no clue what to do with the skein of yarn pictured above. The little booger (little nothing, that's 600 yards of worsted weight alpaca) just doesn't speak to me, mostly because it is so very . . . brown.

I'm sure I have more to say about color, but if I don't do some work soon, I'll get in trouble with somebody, though I'm not sure who.  Off we go!

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*Also, I went to Cornell.  The school colors are red and white and when we used to play against Brown--where the uniforms are a very poor advertisement for the color-- we poured all of our intelligence and maturity into cheering "Our team is red hot! Our team is red hot! Your team is brown. Your team is brown."  This kind of training definitely influences a person's attitude towards color. 

Slacker Chickens, Busted Doorknobs, and a Surprising Statue

It turns out that my chickens don't respond well to threats. I mentioned casually in my last post that some additional layers might be welcome to combat the decline in our egg supply and what do you think those overgrown feather dusters did? They stopped laying completely. Even Red, who has been laying huge brown eggs on a daily basis, had nothing to offer this morning. They must really be mad. Who knew they could be so sensitive? I didn't even think they read the blog.

In other excitement, I fixed our broken doorknob. Well, not fixed, really; I replaced it. And the exciting part was not that I replaced it, but that I replaced it so promptly. Usually fix-it tasks need to marinate on my to-do list for a while before they are ready to be dealt with. Being locked out of my garage, however, is a special kind of crisis that required immediate attention. Compare this to the screen door that I bought last year and still haven't hung, or to the trim that has been stored under my living room sofa for the last four years, and you'll see why I'm so pleased with myself. I even took a picture of the new knob:

Very spiffy, no?

Last up for today is this:

I have no doubt that this is a dementor and my kids concur. The artist, however, is equally adamant that it is a metal representation of Moses, and that explains why it is currently on display at our Temple. Its presence might also explain why my kids find Sunday School to be cause for despair. Just to be safe, we don't like to get too close to it.

Invisible Squash and Chickens on Strike

My little squash experiment failed. I set the squash on the table, invited everyone to try it, and they ignored it. I put a heap of it on my plate, ate it with gusto, encouraged them to do the same, and they ignored it. I chided them on their cowardice in all matters of squash, and they ignored me. It was masterfully done. No matter what I said or did, they carried on as if there were no such thing as squash. By the end of the meal, I was beginning to doubt it's existence myself. Nonetheless, I will persevere. This ignorance of squash cannot be allowed to continue.

More food related concerns: my chickens appear to be on strike. Over the summer, we were still collecting an average of five eggs a day. Now, an average day has one egg and I regret every dozen that I gave away.

Well, maybe not every dozen. But this does raise the possibility-- to the great joy of my children--that we will be adding to the flock again this spring.

Chickens, beware!

Lots of Pictures, But Nothing Much to Speak Of.

Weird. It's been a month since my last post. I'm not sure what I accomplished over the last month, which might be why I didn't post anything. Or I could just be a lazy bum, which is more likely since I sat down at the laptop today claiming that I was going to do some work, and here I am with a blog post instead. Some days (and weeks, in my case) are just like that. I even took a bunch of pictures for use in blog posts, but most of them seem irrelevant now, particularly the depressing pictures of a late season snow we had recently.

Here they are:

I made them small so we wouldn't get too cold looking at them, but I do like the way the snow stuck to the netting over the coop and made a kind of igloo for the chickens.  It reminds me of the tents my kids like to make, in a cozy kind of way.

One thing I have been doing (a little bit) is goofing around with the Hipstamatic app for my phone.  Here is a picture of three little sheep we made after the last spinning guild.  My kids saw some sheep like these for sale by one of the vendors at the meeting and I refused to buy them.  In addition to being the worlds biggest Meanie, I am also painfully cheap and I just couldn't shell out money for something that we (a) could make ourselves from the miles of yarn cluttering up my house and (b) would probably have more fun making than possessing.

They are ridiculously cute and we did have a lot of fun making them, so I was right about point (a).  Plus, they live on my desk and nobody plays with them except for my yarn-thieving cats, so I'm pretty sure I was right about point (b) too.

They also make excellent models.  Here they are--still looking cute-- posed on top of some polwarth wool that reminded me of ducks and daffodils and therefore could not remain unpurchased. The kids agreed with my assessment of the polwarth; it is so soft and skwooshy that I have been forbidden to spin it until everyone is sure that they are done hugging it.

Here is pretty much the same picture taken with Hipstamatic.  The sheep are still cute, but the picture looks all old-timey.

Same with these flowers, which were a gift from the hockey team (the parents, really; I'm pretty sure hockey boys don't think this way) to thank me for sharing El Husbando with them for 4 months of the year.

And I think Timmy looks very noble through the Hipstamatic lens. It's almost enough to make me forgive him for sitting on my laptop and butt-typing some mysterious key combination that rotated my screen 90 degrees on the night I was trying to wrap up some work on a deadline.  Almost. I'll probably forgive him for real when the crick in my neck goes away.

He likes that polwarth top too, which is why he's made a nest out of it for the picture.

Not much going on in knitting.  I finished a pair of socks that I started in September. 



Clearly they were the socks of never ending toil and I'm glad to be done with them.  The first sock was the real bastard of the pair.  I worked on that one from September 6 until March 24.  The second sock took from March 24 to March 31.  Go figure. I worked out what I hope is the most durable heel in the history of knitting by doubling the yarn, adding a reinforcement thread, and using a Dutch heel.   The doubled yarn/Dutch heel combo is the only one I have not been able to wear out.  The reinforcement thread was added in a moment of sock insecurity that followed the premature failure of not one but two pairs of socks that I finished in the fall.  If this fails, I will give up knitting socks and find some new use for the basket of sock yarn in my office, such as tootsing up my garbage bin.

I have gotten a little weaving done.  I finally decided to finish  the placemats that were on the rigid heddle loom.  A little while back I declared that I hated the placemat design I had come up with and I refused the weave the second one the same way. Oh ye of little faith!  Here is the first mat, which I hated on the loom and really really like now that it's off the loom. Too bad I have only one of these now. 

Finishing the place mats sparked a brief weaving frenzy, during which I warped the loom with what I hoped (wrongly) was half of an odd ball of yarn that I earned at the knitting guild's unloved yarn swap and made a scarf for Matty. The scarf came out a little shorter than I had hoped, but Matty is a pretty short guy, so it worked out ok.  He views it more as a security blanket than as a cold weather accessory, which explains why he hugged it more than he wore it when he first got it. 

I had so much fun with Matty's little scarf that I ordered a ball of Chroma fingering weight yarn from Knit Picks and popped that on the loom next.  I got a good chunk of the way into the scarf before the weaving frenzy fizzled and now this is hanging on my wall (still in the loom, which I store on wall pegs) to brighten my office:

And really, that's all. Or at least all I have time for without ruining dinner.

Bits & Pieces

1. This is where we stand with the chicken coop:

Well, not really, because since that photo was taken, we have trimmed the shingles and added a door and some trim. But it is too dark to photograph the door right now and the mosquitoes, who are twice their normal size this year and seem to be armed with hypodermic needles, drive us back indoors almost as soon as we leave the house. And it doesn't matter anyway, because this was my moment of triumph. After doubts and fears and frustrations, we got rafters and plywood and shingles (not to mention drip edge) on top of the shed. And, like a cherry on a sundae, there I am decorating the top. You can see the "movable scaffolding" -- not quite OSHA approved -- at the left of the shed. I didn't like my prospects with the ladder and decided to go with something that offered better stability and much more entertainment value (to the kids at least), like a van. From the top of the van, I was able to scramble up to the top of the shed to shingle the ridge. The problems started when it was time to come back down again. I got part way down the roof, but refused to let go of the ridge so I could slide down the rest of the way and so I was stuck. Thank goodness for husbands, mine in particular on this occasion, who will climb up and rescue damsel roofers in distress.


2. Here is what happens when Daddy goes out to mow the lawn and Mommy goes out to shingle the roof and the girls are left in charge of the boys: TA DA!! Two more lovely ladies come to tea. One of them liked his pretty dress so much that he wore it for the rest of the day, but I'm not telling who.





























3. And here is what happens after a week of spinning the white stuff: Yes sir, yes sir, three bobbins full. After plying, and in combination with the test skein, this brings us to 4 skeins and about 400 yards of yarn. Quality has been variable. There is more useless shorty stuff in the bag-o-fleece than I realized, so in addition to teasing (which I learned the importance of following the test skein), I have to weed out the unspinnable bits. The result is much happier spinning, but still no antidote for the overwhelming plain vanilla aspect of spinning this much undyed fiber. Plus, after all that sorting, the yard looks like it has been invaded by a flock of micro-sheep.

















To relieve the monotony (and preserve what is left of my sanity, thankyouverymuch), I am taking a small dose (3+ ounces) of not-white fiber. This will be plied tomorrow when the TDF picks up again and hopefully I will also have another heap of the white stuff ready to go for this week.











4. Below is a picture of The World's Best Jell-O. It may look like ordinary cherry flavored gelatin, but it was whipped up by a rising star in the culinary world. (No bias here; I'm sure any other 9 year old could make such a fine dessert. NOT!) She boiled and poured and mixed and chilled and the end result was a small bowl of perfection. She makes a mean popover too.



This chickens remain unbearably cute, but they are much too fast for my photography skills. Their wings are starting to get feathery, but their little butts are still fuzzy. They zip around their pen and hop over each other and kick pine shavings into their food and water dishes and are endlessly entertaining to watch. No real names for them yet, as they look too much alike, but our marketing geniuses have temporarily labeled each breed pair based in its primary characteristics: flatsos (they are black and really do look unsettlingly flat when they sleep), speedies (yellow, and fast), and peeps (I think these are the same two chicks as the speedies, but no one will admit it). Mathematically it does not work out at all: there are 8 chicks in four different styles and I think one of the breeds has been labeled twice, but at least we have not yet resorted to naming them "Yellowy" and "Cuteness" and "Fluffy". The next post really will be about vacation. Probably.