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. 

Well, aren't I spiffy!

I'm finally organized and here are the pictures from our very relaxed vacation. There would have been more pictures, but there were some battery issues, even though an experienced packer exercised the required foresight and packed extra batteries. Apparently they were US batteries only, because they refused to work while we were in Canada.

<--- This is where we stayed on Waupoos Island, where our hosts summer their sheep. The house was built in the early 1900s and had the most marvelous combined eating/kitchen area with direct access to the front porch, so even when I was cooking or doing dishes I had lots of company. Ceilings were tall, windows were huge. Lots of light and space. Plus, there was a duck living in the basement. I nearly had a heart attack the first time I opened the basement door and saw something white go tumbling down the stairs. Intruder? Ghost? Carelessly placed volleyball? Nope. Duck butt. The path in front of the house leads to the dock, where we spent most of the week. The view off the porch included this picturesque weathered gray barn, which sits on a little spit of land jutting out into the bay. The rest of the views contained sheep. Here is the dock. A lot of us went fishing, although some of us liked the dock for spinning and reading and not fishing. Others used the time to launch an armada of driftwood boats, most of which had to be rescued with long sticks or the occasional foray in the row boat. Life jackets were a big hit and some of the smaller family members felt the need to wear them in the house too, perhaps to protect against the peril of bath-time.




<---There was a tire swing in the yard and campfires at night, complete with flaming marshmallows.

One morning in the middle of the week, our fine hostess Liz brought us a pair of orphaned lambs to bottle feed. The big one spent a lot of time butting the little one out of the way. We had to hold him back to keep him from budging in the bottle line.












The Island boasts three county "roads", two of which can be found only by careful detective work. In addition, Liz mentioned that we could use the farm lane to hike across the island to the Lake Ontario side, where the shore would be clean and rocky. The beginning of the lane was easy enough to find, but the tracks fizzled out after the second gate and the rest of the hike was all guess work. The natives kept an eye on us, but they were shy almost to the point of being feral and would not give us reliable directions. They were also very suspicious of the camera and uniformly presented their sheepy tushies to the lens. The only one we could get close to was being held in place by a nursing lamb and didn't have much of a choice. After what seemed like an eternity of thrashing through fields and dodging sheep poop (mostly; its not really a place for your best shoes), we took a wild guess as to the right path and ended up in this little piece paradise:



As promised, the shore was clean, or at least it was cleaner than the bay side of the island where lots of stringy yuckamuck washes up. It turns out that the sheep use the lake like a big water trough, so there was some "evidence" on the shore. There were tons of smooth rocks, and we spent a lot of time returning them to the water. Older family members picked up smaller rocks and held rock skipping contests. Demolition man, however, picked up rocks as big as his head and tossed them back into the depths with wild abandon. It's best not to stand too close if you go to the beach with him.

By mid-week, we were ready for a little civilization and we headed to Sand Banks Provincial Park, which is exactly what it sounds like. Giant hills of sand for climbing and a nice sandy shore for wading and castles and moats and dams. A diner lunch was included in the festivities, which was very welcome to the chief cook and bottle washer.

A few rainy afternoons left us some time for Uno tournaments and general silliness.
Back in civilization, it's as if vacation never happened and we are back to business as usual.

In knitting news, do you notice anything missing from this picture? Hmmmm . . . one front, one back, two sleeves. Now what? DOH! We'll never know, because the instructions seem to have been abandoned on the soccer field last week. Good move, mom! I'm sure I'll enjoy finishing this project up with no guidance.



On the Tour, I put in some marathon spinning time last night and this morning and churned out another 300 yards of the white stuff, just in time to take it to Dawn at the Guild meeting; Dawn has agreed to take the stuff to the Genesee Country Village for some authentic historical natural dyeing. The chosen color is indigo, and I choose to believe that it will make up for the snow-blindness I'm experiencing after watching all that whiteness fly through my hands. Amazingly, though, the bag-o-wool doesn't seem to have gotten much smaller. What cruel trick is this?
As a reward for another week of work on the bag, Today's spinning involved 8 ounces of pink merino. It is smooth and soft and drafts effortlessly. A fine reward for the toils of the week.


The chickens remain ridiculous. Their wing and tail feathers are coming in and they have been taking turns perching (and pooping, the little stinkers) on top of the feed and water jars. They scuttle around the cage and hop over each other, and one even attempted a jail break yesterday, but I think she got freaked by all the open space because she broke right back in.

On tap for tomorrow: windows and trim in the chicken coop and some chicken pictures.