Fiber Arts & Salamanders

Killdeer nest

2008-06-03T19:57:00.003-04:00

In the asparagus patch...Mom killdeer was not pleased that I took this picture!

Dinner...

2008-05-24T20:12:00.001-04:00

Asparagus from the garden...

Before & After

2008-05-19T20:21:00.004-04:00

My first re-footing project for PP. Men's stockings....foot was totally worn out. Ripped back to the ankle and re-knit the foot in a similar shade of green.

My quilt is DONE!

2008-05-19T19:51:00.012-04:00

Project: Split Rail Fence Quilt
Started: Early March?
Finished: May 17
Notes: Quilt is strip-pieced. And I ended up machine quilting :-( I wanted to hand-quilt, but more than that, I wanted it done and it was all machine pieced anyway... I'm now using left-over blocks to make a pillow sham.

Spring Yellows

2008-04-22T19:47:00.009-04:00

There are so many things growing and in bloom it is hard to keep up! The daffodils are out in full, the forsythia is noticeably yellower today than yesterday, but still mostly buds. Also, dandelions! The bats are out, Sunday night I heard a woodcock out by the garden, and there are painted turtles galore sunning themselves down by the pond.

Projects…I spent part of the weekend at Laura’s house where we encouraged one another to quit procrastinating and get something done on our myriad projects. I got the top of my blue and brown quilt finished, though I am displeased with it…I had a hard time with the ease on the curves and it puckers. Perhaps when it is quilted it will behave better.

And we spend a considerable amount of time on the porch knitting, too. I finished the Gunnister Gloves for PP…they are washed and blocked, though the dye (cochineal) on one of them washed out more than the other, so it will have another bath before I turn them in.

Last night I made some cloth napkins in appropriate spring yellows and greens out of some fat quarters:

Oh, and I set up a hammock on my screened porch, so if anyone is looking for me between now and say, October, that is where I am likely to be!

And Woodfrogs and Peepers!

2008-04-18T08:43:00.003-04:00

Quite a racket last night....it would have been better if the restaurant hadn't been open doing some event (lots of cars in and out...noisy). But sure enough, there were woodfrogs quacking away and peepers peeping!

I took my other group of homeschoolers to the little island as well, and we got equally soaked. There were many more newts visible than on Wednesday - wer're talking HUNDREDS of newts! I really want to go camping out there - soon.

Daffodils are blooming up by East House.

And I did find the brown fabric for my blue & brown quilt. Washed it last night, so will perhaps cut the pieces out tonight, then work on it and maybe my big quilt at Laura's over the weekend.

Newts!

2008-04-17T08:48:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I took my homeschoolers out for an adventure....there is a small, lovely, blueberry-covered island about 20 feet from the shore of one of the ponds, and a very shallow, rocky crossing place. Most of them were wearing rubber boots, and I piggy-backed the other two with sneakers. Well, we all got soaked anyway, but it was so warm that no one was in danger of freezing to death.

But the best part - the newts (Eastern Spotted, that is) are out! There was still quite a bit of ice on the pond, but there in the shallow bits were the newts, sunning themselves.

There were peepers galore in Plymouth this weekend, but none here yet that I've heard, though I didn't go out to listen last night.

Also in Plymouth this weekend I visited the PP Embroiderers. I had been reading the blog, but WOW in real life. I sat with them for about 3 hours and knitted while they stitched. I now have one glove done, and the gauntlet cuff done on the other. The yarn is handspun, dyed with cochineal and it rubs off on my fingers, turning them purple.

Oh, and the rhubarb and chives are coming up in the garden.

Blue & Brown

2008-04-07T10:46:00.006-04:00

I spent the weekend at Laura's house working on projects. To her dismay, I seem to be obsessed with blue & brown these days. I decided to make the Color Wheel Quilt from "Last Minute Patchwork & Quilted Gifts" but with the color wheel in all blues and the background a deep, dark chocolate brown. I had about 40 blues in my stash, but only enough of about 35 of them. So I had to visit the Henniker quilt shop and buy 17 eighths (you need 52 wedges) to complete the wheel. Then I thought it would be easy to find the dark brown. No. Way. Even Keepsake didn't have what I was looking for. Grrr. Anyway, here is the blue part:

It is actually still in four separate pieces in this picture...you have to put the inner circle wedges and outside border on before you sew it together, which, at this rate, with brown apparently being impossible to find, could be a while yet. (The dark one at about four o'clock in the picture look out of place, but it is actually a dark teal silk and fits in just fine when you see it in real life).

I'm also making the "Follow the Lines" quilt for my new baby step-niece out of a big flowery pink and brown print....

And I finished a pair of socks this weekend out of Trekking Hand Art colorway "Jamaika" (very bright!) Thanks for the yarn, Laura!

Also, good news, Michael picked up the yarn from the PP costume department for me to start knitting gloves. But he says he's holding it hostage until I finish some other projects.

Saturday I went to a flea market with Mom & Ed and picked up a jug of antique buttons - there were lots of ones I will probably end up using with students for craft projects, but I bought it for the treasures! Probably about 20 antique porcelain, some interesting glass, mother-of-pearl, and quite a few hand-drilled bone buttons, too.

Crocuses are up, and daffodils are on their way. Rivers are flooding. Definitely spring bird songs.

Testing, again.

2008-03-03T14:00:00.000-05:00

Blogger wouldn't let me merge my Gmail and Blogger accounts, so I had to set myself up as a second Admin on my blog. We'll see if it works.

Testing, testing...

2008-03-03T13:31:00.002-05:00

Does this thing still work?

I am inspired to pick up my blog again. I have (albeit slow dial-up) internet at home now, so we'll see what happens.

I am buried in projects: a quilt, spinning, and knitting, perhaps I will post some pictures one of these days.

And we are buried in snow....any bets on when the last snow bank will melt? August?

Reasons I'm a Bad Blogger

2007-05-14T07:47:00.000-04:00

1. I don't have internet at home. I'm at work right now and feel guilty.
2. It's really nice outside most of the time. There are all kinds of green things out there and I like to go look at them.
3. When it isn't nice outside I am inside knitting or spinning or something.
4. My digital camera is on the fritz.

BUT it was nice to catch up with all those knit bloggers at NH Sheep & Wool this weekend. And apparently Laura has linked to my nearly non-existent blog, so if you are reading this - welcome - and I'll try to update more often.

Seemed that just about everyone was indulging in Golding spindles this weekend. I'm not a spindle collector, but I did have an idea for a custom Golding - two spotted salamanders carved in a really dark wood with yellow painted spots. I'll think about it.

Well, I'm off to dispatch my roosters (with some help). Attack roosters are unwelcome here (to be a docent rooster at this museum, one must be well-behaved). And docent hens should break themselves of the habit of stealing visitors' sandwiches, but we will address that issue later.

Paddling the Nemasket

2006-10-09T08:55:00.000-04:00

Saturday Chris and I went canoeing on the Nemasket River in Middleboro, MA. He is working on an archaeological contract project in the area and, though we didn't go with them, were inspired to go canoeing because he had heard that this tour was being offered the same day.

We put in at the Oliver Mill and headed downstream. The fall colors were lovely and it was nice and sunny and warm. Well, so much for archaeology...most of the cool things we saw were faunal - a great blue heron that flew ahead of us most of the way, a painted turtle in the water, three deer swimming across, an eagle's nest on a high-tension power line tower, a baby salamander under a log where we stopped for lunch, lots of birds (including a wayward Muscovy duck), and a very cool colonial-era (I think) stone bridge that was a bit of a challenge to get under.

We paddled all the way down to where the Nemasket empties into the Taunton River and upstream a ways on the Taunton to pull out and have lunch. Then we headed back to the Nemasket and all the way back upstream (thankfully, very little current for my tired arms to fight against) and got back to Oliver Mill just as it was getting dark. It was a fun trip (though my canoe steering skills leave much to be desired - not that much experience, plus I got busy looking around at all the cool things there are to see and tended to steer us into the bank or a log or something - sorry dude!). Future trips now being planned!

Excuses, excuses

2006-10-02T09:47:00.000-04:00

I really suck at being a blogger. No good excuse really, just that I have been super busy all summer with camp, transitions at work, spending time with friends and family, being outside, and all my fibery pursuits. Plus, there's that pesky issue of having to conduct all of my online stuff at work since I don't have an internet connection at home. And my digital camera is broken. I like the idea of having a blog, I read other people's blogs, but I get too busy to keep up my own. I'll try harder this fall!

So most recently I've been canning: applesauce, spiced pears, wild grape jelly, wild cranberry sauce, green tomato relish, pickles, peach jam, salsa - all sorts of stuff - yikes, I counted last night and I've done close to 100 jars in all! Nothing like my sister and her husband, though - they did 44 quarts of applesauce, canned over 100 pounds of tomatoes and other jams and jellies.

And I just got involved with some folks who are starting a farmers' market in town for next season - first meeting next Monday - exciting!

Then of course, there is the fiber stuff - I finally finished my sister's wedding shawl and have been making a lot of socks and getting a head start on winter gift knitting. I started a gansey, and have been soing some miscellaneous spinning. Too many projects, of course.

And it's fall - my favorite season. I love the chill feeling and smell of damp leaves. I've been spending more time lately exploring the property here, especially up on the northern end of the property around the ponds (that's where I found the wild cranberries!)

I made it!

2006-05-14T16:24:00.000-04:00

Yes! I got to go to the NH Sheep and Wool festival! (I had to take a somewhat advanced emergency first aid/CPR class in order to get our summer camp license and it was scheduled for 9:00-3:30 on Saturday, but got out early at 2:00 so I zoomed to the fairgrounds!) I got there at 3:00ish, an hour before the gates closed, and ran through the flooded fairgrounds to find Doug, Laura & Pat's booth. Laura took me to the next barn to see some solid-colored sock yarn and on the way I became enamored with a 1 lb. bump of heathery rose-colored romney/blue-faced leicester/corriedale roving. I reached for my checkbook.....and it was gone! So was my Mastercard and my car keys. Yikes! So I turned and re-traced my steps to the entrance gate where the nice lady said someone had extracted said items from a puddle and turned them in. Whew! Luckily the other nice lady with the roving accepted my soggy check, as did Pat when I decided that an ounce of taupe cashmere from her dear goats was also on my spinning horizons. I also got to meet Mamacate, on whose blog I have been lurking, and was kissed on the cheek by a very sweet alpaca. Doug, Laura, Cindy, Pat and I returned to Laura's house for some spinning, eating and talking to cats - a pleasant evening.

Today I am at work at the Admissions desk because we are open for the season now. Except it's raining a lot in central NH this weekend - up to a foot of rain in some places. At least it's not snow, but there is a lot of flooding. People don't do the outdoor history museum thing in weather like this. Oh well...at least the lilacs are blooming.

Overdue update on spring...

2006-05-05T08:45:00.000-04:00

So there was a Big Night on Sunday, April 23 (and probably Saturday, but I wasn't home to go check it out). We went down the trail behind the Trustee's office at about 9:00 with a flashlight and didn't see any spotteds at all. At the first pool we didn't see anything at first, and then.....we realized they were EVERYWHERE in the water! I've never seen so many salamanders in my whole life. We lost count. At the second pool we checked out a corner where I had seen some egg masses already and again saw a whole tangle of adults in the water and I was able to pick one up out of the water to hold for a minute - it's amazing how strong those guys are! The last pool probably had the highest population density - there was a branch in the water and it was absolutely swarmed with salamanders! No wood frogs seen, but they had already been out laying eggs (which at this point have hatched and there are tiny tadpoles in all the pools).

We have new baby chicks here -- see Laura's blog for some photos of her portion of the brood. We had to order a minimum of 25, so Laura took 9 and our land manager here at the museum is going to take about a dozen, leaving the rest of them here. We got the rare breeds mix from Murray McMurray so it is going to be interesting! I'm sure we have one White Crested Black Polish, a White Laced Red Cornish and some miscellaneous bantams.

Working on getting my garden together - not quite warm enough yet to put anything in the ground, and I need to prepare a patch up there. I'm so excited that I have HUGE compost piles to apply this year!

The museum opens a week from tomorrow - yikes! This winter has flown by. I need to get the Family Center up and running, but can't set anything up until we have the carpet cleaners come in. Until then it's just piles and lists of things to do.

The leaves are out enough now that you can hear the wind swish through them. Also heard the first tree frogs singing along with the peepers last night and noticed yesterday that the apple blossoms are about to pop!

I'll try to be better about posting, but there is so much to do!!

Amphibians on the move...

2006-04-15T13:25:00.000-04:00

No Big Night yet, but there are some signs that our amphibian friends are out and about. I led a vernal pool walk today and saw 3 red-back salamanders, 2 adult eastern spotted newts, a green frog slowly emerging from its winter hole, several masses of wood frogs eggs, and could hear the woodfrogs clearly, though we didn't see any up close. One of the people in the group thought he saw a spotted salamander swimming in the water, but no confirmation and no salamander egg masses yet.

The forsythia is blooming today, as are the daffodils and maple trees.

On the fiber front, I have all but finished warping the Harrisville loom for dishtowels. I just need someone to help me roll the warp onto the back beam because I can't keep tension on (and untangle) the warp from the front and turn the back crank at the same time by myself.

Not yet...

2006-04-08T13:10:00.000-04:00

Thought last night was going to be a Big Night for amphibians - I went out looking with the flashlight but I think it stopped raining too early and may have been a bit too cold. I did hear some distant woodfrogs and a few peepers! Soon, soon, soon! Today I had a vernal pool walk but only one family showed up - maybe next Saturday will be more busy. It wasn't the most pleasant weather today, not raining, but raw.

I did manage to start working on my sister's wedding shawl...it is the Bird's Nest shawl out of Folk Shawls in pale blue Silky Wool (Elsebeth Lavold).

And I did receive my new Ashford Joy via UPS on Tuesday! It's the best!

Random Update

2006-04-03T09:28:00.000-04:00

Gosh, it's been a while. Pretty busy around here lately - I've been out and about too much to blog! I'll summarize the highlights...First, just to follow up from the last post, I did finish the back of Laura's sweater for the "Olympics" and now have a bit of the front done as well. We did our first Sheep Shearing Day on March 11 and had 200 people visit and learn about fiber/fiber arts (and see our sheep get shorn, poor guys!); Sugaring Off walks on March 25 drew in about 140 people, too. I'm really starting to notice that after about 2 1/2 years, people are catching on to our family programming at the museum.

I broke down and ordered and Ashford Joy from Copper Moose...according to UPS tracking it will be here tomorrow. They'd better be right! (I couldn't stand banging up my Traditional as I haul it around with me).

Still haven't warped the loom.

Still haven't started my dress for my sister's wedding.

But I did block out my Pi Shawl (will try to post a picture soon).

I went to Plimoth Plantation this weekend and also watched harbor seals sunning themselves in the warm spring sun in Manomet.

Speaking of which - IT'S SPRING!! Right now I'm all excited about my garden - I have most seeds, still need to order tomato and pepper seeds. Poplar trees are in flower, bulbs are pushing their way up, water is running, robins are out in the fields, red-wing blackbirds are at the pond, woodcocks are saying "peent, peent" in the evening. When I was in Manomet I heard peepers and woodfrogs....could be a Big Night soon!

All right, fine, I'm in....

2006-02-13T12:43:00.000-05:00

So I decided to make a valient effort on Laura's aran sweater for the Harlot's Knitting Olympics. I may have mentioned this project before, but let me re-cap...when Laura moved to NH she had several raw sheep fleeces that she sent out to be made into roving. When they arrived I asked if I could play with a particularly nice gray romney and she said sure, "as long as you make something for me!" We decided a sweater was in order, one with fancy viking cables. I made a swatch in the form of a hat seen here with Asterix last year:

So then I started the sweater and then had to rip it out because it was too big. Then I procrastinated for about a year.....So now I've started it again and am mostly done with the back. We'll see...

Also, I wanted to post a picture of my beautiful new drop spindle, made for me by one of our tour guides who is an excellend wood turner. It spins very, very well and for a long time. I managed to drop it and crack the shaft, but it seemed to glue nicely. The woods are curly maple, cherry, yellowheart and padouk:

Warmer times ahead

2006-02-10T13:00:00.000-05:00

After a run of spring-like weather, it's cold again today (but still not enough snow to do my animal tracking program this weekend). I do like winter but browsing through our photo files today, I found this picture which makes me want this weird snowless winter to be over:

Toasty toes...

2006-02-09T15:05:00.000-05:00

Here is one of each of my two most recent pairs of socks - both are from Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Shurch. The one on the left is mossy-rock colored Koigu with mini-cable rib and the one on the right has 3 x 3 cables (with seed stitch in between) in Mountain Colors Bearfoot "flathead cherry" colorway:

Yarn Kids...

2006-02-08T13:18:00.000-05:00

My homeschool class with their KoolAid dyed yarn!

Field Trip!

2006-02-06T15:23:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went to Hancock Shaker Village in western Massachusetts. It was the first other Shaker Village I've been to. They are definitely not in full swing right now, but at least they do guided tours in the off season, whereas we are entirely closed. My tour guide gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of their Dwelling House which has sustained some pretty bad water damage in the attic - we are so lucky to have so many of our buildings restored! Overall the comparing and contrasting was fascinating...so many things were very similar to Canterbury, but they have some very differently designed buildings (the round barn - cool!). They are also a working farm - sheep, oxen, chickens, etc. so that gives it a whole different feeling. The gardens are a lot more prominent - you have to walk through them to get to the buildings, whereas ours are a ways out behind the village and many people never bother to visit them. Fun!

My "new" wheel

2006-02-02T08:20:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to be more consistent with postings, so I figured if I can at least post a picture every other day or so, that would be a step in the right direction.

To that end, this is my "new" wheel...It needs a lot of TLC (it doesn't actually work right now). The wheel rubs against the diagonal piece of wood, among other structural things, and it needs to be refinished.

Every spinner needs an historically accurate wheel for demonstrations...(and one for traveling, and one or two to lend to friends who are learning to spin, and one for everyday spinning...) Right?

Today's eggs...

2006-02-01T14:41:00.000-05:00

Oxbow Initiative

2006-01-31T09:44:00.000-05:00

Those of you, especially, that live in central NH should familiarize yourselves with the Oxbow Initiative. A co-op of towns in the area is proposing to build a solid waste landfill on the banks of the Merrimack River (and on top of a major aquifer) as soon as 2014. Does this sound like a bad idea to anyone else?

Cochineal

2006-01-31T08:29:00.000-05:00

Last week I decided to try out a cochineal dye bath. Pretty crazy stuff really - the dye is made from the crushed bodies of a Mexican scale insect (Dactylopius coccus). I pre-mordanted the yarn (Knitpicks Color Your Own) with alum. Here is the dye pot on the stove:

And here is the finished yarn...magenta:

Some pictures...

2006-01-30T10:05:00.000-05:00

Laura came to tea the other day and urged me to post these pictures of my coffee table (with knitting needles, plant, bowl of rocks, ball winder, swift, sock book on the couch, Twilly, etc.):

And yarn stash in the Shaker built-in cabinetry (edited to put in Laura's picture...it's brighter):

Kids & knitting

2006-01-12T08:52:00.000-05:00

Last week I taught my homeschoolers to knit. They made their own wooden knitting needles with fimo clay end-caps, then I cast-on for them and they learned the basic knit stitch.

During the first class one little 7 year-old boy finally got the hang of it and said to me, "does this mean I'm making a scarf?" When I assured him that he was, he was so excited that he jumped up and bolted down the hall to the room where some of the moms work with younger siblings, "MOMMMMMMM, I'm making a real scarf!!!!" The excitement level is so great!

Next week we'll continue with our scarves and KoolAid dye some yarn to add to them. Should be fun & hopefully I'll have some pictures!

Socks, socks, socks...

2006-01-11T16:07:00.000-05:00

Now I'm on a sock kick and it's all because of these:

"Little Lace" socks from A Gathering of Lace.

It smelled like spring outside today...mmmm. Then again, it's January -- that can't be a good thing. I went for my first snowshoe expedition of the year on Saturday -- explored around out behind the museum -- even out onto a solidly frozen pond. It was beautiful.

Happy New Year!

2006-01-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

Back to work after a week off...kind of nice to be back, though I did have a lot of time to catch up with people...my sister and I went to Cape Cod to see my dad's side of the family there; my Granddaddy came back from Florida so I spent a day with him watching college football; my Mom and I spent a day checking out yarn shops and looking for fabric to re-upholster a second-hand chair she got me for Christmas; Michael and I spent New Year's eve day driving around northern New Hampshire; and I spent a day catching up with a friend from high school and her one-year-old (picture coming soon!)

I also had time to work on projects! I started winding warp for cotton/linen dish towels:

And have almost finished a pair of lace socks from A Gathering of Lace:

Now I'm planning for February vacation camp, spring preschool programs and spring family progams like animal tracking walks, maple sugaring demonstrations, sheep shearing day, and vernal pool walks in April.

Finally, some cat shots; Curious Twilly with the sheep scarf my sister made for me:

And the lovely Abbey with daffodils:

First big snowstorm

2005-12-09T13:30:00.000-05:00

Snow, snow, snow...by noon today there was a foot on the ground and it's still coming down (or sideways rather, it's windy, too). Messy and cold but very pretty (and it means I can go snowshoeing soon!) No excuse for me not to go to work today since I live next door, but pretty much everyone else stayed home today! I did manage to get a lot of work done with no one else around to ask me questions :)

I joined the knitting group in town in November which has been a lot of fun -- good to get to know fellow knitters. Mostly I've been working on my Shetland Tea Shawl from A Gathering of Lace. It's almost done -- I'm working on the edging!

On the spinning front, I taught a drop spinning class for three people at the Center for Traditional Arts on Monday -- it went reasonably well -- the one guy was really into it, the two women were seemingly not as interested, but it was a good experience anyway. A lot of people here at work want me to teach them to spin, so we'll have to figure something out for after New Year's. It would be nice to start a spinning group, too.

I loaned my digital camera to my sister, so no pictures, but I did intend to post a picture of my "new" spinning wheel. It's actually a very old spinning wheel that needed some love. I have been looking for a reasonably priced junker that I can fix up for a while now and the other day Michael alerted me to it's existence at a an antique shop in Northwood. I went to visit it, didn't buy it, and then went back a few days later and found it was on sale, so it has a new home now! It will need some work to the wheel, a new driveband, and eventually to be refinished.

I've also been working on the gray alpaca fleece from Wool Day at the Village. Hand-carding, spinning, then washing the yarn -- just looking at and handling the fiber you wouldn't notice how horribly dirty it is, alpaca isn't greasy like sheep wool.

Yesterday evening...

2005-11-09T14:12:00.000-05:00

...I went out to put in the chickens

and then headed down to the pond to feed the swan. When I got to the top of the hill I saw a strange animal swimming in the pond

which then emerged on the bank near me

a moose! So glad I had my camera! When she saw me she took off and I went on down to feed the swan

On the way back I took some pictures of the Village, since I promised to when I first moved here and hadn't gotten around to it -- it was a lovely evening!

...and then a happy thought for the day

2005-11-02T14:40:00.000-05:00

Anyway, a lovely fall day here -- it's been unseasonably warm the last few days. Crunchy leaves all over the place. I had homeschool kids out on Meadow Pond trail this morning...we were talking about glaciers and rocks, but you gotta love it when out of the blue a 7-year old tugs on your sleeve and says "is it just me, or is this a big-tooth poplar leaf?"

What is the world coming to?

2005-11-02T14:20:00.000-05:00

Now I get spam comments! Funny, but I'm not into water gardening as my previous comments suggest. Is this happening to anyone else? I apologize for the inconvenience to legitimate commenters, but I have turned on the "word verification" feature of Blogger in order to post a comment...

Unbelievable...

2005-10-29T09:33:00.000-04:00

NH Audubon has their priorities mixed up. Ruth has been such an inspiration to so many children for so many years...the kind of teacher every child should have. Her lay-off starts Audubon down a very dangerous path...what is the point if they aren't working with kids anymore?

Long time, no blog

2005-10-16T09:53:00.000-04:00

Hello! I do apologize for the long stretch (almost 2 months) with no blog activity. Today, though, I am stuck behind the reception desk answering the phone and realized I could actually go online and update! Seems like the last two months have been kind of crazy...I did move to the Village in mid-August and love my new apartment. The cats are sort of OK with the whole thing...Twilly seems pretty well-adapted to being an inside cat while Abbey is in a constant state of "get me the hell out of here" which usually translates into getting into everything she can get her paws on. The chickens are here with me as well -- I have been getting my first little green eggs in the last week or so!

This is also the busiest season at the museum -- lots of "leaf peepers" up here taking in the views. Combine that with unprecedented staff loss (I think I counted 11 key staff members that left this season) and you have one stressed-out museum! The education manager and I prepared about 300 sandwiches on Friday and worked the lunch shift yesterday because there isn't any food service staff since the chef left...

Lots of other things going on as well.

I lost my Nana (mom's mom) on September 19. She had been diagnosed with a form of cancer called multiple myeloma in the spring and had been undergoing radiation treatment when she fell during the night and broke a vertebra in her neck where they had been targeting the radiation. Suffice it to say, they couldn't continue the cancer treatment, so after a week in the hospital and two weeks in a wonderful hospice facility, and going down hill rapidly on the last day, she passed away with all of us around her. Granddaddy (her husband of 63 years) seems to be doing well. He calls me and asks how to cook things :)

In September I was called up for jury duty and had to report every Monday for a selection, though I only got picked for a jury once (a 1 1/2 day car accident civil case). It was a fascinating process, though I'm glad I didn't have to serve any longer.

Also, the Center for Traditional Arts opened their doors on October 8. Exciting! I spent most of my days off in August and September helping them with renovation work on the building itself, and now that they're open, I can go up and demonstrate spinning and weaving! They had a really neat hand-built loom donated to them that I warped and started a rag rug project on. I also have a couple of scarves that I knit on consignment in their store. Not like I'm going to make my fortune, but at least I can recover my materials costs so I can keep knitting!

I have been working on projects...I finished another flower basket shawl with the purple yarn that my co-worker Dana brought me from France. I'm also working on a little bear sweater for a friend's year-old baby. I've gotten some spinning done, too....I broke down and bought a half of a gray alpaca fleece at our Wool Day event in September. If my camera worked, I'd post pictures!

All in all, things are well. Fall is upon us here in NH -- finally a clear day after a week of rain! The leaves are changing slowly and there is definitely a chill in the air and the smell of woodstove smoke. My favorite time of year. Time to start pulling out the wool.

P.S. Despite all this stuff going on, I have been reading others' blogs and have really enjoyed hearing what's going on with everyone. I'll try really hard to be a better blogger.

Movin' on...

2005-08-03T20:47:00.000-04:00

Sorry I've been so out of the loop lately...I'm moving! My friend Michael (the Center for Traditional Arts guy) had been living in an apartment at the Museum but since he quit his job there he has also moved, leaving the apartment vacant. The week after Michael announced he was leaving, I had a meeting with our Director and he offered the apartment to me. Over the next couple of weeks I thought about it a lot and finally decided to go for it! The drive to work in Canterbury has been killer in the last year...my poor 1989 Camry has put on 25,000 miles since September and I'm sick of buying and burning that much gas. Now I will be able to roll out of bed, and mosey to my office in the next building over. I'll have 700+ acres of conservation land in my backyard including trails & ponds, a 3 1/2 acre organic vegetable garden across the street, and of course, the sheep (although one of the three, Piggy, died last week due to another break-in to the chicken coop and subsequent over-consumption of chicken feed...we are very sad). My chickens can move into the coop out in the gardens and the Director has made a special exception for the Exceptional Twilly and Abby cats. I will have some additional responsibilities as the Village caretaker including dealing with those pesky, prone-to-false-alarm alarms at 2:00 in the morning, but I think the benefits of living there vastly outweigh the trouble. Plus it's much closer to Center for Traditional Arts so I can be more involved up there, too.

So I'm very excited, very busy, and slowly getting things organized! My official moving-in date is August 15, but I have been taking a load of stuff (where did it all come from???) with me every day when I go to work. Below is a picture of the building my apartment is in...it was built in 1831 as an office/store for the Shakers and also housed their trustees. More pictures to follow!

P.S. And I've learned a sure-fire way to keep oneself from starting a new knitting project: keep your yarn in another town. It really cuts down on the ability to do anything fiber-related at all...I just realized tonight that I already moved all my yarn, needles, spinning wheel, and current projects to the apartment. Oops.

Hot, humid, sticky, muggy, etc.

2005-07-20T18:45:00.000-04:00

I've been a bad blogger! Truth is, I just haven't really felt like sitting in front of the computer lately. Things have been pretty crazy around here! Lots going on at work, including the Director resigning effective Sept. 12 (after my boss resigned in June, and all of the CfTA folks leaving, too!). And then Sunday my grandparents arrived to move into their new house a few miles down the road. No sooner had they arrived when my grandfather fell in the garage and broke his 3rd lumbar vertebra. The ambulance pulled in at the same time as the moving van! So he's been in the hospital and we've been back and forth to see him and trying to help unpack boxes when we can. Today they injected some crazy superglue-cement stuff into his back and it fused the break so now he can get up and walk, just like that! When I went to see him tonight after work he said he thought they would discharge him tomorrow (he did this just so he could get out of unpacking...:))

Chickens are well and the garden is growing. I've been snatching almost full grown peas from the vine here and there, and Eleanor, Laura's daughter, has green beans in her garden. Mom has been keeping me stocked with lettuce from her garden, too, and some really spicy radishes also.

Sunday I am teaching my first-ever spinning workshop (scroll down from "July" to July 23 to read about it!) at work. I have eight people registered, which was my maximum enrollment. Tonight I went and bought roving for them -- gray romney. We'll start out with hooks and drop spindles, then I'll have them do "homework" and produce some yarn during the week. The following Saturday I'll introduce wheels and get going on those. Not a lot of time -- 4 hours in total, but I think we'll get the basics, anyway. I'm thinking of starting a craft group at the Village so maybe these folks will want to participate!

Not a lot else going on -- I think tomorrow evening I'm going up to Center Harbor to get the grand tour of the CfTA building, and help do something, I hope. They closed on the building on Tuesday and immediately started ripping up the carpeting. Guess what? Wood floors underneath....:)

Jammin'

2005-07-02T14:56:00.000-04:00

This morning I picked 18 pounds of strawberries at a local strawberry farm and now the kitchen is a red juicy mess as it all gets made into jam!

Camp is over with -- whew! And just when I thought things were going to settle down at work I found out on Thursday that a very good friend is leaving at the end of the month to start his own business with some other disgruntled current and former museum craft demonstrators. They are calling it the Center for Traditional Arts and will be an organization to teach woodworking, textiles and other traditional skills through workshops, school outreach, etc. They will also have a storefront to sell the things they and other craftspeople make. Doesn't that sound GREAT?!?! That is exactly the kind of thing I want to do -- I definitely don't want to stay at the museum forever. It's been hard to deal with things there lately and I haven't been able to concentrate on doing my real job -- kid's programming -- since I am always dealing with the people leaving, financial issues, etc. The place is imploding. And even though I just found out that we got a substantial donation to keep me on staff for the next five years, I really don't want to stay. I would love for this new venture to be something I could become increasingly involved in. For now it'll be lonely as hell around the museum but am really, really, really happy for him -- he'll get a chance to get back into furniture making which he has had no time for working there.

And then there were 11...

2005-06-28T19:21:00.000-04:00

One of the chickens died :-(

The deceased was the smallest one of the flock and the others, especially the rooster, kept attacking her. Plus she was either not all there mentally, blind or was sick -- something was really wrong with her. So I separated her from the others so they would stop bugging her and she died the next day. The others all look very healthy, so I'm hoping it was just a fluke. Oh well, that's why I got so many to begin with.

Laura's friend Doug assembled up her 48" LeClerc Nilus floor loom in the new craft room! I warped it with a really narrow (like 12") warp and am attempting rag-rug style potholder/trivets. Here is Doug with the loom (whatta guy!):

Camp will be over on Friday -- It's been fun for the most part, though a challenging group of kids to work with last week and low enrollment this week. When we picked these dates last November, who would have guessed that we would have a record number of snowdays? Kids are just getting out of school now and don't want to go immediately to summer camp, I'm guessing. Tomorrow I have six kids and a watercolor artist coming to teach them about painting, so it should be fun.

Yesterday evening at work (after snitching a few ripe strawberries out of the garden) I watched a great blue heron fly in over the pond and land on the TOP of a tall white pine tree, flapping for a while to keep its balance (I didn't know they would land way up there). I also saw an older fawn running across the field and aerobatic barn swallows catching insects. The setting sun last night was salmon-red-orange and huge on the horizon, and just beautiful. It was a great evening.

And just because, here is another shot from my Alaska trip in 2003. This is the view from the small island we stayed on in the Kachemack bay (looking east) :

Summer is here!

2005-06-21T19:50:00.000-04:00

After all this weird weather, hot/cold, wet/dry (really just extended New England spring) I have proof that it's now officially summer:

Mmmm! Out for a walk this evening I discovered a whole hillside full of wild strawberries!

The peas have started climbing:

And all else seems very well in the garden.

The chickens are huge! Here is the latest group shot...posing for a photo was decidedly not in their immediate interest because they were busying themselves with the vegetable cuttings which had just been tossed in. Lots of happy clucking sounds. The lighter colored one at center stage is dubbed "French Vanilla" and is likely a rooster.

We also seem to be having a major frog problem around here....

A belated birthday present courtesy of Mom...I had seen them for kids, but never in a size 10. Thanks Mom!

Finally, thank you all for your kind words about Haylie.

Bye Haylie...

2005-06-18T21:37:00.000-04:00

HAYLIE
1993-2005

Haylie had two more seizures the night before last so Mom et. al. decided it was time to call Matt (the neighbor vet) and have him come put her to sleep. She's buried in the field at home with Annie & Ben. It really was time, though. She had been going downhill so fast -- when I saw her the other day she was almost nothing like her energetic, playful old self anymore. We'll miss her -- a lot.

The last few days...

2005-06-14T19:11:00.000-04:00

It's been hot. It's frustrating when it is way too hot to be outside and be comfortable. What I wouldn't give to be back in Alaska with the icebergs sometimes (I went for 3 weeks in 2003):

The cats thought it was hot, too. A rather melted-looking Twilly is pictured below throwing inhibition to the wind yesterday when it was a muggy 85 degrees in the house! Today it rained and has cooled off A LOT (it's supposedly around 50 degrees right now...ahhhhh....)

I spun some more of my Cormo. Knitting of a Pi Shawl has commenced!

Sunday we attended my step-sister Cady's wedding in Sugar Hill (northern NH). It also happened to be the weekend of the Lupine Festival in Sugar Hill, and the lupines were in full bloom, so despite being hot and muggy, everything was just ten times lovelier than usual. The reception was at the Sunset Hill House which has a gorgeous view of Franconia notch. This is the church where they got married, lupines & all:

And today Nancy (my boss) and I went to Boston to the USS Constitution Museum for a conference on family learning sponsored by the New England Museum Association. Lots of great ideas for what we can do at the Village with our fledgling family learning programs. Back to work tomorrow -- I may be incommunicado for the next couple of weeks as June 20 starts two weeks of camp!

Sheep pics

2005-06-08T19:48:00.000-04:00

Forgive me for my lack of being around this week. I've been pretty busy and to top it off, I found out this morning that my boss is resigning effective next Friday.

People want sheep shots. Well, here is the one picture I could get before my digital camera ran out of battery power:

They are Scottish Blackface sheep -- wethers. Their names, tentatively, are Piggy/Hoover, Spot & Butt (as in the one who head-butts everyone else). Don't blame me, I didn't name them...Yesterday they were released from their little pen into the great wide open orchard (7 acres) to graze. When it came time to put them back in the pen at the end of the day, they could not be found. Eventually the sneaky little guys turned up in the chicken coop (also in the orchard) eating the chicken food with wild abandon! They managed to squeeze themselves in through the slightly-larger-than-normal chicken door. Today they were observed chasing the chickens through the orchard...The antics, I tell ya.

My chickens are well, growing like weeds, and really into chasing bugs.

I went to the Fiber Studio on Tuesday morning to take my class project shawl off the loom since I missed class last Tuesday evening. It's almost done now except for twisting and tying the fringe on one end. Lots of other little projects here and there -- still working on the Flower Basket shawl with the yarn Dana at work brought me from France, a little Kimono shawl design scarf of eggplant colored Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool, and I also joined the Branching Out Knit Along and have started a scarf with some umbilicaria lichen (purple) dyed handspun Shetland. I've also been trying to find time to spin my Cormo, which I have plans to knit into a Pi Shawl of some sort.

Thunderstorms tonight.

Remembering Grandma...

2005-06-02T22:35:00.000-04:00

Jean Crowell Dunham

(June 11, 1922 - June 2, 2004)

Grandma died one year ago today. I was so fortunate to have been down to the Cape to see her the week before she died, though we were not expecting to lose her. Right after her death, and now over the last year, I have been thinking especially about the many perfectly normal little things she did, as she did every day, that were representative of her strength, selflessness, patience, wisdom, thoughtfulness, and grace: We planted flowers in memory of deceased relatives down at the cemetery; she put out pressed linen napkins for dinner and was sure the bean salad was served in the "right" bowl; we picked out flowers for her window boxes; she wove a lattice top crust for a delicious strawberry rhubarb pie with meticulous care -- her way of communicating how much she loved those around her.

Because of all these quiet things, her very being, she was a great teacher to us all, perhaps, I've been realizing, the greatest teacher I've ever had. She was also one of my best friends. I am extremely lucky to have been able to share as much time with her as I did.

The sheep have arrived!

2005-06-02T14:23:00.000-04:00

Today we got sheep (older lambs, really) at the Village! Three little guys of unknown heritage (I'll have to do some research) -- they are mostly white with black faces (with white splotches) and black feet (with white splotches) and have horns. Michael & I sat in the pen for a while trying to make friends with them. A little timid at first, but a handful of sheep kibble helped break the ice. One was definitely more piggy than the others! Another one is definitely more fiesty, initiating several head-butts to her buddies. They are currently being pastured in the orchard, which is enclosed. These are the first farm animals, other than chickens, to live there for decades. It's so exciting!

Greasy grimey...

2005-05-31T17:36:00.000-04:00

Two days off! Thunderstorms! More rain! This weekend (Mondays & Tuesdays are my days off, so henceforth, when I say "weekend" I mean MY weekend...) I mostly did chores, had my car inspected, & went to the dump (where I scored some canning jars at the Swap Shop). I did manage to get some gardening done between rain showers -- I planted the tomato & pepper seedlings, onions, peas & swiss chard today because it finally seemed dry enough to do so. I spun another skein of gray wool for Laura's sweater and washed it and another one that I spun a while ago.

Oooh...I've delved into the new cormo fleece & I'm in love. I thought I'd try spinning it a couple of different ways to see how I like it best. First experiment was to hand card and spin in the grease. I always washed fleeces before, but this fleece is exceptionally clean ("Fellow" was covered) and I thought I'd just try it...and well, um, I think I'm a convert... Here are my reasons: 1) I'm trying to spin a light weight yarn & the grease helps create some friction to keep that tiny yarn from slipping out of my hand and breaking. 2) I think it actually helps me spin a thinner yarn. 3) The grease helps keep the little fuzzies from sticking out too much. 4) It softens my hands and 5) I love the smell of sheep. So I've spun one skein & washed it. All the grease washes out easily leaving a nice pure white very springy yarn. Gotta love cormo.

I know there are people out there who swear by spinning in the grease and those that are vehemently opposed, and not many who go both ways...I'd be interested to hear opinions for and against. How do you process fleece? What are your reasons?

P.S. Hello from the chickies & cats who are all well.

It's Raining, It's Pouring...

2005-05-24T19:55:00.000-04:00

Sun? What's that? Spring in New Hampshire is being very wet this week. Not good for gardening or little chickies going outside or working in the museum business! Very good, however, for watching movies (new Star Wars), knitting and reading and making cats crazy.

Not much to report...the chickies are about the size of pigeons and have quite a few of their grown-up feathers in. They have moved from their guinea pig cage to an outside shed and I have drawn up plans for their chicken tractor (construction delayed because of the WEATHER). They are eating A LOT of chickie food these days and I can't wait until they can forage outside!

Knitting projects right now include a Flower Basket shawl using the purple Rowan that my co-worker Dana bought for me in France, a Kimono shawl pattern scarf out of lovely eggplant colored Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool (because my boss wanted to make one and I had to have something to show her how on), and the displeasing picot trim on the (again, purple) lacy cotton too-big tank-top.

I have not posted any pictures lately because of new computer arrangements in the house (Laura's laptop -- which had the digital camera card reader -- fried itself and was replaced by a MAC which I don't understand and wireless network which allows me to use MY computer, novel idea). I'll figure it all out one of these days.

Finally!!

2005-05-14T21:38:00.000-04:00

Today was really, really fun. There were actual people at the museum today. Actual people! After all those long winter months it is so nice to see real, breathing people again! I think I've started breathing again, too -- it seems a lot less stressful now that we are actually open again. All went well today; I had to cover one tour for someone who went too long on their first tour, but otherwise just fine. Since it was our first Garden Days weekend, we had the Soil Tunnel (Kids loved it!) on loan to us from the Merrimack County Conservation District in the Family Activity Center along with seed planting, decorating Shaker-style seed packets, some garden-themed stories, and my composting worms, among other things. Attendance could have been higher but attendance is usually a bell-curve anway. We finished the day with a wonderful barn dance in our brandy-new (and gorgeous) Garden Barn -- a reconstructed version of the 1828 post & beam barn that used to stand there (it even uses most of the original foundation). We had Two Fiddles from up the road with us doing the calling & fiddling & the bugs weren't bad at all!

I came home to find a beautiful white 5 1/2 lb. Cormo fleece with my name on it -- an early birthday present from Laura, Doug, and Pat who, (lucky ducks) got to spend the day at the NH Sheep & Wool Festival. I have long wanted a nice fleece to process all the way through (i.e. no vegetable matter, second cuts, etc.) and this is it!

Oh right, one other thing....silly me....last night I met Laura at the Elegant Ewe in Concord because they were having a bookbookbook signing with none other than Stephanie the Yarn Harlot. And she knew people who knew Laura & seven of us ended up going to dinner with her! She really is quite funny...lots of Canadian humour! Heeheehee!

My first!

2005-05-11T20:35:00.000-04:00

Liz at Pocket Farm just tagged me with my very first meme ever (see below!). Sorry it's taken me so long to get to it...the Museum opens on Saturday and things are a wee bit crazy these days. But I had to get online tonight because Laura just signed us up for DSL and put in a wireless network in the house. So here I am in my room with my laptop! Today was so nice outside...tonight I have my window open for the first time this spring & all the nice spring smells are wafting in!

The chickies are doing fine. Here is a picture taken on the first or second day we had them. They have since moved on to slightly larger quarters (an old guinea pig cage) and are growing rapidly!

Anyway here is the meme; Funny how so many of Liz's answers are similar to what I would say...I'll try to be original! The Rules: Pick 5 of the following and then complete the sentences:

If I could be a scientist…
If I could be a farmer…
If I could be a musician…
If I could be a doctor…
If I could be a painter…
If I could be a gardener…
If I could be a missionary…
If I could be a chef…
If I could be an architect…
If I could be a linguist…
If I could be a psychologist…
If I could be a librarian…
If I could be an athlete…
If I could be a lawyer…
If I could be an inn-keeper…
If I could be a professor…
If I could be a writer…
If I could be a llama-rider…
If I could be a bonnie pirate…
If I could be an astronaut…
If I could be a world famous blogger…
If I could be a justice on any one court in the world…
If I could be married to any current famous political figure…

The answers ....

1. If I could be a painter...Gosh, I wish I could be a painter. I love colors. I go on these little art kicks from time to time and make a big mess, but never like what I do. I would love to have the dedication & patience to keep a watercolor nature journal! I guess I'll stick to fiber as my art form...

2. If I could be a gardener/farmer...I would love to support myself as a fiber artist/teacher/organic farmer, something like what Deb & Rickie do at Seeds of Solidarity I would grow enough to to sell at our town's farmer's market as well as be a regular supplier for the Concord Food Co-Op. Someday I'll make the big jump & do it...

3. If I could be a justice on any one court in the world…A certain close-to-home world leader and all his corporate cronies would be put away for life for their crimes against humanity & the environment. Enough said.

4. If I could be a librarian…I would keep a special shelf of "Sarah Recommends" for the books listed at the right (scroll down to "must reads").

5. If I could be an architect...My houses would be like Liz the Architect's...small, clustered, efficient & blending in with and causing minimal interruption to their landscapes. Treehouses anyone?

Whew, I did it! Thanks Liz! I don't know who to tag next, but if you read this and want to play, consider yourself tagged!

And speaking of bitter...I live less than 10 miles from the NH Sheep & Wool festival this weekend and I can't go because of the aformentioned museum opening. And its my birthday. Harumph...

Babies!

2005-05-04T19:06:00.000-04:00

The chicks have arrived! All 12 little fluff balls are very well & enjoying their box with heat lamp. I left my camera at work, but will post pictures ASAP. The cats very much wish to be let into the room with the chicks....I don't think so, guys.

Not much time to knit lately, but I have been working diligently on the purple cotton/tencel lace tank-top (again, will post a picture soon). I went to see an old friend from high school and her baby on Monday and corrupted her (the mom, not the baby) into learning how to knit, which she picked up very quickly. I did warn her of the dark path she was headed down and the eventual lack of storage space due to wool accumulation....I don't think she gets it yet. Ha, she'll see.

Abbey (who is climbing on me and demanding to be introduced to the chickies) says "hi" and I say have a great week!

A weekend off!

2005-04-23T11:18:00.000-04:00

Even though it's raining....at least I'm not working a 6-day week again! Time to help clean up the house, do my laundry, actually knit (!), bake some bread, and start some more seeds inside!

Last weekend I had Sunday off and went up to the beaver pond behind the house and saw adult Eastern spotted newts swimming around in the water. Newts have a "teenage" or eft phase in which they are terrestrial, but as adults return to the water for the rest of their lives. I've seen tons of the little orange efts, but never the adults in the water before (they are olive green with orange bellies). It was very cool!

Things have been just as crazy at work this week as I thought they would be, mostly because I was made the Village's new webmaster (after a 5-hour informal training session last Friday with our computer consultant and a copy of Dreamweaver for Dummies) and spent most of the week making long, long overdue updates to our website. This new duty is really hilarious because I have NO web experience (NONE!) other than this blog! At least I don't have to deal with design because the page already exists, only update the content. If you are at all interested in what is going on at Canterbury Shaker Village during our 2005 season it is now all online!

Meanwhile, I was trying to find enough time to plan for our April vacation program (which is still no where near planned and it starts on Monday...ha, ha, haaaaa). And I have been doing my share of procrastination by knitting. I started a (gasp!) cotton lacy tank-top. And earlier in the week I did finish one little project for a friend of mine at work who is due with her first child in May:

These felted cuties are from a Fiber Trends pattern and are a really fun project to knit for the little people in you life! And finally, check out the daffodils & tulips in full bloom.....ah, spring :)

Crunch time...

2005-04-13T20:00:00.000-04:00

Seems like I haven't posted in a while and I apologize in advance if my posts are more infrequent in the next couple of weeks -- the Museum opens for the season one month from tomorrow and I am feeling quite overwhelmed! I am trying to keep up with those blogs I love to read -- everyone's sprouting seeds, ice-free ponds, and finished projects are a joy to hear about -- I'll try to post coherent comments when I can!

This weekend I did manage to get a new compost bin built and introduce some of the worms to their new home, as well as get some tomato & pepper seeds started! Weaving class is going really well -- most of us finished our samplers last night, then Pam took us on a nice trip around the shop showing us all the nice things we can make our final project out of. I chose a really gorgeous hand-dyed rayon (colorway is called "All Hallows Eve") with eggplant, rust, hunter green, black, and a bunch of other very warm colors. Here's hoping it will make a nice drapey shawl or wrap!

And today was also the first time this spring I've heard the woodfrogs calling -- down on the back trail behind the Visitor Center at work. I had a bunch of kids with me down there this afternoon, and they were having a hard time being quiet enough to hear them! After work I went back down, but by then I think it was too cold or something because I didn't hear them at all! It was a lovely evening, though, and a nice reprieve from the daily grind.

MUCH BIGGER NIGHT!!!!!

2005-04-08T19:59:00.000-04:00

Hurray!! Last night was definitely a Big Night for our amphibian friends! I got the biggest dose of spotted salamander I've ever had & it'll take me a while to come down off the high...

So how about this Beauty?

It started raining around 8:30 and by 10:00 it was still in the high 40's temp-wise, so Laura and I went off down the driveway with our raincoats & flashlights. Our first encounter was with a nice wood frog, then a very small frog (later determined to be a gray tree frog). At the end of the driveway Laura found the first Ambystoma maculatum (spotted salamander) who was headed across the road. We walked about a third of a mile down the road and over the next 1 1/2 hours helped a grand total of 14 spotted salamanders, approx. 20 wood frogs, several peepers (Hyla crucifer) and two green frogs cross the road and be on their merry way! Strong little wiggly slimy things...I love it!! Perhaps we'll find their vernal pool one of these days...

Oh, and we could definitely tell the difference between the female salamanders and wood frogs (fat with eggs) and male salamanders and woodfrogs (skinny). Some of the salamanders were at least 7 inches long! Laura took a lot of pictures -- see her blog for more. Unfortunately there were some casualties in the road -- we found 3 spotties and 2 wood frogs that didn't make it, somewhat spoiling my otherwise utter elation!

In pre-school this morning, we went down to one of the pools at the Village but we were unable to find any evidence of amphibian activity. I'll keep checking. Tomorrow night I'm headed down to Ipswich Riverto help out with their "It's the Big Night" program which we developed last year. I get to dress up as a blue-spotted salamander (Ambystoma laterale) and teach people about amphibian life cycles.

That's it for now -- listen for peepers & enjoy this fabulous time of year!!!!

How sweet it is...

2005-04-05T19:18:00.000-04:00

The sap stopped running near the end of last week, so last Saturday & Sunday were sap to syrup days! From the total 7 gallons of sap collected, I think I got about 30 fl. oz. of syrup! Yum, yum, yum! More taps & outside boiling infrastructure next year?

My six weeks were up on the lichen (Mammulata umbilicaria) dyepot, so Sunday I uncovered it and tried it out...this is the third time I've had a go at this, I think, and this batch seems much more purple! The two skeins on the left here are homespun and the one on the right is another Knitpicks sockweight merino skein.

Oh! And what's this? Could it be a finished Kimono shawl? Woohoo!!

And lastly, cats are crazy, just in case you didn't know already. Stir crazy, I think, because it rained all weekend and they didn't want to go outside and muss their fur. Not only have they been waking me up at 5:00 am to walk on my face, but Saturday morning I heard breaking glass somewhere in the house (we've become accustomed to bangs and crashes and thumps due to kitten activity, but breaking glass was a new one). So I checked around...nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the dining room...was I hearing things? Eventually I found a hand mirror that usually sits on the counter in my bathroom shattered in the toilet. How did they do that, we ask? I can only imagine someone was scooting across the counter and rode the mirror like an airborne snowboard into the toilet (the only upshot to the story was that it prompted me to clean the entire bathroom after I had to reach into the toilet to fish out the broken glass). But that's not all, folks! Later Twilly was apprehended carrying my contact lens case in her mouth. I replaced it on the bathroom counter but later found it on the couch. And Twilly also nabbed a Sharpie marker, a toothbrush, a highlighter, and then one of Laura's drop spindles, all of which she carried around in her mouth for a while. I should have taken the spindle away sooner, but it made a great picture:

And Abbey sends her love by walking on the keyboard (qadwdkfhjklhrekjhww). Thanks Abbey.

BIG NIGHT!!

2005-04-04T17:13:00.000-04:00

I think Saturday night was an amphibian Big Night! It was relatively warm and really rainy -- I went to a dinner party with a bunch of people from work at one of our volunteer's houses and my drive home around midnight was one of those hellish drives where your every move is to avoid the copious frogs in the road. Casualties galore. I didn't see any salamanders, but then again, the spotties are black and the road is black....I don't want to think about it. No signs of any salamanders around the vernal pools at work today, though, so maybe only the frogs moved. They usually come out first, anyway.

Great poem

2005-04-03T12:45:00.000-04:00

"A Paper Mill near German-Town doth stand,
So that the Flax, which first springs from the Land,
First Flax, then Yarn, and then they must begin,
To weave the same, which they took pains to spin.
Also, when on our backs it is well worn,
Some of the same remains Ragged and Torn;
Then of those Rags our Paper is made,
Which in process of time doth waste and fade;
So what comes from the Earth, appeareth plain,
The same in Time returns to the Earth again."

Poem by Richard Frame; Printed by William Bradford in 1692 in his"A Short Description of Pennsylvania." Someone at work asked me to look up internet sources on how to process flax and this was on one of the pages. Those people had it goin' on....none of this throw-away society stuff.

It's melting, it's melting!

2005-03-30T18:15:00.000-05:00

Today it topped 50 degrees outside -- could someone write me a note so I don't have to go to work on the next day like this? I did leave work an hour early today & raced home to maximize my outside time! There was a roaring noise coming from the normally little stream to the east of the house, and indeed it is nearly overflowing its banks:

I collected the sap (about a gallon) and sat outside with the cats for a while, but as soon as the sun set it got very cold, so here I am blogging. Abbey, for whom we nearly had to call in the fire department for a rescue mission, is loving this outside thing:

Our animal neighbors are starting to show themselves, too -- I startled a sweet little possum last night when I drove in the driveway, a bear has ripped off one of our birdfeeders, and several deer were out browsing in the field this morning. Still no "Big Night" for amphibians that I know of, but they had one in Massachusetts on Monday night, so it should be soon!

The picture in the last entry of the Flower Basket Shawl was so dark -- I deleted it and meant to re-take it right away, but then I went to Cape Cod for the weekend to visit my Grandpa and ended up finishing the shawl while I was there! So here is a bright enough picture of the finished & blocked FBS:

Laura & I started our 8-week weaving course last night at the Fiber Studio. The first project is a sampler of sorts, so we warped our looms with 2 yards of cotton carpet warp to make a 10-inch wide piece. The warping instruction was what I was really looking forward to because I have had several disastrous warping experiences. The way Pam showed us how to do it made it all much, much neater! Next week we start weaving!

Spring has Sprung!

2005-03-23T20:30:00.000-05:00

The sugar maples are tapped (only 6 taps in all) and I have been getting about a third of a gallon of sap per day from each. I think since the trees are deep in the woods they don't get the chance to warm up very much each day, hence the low output. But it has been in the 4o's every day this week -- yesterday when it was so nice I escaped my office and walked around one of the ponds to be sure the trail would be clear enough for my homeschool programs today. I saw five deer walking out on the ice and also found a vernal pool that I hadn't known about before. The crocuses are popping up by the deck here at home (see Laura's pictures), the birds are singing, it smells like spring and the driveway is a muddy mess! IT'S WONDERFUL! (I staunchly refuse to allow a certain storm, supposedly arriving tonight and threatening 2-4 inches of That White Stuff, to ruin my happy spring mood).

Twilly & Abbey are recovering nicely from their surgeries last week and are delighted to learn that the world isn't always going to be winter. Abbey caught (and killed) her first mouse the other day and was so proud of her clever little self that she paraded and flipped it around the house for a long time until Mommy took it away less it end up decomposing under the couch and stinking up the livingroom. Two days later Clever Abbey found her mouse-cicle outside in the snowbank/garden where I had tossed it and brought it back in. When it later surfaced in Laura's room, she added it to the compost heap. Mouse has not been heard from since.

Dana at work is just back from Paris -- her family went to visit her oldest daughter who is studying abroad there! She was so sweet to bring me four balls of super-soft heathery-mauve fingering wool yarn, which I found in a bag on my desk this afternoon. She sure knows how to pick the souveniers! I can't wait to hear about her adventurous trip -- I had 2 groups of homeschoolers for sugar maple programs today and was decidedly not in the office between 9 and 4:30 and didn't get to say more than "hi-bye!"

Even though the Kimono shawl is almost done...only one more ball of yarn to go, I can't bear to stop working on the Flower Basket shawl to finish it. The FBS is made with some of that KnitPicks sockweight merino that I dyed a few weeks ago. Laura convinced me that the colorway isn't as horrible as I thought (greens, purples and dark pinks). I really liked it in skein form, but when I unwound it (as is usually the case for me with multicolored yarn in skein form) I didn't like it as much. But now it's growing on me again, I think. The first try on this shawl was with the Alpaca Cloud (also from Knitpicks), but I quickly abandoned that idea...has anyone else found Alpaca Cloud to be extremely slippery and hard to work with or is it just me?

The Avocado Disaster yarn has been overdyed with indigo and does not stink anymore. Liz received her Majacraft bobbins and rock tripe lichen (Umbilicaria mammulata) for dyeing. The lichen came from a huge series of granite rock outcroppings at my mom's house -- it is by no means rare there, so fewer qualms about harvesting since lichens are so slow growing. To prepare the dyebath, lichens dried, crushed and soaked in household ammonia for 4-6 weeks. Then the solids are strained out and yarn is simmered in the liquid, which can be diluted somewhat with water. The dyebath will produce reddish brown to magenta to lavendery purple. Check out Karen Casselman's book Lichen Dyes to learn more about it.

Oh, and finally, this isn't anything new, but AARRGGHH!!! at all things Bush Administration (I'm listening to NPR and getting a bit worked up, as I inevitably do when I hear the sound of Georgie's voice. Please excuse me.)

The Great Avocado Disaster

2005-03-16T19:40:00.000-05:00

Twilly & Abbey went to the vet yesterday to be spayed while Mena and Asterix enjoyed a peaceful reprieve from the otherwise non-stop action. I went in and picked them up this morning -- when I walked into the vet's office I could hear "yeeeooow, yeeeeoooow, yeeeeoooow" coming from the depths of the building -- Abbey the free spirit was not happy about being caged overnight. The pitiful noise continued all the way back home until they were released from their carriers in the living room. This evening Twilly is a bit lethargic and Abbey, who is begging attention by purring, alternately rolling over to have her little shaved belly scratched and walking all over the keyboard, says she's FINE. I somewhat regret that her genes will never be passed on!

Liz at Pocket Farm has been experimenting with natural dyeing -- go check out her results with onion skins! And because I am a terrible enabler, I sent her a surprise! Once she receives it, I'll post on what it was....

And now (drum roll, please) the reason for the title of today's entry. Since Liz has been dyeing and I have been reading about it, I, of course, had to get in on the action and decided this evening to finally try the avocado dye (featured in the Fall 2002 Spin-Off) which I have been eating guacamole and saving pits and peels for forever.

Too long, as it turns out. Did I follow the directions? Oops, well, um, noooo.....Upon re-reading the article, I found that the recommended procedure involves chopping the peels and pits and preserving them by soaking them in water for a few weeks before making the dyebath, occasionally boiling them to release the color and kill any mold. The directions DID NOT, unfortunately, recommend to put the pits and peels in the freezer (because it might preserve them longer), then soak them in water for several hot summer months, then leave them outside for most of the fall and winter to freeze again, then bring them in and essentially leave them to putrify for another few weeks before making the dyebath. I meant to get to it sooner, I really did. But I tried it this evening anyway, just in case...

Suffice it to say the whole project was a complete bust. It smelled SOOOO bad (the whole kitchen and my hands still stink). The dyebath was a pale orangey-brown, not the vibrant red promised in the article. The cats vacated the area. With head hung and breath held, I washed the tea-colored yarn several times to get out the stink. I should be arrested for abusing a fine merino sockweight by subjecting it to a horrible, nasty, stinky failure of a dyebath. At least I can overdye the yarn with something else...indigo maybe? This is surely my punishment for attempting a dyeing project alone while Laura (who is at archaeology lab night) and other fiber artists in general were not present.

I still really love the idea of an avocado dye, so maybe I'll try again and be a little more careful this time.

10 days & counting...

2005-03-10T21:48:00.000-05:00

I'm getting a little tired of this....it has been so cold and snowy in the last couple of days and everyone except the cats seems to have a sniffly cold... And windy! You wouldn't believe how much snow comes in under the doors and through the window cracks in the old, old buildings at the Village! But I shouldn't complain -- the early signs of spring are definitely here -- sap has been running in the maples (well not in the last 4 days, but last weekend at least) and at IRWS the red-wing blackbirds are back and were making quite a racket when I was there on Sunday for the first maple sugaring tours! I thought it would liven things up a bit, too, to have our pre-schoolers plant seeds tomorrow that we can watch them grow for the rest of our six-week session!

I did a spinning presentation this morning for 3 classes of first graders at the school I used to work at...we read Charlie Needs a Cloak and they watched me card, spin on a drop spindle and my wheel. They were all so excited! I love it when they raise their hands to ask a question and end up telling a long (if somewhat confusing) story about someone they know or something they saw that somehow relates to what we are talking about -- it all makes perfect sense in their heads and they want to share!!

No progress on Laura's Aran sweater, a bit of progress on the Kimono shawl (I am so determined to finish it...only 2 balls of yarn to go!), and I will admit that I got a copy of Interweave Knits Summer 2004 issue because of Nancy Bush's Madli Shawl (Estonian lace) ...which I suppose I also have to admit to starting (as a scarf) with some of the Knitpicks white sockweight. The border went fine, but I think I am I just really dense when it comes to the main section of the pattern because I messed it up so many times...

Oh, and check out what Laura, Doug & I did last weekend....Laura is famous! She even taught the reporter how to spin!

Last night I was talking to John on the phone and ventured out to the as-of-yet-unrented apartment that is attached to the house to check on my worms. They (in their worm box, of course) have been living in the apartment bathroom for the winter because they had a near-miss freezing accident when I forgot to move them off the porch in the fall. Anyway, I went into the bathroom and discovered that sometime in the recent past (I don't check on them all that often -- they're pretty low maintenance) there was an Escape. I don't know why or how, but probably about 50 of the little buggers got out of the worm box, made down onto the tile and promptly shriveled up and died. Not just that, but the bottom pan of the worm bin was rather full of worms -- they must have migrated down there to look for food. So I had to hang up on John, and spend the next 15 minutes scooping handfuls of muddy worms (some quite small) back up to the proper bin level, feed them, and pray for spring so I can empty about 2/3 of the box into the big outside compost bin to start a worm colony there and give those in the box a little more breathing room. I think the worm composting box will be going to work with me for the summer for kids to throw in their apple cores and maybe start to think that worms are pretty cool little dudes after all....Poor John, though...I don't think he ever thought he would have a girlfriend that would have to hang up on him to go deal with a "worm crisis"!

And finally, I received a package in the mail a couple of days ago from the shelter where I adopted Twilly and Abbey. Twilly had been a stray that had only been there for 3 days, but Abbey had been born there because her pregnant mother had been brought in. Anyway, a worker at the shelter took pictures of the litter of kittens from Day One and assembled a little album that she sent to me -- Abbey's baby pictures! Isn't that the nicest thing?

Camp pictures!

2005-03-02T18:51:00.000-05:00

What a week! I am completely blown away by the enthusiasm, energy & creativity of the kids I had for my fiber arts vacation camp at the Village this week. They spun, wove, knitted & dyed some really amazing stuff. These kids remind me why I love teaching! Here are some pictures of the highlights!

Sam at the spinning wheel:

Jordyn at the floor loom:

Rebecca & Anne at the tapestry loom:

Several very focused knitters:

And the jars of Kool Aid dye (I forgot to take a picture of the finished yarn...oops):

No camp today...

2005-03-01T00:15:00.000-05:00

I hadn't anticipated having the time to write this week due to my vacation program at work, but unfortunately, today we are bombarded with another major snowstorm and camp is cancelled. This is a picture out the upstairs deck sliding door:

Yesterday was quite nice -- only three kids were there so they didn't have to fight over the available wheels (which I introduced after they were reasonably competent with hook spinning and drop spindles -- I personally think wheels are easier, but I've found that kids REALLY want to jump right to the wheel and then end up getting really frustrated because it goes too fast). Tomorrow we weave and I will post some photos then.

Anyway, on Sunday Laura was upset about being a grownup, so as happens in this house when someone is upset, we dyed wool. This time we used pro-chem dye and made stock solutions of red, blue, purple, black, yellow & jade green, then did some mixing, applied the dye, wrapped, steamed, cooled, etc. We employed Laurie's (of Yarn Harlot fame) technique of stuffing roving into an old pair of nylons to keep it from moving during the dye process, which worked very well. This was the first time I've used chemical dyes other than KoolAid and I like the results (bright!), though it isn't nearly as much fun as indigo or lichen or onions or any of those! And until I get a better idea of what I'm doing, these results are entirely non-reproducible -- I had no idea what they would look like when I sloppily applied the dye. Shown here are 440 yards of sockweight merino (recent Knitpicks transgression) dyed mostly green with a shot of magenta -- do I see a small lacy shawl?! Next up is light-weight yarn spun from dyed roving which you see here wound on the ballwinder to show the colors (sort of!). The piece of roving that this yarn was made from went from orange to red to pinky purple to pale blue to dark green to lime. I split it in half, spun two bobbins of singles, trying to make each length of each color on each bobbin about the same, then plied them so that colors matched as much as possible so that the finished yarn goes from orange through the above mentioned color sequence to green...kind of like Noro yarn. The roving on the right is mostly blue/eggplant and rusty orange/red!

The Saga Begins...

2005-02-24T20:20:00.000-05:00

Hurray! The Sweater has been started! But first, background info on this project is in order: Last year before Laura moved to NH and bought this house, she looked at her stash and realized she had gone a little overboard with buying fleeces (but really, who can blame her?) So with the impending move, she washed a bunch of fleeces and sent them off to be made into roving. Boxes and boxes and boxes of roving came back (much to the delight of the kittens when they discovered them recently...) There was one box of nice soft gray roving and I convinced her to let me spin some if I promised to make something for her, namely, a sweater. So I've been spinning this stuff on and off for a while now. No pattern had been decided upon other than that she wanted a "cabley" aran. Around Christmas she bought Elsebeth Lavold's Viking Patterns book, and as she probably mentioned in her blog, I latched onto it and made her a hat (seen below as modeled by the charming Asterix), ostensibly to serve as a swatch for The Sweater (I would definitely recommend the hat-as-swatch-for-sweater method because it's less boring than making a square).

So the other day I decided that I had been looking at the basket of yarn (8 skeins total minus one for the hat) for long enough (plus I was afraid that a Certain Kitten

who hasn't been so great about using her litterbox lately might take too much of an interest in said basket of yarn) and started it. It is a combination of designs from Viking Patterns, "Ragna" (pg. 54) and the Lattice Cable Pullover (pg. 39) in Kristin Nicholas' Knitting Beautiful Classics. The Sweater back has (and front will have) seed stitch on the side then a little twisty cable, then one of the Ragna cables (as seen on the hat above), another little twisty cable, then the lattice braid in the center, twisty cable, Ragna, twisty cable, seed stitch. I am pretty happy with it so far and have about two pattern repeats done (16 rows each). At this point it seems either big enough or too big, in which case she can wear it as the outer layer because there ain't no way I'm taking it out now:

And my Knit Picks order arrived today...merino.... alpaca.... mmmm...

In other news, last weekend Laura and I finally went to the used bookshop in town and it was truly amazing -- John was up here on Sunday and I had to go again just to take him to see it! In terms of absolute numbers of titles, I'm sure they have at least ten times that of Borders -- the place is a two story barn & just jam-packed with books. Some of the sections were so obscure yet so extensive -- like whole shelves on different European, Asian & African countries, for example, and a shelf for each US state...and in the nature & animals aisle, whole sections on elephants and kangaroos. And they have great really old-old books, too -- like nineteenth century botany books with those amazingly intricate engraved illustrations. John was impressed with the Sci-Fi section and found himself a comic rendition of The Empire Strikes Back from 1980. I found a copy of The Goat in the Rug. It's really worth the trip if you live in New England.

At work I am getting ready for my kiddo vacation camp program that starts on Monday -- a whole week of fiber arts! I've done weaving & spinning here and there with different programs, but never had the chance for kids to really learn some of the skills, so this is very exciting! Tomorrow's morning pre-school class is the last in the classroom before camp, so then I can start setting up! Pretty much the last major thing I have to do to get ready is haul the small Harrisville loom down from the Spin Shop to the classroom...it's already warped. It's still not too late to register if you know a kid in the greater Concord, NH area that would be interested! Camp pictures & report next week!

I did it!

2005-02-16T09:31:00.000-05:00

The Fiber Studio 2005 Spring-Summer class schedule came in the mail this morning. The first class listed is an 8-week evening class on weaving on 4-harness looms. I know the basics of weaving and have done it before, but have never had a class and tend to make things harder for myself than I should. I want to be a better weaver. So I signed up!

Then there's the knitting. I am getting bored with the Kimono shawl. It seems to be at that stage where it isn't growing, no matter how much I work on it. Nor is the new licheny/rock koigu yarn as interesting as I had hoped with the shawl pattern I am using -- I think I will take it out and lovingly return the koigu to the stash until I can find a more appropriate rock-like pattern. The gansey sampler is coming along quickly. I have only one sleeve, the neck, and finishing left to do, since I sat down and worked on it like a crazed fiend while Laura took Ellie back to school on Sunday, thereby making me a poor knit-along partner since I am now way ahead of her...In any case, I'm setting that one aside for a while, too until she catches up.

So, bolstered by one of Yarn Harlot's commenters who recently told her to embrace starting new projects and not feel guilty about it, I started a new lace scarf last night. See the cover of the Winter 2004 Spin-Off for the pattern (I REALLY like this pattern). I am using some laceweight merino & silk yarn that I spun from roving that came from The Copper Moth -- the color is called "twig" -- a soft brown wool with shots of pale blue/gray silk.

Oh, and I was bad. I finally decided to order from Knit Picks. Of course I had to order more than $30 worth of yarn because then I could get free shipping. SO I ordered 6 hanks of laceweight white merino (a total of 2640 yards!) for dye experiments and three hanks of baby alpaca laceweight in the "autumn" colorway. All of this came out to just over the requisite $30. Knit Picks is an evil stash-building enabler.

In other news, the Sugaring Off tour training at Ipswich River went really well and I am so excited about leading groups there. Such a great place to work (sigh....) If you are in the Topsfield, Mass. area on the weekends of March 5-6, 12-13 or 19-20, come on over to the Sanctuary and sample some syrup!

Laura and I went snowshoeing on Sunday -- it was gorgeous with the heavy wet snow hanging on the trees. We could hear a woodpecker nearby and headed in that direction -- when we got nearer, I could tell which tree it was without seeing the bird because the vibrations in the tree were so loud as I passed it. It felt really neat, too.

John drew me a blue-spotted salamander wearing a hat and knitting a scarf for "Valentine's Day." I really hate Valentine's Day, so the lack of flowers/candy/jewelry from him was great -- he listens sometimes. I gave him a rock -- labradorite.

It's Gansey Time!

2005-02-11T18:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday evening Laura decided to start knitting the sampler Gansey in Knitting Ganseys by Beth Brown-Reinsel. It looked like so much fun, so I decided to try it, too. I have wanted to join a knit-along for a while, but can't find any new ones (haven't looked very hard, probably), so we decided to start our own Gansey Sampler knit-along! Laura was going to design a button today. Have the pattern? Wanna join us?

Let it Snow

2005-02-10T13:01:00.000-05:00

Alright, I know on Sunday when it was so nice I was suggesting that I wish spring would hurry up and get here, but today it is snowing like crazy -- big heavy clumps of snow -- and now I am thinking that I can wait a bit because this will let me go snowshoeing again. And it is pretty. The trees are coated and weighed down with snow and swaying gently in the wind.

I'm also quite pleased because the fates conspired to keep me home from work today -- snow, cancellation of the school where I was supposed to do an outreach program, and my car, alas, is in the shop again. So after intending to stay awake and read (after getting up at 6:30) and deciding not to go to work, I fell sleep for another two hours and woke up again at 9:00 because Laura had made an appointment for the cats (all four of them) to go to the vet and the roads were OK to just cross town. Mena, Twilly and Abbey were loaded into their crates for the ride while Asterix (because he is a dignified person) got to ride in the car sans-crate which he didn't necessarily enjoy, but handled himself well. Abbey was quite displeased with the whole affair. Everyone is well, though when it was Twilly's turn to be examined she thought it would be a fine idea to leap, claws fully extended, and grab hold of my neck to escape the prodding doctor. Ow.

So I got out my Kimono shawl and am about halfway through. OK, finally a picture (and yes, that is Abbey expertly camouflaged against the navy blanket in the background):

And I should probably mention (because this is supposed to be a fiber blog and it was fun) that yesterday I did two fiber arts homeschool programs at work. I had 9 kids in the morning and 5 in the afternoon. We read Charlie Needs a Cloak (these kids are at a much higher reading level, but it's a fun book!) We looked at and felt different types of fiber -- wool, alpaca, silk, angora rabbit, mohair, flax, cotton, qiviut, and golden retriever -- they really liked that part. Then we learned how to card on some wool that was regretably full of vegetable matter and with truly horrible old cards, but they did well. Then we did some spinning on hooks and CD drop spindles and played around on little wooden block looms to make bookmarks/bracelets, 2 tapestry looms and my 4-harness table loom. Oh, and I almost forgot the Kool-Aid dyeing! All the kids got very into what they were doing -- I have one kiddo in the program who has a form of autism and she sat right down to the spinning wheel and figured it out with such record speed and stayed so focused that by the end of the program her mom wanted to buy a spinning wheel because she was so impressed with the apparent theraputic benefit of spinning! Several of the other kids said it was their favorite program so far. It was definitely my favorite, too -- I can't wait for camp in February!

Saturday I am going down to Ipswich River to get trained to be a volunteer guide for their Sugaring Off tours in March. It will be great to see and work with them all again! It will also be good to learn more about maple sugaring so I can possibly tap the big old maples here at the house. In the fall we discovered that they stand in a straight line through the much younger surrounding woods and also found the collapsed remains of the old sugar shack where the farmers boiled (complete with an old sap bucket). It would be nice to start it up again on a smaller scale!

Springy Weekend

2005-02-06T20:45:00.000-05:00

So its only the beginning of February and it has been in the 40's for the last two days -- can we keep it? Yesterday Mom and I had a great day -- we went over to Vermont to a nice little fabric shop that she had heard about. We didn't find any salamander fabric as we had hoped (but plenty of lizards & geckos, but they looked too much like lizards & geckos to bother with) They did, however, have a lovely selection of frog fabrics, so I decided I should have a coat with snippets of different frog fabrics to wear for pond programs and purchased 1/4 yard lengths of several prints. They also had the vegetable prints that I liked from Keepsake Quilting in fat quarter cuts, so I bought carrot, mushroom, asparagus and red pepper prints to make napkins.

Then we went into Bellows Falls and had lunch at a cute little place called the Happy Cat Cafe, which was decked out in cat stuff and had great chocolate chip cookies and black bean burritos. Then back across the river to NH and up to Newport (we decided it was quicker to get back that way), until I remembered there was a yarn shop there that I had heard of but never been to: Hodgepodge Handicrafts (who doesn't appear to have a web page I can link you to). So we found it and it sucked us in and made me buy a whole big bag of white shetland roving, so I can cease to exploit Laura's supply of wool (yeah, that's it...) The shop also had lots of yarns from local farms, consignment knitted things, wheels (Majacraft dealer, for future reference), and lots of roving. The woman who owns it said that the building has been in the family for years as a furniture store and that over the years she has slowly replaced the furniture with yarn. They had a sweet Jack Russell/Sheltie pup named Henry who really liked to tug at my pantlegs...

So then we headed home to tea with Doug and Laura who spent the day painting the apartment. I delved into the new shetland and by bedtime had one skein. I also finished my faux-koigu floppy hat (no picture available -- it's too silly looking). But here is Abbey with the yarn, at least, and one of the completed mittens:

Today flew by way too fast because I slept later than I would have liked, sat around drinking tea and knitting (oh, alright, I started a new project -- a shawl (what else) with the rocky-licheny-colored koigu. I started it using the Fiber Trends landscape shawl pattern with the picot edges, but went immediately to the seed stitch and will continue for quite a while and do some sort of lace inset thing later on -- I don't know yet). But I really wanted to go outside, so I cleaned out my car while the big, predatory Jungle Cat (Abbey) danced around outside in the mud and snow. Twilly, who prefers the quiet life, only ventured out for a bit and not far from the porch (she really wanted to be inside practicing one of her new favorite hobbies, which Laura caught her in the act of recently):

So after all that excitement and a lot of miscellaneous puttering around, I put my spinning wheel out on the porch:

and spun up some more shetland and some of the brown wool that Laura was kind enough to wash for me. It was SO nice outside (please note the lack of socks)...aaaah....but alas, I know it's not the real thing yet.

We took a walk down to the end of the driveway with Mena and Asterix so that we wouldn't feel like complete sloths and then spent some more time on the porch until it got prohibitively cold (the temp dropped really fast!) Now it's tea time & Carl Hiaasen time. Please don't make me go to work tomorrow.

Kick me

2005-02-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

Will someone please?

I have a case of the blahs AND I have been in a bit of a fiber slump. I (gasp) haven't knitted or spun anything for two whole days. This is all Carl Hiaasen's fault...

I am almost done with my faux-koigu floppy hat and then I will go back to the Kimono shawl. I did go to Laura's twined knitting class on Tuesday night because my car was in the shop again and she was my ride. It was really nice to sit around and knit with people, so went to online yesterday and joined the Concord Area Knitting Group that meets at Borders on Sunday afternoons and monthly at the Ewe.

The kittens, (OK, mostly Abbey) have been being exceptionally persistant lately in finding balls of roving and unwinding them all over the living room floor. When I got home last night I found mutilated zip-lock of angora in the dining room. Mind you, these things were up on shelves, supposedly out of reach of said kittens. They're laughing at me, aren't they?

And then I got to work today and someone had taken a BB gun to the big glass windows of the Visitor's Center, shattering four of them. Just what we need.

On the brighter side, last night I made some okay multigrain bread and tried making yogurt again -- it worked this time! Also discovered the joys of reading by lanternlight while sitting in the hot tub. Some sticky clumpy snow fell overnight, coating all tree limbs. It was really beautiful on the drive in to work. Tomorrow Mom and I are going over to Vermont to a quilt shop that specializes in Bali batiks. The plan is to find one with salamanders or lizards that could pass for them.

Overload

2005-01-31T17:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday John & I went down to Boston to the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. Suffice it to say it was a rock, plant and archaeology geek's playground...

The best parts? Well, there were two best parts....the glass flowers exhibit-- 4,400 glass pieces representing over 800 plant species created by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (this exhibit is worth the trip alone!). I had no idea ahead of time what this collection was about -- I was expecting just ho-hum modern glass flower art. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. These are incredibly realistic reproductions of plants made specifically for botanical study. We walked in and stood there in stunned amazement: "They're glass?" "They don't look like glass!" "It says they're glass!" "No, they can't be glass!" "But it says they're glass!" et cetera, until the very nice docent interrupted us and assured us that they are all, in fact, glass (mostly painted with enamel). Glass goldenrod, glass mountain laurel, glass rhododendron, lupines, red maple (in fall color), asters, figs, water lilies, hazlenut, willow, delphinium, clematis, pitcher plant, a FANTASTIC Oncidium tigrinum orchid, lady slipper orchids, irises, sedges, and on and on and on. Wow!

The other best part was the Hall of Minerals with over 5,000 mineral specimens. Poor, poor John, (but he tolerates me). "Ooh, come look at this one!" "Oh, John, check this one out!" (I think he was actually pretty amazed, too.) I was struck by how much some of them look like living lichens and molds. I didn't take any pictures, but just as an example, check out these azurite nodules on another rock. Doesn't it look alive?

Also cool were the textiles in the Peabody and a bunch of ancient Central American ceramic spindle whorls with "images of warriors" etched on them...

Lions & Lambs...

2005-01-25T18:50:00.000-05:00

Thanks for the title, Laura!

Doug came over for dinner last night and brought the sheep rug & stuffed sheep that Marie gave him for birthday/Christmas. Abbey & Twilly took an immediate liking to both. How cute is this?

Then Twilly decided to model the single mittens I have done recently in an effort to get Mommy to actually finish a project:

No more indigo dyeing done last night...but Doug was kind enough to show us the fruits of his labor from the silk workshop he went to over the weekend in Vermont. Yum!

Snow, etc.

2005-01-24T19:35:00.000-05:00

So it has finally decided to be winter in New England. Saturday & Sunday's storm dropped around 16 inches of the fluffy stuff in Henniker. I need to contact the Cape relatives and see how they fared -- 3 feet down there I heard. Yesterday I shoveled. And shoveled. And shoveled some more. And it's really cold still, too. I had hoped to go out snowshoeing yesterday but the wind was whipping around so much I decided to stay in. I made bread, pugilese, out of the Bread Bible (it's the one on the cover -- yum!), worked on the Kimono shawl (picture soon, I promise) and did a silly Viking braid-cuffed mitten out of some of the indigo-dyed yarn from last week. I started up the indigo vat again and did a bunch more yarn for Laura -- this batch came out much deeper blue. Doug is coming over for dinner tonight and he has been advised to bring yarn to "indigofy." That vat just keeps going and going! I also started a new batch of rock-tripe lichen -- should be ready to make purple at the end of February/early March.

Saturday night was the SCRAP party at the State Library. Good to see lots of people -- Travis was back from Iraq and Pat & Kurt came down from Jefferson even though one of the goats (cashmere!) had two kids on Saturday morning, male & female named Paris & Twilla, respectively. A good (and cold) time was had by all.

This morning there were turkeys in the driveway again -- one of them flew up to the top of one of the big pine trees on the far side of the field. I think they must fly like that huge new European airplaine -- way too heavy to be up in the air. Gravity doesn't work like that.

Blue, Blue, Blue!

2005-01-17T01:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah, yeah, its been a week. The Saved Loom continues to reside in the Farmstand. We meant to move it into the Horse Barn this week, really we did. What a week. Snow, ice, rain, sleet, ice. One of the pre-schoolers asked me if we could go out to see the river (what river?) and I finally figured out he meant the river of meltwater running in the ditch down the side of the road. In any case, definitely not good snowshoeing conditions anymore....

So what to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon? How about an indigo vat? Splendid idea, Laura! (She had all the stuff, but let me do it). This was my first try with indigo (well, second try. The first try was also today and I stirred it way too much and got way too much air in. The second go was much more successful) and I am stunned! It actually came out blue! The best part is watching the yellow-green to blue oxidation reaction....swoooosh -- magic! You can kind of see it in this picture:

This is the second-coolest dye bath I have ever done (rock tripe lichen -- purple! -- remains by far the best) Today there were 9 skeins in all. Three commercially spun cheapies, one alpaca/wool blend that I bought at the Henniker Farmer's Market last summer, two very smooth merino-ish (I don't remember what exactly) skeins that I spun a while ago, one of the gray skeins previously destined for Laura's sweater (and no, she doesn't want it blue after all) and two small skeins, possibly Icelandic, that she spun this afternoon (shortly before leaving to take Ellie back to school). They have been washed & rinsed in vinegar water and are currently drip drying (onto cardboard) in the kitchen:

Aren't they pretty?

SIDEBAR & CAT UPDATE: You may have noticed that Twilly is invading this picture -- kittens & yarn continue not to mix so well, sweetie pies that they are. They want to help, learn, become great fiber artists, but they need to discipline themselves a bit. Yesterday while winding warp for my table loom they were decidedly unhelpful. Today I'll be surprised if they don't wind up with blue spots for all the interest they took in the dripping indigo skeins. AND Abbey killed my orchid this morning -- first she knocked it over, (and I righted it -- "bad kitty") and shortly thereafter she jogged into the livingroom proudly carrying the severed flower stalk in her mouth. Cute but not funny. In an attempt at distraction, I found them a scratching post with yellow spring-loaded pom-pom on top at the Swap Shop at the dump (it doesn't smell). They had fun beating that up, especially once catnip had been sprinkled liberally. Better that than my foot.

IN OTHER NEWS, yesterday I received my very own copy of (drool) The Lichens of North America which I have been lusting after for some time (10 points for John). The Christmas tree came down (on purpose, not due to the kittens -- lucky for them -- can you believe they only broke one ornament over the entire holiday season?) There were over 20 turkeys in the yard/driveway again yesterday. The Kimono shawl continues to grow -- I am about 1/3 of the way through it. No picture yet. Nana called from Illinois to tell me that they have a new peekapoo puppy named Megan -- "Meggie." It weighs a pound and a half. "Dog" we ask? That's smaller than Abbey...

Rescue Mission Accomplished!

2005-01-08T22:25:00.000-05:00

2:30 on Friday. The call comes in: couple moving. House closing on Friday. Situation, dire: one 48" 8-harness Macomber loom to be chopped into bits and carted off to the dump (GASP!) or donated to the Village if we can pick it up on Saturday morning. "It's really big," she said.

Friday evening. Loom Rescue Team formed on behalf of fiber artists everywhere.

9:15 Saturday morning. Braving predictions of more snow, the Rescue Team set out with Mapquest paper, tools for disassembly & blankets for wrapping and soon arrived in a suburb of the lovely city of Concord. Upon entering the house the Rescue Team could hear the small peeping "Save me! Save me!"from the loom in the basement (the basement!) It was alone, scared, and clearly ready to find a permanent, loving home having been made in Saugus, MA, moved to Newfoundland, then Maine, then the Concord suburbs and *never used*.

10:30. Extraction of the loom from the basement. It was heavy. With *some difficulty* the Rescue Team wedged it up and out of the bulkhead. Ouch. Definitely not going to fit in the car.

11:00. En route to Salisbury to Rescue Team Leader's mommy's house to borrow the pickup truck.

11:30. En route back to Concord. It started snowing.

12:00 (Really snowing...) Arrived back in Concord. Loom parts packed into the car & loom hoisted into pickup bed, but because of truck cap, it had to go in sideways and wouldn't clear to wheel wells. So it stuck out a bit...

12:10. The loom is in protective custody (you can breathe now...)

12:30 (Really, really snowing...) Arrived at the Village. Rescue Team leader forgot her keys, but the loom was ecstatic nevertheless as it was unloaded into the barn. A new lease on life!! We'll put it somewhere else (?????) on Monday (did I mention it's really big?)

1:15 (Really, really, really snowing...) Back in Salisbury to return the truck. Tea was served. A pleasant time had by all.

4:30 (Still snowing...) Home sweet home. Mission accomplished. One loom is saved from the flames of hell (or the Concord incinerator).

7:20 (Still snowing??) Evil kittens have taken over the couch, feigning cuteness and sleep, only to get their murderous claws ever closer to my feet. Yup, see....awake. Ouch.

Introducing...

2005-01-05T22:28:00.000-05:00

Twilly & Abbey, Fiends from Hell:

These busy little cats are SO glad to have been adopted by knitters. All that stuff about cats and balls of yarn is true, true, true. Last night Abbey nearly extracted a full skein of Lamb's Pride from Laura's knitting bag and many a fine Brittney knitting needle is now pocked with kitten teeth marks. But they're so cute. Sheesh.

I haven't posted pictures of projects yet but I am currently enamored OF (housemate corrects my grammar) Elsebeth Lavold's Viking Patterns book.

Hello there...

2005-01-05T12:17:00.000-05:00

Regarding the title of this blog, I seem to be obsessed with both.

After 10 days off I'm back to work. I was introduced to blogs, especially Yarn Harlot, over my vacation -- my lovely housemate Laura was reading her posts to me over morning tea. Laura has pictures of my cats (Twilly & Abbey) and a picture of a hat I made a couple of days ago. I'll post pictures of some of the stuff I finished knitting over my vacation when I get home... Fair warning: I'm a major Luddite (and proud of it), so this will probably be an infrequently updated venture. Frankly, I'd rather be spinning and knitting and out looking for salamanders than writing about it. But on the fiber side, Laura tells me that this will give me incentive to *actually finish* projects. On the salamander side, it might let me keep people posted in the spring when the little guys start waking up and heading to their vernal pools. We'll see.

Meanwhile I should get back to work...I'm planning a fiber camp for kids over February Vacation and fiber arts workshops for the spring.