Pictorial Progress Report...

I still need to paint the little desk for under the window and replace the big black chair with something smaller, and a host of other small details.

Consider the Marmot

This one lives under some boulders in the park down the street.

Lucky to live in the high country

Dawn at Fallen Leaf Lake, near South Lake Tahoe, CA.

Something green

It has been way too long since I have accomplished anything house-wise. Yes, I am pleased to say, I am still offloading an item a day from my cluttered home. Except for travel days, I have been consistently identifying something (or more than one something) every day since January 1st. Funny how my house is still cluttered, but it is getting trickier to identify likely candidates to be evicted from the island. Still, it is high time I got back to home renovation. So, at the prospect of a three-day weekend, I decided it was time to get on with converting my unused home office into a library.

I have been planning to do this ever since I switched to a laptop and started doing any and all word processing in other locations. The office became a place to stack things or to occasionally print something. Winifred Gallagher's interesting book, "House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live" encouraged me to think about how I actually use space daily, and to consider my individual habits and needs. And what I need is more bookshelves and a cozy spot to read, rather than a dysfunctional office that doubles as a guest room for guests that almost never visit. Should someone visit, there is always the trailer. When I envisioned this project, the plan was to move the filing cabinet and all the computer peripherals into the closet (taking off the awkward sliding doors) and have nothing but shelves and chair in the room. Showing how a project can evolve, even before it gets off the ground, I have shifted to 2 large walls of bookshelves, and a small desk under the window on the 3rd wall to eventually house an iMac for photography work.

In keeping with my theme of "technicolor cottage", and particularly inspired by this image on a blog I follow, I decided to paint the room bright lime green with white and ocean blue trim. The choice of green might seem a bit overwhelming, but remember two walls will be covered by tall white bookcases and a third is mostly door and closet.
With this project I decided to experiment with the Behr Premium Plus paint and primer in one. I can report that, to my surprise, even the deep green covered well with just 2 coats. (The buglight yellow bedroom got 4 coats and still could have used another.) However, the white was a pain to work with since it was thicker than ordinary paint alone. And cutting in and rolling overly thick paint onto a ceiling was not a joyful job. I assumed the green was thinner due to the amount of added tint, but the deep blue trim paint was also very thick. Weighing the annoyance of the thick paint against the convenience of just 2 coats on deep colors, next time I'll use regular paint for the ceiling and the primer/paint combo just for the deep color areas.

In the future, I would also avoid painting when it is 95 degrees, 10% humidity, and there is no air conditioning. The paint kept drying on the brush faster than I could get it on the wall and the roller kept shifting in my sweaty hands. On the plus side, stray paint does not stick well to sweaty skin.

As always, I added a few coordinated wood-burned accessories. I'll post more pictures once I have acquired the shelves and set everything up. Incidentally, the white paint splotches on the hardwood floor date from well before I purchased the house - I may not be Michelangelo, but I do use a drop cloth when painting ceilings. I did, however, get the green paint on the outlet and plug. I was also working that weekend and needed to paint without unplugging the wireless router.

Bigfoot lurks...

Really, really cool yarn shop

On my recent visit to Bozeman, MT I visited both yarn shops in the downtown area. This one, Stix, is a total surprise. It would be easy to miss if you didn't see the yarn-bombed basement-stair entry along a side street. You think you are entering a hole-in-the-wall, but the inside space goes on and on around corners into new rooms. The selection is wide, varied and high quality. There are a few local lines available, including a run of patterns called Weezie Wear Designs. There is plenty of comfy seating and even a coffee corner. I never wanted to leave. Yes, I bought stuff.

Another blanket

My knitting efforts of the last few months have been limited to this wedding present for my niece and her intended.

The wedding was last weekend and was absolutely beautiful. It took place in the Dallas Arboretum and the rainy weather held off, providing just a romantic mist.

This blanket is made of two strands of KnitPicks Crayon cotton yarn - just the stuff for Texas dwellers with dog (cool and washable). The narrow stripes of dark rose are a nod to my niece's adoration with the color pink. I intentionally made the log cabin construction asymmetrical to give it a little bit of a modern twist.

Still playing with the iPhone 4 camera

See the larger size file here.

Polarizing

Which of these two pictures do you like best?

Stitches West 2011

I was sidetracked by the new kitty, but here is a belated report for Stitches West:

Allison and I figured we'd avoid some of the crowds and went over to Santa Clara on Wednesday and returned Saturday. The drive over took about 6 and 1/2 hours instead of the usual 4 due to the storm in the Sierras. I've never driven through quite that level of snowstorm, but the brand new tires on the truck did their job and we had no problems. Spring has already sprung in the central valley of California and everything was intense green, with bright yellow wild mustard and pink flowering trees. Silicon Valley looks pretty much like any downtown area and is the land of tiny parking spots. Apparently not many of its denizens drive double-cab-long-bed pickups. Except for Wednesday afternoon, it rained every day, pretty much all day.

I took 2 workshops: Free-form Knitting and The Knitted Rug. Free-Form Knitting was taught by Myra Wood. Here are a couple of pieces she showed us. The technique is pretty easy, but it takes practice to get a nice balanced result. My own sample (no - no picture) kept the person next to me in giggles. Particularly when I suggested adding a tassel to the bit that she said protruded in a less-than-family-friendly way.

The knitted rug workshop was taught by Rose Ann Hunter. She was amazing! She talked about and exhibited a wide variety of folk rugs, and we got to try our hands at creating samples of several. I particularly took to the washboard rugs and have started knitting strips for a small rug to go in Zach's favorite basket.

The Market at Stitches filled up the entire humongous convention hall with more color and fiber and chaos than can be described. And it was totally packed with noisy milling knitters. Total sensory overload. I didn't expect to buy much (since I am still offloading something every day) until I saw in the program that KCL Woods was there. And Ken is now making yarn bowls. And gorgeous spindles with exchangeable shafts. The bowl I purchased is made of mesquite "from 90-year-old Earl's woodpile" in Tucson (my home town) - how could I resist? The only fiber I purchased was a small amount of banana fiber, just because it is kinda cool.


The full collection of trip pictures can be seen here.

It's cold today

Sadie

Meet Sadie, the newest member of the family. Adopted today from the SPCA. Zach is fascinated. Clara is sulking.

On the way back to Reno...

Suisun Bay, CA in the rain.

Up.

Been busy with work, so here is an image from my archives. Virginia City, Nevada, July 5th, 2009.

Another Snakey Box

Before.
After.
Questions?

Some projects fail

A long time ago (but not so far away) I took a fancy to producing my own self-striping yarn. The principle is simple - you dye the yarn in REALLY long skeins so you end up with REALLY long color intervals. I had some slightly-prickly, natural gray, handspun suri alpaca that I thought would make a great pillow for propping my feet on. I wound it into one humongous skein using a warping board, and dyed one end brick red and the other steel blue, leaving gray in the middle. So far so good. Happily I knitted up a swatch. The stripes were not anywhere as wide as I had hoped (apparently you need to use REALLY REALLY long skeins) but the resulting narrow stripes would be attractive. To make a nice sturdy pillow fabric, I marked 20ss by 20 rows with thread, and threw the swatch in the wash with my jeans. The resulting fulled fabric was lovely and the colors didn't fade or run. All still good. I did some calculations for size to fit the pillow insert I already had, and launched into knitting. This is where the project stalled.

It was Boring. Really Boring. The project was shoved to the side over and over in favor of more interesting projects. Even when I did work on it, progress was slow. At times it would sit untouched in its basket for months. I gave up on the idea of ever making a second pillow cover (for which I had planned enough yarn) and finally muscled through to the finish. Production was painful, but at least I would have a really great pillow. At this point my only concern was that the trip through the wash might cause the fabric to shrink unequally with the swatch. Just in case, I threw the rectangle of fabric into the washer before sewing up the sides. As it went round and round in the washer, I dreamed happily of my very superior finished pillow. All the torturous hours of knitting such a small pillow cover would be so worth it!

Then I took the thing out of the wash. Despite the happy results of the swatch, the colors in the pillow cover had all run together into a bruise-colored mess. I cannot describe how awful it looked. (I couldn't even look at it long enough to take pictures.) I have no idea why the dyes in the swatch didn't run under the same conditions. Additionally, the edges had curled up and felted themselves into place in solid little rolls. A sane person would have given up at this point. It took a sharp pair of scissors and several hours of work to tease/tear apart these rolls. In hopes of salvaging the many hours of work, I threw the pillow cover into a vat of dark green dye. You can see from the picture above how far the result is from my initial intentions. I now have a somewhat ugly little pillow to show for all the angst.

At least Zach really likes it.

Three views, one iPhone image

Changes

Tonight, for the first time in 25 years, there was no TV to flip on when I got home. Oh sure, there have been times when I was camping, or I was moving and waiting for the cable to be hooked up, but those were temporary anomalies. Today the cable was switched off for good. (It took Charter an extra couple of weeks and 3 phone calls to make it happen, but it really is off now.) I wasn't sure how I would feel about it.

My first reaction was to, of course, reach for the remote. It's a reflex that has been firmly ingrained ever since remotes were first introduced. An hour later I still found myself unconsciously searching out the thing when I entered the room. That impulse will fade. I began thinking about how television has impacted the way I live.

Someone commented to me recently that the tendency for the workday to be broken up into equal hour or half-hour chunks, with most meetings starting on the hour, results from the prolific use of MS Outlook calendars. I'm inclined to think it has its origins in our television-intensive culture, where we adjust our schedules around "prime time" and the evening news. Everyone expects anything serious to start on the hour and last 60 minutes. (Sadly we have come to expect the lighthearted, funny bits to last only half that time, but that's another discussion.) Tonight I find myself still mentally dividing the evening into hour chunks, even though there is no longer any particular reason to do so.

Every evening I sit in the same spot in the living room, with the TV opposite and the laptop on the coffee table. Various objects, from magazines to craft projects, build up within arms reach. Yet I certainly own more seating than the one couch. Other chairs have occasionally become storage for stacks of misc. objects, as if they needed some other purpose to fulfill their reason for existence. Tonight I am sitting in an armchair usually inhabited by a pile of books and a cat. It faces into the room from the same wall as the TV, and provides a view I have not contemplated for a long time. A good view to contemplate life from. (OK, not everyone is thrilled - the cat is sulking since I am sitting in his chair.) Without being tied to the flickering box, I may start using the geography of my house in new ways.

My first impression was that it is very quiet without the TV. I am so used to it providing a level of background noise, and when it is off, I usually have music going. My second impression is that it is very noisy in my house. I hear the fridge, the furnace, and the ticking clock in the kitchen. Even the computer keys have a clack and rattle to them. From outside I hear the vague rumble of a truck heading up the street. And from behind my head on the back of the chair comes a very quiet constant feline purr (from Clara, not the sulking one). Listening to the house's sounds encourages me to relax in a way that, say, watching a rerun of CSI does not.

Finally, a quick report on my progress towards "less". So far I have managed to keep up my pledge of offloading at least one item per day from my house. My biggest victory so far was to send three televisions to recycling last weekend. It is a sad truth that one of the shameful legacies of the 20th century is the multitudinous millions of tube TVs that will eventually need to be disposed of. I wont even try to explain why I had acquired so many.

Another feature in my simplification efforts was to purchase a set of recycled-glass plates that stack neatly and tightly, and send a cupboard-full of mismatched, unstackable, chipped, and sometimes unmicrowavable, china to the Salvation Army. There was a slight bit of buyer's remorse when I discovered that the new dinner-sized plates don't fit in the dishwasher, but I'll deal with it. Yes, the white fluted plates I grew up with, and the fish plates from Costco, are moving on to other families.

Sorry for such a long post. Without television, I have time to ramble on....

Less

A new year usually comes with expectations of self-renovation. We look at our lives, think of all our past shortcomings, and make plans for amends. In the coming year we will become thinner, smarter, more organized. We will recycle more, eat better, exercise more, pay our bills on time, finish projects, and increase our retirement savings. We put a lot of pressure on the new year to fulfill our fantasies of change.

Aside from the required annual institutional goal-writing at work, I have just one direction in mind for this year: less. In the environmental spirit of the Small House Society, I aim to cut down on my overblown accumulation and archiving of consumer stuff. In the spirit of Thoreau, I aim to live simpler and more deliberately. I want to cut back on the complications that are weighing me down and shattering my focus. No - I do not plan to move to a tiny cabin in the woods. I do plan to offload some of the junk and look carefully at where my small reserves of time and resources are going.

So I offer up the "Emigration Game". For informational purposes only, since I have no plans of emigrating any time soon. Here is how it works: Consider the following scenario: You have decided to move to a small cottage somewhere overseas (or apartment or whatever - just quite a bit smaller than your current space). It is very expensive to move stuff, so you are only taking the items that you most need or care about. You are not planning on returning, so storing the rest is not an option. What would you take? How would you prioritize your list? This is not one of those survival games, so we are not talking about duct tape, a knife and a ball of string. It isn't a list of what-to-put-in-the-car-if-the-range-fire-is-approaching, either. Instead it is a consideration of BOTH your fondest possessions and the useful items needed for a reasonably happy life. We are talking things here. So go ahead and make your list. Then put it aside and come back to it a few days later. Or think about it as you navigate your house. You may surprise yourself. Again, this is for awareness only. I am not advocating getting rid of all the items not on the list. Unless you want to.

Here are the top few items on my list:
- Cats
- trailer (and tow vehicle)
- computer (for images, books, and communication)
- camera
- Traditional and Kiwi spinning wheels
- sufficient knitting tools
- Wood-burning and painting tools

The order (after cats and trailer) changes as my mood shifts. Purely utilitarian stuff falls lower on the list.

So what have I done so far this year in the name of "Less"? Two things: First, I have established a policy of offloading at least one item per day. Throw it away, recycle it, give it away - whatever it takes to get it out of the house. It can be large or small. It doesn't count if I am replacing it with a new version or just emptying the usual trash. Second, I have called and canceled my cable TV. I can still get my favorite shows via download, but I will be freeing myself from the focus-sucking, time-wasting tyranny of never-ending crime show reruns. Yes, I know the TV has an off switch, but I am weak, plus I will be saving almost $700 per year (and I only had "expanded basic").

So less is more for 2011.

Silver-Button Mitts

As a holiday gift to my loyal readers, here is a pattern I have created for fitted mitts that button at the wrists. The cuffs are knitted sideways in garter stitch.

Silver-Button Mitts

Size: Woman's medium (to adjust size you can add extra rows above thumb and/or adjust needle size for slightly different gauge)

Tools:
Gauge: 5ss per inch (or slightly less if very stretchy yarn)
Needles: U.S. size 7 double points
Crochet hook required for button loops
stitch holder or scrap yarn for parking thumb stitches
safety pins to mark button loop locations

Yarn:Approximately 170 yards worsted weight. You can use any yarn that will get the gauge, but make sure it has some stretch (linen would be a bad choice). For my pair I used a strand each of Mirasol Nuna (40% wool/40% silk/20% bamboo) and Punta Yarns Kid Mohair Hand Paint, held together.

Four 3/4inch buttons


Abbreviations:
ss = stitches
k = knit
M1 = Make One increase
ktbl = knit through back loop
ssk = slip slip knit
k2tog = knit two together
p = purl

Pattern:

Cuff:
- cast on 15 stitches
- knit every row until fabric has 30 garter ridges
- cast off all but last stitch

Wrist:
- using the remaining stitch as the first stitch, pick up (along the long edge of the cuff) 1 stitch in each garter ridge. (total 31ss)
- divide stitches across double-pointed needles and join
- Knit 5 rounds

Thumb gusset:
- k1, M1, k13, M1, k3, M1, k13, M1, k1 (35ss)
- knit 2 rounds
- k15, M1, k5, M1, k15 (37ss)
- knit 2 rounds
- k15, M1, k7, M1, k15 (39ss)
- knit 12 rounds

Separate for thumb:
- k16, put 7ss on holder, cast on 3, k16 (35ss)

Palm:
- k16, ktbl 3, k16
- knit 4 rounds
- k14, ssk, k3, k2tog, k14 (33ss)
- knit 1 round
- k1, k2tog, k27, ssk, k1 (31ss)
- k13, ssk, k1, k2tog, k13 (29ss)
- Knit 1 round
- k2tog, k to end (28ss)
- switch to k1,p1 rib and continue for 8 rounds
- cast off in rib (not too tight)

Thumb:

- put stitches from holder onto 2 double-pointed needles
- using a 3rd needle and leaving a 6 inch yarn tail, pick up 5ss along inside of thumb (12ss)
- knit 3 rounds
- change to k1,p1 rib and continue for 8 rounds
- cast off in rib
- use yarn tail to close any gaps appearing at base of thumb

Weave in all ends.

Make a second mitt just like the first.

Now the tricky bit:


Important: The button loops on the left mitt will be attached to the left side of the cuff opening and the loops on the right mitt will be attached to the right side of the cuff opening. (Try on the mitts and this will become apparent.)

- Mark locations along cuff opening for 2 loops using safety pins - 3/4 inch from top and 3/4 inch from bottom of opening.
- starting at bottom of opening, single crochet into edge stitches until you reach the first pin
- make 2 inch single-crochet chain, then attach back to last edge stitch crocheted into (forming button loop), and crochet into edge stitches up to next pin
- make a second 2 inch crochet chain and attach as before. Single crochet up to top of opening
- weave in ends
- Sew on buttons opposite from button loops, 1 inch in from edge of cuff opening.

- Repeat for second mitt, being careful to put the button loops on the opposite edge of the cuff opening (for opposite hand).

Enjoy your toasty-warm mitts and have a happy 2011!