I Don't Know Why This is Harder

I have lots of good memories of my grama, my dad's mom. For whatever reason, it's been a lot harder to put them into words.

So the heck with trying to get this mess to cohere, I'm just going to put down the bits and pieces that come into my head.

The first handknit socks I remember seeing were knit by her for my dad.

When I was a teenager and she and my grampa started taking their camper out to southern California and Arizona for the winter, they pared down their household possessions, and she gave me some things.

One was the orange lustreware tea set I posted about several Januaries ago.

Another was a set of sterling silverware. Between the two, I could set quite a nice little tea party table, and it drives me wild that the phrase has been taken away from the event where the table is covered with an ironed linen cloth, where there is a bunch of sweet violets in a vase, where the crusts are cut off the triangular sandwiches.

She had the most awesome bubbling chuckling laugh. You could never mistake it for anyone else's.

When I was a little girl, we went out to their house a lot. My dad had a garden in their back lot. I remember the smell of the hot sand and the brambles - my own back lot smells like that.

Another reason we went out there was that my dad's mixed-breed hunting dog, a long-legged hound mix called Zip, lived out there until I was about five. (We were renting a house next to a church, and Zip howled when they sang the hymns, so he had to live at Grama and Grampa's.)

For years their dining room was dominated by a spindly orange tree she told me my dad had grown from a seed. There were two great little kid-sized rocking chairs (I have one of them), and we used to sit in them and drink Sprite while the grown-ups talked, after it got too dark and mosquito-y to play outside.

We used to cram their house at Christmas Eve, until there just got to be too many of us to fit. They always had a live tree, a prickly blue spruce, in a huge pot to plant outdoors after Christmas.

I remember my grama doing the newspaper crossword puzzles in ink. I thought that was amazing.

And I miss them both so much.

Let Me 'Splain

No, wait, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Oh, what the heck. It's my blog, I'll explain at length if I want!

I am a pretty good chicken photographer, and I can take a decent close-up of knitting or a columbine flower, but it turns out I'm a rotten travel photographer.

And without pictures, I don't have a lot to say.

There have been a bunch of little stumbling blocks keeping me from blogging, little, but one after another, I just don't seem to get to it.

For one thing, what with the home schooling, on weekdays we have a "No computer until afternoon" rule.

However, it turns out my most productive writing time is in the morning, from around 8:30 to about 10:00 am. Pretty much anything I get started in that time slot gets done. But you'll notice that it falls in our "no computer" stretch.

For another, I got this sweet little netbook, and I was thinking that would lead to easier blogging, since I can move it around anywhere.

But the netbook doesn't have all my yummy photo editing software that my PC has, and I haven't figured out yet if it will even work on the netbook.

We bought a new Brother laser printer to replace the horrible old HP inkjet, and the old one is sitting in my computer chair, inconveniencing me and keeping me from using the PC until I woman up and deal with it.

Then there is this mostly snowless winter Michigan has been having - no snow makes our cloudy days all the darker, and I slow down like a chilled lizard.

And! There is FoldIt.

I started playing FoldIt just before we left for the Netherlands. I actually played some of the tutorial puzzles in the airport, then I worked on the science puzzles while we were there.

So I've been playing a lot of that and not blogging.

And to add more weight to the winter darkness, my last living grandmother, my dad's mom, passed away on the 10th of January.

I've written an in memoriam post for her in my head so many times I don't know what I want to say any more.

House Cleaning

Unlocks door of blog, walks in, throws open the window curtains, blows the worst of the dust off, and gets out the broom

Hi! I aten't dead!

It's been a while, hasn't it - in October, I helped make an SCA event (Vineyard Raids) happen and went to the Netherlands with my husband, son, and mother for two weeks.

Since we got back, I've been getting over six hours' worth of jet lag, catching up on the news, and adjusting to the incredible gray and brown contrast to the green of the Netherlands.

I keep meaning to put up some pictures and things, and seeing we've been back for over two weeks now, maybe I ought to get on that, huh?

What should I blog about?

Spot the Repair

The horizontal threads are in the same position.

This is the only knitting I touched since I brought it home. I was afraid if I stepped away from it, I would convince myself it was too hard.

It actually got harder as I worked my way up to the top of the hole, when I had to CONNECT ALL THE THINGS, sewing the patch I had created to the unbroken stitches around and above it.

I commented on Facebook, "People who think I'm such a super lace genius are not familiar with my method, which is DO IT EVERY POSSIBLE WRONG WAY FIRST."

That line might make people laugh, but so many times I reached the end of a row, only to realize I had made a mistake two rows back that only became obvious when I tried to go on to the third row, and couldn't.

As a project, this was both satisfying and hair-pulling-outingly frustrating. I am pretty happy with the end result, but wow. Getting there was no picnic. I was happy to do it for a friend, but I would not do this for any amount of money!

Using My Powers for Good

So what good is marinating my brains in lace knitting, other than turning all evil snark-weasel on badly-knit examples of lovely lace patterns?

We'll see - I'm making an either brave or totally mad attempt to repair a good friend's triangular Orenburg shawl which has a hole chewed in it by her cat.


The yarn is Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk, which makes a nice stable stitch that doesn't run.

The hole runs diagonally, taking three diamonds out of the lace ground section, so it's not a simple matter of picking up at the bottom and knitting straight up.

No, it's a puzzle, this is.

On Following Directions

As I was looking for something else to knit the other day, I went paging through Andrea Kunststricken Sonderheft, 0802, and I noticed that three of the charts in it were Christine Duchrow charts.

They're very distinctive charts, with their rs for knit stitches (from the German rechts) and IIs for yarnovers.

I hunted through my Christine Duchrow books until I found all three.

Duchrow 81.5:
Duchrow 81.8:
And Duchrow 73.5:But what was the matter with the knitted example in the photo?

The original 73.5 photo showed two large holes at the end of each flower petal, and a border of lacy little holes.

I had to knit and find out.

This pattern has not one, not two, but eight notes relating to different chart lines. Some are obvious things like knitting three plain rows following a pattern row. Others are a lit-tle more involved.

The points of the petals are formed by knitting 16 stitches alternating with 15 triple yarnovers in one row, then in the next row, dropping those yarnovers, elongating the 16 stitches, and knitting all 16 together into one stitch!

Just to make that whole process more fun, before and after the whole dropping-a-triple-yarnover process, you also make two new triple yarnovers before and after the petal point to form the two large holes. Wow.Creating the lacy border involves moving the start of the round by one stitch in three different rows. If you skip those moves, you end up with the laddered border in the Andrea photo.

If you follow the directions, you get the lacy holes that match the original photo. So important sometimes, following directions!

After Glöckchen, What?

Yes, Glöckchen is finally done and starched and blocked! Ta da!

This is one of those wonderful Niebling patterns, with no mistakes in the chart, no binding or ruffling to block out, just flowers and leaves standing out against a half-acre of hex mesh.
But you gotta admit, Glöckchen is a pretty hard act to follow.

One more glamour shot:


How can you top that?

How about with butterflies?

I was ready to leave for work when I saw these pretty things out nectaring on the swamp milkweed. It was a very hot and humid day, and they fluttered their wings even as they rested on the flowers.

These are Spicebush Swallowtails, Papilio troilus (aka Pterourus troilus). Some days nothing makes me feel older than trying to keep up with current nomenclature.

Flowers and Flowery Lace Knitting

I have a degree in horticulture, and my area of specialization was floriculture, but I don't have anything like an organized flower garden. I tend to plant things here and there, and because I recognize the seedlings and the early sprouts, mow around them in the grass.

I have flowers all over the place in random clumps. My brain presents me with scientific names memorized decades ago - where does it store all this stuff?I remembered the moth mullein was a Verbascum, but I didn't remember the species, V. blattaria.

My swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, is not growing in a swamp. It is growing out of a crack in a concrete porch slab from the original farmhouse site, about as un-swampy as you could get.

Ever since I noticed a few years back how much the hummingbirds liked the catnip flowers, I've encouraged it, but they aren't the only thing that likes it.

This Silver-spotted Skipper, Epargyreus clarus, likes it, too. The skipper is very territorial, and comes back to the catnip over and over throughout the day. When I went out to take its picture, it flew off, but not very far, and within a minute was back where I could take a close-up.

And here's my White Henryi lily again. I just realized I bought the original bulbs about 25 years ago, and it's come back reliably year after year. 2011 has been a very rainy year, but it made a fine show back in 2008, which was dry.

White Henryi is one of the lilies Donna Lee was talking about in her comment, the ones with a scent that knocks you down and sits on you. Most of the Oriental lilies are like that - the green nectary star in the center is a fairly reliable indicator of strong-scentedness.
Personally, I'm not a fan of scents that knock me down and sit on me, so the majority of my lilies are Asiatics with little or no scent.

The knitting on Glöckchen is done:The casting-off is . . . half done.

Each of the twelve repeats has twenty-two crocheted chains, and I am not a very fast crocheter. I was hoping to finish by Saturday, but along about Thursday afternoon I realized I wouldn't make it. I'm still plugging along, though, because I can hardly wait to block this thing!

Wednesday Bits and Pieces

First, a little bit of responding to comments.

Becky said, "So *that* is what those kinds of spiders are! We quite frequently have them trying to live in our mailbox."

They get in my mailbox, too! My husband emphatically does NOT like spiders (this t-shirt is just made for him), and when these come in the house in the mail, I'm the one who escorts them back out again.

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Cathy-Cate said, "My Asiatic lilies have never looked the same since a friend of ours (who is a landscaper) thinned them three years ago....he said they would bounce back better than ever in a couple years."

I have my suspicions about what he did! The way to thin lilies is to dig up all the bulbs after the stem starts to die and space them out, so each bulb has more growing room. But this takes a lot of time and a lot of labor.

The cheating way is to pull off the stems of some of the lilies in each clump, hoping to starve those bulbs out and let the ones left with their stems take over. This method is obviously a lot faster and easier than all that digging.

But the problem with this method is that if the lily variety is tough, instead of the stemless bulb dying, it just throws up a new stem the following year.

This new stem will be smaller and weaker and less likely to bloom, since it didn't get to store up as much energy when its stem was pulled off.

If this was what happened, I'd either leave them in place (the small stems will probably recover), or else dig them up and space them out in the fall.

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Catsmum said, "I don't want to know what the stitch count will be by the final row."

Well, that's the thing about Nieblings, they don't always increase in a strict geometric way. In this particular doily, the stitch count got to 76 stitches per round in Round 139, leaped up to 101 per round in 140 (that make-a-triple-yarnover-into-13 bit), and has been decreasing by two stitches per pattern round ever since.

I just counted out the last chart round, and it has 91 stitches per repeat, so I'll be ending at 1,092 stitches in the final round.

I also stretched it out a little against a ruler, and it's at least two feet in diameter, even knitted in size 30 thread on a 2.0 mm needle.

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In other news, we found some more beanie babies for Beanie Baby Wars.

An octopus mounted on an ice dragon.

A turkey mounted on a unicorn.

They're jousting.

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Ah! And I finally got a picture of one of the hummingbirds at the feeder this year. I waited so long with the camera all set up that the power saver kept turning it off again.

My camera's preview screen has a speed of 30 frames per second, and when I watch the hummingbird on it, I can see the wings moving! But they were still too fast for the camera and showed up as blurs in the photos.

Glöckchen Progress, Lilies, a SPIDER!

If you are spider phobic, and don't even like to see pictures of spiders, I'm giving lots and lots of warning so you can look away. There is a spider photo at the end of this post!

One of the knitting projects I took to work on at Origins was Glöckchen, but I had only knitted on it a little bit before I remembered one of the reasons I had put it down.

It was so seriously crowded on the needle at over 900 stitches per round that at one point about 11 stitches oozed off the needle while it was between bouts of knitting!

I twisted my husband's arm and had him take me to Knitters' Mercantile one morning before we headed in to the convention. I bought a second US 0 (2.0 mm) circular, so I could stretch Glöckchen out a bit again.

The stitch count peaked at 1212 in Round 139, where you make a triple yarnover and then knit into it 13 times in the plain row. I am finally out to Round 149 with one more pattern round to go after this.

We came home to lilies in bloom.



I just realized my "Tiger Babies" lilies from The Lily Garden have been in the ground here for 20 years.

They look pretty crowded at this point, but after twenty years in one spot, many lilies would have crowded themselves completely out of bloom.

Okay, is everybody ready for my spider? Spider-phobics safely out of the room?
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Last chance to click away before seeing a close-up of a bold jumping spider, Phidippus audax.

Is that thing cool or what? Eyes, nose, and big white lips!