Chimney Tales

The Stargate is still in Chart B, the lace ground bit, where every fourth row is a whole round of YO and a double decrease, quite fiddly in the fine yarn. It's slow knitting and it doesn't look much different from photo to photo.

So I was blanking yet again on any kind of a post topic.

And then! I finally got around to catching up on the blogs I read, and Antonia did a post about chimney sweeps (look at her gorgeous fireplace: I am so jealous), and I started to type a novel in her comments and realized, "Hey! I have a post topic!"

We heat our house with wood and now with the little gas log. When you burn wood, you need to keep the chimney clean.

The first time we started to think about this, we called the only chimney sweep around, and he came in and looked at our short, straight length of chimney.

Then he draped everything lovingly in tarpaulins, took the vent cap off the top on the roof, and swept it from the top down, and came indoors and carefully vacuumed the whole stove as clean as a dinner plate.

Amazing.

And then he said, "Not to shoot myself in the foot or anything, but you could easily clean a nice straight chimney like this yourself." Sweeps really are like Antonia's, even in the wilds of America.

(It is, too, wild here: I saw an owl fly across my driveway this afternoon when we walked down to get the mail.)

Of course, our chimney is just boring black metal, and our chimney pots are soot-blackened shiny galvanized metal, not very photogenic.

The stove itself is pretty, light bluish soapstone with fancy castings. Also in need of a wire-brushing and spray of new high-temperature stovepaint on the cast iron parts.

But!

Last winter the child learned that when the fire had burned down to a nice bed of coals, I would open the stove door and allow the toasting of marshmallows.

Mmmm, marshmallows.