A Walk with Panoramic View

I was reading old posts on Antonia's blog while I was sick, and she mentioned this cool program called Autostitch. It automatically takes your adjacent photos and stitches them together without leaving a messy blur where they overlap.

As soon as I felt a bit better, I took a walk with the camera along the path I keep mowed and took some overlapping pictures.

Here is our son walking south ahead of me, very self-conscious.

If you turn left just past the tree, you come to our fire pit. My husband decided the fire ring was too big and made it smaller, but the extra rocks haven't all been dragged away yet.

This is looking back at the house. No, we can't see the house when we camp out in our back yard.

If you take the path to the left of the fire pit and turn back, this is what you see.

And if you follow that path to the top of the rise and look back again, here is my mossy path I love so much.

When you come out of the trees, you're on a hot, sandy hillside. It was hot dry sand and some moss when we moved here, but slowly the grass is taking hold.

This is the south end of the loop, already looking green and overgrown. I'll have to take a picture later in the summer when the grass and the goldenrod is nearly as high as my head!

The only drawback to these pictures is that Blogger wants to post teeny tiny versions of them, and I had to hink around with Picasa to make them post bigger. But Autostitch sure is a fun way to show a wider-angle view!

Special Delivery

Last week on Ravelry, I noticed a little conversation on the Michigan Fiber Festival group about whether or not copies of the festival's Fiberline magazine had been taken to the yarn shop near me.

I am about in the middle between Marr Haven Wool Farm, where the magazines were, and Needle in a Haystack down in South Haven, so I volunteered to pick them up and run them into town.

Moments after I parked and got out of my car, Barb and Gene Marr's Merino Rambouillet sheep decided to move from the barn way out into the field. But I zoomed in on them and took their pictures anyway.

Don't they look sleek, all sheared for the summer heat we're having?

And this is the shop, lots of yarn mule-spun from the sheep, locker-hooking kits, felting supplies, and other fiber-y things. The picture is clickable, for a better view.

I had a great time talking with Barb about sheep and the fiber festival and the crazy weather we've been having. Friday was my favorite weather, mostly overcast and not so hot, and the sheep liked it, too.

By Sunday, it was so hot the baby robins were panting.
Monday it hit 89 F (32 C) here. In May. In MAY!

And today, I looked out at the nest and saw this: "Hey! Where'd everybody go?"

I would have posted earlier, but our power was out from 9:30 am until about 2 pm.

Intermittent Net

What a week!

I've been struggling with an intermittent internet connection (and a cold) most of last week.

So let me do a quick summing-up.

First off, the robin and her nest. We had cold frosty weather much of last week, but by the weekend, she was feeding babies.

I tried and tried to catch her on the nest feeding them, but one baby craning its head up was the best I could get:

And then seconds after I got that picture, two more popped their wobbly little heads up:

It must be spring in Michigan, because while I was lurking at the window trying to take robin photos, a pair of mourning doves and their baby landed on the garden wall:I see mourning doves all the time, but I think this is the first time I've seen one so young.

Ruth in the bath looks like something you might find in a tide pool:

My first pinning attempt used a lot of pins, all my rustproof florist pins, and I still wasn't quite happy with it.This little doily reminds me so much of some of the Niebling designs, where he totally ignores the "increase by X per round per needle to create Y shape" and just blithely creates beautiful floral shapes. Your rigid one-at-the-end-of-each-needle, like Winde, you will not find in Ruth!

I tried a second time to pin out Ruth, this time stringing a nylon thread through the outer round, tying it, and pinning inside the cord.I still used almost all my pins, but I like the smoother sides of the square better.

I found two errors in the chart near the end, detailed in my Ravelry project notes.

Let's see, what else?

I don't have a new photo of the swirl doily, but I soaked it in water and washing soda, rinsed it multiple times, and dried it out in yesterday's sun. That stain lightened considerably, hooray!

Yesterday I went to a local estate sale, and came home with this haul:Several nice sets of dpns, a copy of Emma Brockstedt's 1916 Practical Tatting Book No. 1, a couple sets of straight needles, multiple nylon circular needles, and something new to me called a "condo needle", with a large end and a small end, all for six dollars.

All things taken together, a good week, especially as I shake this cold.

Now to see if I can get this to post!

Creative Avoidance

Creative avoidance. That's when I'm nearly finished with something, and instead of actually finishing it, I start something else.

I found a doily I really liked in my new book, Knitted Lace II (Kunst-Stricken II):Coincidentally, my great-grandmother's name was Ruth, and her family was German.

It's square and small, only 49 rows. I cast on last night and started knitting. I'm up to row 30-something.

The octopus helps me keep the book open to the chart.It likes the doily because it is on eight 00 needles.

I found this swirl-pattern doily at an estate sale the other day. I soaked most of the yellow out of it, but it has one reddish-brown stain that didn't lighten much. If we get some sun, I might try sun-bleaching it. That works really well on tomato stains, but it doesn't do much versus tea or coffee. I couldn't find an exact match on Ravelry. The edging is a separate garter-stitch lace that has been sewn on.

Anyone recognize it?

Did You Hear That?

A loud squee! noise coming out of Michigan?
Ordinarily that would be me, coming home Kathy Kirchner's trunk show at the West Michigan Lace Group meeting with a copy of Knitted Lace 2 (Kunst-Stricken II), a hot pink tatting shuttle, and my usual haul of Valdani thread.

(And yes, my mom did send me home with another bottomed-out chair. I swear right here in public that I will finish this one in months instead of years.)

But the squee ended up being over this:

Look! Do you see what I see? To me it looked so familiar!
It's the Gertrud Woywod pattern I knitted from the back of The Knitted Lace Patterns of Christine Duchow Vol 3
.

There can't, there can not be two Gertruds who came up with this exact pattern. Gertrud Woywod must be Gertrud Villforth. (The Lacis book says “Billforth”, a mistake due to the confusing German fraktur alphabet on the cover. German sources say Villforth.)

And if you were intrigued by the flower edging, but put off by the handwritten chart, there it is all charted out in neat symbols, with a matching insertion. Sweeeeeeet!

Now I must go page through the back of the Duchrow book some more and see if I can find any more of these in Kunst-Stricken II.

Knit Like the Winde!

I was tired of knitting "Tulip Time", so I cast on the very smallest pattern I could find from Kunststricken: Große und kleine Decken.This is "Winde" (convolvulus or morning glory), a square pattern shown on page 12, where nine squares have been knitted and joined together.

I am probably not going to knit eight more, since I find the flower a little stiff or stylized for my taste.

The thread is one of four vintage 100-yard balls of DMC size 8 perle cotton in color 906 "medium parrot green", and the needles are US 1, 2.25 mm.

This morning I tried to knit it onto my size 1 circular. Bleh. My circ. is a little too long, and wow! Is it awkward to knit a square on a circ! But I needed longer dpns...

So I dug into my storage drawer full of single-pointed needles I hardly ever use, and beheaded four 14-inch single points. I filed the former knob ends into blunt rounded points.

And this morning I've used these four single points more than I ever had since I bought them.

The knitting is slowing a little as I get out to the 50+ stitch rows, but a 200-stitch round still goes faster than the 1000 or so I am up to on "Tulip Time."

Random Chair Caning Odds and Ends

Recaning a chair is both easy and hard.

The individual steps are each pretty easy. The Caner's Handbook has you run in one layer of verticals, then one of horizontals, then verticals again, and then it has you weave in the fourth strand of horizontals, so you don't actually start to weave until the fourth pass.

I was re-reading those directions before I started in on this chair, and I thought, "Wait, this seems familiar . . ." because that's how the Weave-It or Weavette loom directions go! And I just read them in Piecework's March/April 2010 issue.

The hard part about caning is mainly that you have to do so much weaving, all of it by hand, first that layer of horizontals, then a layer of Z (/) diagonals and one of S (\) diagonals.

Once you start to weave the cane, things slow down. I usually only weave over and under three or four times before I pull the whole remaining length of cane through, and I keep the whole seat moist (not soaked) with a dollar store mister/atomizer of water and a couple of wet rags to either side of where I'm weaving. If the cane squeaks while I'm pulling it, I mist it more.

It's easiest to start the strand straight and keep it straight, than to try and undo it if it gets twisted.

You don't need to pull the cane tight while you weave. It will tighten up a bit as it dries, and if it's woven too tight wet, it will crack the frame, handily pre-weakened by all the holes drilled in it.

Cracks in the frame are the bane of chair caning. I caned one chair that had been repaired with L-brackets screwed into each corner underneath, and some of the screws went right through a caning hole.

The holes already end up with as many as six strands of cane going through each one, plus the strand that holds down the binder cane. Getting them past a screw with sharp threads was tough. I had a lot to say about that repair under my breath!

I haven't found caning that hard on my wrists, myself. But I did a lot of data entry at jobs over the years, so I'm used to going easy on my wrists.

My main trick for saving my wrists is, don't do the same thing in the exact same way for too long. Take breaks. Do something else.

If you don't have strong fingernails (I have thumbnails I can use to tighten screws), find something like a guitar pick or a plastic seam turner that you can substitute to straighten woven cane while it's still wet.

For caning, one thing you can hardly get enough of is moisture. Try and keep the weaving strand as damp as the part that's already woven, otherwise it ends up ripply. Damp cane can be tied in knots and bent all around. Dry cane cracks!

Another trick is to straighten the woven strands straight away, while they are still damp. I have a long plastic ruler, and I'll brace it across the chair with a couple of caning pegs at each end, then push the strand straight along the edge of the ruler.

A digital camera is a great tool - for some reason, it's easier for me to spot wiggly strands in the photo than on the chair. Maybe the photo gives me some emotional distance, I don't know.

And then there is perfectionism. Often I have to remind myself that you can still sit on an imperfectly caned seat, even if I didn't run the diagonals perfectly. And that a chair you can sit on is better than a bottomed-out chair that you can't sit on.