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.

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!

Vignette Out My Window

Just before 8pm last night, my husband called to me, "There's a deer out there!"We see deer tracks all the time, and often boot them out when we take walks on our nature loop, but we don't generally see them in the daytime.


Then he said, "What is it doing?"It was licking the piece of plywood that my deerhunting relatives put up to hold shooting targets.


It didn't take any notice of me in the house taking pictures at all.But Truffles got a huge thrill out of running out of the house (inside the fence) and chasing it off!

Summer Summary

So what did I do this summer, besides a little knit-a-square knitting and hardly posting at all?I worked the Broad Arrow at a little more appropriate gauge for the size of the thread I was using.

I took pictures of a tree frog in the phlox.

We went to the Binder Park Zoo and enjoyed the giraffe overlook again.The animals have so much space here. It's such a relief compared to some beat-up, tired-looking pens I've seen other places.


We dog-sat my parents' retired greyhound, Kasper, over Labor Day weekend.Kasper really enjoyed running in both sections of our fenced yard.
He liked resting on his bed afterwards, too.

On Labor Day, we got up and did the local Bridge Walk. It's nothing like the 5-mile Mackinac Bridge Walk - ours is a tiny 0.19K, led by the town crier with a brass bell and bagpipers, and with many people accompanied by their dogs.

This year as we walked back across the bridge towards our car, we heard a whistle and saw this coming down the river towards Kalamazoo Lake.We see a lot of different boats, from kayaks up to cabin cruisers and ore carriers, but this is the first steam paddleboat I've seen.


Tomorrow I'll be seeing more steam-powered machinery at the Michigan Flywheelers' Antique Engine & Tractor Show, but I'm still betting none of it will be boats!

Thorny Post

Marguerite mentioned blackberries in her last couple of posts, and so did Lucia at Rhymes with Fuchsia. I had been twittering about the large and confusing genus Rubus, so I took the camera out for a walk in search of thorny things.

First off, what is the genus Rubus, anyway?

Rubus is the genus of a large group of plants including raspberries, dewberries, blackberries, and thimbleberries found all over North America.

When we moved to our property, I started noticing all different kinds and went to my Peterson wildflower field guide to sort out the differences.

Peterson, for once, blew me a literary raspberry of its own, saying only

Brambles (Blackberries, etc.)
Most plants of the genus Rubus are woody, prickly, or bristly shrubs, outside the scope of this book; most are problems for the specialist. Gray recognizes 205 species in our area. See A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs for a small selection.

So I suppose as soon as I finish patiently clicking through all 237 species shown at the USDA website, I might know what I have growing here.

This is what I see when I go out walking.These blackberries are my favorite kind for canning. They make a tall, stout cane with wicked thorns, but they also produce lots of fruit.

This is the main difference (in my mind, anyway, or maybe my local dialect) between a blackberry and a black raspberry.When I pick a blackberry, the center stays in. When I pick a raspberry (black, red, or golden/yellow), the center comes out and the edible berry is hollow.

Let's take another look at those thorns:Ouch!

Last year I found a happy hybrid: right down the path from the thorny ones, in the midst of a patch of trailing or sprawling thornless blackberries, a thornless blackberry with stout canes came up.It's in a shady spot, so the fruit is not ripe yet.

Check out the lack of thorns!I want to move them into the sun, but I don't want to kill them. I'll probably bury the leafy tip in a pot of soil and let it root.

I think this one is some kind of dewberry, but it never fruits enough to be sure. It has a fuzz of thorns, but they're bendy.
Then I have Rubus something-or-other with completely different leaves, a palmate leaf like a Virginia creeper.
These are the sprawling brambles I have everywhere, the ones that like to rip my ankles to shreds:The leaves turn an incredibly beautiful deep red in the fall, and in the spring they have such a delicate, crinkly-petalled white flower. Before I found the tall-caned ones, I used to pick and can these guys.

Their thorns don't look like much, but there are plenty of them.

Last of all, here is a black raspberry cane, next year's fruiting cane.I can't show any berries for them, because their season has ended.

(And so has this post.)

Blogtoberfest, with Bees

I decided to try and do Blogtoberfest this year, and promptly blanked on a first post.

Then I was cleaning up my camera's memory card and came across some photos I took of different bees in the New England asters.Fuzzy bumblebees.

Earnest honey bees.

Little mystery bees.

And I thought bees would be good to begin with.

Locked in at the Zoo

Many of the blogs I read had some version of the Remembering 9-11 post.

Mine was quiet in a way because of 9-11.

Because of 9-11, my husband's day job has him in uniform most days of the week and some days of the weekend.

Because of 9-11, instead of being called a "weekend warrior, hur hur hur", complete strangers come up to him in the grocery store and shake his hand or pay for his breakfast when he eats in a restaurant.

Because of 9-11, we spent the evening of 9-11 locked in the zoo!

Operation Military Kids is a program meant to lighten the part of the load that kids bear when they have a mom or dad who is in the military.

Through OMK, my husband, our son, and I went to the zoo with a bunch of other military families, were locked in when the zoo closed, and spent the night in Binder Park Zoo's Wild Africa area.

We had dinner and did some icebreaking activities. We had (microwaved) s'mores (a marshmallow and a square of chocolate bar sandwiched in graham crackers) and a campfire. We slept in sleeping bags in a screened building and woke up to the crowing of red jungle fowl.

This morning, we had breakfast and watched ostriches up close.

We watched as the bontebok, zebra, and giraffes were released into their enclosure for the day. (Can you spot the giraffe? A triangular light spot halfway up the slope?)This is a 19-acre area with two natural ponds. I was amused to see that the giraffes have browsed it up around the edges of the fence just like a giant horse pen. It's a big enough area that the animals don't wear it out. I had to stitch two shots together to get the whole width in:

Here's a zoom shot as they were let out. You can see the two keepers who followed them out and shut the gates that lead back to the barn where they spend the night, and one of the two baby giraffes just born this summer.
In the "I love my camera" department, I cropped out all but the bit with the mother giraffe and her baby.Pretty good for about a quarter of a mile away.

Later in the day the giraffes came to the overlook where you can buy part of their daily food and let them take it through the netting. Baby Giraffe stood patiently . . .
While his mother ate some lettuce.

And tonight we are all completely wiped out and looking forward to sleeping in our beds and not on a concrete floor.

Mysterious Ticking Noise

When we were all outdoors around the fire in the dark, I kept hearing a mysterious ticking noise coming from the trees.

I love the internet - I'm pretty sure it was the greater angle-winged katydid, Microcentrum rhombifolium.

The website Singing Insects of North America has a .wav file here. Tick tick tick to you, too, Mr. Angle-wing!

Ooooo-Gahhh!

I was unable to publish this to Blogger this morning, but that was my foghorn imitation. We had a two-hour delay to the start of school this morning due to fog, which I found out in the usual way: by driving to school and finding the windows dark and the parking lot empty!

So my son had a two-hour morning break, which he greatly enjoyed.

And I knitted a needle or three of the green Pi doily I started last night, to try and get into my head what's going on in Elizabeth Zimmermann's Pi shawls. I've been reading the directions in Knitter's Almanac and trying to understand when I need to add stitches and why, and finally decided I just needed to jump in and start knitting. I don't know if I'll try a Pi shawl, like the pretty thing tatt3r is knitting, or any of the shawls being created on the EZasPi Yahoo group, but these things seem to need to travel through my fingers to make it into my head.

After a second trip to school, I managed to get a picture of this year's half-grown bunny:

The Bunny Story
We live on twelve acres of overgrown ex-orchard, so we have lots of wild rabbits. Near the house, we have a large fenced yard that we let our dogs run in. For the past two years or so, there has been a female rabbit who ignored the rest of the twelve acres and made her little fur-lined nest inside the fenced dog yard! Which I usually found out by the sad death of a tiny little baby rabbit.

This year Mom Rabbit seems to finally have grown a brain cell. She put her nest under one of the pallets my husband builds our wood piles on. At the left of the picture, you can see a snip of chain link dog fence. To the right is the edge of a woodpile. Can you see the little half-grown bunny? There are at least two of them living under the woodpile. Usually they have four to a litter, but I have only spotted two out at once so far.

And what a relief, no pitiful tiny baby bunnies to bury this spring!