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!

Nature and Netting

We had more rain Wednesday night. I took the camera in the morning when I went down to see how the drainage ditch handled it.When the rain filled the ditch the last time, we had gotten about 2.72 inches of rain in just over 24 hours. This time we only had 0.65 inches. I could see where the water had risen and made the mud shiny, but it was already down by 10 am.

Camera in hand, I went walking around to see what I could see.

A while ago I spotted this indigo bunting nest while picking black raspberries. There was one bunting egg in the nest and two cowbird eggs. I identified which was which after a little Googling and removed the cowbird eggs. This morning the parents were feeding their fledgling outside the nest already.

These hot pink flowers are Deptford pinks, Dianthus armeria. They are tiny little things that grow wild in the grass.

I try to mow around moth mullein (Verbascum blattaria) rosettes when I notice them in the grass, and eventually I am rewarded with a spike of flowers. I have both white and yellow ones, but the white made the prettiest picture.I'm always a little bemused to find some of my favorite wild flowers are alien species.

In fibery news, I've been bashing my brains against the netting wall again, trying to figure out a 17th century netting pattern from text directions.

The first four rows are straightforward, and from there it's downhill. I've tried several possibilities for the vague fifth row, and unpicked the knots a number of times..

The directions for the sixth and seventh rows are very plain, and put some constraints on what can have happened in the fifth row, so I drew many diagrams and made some assumptions, and got as far as this.

It's good work for hot humid summer days. Our dew point hasn't dropped below 60 F for days, and I wouldn't be touching thread at all if not for the air conditioner wringing the water out of the air.

Early Days

I have not always been a knitter of lace and socks and mind-stretching double knitting.

This might be the earliest knitting of mine that exists. When I was in the fifth grade, our teacher gave us a mimeographed pattern for something called Pixie Boot Baby Booties.

You knitted a garter stitch square, folded it into a triangle, sewed up the sole and the back, folded the top corner down, and voila! you had a baby booty.

That was the theory, anyway.

When I was trying to learn to tat, my fondness for DMC shaded pastels had not left me.

This is not quite the first tatting I ever did. I think it's the second. I just stranded the thread along behind and started a new clover leaf.

No, I think this might be the first tatting I ever did, complete with ring joined in the wrong spot so that it ended up accidentally three-dimensional.

After I threw it across the room, I fished it back out of the corner, got a little squinty-eyed, and did it again to take the curse off of it.

You can't let these fiber arts think they're the boss, you know, otherwise they will make you no end of miserable.

Plainly my fondness for shaded colors has not left me. I'm up to row 21 on chart A of "Lilac Time", a row where each repeat starts with a shift of the stitch marker and a slip 1, knit 2 together, pass the slipped stitch over.

Another couple of rounds and these will really start to look like leaves. Then it will be on into chart B and a swath of lace ground.
It's been raining on and off most of this week, but this afternoon it finally relented a little and the sun even came out.

I went outside to give the birdfeeders a shake and found one last tiny sunflower of the season, barely nine inches tall, under the edge of the yew bush where Truffles likes to dig herself a cool bed in the sand.

A sunny bright yellow flower to enjoy at the end of a chilly and damp day.

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.

A Sampler Post

Sort of like those candy boxes that have all different things in them.

In no particular order:
For Roxie, our mini soapstone stove with a coffee mug for scale. The curved metal skirt in the front is about 14-1/2 inches (37 cm) wide, and it's 17 inches (43 cm) tall.

No, I don't plan on leaving my mug in front of it, but I'll bet the soapstone top will work just as well as one of those electric mug-warmers.

The weather has warmed back up a bit, so I won't be able to try it as a mug warmer until it cools back off outside.

I saw a hummingbird on some of the New England asters, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae, that I rescued from the bulldozers a couple of years back, but I was too slow to get her photo this time. We had a really dry year in 2007 and I lost a lot of the plants I moved. The survivors are thriving this year, which was much wetter.

Yesterday I was thrilled to see a volunteer plant blooming down by the neighbor's drainage trench. They always remind me of the magician's bouquet that he pulls out of his sleeve.

On the non-knitting front, the Vale of York Viking hoard is going to be on display at the Yorkshire Museum from 18 September to 1 November this year. I particularly love the silver-gilt cup. This is the hoard that was only discovered a couple of years ago.

On the knitting front, lace knitters, we can start the party today!

Susanna Lewis's long out-of-print book, Knitting Lace is being reprinted by Schoolhouse Press and is currently available for pre-orders!

If you were planning to sell your copy to pay for your retirement, I guess you're out of luck. But if you've been watching copies on eBay go for $100, now you can order your very own for $29.95. That's only $5 more than the original price back in 1992.

Now I can finally order my own and quit worrying that the library's will go missing.

One of my favorite things, a cone of . . . gray string?Very nice string. ColourMart cashmerino string, over 2100 yards of it. I'm not sure what it's going to become yet.

When I cut and pasted the Woywod chart, I discovered that the join makes a little three-petalled flower, so I am going to knit enough of a second repeat to make that show.
Our son kept saying, "What flower?" when I showed him this, so I dragged the photo into PhotoStudio and made free with the spray paint tool.
Now I only have about five more pattern rows before the flower is finished, so I must go knit!

A Break in the Action

The carpenter we hired spent several days last week turning three windows that looked like this:

Into windows that looked like this:
My husband will be doing the taping and mudding of the drywall around the window. He's already painted the window wells, but that looks pretty much the same, only a brighter white.

The pictures don't really show it, but at the top the window well is about seven inches deep, while at the bottom it's only about three. The dome wall leans in, but the window is vertical. A compound miter box is a good thing to have . . .

The carpenter also framed the doorways, the short hallway that connects the rest of the house to the dome room, the fourth window (a regular rectangular one), the arch into the dome, and the baseboards around the dome. So it's finally looking more like a finished room.

Meanwhile, up on the roof, the roofer has one last bit of the roof to tear off, replace plywood if necessary, and reshingle.

The gas to the tiny soapstone stove is still waiting to be hooked up. That should happen pretty soon.

Speaking as an introvert, I will be really happy when all of this is done!

My husband also spent several hours with the chainsaw turning this

into this:

Just beyond this tree, I noticed the jewelweed, touch-me-not or wild impatiens, Impatiens capensis, is in bloom. Hummingbirds love this stuff.And when I was a kid, we used to have fun touching the seedpods and making them explode.

Here is a sure sign of fall: goldenrod is out. I took the picture early in the morning, but once it warms up it will be full of honeybees.

Warning: Spider ahead!

If you are spider-phobic, this would be a good time to go read your next blog. Spider pictures ahead.
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Don't say I didn't warn you!
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Yesterday when I went outside, I nearly walked into this web (distant picture for the squeamish who couldn't quite resist, closer pictures coming):

Stash Enhancement and a Single Perfect Rose

I'm so behind in posting things I've bought this year, I'm not even going to try to post these in order.
I picked up a set of eight 18-inch interlocking kids' play mats complete with black edge pieces at a garage sale for 25 cents. The knit-blocking mats from KnitPicks are a set of nine 12-inch mats for 20 dollars. Score!

On top of them are four pairs of knitting needles, two of those cro-hook needles, and two odd needles, price one dollar.

The octopus is guarding my haul from Kathy Kirchner's trunk show back in May. Five more balls of Valdani crochet thread, one each of DMC, Opera, and Omega threads, and two of the Sew-Mate tatting shuttles, one purple and one green.

We went to an estate sale a while back and I looked all over the house and didn't find a thing. Then I went out in the garage and didn't really find anything out there, either. But then I noticed some tins sitting on an ironing board - yes, out in the garage.Score! A tin with a little box of tatting thread nestled in the middle of about twenty balls of perle cotton.


This I didn't pay for. I discovered it growing a ways off our walking path.

If you want perfect rosebuds that smell of damp cement, you can buy those at any florist. But if you want old-fashioned rose scent, these beat the florist roses by a mile.

(Why, yes, I have been reading Luca Turin's The Secret of Scent. Gotta love a book about scent with a cover that's a take-off on the Chanel No. 5 box, that starts out on the first page with a footnote about descriptions of Nice, contains lyrical descriptions of perfume scents, that sends me all over the library with references to organic chemistry, crystallography, and how to assemble a simple polarograph in a weekend, and that contains great lines like "Part of the problem here is that soap powder is, this side of a blowtorch, one of the harshest environments to put fragrance in." from the section "Why 'chemical' does not always mean bad".)

Dancing Bear Falls Off the Ball

A while ago I got a call from a friend asking if I'd gotten an email she'd sent. Asking, because I hadn't answered it.

Well. I would describe myself as "not very organized" at the best of times. Sometimes, I have just enough energy to do the things that must be done, and none left over.

"Things that must be done" comprise a much shorter list than commercials would have you believe. On my personal list are things like breathe (so important! hold your breath and watch the second hand to find out how important), eat, drink, and sleep, and personal hygiene.

Blogging and email kinda falls off that list when things get tight.

So let's see, what have I been doing since the 6th of May?

I spent the last two weeks as Parent-in-Chief, while my husband went down to Arkansas for a hazardous material certifier school.

I took some pictures of apple blossom.I've read that my particular camera tends to blow out white highlights, and I have that problem in full sun. These shots were taken under a typical Michigan bright overcast sky. No blown out highlights here - I guess that's something to be grateful for!I took a picture of the deer tracks following the loop path that I mow at the south end of our lot.I caught the baby beech leaves just unfolding.

Over the course of the two weeks my husband was gone, I mowed the dratted grass twice, and then it rained the next day both times, causing the grass to instantly grow some more.

My lace group, whose meetings I have been missing very often and very much (they overlap with work), had a trunk show again. Since Kathy (Kirchner, link here) said she would open the sales room at 4pm, I drove up for the sale. I had a great time talking to my lace-making friends. Boy, have I missed these meetings.

Although I don't often get to attend meetings, not having the time means I do have the money to spend. So I bought two books: first, Knitted Lace Designs of Herbert Niebling, which is the brand-new Lacis translation of Eva Maria Leszner's Gestrickte Spitzendecken, and Sonja Esbensen's Kunststrick II.

I bought a pair of the Sew-Mate tatting shuttles, one green and one purple.

And (did you guess?) more thread, including more of the Valdani pearl cotton I love so much.

Saturday the child and I went to the Binder Park zoo down near Battle Creek, Michigan. This was supposed to be with his Cub Scout troop, but we didn't manage to link up with them.

Besides the great fun of spending his allowance in the gift shop, here was his absolute favorite part of the zoo: feeding the giraffes in the Wild Africa exhibit.Giraffes, ostriches, zebras, and several other species are free to roam in this large open area. Three of the giraffes came to the giraffe-head-height overlook where we could buy giraffe biscuits to feed them. This guy was the tallest of the three, and if you've ever succumbed to pleading puppy eyes, you know the exact feeling when we ran out of biscuits!

For me, my favorite part was after I drove home from the zoo, my husband was finally home. Right now he and our son are at the movies, and I am finally all alone in the house. Writing my first blog post in a week and a half.

Spring Has Its Charms

First off, oops. Yes, I did say 624 stitches, and I even had 624 written down on a piece of paper . . . but I'm not out to that row yet. Hah. Oops. It's only 432.

Last week I was ramping up for an SCA demo (Society for Creative Anachronism) at Holland, Michigan's tulip festival. This past weekend was Kinderplaats, an area set aside for children's activities.

We had a table with a chain mail shirt I borrowed from my brother to put on kids, someone painting faces, and some other armor they could try on. The chain shirt weighs 23 pounds (about 10.4 kilos), and I put it on and took it off kids many times over the two days.

Monday I was so tired that I hardly remember what I did. I know I worked -- what else? Laundry. I think.

Yesterday I know I washed laundry, because when I mowed the grass for the first time, I couldn't mow under the clothesline for fear of getting fresh juicy green grass clippings on my clean sheets.

Then we went to the library, where I soaked my head in more books, and afterwards ran some errands in town. Then we got home just in time to whisk the dry laundry off the line as it started to sprinkle with rain.

Christel has been sitting around for a few days. I knitted off a needle and counted only 33 stitches where I knew there should be 36. I couldn't find my mistake, so I let Christel sit until I had time to figure out where the error might be.

A couple of nights ago, my brain went *Ding ding ding* and offered up a possible mistake:

Today I sat down and checked, and sure enough, I had done the "YO, SKP" twice and missed out a "YO, K3" in there. So now that it's fixed I can work on Christel and knit out to that 624 stitch row.

My name is Ajax and I approve this post.