How To

…have a shower while they’re working on the house next door. My bathroom window which faces toward them is only half pebbled glass and the top half is clear. They are putting on the tar paper before siding the house. They are balancing on scaffolding. First, check to see if anyone is in my window’s line of sight. Nope. Quickly disrobe and leap into the shower. Have a long hot shower so the window gets really steamed up. Leap out, dry quickly and dress before the steam evaporates. Modesty is retained. Whew! Now they’re at my eye level as I work in my study. I can practically reach out and touch them (if the bug screen wasn’t in the way). It’s kind of disconcerting even though they mostly have their back to my window. This kind of thing has been happening at intervals all along in the construction. Things should be better once they get the siding on and finish up the outside.

Speaking of said house next door, we finally did tell them last evening about how we called the police the other night. They were well aware of the missing pipe and the water spurting out all over. Good thing they hadn’t got to the drywall stage yet or it could have been very expensive. His underling got sensible and we now have the cell phone number of William the Contractor. Just in case we need to call him if something drastic is going on. And yes, they’re putting siding on over a very wet house interior. At least the weather is warming up and the sun is coming out. Maybe the 2 inches of water in the basement will dry before everything goes mouldy.

Back to crafty-land. I finally wound my skeins of the moorit whatever-it-is. (Merino? Shetland?) All washed and hung outside in the increasing sunshine to dry.

I counted as I wound and I have about 200 g and 1100 yards after washing. That represents an awful lot of spinning time! It bloomed a bit in the wash and it seems to be pretty balanced although it’s not terrifically even. Should make a very nice shawl anyhow. I only used about half the bag of sliver too so there’s at least one more project in there. If I ever finish the Fern Leaf Scarf-that-never-ends.

Speaking of which scarf, if I’d quit making mistakes and paid more attention to what I was doing, I’d probably have finished the darn thing by now. I’ve ripped out more rows than I’ve knit it seems. It’s just a little too complex to knit mindlessly and a little too simple to really concentrate on. I’m about 3/4’s done and I’d show you but it’s too boring. Time to get it off the needles and move on.

Have you seen the new special issue of Interweave Felt? It’s right up my Spectrum Study Group’s alley since this is our Year of Felt. It includes several different kinds: fulled knitting, nuno, needle felting, wet felting, recycling and even beading on felt. Though not everything appeals to me, there are some interesting ideas that might be worth following up on. For instance knitting with strips of unspun roving and then fulling to make a denser fabric. Skips out the spinning step! But I’m not sure how durable the mittens will be that are made using this technique. I’d like to see the kid’s ones after a winter of snowballs. I’d be willing to bet they’d full more on the palms and perhaps pill some. Of course I’ll have to try it to find out! And there’s not usually a lot of snow around here to test it on. Which is probably why I like gloves, fingerless gloves, or wristwarmers better than mitts. Which might be a possibility.

I haven’t been accomplishing as much crafty goodness as I’d like lately. I’m still trying to get the rest of the junk we pulled out of the attic sorted and outta my face. T-Man is slowly going through old receipts etc. and shredding the ones we don’t need to keep. I’ve still got several boxes of memorabilia to sort through. It’s hard! Do I keep every 25 year old drawing my kids did on scrap paper? Every Mother’s Day card? I’m not really that sentimental and the kids are even less so. But part of me won’t just pitch it all out. At least until they’ve had a chance to look at it and take a walk down memory lane. Yeah, I could start making memory/scrap books with it but I know I won’t. I never finish stuff like that. I even found my wedding scrap book, totally incomplete. And my daughter’s baby book with hardly anything written in it. I’m so bad at that! I just chuck everything in a box labeled “Memories” and hide it in the attic for decades instead.

I’ve got to tell about how we got rid of the dirty old broken toys that had been lurking in the attic. We put them out in the back alley just like the fish tanks and they disappeared within two hours! Even with a garbage strike on, the binners are still out in force. I kind of feel bad about where the discards might be going to end up when they find out what crummy shape it all was in. Bad Damselfly. Transferring responsibility to someone else. But it’s out of my life now. I’ll get over the guilt.

I'll leave you with a photo of my disocactus flowers. They don't happen every year and only last a couple of days so I like to enjoy them while I can. Each one is nearly as big as my hand!