Germ-a-lerm-a-ding-dong

Help! Cold germs ate my brains! Yes, your poor damselfly succumbed to the Winter Plague thanks to a very cute but snot-nosed 3-year-old, Grandbeastie Rosebud. That’ll teach me to wipe her nose and not decontaminate after. Yuck. Exactly 2 days after the snot incident we spent a delightful but foggy Sunday out at Reifel Bird Sanctuary with brother, sis-in-law, and Nana feeding the chickadees, geese and ducks:

Here I even had one little female mallard with her head between my boots eating seeds that Thom chucked at me. They tickled! Now I have to wash my poor boots off too since they’re covered in duck breath and webbed footprints.

Unfortunately it was colder than I expected and I got a little chilled. (Hey, in my defence it was sunny and several degrees warmer when we left home!) Later that evening as we celebrated Thom’s brother’s birthday with fondue I started to feel a little sore throat coming on. Blech. Hope I didn’t share this with anyone there. Today I had to reschedule my dentist appointment too which was supposed to be tomorrow. At least there’s nothing else on the schedule until next week now which should give me time to recuperate.

Meanwhile, Before Bug, I managed to sort out some stuff in my basement dye studio/laundry area.  No m*ths down there either! Yay. I got all the Indian cotton scarves washed and freshened up, 16 in total. (Yes, I have a lot of them.) The area still needs more sorting and cleaning though. I have too many dyes and assists all jammed into 2 cupboards. Things are falling out when I open the doors and I can’t find what I need. Not a good situation. It’ll have to wait until I feel better though. I’m not tackling any dust when I already can’t breathe!

I know I shouldn’t wait so long to clean and sort the stashes but you know how it is. Time zips by too fast and before you know it, more years have disappeared in the rear view mirror. I’m not a messy person. I like to be organised and reasonably tidy but not scrupulously so. And I live with another crafty person who has his priorities too which I always have to take into consideration. Unfortunately his neatness standards are a bit lower than mine and he understandably won’t let me sort his stuff for him. So I have to work around them as best I can. Many years of negotiations have gotten us this far anyway. Heh.

Nothing much more to report really. I got the pearly handspun yarn dyed a deep red-orange semi-solid. The angelina fibres dyed even deeper than the wool and it’s very pretty! No photo yet though. Sorry. It’s still hanging on the basement clothesline. I also found a few items to over-dye (which isn’t happening yet), including a sweater-coat that goes with nothing in my wardrobe and a couple of shawls that I’ve joined together into one blanket. The latter were the results of long-ago sheep-to-shawl contests and, although not from the same fleece, they’re the same weave structure, Dogwood Lace, an Atwater-Bronson lace design. (If you’re interested, there’s more about this structure here.) So they kind of went together ok. It remains to be seen how they will dye though! I don’t really care as long as this thing isn’t white. I’ll be putting it on my bed for extra warmth. More on this when I get to it.

We’ve had so much fog lately but today it’s raining. I don’t care. I’m not going anywhere! Instead I bought myself another Craftsy class with a sale that was offered. I’ve really enjoyed the two that I’ve been alternating watching: The Ultimate T-Shirt with Marcy and Katherine Tilton and Knit Lab: Fit Your Knits with Stephanie Japel. They are both excellent, full of great tips and neither too fast nor too slow for my attention span. I think it helps that the instructors are fun, vibrant, smart people who are comfortable in front of the camera and very able to explain their topics in clear terms. Hopefully the new one I got, Custom Fitting: Back, Neck, Shoulders by Kathleen Cheetham will be as helpful to me. The Tilton class is short on fitting these very critical areas and Lynda Maynard’s Sew the Perfect Fit doesn’t go into it in enough depth so I’m hoping this one will fill in the gaps.

I must like this format – I’m now up to 13 classes! Quite a number were free and I tried to get the others on sale rather than pay full price so it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I’d certainly rather buy a specific class and have unlimited access on my own time schedule than pay a subscription fee. If they go that way they will just lose me. I think I already have enough information in my library to keep me happy for as many years as I have left anyhow! And there’s still lots of free sources on the web. You just have to watch the quality of the information.

OK. I’m done babbling incoherently. More anon.

Life…

Life is just a bowl of All-Bran
You wake up every morning and it's there
So live as only you can
It's all about enjoy it 'cos ever since you saw it
There ain’t no one can take it away.

Thank you, Small Faces, for your lyrics! I bought their album “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake”, a psychedelic fairy tale, back in 1969 when I was all of 18 and T-Man and I were already together. My album is long gone but I’ve been singing this little ditty ever since (in a really bad East London accent too). I think there’s a Universal Truth in there. OK, I know! It’s terminally silly. But work with me here. The world is too darn serious sometimes. Especially on Election Day in BC. Yes, of course I will be voting. Just waiting for T to come with me. If you don’t vote, you can’t bitch! And I’m suspecting some serious bitching will be in order as soon as the election is over since none of the parties have got it right to my way of thinking. But I digress.

I had a lovely time with the grand-beasties yesterday. My! Small children are exhausting! Noisy too. Even worse with my hearing aids on. We played Play-doh and built houses/cages/tunnels for the little plastic people and animals. Then there was some mad running around the coffee table and other hilarity. I managed to bow out of that exercise though. Stargazer’s leg is much better and he’s barely limping now. Princess Pink gave me a lovely weed…er, wildflower bouquet for Mother’s Day, tied with her very first knitting:

Of course she had a little help from her mom. (OK, a lot!) But I’m hopeful she will eventually become A Knitter. The rhyme about Jack does work! Oh, and here’s the rest of my bouquet:

Or the top of it at least. It was nearly as tall as the giver. Came with its own earwig too! I’ve since evicted him to the great outdoors.

In answer to the comment from Suzanne yesterday: I’ve got 4 kinds of tomatoes. My usual Juliet, which are medium-sized cherry tomatoes but oval-shaped like a paste tomato. These have been very reliable for me over the last several years. I cut the final trusses off at the end of the season and let them ripen on the kitchen counter. We ate our last (rather dried-out) ones in December in soup. This year for variety I decided to try a combo pack of 3 heirloom varieties: Brandywine, Marvel Stripe and Green Zebra (which is apparently not really an heirloom). We’ll see how well they do in my greenhouse which sometimes gets too hot in August for good fruit set. BTW, you’re definitely welcome to a couple of my extra tomato plants, if you like! I always grow too many seedlings. There’s especially lots of extra Green Zebras because nobody seems to want them, poor things.

Going back to last week, I’ve been meaning to show you some detail photos of Jane Kenyon’s work that I took at her lecture last Wednesday. Took me long enough. Here’s Jane when I tried to take her photo:

And here’s Jane when I finally got her to hold still for a moment:

She’s such a sweetie! Jane’s designing begins with photos, paintings and mixed media pieces that she further manipulates in Photoshop until she gets an image she’s happy with. Common themes are stones, lichens, leaves, and graffiti. My photography (taken with her permission) doesn’t do her work justice at all, but here’s the middle of one piece that I totally love:

It’s one of the Crevice/Crevasse series and also includes another favourite subject, lichen. Here’s a detail of another piece so you can see the individual stitches:

Remember, Jane’s recent work totally consists of free-motion stitches and nothing else – except a label and hanging sleeve on the back. The cloth is surprisingly soft and flexible in the hand. She creates it completely on the sewing machine using heavy soluble stabiliser which is washed out at the end. There are two rayon embroidery threads in the needle and one in the bobbin. She changes colours constantly and layers the stitches to get this painterly effect. Here’s a larger view of the same piece, one of her series on palm leaf silhouettes:

I couldn’t get far enough away for proper perspective because they were lying overlapping on a table so I apologise if this is somewhat distorted. Unfortunately I haven’t included the edges of the pieces which are gently wavy. Each of these particular pieces is about a metre square, just to give you the scale. It can take Jane several weeks of 10-hour days to stitch each one. And no, she doesn’t do housework! Just art. Sigh.

Paper knitting time! Gotta get the darn thing finished asap. Gee, now I’ve got a really persistent earworm stuck in my head. (No, not the earwig. He’s outside in the garden.) For your own personal earworm, see the Small Faces goofy video on YouTube here. Can you imagine modern bands having so much unselfconscious fun? Sadly Steve and Ronnie died in the ‘90’s, Steve in a house fire and Ronnie (aka Plonk) of multiple sclerosis. “It’s all about enjoy it” – ’cause stuff happens…

Give me those happy days toytown newspaper smile
Clap twice, lean back, twist for a while
Well now we've got the hang of it
There's nothing we can't do with it
And now we're very into it we can't go wrong!

Odd Day

Yes, it is indeed an Odd Day – 5/7/09. Apparently this is a fairly rare occurrence, but since I’m math-impaired I’ll take their word for it. So celebrate, people! Methinks I’m odd enough already though I’m sure I can think of something even odder than usual to mark the occasion before the day is out.

So I’m heading off in a short while to my friend Cathie’s for the monthly Spectrum meeting. Hopefully this time I’ll be able to concentrate and get some play time with my Art Journal. Last month all I could think about was the Papyrine Shawl but since I’m reduced to knitting little leaves and roots at the moment, I think I’ll leave that at home. Besides I have to take the bus with all my stuff and I don’t want to risk getting the paper wet in the intermittent rain showers we’ve been having. I’m using my little wheelie pack because I have so much stuff to bring that I can’t carry the weight. It’s not too bad in a sprinkle but an extended rain will eventually seep through the nylon. Even though it’s not raining right this second, you just know it’s going to start again the minute I step out the door, don’t you?

The lecture last evening with Jane Kenyon was totally fun and inspiring! I can’t wait to try a thing or three for my Art Journal. She spends quite a bit of time with collage, painting and mixed media that often ends up as a design basis for her thread paintings. In her slides, she showed us the steps that the design goes through to the final piece: small artwork or photo, cut/paste/layer/colour in Photoshop, and then stitching, stitching and more stitching. I think everyone has patience for the things that they love but wow! The number of hours Jane spends at the sewing machine is truly amazing! Her final pieces are ALL rayon embroidery thread and feel like solid but supple cloth. Sorry, I do have some photos but they are still in my camera and I have no time right now so you’ll have to wait for them.

More on Jane anon. And thanks so much for the Happy Blogiversary wishes, my dears! I have a bus to catch. Adventures In Public Transit, here I come!

Un-Raveling

For the moment anyway. I was really busy all weekend so didn’t get a chance to even turn on the computer. Highly unusual! The weather was gorgeous, sunny and relatively warm so that may have had something to do with it. In order: I went to the Barber lecture Friday evening, to Spectrum Dye Study Group on Saturday, on a long walk on Sunday and then to another of the Maiwa lectures, this time with Jane Callender, a stitched shibori artist. Today I’m relaxing even though the laundry and vacuuming need doing. They aren’t going anywhere (except increasing in numbers of undies and dust bunnies) so they can wait. Tonight I go to another lecture, not a Maiwa one but at my LYS, with Richard Ashford of Ashford Wheels & Looms. It was my former boss’s idea that I come and she waived the $20 fee for me so even though I’m tired, I’m going anyway. At least the commute is only 3-1/2 blocks. Better than having to buttonhole T-Man into picking me up or begging a ride from someone going my way.

So first off, how was the Elizabeth Barber lecture? It was really thought-provoking, just as I thought it would be. Some of the mummies that Dr. Barber studied in Urumchi, China, were 5,ooo years old and yet were wearing large fringed wraps woven from handspun wool and felted wool caps with finely woven grain baskets to hand. You could see the stitches and the headers where the warp was set up for the warp-weighted loom. You could see the yarn variations attempted to decorate the cloth. One young girl’s wrap had 3 different natural colours of wool. A later mummy of a man (who just looked like he was asleep and not millennia old) had a wool shirt and pants in a handsome deep maroon with contrasting piping and a tubular braided belt. A baby had a cap of blue wool (and possibly cashmere) which was so brightly dyed it could have come out of yesterday’s synthetic dyebath. His wrap was secured with a twisted blue and red wool rope and he had a horn cup and sheep’s teat bottle nearby. Later people still had multicoloured plaid fabrics that would make any Scotsman proud. The effect of these bodies wasn’t at all horrible but absolutely fascinating. Dr. Barber explained much of the prehistory of the area and the conjectures about where these Caucasian people came from and how they ended up settling in one of the driest places on earth. Too much for me to explain here. Read her book. Better yet, read all her books. You’ll probably feel as I do that people haven’t really advanced as people, just our technology has. Are we better off — or not?

On Saturday at Spectrum we had an extended show-and-tell with our last meeting’s felting, mostly scarves. By then it was lunchtime so we had our usual fabulous potluck which included pumpkin soup, veggie stew baked in a small pumpkin, quinoa salad, carrot and daikon radish slaw with pumpkin seeds, and a delicious apple and pecan cake with vanilla ice-cream for dessert. It was definitely a harvest/Halloween meal with orange being the dominant colour! We chatted so long at the dining table and out in the hostess’s weaving studio that we never did get around to actually doing any felting. When I got home I took my felting needle and created some fall leaves on my crochet hook roll that I’d made awhile back. It looks much better now. See?


I did have a bad scare though while I was working at the table outside on my top deck. I felt something land on the top of my head. Since I was sitting underneath a planter that has some quickly-deteriorating impatiens, I just thought it was a flower or leaf from that. I grabbed it in my hand and then noticed that it was a wasp! Yikes! Here I was home alone (T was at a woodturning demo) and I almost got stung. Last time that happened I ended up in hospital with anaphylactic shock and I’d hate to repeat the event. Unfortunately my epi-pen is outdated, though probably still good (emphasis on the “probably”). I’d hate to have to use it and find out otherwise. They are so expensive that I was hoping to wait to replace it until late next spring. Not too many wasps around in winter after all. Luckily I had grabbed the thing fairly gently and although I startled, I didn’t squeeze it but let it go. It landed on my shirt front where I leapt up and shook it off over the railing. Whew! Disaster averted. I’m not sure how long I would have had to figure out whether or not to call an ambulance or a taxi if it got me. T was certainly too far away to get home quickly. Last time it took nearly an hour before it got critical but who knows with subsequent stings. I’d rather not find out. Surprisingly, until this happened I’d gone back to being pretty relaxed around wasps. Remains to be seen if I stay that way or if there’s some residual post-traumatic stress again.

The weather yesterday was still pretty nice so we went for one of our usual walks. We finally got our photos taken for our passports. My photo is really awful! But I don’t photograph well at the best of times anyhow. The authorities don’t care as long as it looks like me, right? I’ve given up being vain about my looks. Who is that old lady in the mirror when I still feel young inside? As long as the passport satisfies those idiots who made them mandatory in order to travel outside of Canada. Maybe I won’t even use it. Or maybe when we get our passports we’ll take a quick trip to San Francisco or something. Just to try them out, you know. See if they’re worth all the hassle and expense.

Last evening’s lecture featured Jane Callender’s indigo-dyed nui shibori which is just to “dye” for. I totally love the precise and beautiful geometric designs that she achieves with her stitching. Almost as fascinating was her story about her family and her discovery of her chosen medium. Though she now lives in the UK, Jane was born in Malaysia and spent her childhood on a rubber plantation. Her parents’ families were associated with such far-flung countries as Egypt and India. Old British Empire stuff. Although the lecture wasn’t as thought-provoking as Dr. Barber’s was, it was still wonderful to see several of the pieces shown in her slides up close and personal. My favourite one called “Trellis” is here and another lovely one called “Dandelion” is here. I didn’t bring my wallet with me so I was unable to purchase any of her small introductory kits (pricey) or her indigo-dyed bone beads. Awww…

It’s raining again now so I’m glad we got out in the nice weekend weather. Fortunately I bought a new umbrella so it doesn’t bother me. We’re right at the high colour mark for the autumn leaves though and the rain kind of spoils the enjoyment. You can’t kick them as easily when they’re wet! Here’s what some of them looked like yesterday:


I have no idea what kind of street trees these are but isn’t that pink just glorious? Oh, and I haven’t been on Ravelry since Friday.