The kitchen floor is in

I’m so happy. The floors are in the kitchen and bathrooms.

And the kitchen floor is blue and beautiful.

Sparks is attractive, too.

Lemon squeezy mitts

Lemon squeezy as in, “easy peasy lemon squeezy”. I hadn’t knit a thing since finishing the Socks For Sparks and Habitat last Fall, so I thought I’d better break in my new needles with something simple and fail-proof. These mitts were it.

I made them out of a very very old hank of Morehouse Merino 3-strand yarn in the Beaujolais colorway. This was the first hand-painted yarn I ever bought, back in 2004, and amazingly it is still available. In the Beaujolais colorway. How many dye companies keep a colorway for five years?

Anyway, the mitts were indeed easy peasy, and they’re very warm to boot. I used less than one hank to make them both. Play with needle sizes and different heavy-worsted yarns to change the size of the finished product. I used size US4 dpns. I used the cable cast-on because I always do use it; I rather like the braided edge it gives and, get this, it is WAY stretchier than either the longtail cast-on or the tubular cast-on.

Cast on 32 sts using cable cast-on and divide evenly on 4 dpns. Knit 12 rounds of K2P2 ribbing.

Cast off 8 stitches (one whole needle) and knit the rest of the round.

Cast on 12 stitches using cable cast-on with fourth dpn. Divide stitches evenly on all dpns. Knit in rounds till mitt is a satisfactory length.

Knit 12 rounds of K2P2 ribbing. Cast off.

Lemon squeezy!

Quilted knitting needle roll

Ah, the knitting needle roll. What an object of joy forever. First, it’s quilted. Second, it’s therefore soft and squishy and warm. Third, it’s pink. Fourth, it’s full of gorgeous bamboo knitting needles.

I need to meet more people who knit, so I can make more needle rolls and buy more sets of these fantastic bamboo knitting needles.

Anyway: after ordering the 6″ dpns and 9″ spns from eKnittingNeedles, I set out to make this needle roll.

It was an adventure, and I feel that I’m a better person as a result. Firstly, I learned things. Secondly, I made a prototype with very few errors, woop woop!

The first step was to machine-quilt the inner and outer fabrics together. I wanted to stipple them rather than quilt them in lines, and that meant doing free-motion quilting for the first time in my life. I first took about twenty minutes figuring out how to put the free-motion foot on my machine; if it helps you to know, you have to unscrew the whole foot assembly to put it on, not just pop off the sewing foot.

I then took another twenty minutes figuring out how to lower the feed dogs on my machine. Those pesky machine designers–I have to pull off the piece of plastic that forms the sewing bed, to get to it. But I got to it. And I pinned together my quilt sandwich, took a deep breath, and began to stipple.

I’d like to note that stippling isn’t necessarily easy. On the one hand, you have to simulate random motion, which is hard to do. On another hand, you can’t see what’s happening with the fabric behind your needle, which makes it hard to (1) not miss spots entirely, and (2) avoid crossing lines, which is a stippling no-no.

You also have to crank your machine’s tension way up.

In the end I got the pieces quilted together, and though it isn’t a very honorable execution of a stipple, it’s mine and I love it.

I then sewed on the pieces of fabric for pockets, spent twenty minutes finding my disappearing-ink marking pen, marked and sewed the individual pockets, and finally bound the whole thing. My binding technique is one I recently heard of from my mother–it creates a nice double-matting on one side of the piece. On this go-around I used single-fold binding, which was a big mistake, and sewed the pieces of the tape together at 90-degree angles, which was also a big mistake. I’ll know better next time, and my next needle roll will be the better for it.

All in all, though, I’m tickled pink with the result and will treasure it forever. Packaging like this is so appealing… I feel, now that if I decide to go Out West in a covered wagon, or to take a three months’ holiday on the Lido, or if I’m transported to Siberia and have to throw things haphazardly in a suitcase in the middle of the night, my knitting needle situation is taken care of.

Joy.

Wonderful knitting needles

There is so much to cover in this post. The crafty gods have smiled upon me, and provided me with a perfect little project.

It began on Thursday. I had been working on knitting a pair of mitts for myself, using my usual two-circular-needles technique for small diameter circular knitting. It just wasn’t working for me, though. The dangling needles were unwieldy, the cords uncooperative, and the needles too short to hold comfortably. I began to despair of ever knitting again.

I didn’t own a set of dpns in the size I was using, so I began to search for some online. I have always favored bamboo for dpns, so I began to look at that. And, oh my. $8? $10? $12 for a set of bamboo toothpicks? That can’t be fair.

And then I stumbled upon eKnittingNeedles (which is not in any way sponsoring this post, btw, I just love them so much I’m blogging about them). They sell sets of knitting needles–6″ dpns, or 9″ dpns, or 9″ or 12″ or 14″ spns–for $25 a go. That’s thirty spns per set, or (be still my heart) 75 dpns. Bamboo. Great. Found a blog review that compared them favorably to Clover. Bought them!

They are lovely. Lovely, delicious, natural, warm, springy, grippy bamboo needles, with decently sharp little points. I finished the first mitt the night they arrived. I sit at my desk at work, helplessly dreaming about all the things I’m going to knit RIGHT AWAY now that I have all the needles I ever needed at my fingertips.

I bought the 6″ dpns and the 9″ spns. I adore knitting with short single-points. So dainty. So manageable. Anyway, I am a sucker for things in matched sets… especially warm natural earthy SouleMama-worthy sets of things. I’m also a sucker for organizing them. And so, obviously, I needed a needle roll.

And it needed to be pink. And made out of Joel Dewberry’s Aviary fabric, with the lovely Asian-inspired birds on the outside, and the lovely woodgrain print on the inside, to echo the needles. Sigh. What a dreamboat of a project. This pink roll is the prototype, and it represents so very many firsts for me.

But it’s just too much content for one blog post. So I’ll sign off for now, and gush about the needle roll… and my first free-motion quilting… and my first machine binding… tomorrow.

Right now, I’ve gotta go back to the office. And dream about knitting.

Old gravestones

Sparks and I spent Thanksgiving, of course, in the tiny town where his ancestors have lived since the early 19th century. Back then the place was on the rise, with a general store of its own. The people got together and built a church, which is still there, and bought land for a graveyard behind it.

The little town now has a handful of houses, the church and graveyard, and church recreation grounds across the street, including a community building, a retreat center, baseball diamond, picnic pavilion, and playground. The general store is no more, and the mail to the residents is addressed to the next town over.

Sparks and I took a walk through the graveyard, and I took pictures of some of the interesting tombstones there. I have wanted to blog about the experience ever since, but haven’t found the words. Maybe the feeling–which is by no means an unpleasant one–just can’t be described. Here are some of the pictures.

This last stone is so interesting because it’s new. Someone bought a stone for an infant who died 135 years ago. What is the story there?

My father in law is putting together a website of all the small graveyards in the area. You can find this cemetery here.

Twelve days till Christmas

And Pudding is all set for it to be Christmas NOW.

Renovation news, mid-December

Oh, there is SO MUCH news about the renovation!

LOOK AT THAT BEAUTIFUL ALCOVE TUB. I’m so excited I could pop. The first night we’re in the house, I am so having a soak in that tub. With the drywall up we finally have a clear idea of the space available in the room, and it is scrumptious. As is the light.

And here is the white subway tile that will surround the bath. I have always admired white subway tile… so clean and chic, and not plain old white squares. Hooray!

By the way… I decided to go with the Foxglove pink paint, in this bathroom. There will be so little wall exposed, between the tub surround and the fixtures and the window and the wardrobe, that I think it will not be overwhelming. Also, I promise that in real life it’s less Pepto-Bismol-like than the mockup I posted previously.

And here is the kitchen, also with drywall! This room is so big, and will be so, so beautiful when it’s finished. White walls, white cabinets, glass fronts, sandy white countertops, and the floor…

The floor will be the ocean of this island paradise. We have the floor tiles for the kitchen and the master and guest bathrooms, and it goes in starting on Monday. After that, the cabinets and fixtures get installed and the hardwood ash floor goes in to the rest of the house.

And at that point we can schedule the move.

Can you tell I’m excited?

Looking for light

Any office rat knows how it is now, in the deep dark depths between fall and winter. Get up in the dark, come home in the dark.

Just a little bit of sunlight in my house and on my projects when I’m home at lunch time. It’ll have to do.

Christmas-prep weekend

Last weekend was my anointed weekend for doing Christmas preparation. I put up two trees and baked five batches of cookies… two of them double batches.

The shopping for these cookies is a treat in itself. At what other time of the year can you go to the supermarket for six boxes of butter, two bags of flour, white sugar, brown sugar, fresh baking powder, two boxes of baking chocolate, currants, and four kinds of nuts? No other time, that’s what.

The recipes are old ones from a catalogue, which I have blogged about before. Many families have their own standard cookies, and if people are like me, they feel clannish about their own cookies being the best. These are, however, extraordinarily good. Objectively.

I also put up the two Christmas trees. I haven’t gotten around to the bits and bobs, but the trees are up! My Christmas Pudding just loves to sit by the trees. She doesn’t bother the ornaments at all–she’s such a good kitty.

And after so much excitement in one weekend, she’s also a tired kitty. As am I.

River Cottage pear and almond cake

Sparks is establishing a tradition of coming down sick soon after Thanksgiving, and as I type he is tucked miserably in bed with a bad cold that has been percolating for a week. I, sadly, have so far failed to catch it, but don’t lose hope, I’m doing my best. I am hoping to knock out the year’s Christmas cookies this weekend, so last night when it became apparent that Sparks really was going to be sick, I wanted to provide some yummy easy-to-eat carbs of the kind that are so important when one has a cold, and protect my cookie stash. Enter River Cottage Pear and Almond Cake.

Sparks and I, who both quite like the idea of having big gardens and small farms and growing and cooking and eating slow, whole food, have been watching what parts of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage series we can get, recently. What a great show–like Martha Stewart, without the snobbery and smugness and shameless commercialism (yes, I have stopped subscribing to Martha Stewart Living. When “living” is about which $4000 handbag I should buy, I’m ready to stop Living). Hugh, for the uninitiated, is a “smallholder” who actually runs a media empire called River Cottage. He produces documentaries, television series, and books about farming, gardening, raising animals, and the subsequent processing of foodstuffs into tasty morsels. If you’re lucky enough to live in Devon, there are River Cottage classes, retreats, and canteens. But anyway:

This was the first River Cottage recipe I’ve tried, and OH MY if they’re all this good then I’m trying them all. This cake is dense and rustic… in the words of Becky from A Little Pricess, “these’ll just stay in yer stummick”. It has wholemeal flour and ground almonds in it, and because I had dried pears off our own pear trees sitting around, I put in dried pears soaked in brandy instead of fresh pears sauteed in sugar syrup. I’m sure Hugh would approve. The result is divine–the dried pears melted into the rest of the cake, and the grit of almonds and wholemeal disguises the grit of the pears, while the pears add to the flavor of the whole. Also, while the cake was baking it gave off a very particular, elusive aroma that I have only ever before smelled while passing certain mall coffee shops, and have always wondered what on earth could smell so good. The answer, I know now, is cooking ground almonds. I may put ground almonds in everything from now on.

I highly recommend this cake. It displaces all other coffee/snack cakes in my repertoire. And the picture of it? The picture of 3/8ths of the original cake? That’s because, eleven hours after it came out of the oven, that’s all that’s left.

Gypsy Rose quilt top

In recent days I have had more time to spend in my craft room than I had had almost since I moved to my house. I have also cured my yarn-buying habit by displacing it with a fabric-buying habit. I also have my craft room half full of pillow forms and yards & yards of home dec fabric for the new house. As a result, I have sometimes of late cogitated on the possibility that there is such a thing as too much fabric. I sold a little on eBay, but most of it I love too dearly to part with. My conclusion is that I need to start using it up at a rate equal to or greater than the rate at which I acquire it.

Thus was born this little quilt top, made of one layer cake of Gypsy Rose by Fig Tree Quilts. I started out by making ninepatches, then debated whether I wanted to cut them in square quarters and sew them together again, or cut them on the diagonal and sew them together again.

Sewing on the diagonal won out, and I’m sorry to say that it was a failure. The middle squares weren’t appreciably diminished, and so from above when you see the whole quilt–like so–it just looks like it’s been sloppily put together, not as if something unusual and interesting was happening. Oh, well. It’s pretty fabric and still a passable little quilt. I shall practice my machine quilting on it, and not cry when I make mistakes.

Pudding, bless her little heart, supports all of my patchwork efforts.

Corncob cornbread

Sparks has access to a dazzling array of vintage oddities. On the one hand his family enjoys junk shops, estate sales, and auctions. On another hand he has received copious hand-me-downs from his parents and grandparents. On the third hand, he’s always looking out for interesting things left on the curb.

Thus was found, several years ago, the corncob cornbread pan. For a long time it was a paperweight, but recently he brought it home, cleaned off the rust, and oiled it up. Cornbread time!

I was impressed by how well the mold took. I’ve had such miserable luck with molded cake pans that I wasn’t expecting much, but Sparks obviously has a magic touch with baked goods, because these were beautiful.

One vintage corncob cornbread pan, ready for regular use.

Renovation news: late November

This weekend, feeling happy and fresh and fit as fiddles due to the roof finally being begun, we ventured to our darling new/old town to see how the house was going.

The roof is indeed going on. The house has such an enormous expanse of roof, though–and a passing neighbor reports that the roofers are delicate flowers who must go home at 3:00 every afternoon–and in spite of having been unable to work three days out of four for the past six weeks, they still needed the whole weekend off–that the roof was only about half laid at that point. No matter; it was laid over the part of the house that matters, and interior work need be delayed no longer.

The bathtub is in place! Oh, it’s a large and grand tub. It is 66″ long and 36″ wide, which is significantly larger than any bathtub I’ve ever had before. I am going to have legendary soaks in that tub, let me tell you.

And above it, the window has been installed! Having some light in that room makes such a difference. The glass of the window is frosted for privacy, and it is double-hung in such a way that the top sash can be pulled down, so the room can be aired and still be private. Woop woop!

Renovation news: mid-November

In the absence of any new photographs to show you, here’s a pretty mosaic of my Flickr favorites:

So. The house renovation. I am able to post about it this morning only because I have GOOD news to tell you. I have several pieces, in fact!

1) The new metal roof is being put on AS I TYPE. After one of the wettest Octobers on record, the new roof is finally, finally being put on. Once this is done, we can continue to make progress inside, without fear of soaking new insulation and drywall. Hooray!

2) The window has been installed in the master bathroom. Sparks has seen it, and reports that it transforms the space. Also, the new bathtub is there, and he says it’s bee-yoo-ti-ful and just the right size.

3) Our flooring guy tells us that to have 3/4″ hardwood put down will probably end up being the same price as having 1/4″ underlayment plus 1/2″ engineered wood put down, so we may as well go with hardwood. Probably. Almost certainly. But he has to run the numbers. Yes!

I have been quiet because it’s been a tense week here; for quite a while there wasn’t much good news about the renovation. It boiled down to two facts:

1) The roof hadn’t gone on, and the forecast is largely for more rain. There were three clear days last week which the roofer chose to devote to another customer. We have spent most of the last six days sitting quietly, with glassy eyes, worrying. Sparks even took to playing computer games, which I had never seen him do before.

2) Lowes yanked their Martha Stewart line of paint colors with no warning and no backsies. The colors are out of the system. We need more paint to touch up the formerly-big-orange-wall! Luckily, Sparks the Hero dug up the paint chip. We will have it color-matched. And hope that it really does match.

By the way, this means that “Bare Branches” is out of the running for the master bathroom color. There are other taupes in the world, but I’m taking it as a sign from above that I should go with Foxglove. So a pink bathroom it will be!

Bathroom colors

Sooooooo. Supposedly, the roof will be put on our house starting today, which means that drywall goes up soon, which means it’s time to choose paint colors. For real.

In the bedroom, my current thoughts are to paint each wall in a very subtle tone. One will be the same lovely warm white as the rest of the house, one an extremely subtle taupe, one an only slightly less subtle taupe, and the fourth a subtle pink… possibly the same Paris Pink that our bedroom is right now.

With that in mind… we have two bathroom wall color possibilities. Please keep in mind that Sparks swears up and down he is NOT going to use this bathroom. He apparently believes that separate bathrooms make a happy marriage.

Eddie Bauer “Foxglove”

This pink is actually redder, in real life. It’s almost a watermelon color. It’s warm and vibrant; much less the flat bubblegum that’s showing up on my monitor, here. I think it provides a lovely contrast with both the dark wood and the bright-white porcelain. I heart it. It does, however, lock me into having a pink bathroom. Painting over it in another color would require primer.

Martha Stewart “Bare Branches”

This is a lovely multifaceted brownish-taupe. It also harmonizes well with the wood and the porcelain. The advantages of it are that it is sophisticated and it would allow me to swap out different colored towels and knickknacks whenever I wanted. The disadvantage is that it is safe and boring, and means that there will be no less than THREE brown rooms in the house. Four, if you count the taupe walls in the master bedroom. That seems kinda blah and boring.

Thoughts?

Dad’s hurdy-gurdy

My dad had been talking about it for years, ever since we got Microsoft Musical Instruments bundled with Windows 95, really. But in the past year, he did it. He built a hurdy-gurdy.

The hurdy-gurdy is one of my very favorite instruments. Do you remember The Mummer’s Dance, by Loreena McKinnitt? It’s the instrument that plays the melody at the beginning. It’s bizarre… and oh, I do love instruments with drones!

To play it, you begin by turning a crank in the bottom of the instrument.

This turns a wheel that the strings all touch. The friction from the turning makes them sound. All at once.

Then, you play keys–just like a keyboard–to play the melody on two of the strings. Another one or two of the strings just play the same tone all the time; that’s the drone. Bagpipes have drones, too. Even some very old viols had them, but they aren’t made anymore.

Here’s a peek at the inner workings of the keys. My my.

At least one of the drones (dad is such an authority on this stuff that I’m hedging what I say) is set to buzz loudly. The person playing the hurdy-gurdy controls the buzz, by way of cranking technique, to create a background rhythm for the music.

Some hurdy-gurdys are large and meant to be held in the lap while you play. As it became a favorite instrument with travelling minstrels, though, it can also be strapped on to the body, for perambulatory playing. Here’s dad getting himself into the harness…

And here he is trying to get the darn thing tuned. The pegs work entirely by friction, rather than being on worm screws as the strings of most modern string instruments are. This makes it hard to tune, and hard to keep in tune.

How about that? Proof that my mother isn’t the only one with mad skillz, in the family.

Altered photographs

I recently discovered the joy of applying textures and overlays to pictures in Photoshop. Oh my, what fun! Now I know why some blogs have such stunning pictures… postprocessing, baby, it’s the answer to all things.

A texture is just another picture that you layer on top of your own picture, then decrease the opacity of so that your original picture shows through. Sometimes they are just a solid color that adds an emotional aura to the picture; sometimes they mimic the dark edges and blots of a daguerreotype or viewfinder; sometimes they have the texture of linen or canvas.

There are many, many free textures available on the web. Google “free textures” or search for the phrase on Flickr; you will find far more than you can sort through and use. My favorites freebies come from Les Brumes, on Flickr. There are also ones to buy, of course. Like many of the people interested in textures, I have found that the $40 set sold by Florabella are exceptionally good and exceptionally usable. I could probably keep myself occupied with only hers, and they are definitely my go-tos for the beginning stages of photo processing.

There are also tutorials all over the web. Any Flickr group dedicated to textures will have them; you can also google “textures tutorial” to find a plethora of information. The basic process, though, is to size one or both pictures so they fit each other, paste the texture onto a layer above your photograph, change the layer’s mode (usually to Overlay, which creates the most subtle effect), then play with the opacity.

Textures are a great way to enhance already-good photographs, and also as I am finding as I scan in decades-old family slides, pictures, and photo negatives, a way to rescue images that have already begun to deteriorate.

Autumn leaves

Every year when the leaves are at their peak, I take a walk and photograph them. I feel like the precious colors of autumn are every bit as much a part of the season’s bounty as the harvest, and that it would be a crying shame to squander their beauty and let it go unremembered.

Plus, there’s no canning or freezing to do afterward.

Last year, I tried taking pictures through the amber lenses of my sunglasses. This year I made an even more important discovery: that the leaves photograph much better on overcast days than on bright sunny ones. On sunny days, you see, they reflect bright-white sunshine, and the colors get lost between the bright-white and the dark in between. Overcast days eliminate the problem.

I think you’ll agree…

Fidget Pie

Sparks and I have been experiencing an unaccountable interest in “good Olde English” food recently. Perhaps it something to do with having recently watched Lord of the Rings, or perhaps it was the trip to Italy that made us pine for a trip to the UK, or perhaps it has to do with our buddies Si and Dave… but anyway, we have. There has been sampling of perry and cider, double gloucester and wensleydale, and last week we decided to make a fidget pie.

Fidget pie is a Shropshire speciality. It consists of a short crust filled with potatoes, onions, apples, and ham (or gammon, more appropriately), bound with flour and cream, and flavored with sage, nutmeg, and cider. Yum.

Sparks, good boy that he is, and his grandmother’s grandson, made the short crust. I handled the filling.

Apples

Potatoes

Onions–blanch these and the potatoes, to partially cook them and take the bite out of the onion

Ham

Fresh sage from the garden

The finished fidget pie.

It was quite a thing of beauty; we felt like hobbits when we ate it. It is certainly hearty, heavy stodge–excellent winter comfort food. I recommend it as an occasional remedy for particularly hectic work-weeks.

Farmer’s Market

I didn’t get to the Farmer’s Market all summer. There was just too much to do, and while it’s a fun place, it’s also a jumbled confusing place… and one that happens early on Saturdays, when I just want to take my time at home.

This past weekend we went, though, for one of the last markets of the year and because the Fall ones are always my favorites.