I stole a bit of time today to get my brown/gray shawl pinned out and blocking. Lace is INCREDIBLY stretchy - or at least if knit from a good wool, alpaca, or other animal fiber - it should be. Here it is in an optically challenging presentation thanks to the rally check sheets I use as an alignment aid:

The checks make it very hard to see, but you can make out a bit more of the pattern now in the detail shot. I promise more pix tomorrow, and I'll take those on a plain white background.

Now how stretchy is lace? My unblocked piece was approximately 39 inches across. See those checks? They're 2 inch squares. My shawl is pinned out to be a square of approximately 60 inches on a side. My guess is that it will spring back somewhat after it's dry. I'll probably end up with something closer to 54 inches on a side (about 4.5 feet across).

We also made significant progress on the final stage of our bathroom renovation this weekend. Here you see The Resident Male exercising his inner artist. Before you write to me with safety tips, please note that we've got about 2 inches of closed cell camping mattress pad topped with another layer of bath towel underneath the no-slip tarp in the tub. The ladder is stable, and won't mar the surface beneath its feet. Plus the ceiling is so low that no one has to climb above the second step to reach it.

As to the color - I don't know if you can make out the difference given the variability among monitors, but the ceiling is bright white, and the walls are barely green. Not mint, not pistachio. Think three gallons of milk with one drop of food coloring. It's my hope that they will contrast nicely with the white tile underparts and fixtures, echo (just barely) the green tile accent stripe, green stone sink top, greenish tint of the glass shower door, and make the green (rather than the yellow) in the stained glass window pop out more.

Even though it's shrouded in protective plastic, you can see that the refinishing of the window and its replacement in the wall have both accomplished. A special merit badge for chemical management (with scrapers rampant) to he who did that work. Goodbye ugly mustard yellow enamel paint! And good riddance.

Comments Problems

We're having intermittent problems with the comments feature that screens out automatic postings. Sometimes if you go to enter your comments the little "type what you see here" box isn't displaying. If you want to leave a comment please scroll down and make sure that you can see that box before you begin typing. If it's not there, try reloading the screen. We're not quite sure what's happening, although we're working on it. When he's not elbow deep in brushes and rollers, The Resident Male (website plumber par excellence) is busy applying his biggest software wrenches to wiseNeedle's pipes. Apologies for any/all inconvenience.

Technorati : knitting; bathroom renovation

On the baby blanket, I decided to rip back the entire edging (about half-finished at the point of decision). I decided I wanted to re-do corner #1, plus I didn't like the way that the joins along the first edge looked. I'd been reducing along the body, working roughly every six rows of edging onto four live body stitches. While the points were lying flat, the yarn I'm using is heavy enough to make the necessary decreases along the body look clunky. (You can get away with this in a fine lace, but not in the almost DK weight I'm using). Instead I've opted for a bit fuller edge with (perhaps) a bit of ruffle. I'd post pix, but they pretty much show the same blanket body as the last post, but with an arrow that says "edging used to be here." More on this later this week.

In other news, I finally got to the post office to pick up the mail I had on hold over vacation week. There, perched on top of the pile was my July No Sheep secret pal package. The formerly mysterious (but now known) Melanie was kind enough to send this:

That's two skeins of Schachenmayr Denim in a sunshiny yellow/orange, plus two tins of killer tea. I dance a dance of thanks! I'm looking forward to trying it all. On the downstream end, I finally made contact with my secret pal recipient, and am busy picking out the goodies for her.

And finally - progress on the bathroom front. Which is a good thing because washing one's hair in the sink can get old after five weeks. The tile is now (mostly) up and grouted. Vanity, storage cabinet, fixtures and finish work are left:

From the top - the view from the hall door. You can see the cleaned, repaired and repainted radiator, the pipes for the bathtub, and the new window frame into which the original stained glass will be fitted. Next is the shower, followed by the view from the window. No I didn't crawl out on the roof to take this - there's a sleeping porch on the other side of the window. And finally, a close-up of the tilework's green pencil line and chair rail - just for Kathryn, who has confessed to extreme bath envy.

If you've written to me in the past two weeks and haven't had a response - apologies. I'm still munching my way through my inbox.

Technorati : bathroom renovation, knitting

I posted a correction to the companion border for my shawl, previously posted a couple of days ago. To minimize confusion, I've updated the files on the original page, rather than re-post them here. I'm up to Row 15, and in working it - spotted an error mid-row. All fixed now.

On the home front, we've got walls and the beginnings of a tile floor now in our new bathroom. Everything is working along swimmingly. I'm happy just seeing the fresh hex tile on the floor in place of patchwork scuffed, curling, mustard yellow vinyl.

Next step is grouting and sealing the tile floor, then it's on to the tiled wainscoting and built-in storage cabinet (on the partial wall, dead ahead in the left hand image, above).

Technorati : bathroom renovation, knitting

Incremental progress on two fronts here at String. First, demolition is now complete. Evil Upstairs Bathroom having been stripped to the studs now finds itself at the very beginnings of build-out. The new larger shower stall has been roughed in, and the electrical work has commenced.

You can see the back side of the lath and plaster hallway walls on the outside of the old wall studs. 1912 was deep in the pre-drywall and wallboard era.

And on the lace shawl, I'm over the half-way mark in constructing the center square. I've got only one or two repeats left before my proportions are correct.

I've also tinkered a bit with the base pattern, translating it to modern notation and changing the directionality of some of the decreases to sharpen the lines. Since I have changed it somewhat and recharted it, I present the result. Click on the thumbnail below to load a full-size image

The original lacy knitting pattern from The Knitted Lace Patterns of Christine Duchrow, Vol. 1 was presented as part of two complex garment designs - a blouse and a baby bonnet. There are a couple of complementary simple band patterns for cuffs and trim on those projects. Except for the introduction (which provides a helpful translation key for the symbols and some historical German knitting terms), the entire book is in the original German. From what little knitting German I've picked up I can tell that even the written parts aren't quite modern German knitting prose. Like English knitting instruction writing, the conventions in German have changed over time. While I can work from the chart to make my own whatever, it would be an extreme challenge to knit up the blouse as described.

As the editors of this book report, Duchrow was among the first to try to present knitting instructions in graphical rather than prose format. Her graphs are idiosyncratic by modern standards and use letters and symbols rather than visual representations to represent the various stitches, but with a bit of practice her graphs are not difficult to knit from. Even though I can't read a word of the accompanying text in Vol. I, I've ordered a couple more books in the same Duchrow reprint series. If you're a lace and lacy knitting fiend, you'll probably have as much fun with Duchrow patterns as I am.

I feel confident I can share the design because I have redacted it into modern symbols, included corrections, and made changes in the pattern as presented. While my graph is recognizable as a variant of the historical one, there are subtle differences. For example, the original graph for this pattern treats all double decreases identically, rather than using directional variants to reinforce the framing diagonals. It also didn't continue the pattern into the edge areas as uniformly. It also didn't show the even numbered row. But for all of that, the pattern works up quite nicely even in the original presentation. I share my redaction/correction as tribute to the original author and the editors of this work, to help other knitters bridge from modern instructions to historical ones, and to encourage others to seek out these patterns and knit them without fear.

Interesting conjecture - from the style of the blouse, it would not be a stretch to say that it was current around the time my house was built. For all I know, the original owner may have sat in the library 95 years ago, knitting the same lace patterns I am working from today.

Technorati : bathroom renovation, knitting

I've gotten a couple of questions about the bathroom project - in specific, what we're aiming for. While we're not doing a historical restoration type true-to-period room, we are taking inspiration from the downstairs bathroom. It's been less meddled with than the upstairs horror:

The downstairs bath has one-inch white hex tile on the floor, white railroad tile (with high rail detail) on the walls, a very similar stained glass window to the one upstairs, and pedestal fixtures. I especially like the little sitzbath - it's great for kids' bird baths or foot washing when you don't want to fill a bigger tub. Along the way this bathroom has lost its original sink faucets and high tank toilet, but in addition to the mini-tub it still has an extra long full size tub (not in the photo); and a simple built-in wooden storage cabinet. We'll be replacing the toilet again as part of the current work due to some unfixable slow leaks on the one that's there. Someday we'll also do the sink hardware, but that's small peanuts compared to the awful upstairs. The rest of the downstairs bath works well enough, and is perfect for the house.

The upstairs bath will pick up the white hex floor and railroad tile with high rail look, with the addition of a green pencil line tile just under the rail. That should accent the green in the window. The upper walls will be painted white. We didn't want to go the restored tub route (weight, mostly plus some cautionary experiences from my earlier days working for an architectural antiquarian), and couldn't find a new pedestal tub in our price range, so we opted for the plainest white with-feet new tub we could find.

The other big departure from historical accuracy is a vanity stand that's natural oak color rather than one that's painted white. It's a free-standing furniture type piece rather than cabinetry, and will be topped with green stone and an underset white porcelain sink. Since the storage cabinet downstairs is original to the house and has never been painted, maybe the "only white painted woodwork in a bathroom restoration" rule isn't hard and fast.. Plain brushed nickel finish fixtures with white porcelain butterfly handles round it all out. And we've opted to keep the separate shower stall rather than combining the shower with the tub. The new shower will be the same depth but a bit wider than the old one (taking up some of the room previously wasted on the double sink vanity), with a very plain frosted glass door instead of a billowy curtain. We'll also keep the mini-radiator, but clean it and paint it white.

That's it. No over the top fancy fixtures, no bowl-mount waterfall sinks or spring rain experiences, no criminally expensive imported tile or lighting, no sybaritic soaking tubs or sauna showers. Just classic stuff, relatively unfussy and congruent with the style of the (mostly) untouched 1912 house. And with luck it will all work well together nicely, be easy to keep clean, and enjoyable to live with.

Technorati : bathroom renovation

A hectic past couple of days here at String. First, the website itself was attacked by spammer 'bots. Between Sunday afternoon and Monday night, they posted over 2,300 individual pingbacks to a collection of specious websites. I've been trolling through all past pages here, deleting the references. I think I've got them all now, but if you see one, please don't click on it - let me know instead and I'll deal with the blasted thing.

The other major event has been the kickoff of our long-awaited upstairs bathroom renovation. We've been in this house now about 2.5 years. All that time our upstairs family bath was only partly functional, with poorly functioning plumbing, 1960s-vintage yellow, clammy plastic paneling (impossible to get or keep clean), patched vinyl flooring, hideous pizza parlor hills-of-Tuscany wallpaper, crumbling laminate over particle board cabinetry, and awful mustard fixtures with gold tone faucets. The only nice thing about it was a stained glass window (partly visible in the first shot):

We've been plotting and planning to replace the whole lot with something functional, clean, and historical in mood. Yesterday the project began in earnest, with the contractor carefully removing the antique window and door, then gutting the rest. I promise not to make this a home-improvement blog, but if anything interesting happens, I might report it here.

And finally, just before the aforementioned chaos hit I had a happy not-so-surprise. I signed up for the No Sheep Swap. I generally don't participate in swaps or knit-alongs, but this one sounded like fun. My gracious and generous upstream swap partner (and all-around fascinating person) sent me this package of goodies:

It's a skein of South West Trading Company's Pure, a 100% soy silk yarn in happy berry colors, plus an embroidered purse big enough to be used for knitting accessory wrangling. Thank you, Melanie! I'll post back here after I've tried it out.

On the downstream end, I have been waiting to hear back from my assigned recipient, but my notes and card have gone unanswered. I can't wait any longer because to abide within the rules of the swap, I have to have her package in the mail shortly. I'll have to pick something out without guidance on color or yarn weight preference, and hope 1) she's there; and 2) she likes it.

[Aside: Apologies to Dena, who inadvertently was awarded an extra E when I was spelling her name. It stands for "excellent" and being obvious, intruded itself smack in the middle of my orthography. Thanks again for the fantastic lace-weight. I'm pretty sure I have enough, but if I do run out, I will resort to all sorts of begging, pleading, groveling, offering, trading, negotiating and bribery to secure some more.]

Technorati : bathroom renovation, knitting

Another post from the missing month. This originally appeared on 25 June 2004

Back to knitting.

Having successfully restarted my younger daughter's raglan in Regia 6-ply Crazy Color, I can now report a modicum of progress:

It's interesting to compare this pattern of striping with the one I was getting back when I was working in the round:

Same yarn, different width. If I had the strength I might even begin again, using the same strategy I employed for my Typeset Tee. That would make even wider stripes, but I'm too lazy to begin this no-think fill-in project for a third time.

The Play's the Thing

How did I manage to knit off six inches each of the back and front in one night? I was at an audition.

I've mentioned before that The Resident Male was in a production of King Lear back in March (he played Kent). He has just tried out for a small role in a staging of Macbeth. But I didn't go with him. My older daughter is caught up by the whole thing. At 13, she went to try out for one of the boy's roles - Fleance (2 lines) or even MacDuff's son (about a dozen lines) . She dutifully prepared her audition piece - Quince's prologue to the miniplay in Midsummer Night's Dream in Act 5, and read for the part. I told her that she'd be the youngest person there by a dozen years or more, but she was undaunted. She even made her way through the infamous tongue twister

Whereat with blade,
with bloody, blameful blade,
he bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.

Something I can't see myself managing. I was tickled that she did so well. I have no idea if she got the part. Callbacks are on July 1st, but whether or not she'll be cast she did us all proud.

The Latest Buzz

House nonsense goes apace. Yesterday's big setback was the discovery of a huge colony of bees nesting in the floor below the sleeping porch. They get in through an old drainage pipe that sticks out through the stucco. The electricians working on wiring that part of the house were less than delighted to find the things. I was even less amused.

Under Massachusetts law the only available option besides letting them bee is to hire a licensed beekeeper to relocate the colony (not that I'd want to poison the little buggers). The hive must be removed after the bees are moved, as its contents would decay over time and cause even more problems. We're trying to get a fix on how long the bees have been there. The longer they've been hoarding honey, the larger the removal cost, extent of the demolition required to get at the hive, and subsequent repair costs will be.

The only consolation is that the beekeepers will test the honey for edibility. If it's uncontaminated (highly likely), we get to keep it. If there's any quantity, I intend to have mead brewed from it so we may at the least, drink to both our and the bees' new homes. Needless to say, things like this are not covered by insurance.

Another lost entry that didn't transfer correctly from the old site. This one originally appeared on 21 June 2004.

WORKING REPORT - CRAZY COLORS PULLOVER

Well, my mindless knitting has suffered the intrusion of some thinking. Looking at my 9-inch deep yoke I've decided to pull it all out and start again:

(That's my toe holding down the edge, clad in a Regia 6-Ply Crazy Color sock.) Why rip back? Two reasons. First, I don't like the one-row color stripe widths that the larger circumference piece sports. While I realize that stripes won't be as deep as the ones on my socks, I like the upper part of the yoke better, where the shorter rows and bounce reflections off the neck hole made the stripes wider. Second, I don't like the way the mini-cable on the raglan "seam" is coming out. I had started this piece on one circ, then moved to two. For some reason, when I moved to two the width of the framing purl stitches decreased considerably. While this tighter look is better, it does leave the upper part looking sloppy by comparison. So having knit up around 2.25 skeins, it's back to ripping for me.

I think I'll begin again, also doing a raglan, but I won't get caught up in the idea of matching stripes across the raglan seam (near impossible with this yarn unless you knit in the round). It will be boring as heck, and seamed to boot, but I think the stripes will work out better on shorter width pieces of knitting.

Sigh. At least house stuff is going well. Here's another couple details - the window from the living room, looking out on the porch, and the fireplace from the wall facing it. The same window is also on the dining room wall.

I'm pretty sure that the inside fireboxes of both fireplaces have been rebuilt. To my untrained eye, the plain brickwork surrounds are a bit incongruous, especially with the red tile hearth, but they appear to be original. Also through the window you can see another of my nuisances. The pressboard hutch so generously left by the former owners. The house contains a few pieces of abandoned furniture for which I now have to arrange charitable donation. Grrr.

Technorati : knitting

Another AWOL post. I've got another week or so of these to post, so I'm going to have to finish catching up tomorrow. This one originally appeared on 20 June 2004.

I'm delighted to report that my time crawling through crawl spaces is about at an end. I've finished clearing out the old insulation, and can now turn my attention to ridding the house of picturesque but destructive ivy. (Stucco doesn't like ivy.) Dust masks are still the order of the day, but working standing up and outdoors has a lot to recommend it. Also, the kids can help, at least for the parts of this task that do not require ladders.

I'm afraid I still haven't had much time to knit. I've been busy measuring, then doing dimensioned layouts of the house in Visio. We're using them to help plan where our stuff goes, and for the electrician, so he knows where to place services. Here's the result for the two front rooms and three-season porch.

Going back from this point, beneath the dining room is the kitchen, beneath the living room is the den, followed by a back bedroom we will be using as an office. A long hallway with stairs up extends from the center opening.

Before you ask, there's no particular price break on not running phone, cable and network to all rooms at the same time as we trench the plaster walls to upgrade the regular electrical wiring. Even though we have only one TV and are not planning on having more than one, we'll have the flexibility to move it around should we so desire. Another consideration - should we have to sell, having the house fully wired is a value point. As far as the furniture, painting, and decorating go right now we're concentrating on getting the major infrastructure things done. Cosmetics and aesthetics will have to wait their turn, and our jumbled mix of yard sale finds, first apartment stuff, and one or two decent pieces will have to do for the foreseeable future.

Actual Knitting

With all this crawling around and drafting, I've had very little time or energy for think-work or involved knitting. I've fallen back into the project I had set aside for vacation relaxation. I'm doing a quick raglan pullover in Regia 6-Ply (6-Fadig) Crazy Color for The Smallest One. Nothing fancy - just a top-down stockinette piece with a two-stitch cable detail on the raglan seams. I'm about six inches into the thing so far. I'd take a picture, but all you'd see is a jumble of red, blue, yellow and green stripes jammed onto a circular needle. My only regret is that if I'm using up this project to unwind after a day of house nonsense, I'll have to find something else mindless to knit while I stare off at the sea.

Technorati : knitting

More reposts. Material originally appearing on 18 June 2004.

ANOTHER INNOCENCE LOST

I can truly say that I've had a new experience this week. One that now ranks in my all-time top ten list of nasty things to do.

Removing fiberglass insulation from a crawl space on a hot summer day.

There's a reason why they call it a crawl space. There's nothing like doing physical work in a dimly lit baking hot, confined cubbyhole; wearing a hooded long-sleeve sweatshirt, fogged goggles on top of fogged glasses; with dust in the air so thick you can feel it working its way through the fabric of your clothes, and a respirator mask that would better be called an asphyxiation mask.

I've finished three of eight cubbyholes. That leaves five plus the attic proper to go. It would be faster except the misguided SOB that installed this stuff insisted on tamping all of the roof soffits full in addition to just tacking the batts to the underside of the rafters. That has to be fished out by reaching down as far as one can into filthy, inky blackness, and grabbing whatever can be found. Insulation, mummified dead birds, whatever...

Then there's the joy of schlepping mounds of shredded, moldy, irritating fuzz down two flights of stairs and into the dumpster - one armload at a time because anything larger won't fit through the house's hallways. If only I could have rented a debris chute, too.

All this is to explain why absolutely no knitting went on in my life yesterday, so there is nothing for me to report on the filet lace project.

Did you know that if enough fiberglass gets into one's ears, even they itch?

Hmmm. As I was writing today's entry, I wanted to refer back to a post I remembered writing back in June of 2004. Apparently not all of the posts for that month imported correctly when we transferred our archives over. So the posts you'll see today are hand-carried ports of the AWOL material. Apologies for the deja vu. True new content tomorrow. I promise.

Material originally appearing on June 15, 2004.

BINGO BUNGALOW, FILET KNITTING

Excuse this shortened entry. I'm deeply enmeshed in home rehab, and haven't had much time to do anything else. Yesterday I measured the entire house so I can draft up a set of dimensioned drawings. That will help us figure out where to put things. While I was doing that I attempted to take some snaps of the house's more nifty features. I'm a lousy photographer, so I've only got a couple.

First the house is a stucco bungalow, built in 1912. That style is pretty unusual for this part of Massachusetts. The majority of older homes in this town are Victorians of various configurations, Dutch colonials built in the 1920s, and saltbox Capes built in the 1930s. In between and in pockets are some older houses dating back to the 1700s and early 1800s, and some post WWII neighborhoods of ranches and raised ranches. The place is fairly big - not as huge as a rambling Victorian, but pretty big compared to the tiny 6-room ranch we're leaving.

The house has had only two prior owners - the family that built it, and the family we bought it from. It's been largely left alone, with very little tinkering over the years. That means that we've gotten some features you rarely find. Like original lighting fixtures in three rooms (this is the biggest one in the living room):

Another amazing bit of preservation is the downstairs bath. Except for the butterfly handles on the sink and an innocuous replacement toilet, it's untouched, with all tile, fixtures, and stained glass window original and intact (the little sitz tub is especially nifty, it's an exact match of its big brother on the other side of the room):

And here's the smaller of the two fireplaces. This one is in the den:

As you can see, all of the woodwork on the first floor of the house has never been overpainted. That's the good news. The bad news is that the entire house is still using the original electrical wiring - the old bare wire on insulator stuff put in when the house was first built. That means there is one plug per room; nothing grounded anywhere in the place; and anemic service. Over the next month we are having a contractor completely rewire the house. I'll be putting in sweat equity, too - mostly ripping out improperly installed fiberglass insulation that's making the roof rot, and encouraging the growth of a truly spectacular mildew farm in the attic. Meaning the insulation is doing the encouraging. I'll be doing the exterminating.

FILET KNITTING

I did have time to start playing with this last night. The Thomas method is daunting to look at in description, but once you start messing with it it's pretty straightforward. Solid blocks are composed three knit stitches. Open blocks are done similar to a one-row buttonhole, starting with a double yarn over. Then two stitches are bound off by passing existing loops over and off the end of the needle. The last stitch remaining is then knit to finish out the block of three. Alternate rows are knitted back, with the second YOs purled to make a garter stitch base.

But here's the kicker. To make the solid areas appear square, each block on the chart corresponds to FOUR rows of knitting. That's two right side rows and two wrong side rows. This means that there's an extra horizontal bar (aka bride) in the center of each block compared to filet crochet or darned net That makes the open areas far less open, and rather compromises the look - especially for very complex charts. Clearly, more work on this will need to be done as I don't think this particular technique, even were I to work with tatting cotton on 000s, would look good for my chart.

I'm not giving up though. Tonight's round of experimentation will include adding height to the solid blocks by Yoda-knitting them back and forth. Working each block as a tiny 3-stitch short-row should square off the units. More news tomorrow...

PS: If you see spurious question marks in these entries, please ignore them. It's not that I'm more puzzled than normal. For some reason, as of this morning every double space in every has morphed into a question mark. I'll investigate.

Technorati : knitting

My list of future (someday) projects keeps getting longer.

Contemplating our living room, The Resident Male and I have decided that the perfect thing for over the fireplace would be a tapestry. So we went looking at various tapestry reproductions sold on-line. The ones in our price range are pretty uniformly horrible - bad cartoons (the drawing on which the weaving is based), cheap looking materials/bad drape, and garish color choices predominate. I won't even mention the awful chenille surface type and printed things that look more like stuff that along with 8-foot tall inflatable teddy bears are normally sold out of the back of vans parked at busy intersections in the summer.

As we were looking we also saw some of the painted canvases intended for needlepoint. Big ones that encompass scenes or details of historical woven tapestries. The better ones imported from France seem to offer more faithful reproductions of their inspiring works than do all of the modern woven reinterpretations.

Now I've done needlepoint before. It's not my favorite, but technical implementation of the style is not a barrier. Plus I know exactly how long (read forever) it takes to do one of these. My mother did a a needlepoint tapestry reproduction in the early 1970s, working a rendition of this classic bit of canvas:

She did it in DMC embroidery floss, stitching the details including the hunter's face, gloves and tassels, plus the hound, songbird, and hawk all in petite point. It's heavy from all that cotton, but substantial enough (and mounted well enough) to resist distortion or curl. That she did most of it in basketweave rather than tent stitch has helped it keep its shape. The thing is a bit less than a yard wide and a bit more than 4 feet tall. It took her the better part of a year. Maybe a bit more. It's roughly the same size as the one that caught our eye - a reproduction of a French woven tapestry from the mid 1500s (the clothing style is early 1500s, but the weavers may have been deliberately trying to imitate earlier works):

In canvas, even with the full thread kit, this one would be within my price range. Not counting a year or more to stitch it, of course. Will I end up doing this? Will the curtains I described yesterday come first? Will I stay true to knitting, and deaf to the enticements of other needle arts? Only time will tell...

Technorati : needlepoint

No knitting today. It was a happy but hectic holiday weekend here at String, full of family and food. Needless to say nothing beyond the targeted activities was accomplished. Still all are fed and happy, with grandparents spoiled beyond their expectations and back on their grand tour road trip.

Just as all of this was getting underway, I received a package from Long Term Needlework Pal Kathryn. She sent me glossy print catalogs from Bradbury and Bradbury, an outfit that offers reproductions of historical design wallpapers. She's right in that some of their offerings are spot on for our 1912 house. I've not trembled to a halt on any of the offered designs yet (although several are very tempting), but I can say that after leafing through the catalogs I am in the early stages of project lust for something else.

Curtains for our library.

The bulk of the pictures from the catalog are available on line. You can see the type of curtains there that hit me. Plain linen rectangles of simple line, hung from narrow brass rods threaded through the top (or through small brass rings rings). But I don't want unadorned curtains. I want to embroider mine. I happen to have on hand a huge set of counted thread border patterns of various widths at my disposal. Plus a pretty good idea of how to go about it all.

I want to put a pair of curtains on each of my two windows, each stitched with a border parallel to the center and bottom edges. Kind of like this:

If you happen to have a copy of The New Carolingian Modelbook to hand, I'm thinking of doing the full giant repeat of Plate 33 - the daSera grape leaves and flowers meander. Possibly in deep hunter green on natural linen. At four curtain panels to cover two windows that are about 5 feet tall by 3.5 feet wide, yes I'm nuts. So nuts in fact that I have to do more serious contemplation as to whether or not I will have the fortitude to take something like this to completion. But I've already started looking into linens...

Once more Kathryn leads me astray!

Technorati : embroidery

Finally. A sunny morning. As you can see below, last weekend we ripped out the offending white picket fence and weedy, rotten bushes that marched along the front of the house.



You can see the little perennial garden at the side now. The tree in that garden is the infamous Kamikaze Robin ash. Compare with:



We also had the big spruce leaning on the house taken down, the roof redone and the copper downspouts replaced. Plus I spent a month last summer fighting stucco-destroying ivy. (It's back. Time for round two.)

Why anyone would have wanted to fence this house in is a mystery to me. Although the property looks large, it's actually pretty small for a house of this size. The fence - in addition for being just plain architecturally wrong for the place - made it look smaller. It also cut the house off from the neighborhood and made it look like a withdrawn dowager, the kind of place the looney lady up the block lives in, that no kid would dare visit for trick or treat. I may BE a looney lady up the street, but I don't want to be a scary one.

Now here's a photo the real estate agent would have died to have been able to present:


(The lawn in the foreground actually belongs to the neighbor, my line is at the edge of the driveway.) Compare this one to the best they could manage. Granted, it was taken in February, not the best time of year for Massachusetts house photography:



We dig out the remaining fence posts this weekend. Next is to paint the trim. Perhaps echo the roof's red in some of it in combo with the white window frames. And turn some of the semicircular scar where the spruce was into a little garden, perhaps with blueberry bushes up against the house, and lower perennials in front. Also, I'm still not sure what to do with the built-in signpost by the front door. Half of me says build a custom hanging flower box for it. The other half thinks that's too kitschy cute and wants to cut it down to match the newel post on the other side of the steps. We'll see which half wins.

Things are finally back to almost-normal around here. That includes getting back on track with my own knitting. I'm almost done with Chart A. In two more rows I'll reach the point where I am supposed to divide for the back and front:



So far I'm quite pleased. The little dragon skin texture is working out well; the side cable has been lots of fun to knit. The next challenge will be to play with the texture pattern and any shaping decreases that will be happening around the armhole. I'm not worried though. I worked out the logic of trimming this particular repeat on the pocket. Shaping around the armhole should be more of the same.

The piece is weighty, and the yarn is a killer splitter but that's to be expected working in a multistrand cotton of this type. Target Child is also quite pleased that I'm back working on the thing.

In other news, ten days of above 40^oF plus savage rain has revealed the muddy glory that is Massachusetts in the spring. That means that sometime in the next three weekends our next major sweat-equity house project will commence - the removal of The Ugly White Picket Fence. I leave you with an archive photo from last year, so you can see Ugly Fence in action (plus the giant pine tree that used to lean on the house):



Why do I think my fence is worthy of destruction?

1. It has nothing to do with the architecture or style of the house
2. It's the wrong size/proportion for the lot
3. It's not on the lot line, and shrinks the visual footprint of the house
   
4. It's discontinuous, and serves no purpose of containment or security
   
5. Walking down the chute path to the front door makes me feel like a sheep about to be dipped
   
6. It's a pain to rake around, shovel over, and mow around.  The snow dunes it formed this past winter completely covered it and required major excavation to move.
   
7. For some reason, the previous owners included a massive sign post as part of the fence, as if they were going to be hanging out a doctor's shingle or a permanent "for sale" sign (you can see it near the front door). I hate it.
   
8. It needs a severe scraping, sanding, and repainting.  A problem since it's probably covered in lead paint.
9. We know someone who wants it (lead paint and all), and who will help us take it down for the privilege of hauling it away and re-using it.
   

Another in an interminable series of progress shots. This one shows more of the top border.

Although I was iffy about it when I first begain, I think that it's working now. Yes, introducing another motif makes the piece?rather busy, but in spite of that - I like it. To be immodest, I've been scouring the web looking for filet crochet work, and I haven't seen anything remotely like this - either for complexity of the motifs, or scale of the project. It's going to look killer on the front door window.

Now to finish out the top and bottom edges. I promise no more incremental photos until (at least) the top edge is finished.

Tree Today, Gone Tomorrow

Some pix of my de-treeing. This majestic 35-year old spruce was certainly pretty from this angle, but it was planted?two feet away from the house. It was leaning on my walls and roof, and its roots were invading the basement. It's sad, but?the spruce?had to go.

Before

After

(Sorry about the shot of my neighbor's SUV.)?

Likewise two four-story tall Norway maples in the back yard were given honorable discharges. In their case, they were completely hollow - to the point where the remaining ring of their trunks was about an inch thick. Both?had canted, and were looming?over my garage and my neighbor's house. They were disasters poised to happen.

The treeguy used a boom crane to extract them from a tight space, lifting the pieces up and over the house?and sparing injury to the surrounding trees. The eighth-of-a-tree?limb that's flying here looks small, but once down on the ground it looked every inch of about 20 feet - larger than some entire free-standing trees. Given yesterday's winds and the number of branches down in my neighborhood (the result of?the last anemic puff from passing hurricane fragments) I'm delighted that the hazard was removed just in time. Plus, I've still got?six healthy maples and locusts in the back yard, one?so?huge it dwarfed the two that were taken out.

Today is Tree Day here at String Central. A crew of treeguys?is outside even as I type, taking down several large hollow trees that are looming dangerously over?our house, the garage, and the neighbor's house. While I'm usually a tree-and-let-live person these did represent real risk, and had to go. I look forward to an airier, sunnier, safer yard. Also quieter, once the chainsaws, chipper/mulcher, and boom crane all depart. Before and after pix another day, once the leafy chaos has subsided a bit.

In knitting news, I have to 'fess up now that June posted her blog entry about the DNA cable. I read her initial complaint, and thought she deserved a wedding present, so I redrafted her cable for her. I wasn't going to say anything about it, but she was sweet enough to post a credit, and to leave me a Mysterious Present in my mailbox (it turns out we live quite near each other):

I'm thoroughly tickled by the mystery gift (in a favorite color combo, no less!). I'm now honor-bound to knit up this nifty June-dyed fingering weight so?I can report back to her?how effective her color placement strategy was in avoiding blobs. I think that it will be appropriate if I do up a pair of DNA cable socks with it.

It also turns out that I'm on the hook for a poncho. In this case, the fomer tween-ager Elder Daughter? has requested what appears to be the fashion accessory du jour. So I sigh, and like a good parental unit, will make one, no matter how boring. I'm still caught up in Dragon though, and I don't want to be sidetracked from it. Socks I can make my portable project. A poncho however is another story. Hope I can complete it before fashion obsolescence kicks in.

On Dragon - not enough progress to warrant posting a photo, but I'm getting happier and happier about the twist panel at the top. With a few more repeats done, the design is easier to pick out, and the denseness of the new panel frames the lighter areas nicely. I think I'll keep it.

Remember I said that

1. I had rescued my knitting things from the storage cubby;
2. I was bound and determined to turn a rather dingy basement room into a needlework retreat; and
3. I wanted to?outfit my haven?on a budget as close to zero as I could manage.

I can report progress on?all three?fronts. I'm sure you don't care about seeing six stacked Rubbermaid storage tubs, but this is slightly more interesting:

I've kept the large table shown in the before shot. The ceiling tile is replaced, the floor is scrubbed, and?all debris is gone. I moved the white wardrobe to the same wall shown in the new photo, above. The white drawer unit is now further down the wall, and the mesh cubes shown here?are betwen it and the gas pipe, which you can see sticking up between it and the other white cabinet in the before photo. My storage tubs of yarn are stacked in the corner of the room where the wardrobe used to sit. No progress on a comfy chair yet, but we're replacing my daughter's desk chair this week, so I'll probably snarf up the abused cast-off for my workroom.

As you can see, the el-cheapo Home Depot storage units we brought over?from the old house are not good candidates for relocation. The drawers are out of the unit you see because?during the move it?shifted from true, and the tracks are now too far apart to hold them. Some minor carpentry is in order before it's useable again. If you're thinking of buying this type of peg-together pressboard storage furniture at a home center or discount store, ?remember that it's build-once-and-leave-it stuff. Regardless of the low cost,?I don't recommend it for people who are still in the nomadic phase of life, especially?if re-using the piece in a new location is a consideration.

The wire mesh cubes however are a new acquisition, and bode to be both durable and capable of being taken apart and put back together many times. Last week?these?units?were on special at Target. One box of them makes a stand-alone six cube unit, and the cost (on sale) was just under ten dollars. I snapped up two boxes in white (they also come in black). They can be assembled in any of a number of ways. I've done my installation in 2, 4, 4 stacks to work around the?large gas pipe on that wall. Because of the geometry of the thing, I've got two mesh units left. Not enough to make another cube, but enough to jury-rig two half-height shelves or dividers in existing cubes by using?some nylon cable-tamers to do the attachments.

The stuff in?my cube unit isn't there for any particular reason. Mostly it was miscellaneous knitstff that got packed separately from my storage tubs. There's my swift and ball winder; my collection of single-malt Scotch containers housing needles and other tools (upright on the white dresser, and horizontal in a top cube); various UFO bags; a stack of some rustic-type wools that in violation of my own stash-management rule, has overflowed it's allowed tub. My small black box of sock yarns; and various coned oddiments. I believe that cone of raspberry is in fact Believe, a find from the Classic Elite mill ends outlet up in Lowell, MA. Books, mags,?and leaflets are elsewhere in the house, in their own bookcase; with mags and leaflets?sorted more or less haphazardly into several plastic magazine files.

Eventually I'll sort through the tubs and pull out Yarns of Immediate Inspiration to put on these shelves; stowing the ones I don't plan on using in the next fifteen minutes. My stash management rule??

If it doesn't fit in my existing containers, I can't buy it.?

That means I either have to knit up new acquisitions immediately, or make room in a tub by using up something that's already there. However, eyeing the tubs I see that they are increasingly filled with odd lots of leftovers rather than full-project amounts. Perhaps it's time to organize a yard/yarn sale/swap meet, and invite the world over so we can all redistribute our holdings to better effect. Hmmm....

Not much inspiration yet on the basement spare room.  Aside from a general cleaning that can't happen until the electricians are done with the wires in the ceiling, and the ceiling tiles can go back up, all progress on that project is mental.  A chair, a place to put the sewing machine up, and more storage are all great ideas.  It's a bit damp in the basement, so I'm leaning to well-ventilated storage options.  I noticed Target has some open wire mesh cubes on special this week. 

On Filet of Dragon, here's the latest progress shot:

Going back and working in the other direction from my cast-on row has created a bit of a fold.  You can see it at the left hand edge of the tree behind the knight.  It won't be so evident when the piece is blocked out and stretched on the curtain rods.  Other than that - I'm quite pleased with the way my experiment in filet is turning out.  Thread consumption to date is in between 1.3 and 1.5 balls of the Coats & Clark Royale 30-weight.  At around $3.00 per ball and $1.25 for the crochet hook, this is also turning out to be one of the least expensive projects I've done.

On the frame - I've got to do a bit of measuring.  I think I'm still a bit shy left and right, then I need something to set off the central design and that allows me about a half inch top and bottom for curtain rod space, followed by another half-inch to make sure the curtain rods don't pull out.  Options include some simple geometrics, some text either all the way around, or at the left and right edges (I'd work a sig and date into the text), or another still narrower scrolling pattern that spreads out into a wider one at the sides.  More think time is needed...

Another quiet day here at String Central. Yesterday we had no power in the house because the electricans were installing the new whole-house panel. Today power is up and down, as they do punchlist things around the place.

Progress proceeds on Filet of Dragon. I've started the left hand edge panel, but have not yet decided on the whole-piece frame. There's not enough yet to make an interesting picture, so I'll spare you.

Instead I post this:

This is the spare room in the basement. It's a former summer kitchen/laundry room. There's a plastic?tub sink just to the left of the work table. There's also a recycled kitchen countertop?with a?shallow dish sink, the corner of which you can see just peeking out on the right. The three white storage cabinets are Home Depot $19.99 specials that (miracle of miracles) managed to survive our move. The table is a legacy from the former occupants. There are two gas lines - one on each wall. Plus some dismal dropped ceiling panels (stacked on the table but shortly to go back up), grungy linoleum flooring, and ancient beadboard paneling, painted sloppy white to cover pea green some time during the Eisenhower administration.

This utopia, this palace, this vast expanse will be my sewing/knitting studio and the family's laundry room. Eventually. Once we're done re-wiring, I'll be able to clean it out. Then I get to relocate my stash of six Rubbermaid storage tubs. Some time when we can afford it we'll be redoing the room completely, moving the washer/dryer back downstairs from the kitchen (I hate listening to?them upstairs). ETA on the greater rehab plan:? plus or minus 6-8 years from now.Until then, we have to make do with what we've got.

I know there are all sorts of great re-do suggestions on HGTV. Ellyn's studio transformation was incredibly nifty, but way beyond my price range. Plus it seems so wasteful when we're planning on gutting the entire basement in the future. So my question is - given the space at hand; the three cabinets and the table, plus six Rubbermaid containers; and a budget of as close to $0.00 as possible - ?does anyone have suggestions for making this a useful, creative space?

Some of you asked about my de-beeing. Here's a photo summary of what happened.

The problem - an active honeybee hive of unknown age, in the walls and floor of a stucco-finish sleeping porch:

The solution - Jeff from Bee Busters - a company in Acton, MA. Jeff is seen here about to cut a one-foot square hole in the porch floor to get to the hive's probable location:

It turns out we were lucky in most respects. The hive was relatively new (in a 95-year old house anything is possible). It was mostly in the wall as opposed to being in the floor. While that was unlucky in that it required knocking an additional three foot square hole in the stucco, the hive was easy to remove. Here's one large piece. The queen is under the scrum of bees at the bottom corner:

The overwhelming majority of the bees were captured, including the queen. Some of the stragglers?were caught using a bee-vac, a juryrigged crate fitted out with a dust-buster engine and a three-inch wide flexible hose. The hummers are now?off to quarrantine to make sure they harbor no parastites, then after that - to work as productive little droners working away in local orchards and fields.

I'm delighted that no giant comb system existed. If it had, we'd have to go through a ton more demolition and restoration to get at the hive. The down side of it being a young colony is that I didn't end up with honey. Honeycombs are two-sided. If a comb has honey stored on both sides it can be harvested for extraction. These combs had bee larvae on one side and honey on the other, typical for newer hives but not suitable for people-use.

The gaping holes in my porch now sit open for several days to dry out. A few foragers out shopping when the hive was removed remain, but Bee Jeff assures me that they'll load up with pollen and follow another bee home to a new hive. He said that if they arrive "with groceries" they'll be accpeted by their new foster family.

All in all the experience was interesting, highly educational, but expensive. Now of course we have to repair those gaping holes...

O.K.  Enough blather.  Back to actual knitting...

Progress continues to be made on my Berroco Suede Shapely T.  I'm now up to the armhole decreases on the back (this shot shows the front folded in half, and the back still on the needles.  The entire front is here):

It's been slow going however - and not because of the pattern (which is great), or the yarn (which is annoying but I've gotten used to it.)  I'm afraid life has intruded into my knitting time.  We've made an offer on a new house, and I'm now in the middle of a cleaning and de-cluttering frenzy, getting ready to put our current place up for sale.  Here's a snap of the new place:

Knitting relevance?  This 1912 bungalow has a striking well-preserved Craftsman-style interior and a large dining room.  While I don't have a dining room table yet, I will finally have somewhere to display my now estivating Kinzel Tudor Rose tablecloth.  So I better retrieve it from the Chest of Knitting Horrors^TM and finally finish it off.   Plus, although you can't see the house's interior, I think there's scope here for some knitted lace curtains as well. 

So laugh if you will, I'm off to pack up my closet-dwelling stash, and The Chest of Knitting Horrors^TM