Bright sunny days are upon us, and the yard is filled with the call of blue jays. Okay, these guys are really noisy, and there are a lot more than usual this year, so the robins seem to be keeping a low profile. All of my plants are growing like crazy in the heat and the gardens are starting to look really good.
The cats are spending lots of time out on the catio.
I’ve discovered that the weeds are also growing like… weeds, so I have been spending an hour every day in the cool of the evening working in the gardens trying to keep ahead of the weed invasion.
There is a lot of pink going on in the garden right now. The Princess Alexandra of Kent rose is stilling going strong, the pink yarrow burst into bloom, and the snapdragons that are now blooming again are… just the pink ones! Of course, the angelica has joined in, and I must admit that the pink does make me feel good.
Even my knitting has pink blooms! This is the Alpine Bloom sweater by Caitlin Hunter.
So, I was thinking that maybe I should get some red when I took a trip to my local garden center this week. Woohoo! Roses WERE ON SALE at 30% off!!! It didn’t take long to locate a landscape shrub rose that had beautiful cabbage rose-ish blooms.
I thought that it would do well with the Ruby Meidiland roses along the back of my house.
The Rubies have been doing really well this year, but the shrubs didn’t fill in along the back of the house the way I thought they would, so there is room to put another rose between plantings.See, the new rose will fit right in there!
Now I have to do more weeding (duh!), get the new roses into the ground, and then I plan to put a nice organic mulch around everyone.
So now there are 38 roses!
Mateo: Don’t forget that tomorrow is Caturday!!
PS: Bea made this comment… “Mateo is wearing his don’t-mess-with-me face. He looks ready to rumble or hop on his Harley and hightail it for Sturgis.”
He kind of does, doesn’t he. I offer in his defense this picture of how he collapsed and fell asleep on the bookshelf last night…
The tough guy photo was taken right after I woke him up. It seems that he wakes up cranky…
So, I got a little testy in one of my Facebook support groups for systemic sclerosis this morning. A member of the group kind of disparaged me and another person for not being positive enough. It was “you need to refuse to let scleroderma define you” in response to the first person sadly saying that she missed her old life, and me giving her an online hug with the comment that if only a positive attitude was enough…
In my defense I had just experienced a Kaiser employee visibly reacting to my lack of wrinkles. As in, wow, that’s great! Like not having wrinkles makes this all worth it.
I lost another 4 pounds at my last check-in, which is concerning, but the nurse was thrilled for me. Me, I was a little teary at the continued loss.
Um, people… do you think that you might be a little shallow here?
I was out on the deck/catio with the cats drinking my morning latte when I hit this emotional wall, and after I had fired off the somewhat testy response, I spent some time in the garden. There were my roses, blooming like the utter champs that they are.
This is my Princess Alexandra of Kent rose.
This rose is looking great this year. Never before has the plant been able to hold up the blooms without the weight pulling the stems over. The problem is our semi-arid climate with hard winters; the plant grows back from the roots every year and it doesn’t have time to put in enough supportive tissue to hold up the blooms. This year, with all the rain and cool weather that we have had, the plant was able to put in enough of this tissue to do the job. The tissue that I’m talking about, a type of ground tissue, is called sclerenchyma. If you’re ever snapped a celery stalk in half and pulled out the strings, you were pulling out sclerenchyma tissue. This tissue is made of dry, hardened cells in the stem of the rose and I suspect that the “scler” part of the word is of the same origin as scleroderma. Look at that. The hardened cells are doing something good for this rose!
In me, not so much. Things have been a little difficult as my poor heart and lungs are not benefiting from the hardening and thickening going on in the cells and tissues of those organs. All of my tendons are seriously pissed off at the moment. Edema has become a problem, and it is becoming increasing clear that I need to stay on oxygen 24/7.
That’s my arm with the imprint of a quilt in it, in case you didn’t immediately recognize it… Edema is kind of a tip off that my heart is struggling and that’s new. The weight loss is also related to my heart/lungs because if oxygen isn’t getting down to my cells like it should, they can’t use energy efficiently, and then, you know, weight loss occurs. The tendon issue is scleroderma actively attacking them and gradually hardening them to bone. Bad scleroderma, bad!!
But look at how great these roses look!
So, what did I say in my testy response? Reality bites. Some of us have progressed to the point where we have to admit that no amount of positive thinking will allow us to attend that family function that we were invited to, or to visit the annual Wool Market in the mountains, or to even walk to the mailbox. To suggest that we could do things if we just had a more positive attitude is hurtful and not supportive. No matter how much you want to believe otherwise, scleroderma does define me and everyone else who is dealing with it. Courage requires us to face down the monster and to accept the reality of our disease. How we choose to function within that framework is up to us.
I may no longer be as mobile as I once was, and the life that I used to have is now mostly gone, but I choose to continue to bloom in place.
Like a rose.
Updates/Notes from the ScleroFront:
Do you like to wear linen? Those fibers are from the water tubes (xylem) in the flax plant, and made of sclerenchyma.
The bunny-murdering neighbor put her house up for sale!!
Yesterday was the Independence Day here in the USA. Fireworks are traditional; my neighborhood goes kind of overboard with the celebrating in that regard. Poor Hannah cowered under the bed and Mateo vanished for the three hours that skyrockets boomed directly overhead and showers of sparks glittered in the night. I finished up all the knitting on the Soldatna Crop, closed the gaps under the sleeves, and then wove in all of the ends. Towards midnight there was a huge thunderstorm that outboomed even the loudest of the skyrockets and I gently misted the sweater and steam blocked it into its final shape.
It is done!!
The Hannah savaged spot is just barely visible, but I am over it.
Do you see it now? The biggest damage is that some of the color has been removed in the fibers that were pulled off in the aggressive grooming Hannah incident. If I move fast, no one will ever notice it and I want to get on with the next knitting project because a new pattern appeared that I want to start right now!! It’s another little sweater by the same designer, Caitlin Hunter, called Alpine Bloom. I downloaded the image of the sweater so you can understand my urgent need: isn’t that the cutest ever? (sweater image is copyright of Caitlin Hunter)
I’m planning right now on doing the colorwork in the hot pink and I may slip in some flower details with the purple. I’ve been looking at other projects online and I actually like the ones that only use one color the best, so I may just stick with the hot pink. Check out the lace at the neckline and the sleeves: cute, cute, cute!! I need to get my needles switched over to this new project right this second, so the Soldotna is now declared done.
In other new, I actually saw a BUNNY in the front yard this week! It is an adult, and it came from across the street to hang out by my tree, but it made me really happy to see it. Stay away from the back yard, little guy!
Finally, how about an update on the roses? They are continuing to flourish and the new blooms are appearing daily. I did a count this week, and I actually have 34 plants right now. Obviously, I need to get another few to take it up to 40, right?
I do have room in the garden because not a single one of the really cute lavender plants that I put out last year came back. A couple of the well established English ones made it, but that was all. I did a little sleuthing on the internet to try to figure out what happened and quickly discovered that the Spanish lavender that I thought was so cute didn’t have a chance.
Yeah, if this plant struggles with temperatures below 10 degrees F, then the -24 degrees F that happened last year absolutely was too cold for it. Actually, it was a problem for most of the garden as I lost the part of the rose plants that were above the ground, but thankfully they all grew back from the roots okay in the spring and it really did help that we had a lot of rain.
It has been kind of a tough week. The weather shifted and suddenly became hot; I struggled with the sudden heat and couldn’t sleep well. I had adventures with online ordering that created a duplicate of an expensive item that finally got returned for me by my son. Mateo caught a baby bunny somehow that he brought into the house; it took two hours to catch it. My ankles/feet have decided that they hate my guts with as much swelling and tendon pain as my wrists did last month. Then the absolute worst: my next-door neighbor poisoned the bunnies and every single baby bunny died along with most of the adults that I have seen. I suddenly understood why bunnies suddenly disappeared last year.
I put the bodies into her trash. Every single one of them, including the rescued baby that I had carefully returned to the yard two days earlier.
Okay, enough of that. You should see what has been happening with the Soldotna Crop sweater:
Look at how cute it is now!!
I’ve been taking the knitting off the needles and steam blocking it to check for length, and I’m so pleased with how the sweater fits and looks now. I finished the ribbing late last night, steam blocked the whole body this morning, and took it out for this picture. Looking good, huh!!
I put the sweater onto blocking mats to finish drying indoors, and then I headed out to take some pictures of the roses. Let me tell you, these roses are really happy with the water earlier this year, and now that it is hot, they are blooming like crazy!
These are the front roses, and they are really looking good this year! Do you see all of those buds? They have never been this lush and prolific before. These roses are called Hot Cocoa.
My Princess Alexandra of Kent roses are enormous!
That rose is over 4 inches across, and for once the plant is sturdy enough to hold all of the blooms upright.
These roses are the little ones that you buy in the grocery store. I planted them outside and they really are blooming their little hearts out now!Do you see what is going on with this plant? I had to put supportive rings around it like you do with peonies because of the weight, and the buds haven’t even opened yet!!
So, the roses are looking pretty darn good. I went back into the house with the pictures and discovered that Hannah had savaged overly-loved the Soldotna while I was out of the house.
She has done this to other items. I think that she is grooming the sweater, but I was not happy…
I pulled the worst of the fluff to the inside of the sweater with a little crochet hook, and then I shaved the remaining fluff off. It isn’t perfect, but it isn’t horrible. I’ve decided to finish the sleeves and will then decide if I should rip back to above the damage and then reknit the bottom of the sweater. I don’t want to reuse the blocked yarn, and it all depends on how much of the dusty pink is left over. I’m pretty sure that I will rip and then reknit. This sweater must be cursed…
Hannah: I couldn’t help myself. I love the sweater soooo much… besides, it was WET WOOL!!!
The weather has been just crazy here. In the mornings the air is cool, the sky is bright blue, bees rule in the garden, and birdsong echoes through the backyard. The cats and I head outside to the catio where I enjoy my current book and morning latte while the cats chase the occasional miller moth and stalk bunnies from their side of the wire. When my latte is finished, I get a little gardening done while the flowerbeds are in the shade and the cats doze on the deck.
See how cool it is out in the yard? That huge mushroom just appeared under one of my trees. Several plantings are now starting to bloom, and the roses are covered with buds. Mornings outdoors are really cool!! By noon clouds are gathering, gloom begins to gather in the house, and ominous rumbles start to sound to the west. The afternoon thunderstorms are piling up and moving east; sometime soon there will be rain, lightening, thunder, hail and hopefully no tornado alert…
This week’s hailstorm… seriously, the weather has been something this year. I don’t know when I’ve seen so much rain before.
Trapped indoors, I spend the gloomy afternoons tinking back on my current knitting project, the Soldotna Crop.
What is going on? Well, there have been an endless run of knitting misadventures with the sweater. First of all, I started knitting this sweater while wearing braces on both wrists. Yeah. The tension was a little funky. I frogged the sweater after a couple of days and started over. I transitioned to compression wrist braces and managed to get a couple of inches into the sweater. Um… the short row turns left holes in the fabric of the sweater, so I frogged back and reknitted that evening using German short rows. Great. I finally got to the colors and started knitting the chart.
I started knitting using this order of yarns, starting with the dusty orchid and moving right.
Yeah. I didn’t like the way the third color, the turquoise multi, looked. I wanted the gold next to the dark plum. I tinked back and dug around in the yarn stash.
I decided to knit the color chart in these colors, the alternative selection.
I really liked the gold yarn in the #3 slot, but the light silver was too light, literally. The weight of the yarn made it seem flimsy in the knitting, so… I tinked it back out. Back to the stash.
That darker grey is a heavier yarn that played well with the others. Yay! I made a lot of progress, but after taking the knitting outside I decided that the new grey was a bad decision. I knitted a swatch with the original turquoise multi and laid it on the sweater.Doesn’t this look a lot happier?
There was more tinking. I don’t want to talk about it. Two days ago, I knit back with the newest color order and this what I got.
I like it!
I think that I’m done tinking for now; the plan is to just keep knitting and let the color chips fall where they may. My hands are feeling so much better that I can knit pain-free again, but I am still wearing the compression wrist braces for now. I’m almost halfway through the color chart and my gauge is spot on. I’m feeling pretty good about the knitting and there is only one last concern hanging over me… I sure hope that this thing fits!!
Have you wondered how the Scrunch socks that I started while struggling with tendonitis are doing?
I’m hoping to get the socks done over the weekend. 🙂
So, that was the week. Beautiful mornings, lots of rain, and adventures in knitting every afternoon and evening.
I still have with me the jade plant that I bought for my classroom almost 25 years ago. I had to make a special trip to the garden center to locate one that year as I needed it for a prop in a lesson in AP Biology about photosynthesis.
Okay, I told a little lie. This isn’t that original plant, but a direct clone of the original. In a way I still have that plant that was bought so long ago in a panic trip to the garden center near the high school I taught at.
Why did I need that plant? Well…do you remember anything about photosynthesis? (I mean, why would you unless you like to memorize chemical formulas from your days in the classroom, and then retain them for the rest of your life…) I’m guessing that you haven’t thought about it in a loooong time! I should start out mentioning that plants use their leaves as little factories to capture sun energy and then they transform that energy into a chemical form that can be used by the plant to make everything that it needs to stay alive. On their way to producing sugars (which we can think about as stored energy) the plants take carbon dioxide from the air, water from the ground, and then produce oxygen as a waste product along with the sugar that they need. Whew. Photosynthesis. There are a lot of structures and chemistry involved and it makes brains hurt everywhere when this unit is taught in biology classrooms. As a teacher I tried to use cute animations, labs, demos, activities, and as many props as I could drag into the classroom. Facing a section in the AP Biology curriculum that demanded that the students understand different types of photosynthesis (adaptations that plants have to survive in extreme environments), I needed examples of the different types of plants.
Which brings me back to the jade plant. This plant comes from Africa; southern Africa to be exact, and it is adapted to living in dry conditions. Remember that plants need carbon dioxide to do photosynthesis? The leaves of most plants have little trap doors (called stomata) that open to let air in. If the plant is losing water through these trap doors too quickly they shut. For plants growing in hot, dry conditions, this is a problem as plants need both CO2 and sunlight to do photosynthesis, but opening the stomata in the day dries out the plant. Jade plants solve the problem by only opening these little trap doors in their leaves at night. The jade does some chemical trickery to store the CO2 dissolved in water stored in the leaves where it is safely banked until the sun comes up. Did you notice how thick the leaves of the jade plant were? These plants need thick, waxy leaves with lots of stored water to support their photosynthesis. When the sun comes up the little trap doors are closed, but the CO2 is released from its chemically captured form in the leaf where it is now used for photosynthesis. Sneaky, right? Do your photosynthesis, minimize water loss, and survive in the wasteland: way to go, jade plant!! The whole process is called Crassulacean acid metabolism or CAM photosynthesis. The entire process was worked out in plants that belong to the same group as jades, which is why I needed a jade plant!
Anyway, back to my plant. It got really old and kind of ugly, so I took cuttings off it and gave plants away to people. When the plant that I kept grew into a shape I didn’t like anymore, I took more cuttings and started a whole new generation of plants growing.
So easy to get a new plant. I made four pots with cuttings, gave two away and kept two with me. They grew really well in my indoor garden under the grow lights and then in the summer I put then outside in a shady location, and they really took off then. These cutting are now the grandchildren of my original plant, but also genetically identical to that jade.
Here are the plants after their second summer outside. I now have them behind chicken wire because of Mateo. He loves to dig in the plants, but they are toxic to cats, so best to be safe.
Yes, one plant is much larger than the other. I don’t know why, but I suspect that it may have something to do with the slime mold that suddenly appeared in the soil the first summer that the plants went outdoors. Actually, that’s why they went outdoors. No slime molds in the house!!! Mine looked exactly like the slime mold used in the opening credits of The Last of Us if you watched it. Do you see why the plants moved outside?
They were fairly large at this stage and getting pretty dense. Happy plants, right?
The jades are 4 years old now and too big to get behind the chicken wire indoor garden. Mateo and Hannah don’t mess with them, so they are growing in the front room. Everything was fine until…
…this picture arrived in my Facebook feed from Nick’s Garden Center, the place where I bought the first plant all those years ago. It’s a blooming jade plant!!! Me want, badly!!!!!
I actually drove over to look at this plant, but it had already been sold.
Dying of blooming jade plant envy, I hit the internet looking for ways to get my plants to bloom. Water more, some sites suggested. Hold the water said others. Everyone said to give the plants a high phosphorus fertilizer to encourage blooming. Do it in the late winter, early spring for best results.
Okay, let’s think about this. This plant comes from an arid region. These are CAM plants, so it makes sense that more water helps with photosynthesis and that means that they have all the materials that they need to grow, and they will prosper if they grow because they need to store extra water in their leaves. The plants actually don’t like overly damp soil, so they have been taking action to keep the soil the way that works best for them. These plants have been growing really well… I think that I have been overwatering them.
This is the plant at four years old. It is now huge, and it has been doing well over the winter in a western facing window. There is lots of new growth.
Yeah, these guys are totally going on a water diet. I gave the plants high phosphorus fertilizer April 1st, and that is the last water that they got. I don’t plan to give them more for at least another month. I also decided to heavily prune the plants as they are so heavy at this point, they struggle to hold their branches up. You can see all the stakes that have gone in over the last year.
Here is the larger plant pruned down. I may take more of the lower growth off tomorrow.
I will probably water these plants with fertilizer again May 1st, but it will be a light watering. It is still too soon to move them outside, but by the middle of May the large plant will be back on the front porch doing its jade plant thing.
Remember that I started this plant with cuttings? That is a type of cloning, and this plant, happily growing on my front porch and hiding all of my delivered packages, is the same plant I used that day decades ago to teach about CAM photosynthesis. That lesson, taught so long ago, reverberates today as I try to convince this plant that it should bloom.
I used to tell my students that biology is life.
Yes, it is.
Notes:
There are three main types of photosynthesis in plants. C3 is the most common type that is used by the grass in my lawn, my roses, and the ash tree growing in the front yard. All of these plants struggle in the high heat of the summer because they have to keep the stomata in the leaves shut due to the extreme dryness of the air.
C4 plants overcome this problem with some chemical trickery that lets them move lots of CO2 along in the cells of the leaf without losing too much water and they grow quickly in July. Corn and sugar cane are examples of these plants.
Cacti are also CAM plants, but they have really gone to extreme measures to control water loss. The plant that we see is the stem (and the stomata are there) while the leaves have adapted into needles that help protect the plant.
Class is dismissed.
Oh, I forgot. Pineapple is also a CAM plant. Pina coladas for everyone who read all of this!!!
The Mother of Cats has been ignoring me for days and days while she knits on a… CAT!!
I hardly know what to think. She had this cool yarn in the stash that kind of reminded her of orchids and spring. The orchids started blooming a few weeks ago and that was that… she began to ignore me and the CoalBear and started fussing over the orchids and the yarn.
Okay, it is true that the orchids are kind of cool. I like to climb into the garden where they are growing from time to time to hang out with them. The Mother of Cats gets a little cranky when I do it, however, so I don’t get to do it all the time. I lately have been sleeping right next to the Mother of Cats while she knits on this… cat… Really, it doesn’t look all that much like a cat, but she kept telling me that it was. Here’s what happened.
The cat started out with some crazy knitting that produced this leg. Whatever. I have a cat paw, and it doesn’t look anything like that. The colors kind of are like orchids, however…As she kept knitting it began to look a little more like a cat, but…What is up with this face!!!
I was really concerned for the Mother of Cats. It seemed like she didn’t really know what a cat is supposed to look like. I can kind of see the chin, but that nose and the EYES were the stuff of knitty kitty nightmares.
Finally, the ears, nose, and eyes were on the cat. Oh, wow. This is starting to look like a kitty (or maybe a pug?) and I can almost hear it asking, “When will I be done?”Two days ago, she finally finished knitting the cat and I helped her put the whiskers on. Gee. He almost looks like he belongs in the orchids, doesn’t he.He even looks pretty good in my strawberry box!But the Mother of Cats says that he actually belongs in the orchid garden. He does look pretty good in there.
Now that the Mother of Cats has finished up the orchid kitty she has gone back to knitting on my blanket. Yay!! She isn’t ignoring me so much because she keeps putting the blanket on me while she sews the pieces together. I can’t wait to get my blanket and we are working on it every evening together while the CoalBear runs wild and chases his toys downstairs.
Mateo the CoalBear: why does Hannah get all of the cool knits?
Hannah: Because I am a little princess, and also because you don’t share the toys!!
The yarn is a silk/merino/nylon blend by Noro called Tsubame. It is dk weight and I just knit the colors as they appeared in the ball as I worked. Mostly. I did throw out some green along the way.
My project page on Ravelry is here. Yeah, I was too lazy to write in any notes on the page.
I used the center quill of feathers to make the whiskers.
5 of my 7 orchid plants are now blooming and they definitely deserve a knitted cat to hang out with them!!
Did you want to see the back of the cat? Here he is!
July was quite the month! A lot of it was hot, really hot. I felt great for a part of the month due to a drug-induced power surge that carried me through lots of landscaping in the back yard. I read two books that were just exhausting. I went crazy for color and bought more yarn. I cooked, sewed, knitted and planted lots and lots of new plants in my gardens. A great month, July!
Today I drank my morning latte out on the deck and thought about everything that got done last month. There were new birds in the yard (blue jays!) and a small flight of honking geese flew over me as did my watering. Most of the baby bunnies have moved on, and the butterflies of July are gone. The flowering plants are recovering after a short break in the heat last week and I look forward to the late summer blooms. It is now August, but I can sense the looming presence of autumn just over the horizon.
In the yard this morning: a just bathed robin fluffed out and drying on the fence, the very first hydrangea bloom on my shrub, and a woodpecker (!) stabbing for insects in my freshly watered lawn.
So this was the month:
I finished my Salty Air Tee! It used exactly 2 skeins of sock yarn and is just perfect to wear now and will be great for layering later. I am now a fan of I-cord bind offs and used them on the sleeve and at the bottom of the body. The neckline was a little loose, so I picked up stitches along the cast on edge and put an I-cord BO around the neck, too! Perfect fix to a sloppy neck problem!I finished a pair of socks!! This yarn, from Hue Loco, is in the Blast Off colorway. Perfect for the month!I sewed a drawstring project bag, and then I spent some time on YouTube watching tutorials and learned how to sew zipper pouches from my “Knitting Goddess” fabric. I still have some of the fabric left over so I just ordered a pattern to make itty, bitty sewn boxes from it. 🙂
I read two books that were a handful. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is confusing, exhausting, and maybe the best book I have read this year. Think about the Lord of the Rings trilogy set in African antiquity, awash with magic and violence, and you would have this book. Hummingbird Salamander is a cliffhanging ecothriller that also chronicles the trainwreck of the main character along with the impending crash of the planet. Another good book, but one that I feel went too far down the climate change rabbit hole. Neither one of these books is uplifting. Nope, not at all. Worthy reads, but not good entertainment on a blistering hot day.
That’s it. In July I used up 4.75 skeins of yarn. I knitted one chemo hat and 5 PICC line covers. I finished a sweater and a pair of socks. You already know about the books.
Crocheting with Hannah.
I have cast on several new projects, and I’m still feeling pretty ambitious and getting things done, but the prednisone party is definitely over. In my new, dialed down state, I’m slowly knitting on a new cat, crocheting squares for a still undefined purpose, and sending my loom some regular side-eye. The spinning wheel has been put back into a corner but I’m hoping to return to it when the weather cools. I’ve pulled out a quilt project and I need to head on over to YouTube again to learn how to paper piece…
If you have been keeping up with the adventures of Casa Hannah and the CoalBear you know that I have been feeling just freaking wonderful for the last two week and getting more done than at any time in the last two years. I’ve been planting lots of new plants and getting all the gardens into order (for the first time in years because… next door pit bull who has now left the scene… yay… adios, pit bull…), and dragging out lots of things to get working on that have been languishing for years. The garden is starting to produce some color with the perennials now which is awesome as I’m seeing hot pinks and purples. Lavender, bougainvillea, and sage. Perfect!
Um… and then the party came crashing to a halt a few days ago as I started weaning myself off prednisone (marvelous stuff, prednisone!) and I got a little dizzy, and I… fell off the stairs. I literally realized I was going to be airborne at the last second and managed to push off enough to twist around and land on my feet in the living room where I pretty much crashed landed into the couch. Sad outcome. Did you realize that you can actually bruise your lungs? Okay, my lungs are less than pristine, but still… my ribs aren’t too happy, either. There was some talk about my liver… I had to stay indoors over the weekend and go back onto daytime oxygen.
That, however, did not stop me from going down the fiber rabbit hole!!
I finished the first silk/yak roving from Greenwood Fiberworks and am ready to start on the second.
I’ve been considering how to attack the variegated roving. Should I separate the colors? Do pencil rovings down the length of the larger piece? Just take it off in strips and let the colors end up however? Still thinking about this one, but I am tending towards pencil rovings.
I made some really good progress on my Salty Air Tee.
I love, love, love the yarn that I am using for this sweater. Isn’t that the perfect color for summertime knitting? This pattern is racing right along and I’m racing to get it finished because… some new patterns dropped on Ravelry and I am dying to knit one of them.
This is the Lace & Fade Boxy by Joji Locatelli, and that first picture is swiped off the Ravelry page and has her copyright. I have four skeins of a dark grey fingering yarn with smoky/woody tones that I am dying to use for this sweater. My first idea is to knit the entire sweater in the main color (lace and all… ignore the fade, we don’t need no stinking fade because I have four skeins of this color…) and then go back and knit I-cord trim at the neck, bottom, and wrists in that really cool multi yarn. That will look awesome, right? On the other hand, if there is enough yarn, I can do the lace in a fade with the pink yarns. I only have just over 100 yards of each color, so that may not work, but it might look pretty cool. I really am tending towards doing the whole sweater in the solid fingering. I have knitted two boxy sweaters in the past (the Vneck version) and I know them to be comfy layering workhorses in cold weather.
Then there is the crocheting. I haven’t crocheted in years because of my dodgy wrists, but I loved this bag (Square Scramble Sack) on Ravelry so much I bought the Noro yarn a week ago. Like I need more yarn, right? I had to order the crochet hooks from Amazon and then I was off to YouTube to learn how to make the puff stitch… that first little square has too many puffs in it, but I felt pretty successful and I’m now making a few squares every day that I don’t fall off the stairs.
There are two more sweaters that I want to knit, but I’ve got them on the back burner at the moment because I’m so far down the fiber hole at the moment I am just focusing on working steadily on each project for a few hours each day. Or maybe every other day so I don’t wear out my hip (spinning) or wrists (crochet). So far I’m making progress and I’m recovering from the fall okay at the same time so all is good. Except… the days of prednisone wonder are coming to an end as I feel the energy and the good times fading away. I start the lowest dose tomorrow and after a week it will be over.
Still, if you look at all those pictures that I put into this post, the days of color continue. Yay! My gardens have been returned to some semblance of order, I am making good progress on a number of projects, and I also got some chores done.
Hannah: I was put into the carrier and then put into the car and then taken to the vet and then I got cat-handled and there were some shots and would you believe that the vet said that I was slightly pudgy…
Seriously, PUDGY!!!
Hannah: Now I have to eat Indoor Cat food and the Mother of Cats has cut back on my cookies. Ugh.
Okay, this is an update on my progress on my goals for the year, but it is also a celebration of how well I feel at the moment and my launch into several projects that are rocking the color right now. Seriously, I am so drawn to colors at the moment that I’m pretty much doing some silly impulse shopping. Who cares. I’m having a good time!!
You want to see the silly impulse shopping and/or pink things first?
I could not leave the local garden center without that pink flamingo for my garden! Hello, it glows in the dark with an LED body. 🙂 What do you think about my Knitting Goddess fabric? Yep. That was a late-night Etsy impulse purchase. I’m thinking that it will make a fabulous project bag. What do you think about that Noro yarn? That will become a crocheted tote bag… I also needed to buy some brightly colored hooks to make the bag, and there may have been another big ball of beautiful yarn that fell into the shopping crate before I checked out, but I’ll never talk about it. My feet are hurting because of the spinning I’m doing, so I had to get those wicked compression socks!!! Yep, I am a total sucker for pink. Well, raspberry pink to be specific, but I will settle for hot pink. Finally, Hannah kept trying to drag off my knitted finger protectors, so I made her and Mateo some little tube-like cat thingies to play with. They like them!
Speaking of color, look at my progress on the spinning for Tour de Fleece.
Can you see that I am making progress? The bobbin on the right is where I am today. I’m almost through the crocus-colored roving (50/50 yak/silk from Greenwood Fiberworks), then I get to start on the variegated roving. I’ve been watching episodes of Vera on BritBox while I spin so I’m actually coming to think of this Tour de Fleece as the Tour de Northumbia… I am happy with the spinning as I think that my drafting is getting easier and the thread that I’m spinning is getting smoother. It may also be slightly larger, but I can live with that!
I started reading this book this week because… look at that cover!!!
I don’t want to talk about this book yet because it really is remarkable, and I am changing my opinion about it as I go. It’s like entering a dream world and just experiencing the adventure without worrying too much about what’s going on. In time, I’m sure, I’ll understand what is happening. Maybe. I don’t care. I’m so entranced at the moment I’m reading a couple of hours a day during the heat of the day.
There is color in the garden, too. Look at this:
There is more color in the garden to replace the fading roses. My veronica is finally blooming, and I went back to the garden center to buy more lavender plants. I now have 11 lavenders in the garden… don’t you think that I should get another, so it is an even dozen? The pink yarrow is hard at work. Oh, yeah, there was also a garter snake in the garden today. Not a lot of color, but a ton of fun to see.
So, how much progress has occurred over the last 6 months?
I finished 30 hats and 28 PICC line covers in the first 6 months. I was hoping to get 50 of each done this year, so I am on track.
I have removed 76 skeins of yarn (100g of yarn = a skein) from the stash through knitting and donations. I hope to get 100 skeins out before the end of the year, so I am on track. I did just have a 6-skein slip, but I’m not worried.
The other knitting accomplishments are two sweaters and two pairs of socks.
I finished a quilt and got it hung up on the wall!
I learned how to double knit. Actually, I’m really stoked about how fun it was and I am looking forward to doing some cute projects. (I found that chart online and watched videos to figure out how to do this. Piece of cake, as it turns out!)
I have finished 32 books.
Well, that’s the progress report. My son helped me get my table loom set up for me to use and I’m dreaming of warping the floor loom before the end of the year. (Mateo: that sounds like fun!!) I’m wondering if I can weave something with the yarn that I am spinning now, and I’ve pulled out another quilt kit that has been languishing forever in a cupboard so that I can work on that in my sewing room. I’m entering the last few days on the full dose of prednisone; the dose will be tapered off and stopped over the next two weeks. While I was on prednisone my rheumatologist gradually stepped up my immunosuppressant to a final dose that is double what I was on previously. I feel really good right now and I have huge plans for the rest of the year.
Yarn, Books & Roses 