Okay, July was a month that I am glad to see go out the door. I did have some great moments in the month; my sister and niece came to visit, I worked at the summer camp at Alta Vida Alpacas, and I spun my friend Deb’s beloved Jake dog into yarn. Good highlights!
Highlights of July. In the group photo of my family we are (clockwise from the top left) me, my cousin Ruth Ann, my sister Selma, and my niece Melissa.
On the flip side, I lost a war with an invasive weed in one of my gardens and my autoimmune conditions went into high gear. For the first time ever I was unable to sleep due to pain (what is up with my joints and muscles?!), gastritis returned after being good for two years, my Sjogren’s flared (!!) and my lips turned blue. Ugh. I blame the heat and the sun.
Now it is August, I’m on oxygen full time, meds have been changed, and I’m in need of a little cheer. Shawls, I need shawls!! The way things are going right now I want to be wrapped in color. Shawls will give me color, texture, lots of mindless knitting, and defiance in the face of medical adversity. I hit the stash, printed patterns from Ravelry, made my shopping list and when I went on the knitting road trip with my peeps last week I scored everything I needed. May I present to you, Seven Happy Shawls…
Shawl patterns matched with my yarn. Top row: Antkarkis Shawl (photo credit to Janina Kallio) Middle row: Rainbow Warrior (photo credit to Casapinka) Bottom Row: A Random Act of Color (photo credit to Mina Phillip)
How is this for cheerful defiance! I was really torn about which one to start on, but I’m leaning towards Antarktis.
Shawls and yarn match by column from left to right. Far left column: Exploration Station (photo credit to westknits). Left middle column: Jujuy (photo credit to Rafael Delceggio) Middle right column: Tamdou (photo credit to Melanie Berg). Right column: The Miller’s Daughter (photo credit to Melanie Berg).
More defiance. This should keep me going in good cheer until the end of the year. I’m torn about the order to knit them; they are all just too yummy for words.
Here they are: seven shawls all kitted up waiting to go. I put the pattern into the box with each yarn, and I’ve already wound the yarn for the top three shawl contenders.
All right August, I am ready for you. Let’s go!!
Notes:
My Ravelry queue can be located here if you would like more information about these patterns and the yarns that I have selected.
I downloaded Fotor for Windows to make some photo collages instead of posting a million pictures. What do you think? I think that you can also make stuff online. It was free, free, free!!
Every Wednesday I go to a local yarn store to knit with a group of ladies who have become my friends. Okay, let’s be honest, they are one of my main support systems. I love the ladies in this group, and last week we all headed out on a road trip to the yarn stores of Fort Collins, Colorado. We visited three stores and treated ourselves to a fun lunch. It was a great (if a little exhausting) time, and it is always exciting to explore new yarn shops, but one store in particular was a huge hit with me.
My Sister Knits is located in the carriage house behind a lovely home on a street shaded with mature trees. We drove by twice before we figured out that there was a discrete sign under a tree out front; the low profile might be due to its presence in a residential section of the city. I really don’t know about that, but it is totally worth the extra time to locate it! To get to the shop you walk through a bright and inviting gate to the side of the house and…
you enter the sweetest yard with brick patios and walkways, tables and benches for knitting, sparkly lights and lovely plantings. I was struck with envy.Then there were the chickens… these pampered chicks have this lovely house for their coop, and the metal and wire structure to the right (which is much larger than shown in the photo) is their courtyard. So cute! I want chickens for my yard too. I want these trees and the decorations, and maybe that birdbath while we’re at it. Do you think a bee hive would be over the top? I got great ideas for my yard before I even made it to the yarn shop!Oh, there it is. The store is located in a converted carriage house that used to be a two car garage with upstairs storage and an office used by the previous owner. Now it is a lovely yarn shop. Let’s go in…OK, the shop isn’t huge, but everything that is there is JUST PERFECT!! Seriously, I wanted everything. Yarn that is hard to find, too wonderful to ignore, and in a great selection of colors. I felt like I had gone to heaven!and I met Julie, who is the most positive and helpful owner you could hope for. No wonder her shop is so appealing.Upstairs you find all the fingering yarn…Madelinetosh and Hedgehog Fibres in every color and weight you could wish for, along with knitted samples, patterns, and cute kit packaging. There were other yarn brands, too, but I never made it that far. 🙂 This table had kits to make Melanie Berg’s On the Spice Market Shawl along with kits for the shawls you can see. You know I bought the yarn to made one of these shawls… There was a Stephen West The Doodler hanging on the wall, with every color of Hedgehog Fibers yarn lurking nearby just waiting for you to put together a three yarn combination… The shop has a license to sell Ravelry patterns, so anything you wanted, they printed it for you and you were in business.
So I got silly and bought yarn. I bought some of the kits that were shown, the yarn for some shawl patterns that have been waiting patiently in my Ravelry shopping cart, and some yarn that was too beautiful to just leave sitting on the rack. I have put together the kits to make seven new shawls (lucky seven… can you feel a new post coming on?), and launched into some small projects that are rich in color and learning. Here is the one that I started first.
Downstairs on a high shelf these little kits were on display: brioche knit cowls. Hey, I always wanted to learn how to knit brioche…Look Mom! I can knit brioche!! Look at how nice these two colors go together. Even the little stitch marker came with the kit. This is the Hawkshaw Cowl by Kate Burge and Rachel Price. That yarn is a single worsted weight merino yarn. Yum!I even learned how to do the i cord cast on that Julie recommended I use. Thank you You Tube!
Today it is cool, overcast and threatening to rain. The Olympics starts tonight, and I have lots of yarn on hand and visions of shawls dancing in my head. Forecast: major knitting.
August has finally arrived; the worst of the heat is almost over and the monsoon is right around the corner. The cicadas are buzzing in the cottonwood trees, and there are birds everywhere. Trees love August here in Colorado; more water and cooler temperatures. My ash tree, beautiful, pampered (he gets an injection every spring to protect him from emerald ash borers, a particularly nasty tree parasite) and greatly loved (well, he provides afternoon shade and is totally rocking his last prune job), is the star of today’s main events. Take it away ash tree!!
The Solaris Shawl is done! Look at the great play of colors against my trunk…The colors of the edging really show off the texture of my bark, don’t you think?and the drape of the leading edge?… just too stunning against my leaves. My owner seems to be pleased with the final product. I tried to convince her to leave me yarn bombed in the shawl, but for some reason she took it off… something about showing it off tomorrow to her knitting group. Whatever. Unless they have ash bark (see what I did there…) it won’t look as nice on them. Just as the day was cooling off this truck pulled up in my shade. Oh, oh. She didn’t seem too happy about this.Yep. This happened. She is now set up with oxygen-to-go. I hope this means she will be spending more time outside with me. The roses kind of miss her.
Notes:
The shawl is Solaris by Melanie Berg. My notes on Ravelry are here.
Ash trees do come in female and male varieties. My tree is a male. How fun is that?
That oxygen bottle comes with a stylish backpack to carry it in. I’m over feeling upset and will be rocking the new look the next time I head out for groceries.
They didn’t have the right size oxygen bottle to give me, so tomorrow the truck is coming back. I may not make it to knitting after all. <sigh>
I learned to knit brioche stitch tonight. It was surprisingly easy. Must be all the oxygen.
I’ve really been dragging lately. I’m out of breath, my arms and legs just don’t want to go, and every now and then my chest hurts. This has been going on since around the first of the year, and so far my pulmonologist and rheumatologist haven’t located a definitive cause. It’s a scleroderma thing, they tell me. I’m on oxygen overnight now, my immunosuppressive drugs have been increased, and I’m just maintaining.
That was until I noticed that my lips were blue one morning while combing my hair. Blue lips? That can’t be good. I did some google searches, scared myself silly and then began to check the mirror more frequently during the day. Two weeks later it was pretty clear that I was rocking the blue lip look every time I came up the stairs. I bought a pulse oximeter, and began to record my blood pressure and oxygen levels throughout the day. Finally, admitting to myself that this was a true phenomenon, I called the doctor.
Of course everything went out of control as soon as I made the call. Now I’m in the middle of testing and doctor appointments. Monday was an especially ugly day; I flunked the 6 minute walk test in 2 minutes flat and was put on oxygen in the hallway. Darn!! It’s a sure thing that I will be lugging an oxygen tank around in a backpack in the near future as soon as I finish the current round of doctor visits and testing. My next doctor appointment is Tuesday, and I think I won’t be able to put off the oxygen trolls any longer after that.
So how have I been handling all of this? Well, when everything is falling apart around you, it is best to just knit, knit, knit! Seriously, knitting is positive, productive, meditative, never talks back and consumes very little oxygen. Perfect! I’ve been just cranking out my Solaris shawl over the last week and the end is now in sight. It is going to be beautiful. Check it out!
I’m in the final edging; I just have a few more rows of color to go.Check out the stitch detail of the edging.The colors that I am using all come from one ball of Crazy Zauberball. You can see how the colors change in the ball in this section of the shawl. I just pull off yarn from the ball until another nice color emerges for my next strip of edging. The project details are here on Ravelry.
So, next week should be a big one for little ol’ me. I’ll be seeing my primary doctor for a breathing needs evaluation, hopefully I’ll be saying goodbye to the blue lips, and my Solaris shawl will get finished up.
I’m not sure how this is all going to turn out, but I’ve got a big shawl queue all ready to go.
I have been battling this ill-behaved plant (with kind of cute flowers) for years now. It has resisted efforts to pull (or dig) it out, and it is just taking over the garden with my Charles Darwin rose. Finally I published its picture and asked for help in identifying it.
The plant grows like crazy……and the flowers are kind of cute. Too bad it is invasive. Bad plant, bad!!
My friend Deb recognized it: it isCampanula rapunculoide. Oops. This is a case of good news, bad news. The mystery is solved, which is good news, right? The bad news is that this plant was imported from Siberia and is now regarded to be an invasive weed. Siberia?! Fabulous. There is nothing like an extreme environment to encourage the evolution of wicked adaptations. Wikipedia (the link above) describes it as “an extremely invasive weed” and notes that “eliminating it is nearly impossible”. Oh, no. I took to the internet to see what else I could find.
Hardy plants for hardy souls posted an article about this plant. It is described as “the evil twin” of a better behaved plant, ladybells. Born to Garden just comes out and calls it “one evil plant”. Evil. Ugh.
It even gets better. There is an online article that describes this plant as “The Zombie Weed“. Zombies! As in “you can never kill it” zombies. As in “do you think we need a flamethrower…?” As it turns out, even a flamethrower wouldn’t be enough; if I burned all the plants, the roots deep in the ground would live on, and on, and on, sending up new shoots for practically forever . Zombies.
I pulled up every leaf and stalk that I could get my hands on. Evidently the plant has extremely hardy roots and tubers underground (made to survive in Siberia, this one…) and I will never get all of it. I can slow it down, however. I raked the soil with a claw tool and pulled out a lot of root material, but evidently the root system goes down a few feet.
Evidently this sweet little plant will take over the lawn, is resistant to weedkillers and is just plain a bad ass plant. Great. In evolution terms, Darwin would describe it as extremely fit. Ripley would tell me that I should just take off and nuke it from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure). It looks like my roses are in big trouble here.
I told you my money was on the purple spiky plant! As it turns out Darwin’s Bane was a good name after all.
You know, I think that I will make a bricked area for my swinging garden chair where that garden is now. The Darwin rose can start living in a pot. I wanted to make a little more room in that part of the yard, anyway. I’ll put in shrubs like catmint and butterfly bush where I don’t brick; they will grow over this evil, zombie-licious plant and steal its light.
The Mother of Cats has been so boring lately… all she does is spin yarn! The spinning wheel doesn’t like me to mess with it, so my brother and I have been left outside to entertain ourselves. Alone. In the gardens. It is so hot even the bugs are hiding…
It could be worse I guess. While she’s inside I have unlimited access to the swinging garden chair. 🙂
My brother Yellow Boy has been sleeping in Darwin’s Garden under the butterfly bush. He’s counting the days until it blooms and the butterflies arrive.
Was that a butterfly?
The Mother of Cats did take some breaks to work in the gardens. Lots and lots of weeds have been pulled. Some new flowers got planted. She accidentally sprayed Yellow Boy with water. I think it was an accident.
The purple spiky plant in Darwin’s Garden finally bloomed this week. Someone, please, tell her the name of this plant!! I don’t think “Darwin’s Bane” is a good name. She ripped out more of the purple plants and moved over some of this pink angelica. Good luck angelica. Only the strong survive in Darwin’s Garden.
Finally she got the spinning done. Hey, she has been spinning that dog! We have been shoved outside so she could spend time with dog hair? Abandoned for a DOG!! What is up with that!!
I do have to admit that this yarn smells pretty interesting……and the final product (she calls it PuppyPaca) looks pretty good.Oh. It’s actually pretty comfy. Maybe dogs aren’t that bad after all…
The finished yarn was taken to her friend Deb today and we were left alone again. What is up with all this feline neglect? When will I get the doggy yarn back to sleep on? There was a hailstorm while she was gone and Yellow Boy wailed (not a brave one, that boy) and hid under the bed. The purple plants in Darwin’s Garden all got knocked down…
…but she doesn’t call it Darwin’s Garden for nothing. My money is still on the purple spiky plant. Tough luck angelica.
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The PuppyPaca is a 50/50 blend of dog down and alpaca. You can learn more about the yarn in this earlier post about Jake and the project to make some yarn from his fur. The final yarn (460 yards) is approximately sport weight. Deb plans to knit a small shawl.
If you know the name of Darwin’s Bane, please let me know!!
No cats whatsoever were harmed during this week (well, Yellow Boy did get a bath…).
Several weeks ago my friends at Alta Vida Alpacas gave me a few skeins of the yarn made in the first mill run of their fiber. I knit some hats and a pair of mitts with the bulky yarn that came from their Huacaya alpaca, and put off working with the sport weight Suri alpaca yarn for a couple of weeks. This was the yarn that they labeled Mill Bag #1: it was soft, slinky, amazing. It just had to be knit in some type of lace pattern, but what?
I played with different ideas and lace patterns, and finally settled on making a scarf in fir cone pattern. You can check out my early efforts at my earlier post Alpaca Days; I finally finished the scarf last week and with no further ado, here it is…
Here she is in all her glory hanging on my front tree. The yarn gives this scarf an amazing feel.Here’s a close-up of the fir cone stitch.
I still had a half skein of the yarn left after finishing the scarf; just enough to make a swatch for another scarf/cowl idea. Cari from Alta Vida foolishly told me I could dye the yarn if I wanted. Hmmm… how brave did I feel? I decided that I was only a little bit brave, but I did want to see how the fiber looked with some color variation. I decided to kettle dye the yarn with my Gaywool indigo colored dye.
I put the soaked yarn into a crockpot and added a dilute dye solution in several different spots with a syringe. After the first infusions of color had spread through the yarn (and the temperature was close to the simmer) I added a second round of dye solution infusions. See, not very brave. Some variation in color, but only with one color in the pot. Call me a dye baby…Here is the finished yarn. By the time the yarn was all dry I had decided to make a swatch of a moebius scarf pattern that I had knitted before in a variegated yarn. Cari and I had talked about a scarf that could also be a cowl. This might be the ticket if the yarn looked nice in the pattern.Swatch! Look at how cool the color is: just a little pooling. Since this is a swatch for a moebius I did a provisional CO in the middle of the central garter area, and then knit one side “up” and the other side “down”.There is trinity stitch on both sides of the scarf/cowl. This is the “up” side……and this is the “down” side showing the wrong side of the trinity stitch.
The yarn is just crisp enough to make the little bobbles in the trinity stitch pop up while still feeling incredibly soft. I think the two sides of the pattern look kind of cool and complementary (and luckily for me, so did Cari!), and as the cowl will be folded and doubled around the wearer’s head both sides of the pattern will be visible no matter how it is folded. The beauty of a moebius is that there is no wrong side and you can just put it on and rock it.
Cari gave me two more skeins of Mill Bag #1 yarn to make the full cowl. I get to dye them, too.
Gosh, this is going to be fun to knit.
Alpacas: You all take good care of that fiber, you hear?
They just sheared their alpacas two weekends ago. I wonder how long it will take for the new batch of yarn to come back from the mill?
Over the last two weeks I have had a crazy case of synchronicity going on. Several random events, totally unrelated, unsolicited, but absolutely linking to a theme of… genetics! Bet you didn’t see that one coming. If you are a total geek of the biology type (me!!) it has been a couple of fun weeks. Here’s what went down.
One of my favorite authors published his new book. Hello summer reading!!
I’ve been spending my mornings outside in my garden swing reading and drinking a latte with the cats. It has just become the best part of the day for me. Two weeks ago the book of the mornings was this one, and I can’t tell you how much I am enjoying the narrative that weaves genes, history, evolution and personal experiences linked to the author’s genetic heritage together. A wonderful book. A topic that is close to my heart after years of teaching cells, genes and evolution to many, many students. Everyone, in my mind, should know enough genetics to navigate safely through life. While I was reading this picture arrived in my phone:
Yep. That is a white squirrel for sure!
I sometimes get calls from friends and neighbors who have biology tales to share. This picture came from someone who was excited about the “albino” squirrel hanging around his home. It has been running through the trees and chasing another squirrel along the fence so I told him it was probably not an albino, but a white squirrel as it seemed to have good eyesight. He didn’t understand that there is a difference, and therefore sent a picture to provide proof. We got on the phone and finally ironed it out with a little Wikipedia help and some genetics review. Now he’s waiting to see what color the pups will be. It’s an urban experiment!!
After the call I put the book away to start on a little gardening. What garden was next on my list? The one that I call Darwin’s Garden!
That poor little rose bush that is getting swarmed by other plants is my Charles Darwin rose.
As coincidence would have it, I had just read about Darwin in the book. Time to start weeding! Looks to me like survival of the fittest is a little out of control at the moment…
I call this Darwin’s Garden because of the rose, but also because there is a lot of natural selection going on. I move plants from other locations to this one and basically let them fight it out. The clear winner is this plant, and I have no clue what it is!! It is spreading everywhere, has tall spikes and little purple flowers that will emerge soon. When I started weeding a lot of this plant got ripped out!Well, look at this. This ground cover type plant has been growing underneath the spiky plant; I don’t like it all that much, but the plant said “whatever… this is Darwin’s Garden, bitch!” I let it stay; with an attitude like that it deserves a chance. I also found snapdragons, columbines, roses, and some iris. There is a butterfly bush that is swarming some rose plants, but I decided to let them just fight it out for now. These Johnny Jump-ups have been growing in the rock border by my driveway out front. Since they are escapees from the flower container they belong in I decided to dig them out and move them.I dipped the roots into this rooting hormone and then popped them into Darwin’s Garden. Let’s see if they can take on the purple spike plant! Maybe they can slap the ground cover plant while they are at it…Here they are a week later in the garden. Transplant was successful.
Here’s the next crazy coincidence: that rooting hormone is a type of auxin, which was first discovered by none other than Charles Darwin!! No wonder the transplant to Darwin’s Garden went off without a hitch. Every single one of the plants I moved made it.
This week things are looking a lot better in the garden. The Charles Darwin rose even bloomed.
Last week I worked at Camp Macusani (which is a whole other post) so the garden suffered a little. Tomorrow morning I will return to the garden swing, my book, and Darwin’s Garden. I’m thinking of moving some angelica that is out of control in there too… Maybe the purple spike plants will be blooming so I can post a picture. If anyone recognizes them, please let me know what they are… Right now I’m calling them Darwin’s Bane.
I’m finally up to the part of the book where we’re getting ready to start genetic engineering. For a biogeek with a molecular biology degree, this is heaven. I can’t wait to see what Dr. Mukherjee is going to say next.
The weather has really warmed up and stabilized this week; sun, heat and no thunderstorms; just what I needed to make my aching muscles and joints behave themselves. This week has been a good one and I took to the backyard for most of the afternoons. There’s a lot that can be accomplished outside. Let me take you on a little tour of my days.
MacKenzie: when she says that she took operations outside what she really means is that I was forced to share the swinging garden chair with her. Does she not understand, June is for cats?!!
The shade of my locust tree covers the lawn swing and a couple of the gardens. What could be better for a person with a latte and an incredibly good book?
The aforementioned book…
I’ve been consumed with the Justin Cronin novel, The City of Mirrors. Oh, my goodness. What a well-written, tightly-crafted book to spend the summer afternoons with. I read the first two books in this series and I wasn’t completely sure that I wanted to dive into a book of over 700 pages to learn the fate of mankind in their battle against the Zombie apocalypse, but the reviews made me take the leap and I pushed the “buy” button on my NOOK. Good decision. I keep highlighting passages that are just so wonderful I want to savor them later. I usually race through good books but this is one that I am stretching out so the experience will continue. The perfect June book.
After an hour of reading the knitting begins. Check out my progress on the Solaris shawl (by Melanie Berg).
I’ve gotten through the first two color inserts in the shawl. To get a different color in the short row section I pulled off some yarn until I was at a new section. Fast, easy, simple.and I still have some great (crazy) colors in the ball to use. Project details are here.
I’ve also taken some weeding breaks. The little roses in my tea rose garden are now blooming, and I have gotten the weeds pulled out of another couple of patches. There are a lot of weeds, but everything is getting ready to bloom so I’m pretty motivated to keep at it.
The bloom on this tea rose is just great; really big for such a small plant. This was one of those little roses that are sold at the grocery store. I put them out in the garden when they look a little worn out and they winter just fine here in the Denver area.Here was today’s project. Do you see the rose plant in there?Oh, there it is!!
Towards the late afternoon as things really warm up I water the flowers and gardens and head inside for food, the news and more knitting (bet that was a shock, huh!) Even the cats are ready to come in by that point. OK, they get kitty treats for coming in, but they would probably come in anyway… especially since I just watered all of their favorite plant nests. 🙂
Yarn, Books & Roses 