Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content.
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| Like The Queen Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content. |
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0 Comments:Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom] Sunday, April 13, 2003 Written about 7:00 a.m. today Well humph. Blogger is not working again today - can barely bring up anybody’s site and my archives are missing again. sigh. So I haven’t even tried to see if I could post anything. Sunday is usually the day I change my weekly side items. Besides, I’m a little afraid to go into the template - something else might disappear. Well - drat on all technological roadblocks - but I’m old enough to still feel grateful for this technology at all. I’ll type this up in a .doc file and post it later. Yesterday was the first sunny dry day after a glorious week of rain. (Gardener speaking here- we had such a drought last year I still haven’t gotten tired of rain) So, of course the garden called, and the light was bright enough for me to see how much dog hair there is on all the rugs and how dusty all the furniture is. The plan was to clean the house, work a little in the garden and spin some. Of course I had forgotten BigDarling. Call it a quirk - but I can’t clean house when he’s around. Usually I can put him out with the dogs, who are also a problem then, in a Marmaduke sort of way, when that vacuum comes out. But the truth is, I don’t want anybody around when I clean house...which mind you, I don’t do all that often. Mostly I pay someone else to do it. Only on off weeks do I and also when I want to get back in touch with my stuff. Bess’ theory of housework: The person who cleans the house always knows where stuff is. And yeah, yeah, I know. BD doesn’t do any housework, but like I said, I’m old. And I’m comfortable with a traditional division of labor. I don’t do car maintenance, nor do I help with firewood. We heat with wood, btw, so that’s truly a chore. Well, okay, it’s easy to just go outside instead of cleaning house. But what needs doing in the garden right now is to dig up all the little plants that have spread out into the paths and put them back in their beds, or else pack them up to give away. I once read a darling post by a gardener who said “I garden with invasive plants” and I knew we were soul sisters. I too share garden space with many chaotic sprawley plants. Lychnis (rose campion), wild violets, tall Phlox, Purple Homestead verbena, Obedient Plant, Sweet Peas, Purple Coneflower, Bouncing Bess (well, how could I not?) as well as that hideous Ehphorbia pestilentia. There are also now some trailing sorts of viney things...(succinct description, no?) that I bought to drape down from some tall pots I have in the garden. They look and spread like periwinkle and I never did learn their names. One is green with white edging and one is green with a yellow heart. Imagine a lovely hanging basket with flowers in the center and these green trailing vines spilling over the sides. Imagine these things taking root wherever they touch the ground. well that’s all over the garden now. Digging them out of the paths without making said paths into obstacle courses riddled with ankle breaking holes requires a trowel and I own 2 very nice ones - only - lord knows where they are, I couldn’t find them. So I wasted another hour looking in every possible place except the right one, getting crabbier and crabbier, and thinking of all the reasons why it was BigDarling’s fault they were missing. Well - you will be pleased to know I have 2 bags of pelleted lime, a path has been cleared through the clutter to the summer window screens, there are new blackberry bushes growing behind the tool shed, and I have a box of Miracid for spraying the roses with - but I never did find the trowels. That ment driving to town (26 miles, round trip) and I didn’t get into the garden till 3 p.m.!! Still managed to end up aching all over, the result of 2 hours of deep knee bends as I stooped and dug those wanderers out of the paths. One path, alas, is so pocked I will have to till it, but the others will do fine once they are mulched. All those little white periwinkley things are now in the circle where Pop’s sundial is (see April garden tour) and where so many Ice Follies daffodils are, nothing will grow on top of them after June. I haven’t yet decided what to do with all the green and yellow ones, but the rose campion is back in bed, the obedient plants are back too, and I just tossed the extra phlox and violets. Oh lord - and I have garlic chives in every da-gone bed! And I managed to fertilize all the roses (there are 37 of them). And today I will edge the beds - a rather easy-going task to do when the ground is wet - and you would not believe what a difference it makes in the look of a garden. Guess I shan’t get to the housecleaning after all. So - what about the mohair boucle? ahh yes. well First of all - do not ever, no matter how beautiful the colors, buy really trash-filled mohair locks. Lordy these things are a bugger to clean. But I did card out some lovely masses and spun up about 5 yards of corespun boucle using DMC cotton perle thread. It’s a lovely chocolate brown and I even rather like the weight this gave the yarn better than the boucle spun on sewing thread, but the perle is a much more visible part of the finished yarn. So it’s important that you spin it with more care. When I spun corespun boucle last fall, I used sewing thread and it pretty much disappeared into the fluff of the mohair. Any nasty tangles I created by my lack of skill were hidden by the mohair’s halo. The perle is a bigger thread and it really exposes any mistakes. I will fiddle around with some more core and binder threads but I have decided that this mohair is not supposed to be spun up into anything I will knit. It may be. But it doesn’t have to be. It can be my “experiment-with-fluff”, because the thought of cleaning enough of this stuff to spin enough yarn to knit a jacket with is just daunting. - worse - it is depressing. Instead, when I will bide my time till Md. Sheep and Wool and look for very clean dyed mohair locks in vivid bessish colors. posted by Bess | 5:21 PM |
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