Sunday, August 14, 2005

Since I'm the last person to discover any cool thing, I just found Rose-Kim Knits. This blog has been running quite a while and it's good. Thursdays are reserved for a feature called "What the Hell?". You can imagine what she digs up for that! If you haven't poked your head in over there, do it.

My new work in progress is coming along swimmingly. I'm so happy with it! But, this evening I was zipping along and looked down and about 4" back, 4 circular inches, on 230 stitches/round, I saw four offending stitches in color B that ought to have been color A. Must have spaced out there. they are not all in a row, but every 4th stitch in one area is wrong. Owen says just to duplicate stitch over, because he can't imagine ripping back 5520 stitches. And that's a pretty good solution. I might ladder down to the errors and reknit them properly, but am leaning toward duplicate stitch. I wish I could show you all pictures, but as I'm planning to submit this one to Knitty for winter, it'll have to be a stealth project for now.

We finally had a break in our humidity. We went to Devil's Lake and had absolute resort weather. The water there is very clear. Not too cold for old moms like me to get wet. Not too crowded. We're hoping to get a few days camping before school starts. The weekends are booked solid, but maybe Scott can get his part of the Big Project done and out of his hands for a while, so we can take some weekdays. The boys played nicely. Owen has a new mask and snorkel and would have spent 4 more hours there if he could have. Not bad for $6 clearance at Shopko. I think Devil's Lake is the only one in Wisconsin with no algae.

The yellowjacket update:
They ate holes through the black plastic and were coming and going at their pleasure. Scott tried making a trap with a piece of meat hanging over some soapy water in a bucket. Only two fatalities. Then he made some traps with soapy koolaid (not just for dyeing yarn: did you know you can drink that stuff?) and soda bottles. No success. But he also put a chunk of watermelon in a cake pan with soapy water. There is no more room for dead yellowjackets! I'm sure there are still a lot more in the nest, but I hope that a fresh trap will take in another couple hundred. If we keep this up for several days, we might deplete the nest enough think about removal. Don't leave dead wood in your yard folks! Another idea Scott read on the internet, but that we haven't yet tried: put chunks of dry ice on the log above the nest. As it evaporates, the CO2 will sink into the holes in the nest and asphyxiate the bees. This one appeals to me as the secondary measure, after we reduce the colony size.

I'll try to start another knitting project soon which will be public. Pictures liven up a blog. And I've had several posts in a row with none!

3 comments:

Jessica said...

Thanks for the shout out. :)
I gave a few captions for the new Rowan as requested.

Nik said...

That owen is a smart dude. You should of heard the gasp I let out when I read about the ripping. Good luck with the knitty submission.

Carina said...

Ooh, that dry ice idea sounds great, and I also like the trap idea. I seem to remember my stepmom making something like that with a soda bottle to hang near her picnic area in the backyard. I wonder if that would work as a preventative. I'm going to try one tomorrow!

Um, I wouldn't rip back. Could it be the back of the project?