Vacation Wrap-Up

August 2: We set out from home. We began looking for lodging on the far western fringes of the greater Cleveland area. No lodging. We tried at least 15 hotels over 4 major intersections. Eventually were told there was a Twins Convention in Twinsburg OH and that there was no lodging until Pennsylvania. So we pressed on to the Pittsburgh Area. We were thrilled to get a room at a Comfort Inn near the airport at about 1 a.m. While I was booking the room a young woman, looking exhausted, came in and wondered, barely daring to hope, if there were rooms. I asked her if she, too, had been traveling across Ohio. Yes indeed.

The next night we stayed with my sister and her family in their funky old house in Pittsburgh.

We had a hard time getting the Little Emperor to sit for a family picture. Kate's husband was the most consistently photogenic of all of us.

From there, we drove on to Treman State Park near Ithaca NY. The kids loved swimming in a natural pool and under the waterfall.


Owen and I hiked down the gorge, which was still a bit strenuous because sometimes you have to go up to go down. We showed Owen the house we lived in when he was born. It was a short stay and went pretty well. Our second night was rainy, so we had to pack up wet camping stuff to drive to NH.

On to New Hampshire where we saw my folks and swam at our favorite top-secret pond. My mom and I went to the League of NH Craftsmen annual fair. There were a few truly remarkable artists, a lot of work that looks like all the others, and a few real duds. But fun to look.

August 10: on to Quebec.
Not long after we crossed the border, a seagull committed suicide on our windshield. It was a terrifying moment, but neither humans nor van suffered any damage.

We stayed at Chateau de la Terrasse, the middle building in this image:

The structure to the right is the US Consulate.








A ship on the St. Lawrence at dusk.


Benches on the boardwalk


Petit Champlain, as viewed from the Terrasse Dufferin.


On our way to the Old Port area

Near the Old Port, we explored the Ephemeral Gardens, an interesting sort of art space constructed for the 400th anniversary. This mirrored graffiti house was one part of it:


Then we went to the farmers market to buy some veggies and cheese. While there, we had crepes, prepared by a nice woman and her two daughters.


Cannons are just play equipment in Quebec nowadays.


I just really liked this house.

During a light rain, I was knitting on the little front balcony of the hotel. Two different American tourists stopped to take my picture! And then, a wild looking older man stopped and stared for several long moments. Eventually, he told me that I reminded him of his mother knitting back in Ireland. Hmm.

We had some very dramatic clouds in Quebec. Indeed, there was a tornado someplace in the province that day! It rained on and off, and we watched the lightening over the evening sky in Levis across the St. Lawrence.

Long Drive Home

Near Ottawa, we saw this Really Big Thing on the highway.
We stayed in Pembroke Ontario.

Upper Peninsula, Manistique MI

Manistique in da Moonlight

Somewhere between Manistique MI and Green Bay WI, we took a little break at a wayside park. The Little Emperor dove right into the sand.




Finally, on August 15th, Home Sweet Home.

Far From Home

We've suffered through a dearth of lodging in eastern Ohio, stayed with my sister and her family in Pittsburgh, camped a couple nights in Ithaca NY, stayed with my folks four nights in NH, and now, we're in Quebec City for three nights. It's the four hundredth anniversary of the founding, so the city is a mad-house. But beautiful as ever. Then we high-tail it back across Canada, through Sault Ste. Marie, and home.

More details and photos to follow when we're home.

Oh, and we saw the Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile again! Didn't get a pic, but it was in easter NY state. Maybe it's stalking us?

Neighborhood sighting

It's not every day a person sees the Oscar Mayer WienerMobile parked a block from her house. On a residential street. With nothing going on. In front of a mid-'60s ranch house. Very mysterious.

Busy Busy Busy

I've been piecing a quilt top for Owen the last couple weeks:



I plan to send it out to be machine quilted because otherwise, it will end up as a permanent UFO. One woman I found online charges about $75 on an average twin size quilt, which is a pretty good deal considering the hours of my life I would spend (not to mention the frustration) if I tried to do it at home. I did notice a business here in Madison with a sign in the window advertising "Machine Quilting" so I'm going to phone them up today and see what they say.

I made this quilt top from a lot of Mr. SABLE's old plaid and striped shirts that had ripped out at elbows and pockets and such. I also picked up a few more shirts at Digger's Outlet to throw in a bit more diversity in the color scheme.

There has been knitting, too, but I have to keep that under wraps a while.

In other news
Today is the Little Emperor's seventh birthday. Hard to believe how fast the time has gone!

Our lives are stressful these days. Mr. SABLE has some employment uncertainty ahead. His company wanted him to move to way-southern NJ by Sept 30. He decided that he really wasn't willing to go to those lengths to stay with that company. He's hoping to find other employment that keeps us in the Madison area soon, but he's considering jobs quite far away, too. As it currently stands, his last scheduled day of work is Sept 30, so after that, who knows? There is a severance package for those not willing to relocate, so we should have a cushion for a few more months after that, but it's a lot of stress and anxiety for us right now. Stay tuned.

Alt Knitting Camp 08

Or The Gourmet S'mores Knitting Camp


I took three group pictures. This one was the best for everyone but me. So, I pulled a fast one. I took my head off of one of the others and photoshopped it onto myself in this picture. But everyone else was smiling nicely!

A great time was had by all. We ate, drank, went yarn shopping, yakked it up, slept a bit. Some of us even went swimming!

Now I'm off to bed. Must rise early to fetch Owen from Geek Camp in St. Paul.


The Swap
Meanwhile, here's the yarn we all brought to swap around/destash.


Somehow, I came home with more yarn than I unloaded. Hmm.

It's Here!

Soon I'll be getting some envelopes stuffed to those of you willing to help distribute to LYSs in your area.

But it's a crazy week coming up, and following on an utterly insane week just past.

So, the 'zine: well, I think it looks pretty good. There were a few glitchy things that happened right at the end, resulting in a bit of confusion (on my part) and a couple little edits and improvements that should have gone to press were left out of the final version. But it was a huge learning experience. It can only get better from here, right? This issue was a bit heavier on sewing, but the fall issue will be fatter and heavier on knitting. Stay tuned.

Butterfly Season

This Swallowtail emerged in our garden yesterday. I got this image of it while he was still drying his wings.


Here's a closer view of his face:


I tried stalking a monarch in the last couple days, but that one was too manic to stay put for even a second. Later in the season they settle down more and pose for pics.

Garden Pics

A couple garden pics to tide you over until I have more knitting to show. The top one is Bee Balm. I have been admiring Bee Balm in gardens all over Madison for many years and we finally have some growing in our own yard. When you see a big stand of it in full bloom in July, you know it's summer. We don't have a big stand, yet, but in a few years, I hope to have it all over the yard.

The second image is just a lily. We have several different kinds of lilies. I love how agreeably easy they are and they always put on a good show.

Material Culture

Regular readers know I'm a great fan of thrift shops. One particular store in my area holds a singular fascination for me: The Diggers Outlet, run by St. Vincent de Paul Society. Diggers Outlet is the last-chance store for merchandise that has run through the other thrift shops. Most goods are sold by the pound with only the most cursory sorting: clothes in giant boxes, household items of every type in another section, etc. Diggers Outlet is where you see first-hand the cast off material culture of modern American society: the clothing fads, the electronics that were cutting edge and now are obsolete, the particle board furniture that self-destructs after 5-10 years of regular use, the must-have kitchen gadgets of yesterday, and so on. A trip to Diggers Outlet jars me into thinking about how short our collective attention span really is.

I'm a textile nut. If you read this blog, you probably already know that. For most of human history, textile production has been slow and labor-intensive. Spinning was done on drop spindles and later, by hand on spinning wheels. The Industrial Revolution started the change that continues rippling today: toward higher efficiency in production, cheaper goods, viewing laborers as part of the machinery, toward ever-changing cycles of fashion and the disposable culture they foster. I'm not a rosy romantic about life in the years before the mid-18th century. I know that life was often nasty, brutish, and short, to borrow a phrase. But it was, by and large, more sustainable than the life we now live.

Textile production used to be so labor intensive that textiles had to be preserved and used up. Only the very wealthy could afford to have several sets of clothes. If you have ever made a garment, from fiber to fabric to finished object, either with knitting or weaving, you know how you feel about the resulting item: it's a treasure! If one use doesn't work out, you find a way to reuse it in another that does: unravel the sweater and reknit the yarn into something new or give it to a person it will fit, or something. Handmade fabric from handmade yarn is not something you want to discard easily.

Mass-produced fabric is so cheap that we generate tons (TONS!) of excess textiles in our society. Unbelievable excess. We shop for and replace clothes with little thought. Some items find their way into the landfills, though they are perfectly usable. Many get donated to charities for resale or distribution to the needy. While searching for images of baled clothing, I found this article.

In particular, I was struck by this quote:

The need to minimise all waste is more apparent when you consider that :

More than 80% of materials are consumed and waste generated by less than 20% of the world's population.

The growth in the world's population and the spread of wealth is rapidly exacerbating the problem.

In order to sustain human life under the present system, global environmental efficiency will have to increase by as much as 50 times.

The whole concept of product life cycle, design, fashion and the responsibility for re-use have to be reassessed. A culture built on the idea of wastage needs to be dismantled and a new way introduced.

Further search led me to another eye-opening article.

What if we all tried to stop thinking like Consumers and redefined ourselves in other terms? What if all our textiles were produced in ways that did not exploit the laborers or the planet? And what if we all recognized that the cost of a basic outfit would be higher, but our expectations about our clothes would be different? We would spend more, but spend more wisely. We would seek quality. We would reuse and re-purpose our textiles. We would choose clothes that wouldn't look dated next year at this time; clothes constructed with future alterations in mind; clothes from quality fabrics that stand up to hard use.

I wonder what our society will look like in 10 years. Or 30. Will we be buried in the excesses of the Industrial Age? Or will we learn to live as though our resources matter?

Note: image found on Buffalo Export website.

A Little 'Zine Teaser...

Just a peak at one of the Knitcircus patterns coming out soon! Tango!
Click here and scroll down for purchasing info. (New site coming soon!)

Finally, a little knitting content!

I recently finished this hat! It was loosely inspired by one in the book Hip Knit Hats, but with my own numbers and variations. I like the way it can be worn in a variety of different ways, with differing degrees of jauntiness!

The lighter yarn is some of the handspun that the wonderful Lady Bean of House of Wool Repute sent me a while ago. This only used a small amount of it, but I have enough to make something else with what's left. The darker green was an odd ball of something I took to be Manos that I got in a big grab bag from the thrift shop several years ago. The Manos is heftier than the handspun, but it doesn't really matter for this use.

For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, I'm kind of a hat fiend. I feel that fun hats are one of the places a woman of size can really go to town without worrying too much about accentuating the wrong place. I mean, really, who can go wrong accentuating her head?

As for the 'zine, Knitcircus, we press the big SEND button tomorrow and off it goes to the printer. I'll be hitting up my faithful readers for a bit of a favor. Well, a favor with a sweetener for you. To receive your free copy of Knitcircus #3, all you need to do is agree to drop off one issue at your LYS, along with a cover letter explaining a bit about us. (No sales pitch: just drop and leave.) Of course, we're hoping that yarn shops will agree to carry us, but they have to know about us first! If you're interested, send me an email (in my blogger profile) and include your mailing address. As soon as we get the issues in our sweaty little hands, you'll get a copy, plus one for your LYS. It's that simple.

Updates

Here we are, sailing headlong into July. The news Chez SABLE is both dull and exciting.

First the exciting:
Issue #3 of Knitcircus is very nearly ready to send off to the printer. We hope to get it dispatched by July 1, with issues ready about a week after that. Putting a magazine together really is like solving a puzzle. Once you get all the component parts roughed in, you still have to find a way to make them squeeze into the allotted space without looking like they're being squeezed. I'm grateful that I was able to hit the ground running with InDesign because of all the stuff about layout and design that I already learned in Word or Pages. I'm grateful, too, that ultimately it's not my project, so I do what I can and hand it off to Jaala. It's nice not being the one who needs to keep track of every detail.

I'm a bit at odds with knitting lately. I have some projects in the pipeline that need some thinking time, like the Kauni cardigan. And some ideas waiting to be turned into projects, too, but they need even more thinking time. I definitely need to get my kids into some more structured activities for some of the remaining summer. Then maybe I could focus on what to knit!

Now the dull:
The summer's been whacky because of weather and mosquitos. We were supposed to spend 4 nights camping at Devils Lake, but our reservation was canceled because the park closed due to flooding. We spent two nights at Mirror Lake, instead, which is just not as nice a park in several ways. It would have been ok, except that the mosquitos were just about as bad as I've ever had on a camping trip. In fairness to the park, this is a bad situation all over the area. It's been too awful to even stand out on the sidewalk and chat with a neighbor in broad daylight for the last 10 days or so. I do think Mirror Lake would be nice for a visit in the fall, except for the drone of the Interstate, which is a more fundamental problem. Because Devils Lake had been closed, one of our great favorite boredom-busters has been unavailable. The park is about 35 miles from our house, so a bit of a distance with gas prices as they are, still, we could go a couple times a week without breaking the bank. The park just reopened on Thursday, so I think we'll have to plan a visit soon. The lakes right in Madison tend toward algae and often close several times a summer due to high bacteria counts. Lately, they've been closed because of potentially dangerous stuff running into them as a result of flooding.

Yesterday I took the boys to see Wall-E, a new Pixar Studios movie. The Little Emperor has been waiting for months for this release. It was a fun movie for the whole family. There aren't a lot of G rated movies that I genuinely say that about. I wish there were more, but it seems like there tends to be a gulf between the really dippy pablum they release for very young kids (i.e. Barney) and the violent stuff that slides by for PG audiences because people don't hold animation to the same standards as live-action movies. So, I'd give Wall-E two thumbs up for the four and up set. And the teen liked it, too!

That's the news for now. Stay tuned!

The Summer Madness Starts

(Suppressing a long rant here about my kids. Just wondering, those of you who talk about how great your kids are at amusing themselves, at what age did you have to get really harsh to make that happen? Because I obviously failed in this aspect of parenting and I would love to get back on track now.)

Anyway, in the last month I've had a crash course, mostly self-taught in the ways of InDesign. This has been a lot of fun and part of the reason my kids are so put out. They expect that they should be the center of my world all day, every day. I kind of think that by ages 13 and very-nearly-7, they should be able to something, anything, without my constant presence. Bah. But, Issue #3 of Knitcircus is well under way and should be available within the next couple of weeks.

What is Knitcircus? It's a new 'zine about knitting and other crafts, produced in Madison, but certainly not Madison-specific in content. We have knitting and sewing patterns, book and yarn reviews, articles on craft-related stuff, recipes. Three rings of knitting and crafting fun! Issue #3 will be the first one professionally printed and bound. It's a smaller issue, but we hope the fall one will have a larger page size and more pages, too. Knitcircus is the brainchild of Jaala Spiro, a fellow Madisonian. She needed a bit of help to continue producing it and a few of us answered the call. Stay tuned...

So, all that activity leaves me without much knitting content to show you right now. When the issue is in print, I'll have new knitting to show you.

Meanwhile, here are some recent garden pictures:

June 9, 2008

After all this wild and dramatic and sometimes destructive weather has cleared out, it's not a bad day here.


Fancy Ferns


Fluff Storm

More of the Merino/Tencel

Or The Boasting Goes On!

But first, a peony bud:

Ours are taking forever to open this year. The anticipation is driving me nuts.

Now on to the yarnography:

A little 11 gram/88 yard mini-skein. I intend to use this for a swatch. Right now, I'm leaning toward Muir from Knitty Fall 07. If I like the swatch, I'll make it more like a scarf than a stole by taking out one repeat of the pattern.

The next few get a bit bigger when you click them.






We're having very dramatic weather here today and I missed a window of sunshine. When I use the flash on this yarn, the tencel puts on a highly reflective sheen, which I find a bit distracting and not an accurate representation of how the yarn really looks.

In Other News
We are rapidly crashing into the end of the school year. This tends to lead to a dramatic decrease in anything that requires sustained thought from me. I have a lot of writing to do for KnitCircus as well, so please understand if posts become somewhat infrequent for a while. Of course, there's always lots of quick, easy post fillers in the summer with garden photos, right?

I also wanted to mention that I edited the Knitting Camp post to answer Helen's question. Helen, I don't have your email for a direct response, but I hope you'll be able to come! It would be great to meet you. JP, you too!

Unreasonably Boastful Post Ahead

Alternate post title: The Longest Four Ounces of My Life
To say I am quite pleased with myself wouldn't go nearly far enough. I've finished up with most of the 4.1 ounces of 70% merino/30% tencel roving, dyed by Sandy of Sandy's Palette, that I got at the Alpaca Festival. I haven't measured yet, but I think this qualifies as lace weight.
edited to add: measured approx 720 yards in about 100 grams. Skinny!


On the Niddy Noddy


The Money Shot

This was a very slow spinning project. The fiber needs constant vigilance because the moment I let down my guard, the strands would slip on through my fingers. It was definitely a learning project.



The plying alone took hours last night. I took these photos before-bath. I'll do more on a brighter day, once the skein is washed and ready to pose.

Meanwhile, here's an iris:

Bridal Wreath

Knitting soon. And spinning. Meanwhile, the bridal wreath is in bloom, so enjoy it!