Ghost trees

Whenever I go for a walk in the woods in the spring after (or during) a rain, I'm always struck by the contrast between the water-dark wood of tree bark and the tiny new fresh-green leaves. The contrast is especially strong with dogwoods, whose just-opened new flowers are a pale green. It's easier to get a sense of this ethereal quality when in an actual forest and not in the suburbs, surrounded by neighbors' homes. But the half a dozen dogwoods on our property (a happy legacy of previous owners) are enough to take me a real forest in my own Proustian moment.

A very, very large FO

The living room is finished. The living room is finished. Whew! As promised, here is a photo of it.

We got our paint from Sherwin-Williams. For other painting projects, we'd used Behr, but this time we decided to throw down for some really good stuff (this is, technically, the "showpiece" room of the house) and get some much-needed advice from People Who Do Know Squat About Paint. Yes, it cost a bit more than Behr, but wow, it was really worth it. This stuff went on the walls so easily and smoothly. Even our friend Gina, who has loads of experience with painting projects and helped us with this one, was impressed with it.

On the walls is Restrained Gold (probably the only color in the universe that goes with our furnishings, which are all from different color groups), in the Cashmere paint line, in a flat finish. It's not completely flat--when you look at it from an angle, it has a slight sheen--but it's nowhere near an eggshell finish. Unlike most flat finish paints out there, this stuff can be touched. That feature was pretty essential to us, since we don't want to spend the next several years telling our child "Don't touch the walls." 'Cause you know what? The walls will be touched. For the trim we used Alabaster (a white with a slightly reddish-gold tint, if you can imagine that), and the ceiling has plain old ceiling white on it.

The room isn't 100% finished: we haven't hung anything on the walls yet. We have a giant mirror (a five-dollar buy at a yard sale last spring) that will probably go above the piano after we sand and restain the wooded frame. We're going to wait a little while before hanging any art, though, to give ourselves time to live in the room a bit and see how it feels.

So here's a curtain question for you: what should we do with the windows? In the past, we had dark red floor-length drapes that we hated. (But they were left by the previous owners, and free is a very good price to pay for drapes--especially in a room that you're planning to redo soon anyway.) We never closed them, though, preferring the natural light and airiness of open windows.

Let me say this up front: venetian blinds (vertical or horizontal, metal or cloth) are not options. I think wooden blinds or shutters would be too "heavy" for this room. I'm sort of inclined to go with a short curtain, something like a little longer than the windows themselves. But isn't there some "rule" about how "formal" rooms are supposed to have floor-length curtains? I don't have anything against floor-length curtains per se, but I think they'd end up getting stuck behind the table-chair arrangement on one side of the window. And I have two cats, so the bottom three feet of long curtains would be covered in cat hair in no time at all. So...any suggestions, anyone?

Finally, I want to point out one of the things in this room that gives me the most joy. This desk (a new IKEA purchase, as are the two glass-fronted bookcases flanking the piano) is what we've nicknamed "the dumping ground." You know how you come in the door and your stuff just ends up in places--cell phones (and chargers) all over the kitchen counters, briefcases and purses and diaper bags all over the hallway? We decided to have a space dedicated to corralling this stuff. We don't have a proper foyer, so we put this space just inside the living room, right around a short wall from the front door.

The large compartment of the secretary desk is where we put briefcases, diaper bags, and purses. The shelves above it give us extra storage for stuff we don't need out all the time but still want accessible: camera bag, camcorder, external hard drive (back up your data regularly, people!). The bottom shelf is my favorite part: courtesy of an eight-slot surge protector, it's the charging station for cellphones, camera batteries, wireless computer mice (yes, we are geeks), and other such gadgets. Everything has a place to go now, and when the doors are closed it's all hidden. I love it.

Irony

A few days ago, I reached into a bookcase to pull out a cookbook and received a nasty paper cut right under the fingernail of my index finger. (Ouch ouch ouch...)

The culprit? A small piece of paper sort-of-glued (it pulls off easily to reveal a wad of glue that looks like a booger) to the outside cover of the adjacent phone book.

The piece of paper? An ad for a local personal-injury lawyer.

Think I ought to sue 'em?

The liberal conspiracy is at it again!

(I wonder how many Google hits on that title will bring people here...)

In Making Light I came across this letter, written by a Little Rock lawyer and published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on 16 April:

You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two. This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they ?

Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.

CONNIE M. MESKIMEN
Hot Springs

My first thought was "Oh. My. Dog." Then I read through the comments and learned that the letter was apparently a satire--one that yielded lots of angry letters in the newspaper from readers unaware that it was a satire. Did the newspaper print the original letter in all sincerity, I wonder? Or were the editors also aware of the joke?

A knitalong for two

Ever since SP9 ended, my spoiler, Lynnette, and I have kept in touch. One thing we discovered is that we're both new to lace knitting--"new" as in "haven't done it before but would really like to." We also discovered that we both have a fondness for dragons.

"Hey," we thought, "wouldn't it be fun to do a lace project together?"

After a few e-mails back and forth to discuss several possible patterns (the "Heere Be Dragone" shawl was mentioned but quickly determined to be not-a-good-idea-for-a-first-lace-project), we finally settled on the Dragon-Scale Scarf from Heritage Yarns.

By coincidence, we both started our scarves at the same time (around Easter weekend), but house-related concerns (and not having the scarf and my camera anywhere near each other whenever I thought to take a picture of the thing) have kept me from posting about it until now. As you can see, I'm nearly two feet into it (I started a new skein at about eighteen inches).

I've opted for a heavier yarn than the pattern calls for: I'm using the fabulous Patons SWS that Lynnette gave me, and I love how the scarf is turning out. The pattern's twelve-row repeat isn't difficult but is interesting enough to keep me from getting bored! I doubt that I'll be ready for Heere Be Dragone after this, but maybe one day, after I get a lot more lace knitting under my belt!

Speaking of friends...

By happy coincidence, I have reason to write up another "wow, my friends are great" post. In this case, the friend didn't give me much-needed decorating advice but sent me yarn.

About two weeks ago, Beth, my roommate from college, called to let me know that her local yarn store was having a mega-sale. Would I like anything? she asked. I was sorely tempted but opted to save my pennies this time. Apparently, she decided to take matters into her own hands: in the mail a few days ago I received a package full of Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino.

Now, I love this yarn. I've raved about it here before, and Beth and I have had extensive discussions on the subject. And now I have a lot of it. In addition to the four skeins of peach, two skeins of sage green, and two skeins of chocolate brown that Beth sent, I have one skein of chocolate brown (leftover from the cardigan I made for Sylvia) and three skeins of red (from JD). That's twelve whole skeins of this stuff!

So what should I do with it? I'd love to hear suggestions! I think it would be fun to use it all in one project (though I suspect the red may be a bit too bright to go with the others). A striped sweater? Some sort of intarsia thingamabob?

I know these things are true

1. There is special circle of hell reserved for the people who put this god-awful sun-moon-stars wallpaper border in my house. Not only did they exhibit terrible taste in wallpaper, but they put this stuff directly under crown molding in the most formal room in the house. What in the world were they thinking? Fortunately, it all came off--though not without some elbow grease.

2. Home fix-it projects never take as little time or money as you think they will. A few months ago, Jan and I were talking about all the things we want to do with our house, and we realized that we were experiencing the sort of option paralysis that stops us dead in our tracks when we're standing at the counter in an ice-cream shop: with so many choices, it's hard to know where to begin. So we decided to choose something "simple" and do it, just to feel a sense of accomplishment.

"The living room!" we declared. "The supplies won't cost much--just paint!--and painting doesn't take that long to do, so we'll be done in no time! And really, it's about time we got rid of that wallpaper border before its ugliness causes permanent blindness." It took about two whole months to settle on a paint color (tip: paint your sample paint on a big piece of foam board, so you can move it around the room and test it against your furnishings and in different lighting conditions), then nearly a full week of every-free-minute work to get the supplies we needed and to clear out, prep, and paint the room. Oh, and of course this cost about twice what we anticipated.

3. Shoving nearly two rooms of stuff into one heavily used room is no fun at all. We moved all of our living room crap, er, I mean possessions into our not-terrible-spacious dining room, which made for very crowded mealtimes and decreased enthusiasm for cooking. (In addition to being the Week of Living Room Painting, this was the Week of Take-Out Food.)

Sylvia handled it pretty well. As an almost-two-year-old, she could have gone the way of "something has interrupted my routine, and I don't like it" or "hey, cool--I have a different view from my high chair now." Fortunately, for all of us, she took the latter path.

Those people who live through kitchen remodels? Gah, I don't know how they do it...

4. Good friends are worth their weight in gold. In addition to serving as color consultants who surely saved us from some horrible mistakes, our friends Katie and Gina helped us out tremendously. Katie lent me her wallpaper steamer (which worked well enough that I didn't have to resort to any chemical goo--hooray!), and Sylvia spent Saturday morning at her place (with her husband and daughter), which gave us a few hours to paint the ceiling and get the stinky oil-based primer on the walls (tip: use this type of primer over places where you've removed wallpaper, or else the adhesive--which you can never fully remove--will bleed through your paint and cause you much sorrow) without subjecting a small child to the fumes.

Gina, who has painted more rooms that she can probably remember and is a painter extraordinaire, spent pretty much her entire weekend with us. Jan and I, being the cowardly novice painters that we are, gave her all the tough jobs, like cutting in around the edges. (Going near white surfaces with brush full of colorful paint is, like using steeks, on the list of Things That Scare the Crap Out of Me.) And she was amazing--all the paint she applied went where it was supposed to go. Me...well, I had a few little spots to tidy up.

On Saturday, Gina's husband, Todd, came with her and fulfilled the critical role of Baby Wrangler. He and Sylvia spent the entire afternoon in the den, reading books, drawing pictures, and building tunnels with pillows and blankets. ("Paint: $120. Brushes: $30. Having someone make sure your child doesn't try to eat Sherwin-Williams products: Priceless.) On Sunday, Gina returned to help paint the trim, which took about as much time as the rest of the room combined, thanks to the three, large, multipaned windows in this room.

BUT IT'S ALL DONE! (Well, almost. Tonight we pick up a final pieces of furniture and finish putting everything away.) Pictures of the finished room will follow soon...when it's fully finished!

Just what I needed

My SP10 sent me a note the other telling me to watch the mail for a surprise. In an amazing display of perfect timing, it arrived yesterday--a delightful package of goodies to lift my spirits after a day of home fix-it tasks (including wallpaper removal--ugh).

The contents included a woolly little sheep tape measure--just what I needed, 'cause Sylvia likes to "measure" things with my knitting tapes and hide them all over the house. Interestingly, everything she measure is declared to be either "two" or "five." I'm hoping this new tape measure will be a bit more accurate! :)

Also included was a package of B'Loonies (you use the enclosed mini-straws to blow tubes of goo into funky balloons!), a package of thyme herbal bath powder (fabulous!), and a bar of verbena soap. This last item is incredibly fragrant--I really wish Blogger had a built-in smell-o-scope or something (scratch-and-sniff blog posts, anyone?) so you could smell it.

A cheery note explained the last item in the package: a miniature hank of yarn spun by my SP10 herself! It's so darn cute, too. I love the mushroomy color, and I'm eager to know the story behind this yarn.

Thanks, SP10! This really made my day!

Not-stupid investments

Many many years ago, I started reusing my Ziploc bags. It's easy--just turn 'em inside out, wash them, then let them dry on the dish rack. The freezer bags are particularly durable; some of mine are three years old. The problem is that Ziploc bags aren't renowned for their ability to stand up on their own, so they usually fall over and take a long, long time to dry properly. When I first heard about a thingy (yes, that is the technical term for it) that holds your bags open while they dry, I thought, "That's stupid. No way am I spending twenty bucks on that thing." Well, I finally succumbed and threw down the bucks for it a couple of weeks ago. And let me just say this: wow, I should have bought one of these things sooner.

Same goes for this compost bucket. I am a big believer in composting when you can. All through grad school, I lived in apartments with no yards or gardens. I yearned to have a compost pile of my own--and did, briefly, when I lived in Eugene, Oregon, for a summer while doing some predoctoral research. (I'll write more about that experience another time.) I remember one time my housemate and I had a potluck dinner that was attended by about a dozen people. As people were helping with the post-meal cleanup, they asked, "Where is your compost pile?" (It was in the middle of the huge garden, in the side yard.) Not "Do you have a compost pile?" but "I'm assuming you have one--'cause, you know, this is the Whiteaker neighborhood of Eugene-so just let me know where it is." I loved that.

When I moved to the Mid-Atlantic, I was delighted to have a garden--and a small compost pile. And when Jan and I bought our house three and a half years ago, one of the first home-improvement things we did was built a compost bin (a "3-bin yard waste composter"--the free plans are available here).

During my entire composting life, though, I've been putting my kitchen scraps into an old yogurt container on the kitchen counter, then taking it outside when it filled up. (This is a practice I developed in Eugene. After all, grad students don't have extra money to throw around on fancy-schmancy compost buckets! Well, maybe the engineers and computer scientists, but not the impoverished cultural anthropologists!) This system has the great benefit of not costing anything. It has the great disadvantage of stinkiness--particularly in the winter months, when trips to the compost bin are less frequent (brrrrr!).

So when I decided to get the plastic-bag-holding doodad, I figured, "Why not? I'm already going to hell anyway for buying this incredibly yuppified and overpriced thing--might as well add on a fifteen-dollar compost bucket." After using this green bin (which fits nicely under the sink) for a few weeks now, I have to admit that I really love this thing.

My VisualDNA

I found this via the Peaceable Imperatrix and decided to give it a try. There are some limitations with this "quiz" (as with all of these online quizzes and personality-test thingies). For example, the "gross" category was limited mostly to bodily functions and obesity. And on most pages I either didn't find an exact match to what I had in mind or wanted to choose more than one option. Still, it was a lot of fun to do this! (If you try it yourself, let me know what results you get!)

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

Notice the chocolate references here? And the mountains? Although I now live not terribly far from some parts of the Appalachians, they aren't as accessible as I'd like. When I lived in southwestern Oregon, I was only half an hour away from a trailhead in the Coast Range. Ah...

Stardust

No, I'm not talking about some casino that was blown up in Las Vegas recently. That Stardust pales in comparison to the upcoming film Stardust, based on the fabulous novel by the fabulous Neil Gaiman. I saw the trailer a couple of weeks ago, and I've been drooling with anticipation ever since. Based on that, it looks like it will be fairly true to the book. Gaiman discussed it in his blog, and he says he likes it. He also says in another post that he isn't contractually restricted from saying anything bad about the film adaption of Stardust. So if he thinks the final result is lousy...well, I hope he tells us!

A birthday Moebius

Last November, I learned how to knit a Moebius using Cat Bordhi's cast-on. The result was a lot longer and thinner than what I expected--not really my style as far as scarves go, but Sylvia loves it, so it's hers now.

I knit another Moebius in December as a Christmas gift for my mother-in-law. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of it before I gave it to her, so all I can do here is describe it. I used three balls of KnitPicks Suri Dream (in Atlantic), cast on 80 stitches (160 if you could the top and bottom stitches separately), and knit until I ran out of yarn. The result was a scarf that hung down to my waist, could be worn as a double loop, and was wide enough that one loop could be pulled over the top of the head as an impromptu hood.

I was working on that scarf when I had my annual checkup at the satellite office (in my town) for the Birth Center. (The birth center itself is about forty-five minutes from my house.) The midwife who saw me on that day, Nancy, was the same one who'd been with Jan and me when Sylvia was born at the Birth Center in May 2005. She's not a knitter but is new to crocheting, and she was pretty interested in the scarf I was working on. I like her tremendously, and I decided then that I was going to make one for her as a surprise. I ordered the yarn for it now long after, but various other projects have kept me from starting it until this weekend, when Jan, Sylvia, and I visited his mom (who lives three hours away) for a couple of days.

I started with 50 (100) stitches and knit for about two inches, but it was turning out much longer than I wanted. I was aiming for a short, fits-around-the-neck thing, so I started over with 35 (70) stitches, which turned out to be perfect. I cast on with #9 needles, knit one row and purled one row, then switched the right needle only to a #11 (keeping a smaller needle on the left, so the yarn would pass over it easier--this is a tip I just learned from my friend Beth, who read it in Bordhi's book). I used one entire skein of KnitPicks Suri Dream Hand-Dyed (in the Falling Leaves color), and the whole thing took only about three or four hours. The large stitches give the scarf an airiness, but the alpaca and wool--along with the width of the scarf--make it warm indeed.

I love how this turned out, and I hope Nancy likes it, too! I'm going to put it in the mail to her this week. It will get to her too late for this winter...but just in time for Sylvia's second birthday!

A week of knitting

Last night my local knitting ground met at a coffee shop for our first-Tuesday-of-the-month not-at-the-community-center get-together. (On the third Thursday of the month, we are at the community center.) I had finished the heel flaps on both of my toe-up socks, so I was all ready for Pat to help me through the next step: picked up stitches on the sides of the heel flap and making the ninety-degree turn that makes sock knitting so freaky and mysterious. It went quite well...or so I thought. When I came home, I finished up one sock and discovered that I'd picked up about ten more stitches than I should have. Oops. I sent Pat a "oh crap, what do I do now?" e-mail about it this morning, and fortunately she was able to tell me how to fix it by decreasing before I start knitting the round top part. I'll have to be extra-careful when I do the heel on my second sock, now that I know that my subconscious wants to pick up way more stitches than are good for me. These socks aren't going to be a perfectly matched pair...but hey, they are my first real socks, and besides, all of these "idiosyncracies" are what make handknits so charming, right? Right?

Yesterday I also finished up the front of the pullover vest I'm knitting for a baby that's due in mid-June. The top part looks kind of weird to me...like a halter top gone bad or something. I'm supposed to block it before seaming, and I'm wondering if blocking will smooth out the profile a bit. But I'm also wondering if I should rip it down to the base of the v and try again, this time modifying the pattern a bit to get wider "straps" up the sides. (I followed the pattern exactly as written this time.) What do you think? Any suggestions?

A zig and a zag

Via Craft I found this fun project: Tricia at Bits and Bobbins has posted a "pattern" for a fun and funky zigzag scarf. I say "pattern" because her instructions have a lot of "however you want to do it" flavor to them--which isn't a bad thing, 'cause this project could have a gazillion variations.

This looks like a great project for using up odds and ends of stash yarn (which is what Tricia is doing). And if you don't have enough yarn in your stash to get the variety of color and texture that you'd like...well, there's a good reason (as if one is needed!) to do some yarn shopping.