Missed It By *That* Much

My goal of finishing one thing a month is going to fall a wee bit behind. I was trying to finish the log cabin blanket by the end of January (that'd be today), but I'm not quite going to make it. Every evening this week I've been working steadily on it for a couple hours before bed, and had I done that again last night I'd say I had a shot at finishing it tonight. But I couldn't manage it last night. I was incredibly tired for some reason ... every once in awhile (okay, maybe once a week) I have a night where I just lay around and completely veg after dinner, doing nothing, falling asleep by 9:00 or so, and getting about 10 hours sleep. That's fine with me, obviously I needed the rest, so I never fight it when I feel one of those nights coming on. Rest is good.

But consequently, I got a little behind in the finishing schedule. I completed the border on two sides and part of the third side this week. So I still have what's left of the third border and all of the fourth border, plus weaving in all the yarn ends on the back. For a time I was doing that as I went along, then I just kind of got tired of it and stopped ... so now there are dozens of them still to weave in. I don't mind, but it's going to take awhile.

So the blanket probably isn't going to be done till this weekend. But the good news is, it WILL be done this weekend!!

I'm trying not to obsess about my next project already. I'm not sure whether I'm going to make myself a pair of socks first - I've been wanting a pair since I made the three pairs of Christmas socks in the last couple months - or get out those 2 skeins of stash yarn and work on that scarf I have in mind.

Of course, the pirate coat will be an ongoing project as well, because I would like to get that done by May (the first event of the year that I'll be attending), and to do that, I'm going to have to work pretty steadily on it, amidst whatever knitting project I have going as well.

On that note, I have some time before work ... I think I'll knit.

And so it begins ...

I started on the pirate coat today. I was obsessed, I was a sewing fiend ... mostly because I don't really care so much for the sewing part, and really just wanted to get to the embroidery part.

I didn't make it that far ... but here's what I did get done between about 11:30 this morning and 6:00 tonight.

First I cut out all the pattern pieces and pinned them to my fabric. This took a lot of time, for several reasons. First, my fabric was 54" wide rather than the 45" called for in the pattern. If I had any math sense, I may have been able to figure out how much less I needed, since the fabric was wider, and not have had to get the whole 6 1/2 yards. But I'm not that mathtelligent, so I just got the 6 1/2 yards. Consequently, after first pinning the pattern pieces out according to the pattern schematic, I realized I could save a lot of space by rearranging them ... so I did. (I also had quite a bit of fabric left over, but I'm sure I'll find a use for such nice twill).

Finally, I was ready to start cutting ...


... this part always makes me nervous. I'm always afraid, what if I screwed something up? At this point, I'm totally committed ... if I screwed up, it'll be too late to fix it once I cut everything out.

Eh, whatever. I cut them out, and then laid out the back and one front side on the table, to begin brainstorming my embroidery coup de grace. (The material is all black, it just looks all different kinds of shades in these pictures).




But I wasn't really getting inspired from looking at it this way, so I decided to put at least some of the coat together. I figured I could envision my embroidery scheme better that way, and it wouldn't really make it any harder to embroider some parts of it ... like the skirts.




Then I got paranoid that the sleeves might not fit, so thought I'd better do them to make sure, before I invest any time in embroidery. I got one done ...

... and it fit fine, but by then I'd pretty well lost steam (it was getting close to 6:00) so I called it a day. My one-armed pirate coat is hanging out awaiting further developments.

One small project I might have been able to start on tonight, embroidery-wise, is the cuffs. But I needed interfacing to begin putting them together, and I hadn't gotten any at the store yesterday. I thought I had some, but it turns out I didn't have enough. I don't want to embroider through the interfacing, but the way this pattern is set up, there is a cuff set with interfacing (the 'facing' cuff) and then a cuff set without interfacing (the 'outer' cuff), which you then sew together, turn right side out, and use as the cuff proper. I don't want to get that far before I do the embroidery, but I do I want to put them all together at least pinned, to get a good idea of exactly where on the cuff the embroidery will be most effective, and how much space I have after seams. To do that, it would be easier to work through the process in order, and that would have required putting the interfacing on the cuff facings to proceed from there.

Had my mind been clearer, I may well have been able to figure it out without the interfacing, but ... it was getting late, I was hungry, there'd been rum, and I'd been working on it for over 6 hours. I decided anything else I did at that point was highly susceptible to serious screw-up, and my best bet was to call it a day, and relax in front of the TV knitting (and probably watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3!).

Meanwhile through much of this, I'd been throwing together a pot of beef stew. It's funny - I learned to make beef stew from my mom years ago. Then for a long time I couldn't get it to turn out quite right, and was always futzing with it. But the more I futzed, the worse it turned out. This time I really wasn't in the mood to cook, and was just tossing stuff at the pot on my downstairs breaks from sewing on the way to or from the bathroom or to make another drink ... and this is the best beef stew I've made in a long time. Apparently it doesn't like futzing.

I'm so psyched about getting to the embroidery on this coat!! But I know I have to take it one phase at a time, and do each one well, if I want the whole thing to really turn out nice, and not just look trashy. So I'll be patient, and work through it. I need to get interfacing, and finish the front facing before I can hem it ... then I can start planning the embroidery for the 'skirt' panels. And I need to figure out the cuffs, and then I can start embroidery on them as well. I'm also going to be embroidering up the front facing and around the neck, and that part I could probably start on any time, although it might be wise to decide what type of fasteners I'm going to put on the coat, and get them, so I can plan my embroidery around them.

There's still a lot of prep work before I can get to the embroidery. Not to mention, finding or making up designs for the embroidery itself.

For tonight, though ... looks like it's back to finishing the Log Cabin Blanket. And a big ol' woo-hoo to that.

You want the Futzless Mom's Beef Stew Recipe? Here ya go ... but remember ... this is totally futzless, so if you're not comfortable cooking this way, either bite the bullet and give it a try once, or move on to something more precise. But I'm telling you ... all the years I tried so hard to make this beef stew "right," this is the first time it's turned out this good, and this is exactly how I did it.

Mom's Beef Stew

about 1 1/2 lbs stew beef (give or take a chunk or two)
about 3 carrots
about 3 potatoes
a can of peas
some water
some cooking oil
some flour
a heavy pot

Cut the beef into pieces you'd like to see in your stew. I use scissors for this. Trim any excess fat.

Pour some cooking oil into the bottom of the pot and heat it up.

Dump some all purpose flour into a gallon-size ziplock bag. Throw in the meat, shake it up really well. When the oil's hot, open the bag and pull out handfuls of the meat, with whatever flour you happen to grab with it. (don't try to get all the flour, but don't make a serious effort to shake any flour off the meat, either). Toss it in the pot. Let that cook a little while, then use a spatula, wooden spoon, or whatever you find handy to stir it up a bit.

Continue to cook and stir the beef with flour until it's mostly browned. Stop before it burns.

Put hot tap water in the pot till it covers the beef by about an inch or two. Cook this for 2 hours. Once it starts boiling good, turn the heat down and adjust until it's mostly simmering. Keep a lid on. Stir often. Keep it simmering. (Usually when I make beef stew it doesn't stick; this stuck horribly and had to be stirred a lot; however, as I mentioned, it turned out better than usual, so I figured it was worth it).

Go do something fun for awhile. When it's been almost 2 hours, peel 3 carrots (more or less) and chop them into about 1/2" rounds. Throw those in the pot, stir again, put the lid on.

About 25 minutes later you're going to add potatoes, so sometime before that peel 3 or so potatoes, and chop them up into more or less bite-size pieces. Toss those in, stir, put the lid on.

At various points in this process shake in quite a bit of salt (if you like salt; if you're on a low-salt diet, I'm sorry ... do your best). A generous portion of pepper wouldn't go amiss, either. Stir often, since - as I said - this version seemed to stick more than usual. (I think it was the excess flour; but that's what makes it thick and stewy - so it's worth it).

When the potatoes have cooked about 25 minutes, open a can of peas. Now you can do two things with the liquid in the can: if your beef stew is just about the right thickness (and if you played loose with the flour, it should be), you can drain the liquid into the sink. If your beef stew has managed to get too thick (hard to imagine) you can dump the liquid from the can of peas in with the peas. Either way, dump in the can of peas and stir it up. At this point it's basically done ... just leave on the heat and stir long enough to heat the peas (about 5 seconds).

If the stew isn't thick at all, you did what I'd been doing wrong for years - not enough flour at the start. This is where I start futzing, and usually bugger it up. The only fix for it I've found out at that point is to make a flour and warm water slurry, and add it to the stew. It will probably thicken it up some, but it always detracts from the color and flavor when I have to do that. That's why this pot turned out so well - I didn't have to do that this time. So remember - lots of flour at the beginning.

There ... that's my N0-Futz Mom's Beef Stew. If it's excellent, thank my mom. If it turns out like crap, it's your fault.

Do you see this?? Do you?

That's a black border. That means I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have finally gotten sick of adding patches to this log cabin, and I'm declaring myself four borders away from done.

Woo. Hoo.

I wanted to stop working on it before I got so sick of it that I couldn't stand to use it once it was finished. And I finally snapped and reached that point this week. Unfortunately, the black I happened to have on hand was sport weight, while most of the rest of the blanket is made out of worsted weight. It will work ... it will ... but it's a little awkward in these first rows. Oh well. Whatever. It'll be fine. Really. Fine.

I'm going out Saturday to pick up some more black yarn (I don't have enough to finish all the borders). I'll get worsted weight then. It'll all work out. That's one of the cool things about this blanket ... it's very forgiving.

I'm desperate to start something new. I'm not sure what. I have that luscious Cat Bordhi book to work on. I found two skeins of yarn in my stash, a very pretty wool I bought on a whim one time. It was the only time I'd ever bought yarn without a project in mind, and being a neophyte at it, only bought two skeins. So there's not enough there to make much of anything, but when I re-discovered it the other day, I thought, "I want to make something out of this." I'm thinking about seeing if there's enough to make a lacy scarf or something. Maybe I'll try that.

I have an addendum to the knitting goal for the year ... not only do I want to finish my current projects, but I want to try to finish one project a month. Which means a lot of smaller projects throughout the year, interspersed with my larger, life-long projects (like the Celtic Icon sweater). Well ... it may not be a good idea, because the more time I spend on little projects, the less time I can spend on the big ones.

But maybe I just need a little instant gratification, a few quick projects to make me feel better.

Of course ... that's exactly how the log cabin blanket started ... ...

Pennsic Pre-Planning, Phase I

Every year around this time I start serious Pennsic planning. I don't know why it hits so hard in January - whether because, in years past, Pennsic was such a highlight of the year I looked forward to it for so long, and January was really the first realistic time I could start planning; or whether it was just that there is always so much to do that I knew if I didn't start in January, I'd never get it all done; or if it's just that mid-winter blah settling in, when there's really nothing else much going on for the next couple months and a good time to plan and look forward to warm-weather activities.

Maybe a combination of all three, but for whatever reason, January's always been the first of the new year's Pennsic planning time.

This year is no exception, although it's not with great anticipation I approach it, but more with a bit of apprehension. Last Pennsic was the worst I ever had. So bad that up until just a few weeks ago I told everyone it might effect that I was still seriously considering not going this year. And I was, it was serious, not just being pissy. The reasons it was so awful are many and varied, and some are my own fault, but that doesn't change that it was Really. Bad.

But it gets in your blood somehow, and it's a hard habit to give up. It has so much potential to be really awesome, and all too often by January I've forgotten the bad and only look forward to the good - remembered previous good years and hopes for future good years.

At least I did learn one lesson this year - the definition of insanity: continuing to do the exact same thing, and expecting different results. I have finally gotten two important rules through my head:

• if I don't change something about the way I do Pennsic, it's going to continue to suck and leave me depressed and disappointed at the end of it every year
• I can only change the way I, myself, do things; I can't force anyone else to change the way they do Pennsic to make it better for me

This makes it tricky when part of my problem does, in fact, involve the way the people I camp with do things. But trying to change that isn't an option, so I have to look for new ways to make things bearable for me, without expecting them to change what is comfortable and works for them.

My worst complaint last year was it taking an entire day to tear down camp, and not getting to leave till late in the evening, and finally getting home long after dark, so exhausted that for the very first time in my life I was literally falling asleep behind the wheel on the way home. I have never, ever done that to myself before. And never will again, I don't care what the rest of my camp wants to do. So one new thing for this year is that I intend to leave site that last Saturday at 3:00 p.m. I will happily help my campmates tear down and pack up camp from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Saturday, I will even happily do my own personal packing before that (either in the morning or the night before) to ensure I can devote a full 6 hours to camp work.

But come 3:00 I'm outta there. This will solve the problem of coming home at night, exhausted and frustrated and completely worn out. Six hours ought to be more than enough to completely dismantle and pack our camp - it's not that large or complex - if we all work together on it. So I don't think this plan is out of line or too much to ask of my campmates. If they prefer not to do it, well, there's nothing I can do about that - but at 3:00 I'm gone, whether the camp's done or not. So hopefully, instead, we can all work together so that it's a win-win for everyone: they get my help tearing down and hauling stuff home, and I get to leave at a reasonable hour.

The other changes in plans I'm making are more personal. For one thing, I'm taking less stuff. My Pennsic stuff has grown through a slow arc over the years, initially taking way too much, then taking more for several years, then slowly paring it down. This year I'll be going extremely minimalist. I have learned over the 6 or so Pennsics I've been to that I don't use half of the stuff I take with me ... so there's no point in packing it, finding room for it in my crowded tent, and then hauling it all home. I don't need to take half my possessions: a book to read, a knitting project, an embroidery project. That's about all I'll actually do.

For a few years I was putting shelves in my tent - plastic, stacking shelves. It was rather convenient for storing stuff in my tent, except that my tent's always on a hill, so everything being at a steep angle made it a little tricky. I could have leveled up the shelves with some wood shims, but ... more stuff to take, so I never bothered. I'm doing away with the shelves this year - less stuff to pack, and I can just use the totes I haul stuff in to store it in my tent, with the bonus that if we have one of those Noah Pennsics where it rains and rains and rains, stuff will stay dry. That was another problem last year - it rained so much, everything in my tent got soaked. You never know when you're going to have one of those years, and it always rains at some point, so I may as well anticipate that.

There are a few other personal things I know I need to do as well, most of them attitudinal in nature ... like not turning Pennsic into a pilgrimage to Mecca and placing such high expectations on it that there's no way it or I can live up to them. But I won't bore you with the gory details of those.

Otherwise, I have a lot of fun stuff I want to do in the coming months as well. The never-ending garb-making, of course. Although there's never enough garb, I have an issue in that much of the garb I made and wore my first few years no longer fits (bad Rayne), and the new stuff I made last year that does fit isn't quite enough to cover a whole Pennsic without coming home to do landry. So a few new outfits are in order. I also want to start sprucing up what I do have - some embroidery or inkle trim on a few things. I'm going to make a haversack like the one the Dread Reverend bought last year ... a canvas sack with a strap long enough to wear over your shoulder, cross-wise across your body. Great for carrying things on outings, day or night. I've yet to find a belt pouch I like, and the few I've tried to make have never worked either. This is one thing that will really come in handy.

My big project this year is a pirate coat. I made the Dread Reverend one from a pattern that came out after 'Pirates of the Caribbean' - it is, of course, a coat similar to the one Johnny Depp wears. (I'd post a picture, but can't seem to find one of him wearing it ... I lost many of my pictures when my computer got stolen last August). I made his out of a purplish upholstery velvet, very cool. But knowing how the heat gets to me at Pennsic, I'm going to make mine out of a much thinner material - a cotton just heavy enough to hold its shape, or something along those lines - and black. Then I intend to embroider all over it, also in black, so it'll be very subtley fancy. I don't go in for much flash. I looked for some nice understated brocade material online, but couldn't really find anything appropriate (that wasn't hideously expensive), so ... I'll make my own, as it were.

That project alone could take from now till Pennsic, and I'm anxious to get to the fabric store and find the material. I would have gone this weekend, but we're in a deep freeze at the moment, with temperatures in the single digits and wind chills in the negatives, so I really didn't care to leave the house this weekend.

Anyway, that's how I've spent my morning ... Pennsic planning. But with a little forethought and much attitude adjustment, I think I can make this a fun and relaxing vacation again, instead of the sad downhill spiral it's been the last few years. There is so much potential in this event, and not just a lot of "go, go, go" and "do, do, do" ... my favorite memories of Pennsic are beautiful, relaxing things like sitting on a hillside in the shade of a tree half-reading a book, and half just watching people and admiring the ambience ... or strolling casually through the marketplace with no buying goal in mind, just seeing all the amazing things that are there like at a bazaar in a foreign country or something ... or sitting around a fire listening to good music (or even the not-so-good music ... it's all pretty fun there). There's lots of good, I just have to remember what works and what doesn't ... and quit being the living embodiment of the definition of insanity.

I've an inkleing ...

It's been a busy week. The Dread Reverend had back surgery on Wednesday. He was only in the hospital one night, they sent him home Thursday. He's not completely incapcitated, but he's in quite a bit of pain, so he moves around as little as possible. Mostly we've been living on the air mattress on the living room floor ... which is okay with me, I like it there.

In crafty news, I tried a new experiment with inkle weaving last week that didn't go so well. I've made several bands in plain weave recently ...





... and I'm quite happy with this process. But I (of course) wanted to change things up a bit and begin getting a little fancier. So I started trying the pick-up method of making a pattern. It didn't go well at all. I tried a variety of different fibers for the weft - embroidery floss, full strands and split, crochet cotton, and sport weight yarn - but nothing was giving the full coverage, without the big gaps, that would be necessary for making a nice picture. In fact, it all looked pretty crappy.





I even tried using the thickest yarn I had, a thick wool I was using for my tapestry project - even that just disappeared between the warp.




I don't know what I was doing wrong, but I do know this ... I'm just not going to get frustrated about this, and abandon it like I did card weaving. Later, when I have time to work on it again, I'll try some other techniques for making patterns. I'll let you know how it goes! And if I never figure it out, oh well ... I'll be content with designing patterns by the way the loom's warped, and then just happily plain weave away. That's what I'm going to do to finish my test band - I got the loom all warped up with all that fiber, I'm not going to waste it just because my pick-up techniques failed. I'm going to finish weaving it in plain weave, and I think that narrow dark and light green pattern is way cool, anyway.

This *%$$^&($ Old House

Am I paranoid? Probably. Is it justified? Maybe.

The problem is, I've been convinced for a year that my house is going to fall down. Okay, so maybe it's not going to fall down, but I think there's something terribly wrong with it. I waffle back and forth between being paralyzed with fear, and choosing to ignore it entirely and hope it wil fix itself. Neither being a very effective way to deal with these sorts of things.

What is my problem? Things like this.



Looks benign, you say? Read on. This started about a year ago. When it first happened, I didn't think anything of it. I don't know how permanent or long-lasing caulking is supposed to be, but it's always been my experience that no matter how well a tub is caulked, in a few years, the caulking will need replaced. No big deal. So when this first happened, last January, I thought it was just that time.

We recaulked. A few days later it looked like this again. We did it again. It did it again. We had someone else come in and completely recaulk the entire tub. It did it again. We fought with it all through the late winter and spring, until sometime in warmer weather, when the caulk finally stayed.

Till now.

I was doing okay until someone told me that it probably meant I had a crack in my slab which had caused the slab - the very foundation of my house - to shift, dropping one end of the tub just enough to leave this big gap, in which caulking would not stay - it was just too wide a gap for it to adhere and stay in place. (You can't tell in the picture, but that gap between the tub and the tile above it is about 3/4" wide.)

If that was the only problem, I might have better luck ignoring it. But there's this.

These are the bathroom door (inside, and out in the hallway), the bedroom door which is in the same hallway mere feet from the bathroom doorway, and a vent in the wall to the furnace room, also in the same hallway and a couple feet from the bathroom door.

And that's not all the little cracks congregating around this area of my home. Those are just the most photogenic. For the record, some of them have been there ever since I bought the place 13 years ago, which might indicate something that certainly isn't happening very quickly. But most of them have also gotten significantly worse in the last year. That one in the bathroom, the first picture, was only about 3" long for 10 years or more, then in the last year it shot up towards the ceiling and became it's current monstrous size.

In some panicked research online, I discovered that these door-corner cracks are all signs of foundation problems. Ironically, no one ever mentions your bathtub sinking into the floor being a sign of anything. Maybe it's too horrible to even talk about.

The good (??) news is, maybe, that this is the only area of the entire house that has such a problem. There aren't any cracks, gaps, or other disturbing phenomena any place else. Which, on the up side, is a good thing; and on the down side, leads me more and more to think there's something definitely wrong with this area of the house, or the foundation, or something. It's tempting to think if it limits itself to the bathroom and hallway, I can ignore it ... but unfortunately, it's one of those laws of physics that these things tend to spread

I don't know what to do about this, primarily because I'm terrified of what might need done to fix it. Will they have to rip up my floors and tear out walls to get to the slab? Where am I going to live while they're doing all this?

And more frightening, how much is all this going to cost?

No - saying I don't know what to do is not true. I know what I need to do, have someone come out and look at it, so I know one way or the other, and can quit waffling between pretending it's not happening at all, and imagining the very worst. But I just haven't worked up the courage to do it yet.

Ironically, every single person I've talked to about this has told me the same thing: "Ignore it." Funny that that's what I'd prefer to do, and what I did for a year, but I'm having a hard time accepting that it's really okay to do that, and I'm not just being an ostrich, while my house is collapsing around me.

Granted, none of these people are contractors or structural engineers (well, one of them might be some type of engineer), nor have any of them seen any of this, only heard me describe it. But all of them have said, fuhgettabout it. It's nothing. Normal wear and tear. You're worrying over nothing. And even if it is the slab, your house isn't going to fall down. So just ignore it. If it ever even needs fixed, it might not be for 30 more years or more.

Sure. Okay.

I'd really like to forget about it. I'd truly love to. But although I haven't done anything about it yet, I'm having a hard time truly ignoring it and forgetting about it.

If the house falls on me, does that mean I'm a bad witch?

Yard Work - in January!

The gardening gods must have felt honored by my recent obsession, and decide to grant me an indulgence (because of course, it's all about me). It was in the high 60s here yesterday. When I got home from work, I went and changed and headed outside to do some mid-winter yard maintenance. I cleaned the pond filter - it had gotten a bit sludgey and the little pond fountain was barely clearing the surface of the water - and then I raked up two bags of leaves that hadn't gotten done in the fall. I was out there for about 2 hours, in p.j. pants rolled up to the knee, barefoot. I had put a fleece pullover on, but even that was actually too hot.

That was wonderful!! What a delighful break in the middle of winter. Apparently today's supposed to be similar, temperature-wise - there's even a chance of a thunderstorm! - then it's back to the 40s and 30s. Ah well. It is January, after all.

Actually being outside, in the yard, in the fresh air, got my gardening imagination fired up even more. I was finding all kinds of new projects I'd like to do. It looks like I'm coming up with years worth of gardening work. Well, there's nothing wrong with that ... provided my house doesn't fall down. Oh yeah - there are some house issues here, I'll talk about them another day. I don't want to spoil my warm-weather buzz.

I'm still plowing away on the log cabin blanket, but it's going to be time to finish it soon. Partly, because I'm getting sick of it, and I need to stop before I'm so tired of it that I never want to see it again (or, accordingly, use it as it was intended) once it's done. Partly because I'm getting lazy now that I don't much care anymore. Trying to use up yarn, I've run into strips that aren't the right size, are several rows short of the width they're supposed to be. Which is going to make the outermost rounds of the blanket look all wonky and out of symmetry with the rest of it - the inner sections which all look so tidy, being the same size. It's possible this won't really matter, since it's a very folk-artsy looking thing anyway, but I won't really know till it's too late and it's done. I'd hate to put all that work into it, only to have it come out looking like something totally trashy that I don't even want to use.

So, I suspect very soon, within the next week or so, I'm going to be declaring it finally done. The only thing I still have to get for it is some black yarn. Since I made the center square black, I decided to do a border all the way around the outside in black too, partly to add some polish to it, and partly to set off all the interesting colors I used throughout. But I don't have enough black yarn for that, and I will go pick some up this weekend just for that finishing work.

I've got to start a pair of socks pretty soon, anyway. My boyfriend's having back surgery next Wednesday, I need hospital knitting, and I'm not dragging that huge blanket around for that.

I have some inkle progress and experimentation to report as well, but that needs to wait for pictures. Busy, busy ... and it's only January!

Sorcerer's Secret Garden

I have this awesomely cool book called "Magical Gardens: Myth, Mulch & Marigolds" by Patricia Monaghan. It's not new, but I recently got it off the bookshelf and began reading it again, with my newfound gardening obsession. The book has a variety of information, including some pre-planned gardens. There is one called "Sorcerer's Secret Garden" which I have become enchanted with.

It involves walling off an area about 15 x 15 on your property, and building a garden within it, with a sturdy, old-world-looking gate in one wall, and a flagstone path which spirals in to the center, where a bench (or comfy chair) awaits your pleasure. The plants have cool names like Wizard coleus, Edge of Night hosta, Court Magician tulip, witch alder.

The plant names are cool enough, but it's having the walled garden that fascinates me. I would love to do this in my yard!! (The privacy would be phenomenal). But the only place I can see that would be reasonable to do it is behind my garage, in the back corner of my yard ... and it would be entirely in shade all the time. Most of the suggested plants would not grow in that much shade.

I'm seriously considering trying it anyway, and just modifying the plants. Those chosen in the book's plan seem to be mostly chosen for their cool names, but when I went and looked them up online, some of them don't look any different or more 'magical' than other plants with much more mundane names. So it occurred to me that I might be able to modify this plan to include plants not for their names, but that will actually grow and thrive in such deep shade, and look appropriately private and mysterious as well. A garden filled just with many shades and shapes of green could look quite tranquil and mysterious.

There are hundreds of varieties of hosta, many of them strikingly different. I've found hostas extraordinarily easy to grow - I have about 8 on my property that I basically just threw in the ground one year, and they've pretty much thrived ever since. There are also two different types of ivy already growing behind my garage, and flourishing - one began covering the back of the garage itself a year or two ago.

I have two trumpet vines growing on my back fence which are doing pretty well in almost full shade. They don't bloom as proliferously as others I've seen in full sun, but they do fill out and completely cover the fence with greenery every summer, providing a nice privacy screen. The only issue I see with them is that they seem to be very slow-growing - at least here, in the shade.

A variety of ferns would also look quite magical.

I've discovered quite a list of other plants, some even that bloom, which allegedly do well in shade. Fern-leaf bleeding heart, black snakeroot ('fairy candles'), vinca, columbine, globe flower, some violets.

I think that I could probably create quite a peaceful, private little sanctuary with ivy, ferns, hostas, and other shade-loving plants with interesting foliage or blooms. In fact, just imagining it makes me feel peaceful and relaxed.

Oh! And some water! Not a whole pond like the one I have, but some interesting cascading water feature.

The tricky bit would be building it. Well, and buying all those plants. And I'm not sure yet how to fix it up so that it would look nice and fit into the yardscape, this sudden walled thing behind my garage, without looking jarring. I can use the back wall of the garage for one side. Adjacent to that is a short brick wall. I could add a topper of lattice board to raise the height of that to about 6', and once covered with vining greenery, that could be the second wall. I'd only have to find something for the remaining two walls. Maybe one could be a solid screen of tall, skinny evergreen something-or-others. Expensive, but pretty - with year-round interest.

I was considering building a storage shed behind my garage this summer, to hopefully be able to do away with the $70 a month storage unit we're renting. Maybe, if I situate it just right (and don't get one too big), I can use part of that to wall in my secret garden as well.

Not going to be easy ... (or cheap) ... but this is something that I find so charming and intriguing that I think it's going to be one of my long-term plans, something to nurture and muse over in the coming years. It might take me years, too, to do this, but ... it's nice to have long term plans to dream over, as well as the short-term stuff.

And it's only January!

The Haphazard Gardener

The gardening bug has hatched for the year ... and is biting incessantly. In years when I have any interest at all in my yard, it usually starts around this time. It's a particularly strong obsession this year, because this is the first year in a long, long time that I actually have any hope of accomplishing anything.

I have always wanted to be a hobbyist gardner. Not the kind of horticultural expert that turns my tiny yard into a showcase that newspapers and magazines want to come photograph and give awards to. Just some nice landscaping that I can enjoy throughout the year.

My low ambitions, however, have no bearing on the level of fervor that January brings on, when I'm in 'gardening mode.' I've lived in this house for 13 years, and from day one I started trying to fix up the yard. I have more or less completely failed, for a variety of reasons, but fortunately I know what most of them are, and have hopes of correcting them this year.

One problem has always been money. I'd take a plot of land I wanted to turn into a flower bed, and go nuts picking perennials from gardening catalogs - (I considered perennials more cost-effective than annuals, because you don't have to spend money for flowers for the same spot year after year) - then realize it was going to cost me $400 to buy all those plants. I couldn't afford it. I'd buy 2 or 3 plants (for a 6' x 10' area), thinking I would 'start small' and work my way up. But those few straggly plants, not living up to my grandiose expectations, would soon become neglected, wither and die. I would give up for a few years.

Another problem in recent years has been lack of time and having far more important things to occupy myself with.

The time problem is no longer an issue, and I can spend as much or as little of it as I like on the yard this year.

The money problem remains to be seen. It's still somewhat of an issue, but not as much as it has been in the past. But more importantly, I've finally learned a couple of lessons. One is that if my vision for an area requires 15 or 20 plants, only buying 2 of them and expecting the area to look anything like my vision isn't going to make me happy. I either need to pony up for the number I need to get things started right, realizing that (if all goes well), I won't have that financial layout every year (at least not for that particular bed), and hopefully I can just get down to maintaining my investment; or I need to learn the fine art of patience, understanding that buying plants piecemeal over a number of years will eventually get me what I want, but it's going to take time, and for it to work, I have to care for and maintain the small investment I do make each year, to some day have the garden I envision now.

I'm planning to adopt a sort of middle of the road strategy. I'm willing to invest a little more money in plants this year than I have in the past, to get a little better jump start; while at the same time looking at this as a long term endeavor, trying to see the big picture that will emerge down the road. That's the plan, anyway.

I have several areas around the property that need desperate work. I'm not going to try to tackle them all this year. Since my favorite focal point is the pond garden, I'm going to concentrate my efforts there this year, patching up the rest of the place as best as I can till other years. That is the first step in phasing this thing through a couple years to keep the cost bearable.

So I look at this ...

... and all I see is potential for the coming spring. There's a lot of work to be done, that's for sure. For one thing, I want those two rounded evergreen shrubs out of there. They just don't fit in with my scheme. They are not doing well as it is, but I plan to move them (I would never get rid of anything that's still living, however tenuously) some place I hope they will be happier. Then I will have the expanse from the tall pointy evergreen on the far left, which you can't see in this picture (don't you love my use of proper names?) all the way to the pond.

I need to seriously work on the soil in that bed. It's so clay-ey I can barely plant anything there. My endeavor with a few annuals last year amounted to mostly digging a hole, setting the plant in, and throwing a few chunks of clay back on top to hold it in place. Not gonna work. I know I need to condition the soil heavily, with good organic something-or-other. Hopefully the local nursery will help me choose something appropriate. Then it's dig, dig, dig. For awhile.

The leggy, non-blooming lilac is in the middle of a 3-year pruning plan - the first time I've ever undertaken and maintained any kind of long term garden goal. I love lilacs, but this one has become so tall and thin and malnourished that it usually only gets about 6 or 7 blooms on it in the spring, and those clear at the top - that's just sad. Rather than taking the hard line approach of cutting the whole thing back in one year, I've been slowly pruning it back following a 3-year plan I found online. Hopefully at the end of that, it will again be a relatively compact, bushy, heavily blooming lilac.

The little dead looking azalea over on the right side also needs severely cut back, to fill out and enjoy some rejuvenated bloom. It, too, is all leggy and feeble, only getting a handful of flowers last spring. That, unfortunately, doesn't have a 3-year plan. It'll probably all get cut back to 6" or 8" above the ground this spring, which will probably do away with any bloom this year, but hopefully rejuvenate it for next year.

Although he's fast asleep underground at the moment, there's a giant hosta in front of that lilac that is about to take over the entire bed. This spring that hosta will get dug up, divided, and replanted - half where it is, and the other half across the pond from him, for a little balance in the landscape. Dividing hostas is one thing I have managed to do successfully in the past, so I'm hopeful that will work out well.

Last year I planted some impatiens behind the pond. But they didn't do very well, which I found odd - I've been known to throw a bunch of impatiens into some soil along the driveway, and have masses of them by mid-summer, spilling out into the driveway, with little attention on my part. It was excessively dry last year, and although I did water them, it probably wasn't as often or as deep as necessary. But the main problem back there is that the pond is really too close to the fence, there's only about 2" between the two, and I can't get into that area to really dig things up or get the plants in the ground well. I've decided to forego that torture, and fill the space behind the pond with a wire planter lined with sphagnum moss, hung just off the ground, filled with impatiens and cascading petunias. If that goes as planned, the flowers will fill the planter and spill over the sides, maybe even to hanging down around the stones that edge the pond - and that'll look cool.

Those are the relatively easy and inexpensive parts of the plans. The tricky part came while trying to plan out the expanse between the pond and the remaining evergreen I plan to leave. I'll tell you what - planning a garden for a very tiny space may be harder (if less expensive) than planning for a large area. To me, anyway - complete neophyte that I am. I kind of like the look of those cottage gardens, but with a formal-looking, trimmed conical evergreen on one end, and a pond on the other, I didn't think a big falling-about mass of cottage flower-type plantings would really fit there. I decided to go simple - a good idea on a number of levels. I am planning to just kind of fill that area with only two main plants, then edge the front and around the left side of the pond with some annuals. The plants I'm considering for the main area are some hardy geraniums in the back in a kind of 'C'-shape, with a patch of daisies (because I love daisies) filling in the center of the C. I don't want it too formal, like an English herb garden, but in such a small space, some organization will, I think, make it look better.

That's the plan anyway ... we'll see how that works. And fortunately it shouldn't require hundreds of dollars worth of plants to try this out. In fact, I think I'm even going to try my hand at starting a few things from seed. So very much cheaper, if I can find the space indoors to do it.

It's supposed to be in the 50s this weekend ... wonder if it's too early to start digging?

2008 Finished Projects

Knitting

1.19.07 ~ 2.6.08
Log Cabin Blanket
Various acrylic yarns
Pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting

February 2008
Scarf and Wristlet Thingamabogs
Elann Peruvian Highland Wool
Pattern: My Own Creation

March 2008
Socks
Knitpicks sock yarn - Felici
Pattern from Cat Bordhi's
"New Pathways for Sock Knitters"

June 22 ~ 30, 2008
Socks for my sister-in-law
Yarn: Elann "Sock It To Me"
My generic sock recipe w/ 2x2 ribbing

Sewing

June 2008
Side inserts into existing garb dress
Two t-tunics

It's "That Day"

First day of the year, one usually attributed with high hopes of promising new ventures in the coming year ... as if the clock moving from 11:59 p.m. to 12:01 a.m. changes everything.

Ironically, many people begin this allegedly most auspicious day in a decidedly less than auspicious way ... with a raging hangover. I'm not one of them, but I seem to be living with one of them. (And it's not Tyler).

I've thought it over, and have two yearly goals to add to my list. They're the kind of things that don't really need written down, but I decided to anyway, because everytime I look at the list, it will remind me what's really important - more important even than 'getting things done.'

The first is "enjoy life." Yeah, it's true, sometimes I actually forget to do this. One of the reasons my creative projects tend to languish is I get so caught up day to day in stuff I think I 'ought' or 'need' to do that I forget to take time for the things I like to do. I read somewhere once that it's best we get over this mentality of "I'll enjoy whatever as soon as I get whatever else done." The in-basket of life is never empty, the to-do list never completed. If I wait till I have all my 'chores' done to do something enjoyable, it's never going to happen.

The second one is "simplify my life." I've been a big proponent of the voluntary simplicity movement for a long time, although I have had varying degrees of success at it. It is a large part of why I'm working part time, even though that puts a pinch on the finances. Hey, when life's really simple, you don't need as much money. I said then, and still believe, that having time is more important to me than having the money. (Major home repairs notwithstanding ... but that's a blog post for another time).

Simplifying isn't just something you wake up and decide to do one day, and from then on your entire life is immediately changed (although the mental shift can create an instant change in how you see everything in your life). Ironically, it does require some effort initially, and then some constant (if hopefully minimal) maintenance. Especially if one is in the habit of accumulating tons of stuff, or committing themselves to doing far more than there are hours in the day to accomplish.

To me, simplifying my life isn't that big a deal (which works out well - simplify the simplification process). Clear out the clutter, and simplify the things I feel I "have to" do each week, so I have more time for the relaxing, enjoyable things I want to do. I've been working steadily to reduce the mess and clutter in his house, and that will be an ongoing thing. In fact, I finally - finally - got the upstairs hobby room done a few weekends ago. I didn't take a 'before' picture, but trust me, it was a disaster. Before I did this, there was so much stuff piled in the center of this space that you couldn't even see to the far wall. Organizing this area did involve sacrificing a lot of stuff ... stuff I didn't need or want anymore, or was probably never going to use, but had stubbornly hung on to "in case I need it." Hobby stuff seems to be the worse culprit for that mentality. But without that sacrifice, I'd have never had the space to do this. So it was worth it, because I find this room absolutely beautiful now, enjoy spending time there, and can easily find the stuff I need to work on any projects I do want to do.



I used to have a table permanently set up in this area, but it took up too much space. Now I have a folding table which is leaning up against the wall off to one side, and when I need it I can easily set it up - and when I don't, it's out of the way (and not accumulating tons of junk that it's easier to leave laying on the table than to put away).

I think the main point of focusing on the simplification to me is linked to my first list addition - enjoying life. When I keep my life simple, that is what gives me the time to enjoy the things I want to do, but often haven't made time for.

I'm not sure what all this is going to entail yet, but having it on the list is a constant reminder to not overcomplicate things, and whenever possible keep things simple.

In other news ... this is the current status of the log cabin blanket.

I was able to take a picture last night when I finished and bound off a color. I am truly astounded that I've worked on this for a year, and it's no bigger than this. Granted, I didn't work on it non-stop for a year, but still. I originally wanted it to be bedspread-sized (why? I have no freaking idea). But now I'm down to being happy just using up most of the rest of the yarn I bought specifically for this project, and then calling it done. I haven't bought a lot of yarn just for this, but I did buy some, and the thing about it is, it's all acrylic yarn, usually in single skeins. I don't keep much of a yarn stash (see that 'simplifying' thing above), and I don't anticipate having much use for single skeins of acrylic yarn. So I'd like to actually use these for what they were intended before I call this blanket done.

The strips are going to start getting interesting though. The last one I did, the peach on the left-hand side, I didn't have enough yarn to make it the full 9 purl-bumps high, so it's smaller than the rest of the strips. This really doens't effect how the blanket works - you just work around that patch the same as all the others when you get back to it. But as I use up partial skeins of yarn, I'm probably going to run into that problem more and more. But that's okay - this kind of thing will look fine whatever I do.

I'm going to work on ploughing through that over the upcoming weeks, and hope to finish it by the end of February.

One big bonus of working on this thing in the middle of winter - I can spread it out over me while I knit, and it is very warm.