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.