The knitting mess

This was the scene on my sofa not too many days ago.

I had to pick up all the projects laying around the apartment because maintenance staff was coming in to change filters in the HVAC and batteries in smoke detectors. At least that's what they said -- and seems to be what they did. (I really do think air conditioning filters should be changed much more often, but it's a mystery to me how to get to the filter. I've studied the machine carefully. The access panel is cleverly hidden, believe me. It's probably just like the plate screwed to the front of my hot water heater to keep me from adjusting the temperature.) However, I'm not a total idiot. They really do this twice a year just to make sure you haven't trashed the place out. I have no idea if large quantities of yarn covering every surface would qualify for "trashed," but I needed to pick it all up and think about these projects anyway.

There are seven projects piled in there. There are three others floating around the dining room; it was just too depressing to add them to the pile. I think I've found my limit. Ten is too many.

The most aggravating one is a sweater for me which is 95% finished. I've knit the front placket and collar twice. I have now come to the conclusion that I must perform surgery on the bottom of the sweater to lengthen it. So in addition to giving the shawl collar a third try, I'll have to remove the bottom band first, add about an inch, and then I can pick up the stitches for the front. Since some of these are for Christmas, it's looking like the sweater is going to be a January project.

In the last week I have made a little progress. I can say that I've finished two: A baby sweater due for a shower last week and a pair of socks that have been on the needles for two years.

I'm dedicating many hours of the long Thanksgiving weekend to working on these. Unfortunately I won't be able to post photos here. The rest is Christmas stuff. I am fortified with pumpkin pie, soup, and lots of BBC mini-series checked out from the library. I'm off to finish something. Really I am. Right after I take a nap.

Let there be soup

Wow, six weeks. No writing. I'm a slacker.

Fall has come and gone. The leaves were glorious, but now the trees are naked waiting for that first blanket of snow. The light in the afternoon doesn't have the golden glow of autumn anymore, it's the fuzzy blue gray of winter. Which makes it really hard to take pictures of anything.

I said I was going to try and notice the fall season this year. I tried -- really I did. But again I have almost no pictures to show for it. These are it: one shot of the Catskills from the Thomas Cole house, Cedar Grove, and a shot of Canadian geese paddling around in the pond of the apartment complex. (I say Canadian, but I have no clue -- that's just what everybody around here calls them. They could be from Alaska or Greenland for all I know.)

It takes some getting used to hearing geese. I always feel like I'm in a foreign country when I hear them honking across the sky. Such a strange sound for me, even after two fall seasons in the northeast.

I started to tell you about soup and got sidetracked; back to soup. A friend and I organized a soup swap at the first of November. (The link is to the page I created with collected instructions for those we invited.) I ran across mention of the idea on a food blog. I cannot, of course, remember which one at the moment. Clicking around as one does when you come across an interesting idea, I found multiple websites about soup swaps. The whole concept beats cookie swaps hands down. Lots less sugar; lots more useful.

Deciding what soup I was going to make six quarts of was the hardest part. It had to freeze well -- this knocked out all my favorites in one fell swoop. Soups with potatoes, cream, cheese, milk don't freeze very well. So I did what I always do when faced with a cooking project: research. This time I went to the library to find soup cookbooks and found quite a few. Of course careful perusal of four cookbooks left me with about 20 recipes I really wanted to try. Way too many to choose from. I ended up making a recipe from a book I already owned, White Bean Soup from The Fig's Table by Todd English and Sally Sampson. And I'll have you know that I bought this book 10 years ago before he became a celebrity chef and starting selling things on HSN.

So I've been eating soup. 15 bean soup, gumbo, chicken noodle soup, butternut squash and apple soup. I still have chicken tortilla and vegetable beef in the freezer. And I think, instead of cooking turkey over Thanksgiving, I'm going to make soup. Well pumpkin pie and soup. Let's not get our priorities mixed up.

A new appreciation for soap

Today we spent the day at Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts. We got a chance to tour six of the houses, and spent time in the museum with the textiles collection and more furniture than I could possibly absorb visually. The houses were built from early 1700's through mid 1800's and had all sorts of interesting features, but I was particularly taken by the doors.

We learned all sorts of things about life in that period of time. No screens on the windows -- if you were wealthy you had glass, otherwise there were only shutters - or an animal hide. No refrigeration. No heating other than what came from a fireplace...no cast iron stoves. The height of ceilings and doors was kept low not because people were shorter (although they were) but lower ceilings conserved heat. Candles were very expensive so people burned fish oil. People spent so much time breathing in smoke and fumes that many had serious respiratory conditions...which is one of the reasons they slept mostly sitting up.

I learned about possets, porringers, caudles, and "punch." (Which is certainly not what is served these days at lady's luncheons.) Found out that salt was never served in a shaker. And that shakers usually contained other sorts of ground spices. Serving pieces usually had lids to keep bugs out, forks weren't used, spoons were set on the table turned bowl down (which is why all the decorations on sterling spoons are on the backside). Five cubes of sugar in a tiny cup of tea was common practice. Which is why sugar bowls were so big...you had to have a lot of space to hold sugar cubes for five or six guests. Treenware is wooden, from "trees." (I always wondered if the name could be that simple...). And there was replacement for pewter that didn't have the lead, called Britannia metal but it wasn't available until the late 1700's.

From the age of 14 a young girl spent a good amount of her time filling her dower chest. She produced linens, clothing, ornaments, paintings, dishes, etc. The moment she married, the chest and all its contents became the property of her husband. Women couldn't own land, houses, not even furniture. If her husband died, the property passed on to her son, if there wasn't a son, it was passed to a son-in-law or to a brother or uncle.

Church attendance in this community was pretty much an all day affair on Sundays. Two to three hours in the morning and another several hours in the late afternoon--if the reverend felt that the previous week's sins warranted the extra time. If you nodded off in church, a deacon came to stand beside your pew and pound a staff on the floor loudly to wake you up.

Windsor chairs were always painted. They were made with many different kinds of wood so they were painted to unify the color....black, yellow, green, or red. Houses were usually not painted. It was a sign of wealth if you could paint an interior room and even more if you painted some part of the exterior. Most household items were imported from Europe: rugs, sterling, pewter, porcelain, silk, linen, even wovens in wool. Having any of these items in your house was a sign of wealth. Rugs in particular were very rare.

They didn't keep washstands and pitchers in sleeping rooms -- for that matter, there wasn't such a thing as a room designated as a bedroom until much later. Rooms were usually all purpose: eating, cooking, sleeping all happened in the same space.

At most people washed their hair four times a year - spring, summer, fall, and winter. With lye soap. Which made your scalp turn red and burn for days thereafter. I had a hard time believing that one, but I did a little reading online and although there seemed to have been finer soaps made in the early 18th century, they would not have been available in America until almost the beginning of the 19th century.

I came away with a new appreciation for modern conveniences and as we were driving home we asked ourselves, what will people think of our primitive living conditions in 300 years?

And at the very end of the day, I found out that my fascination with the door frames certainly wasn't unique. The museum store had a poster for sale, "Doorways of Deerfield." Needless to say I didn't buy it.

Colors and Signs of Fall

When I saw the sumac turning slightly red at the end of August, I cringed. Fall already? No! There wasn't any summer this year. But it's barely 50 degrees right now and the low tonight is forecast at 38. So it's here and I have to stop being in denial. I might even have to pull out a long sleeved t-shirt. And no, that's not sumac in the photo, it's just what I caught outside my door this morning.

So there are the first signs of fall and here's another--caramelized apples a la francaise--tarte tartin. I picked up a bag of the very first, local, new harvest ones I found. They were just labeled "early apples" but they were great. When I got tired of eating them out of hand, the rest became this upside down pie.

And if you knit, the most sure sign of fall is knitting something toasty. This time it's mittens, seriously warm mittens, mittens that will cheer you up in the gray cold winter.

I have a copy of Kristin's latest book, COLOR by Kristin, and thanks to the generosity of Westminster Fibers during the class I attended in August, I had four colors of Julia yarn, so I picked easy and four-color, et voila. I did play around with the color some, considered making the background of the mitten the caramel color, but in the end, decided to follow Kristin's lead, roughly.

This is the first time I've ever knit with this yarn and I think I'm a convert. It is really great for color work. The softness of it makes stitches blend nicely. What wasn't so easy was working out the tension so that the stranding didn't tighten the mittens down to doll size. It is the first time I've ever done any stranded color work on something so small. A simple band or two for a hat is the most I've ever attempted. You do have to think about it. But the beauty of this pattern is that it's not complicated, so you can focus on how you're knitting, because what you're knitting isn't too hard.

Now I just have to finish the second one. And grow longer fingers. I swear it fits...but when I look at this in the photo it shows how short my fingers are.

Last year fall was a blur because I was focused on THE WEDDING. This year I think I might try to enjoy it: walk in the cold air, pick some apples, go to one of the many fall craft fairs, take a "leaf peeper" drive, and wear some mittens.

A wicked good vacation

Two friends from work and I went sailing for a week on a "tall ship" - a schooner. We drove from Albany and left with lots of extra time. The phrase "missing the boat" has a whole new meaning when we truly could miss the boat if we didn't plan for summer vacation traffic jams or road work. Of course none of those things happened to us so we had a lot of extra time. We made sure we had a lobster roll for lunch just as soon as we got to the first town in Maine so our list of "must do's" had it's first check on it.

We'd driven for six and a half hours and hadn't seen the ocean yet. We stopped in Portland to see what the guidebook called "the most photographed lighthouse in Maine," the Portland Head Light. How could we miss that? The sun was shining and even from the parking lot we could hear the waves and the gulls flying overhead. And the smell of ocean air. It was the point at which we knew we'd made it.

From there we went on to Rockland where the J&E Riggin was waiting for us and about 20 other people. We made it for the Captain's call at 6:00 pm. We were still reeling from "cabin shock" (It's hard to imagine a 24 inch wide bed, under a beam, down a hatch, backwards, until you've experienced it.), but we were able to listen enough to get the gist of our first evening's orientation.

Captain Jon filled us in on the basic plan; gave us an idea of what days and evenings would be like; when breakfast, lunch, and dinner were to be served; and then we got the detailed explanation of how a marine toilet works - uh I mean the "head." At this point I wasn't so sure I'd made the right vacation choice! But we were all in it together, we were committed, and amongst the three of us there was one seasoned boater who assured us it wasn't that bad. (I was reserving judgment.)

From there we went back into Rockland to find dinner. Fortified with local ale and seafood we returned at 9:00 pm and were tucked away by 10:00 pm, an hour so early for me that I was awake at 5:00 am the next morning. Which is actually an hour after the crew started working.

The wood stove is fired up shortly after 4:00 am so that it will be hot enough to produce coffee at 6:30 and breakfast at 8:00. I meant to get a picture of that stove -- I still have a hard time believing that there's a cast iron, wood burning stove on a wooden ship, but it is there and Captain Annie is a master at making it produce wonderful food. Food so great I forgot to take a picture of it. I was too busy eating.

We had spectacular weather--the best of the entire summer; we got to see a lot of the Maine coast. At the end of the trip Captain Jon gave us a copy of a map he had painted with our trip drawn in. It's different every time, since they go where the wind goes. I transferred the route roughly to a digital map:

We helped with hoisting and furling sails, weighing the anchor, and dish washing, but even with that activity there was lots of time for just hanging out on deck soaking up the sun, reading, knitting, and drinking in the ocean air and the incredible scenery. Seeing the coast from the water is a whole different experience from standing on land looking out.

Our trip coincided with Windjammer Weekend in Camden, so we got to see many other schooners coming into the harbor. There were 21 docked by the time they all came in. Quite an impressive sight. I took pictures of them, instead of the Riggin -- it's rather hard to a take a picture of the boat you're sailing in while it's moving! This is the Louis B. French and the Isaac H. Evans as they came into Camden.

I have two favorite photos from the trip. This one was taken on that first morning, 5:00 am when the fog was still hanging over the water.

And this one, taken one of the days midweek almost at noon on a very calm day -- the whites and blues in contrast were spectacular. Not a cloud in the sky.

The rest of the pictures are posted here.

Can you tell that I'm planning my next trip already?

Back in Mass

A friend and I went back to Massachusetts today, intending to go to the Prendergast exhibit at the Williams College Museum of Art. We didn't quite get there.

We followed the Mohawk Trail (Highway 2) east across New York, over part of the Berkshires, and into Massachusetts, stopping at multiple places along the way. The highway roughly parallels a footpath the Indians used to travel from Connecticut to the Hudson Valley. It crosses both the Hoosic and Deerfield rivers so many times we lost count. We got stuck in the art galleries and the glassblowing studio in Shelburne Falls. That's when we decided that since it wasn't raining, it seemed a shame to spend a Saturday inside. Something of a rationalization, but the summer is too short around here. And the exhibit is going to be there a couple more weeks.

We took a walk over the Bridge of Flowers, went to Greenfield for lunch, stopped at the Apex Orchards for peaches, plums and apricots, found an antique store to spend an hour or so in, and then wandered to historic Deerfield. The museum houses in Deerfield merit an entire day -- eleven houses along a mile of road that you can see inside if you go with a tour. Since we had arrived so late, we decided to wander through the burial grounds and save the house tours for another full day.

The mosquitos and gnats almost drove us away, but I did get a couple of pictures of head stones. Having lived in the midwest most of my life -- where European settlers didn't arrive until the 1800's -- for me the northeast is "old." Granted not old like China, the Middle East or Europe, but still a lot older than Austin, Texas. This one was one of the oldest head stones in the burial ground. 1695. 314 years ago.

I would have assumed that the minimal carvings on the stones were for lack of money or time or skilled carvers had I not picked up a brochure about the burial ground while we were perusing the museum store. My only experiences with sculpture and carvings in graveyards was the time my mother and I spent most of a day in the cemetery of Recoleta in Buenos Aires. That one is tied to the Catholic Church and the iconography is very different. Deerfield was founded by Puritans who had prohibitions against idolatry. The skull with angel's wings (which I certainly didn't figure out on my own -- many of them looked like flying heads to me!) was considered to be an acceptable reminder of mortality and the resurrection.

So that's the history lesson for the day. Back to knitting next week.

Color Immersion

Last weekend I had the chance to join a knitting class - the first since I've moved to the northeast. And since it had been close to 15 months ago that I'd been to any fiber-related class, I sort of jumped off the deep end and went to Kristin Nicholas' first weekend stitching on the farm. (Kristin has pictures of the group posted on her blog.)

The sun actually shone for an entire day (a rarity this summer in the northeast), and I spent two days laughing, talking, knitting, embroidering, and eating. In the company of like-minded individuals. Heaven.

There were sheep

There were dogs, Phoebe and Nessy..this is one of them, I don't know which. I couldn't seem to keep the names straight. They came along with us on the hayride. That forced them to sit still enough that I could get a shot.

There were cats. I kept trying to catch the kitten, as Kristin says, the "kitten in the garden" shot. Here's my best catch. Julia, Kristin's daughter, made sure I knew that this one, Hannah, is not looking for a home.

We worked on techniques--steeks, edgings, embroidery, two-handed knitting, and I learned some new tricks. (It always amazes me that even after doing this for 20 years, there are still things to learn about technique), but the real draw for me was the color.

Kristin's house surrounds you with inspiration--there's color, pattern, and texture wherever you look. She's poured many hours of work painting, making and collecting into the decoration. Even the fridge in her studio serves as a textile design board. It makes me hate the buyer's beige walls I live in even more.

Kristin spent a morning talking about where she sees color and how she uses it. From the incredible nature that surrounds her, from her travels, from textiles she's collected, from pottery, from paintings. It's funny because I think about color like this when I'm working on something for print/web publication, but I don't think that way about knitting. Kristin works from a photo or idea directly to a swatch. So during the weekend I tried to take pictures of colors or textures that I thought were interesting...without thinking about whether I would ever wear these colors. More of an exercise in "seeing" rather than knitting.

Here's what I came up with:

The challenge for me would be to turn some of these into a swatch. First because I'd have to actually own yarn in some of these colors! And second because the only thing that occurs to me off the top of my head is stripes. Kristin takes the colors and uses them in pattern maybe more often than stripes or blocks.

I didn't pull the colors out of this one -- blues and greens, but the view from the hilltop at the end of our hayride was wonderful.

Many thanks to Kristin who shared with us her art, to the Farmer who shared with us his home, and to Julia who shared with us her mom.