mini holiday (girls only)

My husband and I are taking separate mini-holidays this weekend. He's off with the guys playing volleyball and camping, while I'm up home with my mother, sister and cousin knitting and crafting with fiber. He'll get his volleyball fix and I'll get my fiber fix.

And we'll both be happy to see each other come Sunday afternoon.

Here's a project I started today. Elizabeth Zimmermann's Mitered Mittens, a project that I've made a half dozen times before. A quick knit, perfect for a weekend getaway.  The yarn I'm using is MOCHI PLUS, a 80% merino and 20% nylon blend.

Soft and silky. The perfect yarn for this project since I indeed to give them away when they're finished.

Hope you're having a happy weekend . . . even if you're in mixed company!

beautiful blue wedding

Blue is a beautiful color for a June wedding, especially when the temperatures are soaring. At least the color blue makes one remember what it feels like to be cool, crisp and composed. Yes, blue at a summer wedding is a good color.

Here's the bride's bouquet, we added blue carnations and some trailing purple fountain grass. The fountain grass added a romantic touch to the arrangement . . . this is something my sister thought to bring to test out and it surprised us all.

Of course, you know I'm not happy if I can't post buckets of roses on this blog if I've come across some. So here you go.

The socks I've been working on are also going well. They have a touch of blue, so I'll go ahead and post them here. One more to go. I'll try to find a cool place to take cover this afternoon and get some knitting done.

Blue stripes mingling with knitted twists make this an entertaining and easy project to work on. Behind the sock in both images is the combed top that I spun to make the yarn for these socks.

what's bloomin'

 

Summer has kicked into high gear here in the tendril and twine garden. Anything that was planted that could bloom is now blooming. The poppies that I've been trying for years to grow are a splash of vibrant color at the edge of my lettuce patch. 

My papaya orange cone flowers have dozens of blossoms. They cheer me up each morning when I wake up and visit them with my coffee before getting ready for work. I like the way that these flowers start out looking like a cousin to a daisy, but then there petals slowly fold down along their stems as they reach their centers toward the sun. 

I can certainly think of many reasons to plant some onions in the garden, they end up in many of our dishes, but this year I let some of the smaller bulbs blossom out and have been enamored with their white orbits of star-shaped flowers. Several of these blossoms have ended up in flower arrangements around the house. 

I'm trying to keep up with the raspberries. I'd like to pick and freeze some to use in smoothies when the weather turns cold, but so far I've only managed to freeze one bag.

Beans are already coming in. I don't know how we're going to eat them all. Tonight's going to be our first meal with fresh green beans. 

And finally, this is what I woke to discover in the garden this morning: a lovely exotic spider plant. These beauties are new to the garden this year. I got the bulbs this spring and planted them during the daze (or craze) of my final semester. As I was planting them I told myself: "When you guys bloom I'll be done with school and happily relaxed and centered." Luckily, all of that has come to pass and now I can enjoy this in the garden. 

Work on the sock continues, but as you can see I've switched up the pattern to one that I've done before. The cables on the first pattern required too much concentration for my busy schedule of gardening and work at this date. I need some instant gratification and this pattern, Anastasia Socks by Pepperknit is exactly that.

Here's to a lazy summer day of raspberry pickin' . . . weedin' the garden . . . and knittin'. . .

I don't leave the house without it

My husband and I were out and about this weekend as we seem to be every weekend. (Sigh, I will never catch up on house and garden work at home, but I guess that's okay.) We packed up early on Saturday morning intending to not return to the house until late Saturday night. Our schedule for the day included a pancake breakfast and then several stops for groceries and gifts before settling into the car and onto the road for a trip up north to my parent's farm. We intended to pick up my cousin and her husband along the way,  insuring that we would have one happy carload for a road trip.

Everything was going well until I realized that I'd forgotten my cell phone at home. Garrett doesn't understand how I could leave the house without something as essential as my cell phone. He patiently explained to me that every day he doesn't leave the house unless he has three things: his wallet, his car keys and his cell phone.

Huh.

I patiently explained to him that all of those essentials cancel out for a woman if she has a husband. He can be counted on to remember those things and she can forget her cell phone, but instead remember to bring a camera, some important knitting patterns and key ingredients for recipes they intend to prepare and consume over the course of the day.

Now that's team work.

These socks are a result of my previous visit to the farm. We all dyed some fiber to spin for socks and now we're all happily working on our patterns.

These are the lovely socks that my cousin Ashley is working on. I love the flashes of orange and the pattern that uses a combination of "slip-slip-knits" which masquerade as cables. I guess no cable needle is required for this pattern. This pattern is called "Nutkin" and it can be found here.

Here's some lovely bruschetta made with some basil from my mother's garden. Pretty potent stuff.

We were all - of course - celebrating Father's Day and my Dad's birthday - all of which happen to fall in the same week. My Mom was at work with her colored pencils. When I saw this card I thought it was about how we all seem to find our way home to gather around the "home fire" and celebrate as a family, but her motivation seems to have been inspired by my father's tendency to start things on fire - but that's another story for another blog.

Hope everyone had a happy Father's Day weekend.

creative habits

It's taken me a while to get back into my creative habits since I finished school. I've slowly been packing away my notebooks and projects and turning to the activities that filled my life before the craziness of grad school.

This sock yarn had been sitting on the bobbin for a least a year. I finally finished enough to start a pair of socks and started knitting. This pattern comes from the premiere issue of NORO knitting magazine. There's some familiar patterns on its pages, but enough new ones to tempt anyone who loves splashes of bold color.  This pattern is simply called cabled socks. They feature a combination of large and small intersecting cables that wrap the foot like a pair of Roman sandals. 

This is what my yarn looked like on the bobbin. 

This fiber is from my mother's CVM romeldale sheep. The colorway is called Morning Glory. This blend is 100% wool and we pot dyed it to achieve this random striping color effect. I spun it in singles so that I can watch the bands of color shift, stack and blend.

It's always exciting to knit with hand spun yarn, you never know what colors will pop up next.

Yum yum. Living local and straight out of the back yard. . . well the raspberries and greens are from the backyard. I was craving avocados. I made a tangy dressing with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and a dash of sea salt and pepper.

This is what I've been craving all year.

up home

This past weekend we got the chance to visit the farm. It's been a while since we've been up home. We spent the day dying fiber, spinning yarn, baking bread and chatting it up. My mom's busy collecting images and gathering information so that she can create a website for her fiber and yarn.

Here's a preview of some of the beautiful shades of fiber that we can expect next spring at shearing time. This little lady just loves to mug for the camera.

What's on the wheel: I'm thinking about spinning enough of the dyed top for a pair of socks and I want to make a sweater out of the naturally-colored ivory yarn on the far right. Should be a lot of happy summer spinning.

Thanks to my cousin Ashley for the beautiful photos of the farm animals.

it's called stacking the deck

What do you do when you don't have time for the beautiful things in your life? When you don't have time to fuss with them and enjoy them like you usually do? Here's my life strategy at the moment: it's called stacking the deck.




You surround yourself with beautiful things so that when you're stumbling around in that blind daze of "I must do twenty things at once" you can't help but trip over something beautiful.




These somethings are usually tiny and fragile: flowers from the garden, seedlings reaching for the sun, chives plants about to explode in purple blossoms, the last days of color on a neighbor's flowering shrub and wicker baskets over-flowing with fiber.



The seeds that I planted three weeks ago are finally pushing up through the earth in my garden. When I catch a moment I like to go out there and poke around. Soon I'll be able to wander out there in the evenings with a glass of wine, but for now I'm grateful for the evidence of all the hidden abundance in my life and the lovely world around me.