Staycation week adventures

 It was a holiday week for us, a staycation with a few day trips planned.   Our first one got rained out by torrential rains.  We'd left to visit friends when the skies opened up and was just pouring down rain.   The rain was so heavy that there was virtually zero visibility.   We tried to keep on, figuring that rain this heavy only lasts for a few minutes, but nope, it kept on pouring down.  We cancelled our trip when we realized that the storm front was directly over us, travelling in the same direction as us ( thanks to phone weather radar!). We took the long way home as we missed our turn because we couldn't see it until we were right there.  Water was pooling on the roads and puddling badly.   A nearby town had photos of water in parking lots coming to the doors and past of some cars!  Crazy weather!

Dome open and CN tower

Our next foray was to a Blue Jays game a couple of days later.  That was also an adventure.   The weather was superb but stop and go traffic on the highway slowed down our trip dramatically.  Our train stop had no parking spots available at all.  Because the train is so much easier and faster than driving, as well as cheaper, we went to the next stop and the same.   The third stop we won and found parking.  We arrived the same time as our train but by the time we got from the far end of the parking lot to the platform, the train had left on its merry way.   Half an hour later, the next train arrived and we had so many Blue Jays fans there, that the announcer was cheerfully telling us to enjoy the game and a reminder of the stop we needed.

My view from 3rd Base line

We'd allowed a lot of extra time, thinking we'd grab lunch in the city and have time to look around the ball park.   Instead of arriving at 12:30 pm, we got there at 2 pm.  Sheesh.  However, the Jays played a great game and they won, which was really nice.  On our way home we took our time getting to the train station, waited for the next train with all the other Jays fans who'd missed the first train, and got to our desired stop with no issues.  The conductor announcing stops wasn't quite so luck and messed up announcing the station stops several times.  It was creating a lot of giggling in our carriage at any rate.  Finally we got to the station and our car was gone!  We'd wandered around the now half empty parking lot in the area where we'd parked and our car was not there.   All of a sudden a very nice lady stopped us and told us she'd just done the same thing.  It turns out there are 2 parking lots (we found out later there were actually 3 different parking lots) and she told us how to find the other lot.   A wander over there and I stayed in the terminal, just in case, and Hubby went off to find the car, which he did.  I ended up leaving the terminal to wait outside because a very noisy and violent person came in swearing and screaming at me, while banging things around.   Fun times (not so much).  

The next day we went back to the same area to visit our friends and have a bbq and some good conversation.   We took the scenic route to avoid the traffic and were late, but still had lots of time to catch up.   Our way home took us to where we could see the highway, which was at a standstill, so we took a scenic route back home.  It was longer in distance but  probably faster.  

Yesterday, after a busy week, we decided to just stay home.   I spent time in the garden and harvested the garlic.  As expected all the garlic that had been partially uprooted by the storm and tree falling didn't  grow anymore and so there are a lot of smaller heads of garlic.  The two with the undisturbed roots were a decent size though.   I watered the garden and then rinsed off most of the dirt from the garlic and have set it out to dry.  Once the outer skins have dried and become papery, the hard neck garlic will last several months. 

Freak Fierce Storm.

 

First look at the storm damage on the garden

Weather perceptions are defined by what your climate normals are.  We're currently stuck in a miserable heat wave.  Our daytime temperatures are hovering in the 33C to 34C, with a humidex of 42C - 44C. It may not be that warm to some areas, but here it's really quite abnormal.  We're definitely not used to these sort of temperatures, although we get it once or twice a summer for a couple of days at a time.  It's not cooling down much at night either, making for little relief.  

Split tree that fell on the garden

Besides being uncomfortable, there is usually a risk of pop up storms.   We had one of those yesterday afternoon.   I kept thinking to myself that I should bring the laundry in because it would have been dry fairly quickly, when I looked outside and realized that the hazy blue sky was now grey.   I ran outside just as a few drops started falling.  
I did get the laundry off the line but it was starting to get a bit wet by the last couple of t-shirts.   I then ran to the barn to shut the door.  I'd left the chooks inside because the two new girls have still been hesitant to come in at night.   The more they're in their coop room, the more they realise it's home.  Obviously a week wasn't enough to settle them in with the existing flock.

Anyway, by the time I reached the barn, the winds had picked up.   I got back to the house, with the wettish laundry in tow, but I was soaked because the rain was now pounding down.   After changing my shirt and towelling off my hair, I made dinner early because with that rain and the winds, our power could have gone out at any time.  It did flicker, but we ended up being okay. As I started to make dinner I heard the sounds of a tree or branches coming down.   We checked the windows but couldn't go out because the rain storm was now crashing down thunder and lightning too.   It was a quick moving storm and about 20 minutes later, my son found the culprit.  Half a tree had fallen down on my garden!  Yikes

Bird feeders and stands in with the garlic bed

We'll start the clean up this afternoon.  It's going to take a bit of time and a chainsaw.   From a quick glance, it looks like all but a couple of the 36 garlic plants have been crushed, along with all the green beans, all but 3 tomato plants, some peppers and cucumbers.   Fingers crossed there will be enough growing tips left on the tomatoes and peppers to keep them viable.   I'll have to go get more tomato cages if the plants can be saved because they are mangled!

The bird feeders and the  wrought iron and steel hanging posts are bent and tangled in with the branches and plants of the raised beds.  Even most of the large pots and planters were hit.   Last nighty I was able to salvage two tomato plants which were on the perimeter of the fallen tree trunk and branches.   One needed a bit of repotting so I'm hoping that the roots weren't disturbed too badly.

The stupid tree also took down the clothes line.  Luckily it looks like the cable didn't break but just pulled out at the ratchet thing which holds the ends together.  As long as we can find the wheel which was attached to the tree at the far end, it should be a fairly easy, inexpensive fix.  Still, I won't be able to hand the laundry out until the rest of the clean up is done and we can see if we can find the missing pieces.

Another Shawl You Say!

 

I know I told myself I would knit any more shawls, but they are good evening knitting projects.  If it's simple enough, I can knit while talking or watching a show or even reading a book!   This one is entirely handspun yarn.  The grey is Corriedale and the white is Shetland /Blue Faced Leicester cross.  Both were lovely to spin, although the Shetland cross is taking a good while to process to get the VM out.  I found combing was very effective but a bit more work than I wanted to do.  Instead I've been flick carding the locks and carding them with hand cards to make rolags.  Takes a bit of time but I can do more at a time.  If I get industrious, I may call up a friend and see if I can use her picker to loosen all the locks.   A lot of the VM will fall out during that process, making the carding easier and faster.

I carefully measured the centre line, which is a cable to make sure that the shawl wasn't too large.  I then wet finished it in the washing machine with a bit of Eucalan.  I was careful about only letting it agitate for a minute or less at a time, checking regularly and letting it soak in between.  I was trying to get a balance of yarn blooming and just a bit of fulling to keep the shawl from becoming too big.   I'd use a larger needle size to make sure that the Corriedale stayed soft, so stretching was definitely something to take into consideration.  Well the wet finishing worked really well, and the stitches all evened out.  The yarn bloomed nicely and I'm impressed with how well the Eucalan worked to get the yarn really clean and it stayed soft.   It did however, not full much at all and it's a lovely, airy and large shawl.  I'm disappointed at how little the cable shows against the grey yarn.  While I know that cables show up better on lighter yarns, in my mind the grey was lighter than it actually is.  Still, it's a soft and cuddly shawl.  If I don't use it, it may go on a sale table sometime.

I did play yarn chicken with the bottom white stripe.   I was sure I had enough yarn left in the ball to cast off after I'd knit the required rows.   I got to the half-way mark and thought that  for sure there was enough to finish.   When I was 3/4 done the cast off row I was starting to wonder whether it would be better to switch out the yarn now, or to risk running out with 3 or 4 stitches left.   I kept knitting and yes, I won with 6 inches of yarn to spare!  Phew!

Happy Summer Solstice

Our guild dye day was somewhat disappointing.   We had two options and you could do both.   Nature dyes, with 4 different pots and weak acid dyes, because you could easily paint a warp or a skein while we waited for the nature dyes to take.

I pre-mordanted all the wool for the natural dyes with 10% alum.  We had easily 2-5 times the dye materials to WOF ratios so there should have been lots of dye pigment available.  The only issue we really had was that there wasn't enough power to keep all the pots simmering on the hot plates.   The walnut dye went outside in the sun.  The madder ended up in a crockpot and the dandelions on a hot plate, which never got past a very low simmer.   The stinging nettle went inside onto a stove, was forgotten about and ended up bubbling gently and happily away.   Until this combination, we kept blowing breakers.   Hindsight being what it is, we should have moved another pot or two to the inside stove and left one on the hot plate in the garage.   Live and learn.    The stinging nettle was an experiment and I'm pretty happy with that colour.  It was a lovely green.  I left this one 48 hours before rinsing and it's a little darker than another sample that I'd seen which was rinsed shortly after being removed from the dye pot.  

I'm not sure what's up with Kevin.  I've absolutely never, ever seen him being silly.  He is a very proper kitty, who never seems to do anything to make me laugh.  He was waiting for me to turn the tap on.   He usually comes up to me and stares until I notice him and guess at what he wants.   He usually leads me around to various places in the house before ending up at his desired goal.   I'm guessing that he didn't want to play that game that day and just waited patiently.  While he likes to drink fresh running water, his water bowl was also full of fresh water.  When he's at the sink, he sort of gently puts his front feet in as little as possible to reach the tap, like it's some sort of great irritant.  He does squint his eyes at me if I don't figure out what he wants quickly enough though.

A little rant and some updates

New scarf on the loom.   There was a yarn sale a few weeks back and they had some yarns by Caron, which while acrylic, is super soft.  There were some odd colour ways, but several really nice ones.   I liked the purple painted colour way in the ball, but it made for a rather dark and heavy looking scarf.  A couple of the colour ways were white with short lengths of colour which have made really nice scarves.   This is a blue which is weaving up with lovely patches of green and purple.   I'd gotten a teal to use as the weft, but it was too dark. I unwove it, restarted weaving with the same yarn as the warp and really like the colours and the way it's weaving up.   It sort of feels like a night sky with the northern lights, which is making it fun to weave up.

I meant to wash fleece over the weekend but had a very quiet read a novel, knit a bunch and warp the loom weekend.   I still have 3 1/2 sheep fleeces left to process.  I'll have enough Orvus to wash them, but will likely need more degreaser and Dawn.  Also I have some absolutely lovely, although full of VM cria (baby alpaca) fleece to play with.  Yay me!

My baby got married to an absolutely lovely and wonderful young lady who my whole family adores.  She is friendly, warm, funny and caring.  She makes friends everywhere, remembers people that she met at conferences and places in previous years and just made everyone she was with feel welcomed and befriended.   It was the most amazing thing to be a part of.   While we already considered her family, it's now official.   The only downside is that she's very allergic to cats, and my cats leave enough cat hair and dander around to make another 2 of themselves, so we go to visit them, rather than have them visit us.   It's not worth risking her health for that.  She is however extremely worthy of getting hand made items.   It's so easy to love her and the way she fits into the family.

The Alliums just keep on giving.  Even after their flowers are spent and they've gone to seed, they are an interesting architectural element in the garden.

washing and processing a new fleece

 I've been washing fleeces.   This one is likely a BFL/Shetland cross.   It's about a 3-31/2 inch staple length.  There is a bit of VM, which is to be expected since the sheep are kept outside all the time.  The worst VM I've ever found came from sheep who were kept in a barn almost all the time.  It was just loaded to the point of almost being unusable, especially when combined with the excess lanolin produced from being sheltered all the time.   

This fleece was easily cleaned. I put portions of the fleece into lingerie bags. I used my laundry tub to soak, with no agitation for any of the soaks or washes.   I used a warm water soak to remove a lot of the actual dirt.  Then I used a hot water wash with Orvus paste and Zep degreaser, which removed most of the lanolin.  The second wash was just Orvus and a tiny squirt of Dawn dish soap in hot water.  It needed 2 or 3 soaks in decreasing temperatures of hot water.  As the water cooled down during the process, I used the next water bath at a similar water temperature as the previous one had as I drained it.   Since the two factors for felting wool are agitation and abrupt changes in temperature, this would hopefully stop that from happening.

I tried a batch in the drum carder, but didn't like the results.   The VM doesn't generally fall out in a drum carder, usually does when spinning.  What I had missed was that this fleece was a bit tippy, meaning the tips were weak and were either a bit felted or they just broke off when processing, and there was a bit of a short undercoat and some felted cut ends.  These caused a lot of neps to be formed in the drum carded batts.   I tried combing with Valkerie viking combs, which produced a stellar result but about 25% waste, which is pretty normal.  The problem that I found though was that required a lot of arm strength with the felted tips and cut ends.  I ended up flick carding the locks and turning them into rolags, which resulted in minimum waste and a lovely, spinnable rolag.  It's still a lot of work though.

I learned something.   I'd been taught early on that flick carders work best using a tapping motion to create static electricity, which opens the lock and lets the VM drop out.  This technique works exceptionally well, and doesn't take a lot of effort since it's just a gentle tap, tap that's needed.  However, this works until it doesn't.  With the weak tips and the bit of felting at the ends, that brushing that I've always warned people not to do, is totally required here.  The tips need more effort than the tapping allows for and the felting at the cut end, despite being really slight, doesn't respond at all to the tapping.  This means that I was tapping away and accomplishing absolutely nothing!  So I resulted to a mixture of brushing the tips and then tapping.   Takes more time and much more effort but I was able to get those beautiful rolags that I like to spin.   It's going to take me forever to process this fleece at this rate.

Now if only I had labelled the lingerie bags that I'd used to wash the 2 white fleeces in.   They are all the same bag, as in the same colour, the same size, the same everything and when filled with white fleece, yup, they look all the same.

Beaded Dorset Buttons

 All the peppers and tomatoes are in the pots.   All the flowers for the deck are planted, although I just realized that I've been watering Geranium cuttings all winter, and I have an empty hanging basket that I should pop them into.   I just found out why the parsley plant didn't do well last year, and not only because of the swallowtail butterflies.   There is a chipmunk that likes parsley and I see him at the planter, nibbling away at the leaves and stalks!  It's supposed to be rainy on Saturday, so I've planned for some time on Sunday to finish up planting the seeds.  Beans, cururbits, Kale and chard on deck please!

I was playing around with Dorset Buttons a couple of nights ago and learned how to add beads to my buttons.  There is a rug hooker that does Dorset buttons as well, but she uses heavier yarns and larger rings to make them.  She adds all her beads after the buttons are finished and just sews them on.   I didn't think that would work with my buttons.  The Dorset buttons I make, are smaller and with finer threads, so I learned several different ways, including adding them while winding the spokes and sewing them on afterwards using  3 different methods. I'm pretty pleased with my first attempt.   I used Perle cotton and some nice glass beads.   Next time I'm at a textile store, I'll check for some beading needles with larger eyes, just to make things a little bit easier. What I had worked adequately, just not as easily as I'd hoped.

This is another attempt with Perle cotton and glass bugle beads.  It's smaller than the blue button.  I think the ring was too small for the space the bugle beads take up, as some of them are pushed down a bit.  Auto correct keeps trying to make it seem like I'm using Beagle beads, rather than bugle beads, which is kind of funny.   Apparently bugle beads come in different diameters, which seem to vary by very small amounts, like .2mm, .4mm, .7 mm larger.  Really, it might be fun to try, but I'm not in any hurry to source these as I can't imagine that what I made wouldn't work for most purposes for which I might need it.  These work fine for me.  Gina B Silkworks has some interesting button tutorials on YouTube, which are really well done.

FLEECE UPDATE: I've two lovely white fleeces washed already.  I have the remaining 3/4 of the Icelandic fleece washed.  It was a really enticing grey, but I didn't enjoy spinning it.  I gave some away and I'll try again with the rest.  I washed up a bit of New Zealand merino that I've been carting around for a while too, just to get it out of the way.    I've a fabulous black fleece and two more white fleeces to wash, as well as half an amazing cria (baby alpaca) fleece that I can't wait to work with.  Guess what I'm doing this summer?