The last week of summer is upon us, and I am noticing the light relaxing into longer shadows at a slightly earlier time each day. I really feel that my beloved Autumn is near! There is the usual locomotive knitting going on, but in this last week of summer I am enjoying some humble little silly thing “on the needle”, something just to take my mind off of knitting for a little while, so that I can be rested creatively speaking. I started and quit several times in the last year, yet I could not quell an incessant nagging urge to make at least a good start at counted cross-stitch, but to do so I have first to get past the very uncomfortable sense of being a rank beginner, while I repeatedly wrestle an equal urge to give up. That itself is the real exercise here, to squeeze myself into that constricting humble place of being. This, I am convinced, should be good for me, although I really don’t have time or room in my life for another textile hobby. I’m fine with my wobbly mis-shapen X’s , its all good, its all stitching. Stitching of any kind is a mental health elixir I believe in.

I am really pleased my last days of summer have shifted into this peaceful mellowness, a fresh beginning, these first new humble stitches . . .

Do enjoy your remaining days of summer !

The madrone trees are shedding again. It seems they do twice a year if my memory is correct, they burst out of their thin skin and deep russet peels land everywhere. Some are quite large scrolls!  I’ve been wanting to do this experiment for years upon years now, so finally I took a brief tour around the house with my stainless steel stock pot, collecting some, not sure how much.  I just filled the pot with cold water, and will just let the pot sit without lid out in the scorching hot sun of the deck, while I think about it and research how to properly dye with tree bark. Even only improperly , in case I am lacking anything for the dye bath. One thing for sure, it is not something I have to rush into in the next hour.  This is the post before I’ve dyed anything. I’m welcoming all kinds of advice from anybody who’s done natural dye from bark.  I don’t have any mordants, however I do have plenty of undyed yarn ready to dip!

I made a post a while back on the madrone as a colorway in Tweed Chronicles, and featured it in a post many years back too, which both do go into a little more depth about this beautiful tree. The wildire had killed off so many that surrounded our house, but the trees have a hopeful future as many of the new shoots that grew out from the base of the burned trees are now up to nearly 15 feet high, and in last post July Days, you can see them again through the window, and making their way back to trees again on the side of the deck.

Anyway, I should like to see a Part Two to this series, a future “after dying” post, but as things are now, this is undetermined. I am dreaming of a signature colorway from my own madrone woods, but not having too much expectation, I just hope this second attempt at dying with madrone bark works at all!

Edit in: Please see my post  Tweed Chronicles: Madrone

Savoring moments in my morning window space, knitting and enjoying a second beautiful cup of home-roasted coffee while mulling over the notes, the careful calculations, the charts drawn and redrawn a dozen or more times, sipping, sifting, filtering out the dregs of many half-starts, and deleting files. I am closer to the finish with the best work, in my opinion, of my designing ability.  Soldiering on through the pandemic days and the spring and summer months as the empty calendar pages flip, getting nearer to that time when it will simply be finished.  But I am taking my time. I am learning a lot about knitting sweater proportion, enjoying snatching up my calculator and changing up the numbers in a slight panic yet again, a thing which has become a little brain rush, but also am learning to keep the perspectives reasonable and stress minimal.   Its all a thing I love to do.

The volunteer vegetable garden is flourishing and I am stunned each and every day to see it, realizing that when the garden is least imposed upon it does its best magic! Volunteer squashes and tomatoes taking over , and watering with a sprinkler is attracting birds by the flocks!  So many robins, gold finches, and bluebirds have become like pets, more interested in bathing in the baths and foraging than to worry about me walking by too near ~~~  my little darlings!

The insects have dwindled as a result of having all these insect-munching birds around, and what garden pests? I don’t see a single one! Life among the birds and the happy garden, and because they are thriving, so am I thriving.  Not much is ripening yet, except the lettuce and leeks flowering , so of course, that explains the vase of flowering lettuces on table which I hope to save seed from.

My list of kitchen concoctions is growing in number, as I practice making with basic ingredients. The counter is sprawling with sprouting jars of alfalfa and winter wheat in various stages, soaking beans, yogurt setting up, and the oven is getting worked with all the loaves I am baking with hefty mix-ins of sprouted wheat grains. I got a hold of a five pound bag of raw organic peanuts and for the first time in my life am learning how to pan roast, and make peanut butter!  I often have for lunch some home-made hummus on home-made bread with a thick smear of home-made savory greek yogurt, and topped with a pile of home-grown alfalfa sprouts . . . paired with a tall glass of lemonade which is just a bunch of ever-so-thin lemon slices packed into the bottom of the glass, sweetened with a home-made ginger syrup I make from piloncillo and fresh root of ginger, a ton of ice, top off with water,  and voila! A lot of home-made.

I am going for walks more now, although short ones, as the trails are rather hemmed in by ever toppling  charcoal trees but I do get myself going up to witness the changing landscape.  Gone are the days when I could just walk up the ridge road to the peak and get in my three and a half steep miles. Those days will return, I just don’t know when, perhaps the next generation. So I walk a bit less, and work outside a lot more.  Walking barefoot all summer on sub-floors, not caring in the least that the finish floors are not done, just enjoying the house and the steady superb trim work that Jeff is doing, exactly as he had done on our original house. Oh! And that sprawling pile of building mess, lumber & tools which occupied the middle of the house and nearly hid the lower half of this post,  as of last week, is now gone! A massive aesthetic improvement to the house.

Lastly, I am finding that lots of little mini naps to defrag my brain is the best recipe for clear thinking, being endlessly enchanted by the calm space I’ve made in my loft just for naps, I find that it is improving my mental endurance in the day, especially getting up and out of bed at 5 o’clock every morning,  I think I’m about ready for one now.

Signing off with no complaints,  busy in the sheltering-in pandemic days, and life is good.

Its been a while since I posted any photos of the house-in-progress.

A year ago in May   we were in the middle of a long haul of building; contractors everywhere, loud power tools, roofers, drywallers, plasterers,  and I ached with all my being for it to be quiet and to work again in my loft. Now I must say, seven months to the day after having moved from the tiny house 500 feet up to the unfinished-but-signed-off house, amidst still tools and piles of lumber in the living room (which are still there)… I am feeling everything once again in its place, and throughout the house I hardly notice the lack of some trim and finish flooring. Especially in the loft, my workspace, a room that in the first days of last Autumn I was so eager to kit out, everything was just waiting for the sign-off with the county.  Now a bit more relaxed and seven months later I am quite charmed at the trim, a knotted board for the doorway into the loft, a real polishing touch of finish work and what a nice surprise from Jeff knowing I love the knotted boards the most.

Last May I was knitting a pile of socks for a new pattern dedicated to Emma for she just had her fourteenth birthday and in celebration I had mowed  a whole lane  where I could “walk” with my old girl Emma, who wasn’t really able to walk much anymore.  Well its May again, and I’m mowing a lot of wild grass again, and as the rain is most likely on its way out so am I watering like a maniac too. Working outside now is my big big focus. Less time for indoor things. 

Oh but maybe this….

I am making slow progress on my Fishwives lace stole I started up again in March. Its been a difficult and rough couple of months with Emma gone and the whole pandemic thing , but I’ve been throwing myself into the yoke,  figuratively and literally,  as I’ve learned that hard work is the best medicine through sorrowful times and uncertain times.

And this, a sweater yoke ….

I guess its about time I mention that I’ve been working on a new design that in subject relates to all that I have been posting about in the series in recent posts “Gifts From The Sun“.   For a few years now, I really do enjoy researching something as a mark of inspiration connected to a new upcoming design, while spending the hours knitting myself to exhaustion, with plenty of ripping out and starting over that goes a long with it.  I have been thinking about a few things; the wool/yarn industry in Peru and its relationship with the people of the Andes, of tempering my yarn snobbery and trying to have an open mind about a yarn that frankly I never paid that much attention to. A yarn that I have used to make felted satchels for many years, and that as why I had quite a lot of it around, because a couple of months ago, I was knitting many sturdy basket tote bags and felting them for my new pattern Maiya’kma.

Now, again, the same yarn is on my needles for something entirely different. Words that come to mind ~~ moderately soft, quality, plies, strong, classic, and with a colossal selection of rich colors ~~  I must say its rather blowing my mind that this all-purpose and inexpensive one-hundred percent Peruvian wool yarn has made it to my top favorites as a colorwork sweater yarn, and very unexpectedly. I just never thought about it in this way.  

More in the weeks to come!