I wasn’t going to post for a while,
but this morning it is so beautifully cool and foggy, and I feel totally revived from it!
Knitting a new lace design.
Life is good.
Category: landscape
Out Walking
This morning we got out earlier than we have been.
I am hiking solo now, but sometimes I’ll drive up the road a little ways and give Emma a ride, then she waits in the car in a nice shady spot.
She still looks so healthy, but she does not like to walk very far.  Isn’t she just beautiful?
Today I had my Nikon and took some photos of regrowth in the landscape. New shoots emerging prolifically from burned trees everywhere!
The wildfire burned so much foliage and shrubs on the ridge that I’ve been finding old dump sites and old roads long abandoned too, but mostly, trees are making a come-back , and the flowers bloomed as ever before…
On the way back to our Tiny House, stopping where our house “was”. Do you recognize the landscape beyond that I so often photographed from our deck?
Many trees I am finding , are still alive with green crowns, so all is not lost. In fact, the big black oak which shaded our house and most of the deck in the heat of the summer afternoon, was so badly burned we thought no chance, but now it has green sprouting out of ash-grey trunk! The wildfire brings so much perspective about potential of regeneration, that I must witness this as I walk through the seasons. I’ve put all my focus on the hill before me, and knitting as I go.
Life is good.
Afternoon Light
Wildflowers lingering in the whitening grass.
My favorites are the tall wobbly blue Brodea, and the dainty fragile wild roses, absolutely everywhere!
The cheerful wild peas climbing up the garden fence…
Yesterday walking about with Emma,
capturing just a few of the woodland wildflowers in the late afternoon sun .
Quite a different mood & light cast from Early Light that very same day.
Brodea in small little gatherings , as they wobble in the breeze in unison.
Everywhere these plump yellow-green shy flowers with their faces always cast down.
Life is good, and everything in its place.
Early Light
This morning as I was taking pen into hand to write my morning journal entry, I noticed a warm orange glow cast from the sunrise, and giving an intense beauty into the forest. Early morning light sure does give me perspective, and so I grabbed my camera and just looked about.
My life hasn’t felt very photogenic lately, so capturing these images suddenly lifts me a little. It seems always less the subject, and nearly all the light, which makes or breaks a photograph.  And as I have been feeling so overwhelmed with being uprooted during this crazy shuffling about, now seven & 1/2 months since the wildfire, this morning’s sunrise brings a delicate understanding of how both expectation & impatience are troubling me.
As I write this a very big and ominously black raven lands just outside the picture window, on the roof of the little shed next to Tiny House, and seems to be inspecting something. I love the ravens, I am so happy they weren’t away long. The wildlife is indeed more scarce since the fire, but seems to be slowly populating this lonely wood. I have felt thrown out of synchronization with the wild for what is half a year before we moved our Tiny House up here, and I realize this morning that I missed out on a full half rotation around the sun, from 10th of October last year to the 1st of May, being away from this place. That is a long time for a hermit (merely a soft kind word for agoraphobic) . I must just … b r e a t h e….. now back up on the mountain. Breathe it in!  This month of May has been such work learning to live and operate inside of a small space. A really small space, and still doing without so much that makes the experience more like camping … as though my ‘real life’ is still on hold.
But life is not on hold, must forget how life once seemed, and open my eyes to the reality of being here, and now, and this could be as good as it gets. Still , my knitting design which has been seriously ergonomically tampered with, nothing in a neat orderly space, but in boxes, here and there, is going to hibernate a spell while we go through more harrowing experience with the demands of the county, which in the end may prove an ironic and impossible situation for rebuilding.
I strive to be happy for what I have.  Namely, my charcoal forest, and sense of place…. the ones I love, and this Tiny House.  I guess I just need more time, figuring my way forward, thinking about what matters. Life is so short, and I feel each day which slips by that even the rhythm of work of my knitting design has become distortingly hazy.  I find I am caught in a sort of reflection of life up to the fire, and am wanting to set in motion the way forward, but frozen peering into that reflection.
Life is difficult often, but good,  and everything in its place.
A tint of wild rose.
A few weeks back, only a couple of days after we moved into our new Tiny House, I dyed this sock yarn with food coloring. My favorite shade of rose inspired by the old-fashioned roses in my garden …
But perhaps mostly, the dusty rose of my tea pot .
I was going to make this whole experiment into a dying tutorial, and had taken down the steps, but thought to wait how it turned out.  At the dying stage, the experiment was working beautifully, having gone from two balls of Patons Kroy in color Linen ( in this post recently) , to what I was trying for ; a dusty grey rose tinted slightly variegated overdyed yarn.
The yarn came out exquisitely. So I decided to knit the socks.  It took a few weeks, and now here are the results, of um, their good side …
Unfortunately , I am not impressed with this dye, not at all. Because although the yarn may have been dyed to near perfection, and even though I used vinegar to fix, as I suspected the food coloring would not last… which it did not… in the first wash, there are blotchy patches of fade, showing the tan shade of linen beneath, after drying in the sun, on the faded side …
So its back to my favorite Jacquard Acid Dye if I am ever to dye again at all.  Dying is such a hazardous hobby, and I really was hoping I could rely on food coloring, but that was wishful thinking.
A lot of work to put into knitting these beautiful Fishermen Socks  only to have the dye leech out. But with very little yarn left over, I am really happy of the knitting itself, which was very enjoyable, and I fear I am thoroughly addicted to knitting these St Andrews Harbour socks , piles of them, and may just keep on knitting them for the forthcoming winter holiday gift season.
This pair will not be worthy of gift giving next winter holiday, but they will be most excellent hard wearing boot socks for my LLBean gardening boots, and what I was thinking of back in this post , of roses captured in socks!
Pattern:Â St Andrews HarbourÂ
Yarn:Â Â Patons Kroy Sock, color ” Linen “, overdyed with food coloring, five parts red to one part blue.
Ravelry details here.