Stages Of Feline Development

Day 150: After seeing a cute design for cats woven on an eight-shaft loom, I set about hunting for one I could do on four shafts without having to weave it as false damask. I was unable to find a draft, but I was not ready to give up on the idea. Thinking in terms of both pickup and overshot, I figured I could effect much the same thing with only two sheds and a lot of patience, so I ran a short, narrow warp on my smaller rigid heddle loom, got out the graph paper and made a preliminary design. I knew it wasn't going to be perfect, but as it turned out, the first few attempts came closer to my vision than I'd anticipated. I still have a few refinements to make: longer tail with more curve, one additional row on the body, reduction of the left shoulder by one X, but at least I have a recognizable cat.

Puzzle

Day 148: Genius types get bored easily, so when I created a gift list for Merry's birthday, I focused on mentally stimulating items. A friend in Australia sent him this puzzle feeder, and although I was sure it would keep him occupied for a while, he had solved all three levels of challenge in the first thirty minutes, and was capable of repeating the hardest one from there on out. In addition, he invented a new solution which wasn't in the manual, i.e., completely removing the lids from the feeder cups instead of simply pushing them aside. Puzzle is now one of his favourite occupations, and he comes running when I say, "Puzzle!" What he doesn't know is that most of the "treats" I stock it with are just a different brand of regular cat food.

Another Hellebore

Day 147: Perhaps I should walk around my yard more often. It seems I was mistaken when I said my other Hellebore wasn't in bloom yet. It's in a shady spot, and I have a tendency not to notice it because it's not very large yet. Unlike the one in my flower bed, its leaves have lighter coloured veins, making them appear almost mottled. I've been trying for some time now to establish a "shade garden" of Hellebores, Hostas and Maidenhair Ferns under Big Doug. It's coming along at a turtle's pace. I either need to buy more plants (not likely to happen) or hit my botany partners up for more starts. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Joe!

Comfort Food

Day 146: I will not hear argument to the contrary: there is no better comfort food in the world than homemade bread. I say that even though making bread has been part of my normal routine for over fifty years, and is something I don't really even think about, other than, "Oh, I need to make bread" when I see that I'm down to the last half loaf. The aroma of bread in the oven is uplifting. It challenges the deepest gloom. The promise of a hot, fresh slice slathered with butter defies any cookbook which warns the baker not to cut into a loaf until it is fully cool. Get that heel while it's soft! This week, I've made bread twice (cinnamon and sourdough), which speaks loudly of my current world-view. If I should swell up and bust from eating too much homemade bread, what better way to go?

Hellebore Season

Day 145: It's Hellebore season, and mine are heavily packed with flowers. They emerge from the center of the plant, rising above last year's deteriorating foliage which leaves the garden looking a bit tatty, but this can be forgiven in view of their sheer profusion. Only the "black" ones are in flower as yet. They are a major feature in my east-side flower bed, and the roots are so compacted that I can't divide them even when I jump on the shovel. Maybe I should sharpen my axe? In any event, even once the flowers have cycled out (and they bloom for quite a long time), the foliage stays lush and green throughout the summer. As perennials go, there are worse things to which you could dedicate a flower bed.

Spring

Day 144: We've come 'round the corner of winter. Not only are the Snowdrops in bloom, last night I heard the Pacific Chorus Frogs singing on the far side of the pasture, no doubt inspired by several days with highs in the 60s. Their music is one of the most delightful things to my ear, and it's soon to be followed by another: the plaintive note of the Varied Thrush. I'm ready. And I'm ready for the First Day of Skunk Cabbage, but that won't come for another two weeks or so. There is such joy to be found in Nature, even when all else is the stuff of nightmares. Snowdrops, frogs, Skunk Cabbage...they give me hope.

Knitting Socks To Match

Day 143: Today, I thought we might step sideways into another area of fiberarts: knitting. Variegated/ombre yarns are an excellent choice for socks, but people often have trouble getting both socks to turn out the same. There are several reasons for this, the first being that commercial space-dyed yarns are put up by yardage, not repeats. Let's assume a colour sequence of red/white/green for ease of explanation. If the sequence was one yard of each colour, life would be easy. A 333-yard skein would contain 111 repeats, starting with red and ending with green. But that isn't the way the real world works. The colour sequence might be two yards of red, one of white, and one of green, i.e., a four-yard repeat. Therefore, our 333-yard skein would contain 83.25 repeats, which is obviously not a convenient multiple. The next skein wound by the factory would pick up where that one left off, and thus, the chance of our purchasing two skeins which each started with two yards of red would be fairly small. And then it gets even more complicated, because many space-dyed yarns contain more than one sequence, e.g., the full repeat might be two yards of red, once of white, one of green, one of red, two of white, one of green, one of red, one of white, two of green which, although the colours are equally represented over 12 yards, the repeat of the full sequence occurs over 12 yards as well. Consequently, the first thing you must do to create matching socks is identify the colour repeat and start each sock in the same place.

Now we come to another factor: tension. None of us, no matter how good we are, knits at the same tension every time we pick up the needles. That means we may get 40 stitches out of one yard of red from our example one day, and 42 the next. These small differences can add up! That means at some point, we're going to have to make allowances, and here's how to go about it.

As I said in the first paragraph, the first thing you want to do is identify the repeat and start each sock in the same place. Yes, you will be working two socks at once, although as a general rule, you can probably knit a whole cuff/leg before you need to adjust. In the case of the socks in the photo, I had trouble telling the blues apart until I came to the lightest one at the end of 55 rounds. Aha! That would be where I needed to have the socks match up. I knit the second sock to that point, found that I still had a yard or so of the next-darkest shade left, so I cut the yarn at that point and, using a Russian join, connected the darker section to the lighter one so that my next stitches would be in the lighter colour. Now the heels will match (or, as they say, "close enough for gov'mint work") and I won't need to make another adjustment until I begin the foot (and probably not even then). If I'm a stitch or two off when I reach the toe, I'm not going to obsess about it.