Bead-Dazzled

Day 121: Of all my hobbies, one of the most enjoyable is beadwork. These little "medicine pouch" necklaces are made with #11 seed beads (my favorite beading medium) and have a small piece of felt inside them for scenting with perfume or aromatherapy oils. I've made dozens of them over the years, putting them out on consignment in local gift shoppes or giving them as gifts. The daisy chain is a strap necklace, and the pattern is also nice for bracelets or a dainty hatband. It's been a while since I did any beading! Maybe I'll pick it up again when I get done with my current bobbin lace project.

Comfort Zone

Day 120 (Part B:) Baseboards seemed to make more sense than fan-driven wall heaters for my crafts room and bath. They can be set to maintain a lower temperature and then cranked up before I plan to be in the room for any length of time. Being able to control my "comfort zone" in any given area makes a lot more sense than heating the entire house with an oil-guzzling furnace which in any event is on its last legs.

Should Have Done This Years Ago

Day 120 (Part A): Yes, I should have done this years ago. It took a furnace crisis and my oil company discontinuing delivery service out here to push me into installing electric heat, but as of today, it is done. My home is quite small (980 sq. ft.) and cozy with a large living room, a large kitchen, two modest bedrooms and a bath, and of course I can't be in more than one room at a time, so it seems silly to heat them all equally. I had wall-mount heaters with fans installed in my bedroom and the living room, and baseboards in the crafts room (spare bedroom) and bath. A wide archway into the kitchen allows heat to pass freely from the living room. Electricity is one of the more economical ways to heat in my area, certainly better than oil and much cleaner. I expect these units to pay for themselves within a year or two. Even better yet, I can stand in front of one of these when I want to warm up!

Winter Residents

Day 119: Whether you want to call him a Rufous-Sided Towhee or a Spotted Towhee, Pipilo maculatus won't mind as long as you see to having his breakfast available on wet snowy mornings. Primarily a ground forager, Mr. Towhee will scratch seed out of a feeder with a quick back-hop kickstep and then perform the same dance to raise it from where it has fallen. His tail is almost constantly in motion, flicking and twitching to reveal white corners on the outer feathers. His most striking feature is his bright red eye which only colors up from dark brown at adulthood.

Here in my personal bird "sanctuary," Towhees are more numerous in wintertime, feeding alongside Dark-Eyed Juncoes. They love to hide in the contorted filbert, safe from larger predatorial birds in the tangle of its branches.

Birdproof Stitch

Day 118: We have my husband's parrot Carlo to thank for the renaming of bicolor bee stitch. You see, Carlo was "Papa's Parrot" and made no bones about telling you so, or defending his exclusive rights to Papa when Bruce was home. While Bruce was at work, Carlo and I got along quite nicely, but once Papa came through the door and Carlo took up his position on his shoulder, I knew better than to approach lest I find my ears pierced again or a nip taken out of my hand or arm.

Enter a knitting project. I wanted a warm winter sweater, so dragged out Mon Tricot to select a stitch, and then worked up a raglan pattern with knit-in sleeves. Only after the sweater was done did I discover that the texture baffled bird-bites when Carlo thought he had a mouthful of Mama-meat but only had his beak full of yarn. Bicolor bee stitch became known as "birdproof stitch," and over the years, I wore out half a dozen "birdproof sweaters."

Birdproof stitch is made entirely of knit rows which makes it fairly quick to work despite the fact that you only gain the length of three rows for every four. The first and third rows are straight knit over an even number of stitches. Row two is made with a repeat of *k1, k1 in the stitch below,* end k2. Row four begins with k2, then *k1 in the stitch below, k1* to the end. The pattern lends itself well to using up tag ends of yarn as rows 3 and 4. The main color is carried on rows 1 and 2. It also makes a lovely sweater worked in two shades of the same color. Many variations are possible, but I like mine loud and tropical...as a reminder of Carlo, who really was a sweet little guy when the two of us were home alone together.

Fish Out Of Water

Day 117: Just having a little photographic fun today! These goldfish always sat atop my mother's hutch when I was young. They're wooden, and the lighter colored one is missing one of its beady eyes (a situation I will remedy some day if I can find a suitable bead). I seem to recall that at one time, they had stickers on the bottom saying they were made in China. These too are long gone.

I wanted to find a way to present them so that they looked like they were in a watery environment, so spread a sheet of blue cellophane over a piece of white cardstock and arranged the Hoya bella so that its tendrils hung down behind the subjects. The setting looked exactly like a houseplant behind a couple of wooden fish, not at all what I wanted. Then it occurred to me to put the cellophane OVER the plant which created a more "watery" look. A little sand for a sea floor, and my little carp were swimming happily along as fish out of water.

Old Friends Who've Just Met

Day 116: Eight years in the making! That's how long I've "known" John, my Canadian photographer friend through the internet. We met in a geocaching forum when I noticed that hs avatar was the International Harvester (FarmAll) tractor logo. My daddy drove a FarmAll tractor, so I inquired and found out that John restored them as a hobby. Some time later, we discovered that we shared a mutual interest in photography, and knew that sooner or later, we'd have to meet face to face.

That said, every time we seemed to be on the verge of connecting, either scheduling wouldn't work, his plans would fall through or my weather would pin me down. So near and yet so far away, he visited another friend on Whidbey Island, but I was unable to free up time to join the gathering. We've been trying to get this together for several weeks now, but again, changes in John's travel plans made it look impossible.

When I turned on the computer this morning, I had no idea I'd be driving to Seattle today, but a flurry of emails sped through the ether as we tried to arrange a place to meet with neither of us knowledgeable about the city. John was going to be strictly afoot because his Canadian credit card wouldn't work to rent a car. In a last-ditch measure, I picked a street corner near his hotel and said, "Meet me there!" and out the door I went at high speed. I hadn't been there five minutes when he knocked on the car window.

The two of us went out to lunch and then spent the afternoon prowling the Museum of Flight, both of us intrigued by displays of engines and flying machines from bygone days. For a few hours, we joked and teased just as we do in emails daily, old friends who'd just met for the very first time.

Haggis And Neeps

Day 115 (Part B): Haggis, neeps (turnips), tatties (potatoes) and a bit of Atholl Brose made with Glen Livet set the scene for a Burns Night Dinner celebration, as spartan as would do any Scotsman proud. I regretted not having a bagpipe CD to put on the player, but it probably would not have been audible above my sighs of ecstasy as I made my first acquaintance with the Haggis of legend. Now I will say this: were I condemned to swing on the gallows for my piracies, I would request as my last meal Haggis and neeps.

Spicier than I expected, the Haggis was light and airy and deliciously fragrant with sage. Red pepper gave it a bit of tang, though not to overpower the delicate savour of lamb, the lamb tempered with just a bit of beef. Simmered in beef broth, the glorious Haggis cooked gently for two hours before I tossed in a handful of cubed neeps, tatties not being to my liking. Another twenty minutes had them fork-tender and ready to serve.

The aromas filling the house had left my stomach growling. It was a hard task to set up this shot with dinner on the boards! I had intended to spread this meal out over three nights, but I found myself gobbling down half at one sitting, so delicious was this unique traditional Scottish delicacy.

Life Is Too Short Not To Try New Foods

Day 115 (Part A): It has long been my assertion that life is too short not to try new foods. I've eaten some very odd things and found them to my liking (lutefisk included), but one thing I had never tried was Haggis. My Scots heritage would not allow this omission any longer, so around Christmastime, I began my search for the Elusive Haggis. Through our British postmistress, I finally found a butcher shop which prepared their own, along with other specialty meats made in the traditional British or Scots manner. I ordered a one-pound Haggis. After all, there's only one of me. It was delivered frozen, to be thawed prior to cooking in the slow pot in an inch of beef broth for a couple of hours. Lamb and beef spiced with sage, red pepper, black pepper and sugar, I was certain it would be good.

Upgrade This!

Day 114: Right before Christmas, the nice folks in our IT department at the Park upgraded our old SharePoint to an entirely different version. The old one was getting pretty well stuffed with volunteers and applicants and hours, and was starting to really bog down when we needed to add something new. However, we soon discovered that the upgrade's capacity for handling our volume of files was significantly less, requiring us to compartmentalize large groups of files in multiple smaller increments. In other words, in the old version, you could see all the files for the last ten years. In the new version, you were lucky if you could see a whole year without having to open a second set of 500. Instead of having a broad overview on one page of A-Z, the new version required you to close "A-Cr" in order to open "Cr-Do" as a new page.

The next thing we discovered was that categories such as "position description" had disappeared entirely. Data fields had to be recreated from scratch in the new SharePoint. Then there were issues with missing hours, whole missing years, evaporating categories which resisted reinstallation, and so on. Each day brought a new set of challenges, and the regular work was backing up. One thing after another had to be readjusted, reinvented, realigned. The air was getting a little blue in the office as both Kevin and I exhausted our vocabularies and threatened to pitch the computers out through the second-story windows and into the snow.

Little by little, tweak by tweak, Kevin and IT worked at whipping the system into shape, but broken bits kept cropping up here and there. Much to our dismay, we discovered that the electronic copies of applications we'd attached to potential volunteers' files had gone missing. Resorting to backup files from the old system and from other sources, my task for the last few weeks has been figuring out what needed to be reattached and where to find it. Today, I buttoned up the last of them; done, complete, finito.

Kevin still has a list of tweaks to make, but I'm caught up on new applications and recording hours. The next time somebody says "upgrade" to me, I'm going to upgrade them right between the eyes.

Eating Condition

Day 113 (Part B): "Central heating" sounded like such a good idea at the time! All my life, I have relied on some form of radiant heat in my home, whether it was a freestanding oil stove (not a furnace), a propane stove or a wood stove, or even a portable electric heater, and I never realized how nice it was to stand in front of the heat source until your clothes were nearly smoldering, then to go park in a chair and be comfortable for an hour or more. When I moved into this house and winter came on, I went to stand on a register to circulate warm air up my trouser legs, only to discover that the heat vents were at ceiling level and the registers in the floor only let cold drafts into the room. That was my first taste of "central heating," and it left me feeling I'd made a large mistake.

Shortly thereafter, I discovered that furnaces are fickle beasts. They consume vast quantities of fuel. They require cossetting and cajoling. They like annual medical checkups and they don't carry insurance to cover them. In short, I decided that "central heating" was the devil's own invention, but I was stuck with it.

Today when I had to have the sucker-upper truck out to clear the chimney of a major obstruction, I had to laugh at the alteration the repairman had made to the imprinted "heating - air conditioning" sign on the side. It seems to fit this furnace's gluttony for oil and dollars.

Oh, for the days of a freestanding stove, the kind you lit with a match tossed into the fire box! I don't think they even make them nowadays.

Call A Doctor Quickly!

Day 113 (Part A): Last Friday, the patient was discovered in what appeared to be the last stages of terminal decay, unable to breathe and temperature dropping below life-sustaining levels. It was triaged within 24 hours, but the outlook was unfavorable. Specialists were called into conference, treatment options were examined and a tentative plan of rehabilitation was suggested with little hope of efficacity. However, when the patient's airway was cleared of a massive obstruction and the invalid was placed on a respirator, it responded in a positive manner. Internal injuries were ruled out, and the prognosis is good for several more years of productive life.

Size Matters

Day 112: Let's play a guessing game! How large or small are these objects? There is no tricky post-processing here, other than the addition of the lens flare on the gem. The three items were arranged together for the photo and there is no illusion created by perspective. If you believe you recognize any one of them, remember you have to justify the proportions of the remaining two. Have fun figuring it out!

Still Life

Day 111: Many long years ago, word came to my ears about a special place, one the teller of the tale had never seen himself and only knew through word of mouth, but he related its wonders to me in words which opened a scene in my mind's eye onto a broad valley filled with wildflowers and meandering rivulets of chuckling water. It called to me as surely as the North called to the sourdoughs of a century ago. By the fading glow of a Coleman lantern in an isolated cabin, I resolved that some day, I would go there. It took me twenty years or so, but when I found it, I knew I had found "home." Over the next 25 years, I returned there many times, and on the occasion I knew would be the last, I brought back the small handful of memories shown here in the vase. Among the things on my shelves, these dried seedheads are one of my dearest treasures, as is the wooden bear, hand-carved by sister-of-my-heart Alison.

Dark-Eyed Junco, Junco Hyemalis Female

Day 110: Colloquially, they're called "snow birds" by many of the locals. Some field guides refer to Junco hyemalis as the "Oregon Junco," but more often, you'll find them lumped with other variations (Pink-sided, Slate-colored, etc.) under Dark-Eyed Junco. The ladies of the Oregon variation have a grey hood rather than the black exhibited by the males and can be difficult to distinguish from the Pink-sided form where both occur together. Additionally, there is a lot of subspecies interbreeding to further complicate the issue, a good reason to consolidate these common birds under one heading. Here in the Pacific Northwest, you will see them often and at all times of the year.

Site Steward

Day 109: Amongst other less pleasant things occurring on this day, this morning I attended a training session at Pack Forest for new and old Nisqually Land Trust Site Stewards. I have been a Steward at the Ohop valley property for over half a year now, and learned quite a bit about the other properties the Land Trust manages. I also got to meet other Stewards who work in the same area and was intrigued to find that among us, we perform quite a wide variety of duties. My focus is on wildlife observations, native plants and removal of invasives, and litter patrol. Other tasks include water sampling, salmon inventories, revegetation projects, fence repair and so on.

There was some discussion of a new docent program which is anticipated to open in 2014, a project which interests me keenly. The duties of a docent would include leading nature and photo walks, birdwatching trips and discussions of the area's history. I'm looking forward to becoming more involved with the group in this regard.

Lapis Lazuli, Sky In A Rock

Day 108: One of the options for December's birthstone, lapis lazuli ("LAP-is LAZ-oo-li," not "LAP-is laz-OO-li" is as blue as the sky. It is the gem form of lazurite and often has flecks of pyrite distributed throughout the stone. There has been some debate as to whether or not this is desirable, and even now it boils down to purchaser preference. I happen to like it, and thus purchased most of my rough with pyrite inclusions. On the other hand, veins of white calcite may also be present in the mineral. These are undesirable.

The stone in the pendant measures 20 x 30 mm. I have a small bag of raw pieces, but I gave up lapidary work over forty years ago and sold off all my equipment. I couldn't bear to part with the rocks, though, and still have several boxes of assorted slab material as well as other chunk rough. Collecting rocks is more fun than wearing them in my book!

Memories Of Marmot Skull Gap

Day 107: In my younger years, I spent many days exploring trailless backcountry, my trusty map and compass in hand. It was not uncommon for me to disappear into the wilderness for two weeks at a time, returning to civilization at the end of my sojourn with fir needles caught in my hair, a little puzzled by why friends and relatives alike fretted about me during my absence. I have always been at home in the woods and, at least in the Pacific Northwest, have found it hard to get lost even if I worked hard at it. I nearly always wound up retracing my own footprints, the lay of the land the only "marker" I might need.

On one of these many treks, I was working my way toward a summit and found my way impeded by dense juniper and cedar. It took a bit of scouting, but eventually I found a way through the maze and in the process, discovered the skull of a Hoary Marmot. I did not pick it up, thinking I'd collect it when I came down from my goal, but I got distracted by some other vista and returned via a different path. It was not until I was back in camp that I remembered it, and since I was not going that way again, I wrote it off.

The following year, I returned to the same area and again climbed the same peak, passing through the gap in the brush as I did so, but I failed to find the skull even though I searched. Nevertheless, since the passage through the scrub had not closed in, I dubbed the spot Marmot Skull Gap.

Over several more annual trips, I searched again for the skull and failed to find it. Then one September as I passed through the Gap, a bright white object caught my eye, exposed where I could not have missed it. I am guessing that some critter had carted it off to a den and some other critter had then removed it, but in any event, one jaw was there at my feet. I figured I might be able to find another piece if I searched carefully, and by the time I was done, I had three of the four jaws and all four long front teeth.

Marmot Skull Gap is beyond my physical reach at this point in my life, too many miles and too many days into the interior for me to tackle. I still enjoy map-and-compass day trips, though, and I have these physical reminders of a place I see as clearly in my mind's eye as if I were standing among its tangled branches at this very moment.

Legal Interpretation

Day 106: Skunk should have been a lawyer. She and Tip both know that cats are not allowed on hard surfaces in this house...no cats on counters, no cats on shelves, no cats on the desk or the kitchen table. It is a prohibition I established with them when they were both very young, and it's only been breached a few times, generally with good cause. For example, Tip cannot resist a receipt printed with soy-based ink. He will steal them off the kitchen table regardless of the consequences, so I just don't leave them there.

On the other hand, cats ARE allowed on soft furniture. They can sit in any chair, sleep on the bed, share my pillow, or sit on the covered lid of the toilet while watching me bathe. Soft, good; hard, bad. That's easy.

Since my bobbin lace bolster is quite heavy and cumbersome to use when I'm seated in an arm chair, I like to put it on an end table which I can draw up with one leaf extending over my knees. In order to tilt the bolster toward me, I set it on a rolled-up microfiber blanket and pull it forward so it rests at a slight angle. The blanket keeps it from slipping off the table as well. When I am done with a session, I put the bolster on top of the harpsichord and tuck the table underneath. Today, I neglected that last step before I went to town.

In Miss Skunk's eyes, that blanket-covered table fell under the definition of "soft furniture," and you have to admit, her logic couldn't be faulted. She's accustomed to using the blanket or one like it as a bed. Obviously, I had put it in a new location specifically for her to try out. Any argument I could have presented would have been thrown out as invalid, so I just grabbed the camera, inextricably bound to honor the set of rules I'd laid down.

Minerals Azurite, Pyrite And Stibnite

Day 105: My mineral collection has been confined to boxes in the garage for the last twenty years or more, the occasional specimen only rarely being brought out of storage for a photo shoot or some other short-term project. I simply don't have space to display rocks, nor the patience to keep them dusted. Unfortunately, many of the labels have fallen off individual boxes and my memory is somewhat vague when it comes to the more obscure examples, so today I pulled out a sampling easy to identify.

The blue crystals are azurite, a relatively soft carbonate (hardness 3.5-4.0) found in Arizona and Mexico as well as other sites around the world. Its color comes from copper.

Pyrite (a sulfide) is also known as "fool's gold," although any fool knows that gold does not occur as cubic or octahedral crystals. It is often found in hydrothermal deposits. It has a hardness of 6.0-6.5.

Stibnite is another sulfide. Its primary component is the element tin. It is quite soft (hardness 2.0) and its long, slender crystals have a beautiful silvery sheen.

Conference Room Curtains

Day 104: The curtains are beginning to close over the windows of our second-storey offices at Longmire, their beautiful draperies reaching ever downward as daytime temperatures allow for only minor melting. We keep the ones above the visitors' entrance knocked down lest one fall on a passerby, but the ones on the rear of the building and outside the conference room where people on the ground are protected by a roof are being allowed to grow and die as they will. The roof itself is burdened with several feet of snow now, and in the "warm zone" close to the heated building, the remains of arm-thick icicles are scattered in chunks up to two feet long.

While visitors played in the snowy "yard," I chuckled at the comments borne upward on the cold, crisp air. "Wow! Look at those icicles!" "Don't get too close, honey. You don't want one to fall on you." Adults and children alike love these magnificent spectacles of winter, as do we who sit inside watching their fingers stretch down, seeking the snowy field below.

Fish Tales

Day 103: There was a time when my fishing buddy and I inventoried the waters at least once each week every week of the year. Whether we were pulling put-and-take trout out of Mineral Lake, netting smelt in the Cowlitz, dragging silvers up through 80 feet of free air at Riffe fishing bridge, wrestling with king and coho salmon in the Tilton River or casting mud shrimp up against an ocean jetty hoping for surf perch or cabezon, we purposed to catch fish and did so most successfully. However, Sande had one great weakness in his piscatorial skills, and that was that his reflexes were not quite fast enough to set the hook reliably in the mouth of a salmon. He missed more than he caught, much to his frustration as I stood beside him pulling them in one after another. I coached him repeatedly, not realizing then that the problem was deeper than age. He was in the first phases of Parkinson's disease and his motor control was diminishing.

On one particular morning, my phone rang and I was surprised to hear him open the conversation with the statement that he had gone fishing without me on the Puyallup. Referring to one of our favorite spots, he said, "You know the blue building? I went down there. And you know what? I caught a nice big salmon!"

I wasn't sure which part of that statement shocked me the most, that he'd gone fishing without me or that he'd hooked and landed a salmon unaided. Since the latter wasn't a total impossibility, I began asking stupid questions as I tried to absorb the information. "You went fishing without me? All by yourself?" Already I was making plans to show up on his doorstep the following morning.

"And guess what else?" he continued. "I waded out..."

"You waded out?" I interrupted. "You? In the Puyallup? On those slippery rocks?" He never liked to wade. This was unthinkable!

He continued his narrative over the top of my blithering. "I waded out right where that one big branch sticks out, and in about five minutes, I got another bite." A significant pause ensued, during which I made assorted incomprehensible choking sounds and just as I was getting my breath, he added, "...and I caught another nice fish."

This was more than I could bear. "TWO??? You caught TWO SALMON??? Without ME?" I was horrified, aghast, shocked to the very core of my being. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that he hadn't even invited me along! He hadn't even told me he was going!

Then, much to my increasing consternation, he added the final insult, "And then I said to myself, 'What do I need HER for?'" It was playfully put, but the truth of it wounded me deeply. He really didn't need me there to offer my usual commentary on where to cast, how long to let the bait sink, how to govern its bounce along the rocks on the river bottom without getting snagged up. Visions of being outfished began running through my head. He'd never caught as many salmon as I reeled in during the season.

At this point, I was reduced to sputtering the same phrases repeatedly. "You went without me and you caught two fish?" I was still jabbering when he added quietly,

"And then I woke up."

A full thirty seconds elapsed before the revelation soaked in. Sande is a Norwegian. He is a consummate storyteller and can keep his face so straight even after he's delivered the punchline that sometimes it's two weeks before you realize you've been had. When it finally hit me that he'd been relating a dream, I howled with laughter. Oh, he'd suckered me in on that one beautifully! He didn't need to catch fish. He'd caught a fisherman!

These days, we only fish together a couple of times each year. He has trouble walking and controlling the trembling in his hands. But when we get together as we did for today's football game, we talk about the good times and the adventures, and remember all the big ones that didn't get away. There were a lot of those.

My Pal Spoolie

Day 102: Meet Spoolie, one of my best childhood friends. He was made for me by my mother when I was about seven and has managed to survive countless moves, being in storage, and other forms of inadvertent abuse. He had a hair transplant and a facelift about thirty-five years ago because his smile was faded and he suffered dreadfully from split ends, but at the core of it, he's the same fellow I loved more than any of my other playmate dolls. He's been on bike rides and backyard campouts. He's gone rock collecting and berry-picking. He's kept me company on many a cold winter night when I was snugged up under the covers reading a book. Who could resist that irrepressible grin?

Spoolie's life and spirit are in his assembly, the warm feel and color of the wood animating him with its magic. They don't wind thread onto wooden spools these days, and more's the pity. Plastic spools simply wouldn't do for a creation like my pal.

Lace

Day 101: Given that I had just shipped off two of my last three bobbin lace bookmarks recently, I decided it was time to make more. I try to keep several on hand for get-well wishes, weddings, condolences and the like, and generally work them up in batches of two per color, using sewing thread for the body of the lace and perle cotton for the gimp along the border. Although sewing thread is considered a heavyweight material for this type of lace-making, the finer threads are generally only available in white and cream.

The card beneath the lace is called a pricking. It shows where each element of the design is to be placed, and is perforated before mounting on the bolster so that pins may be inserted to stabilize the lace during construction. Sometimes a pricking allows for a variation of motifs. The pins used in bobbin lace are finer and shorter than standard sewing pins. As threads are crossed or twisted (passed over an adjacent thread from left to right, or from right to left), a pin is put into place at the junction of the threads and then "closed" with a similar action of the threads. Additional twists may be added to make a more rigid lace. Bobbins are generally worked in pairs and are often weighted with beads at the end of each bobbin shank which not only prevent them from rolling around on the bolster but also help the lacemaker to identify their position. When you have several dozen bobbins in play, it's easy to lose track!

These little bookmarks take about an hour and a half to complete. They require 14 pair of bobbins, two pair carrying the gimp threads and twelve for the working threads. I've completed one since loading the bolster yesterday, and have just begun the one shown here.

Today's Mail

Day 100: I had been alerted to the fact that I had a package containing small parts headed my way from Canada, but I was not expecting it to arrive for a few more days. When I discovered it in my mailbox today, I took it, per instructions, to a spot where I could open it without fear of cats making off with tiny things. As it turned out, the items were safely contained, and oh, what wonderful gifts!

My Canadian friend's woodworking skills are legend. I already had two beautiful pens she had given me, but this ebony fountain pen has already achieved "favorite" status. There is nothing quite like the feel of writing with a fountain pen, even if your penmanship is as dreadful as mine. I suspect it will inspire a Morgan Corbye story or two as it glides across paper.

The lace-making bobbins could not have been more timely. I just started a bobbin-lace project this morning. The narrow shafts of these will allow them to be clustered on the bolster much more easily than the "fat-handled" batch I'm currently using. Thank you, Di!

Arts Of Bygone Days

Day 99: Most of my needleart skills were learned at my grandmother's knee, and an exacting teacher she was! When I was a child not yet in kindergarten, she had me embroidering pillowcases and handkerchiefs with the stricture "across four threads and back two" governing the length of each stem stitch. I credit her with also educating me in the fine art of patience, something she readily owned to doing. As a young woman, I found employment as an art-needlework consultant, and it was in that shop that I learned one art my grandmother didn't know: tatting. Some time later, I discovered bobbin lace and added that to my repertoire.

At one time, I entertained the idea of opening a small school for students of stitchery, thinking I might call it "Arts of Bygone Days." It never came to pass, and I have contented myself with giving the occasional class in one or another of these crafts.

Top left: bobbin lace employs threads generally much thinner than sewing thread wound on wooden bobbins in pairs. The hexagonal dainty measures approximately three inches from tip to tip, and was made using size 120 cream thread. It required 22 working pairs of bobbins and two pair of gimp bobbins. Thanks to this photo session, I finally got around to putting a linen center in it!

Top right: tatting is worked with a shuttle or shuttle-and-ball, and most commonly utilizes #70 tatting cotton or fine (#30) crochet cotton. It is comprised of rings and chains ornamented with picots (loops of a single thread). It's a wonderful "pocket hobby" since the work can be easily stuffed in a small bag for transport.

Bottom left: most people are familiar with crocheting, and there are many different styles within the art. Filet crochet is made in blocks of double-crochet stitch for a very solid look, and Irish crochet is characterized by its abundance of picots. I prefer working with #30 or #50 cotton and hooks in sizes 10-14.

Bottom right: knitting is worked with two or more needles (socks, gloves and mittens generally take four). The finer sizes (0 and smaller) are referred to as "knitting pins," and are used to make delicate lace. Pins come in sets of five to allow doilies to be divided into working quarters.

My grandma was a great one for never allowing her hands or mine to be idle!

Notions

Day 98: My hands are so small that it is very difficult to find a thimble to fit, and although I generally prefer to hand-stitch while wearing a leather one (even harder to find in my size), I keep a couple of metal ones handy. It takes a bit of practice to learn to use a thimble. In fact, most peoples' tendency is to hold the finger wearing the thimble out of the way at first, but once you have mastered the art of using one, you'll never have to worry about driving the eye of the needle into your hand. The point is another matter, and many's the time I've sewn myself to a piece of fabric by picking up a thin layer of skin, only to discover that I can't lay the fabric aside when I want to get up and go for a cup of coffee.

Every person who stitches by hand should keep a supply of various sizes and styles of needle in their sewing kit. Once again, it will take some practice to learn to use a curved needle, but this tool is particularly useful when stitching seams in heavy materials such as canvas. Likewise, a three-sided sailmaker's needle will pierce leather when a standard needle would bind.

I have a notion that your sewing tasks will be much easier if you use the proper tool for the job!

Really, Really Peeved

Day 97: Don't pi** off black birds. They may blow up or go to pieces.

These little Angry Birds are erasers which double as puzzles, and while I'd never dream of using one to "cancel half a line," I did take one of them apart. The tiny, rubbery pieces aren't truly interlocking, so it was an exercise in patience to get the Bird reassembled. Not gonna do that again!

A sucker for the Angry Birds games, I still have yet to purchase the Star Wars version, although I played a few levels on a friend's iPhone. What the heck, it's something to do in between chapters of "Barnaby Rudge."

Topsy-Turvy

Day 96: Cabin fever is setting in. I am getting tired of photographing "objects" and want to get out in the field to look for interesting stuff. I want birds and wildflowers and lichens and landscapes! Let me get out of the house, please!

Well, it's winter. What can I say? There just aren't any wildflowers, the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest could be shot in color and you'd never know they weren't monochromes, most of the lichens are under snow and the five or six species of birds which are now coming to my feeders have been photographed more times than I can count. However, as I was returning from the obligatory morning cloud shoot, I saw potential in a Douglas Fir cone. I picked it up and had gone no more than a dozen feet farther before deciding it would probably be a dumb thing to photograph and I was just on the edge of tossing it away when the reflection of its parent tree on the hood of the car caught my eye. An idea started to form.

It wasn't easy to position the camera so that the roof of the carport didn't get into the frame and I had to use my elbows for a tripod, but I got the "floating cone" effect I wanted. Now, please bring me some sign of spring before I climb the walls!

Porcelain Petals

Day 95: The porcelain petals of the roses ornamenting this tiny container are only barely more than paper-thin, so delicate and dainty that I keep it safely behind glass. It was a gift from a friend who purchased it in England. I love the intensity of color in the flowers, contrasted so beautifully against the creamy white. The interior cavity is only an inch in diameter, and although I don't keep jewelry in it, it would be perfect for a small item like the pinky ring I've chosen to display beside it.

The ring is equally dainty. The stone is a sapphire which my father brought back from India at the end of WW II. My late husband faceted it from the rough and set the finished stone in 14 karat white gold.

Hard Water

Day 94: I returned to work today after two weeks off, and discovered that winter had settled on Longmire with a vengeance. The parking area which had only been lightly dusted with snow before Christmas was a solid sheet of ice and the ground was covered with approximately two feet of white cold. I went out walking during lunch, Yak Trax on my boots not entirely adequate to keep me from slipping and sliding, although I made it as far as the Community Building on the far side of the river and back without incident. I took the obligatory snow photos because who can resist a winter wonderland? But what really intrigued me was the moss encapsulated by ice just outside the back door of the Administration Building.

Getting a shot was tricky. The nodules were forming even as I tried to focus, drips from the eave above spattering as they hit the rounded surfaces. I'd get the lens close and...splat! I'd have to wipe it dry again. But persistence paid off and I was glad to go indoors again to reheat my chill-reddened hands. It's hard to run camera buttons with mittens on!

Enhydros Amethyst And Watermelon Tourmaline

Day 93: Back in the days when I was rockhounding, I had quite an extensive array of thumbnail and small mineral specimens on display in a cabinet. When I moved here over twenty years ago, I boxed them up and put them away "for keeps" in the garage. A few times each year, I find a reason to pull down the boxes, looking for some specific rock for some project or another, and occasionally, I can't bear to tuck a favorite out of sight again.

A few days ago, I discovered a tiny white plastic box in the back of my desk drawer while I was looking for the stapler. "Oh!" I said to self, "Is that where I put the watermelon tourmaline? That'd make a good macro subject!" But it seemed lonely all by itself, so I decided to include the amethyst.

Both of these crystals are unusual, although not expressly rare. Tourmaline crystals are long and thin, and have a crystal lattice which causes them to appear darker or lighter depending on the angle of view. The watermelon effect is only seen in cross-section, but if you were to view a full-length crystal from the outside, it would appear almost black. The green only becomes apparent when it is cut and viewed at 90° to the plane.

The amethyst is exceptional in that it is an enhydros, i.e., it contains small bubbles of water inside it, each with an even tinier air bubble floating along like the bubble in a carpenter's level. The water was trapped inside as the molten quartz cooled.

Although both of these specimens are small (the amethyst is about an inch long), they represent two of the oddest geologic novelties in my collection. They're not going out to the garage!

Tasteful

Day 92: As part of my New Year's celebration, I bought a jar of "inexpensive" caviar, a product I've had on several previous occasions and always enjoyed. Oh, it's salty, to be sure, and perhaps the pricier versions are less so, but since I have never tried them, I have nothing to compare. Served atop plain crackers and a smear of cream cheese garnished with green onions, a little roe goes a long way.

This particular brand comes from the inelegantly named lumpfish. The individual grains are pleasingly firm and flavourful. Sturgeon be hanged, I've made my own from shad roe which, admittedly, goes better as a sandwich spread than a savoury treat.

Swirly Things

Day 91: My two "sisters of the heart" managed a meet-up last fall in Portsmouth NH and went on a shopping trip, thinking of gifts for Christmas and other occasions. They stopped at a store which sold marbles on a "you-pick-'em" basis (individually) and shared a chuckle over "great minds think alike" as each of them selected ones they knew I'd enjoy. These arrived yesterday in honor of my birthday.

It isn't obvious in this photo, but the two farthest back are the biggest doggone shooters I have ever seen. They're enormous at a full inch and a quarter in diameter! The foreground swirlies are standard shooter size and the cat's-eye slightly smaller.

When I was little, I kept my marble collection in a fruitcake tin and loved to arrange a line of my favorite "jewels" in the recess at the edge of the lid. I would tilt the lid to set them spinning, absolutely entranced by the ever-changing "light show" created by the colors. The sound drove my mother bananas! She'd put up with it for only so long and then would try to sidetrack me onto another project. It seldom worked for long!

Every now and then, I pour my present stockpile out on the floor and search out favorites. White swirlies rank very high on the list! Thanks, Patty!