Off the Wagon

On Saturday, I found a sweater's worth of lovely bluebird colored tweed fingering weight yarn on etsy.com. It was being sold at a terrific price, and it took a great deal of willpower not to click on the button.

But I didn't. I even confessed my sin to the pre-teen son, and he shared the near miss with my husband, usually a surefire method to help prevent these nasty slips with my yarn addiction.

On Sunday, with both of them out of the house, I ran a quick check on etsy just to see if the yarn was still available. If all the skeins were still there, I would consider that my message from God, and I would be compelled to buy it as soon as I saw it.

It was gone. All six skeins. Whew.

But I had a long, stressful day today, so when I came in this afternoon, I checked etsy's knitting offerings, narrowing my search to recycled or reclaimed yarns. And I fell off the wagon, folks. Not just a whoops-I-nearly-lost-my-balance slip of a single skein of sock weight wool. This was an all-out effort that took clicking on seven--yes, I am snubbing as I type it--seven separate skeins of turquoise silk/cotton at a much cheaper price than I planned on paying for silk yarn later in the spring. I practically shook when I saw it.

I am knitting like mad to finish the strawberry beret, the striped raglan, and the perfect cardigan before I start the Buttercup top that Frogginette is also knitting. I am not as adventurous as she is; I will probably follow the pattern slavishly.

Anyway, I was doing so well, cleaning out those bags of yarn, knitting them up into nice little items for myself and others. I wonder if I'll be able to avoid another hiccup in the diet. I made it 25 days.

Stash Reduction Continues

January continues to be cold and rainy, so the Stash Reduction Project is working out well. It isn't as if I have nothing else to do. With all the changes in my work schedule, the graduate course I am taking and the college course I am teaching, I have plenty to think about. But thinking about my knitting gets me through my work day.

Since I began the SRP, I have had to be a bit more creative, and that forces me to think about color combinations and pattern adjustments. For example, I am knitting a sweater from some Harrisville Highland tweed. I didn't have enough of that color to make an entire sweater, so I began pulling strands from the yarn stash. The sweater is turning out quite well. I am nearly finished with the body, and even though I have had to ravel a knitted vest to reclaim most of that Harrisville Highland, I can live with that.

Last week, I knitted a beret from hand dyed chunky weight wool--very blueberry. I have enough wool to make another just like it. Actually, I have enough purple hand-dyed wool to make two purple ones just like it, and I am knitting a red one using half hand-dyed recycled merino wool and half solid red. This hat style is not exactly flattering on me, so I'm taking them to work to see if I can sell them for $10 each.

But with a little extra cash in my pocket, I might be tempted to buy some more yarn.

Stash Reduction in Progress

This winter I have tried to go on a yarn diet. My husband would probably say that a yarn diet--at least for me--is never a cold turkey diet. You know the diets where you deprive yourself of every good thing you can imagine--butter, dessert, butter, chocolate, and butter?

That's not my style for food dieting and it isn't my style for yarn dieting, either. However, I recognized the need for some stash reduction back in the fall, so I engaged in some early Christmas gift knitting. I knit a hat for Sarah, a top for Kay, and a few scarves to put back for last-minute gifts. All these items were knit from the stash, but they were small items that didn't really put a big dent in the current holdings. It seems that the more I pull out and go through, the more yarn I have. I believe that like-species find each other in the bins and bags and shelves and find ways to multiply.

So, to lighten the yarn load that must be weighing on the floor joists in my "yarn area" (as if I have only one area!), I knit two items from Way-Back Stash: the Mayer sweater knit from 15 skeins of Aran wool I purchased at a sweater shop in Killarney a few years ago and the End of May Hat (knit from three small hanks of wool I bought in a tiny English village.

The Mayer sweater project was knit almost entirely while watching Days 1-6 of 24. Easy knitting: I made only one mistake that required tinking back. The End of May hat, however, was a white-knuckler most of the time. I'm pretty sure I was what you could describe as surly while that hat was going on, but it was only about three days of knitting, and three days of surly is pretty normal for me.

My reward for the SRPs (Stash Reduction Projects) will be a nice purchase for myself later on. Perhaps it will be some silk or some silky bamboo. I have a nice gift certificate to start with. But, if I shake all the stash yarn out and make it look pretty maybe I could trick myself into believing that all of that yarn is somehow new.

If you have any requests for gifts, now is the time to make them.

My Apologies to William Carlos Williams and My Husband

This Is Just to Say: an apology composed in the garden

I have eaten
the strawberries
that were in
the garden

and which
you were probably
thinking
I would not see.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so warm.


This is what happens when English majors grow their own food.

Blowing in the Wind

5 Reasons to Hang Out Your Laundry

1. It's free; all it takes is a little extra time.
2. Your clothes smell nice. I mean, Bounce smells good as long as you aren't thinking of all the chemicals used to make that smell.
3. Sunlight is a natural bleach. (Which is good for white clothes, but not necessarily for dark, black, or red)
4. Your clothes are easier to iron after they have had a good blow in the breeze. It's true. Try it.
5. Hanging out your naughties on Sunday morning gives the neighbors and the congregants at the church next door something to talk about.

It's Too Dark to Read

It's hard to believe that it's been over a month since my last entry. We've planted all the onions--300 sweet and 400 storage onions--more potatoes, radishes, golden beets, tomatoes, and cabbages. We should be weeding and mulching with compost, but it started raining several days ago, and it hasn't stopped long enough to allow the soil to dry out so that we can get back in there. In the meantime, the weeds are growing as fast as the desirable plants and they like the compost just as much, too.

Fortunately, the spinach and lettuce are growing in raised beds behind the house. They tend to dry out faster, and they are not surrounded by soupy mud that sucks my shoes off. We've been eating fresh spinach for several days, and I picked the first bunch of mesclun lettuce to sell at work.

The easiest way to use up that spinach is to eat it in a salad with homemade balsamic vinegar dressing. A friend at work gave me pecans for Christmas, and I chop those and toss on sometimes or add some parmesan cheese--or both--sometimes. At Easter, I added some fig goat cheese and cranberries to the spinach, and I must say it was quite tasty. I also make a beans and spinach dish that tastes much better than it sounds. I saute a red onion, open three cans of cannelini beans, drain and rinse them, then add them to the onion. A half cube of Knorr veggie bouillon and a cup of water goes in and I simmer that for about 20 minutes before adding four big handfuls of prepared spinach. Once the spinach has wilted, I stir it into down into the beans, add some salt and pepper, and we have a simple, hearty dinner.

I've been quite busy with yet another endeavor. Our sweet little Junie B dog was so sad that, after much research and discussion, we decided to adopt a dog from Kentucky Lab Rescue. We came home from Winchester two weeks ago with a surprise for Junie, and I'm thinking she might wish she hadn't acted so depressed!

Trudy is a handful, to say the least. She's two years old and little more than a giant puppy. We've started obedience training, and I'm not sure whether I'm being trained or she is. She's just about gotten me whipped into shape. Sometimes I think perhaps I made a mistake in taking on yet another project--I counted my unfinished knitting projects last night, and the ones downstairs alone numbered twelve!--but eventually she'll settle down, I hope, and be a good companion for me and I'll be able to rest my feet on her while I read.

I need her near me, because as Groucho Marx says, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

There Is a Season

A compost bin just out the backdoor is handy; it keeps most of our food waste from going down the drain or into the landfill. It would be even more useful if I could get into the habit of taking the food bits straight outside instead of letting them "settle" in the lidded tub we leave in the sink to collect them. Taking potato peels to the bin is much more pleasant when done immediately. But I'm lazy when it comes to compost. I never forget to put the scraps in the kitchen bin; I just forget to transfer them to the big bin outdoors.

I forget to turn the compost, too. Some gardeners claim that there is a science of sorts to keeping a good compost pile or bin. 43% green matter, plus 51% brown matter, or some such formula. I can't ever get it right, but I do know that if I would simply turn the whole mess pretty occasionally my compost would be helped along and I would have my very own fertilizer to add to the garden.

A few weeks ago, I peered into the compost bin, wondering if even the bottom layer could be used in the raised beds. (The bin I have is something like this one, only a bit bigger.) I slid the door up, and the bits from two years ago were still sitting there looking pretty much the way they looked when I threw them in. I felt kind of like an archeologist must feel when digging through old refuse piles. Hey, there are those corn cobs from the roasting ears we made for Mom's birthday party! And the cherry pits from the cherries I preserved! And that was just in the top layer.

Something had to be done. That mess had to be turned, and I am not tall enough and the bin is not wide enough to do it with regular tools--say, a hoe or a pitchfork or even a shovel. So I ordered this compost aerator. I like gadgets, and the price was reasonable. It arrived this afternoon, and it works great. It chops the compost as I push it down, and it turns the compost on the way back up. It wasn't really easy--probably because the compost was old and wet and really packed down--but now that I've done it once, it should be easier next time.

And now that I have a new gadget, I can turn, turn, turn.