Kelly's Green: gardens, books, yarn, laundry...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

We were out in the front garden last night after supper, running around and checking on the caterpillars, when I noticed one decidedly out of place, parked far away from the food, on the porch railing. “Silly thing,” I thought, “let’s get you out of here and back at the buffet where you belong.” I went off to find a suitable leaf to scoop it up, planning to reunite it with its siblings who were still plowing through the food supply as relentlessly as, I’m told, teenage boys can. The caterpillar didn’t move in the moment I was gone: it was still there, still as death.

It didn’t look that good, really, its bright stripes shadowed to a dingy grey, head down but making no progress towards the bed where the milkweed was growing, just stuck there…

Exactly. Stuck there, with a tiny white blob of something gluing it upside down to the wood. It wasn’t moving because it was on the brink of moving on, done with this caterpillar business, and ready for something else.

It was too dark to take a picture then, but this morning, I found this:

That little bit of scurf at the top is what’s left of the stripy caterpillar skin. I know that because we interrupted today’s breakfast to watch this:

The caterpillar twisted and squirmed as it shucked itself out of its old skin. And it didn’t take long for the new pupa – which was still fairly fat and soft and grub-like when it first emerged -- to shrink itself up into a hard shell (can you see how the orange stripes condensed?) to wait for what’s next.

Monarch Watch says 10 to 14 days. We’ll be waiting, too.

Postscript: the butterflies have arrived! Follow the whole story here.

In which the lazy gardener is rewarded

The clock is ticking on the garden’s open day deadline. In my dreams I see calendar pages shuffling off into the air, Hollywood style, like the leaves that are falling from the weeping cherry tree too soon because it’s so, so dry. The soil in places is like powder; young trees are wilting, and I can’t drag the hoses around fast enough. I will not want to open the water bill when it comes next month.

And whose idea was it to pick up a last minute freelance job (Appliances! Furniture! Color trends!) that’s got me indoors writing when I need to be out pulling weeds? (How about paying for the water bill, and all those extra plants I keep tucking empty spots in the borders. Oh, right.)

But Sunday afternoon, I was out weeding, working right by the front door. A friend who will be helping out on the open day would be dropping off her daughter to baby sit in a few hours. I didn’t want her to be losing sleep over the state of the place (that’s my job) so I thought I’d spiff up the beds on either side of the front walk.

I’m about to start yanking the weedy vines that are covering a little boxwood, and I spot these:

Now I’m pretty sure those are monarchs, but they can’t be, I think, because this is bindweed, the weed I was planning to pull, and the monarchs only eat milkweed. Nine comes over and takes a look. She thinks they’re monarchs, too. Time for little research: monarch + larvae + bindweed -- and boom: Monarch Watch gives me blue vine, Cynanchum laeve, which, though often mistaken for bindweed, is a milkweed (though not an Asclepias, which are the milkweeds I know) and a great late season food source for monarch larvae.

Back out to the garden, and here I am having a little paradigm shift right there by my front porch. Well of course, it’s a milkweed; that explains the bright orange yellow aphids, and look, there’s the cluster of white flowers just like the photo, and oh my: look at all of the caterpillars.

Six comes on over, considers the situation, and announces “We’ve got a caterpillar farm!” – and it’s him, out of all of us, who spots (even before he goes back inside to get his cowboy/rancher hat) the tiniest ones of all. We count nearly twenty monarch larvae, grazing away on the leaves.

Checking on our fattening herd this morning, I discover the lovely little things are doing my weeding for me.

Counting down the days until the garden’s open, I’m fighting the urge to be conventionally presentable, remembering overheard chatter a few years ago during a Garden Conservancy open day at a truly great local garden, which the chatterers found “kinda weedy.” I keep reminding myself that one visitor’s “weedy” is somebody else’s “habitat,” and that’s part of what this garden is about: lots of things live here, not only us; some times I just let things be, gardening by benign neglect.

So, caterpillars: Eat up guys and girls, and then how about if you all go off and transform yourselves into lovely butterflies and let me mop up your leftovers in, say, about a week and a half. Can we do that? Do we have a deal?

Postscript: As of 6:00 pm Monday, it’s raining, gloriously raining.

Knitting with the goddesses

No, I don’t mean my S&B group (although things are shaping up to get back together starting in September – yeah!), or even Ann and Kay. The picture is my mid-August Monthly dishcloth, and as soon as I figured out it was a slipped stitch pattern, I went to flip through that section in the third Barbara Walker book, which I’ve been renewing and renewing from our public library (it’s the only one of her books they have). I didn’t find the pattern in there, but I did find this:

“Color patterns of this type tend to be small, with comparatively few stitches and rows to repeat; so they are easily learned by novice knitters. Beginners are usually delighted by the dazzling fabrics that can be easily obtained with color patterns.” (Charted Knitting Designs 226)

I’ve said it before, how smitten I am with slipping stitches: Big Dotty, and the substitute Nina border, and of course the ubiqui-ballband, and so Miranda Novice Knitter felt her feelings a bit hurt reading that, like maybe Ms. Walker was suggesting it was only puppy love.

My new-ish knitter’s eyes tend to sort the handknits I see into pieces that seem to be mostly about color, and pieces that seem to be about texture and stitch patterning. (Which puts lace and sturdy cabled things in the same category; is that odd?) I’m a color addict myself (witness the garden, and my required daily dose of Kaffe) – but I suspect what hooks me about the slipped stitch color patterns is the way color and texture are inseparably intertwined.

Elizabeth Zimmerman seems to be poised to enter my knitting life, too, thanks to that baby sweater I posted yesterday. We’ve owned it for years (please don’t be upset Knitters, I’ve seen the light now, really I have) and while I’ve been fond of it (in a “What a lovely sweater, thank you, loved and worn by 2 daughters and their toys” sort of way) I don’t think I had ever truly looked at it. And now I find myself able to see it in a way I never could before (Again, like in the garden, when your eyes open because plants you know suddenly emerge from the haze of green). I want to make this sweater. Thanks to all of you who pointed the way to the pattern.

And libraries: I don’t own a Barbara Walker yet, and I’ll find a way to borrow EZ first. Clickity click click, readers (me included) are finding their way between blogs and LibraryThing. So much of what I read and look at these days comes from the public library (we have a great one): it’s partly economy, partly trying to reduce my own possessiveness, and partly simply believing that public libraries are a very good thing. LibraryThing isn’t meant to be a wish list generator – but I’m giving serious thought to tagging for my library catalog there the books I may not own on my shelves, but own in my head and my heart. Chaucer’s Oxford scholar wished for twenty books at his bedside – an extravagant number, of course, for the time – but I’m thinking that’s quite the possibly the ideal size for a personal library: just enough to carry, maybe, if you had to pick them up and run.

Baby knits

It wouldn’t be entirely true to say that this Mason Dixon Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono is finished. I’ve woven in the ends I’m done with, but (in spite of what the pictures suggest) the piece is still unseamed – on purpose. I’m scheming some variations on the kimono, and want to be able to fiddle around with it while it’s still a piece of fabric.

Various kimono-commenters on the Mason Dixon KAL have been wishing to see more kimonos on actual babies. We’re a bit short on those around here at the moment (and the baby this kimono is destined for isn’t due until December). So I went hunting in the kids’ rooms for a likely substitute, and came up with this:

Even though Jennifer Rabbit isn’t exactly newborn size in all her dimensions, she does fit the one baby handknit we have, a sweater that the wife of one of D’s colleagues made for baby Eleven. (Didn’t know a lot of knitters back then ….)

So I pinned the kimono sleeves and sides together, and gave it a try. Good to see the kimono wrapping around a big, fat bunny belly – it made me want to choose a method of closing it that will adjust as baby grows.

But back to that baby sweater: does anyone recognize the pattern? (It would have to be at least twelve years old.) Or was it the product of an old favorite, learned it from a friend baby sweater recipe? Please comment if you can supply any clues.

I’ve been looking at it closely, trying to figure out how it’s put together – and have surprised myself by just how much sense I’ve been able to make of the knitting. Maybe it’s time to venture a little farther into sweater making… (And yes, the Addi Turbo is heading back to the Not a Rug Vest right away.)

Back to school

Nobody cried this morning when it was time to head back to school -- but I remembered one time when I did. Eleven was about four months old, and we were out for our morning walk through the neighborhood. I pushed her stroller around a corner -- and there was a big yellow school bus, and there were the moms and the dads, taking pictures and waving goodbye.... How could they possibly, I remember wondering, how could they possibly ever let them go?

The biggest editing project of all

Kind of a gap on the calendar over there… Where have I been? Outside, because I can’t dodge the date I’ve been in denial about all summer any longer. The biggest editing project of all does not, in fact, involve writing (although two editors are waiting, right now, in the middle of August, to hear from me on matters related to October). And it’s not as if I haven’t know about this thing for about, say, oh, a year. (Yes, I’m still dodging; I’ll get to the point.) It is, fact, the garden, which, on the morning of the second Saturday in September, is Open. Just for a local fundraiser, but still: folks will be asked to put a five dollar bill in the cash box in return for the privilege (yikes) of having a wander through our three quarters of an acre.

There is, sad to say, no closet big enough to scoop all that’s out of place into and shut the door. I’m pulling weeds as fast as I can, and the compost heaps and the brush pile are growing. I’m watering things, too, which is not something I do ordinarily. Normally, newly planted things get watered around here just long enough to have a good shot at settling in and surviving – days, maybe, for an annual; months for a tree – and then they are on their own. (This also explains why I’m dreadful with houseplants.) You stack the deck in the garden, of course, by choosing plants that are appropriate for the site and the climate, and by giving them good soil to grow in. Tough love, more or less, but that’s what I’ve got time for. And quite honestly, it’s an enormous learning experience, to see what thrives where, especially the plants that seed themselves in the beds from year to year. That’s part of the garden editing process: choosing what to do with what shows up on its own – Keep it? Move it? Yank it? That third choice segues into weeding, which I love to do (really) – by hand; it’s the best way to slow down and look closely at the plants.

A few additions are in the works, too; filling in blank spots and fine tuning places I’ve been waiting to fix. (Nothing like a deadline, is there?) One of those places took up the better part of Saturday.

I’ve been wanting to add some sort of water (a fountain, a pond, something) to the garden for ages. With the open date approaching, I had started looking a bit more seriously for something, like a a stock tank or a galvanized wash tub, to turn into raised pond, but never saw anything that seemed right. Until Saturday morning – I was driving past a second hand furniture store, and there it was, big and shiny on the sidewalk outside:

Before and after:

The plants – an ornamental grass, some purple coneflower, and a dozen or so yellow daylilies – were all dug, divided and transplanted from elsewhere in the garden. I still need a pump and/or a fountain to make the water move: when water from the hose hits the sides of the tub it sounds just like rain on a metal roof – that’s the effect I’m looking for.

And managing, barely, to squeeze some knitting in, after dark.

Anyone who’s doing the monthly dishcloth KAL will recognize this:

It’s my first one since signing up for the KAL at the end of July, and I’m so happy that it’s a slip stitch pattern; I love them.

My first Mason Dixon Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono is so close to done I can’t stand it:

Nine is cheering me on for this one, since the needle it’s on is the one I need to get back to the Not-a-rug-anymore Ninepatch Vest. The sock? The Cedric Diggory Memorial Scarf? Don’t even ask.

News flash: it’s not a rug any more

Eleventy-billion ends woven in, I had laid the two halves of the nine patch bathmat/rug down to match the pieces for the middle seam, and popped in a big safety pin a few inches from the edges. I am staring at it, mulling “Border or no border? I know, I’ll ask the readers.” Nine appears, picks it up and pops it over her head, like a vest, and announces she loves it, it’s the coolest thing she’s ever seen, and all it needs is a button, and, well, a few more inches of back. “Can I have it please, Mom?” I am stunned. It actually looks pretty good, and beyond that, fits, even the little sleevelets that form when you match the sides. Apparently, I am not done knitting this thing after all.

“And besides, Mom,” Nine pointed out, when I outgrown it, you can always turn it back into a rug.”

Bib by Eleven

Eleven went shopping in my cotton yarn stash the other day, mapping out a series of solid color Mason Dixon baby bibs matched with burp cloths in coordinating ombres. We'll keep you posted: one bib done, and she's cranking away on the first burp cloth. Go E!

Magic markers

The year I was in tenth grade, my whole family picked up and moved to the suburbs of Paris, while my dad was on a sabbatical. I enrolled (with 2 years of school French behind me) in the Lycee d’Orsay. It’s amazing how quickly you pick up a language when you’re truly immersed in it – but for weeks and weeks, there was the perpetual frustration of not being able to say everything I wanted to. I started to get my new friends’ jokes, for example, but couldn’t tell one myself, unless it was by accident, like when, one sunny afternoon, I announced that I intended to have myself “gilded.” (I was looking for “bronzer,” but it’s not like the English idiom makes any more sense: is it “tan” like the color, or like “tan your hide”?) I got it eventually, to the point where my French was pretty fluent (and still is, with a bit of warm up time – although, Rip Van Winkle-like – it’s the well-preserved French of a sixteen year old schoolgirl in the late 1970’s. Do you still talk like you did when you were sixteen? Probably not. And you can imagine what sort of embarrassing things might happen when a forty-something mother of three starts channeling a Val(ley) de Chevreuse Girl.

Anyway, it’s like that with the knitting. There are things that I imagine making, but I simply don’t know how to make the yarn do that. That’s how it was with the mitered ball band. I was taking a stack of them out of the wash a few weeks ago, and (who knows where these things come from) was inspired to do a bit of laundry room origami, and folded a ball band so that the rows of “bricks” met in a miter. Very cool.

At the point, the only way I knew to do a miter was by following the line by line pattern in Mason Dixon Knitting – and like I’ve said elsewhere, doing the ball band pattern and counting stitches for the decreases in the miter felt like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. Could not do it.

In the meantime, though, Mason Dixon Kay put her Ninepatch Dishcloth up on the Mason Dixon blog, and, in the process of cranking through 2 dozen little mitered squares for my ninepatch rug/mat (which, by the way, is knit but not sewn – it’s next in line) using a stitch marker – well, that kind of miters were OK now. With that in my knitting vocabulary, I went back to the ball band idea – and this time around, it was a piece of cake.

And so here are the basic things I figured out about how to miter a ball band warshcloth:

HOW TO MITER A BALLBAND

Cast on a odd multiple of 5 stitches (remembering that the finished sides will be approximately half as long as your cast on), placing a marker before the middle stitch (for example: with 45 stitches, on the RS the marker will be on the needle between stitch #22 and stitch #23.)

On the RS, work in the ball band pattern until you get to 2 stitches before the marker. SSK, pass marker, K1, K2tog on the K rows of the pattern; (NOTE: on the P rows of the “bricks” I did P2tog, pm, P1, P2tog, but my decreases probably slant funny. Suggestions for how to decrease in pattern on the purl rows?).

Still on the RS, after the decrease in a “brick” row, you need to figure out how to make the second half of the row be a mirror image of the first half. Go to the last stitch on the left needle, and counting from the end towards the middle, figure out, according to the ball band pattern, which stitches need to be the slipped ones. Resume the ball band pattern at the middle of the row, slipping the stitches you identified (NOTE: this is only really an issue each time you start a set of brick rows; after the first row, the stitches to be slipped are obvious.)

On WS rows, follow the ball band pattern, EXCEPT always P the middle stitch (which is the one BEFORE the marker on a WS row.

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That’s it; not so scary after all. And please, any suggestions about how to streamline this – and how to sort out the purl row decrease – are very welcome.

Another reason why I love the web…

Assorted clicking and linking brought both Yarndex and Smileys across my screen yesterday – kinda like seeing the ocean for the first time. It was another Miranda-ish moment: Oh. My. I never knew. At nine months since I started knitting, yarn stores are starting to feel like less overwhelming places: the more I read (thank you, knit bloggers one and all), the more I can recognize makers and their different yarns, tiny pockets of familiarity, although in terms of yarns I’ve actually knit with, the list is still miniscule.

How not to be overwhelmed all over again? Talking myself through this in terms of gardening: after 20 years of it (OK, it is so bizarre that that could possible be the right number) I can recognize a fair share of what will grow in my part of the world, and if I don’t know it, I’ve got the resources to make a reasonable guess. Of those plants, how many different ones have I actually grown myself? It must be several hundred that I know that much better, whether I’ve managed to keep them or kill them. But take me out of the temperate zone into the tropics, for example, and I’d be right back at the “it’s all green to me” stage. The yarn? It's a whole new world to be curious about.

And then today, Mason Dixon led to The Bookish Girl which led to LibraryThing. Better than sliced bread? You bet. I’ve always been meaning to talk more about books here, and now I’m thinking that even if I’m not managing to write about what I read as much as I’d like to, that part of the conversation can go on in the sidebar (after some fiddling with buttons and widgets). Plus my library will be cataloged – hooray!

First thing today, though, was three hours of weeding and watering in the garden, with the crocosmia in bloom (more orange!) and the company of this lovely creature (it’s a black swallowtail) nibbling on the fennel leaves: