stash

Today I'm back in Illinois, relaxing with my family and looking forward to celebrating Christmas. There is still Christmas knitting to be done, mostly on my gift for Mom, but I tried to pack light for the car ride back out here, so I don't have any extraneous projects at the moment to distract me from the real work at hand.

I left all this beautiful yarn in New York:


These are my favorites, displayed on the overwhelmingly pink wall of my New York bedroom.
From left to right I've got Lisa Souza Sock! yarn in South Pacific, bought after listening to the Lime and Violet podcast. Those ladies sure can conjure up yarn lust.

The pink skein is Dream in Color Classy (Merino wool) in a color called China Apple. This skein came from my favorite LYS in Des Moines, Knitted Together and it was thanks to a gift of yarn money from my Grandmother I was able to buy such a luxurious bit of yarn. It's a worsted weight, and I have no idea what I'll do with it.

Next, the blue skein is Mountain Colors Bearfoot. Back when I had my employee discount at Iris Fine Yarns in Appleton I bought an embarrassing amount of yarn, and this was one of those skeins that came home with me. Serviceable, I know this will turn into a lovely pair of socks somewhere down the road, but it's wall decoration for now.

The chocolate color on the far right is alpaca yarn I picked up at the Cooperstown farmer's market from Linda, the alpaca farmer who lives down the road from me in New York. I pass her farm every day and wave at the happy alpaca who live there. Linda is a very savvy farmer who knows that she has to have a market for her goods, or there's no profitability to breeding alpaca. Alpaca fiber is amazing, silky and dramatic while incredibly warm and soft, probably my favorite high-end yarn, and Linda knows its value. This little splurge was totally worth it though, since it gave me an excuse to strike up a conversation with Linda in the first place.

Finally, the blue skein is the one I'm most proud of having in my collection. It's wool from the 1850 flock at Living History Farms, naturally dyed with indigo in a big copper pot over an outdoor woodfire. Katie, the 1850 domestic supervisor, was an early friend of mine in Iowa and we bonded over food and fiber love, so when I finally got a play day away from 1900 and came to work Wednesdays on her farm, fiber was what I worked with the most.

We spent afternoons carding and spinning on the wheel, until, on my last day there, I Navajo-plied what I had spun and came away with a beautiful even 3-ply skein of wool, alive with a subtle gradation of indigo. Katie gave me this skein as a going away present when I left for New York. Characteristically, I don't want to spoil it's current state to make it into something else more beautiful/useful, just in case I ever change my mind.

The potential of an untouched skein is vast; sometimes it's just nice to have all those options waiting to be tapped.

Grunt

Fire Good!

The Quilt (Part I)

I have been knitting. Oh yes, I have been knitting. It's all for gifts though so I can't show and tell just yet. In the meantime, allow me to showcase my mom's craft: quilting.

I don't remember my mother ever not quilting, though I know once upon a time she didn't. When I was growing up, one of the best rooms for playing in was Mom's quilting room; she had cabinets full of notions and shelves of fabric. To my great horror she would throw out huge scraps of that fabric, just the bits that were too small to become pattern pieces. I would paw through the scraps and salvage the bigger pieces to start my own fabric collection, sometimes even sewing them together in vaguely pictorial scenes. I put a swatch of green corduroy (what on earth was Mom doing with green corduroy that I wound up with that much of it?) next to a swatch of light blue and "appliqued" on a flower that the generous might describe as daisy-ish. I made an American flag with 10 stripes and about 3 stars. I took a kids quilting class at a local fabric store and made a passable wall hanging of, first, a garden of veggies and then a fusable webbing collection of hearts. I liked them ok, but I knew they were not the sort of thing Mom did and they were therefore not quite right.

Mom meanwhile was churning out beautiful bed quilts and lap quilts and wall hangings and all sorts of fantastic things. Here and there among the simpler ones were quilts she would call masterpieces- the ones she spent years or more on, with elaborate apliqued borders and miles of intricate hand quilting. There was the grape basket quilt, pearly gray and rich purples, based around a set of blocks for someone else's quilt top that never quite happened. And the Virtuous Lady, still in production (I think) in warm earthy colors with a border that makes me think back to medieval manuscript marginalia.

(illuminated page from a Bible, manuscript painting, Flemish, early 14th century.
Photo from Medieval Art, Verinoca Sekules
click for detail)

She's very good at those kinds of borders.

Quilting is the only thing I think Mom does that she gives herself due credit for being really really really good at. She accepts praise for being a good teacher, a good wife and mother, a good person, often too humbly. Her quilts are something else altogether. She gets her masterpieces appraised and has a dollar amount to associate with them. Quilts are not tifles and are only given away as signs of deep love to those she cares about most. I am one of the lucky ones and have never been without a quilt of my own. There are three that have been made just for me: a pastel shoofly that covered my bed for most of my childhood, a stark, linear blue and white quilt that she started for me when I was a baby and I had to grow into a bit, and a brushed cotton twin-extra long quilt that she made to keep me warm at college. Mom has never been stingy with quilted love, especially to family.

My family is full of creative people. You can't turn your head in my parent's house without seeing something beautifully handcrafted. There's a painting that I love of the ancestral barn, done by my uncle's uncle. Long silk and satin dresses in my old closet that my aunt made for my highschool dances. A beautiful photograph of a wooded river taken by my Grandpa and framed under his direction. My grandmother's quilts for my brother and I used to be there, but we can't bear to part with them so now they're with us. My mom's quilts, of course, are everywhere. And the house itself is my dad's creation, from the second story addition (electrical and plumbing too, yes) to the remodeled kitchen.

I do the knitting thing, of course, but this summer I decided I wanted to make a quilt. A real quilt. Pieced on a machine, none of this fusable webbing stuff. When I went home to visit in September, Mom and I went to the fabric store and bought a little bit of new fabric and used a bunch of her scraps to round out the collection. So there's a lot of Mom and a little of me in the fabric. I picked a pattern (Dutchman's Puzzle) and she did the math to make everything work out to the right size. She showed me how to use the rotary cutter to cut pieces and guided me through piecing the first block, making sure the points were clear and neat.

I had to pack up the sewing machine (borrowed from Grandma) to move it to New York, so the project waited. Once I got out here though, I went to town and the blocks are all finished now. I took a few pictures of my favorites; there are 16 blocks all together.

Animals make photoshoots tricky...

After three days of driving, during which Abigail the kitten and I were beset by snowstorms and icy roads, I made it to my new abode in Fly Creek, New York. By the time I got off the well traveled roads, the sky was darkening rapidly and I was more than a little nervous. When I got to the house, Brett had left the light on, but, not counting the pets, I was alone. In the dark. In the cold (the heat was out). Surrounded by forests and fields.

There was no phone service at the house. There was no internet connection. I've never felt more isolated than I did that first night, waiting for Brett to get back from Austin.

The whole reality of what I had done was terrifying. There had been no room for doubt; for weeks I did not allow myself to second guess the decision I had come to so painstakingly for fear that someone would see my worry and talk me out of it. I wanted to come here and do this "adventure" thing and, having arrived, I had to either tough it out or collapse into a puddle of directionless emotions. I unpacked and cleaned and did whatever I could to take my mind off my insanity.

Once I finally unpacked the car, I drove back down the road until I got cell reception (There is none at the house. Or anywhere nearby, apparently.) and immediately pulled to the side of the road, punched the flashers, and called my parents. I felt that night like I did at slumber parties, or gone away to camp: trying to be brave and focus on the excitement, but not quite confident enough to not feel desperately, horribly homesick.

I fell asleep on the couch, waiting for Brett to get back, and when he did, another person in the house made everything so much easier. No longer alone, it was easier to be happy about the move and to enjoy the chance to do whatever I wanted with my time. I baked cookies and planned a cheap grocery list and knitted and sewed. I drove around and looked for someone to hire me part time, discovering, again, that I lack the self confidence necessary to believe that anyone should hire me or would even want to. Logically, I know I rock. Emotionally, it's much less certain. But I picked up application after application to jobs I'm extremely overqualified for. Until I finally got up the nerve to walk in to Portabello's, where, after I made a joke about pirates, they offered me a job on the spot. The restaurant is very nice and the family who runs it is delightful. I like going to work there, though I'm still learning just about everything I need to know to do my job well. It's only been a week. I'll pick it up.

The pictures I have for you are of the house and surrounding land. (Taken from the comfort of the now warm house)

The view upon walking in the front door. Two bedrooms off to the right, one of which is mine. Rest of the house is off to the left, starting with a mudroom with the door to the basement and the sliding glass doors to the back porch.



A little further is the kitchen and what we've made into the dining room. Off to the left there is what may someday be a sitting room. As you can see, there is a pool table there now. It is not ours and was not supposed to be there. It's a pain.


From the corner of what may someday be the sitting room. Complete with prowling Abby.


From the foot of the stairs looking back towards living room. Upstairs is Brett's room. It has a deck and a jacuzzi, but no heat vents. It is therefore very cold most of the time.

From the window at the foot of the stairs the view to the front yard is thus:


And the back yard looks like this:


(The stone thing is a huge firepit. I like marshmallows and hotdogs.)

Chester is looking out the window in the pool table room.


And this is what he sees:

That's Brett and Honus, at the edge of the yard. The steel garage thing is not on the property, but just barely. The "road" next to it is the property line.


Maybe someday I can train Honus not to bolt when he's outside and we won't have to leash him for walks, but I'm still working on it.

Every time I'm out for a drive I see things I want to show you all. My midwestern experience with farmland is that the road is straight and the farm houses/barns/etc are set pretty far back from the roads. Here, the road takes the path of least resistance around the hills and often splits farmsteads right in half with the house and garage on one side and the barn and other outbuilding on the other. One pretty white Georgian farmhouse with a wrap around porch has a large molding around the front door, wide enough on the lintel that they set a row of pumpkins over the top of the door.

In summation: I'm here, safe, employed, and now, finally, blessedly, connected to the internet.