The neat thing about poverty…

I charged the batteries for the camera. I put them in the camera. Then I left them there and they lost their charge again. So in desperation I took this horrible picture with my phone:

Isn’t that charming? As you can’t really see, all I’ve done is change the back, which used to be a single plank, so that it matches the front structurally. Looks and is more balanced, although what I had to do it with is 2x4s, so it is not exactly “delicate”. It is well balanced however, and spins just fine. I even secured the pedals, which I had been meaning to do since I built the thing in the first place, but never actually bothered.

The big exciting news right now is that it is, as of this moment, more than 16ºC in my kitchen. (That is around 61ºF, for those who don’t speak metric.) I cannot probably convey how wonderful that is, but I’m going to try.

We’ve been here for five years. When we moved in, as I think I have mentioned before, there were electric rads in all the rooms, but because the house had been abandoned and left open to the ravages of weather and bunnies, the rads were shall we say, less than reliable. To wit, we turned one on and there was a horrible crashing buzzing sound and a flash of blue flame. So we removed them. This was not a big debate with us, because even if they worked perfectly, we cannot afford to pay for electric heat. Not in an “oh, that money could be spent on so many other things” kind of way, but in a brutally simple “that money simply isn’t there and can’t be spent at all” kind of way.

We might have been able to swing gas heat, back then, although gas prices have gone up so much that would probably have been out of the question by now as well. But it really never came up, as there isn’t any gas connection out here anyway. So we chanted “Be Like The Ed” (which had already become something of a mantra for us) and decided we would just use the wood stove which was already conveniently parked in our back room.

Except the wood stove which was conveniently parked in our back room was, forgive my language, a piece of crap. It had two options – “not hot”, and “chimney fire” — and ironically the chimney fire option did not necessarily mean the house was warm, since the chimney is on the outside of the house, and does not transfer any heat into the building.

So we got a ‘new’ stove. It is a Franklin stove, about the same vintage as the building (1893). It is shallow, kind of looks like a fireplace insert actually, but it works very well. If you put wood into it every half hour, it will get the room that it is in pretty comfortable, and the little spot right at the top of the stairs gets very warm indeed. The only two catches are, you have to put wood in every half hour, which kind of precludes having a life or doing anything else effectively, and the other rooms of the house still had no heat at all. And every morning we were back to below freezing, because I don’t mind jumping up once or twice a night to feed a stove or check on babies or something, but forgoing sleep entirely and burning extra wood just to make one room somewhat comfortable just never seemed practicable. The other catch, which we discovered surprisingly late in the game, was that no amount of fan-blowing or screening or window-plasticking was ever going to make the other rooms warm, because the house was built (cleverly) with electric heat in mind, and the interior walls are all insulated. And while the exterior walls had insulation which due to leaks and rot had gone completely to pot, the interior insulation was fine and fluffy and totally preventing any heat transfer at all between any two rooms.

So every year the pipes froze, and every morning I got up and broke the ice on the animals’ water and lit the fire, and melted snow for coffee, and counted it a bonus that six months out of the year I didn’t actually need to run the refrigerator. Then I would keep the fire going until Raven got up, at which point I would go try and get some work done, and he would completely forget to feed the fire and it would go out, and I would try really hard not to be a total bitch about the whole thing, and we would wind up spending most of the winter on the front porch, which being glassed in and southerly, is actually pretty darned warm as long as the sun is shining. The net result of all this is that the average daytime temperature in my house during the winter is about 7 ºC (45º F). Which is cold, no matter what form you write it in. And the kitchen, dark and easterly, is always colder. No matter what season it is, you can pretty much count on it being five degrees colder in the kitchen. In summer, that is nice. In winter, we had long ago dubbed it The Room You Don’t Go In.

So here’s the neat thing about poverty:  it takes forever to get anything done, and it is usually very hard work, but holy crow is is nice when a job is finished or when something you do works!

A couple of weeks ago our neighbor came over with his backhoe and dug a trench for us from the furnace we got last year to the house.

Then we took insulation and wrapped it around two lines of PEX pipe, and stuffed the whole thing through a big PVC pipe.  One end is hooked to the furnace, and one end is hooked to a pump which circulates water through a great deal more PEX tubing that is buried in my floor.  Which is why I have been paving my kitchen all summer.  Concrete floor, full of pipe.  Light the fire in the furnace outside, which is like a giant woodstove sitting inside a tank of water.  Water gets hot, pump pushes water through floor, floor gets warm.  Kitchen, ‘The Room You Don’t Go In’, is 16º!  And rising!

When you walk in my front door from the porch now, it is warmer in the house!!! There is still a lot of work to be done – eventually all the downstairs floor will be piped, the kitchen was just first because it was so very cold.  But because it is radiant heat it is already having an effect on the front room (which is next in line, being second-most-cold): the walls themselves will pick up heat from the floor, as will anything actually sitting on the floor.  So essentially everything in the house will become just a little bit warm.

This winter, barring the usual opportunities for horrible disaster, our house will be a home, not just a shelter.  Which is the best thing ever, because we love our house.

 

Wheelmod

One of the things I have been griping about wanting is a plying wheel. You know, nice big orefice for bulky yarns, embarrassingly ginormous bobbin to overcompensate for the fact that the bobbin I’ve been using only holds 2oz of fibre…

I was going to make one this summer, that was supposed to be my big stupid summer project. Except the only ‘project’ that got accomplished this summer was paving the kitchen floor, and in the meantime my stupid brain decided that although I do very much want a large orefice and overcompensatingly huge bobbin, it would be really cool to build a wheel-in-a-box like the gorgeous Journey Wheels. Not that I expect it would turn out that gorgeous, but I’m pretty sure I can do it, and it would be awful neat to try. So the wheel that I already have cut is probably going to that project, and I’ve been staring at my wheel instead, trying to figure out what I can do to modify it.

Then Sunday, my in-laws came out and my FIL helped me put our broken roof back together. And as an extra-super-bonus favor, he used his much-bigger-than-mine stepladder to patch the hole in the wall of my studio! This was so exciting that in a burst of confidence and accomplishment (and also probably some leftover adrenaline from climbing on my scary slippery roof) I started attacking the wheel.

As usual, the equipment used was mostly in the “some stuff I found” category. Total cost was about four dollars, because I bought wooden discs at Michaels, and I got a bunch of them. (They’re like 35 cents each.) If you had to purchase any of the other stuff I used, the cost would probably go up to about ten bucks.

First I added a big ugly front support to my wheel, so that I could extend the flyer and spindle:

Granted, that’s not too pretty, but some sanding and painting will clean it up and make it look more like an actual unit, as opposed to some Frankenstein’s wheel. Strange as it may seem, I’m more concerned with function than with form on this one!

Then I had to build a flyer. This was startlingly easy – mostly. Some chunks of wood, a whackload (18) of little brass hooks (we have a big jar of these, I’m finally starting to run low) – and bent nails would work too, if you haven’t got an inexplicably big jar of shiny brass hooks, and a length of dowel:

The orefice is a 1/2 inch PVC pipe join that I got (also 35 cents) a while ago, because I always look at things in hardware stores with an eye to what they might be able to become, and it looked like a big ol’ orefice to me.

I just put a big long screw straight through the pipe, the crossbar of the flyer and into the dowel to hold everything centered and together. I sanded a light groove for the pipe to sit in, angled slightly so the yarn will be guided up and out over the crossbar to the hooks. The edges of the crosspiece are sanded too, so as not to snag the yarn.

The flyer wheel is three discs (one small sandwiched between two large) glued together. Then I drilled out the centre, did a little dance of celebration because I totally expected it to shatter when I did that, and it didn’t; and then pounded a nut into the centre of the piece.

That little nut is actually really important to the only bit that was really hard in this project. See, I wanted to use dowel for the spindle, because a) I had some and b) the some I had was conveniently the right size for the bobbin I made:

Which bobbin in turn is the size it is because when I made those naked costumes a while ago, the fat lady’s boobs were stuffed with two plunger heads that I got at the dollar store, and the plastic handles of the plungers were just the right size to make four bobbins of a length and circumference to go on the dowel that I happened to have. So you see it all came together brilliantly. And using wooden dowel meant that I could screw on that orefice as mentioned above and have only the one big solid join.

Problem is – the other end. The flyer wheel needs to be fixed when spinning, but removable to get the bobbin off. (At least with this design, which is based on the one I’ve already got and is working well for me.) I considered squaring the dowel, drilling a square hole in the flyer wheel and then trying to shape the very end as a smaller round, which would look like this if I could draw:

but the opportunities for my messing that up were just SO VERY big, that I figured there had to be a better way. I tried sinking a bolt into the dowel, (hence the nut on the wheel) but I couldn’t get it in very far and so it kept popping out and causing disaster. So this morning as I was tearing apart the Hardware Stuff Shelf looking for a solution, I found this:

It is supposed to attach your toilet to the floor. We don’t have a toilet, so I figured nobody would miss it. Voila!

The screw half is really long, so it’s in the dowel good. The nut in the wheel can only go down so far on the bolt half, and then it stops on the unthreaded middle bit.  I ground off the threads from the bottom part of the bolt, so the spindle will turn freely in its mounting hole.  (Be careful with that part, you don’t want to mess up the threads on the upper half!)

And look!  Yarn!

I’m feeling very smug about this.  Fortunately I hear a chainsaw, which means it’s time for me to go stack some wood – a nice, practical, humble exercise!

 

Do you Kipple?

I do. And, since about a year ago when a friend lent me a Collected Works of, I have had one poem stuck in my head. So I’m finally doing a project, my inspiration and my materials list being “a rag, a bone and a hank of hair”.

The rag in question used to be a large chunk of charcoal-grey corduroy. Did you know, if you wash a chunk of 100% cotton wide-wale cord a few times with a LOT of bleach, it has an effect very similar to tossing it into a cement mixer? It’s true. But I don’t have a cement mixer, so I had to go the other route. Then, I painted it in the rain. I’m very sorry, I don’t have pictures of any of this. I was out in the pouring rain with a can of paint, several baby chickens, a few curious (and damp) sheep, and six yards of distressed, nay downright frantic cord. I haven’t got enough arms to take a picture of that!

Other than that, I’ve been spinning with every free moment, and also working out the plans for a new wheel in my head. There IS going to be an Etsy shop. Right as soon as there can be. And in that shop I will offer for sale the fruits of those things that I do, whatever they are. Like yarn. And maybe some tools. I like tools. And I shall call myself “Old School Fibre” except probably I shall spell ‘Fibre’ wrong in American, so that other people can find the store. But that might bug me a lot, so I’ll keep you posted.

On what seems like completely another topic, but is connected in that I never seem to get anything done around here because I’m always doing something else… Stalkermom got a steam cleaner. Yesterday I was helping her clean her place and I got to use it. And then I got to borrow it, and so at least part of today will be spent prancing about shooting jets of hot steam at things that are dirty. Steam cleaners are Fun. I believe I will have an answer this year when my in-laws ask me what I want for Christmas.

That’s kind of funny in itself, I’m not sure if they’ll actually get me one or not. Every year they ask us what we want, and are never willing to accept answers like “world peace” or ‘higher standards of education’ or even ‘a wealthy patron’, so I ask for cookware. Which I guess kind of bugs them, because it’s supposed to be a bad idea to give a woman kitchen appliances or tools for housework or something. I understand why someone who was hoping for flowers might be irritated to the point of frenzy by receiving a broom and dustpan instead, but I like cookware. I like cooking and baking.

So they finally came to believe me, mostly I guess because why would l lie about something like that? but now I have a pretty good stash of cookware/bakeware and there’s nothing I’m really aching for, which leaves me at a loss for the “what do you want for christmas?” phone call. Unless there is a christmas sale on steamers. I think they’re kind of a hot item this year, so there might be.

I’m supposed to do the blog flog thing, because (too long ago) Lucy sent me this:

which is super neat, and it is my (neglected) duty to post five other blogs to pass it on to. I’ve been stalling, because I just did that ‘you make my day’ thing not too long ago, but let me see, where shall I send you this time?

1. Prairiedogs of I-10 a pair of Texan sisters offering lots of wit, snark and knitting.
2. Domesticrafts, life in downtown Boston, still more knitting and some really fabulous photography
3. Carrie is a friend of mine from the Chatham knit night, and not only does she give you fibre and book recommendations, but there’s gonna be a baby soon too!
4. Speaking of babies, Geckogrrl has a great mind, an interesting life, and is now chronicling the changes involved in starting a family, and moving ever further from Venice Beach.
5. Jessie is off the hook, because she already got nominated and posted her list the other day, but I’m sticking her in here anyway because she’s fabulous, her blog is fabulous, her homestead is fabulous, and my only regret when reading her is that I can’t just run over there for spinning and coffee, ‘cos she lives in Vermont and I don’t.

 

Down on the floor

I’m not even going to apologize. I’m totally beating myself up though, because the longer I go without writing here, the harder it is to actually get up (or down) and do it, and then by the time I do I’ve forgotten all the things I wanted to tell you.  Or I remember them, and then I make a post so long that nobody wants to read it!

I’m still blogging in my head every day.  If I had a brain machine that would type into the computer the things that I think to this blog while I’m doing other things, you could read a post every day.  Fewer pictures though.  And it would be really creepy.  I’m glad I don’t have a brain machine.

Don’t have a lot of time for fibre just lately either, alas.  I have been spinning a little – a border collie/blackface blend that I made out of these bags and bags of dog hair I got a while ago.

It’s very very soft, and felts like a dream (if you dream of felting, which I personally don’t).  I think it is going to be some lace, because although I am also massively behind on blog reading, I can’t help but notice that Jen has been cranking out quite the stack of jealous-making lace things lately, and I want to knit the Luna moth shawl. Which by the way is totally impractical for me, and I’m crazy to want to do it because it will be snagged and ruined within moments I’m sure.  But I want to anyway. So since it’s taking me so silly long to spin the stuff in the little snatches of time I’ve had lately, I’m going to spin it and the just look at it for a while and see if there’s anything else it would rather be.

What’s mostly been keeping me busy is this ‘farm’ thing.  I am by the way still using the word ‘farm’; even though I philosophically agree with the ‘homestead’ linguistic, the word itself doesn’t have any resonance for me.  I don’t know if that’s a Canadian thing, or just personal.  But I’m used to calling the [evil] big industrial farms ‘factory farming’ and/or in the case of the massive soy fields around here ‘cash cropping’ and we don’t have any of that, we’ve just got some chickens and sheep and a garden.  And a goose.  Around here we’d probably be called a ‘hobby farm’, and I hate that description – this is definitely, whatever else it may be not a hobby.  Whatever you prefer to call it, the advent of the sheep last fall definitely marked a major change in the seriousness with which I have to approach the whole livestock rearing thing.  We’ve also started selling eggs, because only friends were willing to take them for free – even when ‘free’ really meant ‘in exchange for the random bags of wheat you leave by the mailbox’ or ‘as a thank you for plowing my driveway’.  So I put up a sign, and by some weird small-town speed-of-light gossip thing, people who never even drive down my road instantly knew that we had eggs.  Now the chickens are self-supporting, and I don’t have a fridge full of too many eggs.  Good deal.

Also as a result of my egg sign, someone dropped off two incubators that they’d been looking to get rid of, as they have no chickens and these things were taking up space they would prefer to use for lawnmowers and things that they do have.  This is so many shades of cool.  First, I have very much been wanting to try hatching eggs myself, but y’know, sitting on them for a month seemed impractical, and I have no warm feathers.  My first choice is of course to let the hens do it themselves, but nobody has shown an inclination so far this year, and anyway I need to increase the flock at a somewhat higher rate than the one-and-two chicks per hen that we’ve had so far.  (Really I should let Patches live and run two cocks.  He’s nice enough, he’s just kind of a wuss.)  So I’ve got some eggs in an incubator and we’ll see if anything hatches.

But just having an incubator turn up on my doorstep is not the coolest bit (although it is very nifty) – the coolest bit is this:

Two of ’em!  Aren’t they gorgeous?  They’re Buckeye “standards”, which I found listed in a trade manual from 1913 – by the 20s they were making them in cast iron, so they’re definitely from around that time.  They belonged to the grandmother of the ex-husband of the woman who dropped them off.  Her dad says his mother had one just like them also.  One of them is converted to run off a light bulb, or either one of them could be run off of the original lamps.  They even came with the manual, which is some great reading, let me tell you!

Another thing that has been keeping me out of trouble and away from the knitting is – pretty floors.  You may or may not remember when I did the bedroom last year, and the only thing I couldn’t do anything about was the plywood floor?  Well, we’ve had a pile of scavanged wood sitting in our front room since sometime after Christmas, and we finally laid a floor in the bedroom.

Ain’t that just a mighty big improvement over paint-speckled plywood?  But that’s not all, folks!  There was, as it turned out, a LOT of wood piled in my front room.  (People who have been here and had to sort of climb over it will verify this.)  So we managed to put a floor on the front porch as well!

As you may have noticed, I spend a lot of time on my front porch.  We both do.  It’s warm on sunny days in winter, because Raven enclosed it with glass doors.  The animals like to sit in the doorways and get sun and breeze.  It’s a nice place to work on things.  It’s also an easy place to let a pile of crap build up, and since we had this old chunk of carpeting on the floor to block drafts, it got pretty gross, between us tracking in mud, and Phil sleeping there lately… ew.  And of course it’s the first thing people see when they come in, and it looks so junky – actually I think “junky” is almost complimentary sometimes.  It was pretty bad.  I have a ‘before’ picture somewhere, but I don’t even want to show you.  Ick.

But here it is now!

Only about a million times nicer, and easier to clean too.

Ok, you’ve stayed with me this long, (or you haven’t, and you’re just skimming down for goose pictures.)  Either way, here’s Phil at eight weeks:

You will notice that he’s wearing a sling.  When his feathers started coming in, one of his wings was very wonky.  Looked almost as if he’d broken it, except of course he hadn’t – ‘cos you know, being as he was with us all the time, we would have noticed.  Also, he wasn’t in any pain, he just had this crazy floppy wing.

See?  (Also, you can see some of the gross carpet.)  Anyway, we were worried that he wasn’t going to  be able to fly, and also that it was going to hurt his social life when he got older and interested in dating – because you know what teenagers can be like, they make fun of you if you’re ‘different’.  Well, after a morning spent on the telephone trying to find an actual person involved in animal rescue/natural resources, which division of government around here is apparently run by ansa-phones, I found a nice lady who explained that this is a growth thing caused by a high protein diet (so much for ‘he needs lots of protein’, which by the way came from the same source as ‘he’s a duck’) and it happens in the wild too, so we didn’t have to feel bad – but we should tie up his wing into the correct position and keep it there while he finishes growing.  So Phil has a sling.  He can still flap his wings, he just can’t extend the “wrist” bit on one side, but he can reach to preen his feathers, which he couldn’t before.

Here’s another cute picture from about three weeks, just to show how fast the little fella has been growing:  (And to make sure you are well sated with cute birdie pics before I sign off!)

 

Just, y’know, a post

Look! Knitting! And technically spinning and dyeing as well, since I never got around to posting this yarn when it was still just yarn.

I’ve been fascinated with the sky for quite a while now, I keep taking pictures of it, which alas are never as cool as the sky itself. This yarn is my first (I know there will be more) impressionistic attempt to capture some of the cool things the sky does out here.

I did actually manage my May TIF project, but inexplicably my computer ate the pictures. It was quite the disaster actually, about 50 shots just turned into absolute rubbish. I had adorable pictures of FreeBunny#1 playing around by the pond, pictures of Phil with the punk-rock hair he gets after he has been diving around in said pond for a while (black and spiky with yellow tips, I want my hair to look like a wet baby goose!) and some actual proof that I do occasionally get something done around here. All gone.

Remember when this was predominantly a fibre blog, and not the farm-blog of a chick who knits occasionally? Me too. It’s ok, the fence is finally finished (hip hip hooray!) and as soon as the sheep finish trying to figure out how they can get around it (so far they are full of fail, but give ’em a week or two) and accept that they freaking well live here, maybe I can get up to the studio again. The only thing I’ve been doing up there lately is making a white linen altar-cloth, which as you can imagine doesn’t photograph interestingly.

Oh, for Bev and anyone else who is interested – I finally took new pictures of my big funny-looking house:

As you can see, it still needs some work. I love it, though. Here, look at a pretty flower instead.

This iris is saying, “I don’t care if I’ve been eaten repeatedly by sheep, and was dug up and moved just last week, I’m going to bloom anyway, dammit!” You go, little flower.

Here’s Raven’s garden in front of the funny looking house. It’s super pretty and full of huge irises (which don’t scare me), and it distracts people from noticing that the house is still on the dowdy end of the scale.

I know that it works, because sometimes our neighbors stop their trucks and say “wow, your garden is looking so pretty, it’s really coming along!” and so far no one has also said “did you know the front of your house is sliding off?” or “where exactly did that piece of roof go?” They do sometimes say, “you should sell tickets to this place”, but I think they mean it kindly.

This morning I woke up at five because a flock of geese flew past, and woke Phil up! He cheeped at their honking – maybe all of our telling him that he is a goose and that his cousins all live down by the lake is finally sinking in! It’s actually kind of nice waking up with a snuggly downy goose – he sits kind of on my shoulder and snuggles up to my neck. For those of you whose minds go directly to the more unpleasant aspects of cuddling wild birds, there are thank mercy no bugs, and well yes, I’ve been doing an awful lot of laundry. But really, it’s sweet. He’s all soft and chirpy. We hope he acquires a youthful spirit of independence very soon, before he weighs fifteen pounds and has big poky feathers. His feathers are just starting to come in – you can’t see them yet, but if you rub his back and tail you can feel the quills.

Look how big he’s getting! This is three weeks old. As you can see, he’s still Daddy’s little sweetheart. Raven hand-selects clover and maple keys for him to eat, and hand-feeds him dandelions. I can’t imagine how this will help him acquire that youthful independence I’m dreaming about. Me, I just wander around doing what I’m doing, and let him figure out where I am. If he cries I will call him to me – he knows his name – and assure him that he’s not being abandoned, but for the rest of it, it’s his job to know where mommy is, and if he wants to wander off and eat grass “over there”, well good. Mostly he sticks pretty close, and in the mornings he can cheat, because he knows my routine (chicken coop #2, chicken coop #1, barn, house again) and so can meet up with me anywhere en route and not have to worry about being trampled by hungry barn fowl.

 

Clean springing

Today’s gratuitous lamb picture:

The naked old people are going well. They actually make up very quickly, the greater part of the time involved is me, consulting the shape of imaginary naked old people in my head (all of the old people I know tend to wear clothes; they get cold easily) and figuring out how to cut those shapes. Despite what I said last time, I even have pictures, because one of them is also supposed to be fat, and so there is so much stuffing in the costume that it looks like something even without a person in it.

Note – if you or someone you love is, in fact, a naked old person, please don’t be offended, I’m just doing my job. Although yes, I am obviously enjoying an utterly juvenile delight in saying “naked old people” as often as possible.

There’s another chubby and also hairy-arsed one (a guy), and two skinny ones, and the other two are just kind of podgy and droopy. As appropriate. These are (did I mention before?) for LYSISTRATA, which hopefully explains everything.

Speaking of old people I know, I bought a vacuum cleaner. Yes, of course I can bring that together, would you really still be reading this blog if it didn’t come with the challenge of figuring out how the heck a) turns into b) or even f) in my mind? I didn’t think so. Here then, is my wandering and pointless story:

Like most people at one time or another, I had two grandmothers. Both were tiny and quite pretty, both were willing to let me stay at their house for at least a week every summer from quite a young age, and both ate food to stay alive and breathed oxygen. After that we pretty much run out of similarities, except that they both loved me a lot but also both ‘got along’ better with my brother once he came along. This was never actually spoken, but I had the impression that he was easier to deal with because he wasn’t weird. (This is not true. My beloved brother is really VERY strange, but is also really good at faking normalcy.)

My one grandmother was kind of dotty, but very very creative. She was (at least by the time I knew her) kind of overwhelmed by the whole ‘housekeeping’ thing – she would do laundry, and run a vacuum around at least the main room of the house now and then, and I might even have seen her dust a few times, although I wouldn’t put money on it. What she liked to do was sew, and draw, and make little dolls, and make clothes for the little dolls, and cut paper, and tat lace, and paint tiny pictures on rocks, and crochet, and… you get the idea. Also she kept budgies, and taught them to talk. And she fed the birds outside, and I’m pretty sure she talked to them too, although they never answered (that I know of).

My other grandmother was SuperHouswife. June Cleaver was eating her dust. She vacuumed all the rooms every day and also dusted, and hosed down the outside of the house, and trimmed her hedges and cleaned the patio (possibly with a vacuum) and swept the porch… and that was just the stuff she did before she started whatever she was planning to do that day. I am not kidding.

Guess who I resemble more? If you picked June, you have not been paying attention!!!

I like having a clean house. Really, I swear I do! It makes me happy! And it makes me happy to be the one cleaning it, because I get kind of creeped out by the whole ‘other person coming in to clean up my mess’ thing. I would be the one who would clean up for the cleaning lady. Or, conversely, I would not clean up for the cleaning lady, and she would shriek and run away and never be seen in this town again. Either way, I lose. Because although I do really and truly like it when my house is clean, I would on the whole rather be sewing, or making lace, or knitting, or spinning, or talking to chickens or hugging sheep. And so most of the time, those are the things I actually do, and otherwise I just kind of run a vacuum around in the places people will see, and try to convince Raven to dust. Which even works, sometimes.

And then the vacuum cleaner broke.

Now, we tend to aquire things when other people are done with them, and as a result when things break it is rarely a question of replacing a belt or tightening a nut. Things around here when they break explode, or melt, or shatter, or burst into flame, that kind of thing. Sometimes a combination of two or more of those things at once. And it’s often not the ones you would expect, either. We had one TV melt, and another melt and blow up, I had a hand-held sander that seemed to be melting while bursting into flame. The vacuum – which until this point had been a pretty decent upright – shattered, and then burst into flame. Entertaining, really.

But I live in the country, and there are animals inside and out, and frankly it was getting kind of thick in here. Something had to be done, and since the vacuum cleaner had actually decided to burst into flame while Raven was trying to see what he could do about fixing the ‘shattered’ part, it wasn’t really going to be part of the game plan. So yesterday (because I would have no idea how to make one, and also I had a gift certificate) I went out and bought a brand new, briefly shiny shopvac. It is my first new vacuum ever, and I’m very excited. I cleaned lots and lots of the house with it yesterday, and when I get done writing this I’m going to go clean more. I’ve never had a vacuum that had both reach and suction at the same time before! I may even be able to get some of the cobwebs off the three-inch stucco that some lunatic put on the eighteen-foot-high ceilings in my back room! (Someday, oh someday I will have nothing better to do, and some scaffolding, and a hammer…!)

I’m quite sure the thrill will wear off, probably very soon. But in the meantime, I’m actually getting some spring cleaning done!

 

Feeling a bit random today

This is what happens if you lie down for ten minutes in my house:

I’m not sure who was there first.

Actually, it’s not too different if you lie down outside, either – just different animals. Anybody have any advice on how to teach a sheep not to jump up on people? Because it’s really, really cute right now, but later on it’s going to hurt, I expect.

Usually, my internet connection is quite fast. A couple of years ago there was a program started to help farmers and other rural types around here to get decent internet. We had dial-up, of course, but since the phone lines around here seem to be based on the “tin can and a piece of string” principle, it was a tad frustrating. So they (y’know, “they”) installed all these wireless towers, and now we can have high-speed internet and a reliable connection, just like the city folk.

Except for when they have to move or fix something, like this week. This week I’m back on dial-up, and whoo boy, is it slow. Also, it keeps bumping me off line.

I had to do some internet stuff today though, so rather than bang my keyboard with frustration while I waited for things to load, I started a sock.

Printed some shipping labels:

Did some internet banking:

Checked the weather:

Dropped by Ravelry:

I’m kidding, I’m kidding! I was only on Ravelry long enough to check my messages. That last picture is the other sock in the pair, and it already looked like that. But, you know it could have happened!

The dye in those socks, by the by, is yellow food coloring, the last of the sumac, and beets. I don’t know why the beets are orange, unless it’s one of those PH things, there was a lot of vinegar in the mix. I think it’s funny, because every time I’m talking to a non-crafty type about dyeing, they say “oh, you should dye with beets, they stain everything!” I tried dyeing cotton with beets ages ago and got no color at all – although it seems to me there might have been a reason I’ve forgotten. Had no luck with red wine, either. And when I tried beets on wool the other night, I got – orange.

I’m kind of happy, though, because these socks are turning out not-unpleasantly, which is about as far as you can get from what I was expecting. Yellow and orange top the list of my least favorite colors (but your rhinos are still cool, Lee!) and I thought these were going to be hideous. Another argument for dyeing before spinning! (A connundrum: I like spinning dyed wool, but I like dyeing spun yarn. Must seek balance.) Anyway, despite having spent hours of work and gallons of paint ridding my life of that weird pinky-orange, which the previous owners of the house apparently liked A Lot, I’m not going to mind wearing these socks after all.

Caboose on this scattered train of thought: Our place used to be a school. It was closed in ‘68, and shortly after converted to a house. Then there was an eerily long series of people who lived here for a year or two – enough to make us wonder, looking at the title search, whether the place was demon-infested or something – then one family had it from ‘89 to ‘99 or so, and then it was vacant until we bought it.

During all that time, and with all those owners, don’t you think it is terminally weird that nobody painted the walls? Oh, the original people did. And at some point, I literally think it was when the last owners were trying to sell it, someone wallpapered the tiny downstairs bathroom. But other than that bathroom, all the walls had one layer of paint. The only thing that had been done to personalize the decor, by anyone, was some sponge dabbing, which was done mostly as borders, on the same original paint job. I get the shivers just thinking about it. I can’t imagine living somewhere and not wanting or caring to make it mine. Sure, sometimes you have an apartment or something where you’re not allowed to change the walls, so you do what you can with pictures or slipcovers or whatever, but in your own house? That you bought and live in?
I just don’t get it.

 

Fill in the words

Sorry, there is no fibre content in this post, because I’m in a car, with Stalkermom, the Ed, and a small dog named Barney,

and I have not got knitting. This seemed like a good idea when I left – I thought I would be in the cab of a truck with no space to knit, and although I am on my way to Toronto to hang out with Emily and Krista, I am also hoping to catch up on what is has become several years worth of missed beer-soaked arguments with their spouses Dru and Simon.

But I’m in a car, and I have no knitting. There is a cat-and-wool picture at the bottom of this post, if you want to just skip to the eye-candy.

my mother brought HER knitting.

I’m really looking forward to some good conversation tonight. Simon and Dru have always been great people to argue/debate/think out loud with, and more and more I realize how much I need that, how much the way I think has always depended on not just words, but the exchange of words. I’ve complained before about “losing my words” and I don’t know what it sounds like but I mean it quite literally – the way I think and process ideas has been changing ever since we moved to the relative isolation of the farm.

I think that’s partly why I’ve been so enjoying talking to Jodi lately. Not that talking to Jodi isn’t great in and of itself, she’s a terrific person. But the project she’s involved in right now, and her thoughts on it… it’s exciting to hear her talk about, the project itself is fascinating, and listening to her explain it has started giving me a handle on how to approach – no, how to understand – what is happening to me. Apparently my hands went ahead and began expressing the changes some time ago, without actually consulting my brain – big surprise, eh? But talking with Jodi about alteration and destruction is helping my brain catch up.

Jodi outside Milk in Windsor, modeling a new (although pieced together from older) project dress.

I knew, obviously, that I was expressing myself by decorating my house. I mean, that’s the point, right? In decorating. But it took Emily and Dru and Jodi to point out to me that the house is an organic work, that I’m not actually so much decorating as creating an installation (in quote-unquote artistic terms – I am making a space I want to live in, it just happens to be a bit more representative of my internal processes than I was externally aware of). It is not just a project, but a Project, I suppose.

For example, the walls. In my conscious mind, I am painting words on the walls. The stated purpose being to create a sort of unique and readable wallpaper – thought provoking in places, perhaps, but not profound or especially startling.

But, as I progress, I discover that there are “rules”. First off, the words are all “used”. By which I mean I am not writing anything myself for this project, nor am I letting Raven do so. All of the quotations are from published works. Genre or form doesn’t matter, there are songs, poems, fiction and non-fiction.

Second, many of the words are self-referential within the project. The quotes do not necessarily stand alone, removed from their original context, they often don’t mean anything without the new context of the wall. I have quotes referring to doorways and passages in doorways and passages, quotes about table etiquette and foodstuffs in the kitchen. Many of the quotes are actually about words. One of my current favorites is “these are the things that are written and painted on one part of the wall”.

Another rule I’ve discovered then is that I don’t want the quotes to be particularly meaningful. Raven and I each have some favorite passages that have found their way into rooms, but on the whole I am not trying – I am trying not – to fill my house with moving or meaninful phrases, or deep profundities. Where such things do go up I like to combine them with opposites, frivolities or contrary arguments/observations. The walls may contain a dialogue, but they are not actually intended to provoke one.

Finally, the words in the last stages are obfuscated. I am painting over the decorated wall, in such a way that the words are much harder to read, and much less obviously there. As a decorative feature, my intention was that the words be gradually noticed, that the first effect would be textured walls, and the nature of the texturing would be noticed later, if at all. I hang pictures and mirrors and place furniture in front of walls without regard to the passages being wholly or partially blocked (there are a couple of puns, I have a passage about a hanging a mirror in your entryway behind the mirror in the entryway).

As a decorative feature, this makes sense. But it’s been three years in the doing, three years during which I keep upping the ante in terms of obiliterating the words I’ve so carefully selected and painted, and I’ve only just now realized that as I think more and more visually and become less and less verbal, I do more and more to obliterate these representations of my old medium of thought.

This is connected to a lot of things, not all of which I’ve got a handle on yet. I’m putting this in the blog mostly because this blog is a place I notice my – I don’t think it’s mistrust, not yet – reluctance with words. I write far more entries in my head as I’m working than are ever posted here, and I feel badly that I don’t share here as often as I could/should.

As promised, here is some fibre, with cat:

 

I resolve to resolve…

First, some whining: Spent the last couple of days in horrible pain for a reason that is looking suspiciously like arthritis in my left shoulder. Joy. Not. Couldn’t sew, couldn’t type, couldn’t spin – couldn’t knit either, but I did anyway. This was a Bad Plan, as it turned out, because it really did hurt. A lot. But the alternative was sitting around all day staring at a pile of things that needed doing and thinking, “wow, my shoulder sure does hurt! Yep!” which sounded like a little piece of hell. So, I knitted.

What I knitted was a pair of those Fibre Trends clogs, which I can’t show you a picture of, because I was so excited to get them knitted up that I dropped them in kool-aid and then tossed them in the washer without even thinking to grab the camera. Now they are felting.

So, instead of a picture of silly floppy clogs, you get a picture of the current costume WIP:

a reproduction Victorian bodice, out of grape cotton/linen with silk accents. Ah, I’m loving this project. Bands and boning, silk lining… it’s like doing the stuff for Dorian Gray, except for ‘real’. Dreamy.

What else? Oh yes, the furnace! We have finally actually got our wood boiler. Here it is, parked out behind the house

And there it will sit, doing absolutely nothing until next year. Alas. But think of the motivation we’ll have to get the piping done next spring, since every time we look outside this winter, there it will be sitting, smugly, reminding us of how warm we would be if it was only hooked up to something!

Right, that’s all for now, as the last couple of days put me even further behind than usual… I keep resolving, you know, to sit down and make some resolutions… to schedule myself somehow… anybody know where I can get me a nine-day week?

 

I’m here, really!

If someone called you in the middle of a holiday weekend, and said “I’m out on a chicken farm with my girlfriend, you should come out here too”, would you go?
Apparently, some people would. I’m not sure I myself am one of them – and it was my party and we were having a pretty good time, but that just seems like a kind of strange phone call to me!

I’m sorry, I’ve been falling completely behind on this blog thing. I’ve been spinning. Because you asked, here is a picture of the now-completely-finished-and-functioning wheel:

I made it be pretty.

And here is a picture of what is going to be a so-called traditional aran sweater for my brother, when there is enough of it.

So-called, because some company in Ireland is selling these sweaters, with all sorts of “information” about how each sweater pattern belongs to a particular family, and what the stitches represent. I find it very funny, but I’m knitting one anyway, because our “family sweater” is kind of pretty, and what the heck, people get all silly when presented with a ‘clan tartan’. Same difference. (This sweater is the actual and whole reason I made the wheel. I want to knit this sweater for xmas, and with a drop spindle – it simply was not going to happen!)

When I wasn’t spinning last week, I was painting. In the course of the Giant Re-Plumbing Project, Raven will be moving the water heater to a different spot. We thought maybe we’d try having pipes on inside and/or insulated walls, rather than what we’ve had since moving in, which is pipes resting up against uninsulated stone. For a novelty.

Since it isn’t often that one has a chance to do a really good job painting behind a water heater, I took the opportunity to paint the wall before we move the thing, and to do it in such a way that I won’t have to do it again for some time. So I decided to do fake wooden boards, on the theory that if when I change the color of the room later, it still won’t matter that there are fake boards behind the heater. I’ve got the same thing over the counter in the kitchen (adjoining room) so it will sort of blend in. I hope.

If you want to paint fake old boards on something, you will need:
your base paint (latex not-gloss)
your board paint (ditto)
a paintbrush of whatever size you find convenient
a teeny tiny paintbrush for fine lines
some very light acrylic paint for highlights (I use dollar-store craft paint, it’s fine)
some very dark acrylic for shadows
a woodgrain tool (something flat with notches in it, pictures below)

Isn’t that a scary green? It’s ok, there is no place where it will exist unaltered. Anyway, the scary green is the background – you can use whatever you like, to go with your room, just be aware that a) it will show between the ‘boards’ and b) there is going to be some high-school art level colour blending going on here, so it will affect the surface shade.

Paint your boards on. This does not have to be neat and tidy, I definitely do not mask it or draw straight lines or anything. I mean seriously, have you looked at old boards? This is the part where that colour blending happens. Due to the fact that I’m taking pictures in a small room with no windows and fluorescent lights, it was durned near impossible to get a decent image of the boards colour, but they look like a very dark rich brown. What I actually used was purple (because I had that) but if you’ve done kool-aid dying you probably already know that if you mix purple kool-aid and some green, you get a brown. These paint colours are eerily similar to kool-aid colors, and the results are also the same.

The purple that I used is in fact one of those glaze paints that stay wet for a bit longer. If I were Debbie Travis, I would tell you that you really really need to use that. But I’m not. All you have to do is make sure you do this next bit before the paint dries, which means you’ll probably be painting two or three lines, then doing the next bit, then back to painting lines.

The Next Bit:

Take your wood grain tool or Other Object with Notches Cut In. (The first time I did this, on the chicken coop, I used a piece of rubber that I found lying in the road and cut some notches in the end with kitchen scissors. Later, I found that thing in the picture above. I don’t know what it is, but it works. What you want to do is drag it through the paint, VERY GENTLY, so that it scrapes off some of the wet paint. Vary the angle at which you hold it, and the ‘grain lines’ will get closer together or further apart. Swoop it in a narrow arc, down then up or up then down, and you’ll get a knothole or a place where a branch was.

Next, take your light colored acrylic and paint lines on the tops of the boards and down one side. These are supposed to be highlights, so be logical and put them either facing the actual light source, or most common light direction (if outside.) This part is very very very boring. Sorry.

Now guess what you’re going to do with the dark colored acrylic? Yup. Shadows on the opposite side to where you put highlights. This is also very very boring, but it has the advantage that when you begin to feel you’re going mad, you can mix it up a bit by painting dark spots in some of those knotholes. I usually paint little nailheads at the tops and bottoms of the boards too, and then when everyone is impressed I laugh and think, “you have no idea how bored I was! Ha-ha!”

…and that’s pretty much it. If you wanted to, you could do a wash over top in green or gray, to make them look kind of mildewy. My laundry room tends in that direction all on it’s own, so I didn’t feel like encouraging it, although I did do so in the kitchen. Just mix a bit of (not glossy) paint with water – half-half or so (have you gathered I am not precise?) and paint completely over everything you just did, then take a rag and pat the whole surface, removing most of the paint wash, and wondering why you bothered. But there will be a light tint on the surface that ‘ages’ it, I promise.

Now as soon as I get around to painting the wall around this corner, I will look slightly less crazy. I hope.

(The chicken coop door on which I used that chunk of rubber stuff and regular paint instead of glaze):