A Lazy List from Photo file 033

Just a list of things that will either catch us up on things that have been left hanging or some other random topics that have little relationship to anything else:
The sock that could defeat an Olympian team of knitters, should one exist.

I was very excited to get this pattern designed by Yarnissima. It is called "Sottopassaggio"

I found it through the Twist Collective, a quarterly newsletter on knitting that is pretty neat. Here's the site:
http://twistcollective.com/
I love the cable that goes across from one toe to the opposite ankle and the second cable that starts up the other ankle. However....the cable that goes up the other ankle is a killer. At one point I was using 7 needles to try and get this baby. Didn't happen. In knitting the pattern is read from left to right for the first row and then right to left for the second row and so on. On this cable, the action of twisting the stitches to get the lines to loop over each other happens on the rows that read left to right. Seems simple since that is how we read English. BUT the maneuvering of the stitches occurs from behind and from right to left in the middle of the left to right instructions. This is like a double negative within a phrase that is itself negative inside a positive thought. It is like magic without wands. I was incapable of doing this. I tried two or three times following instructions, then two or three times inventing different solutions and finally, I ripped it out. No cable is going to happen on that ankle. Sorry Yarnissima. This sock is the opposite of the Road Trip Shawl.

These two bobbins are the singles spun from the batts of Floozy that were dyed with the Golden Rod. I claimed that the colour was like taupe covered with cat pee. At this point in the process I can say my mind has changed. It looks like a yucky yellow with too much grey in it. Then I plied it together and
I can't say I'm impressed. The nice yellow bits are lost, the yucky yellow bits are blurred by even more grey and I just don't like it. Steve says it looks good, but it doesn't grab me. I have 86 metres of this yarn and sometimes, at the conclusion of something that felt like a good idea at the time I simply think 'I could have read a good book."
In August we usually go to our camp as much as possible. Over the years we have worked ourselves in several fits of sweat and too many arguements until one day I threw down a hammer and said I never wanted to return again. Well you know how that went. Next weekend we finished the kitchen gazebo. That was two years ago and each summer we try to improve something but only one thing a year otherwise going up is no fun. We usually break that rule but knowing we are breaking the rule helps us to keep it to two things.

This year we replaced the roof with this fetching orangy-tan vinyl and voila, the leaking has stopped. On the walls you see screen. The leaking hasn't stopped there but that's to be expected from screen.
Currently we sleep in the kitchen gazebo. Last summer the sleeping tent had a leaky roof, the platform had sunk to a slant, and I was frustrated crawling around on the floor or the air mattress. Now when we sleep, we have more room to move about, but whatever the weather is doing, it is doing it in our sleeping area. Yes, there was quite a weekend where it was raining so hard, the old roof failed entirely and it was raining inside the gazebo. We rigged up a tarp over the mattress and crawled under to wait it out. It stopped raining outside but the roof had all these saggy pockets of water that had to drain so it continued to rain inside the gazebo for the rest of the night. Remember that feeling of how I could have been reading a good book? I thought that a few times as we waited for the night to be over.
The other thing we did this summer was to invest in clear vinyl curtains. They go over the screens on a windy or rainy day, making the space that more liveable. Being clear, you can still see the view, which is lovely.


Our number two project this summer is to build a foundation for a bunkhouse that will have a roof, glass in the window openings, walls that mist, rain, blackflies and wind can not penetrate and a floor (see walls). There will be room for a potty and it will be secure enough that we can get a futon instead of an air mattress. We don't dream big, but we do dream detailed.