PLANNING FOR GOLD
Another AWOL post. I’ve got another week or so of these to post, so I’m going to have to finish catching up tomorrow. This one originally appeared on 20 June 2004.
I’m delighted to report that my time crawling through crawl spaces is about at an end. I’ve finished clearing out the old insulation, and can now turn my attention to ridding the house of picturesque but destructive ivy. (Stucco doesn’t like ivy.) Dust masks are still the order of the day, but working standing up and outdoors has a lot to recommend it. Also, the kids can help, at least for the parts of this task that do not require ladders.
I’m afraid I still haven’t had much time to knit. I’ve been busy measuring, then doing dimensioned layouts of the house in Visio. We’re using them to help plan where our stuff goes, and for the electrician, so he knows where to place services. Here’s the result for the two front rooms and three-season porch.
Going back from this point, beneath the dining room is the kitchen, beneath the living room is the den, followed by a back bedroom we will be using as an office. A long hallway with stairs up extends from the center opening.
Before you ask, there’s no particular price break on not running phone, cable and network to all rooms at the same time as we trench the plaster walls to upgrade the regular electrical wiring. Even though we have only one TV and are not planning on having more than one, we’ll have the flexibility to move it around should we so desire. Another consideration – should we have to sell, having the house fully wired is a value point. As far as the furniture, painting, and decorating go right now we’re concentrating on getting the major infrastructure things done. Cosmetics and aesthetics will have to wait their turn, and our jumbled mix of yard sale finds, first apartment stuff, and one or two decent pieces will have to do for the foreseeable future.
Actual Knitting
With all this crawling around and drafting, I’ve had very little time or energy for think-work or involved knitting. I’ve fallen back into the project I had set aside for vacation relaxation. I’m doing a quick raglan pullover in Regia 6-Ply (6-Fadig) Crazy Color for The Smallest One. Nothing fancy – just a top-down stockinette piece with a two-stitch cable detail on the raglan seams. I’m about six inches into the thing so far. I’d take a picture, but all you’d see is a jumble of red, blue, yellow and green stripes jammed onto a circular needle. My only regret is that if I’m using up this project to unwind after a day of house nonsense, I’ll have to find something else mindless to knit while I stare off at the sea.
ANOTHER INNOCENCE LOST
More reposts. Material originally appearing on 18 June 2004.
ANOTHER INNOCENCE LOST
I can truly say that I’ve had a new experience this week. One that now ranks in my all-time top ten list of nasty things to do.
Removing fiberglass insulation from a crawl space on a hot summer day.
There’s a reason why they call it a crawl space. There’s nothing like doing physical work in a dimly lit baking hot, confined cubbyhole; wearing a hooded long-sleeve sweatshirt, fogged goggles on top of fogged glasses; with dust in the air so thick you can feel it working its way through the fabric of your clothes, and a respirator mask that would better be called an asphyxiation mask.
I’ve finished three of eight cubbyholes. That leaves five plus the attic proper to go. It would be faster except the misguided SOB that installed this stuff insisted on tamping all of the roof soffits full in addition to just tacking the batts to the underside of the rafters. That has to be fished out by reaching down as far as one can into filthy, inky blackness, and grabbing whatever can be found. Insulation, mummified dead birds, whatever…
Then there’s the joy of schlepping mounds of shredded, moldy, irritating fuzz down two flights of stairs and into the dumpster – one armload at a time because anything larger won’t fit through the house’s hallways. If only I could have rented a debris chute, too.
All this is to explain why absolutely no knitting went on in my life yesterday, so there is nothing for me to report on the filet lace project.
Did you know that if enough fiberglass gets into one’s ears, even they itch?
BINGO BUNGALOW, FILET KNITTING
Hmmm. As I was writing today’s entry, I wanted to refer back to a post I remembered writing back in June of 2004. Apparently not all of the posts for that month imported correctly when we transferred our archives over. So the posts you’ll see today are hand-carried ports of the AWOL material. Apologies for the deja vu. True new content tomorrow. I promise.
Material originally appearing on June 15, 2004.
BINGO BUNGALOW, FILET KNITTING
Excuse this shortened entry. I’m deeply enmeshed in home rehab, and haven’t had much time to do anything else. Yesterday I measured the entire house so I can draft up a set of dimensioned drawings. That will help us figure out where to put things. While I was doing that I attempted to take some snaps of the house’s more nifty features. I’m a lousy photographer, so I’ve only got a couple.
First the house is a stucco bungalow, built in 1912. That style is pretty unusual for this part of Massachusetts. The majority of older homes in this town are Victorians of various configurations, Dutch colonials built in the 1920s, and saltbox Capes built in the 1930s. In between and in pockets are some older houses dating back to the 1700s and early 1800s, and some post WWII neighborhoods of ranches and raised ranches. The place is fairly big – not as huge as a rambling Victorian, but pretty big compared to the tiny 6-room ranch we’re leaving.
The house has had only two prior owners – the family that built it, and the family we bought it from. It’s been largely left alone, with very little tinkering over the years. That means that we’ve gotten some features you rarely find. Like original lighting fixtures in three rooms (this is the biggest one in the living room):
Another amazing bit of preservation is the downstairs bath. Except for the butterfly handles on the sink and an innocuous replacement toilet, it’s untouched, with all tile, fixtures, and stained glass window original and intact (the little sitz tub is especially nifty, it’s an exact match of its big brother on the other side of the room):
And here’s the smaller of the two fireplaces. This one is in the den:
As you can see, all of the woodwork on the first floor of the house has never been overpainted. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the entire house is still using the original electrical wiring – the old bare wire on insulator stuff put in when the house was first built. That means there is one plug per room; nothing grounded anywhere in the place; and anemic service. Over the next month we are having a contractor completely rewire the house. I’ll be putting in sweat equity, too – mostly ripping out improperly installed fiberglass insulation that’s making the roof rot, and encouraging the growth of a truly spectacular mildew farm in the attic. Meaning the insulation is doing the encouraging. I’ll be doing the exterminating.
FILET KNITTING
I did have time to start playing with this last night. The Thomas method is daunting to look at in description, but once you start messing with it it’s pretty straightforward. Solid blocks are composed three knit stitches. Open blocks are done similar to a one-row buttonhole, starting with a double yarn over. Then two stitches are bound off by passing existing loops over and off the end of the needle. The last stitch remaining is then knit to finish out the block of three. Alternate rows are knitted back, with the second YOs purled to make a garter stitch base.
But here’s the kicker. To make the solid areas appear square, each block on the chart corresponds to FOUR rows of knitting. That’s two right side rows and two wrong side rows. This means that there’s an extra horizontal bar (aka bride) in the center of each block compared to filet crochet or darned net That makes the open areas far less open, and rather compromises the look – especially for very complex charts. Clearly, more work on this will need to be done as I don’t think this particular technique, even were I to work with tatting cotton on 000s, would look good for my chart.
I’m not giving up though. Tonight’s round of experimentation will include adding height to the solid blocks by Yoda-knitting them back and forth. Working each block as a tiny 3-stitch short-row should square off the units. More news tomorrow…
PS: If you see spurious question marks in these entries, please ignore them. It’s not that I’m more puzzled than normal. For some reason, as of this morning every double space in every has morphed into a question mark. I’ll investigate.
ETERNITY AS A FUNCTION OF AVAILABLE WALL SPACE
My list of future (someday) projects keeps getting longer.
Contemplating our living room, The Resident Male and I have decided that the perfect thing for over the fireplace would be a tapestry. So we went looking at various tapestry reproductions sold on-line. The ones in our price range are pretty uniformly horrible – bad cartoons (the drawing on which the weaving is based), cheap looking materials/bad drape, and garish color choices predominate. I won’t even mention the awful chenille surface type and printed things that look more like stuff that along with 8-foot tall inflatable teddy bears are normally sold out of the back of vans parked at busy intersections in the summer.
As we were looking we also saw some of the painted canvases intended for needlepoint. Big ones that encompass scenes or details of historical woven tapestries. The better ones imported from France seem to offer more faithful reproductions of their inspiring works than do all of the modern woven reinterpretations.
Now I’ve done needlepoint before. It’s not my favorite, but technical implementation of the style is not a barrier. Plus I know exactly how long (read forever) it takes to do one of these. My mother did a a needlepoint tapestry reproduction in the early 1970s, working a rendition of this classic bit of canvas:
She did it in DMC embroidery floss, stitching the details including the hunter’s face, gloves and tassels, plus the hound, songbird, and hawk all in petite point. It’s heavy from all that cotton, but substantial enough (and mounted well enough) to resist distortion or curl. That she did most of it in basketweave rather than tent stitch has helped it keep its shape. The thing is a bit less than a yard wide and a bit more than 4 feet tall. It took her the better part of a year. Maybe a bit more. It’s roughly the same size as the one that caught our eye – a reproduction of a French woven tapestry from the mid 1500s (the clothing style is early 1500s, but the weavers may have been deliberately trying to imitate earlier works):
In canvas, even with the full thread kit, this one would be within my price range. Not counting a year or more to stitch it, of course. Will I end up doing this? Will the curtains I described yesterday come first? Will I stay true to knitting, and deaf to the enticements of other needle arts? Only time will tell…
POST-HOLIDAY QUIET
No knitting today. It was a happy but hectic holiday weekend here at String, full of family and food. Needless to say nothing beyond the targeted activities was accomplished. Still all are fed and happy, with grandparents spoiled beyond their expectations and back on their grand tour road trip.
Just as all of this was getting underway, I received a package from Long Term Needlework Pal Kathryn. She sent me glossy print catalogs from Bradbury and Bradbury, an outfit that offers reproductions of historical design wallpapers. She’s right in that some of their offerings are spot on for our 1912 house. I’ve not trembled to a halt on any of the offered designs yet (although several are very tempting), but I can say that after leafing through the catalogs I am in the early stages of project lust for something else.
Curtains for our library.
The bulk of the pictures from the catalog are available on line. You can see the type of curtains there that hit me. Plain linen rectangles of simple line, hung from narrow brass rods threaded through the top (or through small brass rings rings). But I don’t want unadorned curtains. I want to embroider mine. I happen to have on hand a huge set of counted thread border patterns of various widths at my disposal. Plus a pretty good idea of how to go about it all.
I want to put a pair of curtains on each of my two windows, each stitched with a border parallel to the center and bottom edges. Kind of like this:
If you happen to have a copy of The New Carolingian Modelbook to hand, I’m thinking of doing the full giant repeat of Plate 33 – the daSera grape leaves and flowers meander. Possibly in deep hunter green on natural linen. At four curtain panels to cover two windows that are about 5 feet tall by 3.5 feet wide, yes I’m nuts. So nuts in fact that I have to do more serious contemplation as to whether or not I will have the fortitude to take something like this to completion. But I’ve already started looking into linens…
Once more Kathryn leads me astray!
DON’T FENCE ME IN
Finally. A sunny morning. As you can see below, last weekend we ripped out the offending white picket fence and weedy, rotten bushes that marched along the front of the house.
You can see the little perennial garden at the side now. The tree in that garden is the infamous Kamikaze Robin ash. Compare with:
We also had the big spruce leaning on the house taken down, the roof redone and the copper downspouts replaced. Plus I spent a month last summer fighting stucco-destroying ivy. (It’s back. Time for round two.)
Why anyone would have wanted to fence this house in is a mystery to me. Although the property looks large, it’s actually pretty small for a house of this size. The fence – in addition for being just plain architecturally wrong for the place – made it look smaller. It also cut the house off from the neighborhood and made it look like a withdrawn dowager, the kind of place the looney lady up the block lives in, that no kid would dare visit for trick or treat. I may BE a looney lady up the street, but I don’t want to be a scary one.
Now here’s a photo the real estate agent would have died to have been able to present:
(The lawn in the foreground actually belongs to the neighbor, my line is at the edge of the driveway.) Compare this one to the best they could manage. Granted, it was taken in February, not the best time of year for Massachusetts house photography:
We dig out the remaining fence posts this weekend. Next is to paint the trim. Perhaps echo the roof’s red in some of it in combo with the white window frames. And turn some of the semicircular scar where the spruce was into a little garden, perhaps with blueberry bushes up against the house, and lower perennials in front. Also, I’m still not sure what to do with the built-in signpost by the front door. Half of me says build a custom hanging flower box for it. The other half thinks that’s too kitschy cute and wants to cut it down to match the newel post on the other side of the steps. We’ll see which half wins.
BACK ON TRACK – ROGUE
Things are finally back to almost-normal around here. That includes getting back on track with my own knitting. I’m almost done with Chart A. In two more rows I’ll reach the point where I am supposed to divide for the back and front:
So far I’m quite pleased. The little dragon skin texture is working out well; the side cable has been lots of fun to knit. The next challenge will be to play with the texture pattern and any shaping decreases that will be happening around the armhole. I’m not worried though. I worked out the logic of trimming this particular repeat on the pocket. Shaping around the armhole should be more of the same.
The piece is weighty, and the yarn is a killer splitter but that’s to be expected working in a multistrand cotton of this type. Target Child is also quite pleased that I’m back working on the thing.
In other news, ten days of above 40oF plus savage rain has revealed the muddy glory that is Massachusetts in the spring. That means that sometime in the next three weekends our next major sweat-equity house project will commence – the removal of The Ugly White Picket Fence. I leave you with an archive photo from last year, so you can see Ugly Fence in action (plus the giant pine tree that used to lean on the house):
Why do I think my fence is worthy of destruction?
- It has nothing to do with the architecture or style of the house
- It’s the wrong size/proportion for the lot
- It’s not on the lot line, and shrinks the visual footprint of the house
- It’s discontinuous, and serves no purpose of containment or security
- Walking down the chute path to the front door makes me feel like a sheep about to be dipped
- It’s a pain to rake around, shovel over, and mow around. The snow dunes it formed this past winter completely covered it and required major excavation to move.
- For some reason, the previous owners included a massive sign post as part of the fence, as if they were going to be hanging out a doctor’s shingle or a permanent "for sale" sign (you can see it near the front door). I hate it.
- It needs a severe scraping, sanding, and repainting. A problem since it’s probably covered in lead paint.
- We know someone who wants it (lead paint and all), and who will help us take it down for the privilege of hauling it away and re-using it.
WORKING REPORT – DRAGON, DRAGGIN’ ON WHILE TREES FLY
Another in an interminable series of progress shots. This one shows more of the top border.
Although I was iffy about it when I first began, I think that it’s working now. Yes, introducing another motif makes the piece rather busy, but in spite of that – I like it. To be immodest, I’ve been scouring the web looking for filet crochet work, and I haven’t seen anything remotely like this – either for complexity of the motifs, or scale of the project. It’s going to look killer on the front door window.
Now to finish out the top and bottom edges. I promise no more incremental photos until (at least) the top edge is finished.
Tree Today, Gone Tomorrow
Some pix of my de-treeing. This majestic 35-year old spruce was certainly pretty from this angle, but it was planted two feet away from the house. It was leaning on my walls and roof, and its roots were invading the basement. It’s sad, but the spruce had to go.
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(Sorry about the shot of my neighbor’s SUV.)
Likewise two four-story tall Norway maples in the back yard were given honorable discharges. In their case, they were completely hollow – to the point where the remaining ring of their trunks was about an inch thick. Both had canted, and were looming over my garage and my neighbor’s house. They were disasters poised to happen.
The treeguy used a boom crane to extract them from a tight space, lifting the pieces up and over the house and sparing injury to the surrounding trees. The eighth-of-a-tree limb that’s flying here looks small, but once down on the ground it looked every inch of about 20 feet – larger than some entire free-standing trees. Given yesterday’s winds and the number of branches down in my neighborhood (the result of the last anemic puff from passing hurricane fragments) I’m delighted that the hazard was removed just in time. Plus, I’ve still got six healthy maples and locusts in the back yard, one so huge it dwarfed the two that were taken out.
TREE DAY
Today is Tree Day here at String Central. A crew of treeguys?is outside even as I type, taking down several large hollow trees that are looming dangerously over?our house, the garage, and the neighbor’s house. While I’m usually a tree-and-let-live person these did represent real risk, and had to go. I look forward to an airier, sunnier, safer yard. Also quieter, once the chainsaws, chipper/mulcher, and boom crane all depart. Before and after pix another day, once the leafy chaos has subsided a bit.
In knitting news, I have to ‘fess up now that June posted her blog entry about the DNA cable. I read her initial complaint, and thought she deserved a wedding present, so I redrafted her cable for her. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but she was sweet enough to post a credit, and to leave me a Mysterious Present in my mailbox (it turns out we live quite near each other):
I’m thoroughly tickled by the mystery gift (in a favorite color combo, no less!). I’m now honor-bound to knit up this nifty June-dyed fingering weight so?I can report back to her?how effective her color placement strategy was in avoiding blobs. I think that it will be appropriate if I do up a pair of DNA cable socks with it.
It also turns out that I’m on the hook for a poncho. In this case, the fomer tween-ager Elder Daughter? has requested what appears to be the fashion accessory du jour. So I sigh, and like a good parental unit, will make one, no matter how boring. I’m still caught up in Dragon though, and I don’t want to be sidetracked from it. Socks I can make my portable project. A poncho however is another story. Hope I can complete it before fashion obsolescence kicks in.
On Dragon – not enough progress to warrant posting a photo, but I’m getting happier and happier about the twist panel at the top. With a few more repeats done, the design is easier to pick out, and the denseness of the new panel frames the lighter areas nicely. I think I’ll keep it.
SLOWLY UNPACKING
Remember I said that
- I had rescued my knitting things from the storage cubby;
- I was bound and determined to turn a rather dingy basement room into a needlework retreat; and
- I wanted to?outfit my haven?on a budget as close to zero as I could manage.
I can report progress on?all three?fronts. I’m sure you don’t care about seeing six stacked Rubbermaid storage tubs, but this is slightly more interesting:
I’ve kept the large table shown in the before shot. The ceiling tile is replaced, the floor is scrubbed, and?all debris is gone. I moved the white wardrobe to the same wall shown in the new photo, above. The white drawer unit is now further down the wall, and the mesh cubes shown here?are betwen it and the gas pipe, which you can see sticking up between it and the other white cabinet in the before photo. My storage tubs of yarn are stacked in the corner of the room where the wardrobe used to sit. No progress on a comfy chair yet, but we’re replacing my daughter’s desk chair this week, so I’ll probably snarf up the abused cast-off for my workroom.
As you can see, the el-cheapo Home Depot storage units we brought over?from the old house are not good candidates for relocation. The drawers are out of the unit you see because?during the move it?shifted from true, and the tracks are now too far apart to hold them. Some minor carpentry is in order before it’s useable again. If you’re thinking of buying this type of peg-together pressboard storage furniture at a home center or discount store, ?remember that it’s build-once-and-leave-it stuff. Regardless of the low cost,?I don’t recommend it for people who are still in the nomadic phase of life, especially?if re-using the piece in a new location is a consideration.
The wire mesh cubes however are a new acquisition, and bode to be both durable and capable of being taken apart and put back together many times. Last week?these?units?were on special at Target. One box of them makes a stand-alone six cube unit, and the cost (on sale) was just under ten dollars. I snapped up two boxes in white (they also come in black). They can be assembled in any of a number of ways. I’ve done my installation in 2, 4, 4 stacks to work around the?large gas pipe on that wall. Because of the geometry of the thing, I’ve got two mesh units left. Not enough to make another cube, but enough to jury-rig two half-height shelves or dividers in existing cubes by using?some nylon cable-tamers to do the attachments.
The stuff in?my cube unit isn’t there for any particular reason. Mostly it was miscellaneous knitstff that got packed separately from my storage tubs. There’s my swift and ball winder; my collection of single-malt Scotch containers housing needles and other tools (upright on the white dresser, and horizontal in a top cube); various UFO bags; a stack of some rustic-type wools that in violation of my own stash-management rule, has overflowed it’s allowed tub. My small black box of sock yarns; and various coned oddiments. I believe that cone of raspberry is in fact Believe, a find from the Classic Elite mill ends outlet up in Lowell, MA. Books, mags,?and leaflets are elsewhere in the house, in their own bookcase; with mags and leaflets?sorted more or less haphazardly into several plastic magazine files.
Eventually I’ll sort through the tubs and pull out Yarns of Immediate Inspiration to put on these shelves; stowing the ones I don’t plan on using in the next fifteen minutes. My stash management rule??
If it doesn’t fit in my existing containers, I can’t buy it.?
That means I either have to knit up new acquisitions immediately, or make room in a tub by using up something that’s already there. However, eyeing the tubs I see that they are increasingly filled with odd lots of leftovers rather than full-project amounts. Perhaps it’s time to organize a yard/yarn sale/swap meet, and invite the world over so we can all redistribute our holdings to better effect. Hmmm….
String-Or-Nothing 