It Is Time

The seed catelogue came in well before Christmas. So early in fact, that I thought that there must have been some sort of mistake. I guess that the seed people must have been lookig to cash in on some Christmas shoppers.
However, I was busy with all things Christmas (mostly of the making kind) and so it was set aside. And, I will admit, forgotten.
It resurfaced the other day and so Bill and I started to look through it. I chose the peas, he chose the tomatoes. We also ordered broad beans, green beans, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, and dill.  Lettuce, beets and brussel sprouts round out the order. We have other seeds left over from last year and so will also have spinach, broccoli, onions, corriander, and basil. Mira might try her gourds again. Hopefully this year, we can keep them in check a little better. They really grew. A lot! Very quickly! And for a long distance. I was quite shocked to go back to the garden after a few weeks absence and find gourd vines having traveled more than 30 feet!
Over the last couple of weeks, we have been blessed with weather that was unseasonably warm. There were a few days when I was able to go about with my jacket unbuttoned and my hat and mitts in my pocket. Sunshine, no wind and temperatures just above freezing. Now we have been dropped back into the deep freeze with night time temperatures in the -18 to -24 C and the daytime highs being -15 C ish. Reality in my little corner of the world. The thought of green things growing in the warm summer sun is a little balm for my frosty toes and nose. Only 4 months till last frost!

New Loom

Well, actually it is an old loom. It is not even new to me seeing as I have owned it for at least 14 years. What is new about it is the fact that it is set up in my house and I am able to weave on it!

It's a Fanny LeClerc was the first loom that I bought. When I bought it, it was dismantled in a junk pile of a house and I had to go back three times before I had all of the pieces. The place was way out in the middle of nowhere and at least 30 minutes away. We were not amused.

But once I managed to get all the pieces, I set it up in the spare room and started back on my weaving adventures. Then my boys were born and my "studio" became their bedroom. This loom was dismantled and shuffeled to the shed and eventually out to the garage.
Where it stayed.
For years.
A few years after the boys were born, Susan gave me the little Dorset and I was weaving again. I only thought of Fanny occasionally when I wanted to do something like overshot which requires you to switch back and forth between plainweave and twill. The Dorset is a direct tie up and not, in my mind at least, the type of loom to be weaving anything that requires a lot of foot dancing.
This past summer we got rid of the couch and a space in the living room opened up. Then we had the washing machine incident and the old washing machine ended up in my living room for a little while. When we finally move THAT out, I looked at the space left behind and thought "Hmmmm, that Fanny is just about the same size!" And just like that, Fanny was back in my life. It is tucked between a chair and the plant stand which makes it an ideal location because I have great lighting and a place to set my cup of tea and some weaving tools.

Currently on the loom is a set of four scarves to submit to a show that my weaving group is having in March.  I tried to take a picture of the first scarf but the lighting, while great for weaving, is not that great for photographing silk. It just looked really wrong. So you will have to be content to know that the first scarf is orange (as you can see) and the others are all different colours.  And, yet again, you will have to wait to see the results.

Getting down and dirty

A couple of weeks ago, a new semester of school started, and along with it was a new session of evening classes. One of the classes is a throwing class. Throwing pots on a wheel that is. Not throwing things across the room. Although that may happen with pots from time to time. All accidentally of course.

As I mentioned this past summer, I had taken a year of pottery back in my student days. I really enjoyed playing in the mud, most days, and thought that it would be nice to do a little more. I also would like to make a few large bowls and the perfect mug. I looked for my prefect mug at all of the craft sales that I was at this past Christmas season and didn't find what I was looking for.

So now I have a goal.

Here is what I threw the first day of class. 9 muggy forms and 3 bowls of various sizes. Unfortunately, they ended up being a little to dry to put handles on by the time that class came around again so I h=now have a bunch of "vases" or "handle-less mugs".

 Here is one of the 4 bowls that I threw last night. The circular batt that it is sitting on is about 12 inches in diameter to give you a rough idea of the size of the bowl.

And here are the other three bowls that I did last night. They make me very happy!

Next week, I get to trim these babies and try and throw my perfect mug form. And for those of you who have never done any pottery, when you throw a pot on a wheel, you usually leave some extra clay on the bottom and when it has dried a bit, you put the pot back on the wheel upside down and use a special tool to "trim" away any excess clay. That is how potters put a little rim on the bottom of pots. We call then feet.

As for the two things that didn't work out, well, you all know what a lump of sloppy clay looks like right? But I saved my clay and spread it out of a plaster bat to dry a bit. Next week I will get a wedging lesson. I tend to kneed my clay, which is a bad thing. Wedging is sort of like kneeding except that you are both softening the clay and removing any air that is present. Kneeding is an action that introduces air into the mass that you are working with and air pockets in clay are bad in so many levels. When you are throwing, they make your clay uneven on the wheel. Think unbalanced spin cycle in the washing machine and then translate that to wet clay. Not good. It can also cause your pot to blowup when being fired because the air pocket heats up and has no place to go, pressure goes up and a piece of your pot comes off. Also not good.
So I need to learn how to stop kneeding my clay and start wedging it.

Everyday is a new adventure.

Silver Spoon

For Christmas, I got a gift card from mom for Chapters. I had to go to the mall on Thursday to return something and thought that I while I was there I would look to see if I could find something at Chapters that sounded appealing.
I looked at novels, craft books, the sales shelves and nothing really popped out at me.
And then I went to the cookbook section. There many books popped out but there was one that really grabbed my attention.
The Silver Spoon. I had heard a review of it on the CBC last year and it sounded pretty good. I believe that it had been compaired to the "joy of Cooking" except for Italian cooking. Bill had also been expressing an interest in doing some more ethnic cooking. So the Silver Spoon it was.
And it fits nicely on my cookbook shelf.

When faced with recipes from a different part of the world, you can expect to find some ingredients that you have never heard of before. But I really never expected to see Beef Cheeks as one of them. I never realized that they were a part of the cow that one ate.

 And by beef cheeks, they mean the cheeks on the front part of the cow, not the back end. Apparently they are quite tough and stringy, no surprise with all of the chewing that a cow does. But when cooked correctly they are wonderfully flavourful. I don't know that I will ever actually try this recipe, but if ever presented with beef cheeks, I will know where to look to learn how to cook it.

First official FO

Last year, my friend Amber came home from BC. She had moved out west a couple of years earlier and when her mother told her she was moving, Amber knew that it was time for a visit. Time also to sort through some of the things that she had stored at her mother's.

We had a pizza night and she brought along some of the things that she had decided that she didn't want to cart out west again and among the yarns was a skein of her slubby handspun in white and cotton candy pink. Or Barbie pink. Or Girly girl pink. It was such a shock to see such a colour among Amber's things. She is bright, vibrant colours. Bold, in your face. But pale pink?
It was so odd, and I knew that Nicole would LOVE it, that I grabbed it and intended to make a hat for her.

Well, time passes and other things get made and stuff gets piled on top of other things. And then suddenly it is Christmas time and you realize that people will be showing up at your house and maybe it is time to do a little cleaning. Excavating in some cases.

And I found Amber's Pink Yarn. And a hat was born. It was a really quick knit and I finished it on New Years Day. So it really was the first official Finished Object of 2010.

It is a simple hat. I took a guess and cast on 60 stitches and did the typical k2p1 around until, after trying it on the correct head many times, I decided that it was safe to decrease. Near the end of the skein, there was an unexplained colour change which made this cute little bulls eye. I had some yarn left and thought that it would be cute to give the hat a little..... thing? on the crown. She likes it so far but if she decides that her stem must go at some point before she out grows the hat, it will be simple enough to make it disappear.

Earthy new yarn

Yet more new yarn. This one 100% merino that I added some silk sliver to as I spun. The silk is mostly white. I dyed it in the same pot as the yarn, but silk sliver is really hard to dye through. The silk doesn't want to open up and let the water in and the fiber on the outside of the sliver is so thirsty for dye that it soaks up all the dye in the area quickly and it doesn't have time to penetrate. So the inside of sliver dyed in the way that I did for this experiment, can have a white core. There are ways to overcome this. The one that I use most often when dyeing silk sliver is to heat the pot up before adding the vinegar. The heat helps the dye to penetrate. You can also paint the sliver, let it sit for an hour, wrap it in celophane and steam it. The benefit to this method is that you can manipulate the silk and pull the fibers apart so that the dye can penetrate.

New Yarn

Over the Christmas holidays, I managed to get spinning again. It was wonderful! I hadn't really done any spinning since the Spinning retreat around Halloween. I started to spin this 80% merino, 20% silk that I dyed, thinking (haha) that I might have enough time to spin the skein and weave another handspun scarf for my sales table before Christmas.

It didn't happen. At least not before H1N1 hit in mid November. At that time, I just gave up doing anything extra. I was in bed for a week and tired for a month so what I had to sell was going to have to be what I had.

In any case, I finished the skein the other day. It is still not washed and set, but it is all plied and skeined off.

matching colours

Sarah helped me with the Christmas Choice Craft Sale because my co-organizer was home with a preemie baby and was not available. However, I am very glad to report that Connor is doing fine these days.
When I found out that my co-organizer (coincidentally also named Sarah) would not be able to be there, I called in.....my other friend Sarah. Why do I feel like I'm in the remake of the Bob Newhart show?
In any case, Sarah was more than happy to keep me company, and refill the cookies and keep an eye on the mulled cider and do a thousand other things that needed doing while I was in at the sale and trying to flog my wares.
As payment I offered Sarah anything she wanted, such was my gratitude. Money, fast cars, drugs (well. Maybe Tylenol and Sucrets would be as far as that offer would go)
In any case, she just asked that I dye a skein of yarn to match a skein of silk that she bought off of me last year. No worries! I said....until I realized that the skein that I had dyed before was silk and was dyed with acid dyes and the skein that she wanted dyed to match was a silk bamboo blend and needed to be dyed with fibre reactive dyes because acid dyes will not dye bamboo.
Lesson time.... in my world, there are two basic types of dye. Acid dyes dye protein fiber, which is basically anything that comes off of an animal. Or out of in the case of silk.
Fiber reactive dyes are dyes that will work on cellulose fibers or anything that is plant based. Or, again, silk.
SO my task was to match a colour created with acid dyes with fiber reactive dyes. This is like comparing apples to oranges. There are two different types of dyes with two different types of base colours. Next to impossible. For most people. Thankfully, I had a secret weapon on my side. Her name.....is Harriet. She has been the studio head of the Surface Design department for many years and this woman knows colour. As in KNOWS COLOUR. She was in one day before Christmas and I begged he for a moment of her time. I think she was ironing some burnout velvet at the time and so had a moment to spare.
The conversation went something like this.
Me: Hi Harriet, can I use your brain for a moment?
Harriet: Sure.
Me: I need to match this colour (points to one colour in the multi coloured skein) It was dyed with acid dyes, but the skein that I have to dye has bamboo in it so needs to be dyed with FR dyes.
Harriet:Hmmm. Try 70% Navy, 20% Teal, and 10% Black.
Me: Thank you thank you thank you (accompanied with much bowing and scraping)

And here are the results. Top skein is the silk dyed with acid dyes and the colour that I was trying to match is blue in the center. Bottom skein is the silk bamboo skein that I dyed and rinsed until the cows came home.

I know that monitors present colours differently and all, but I am pretty impressed with Harriet's assessment of the colour and her knowledge of the fibre reactive dyes that we use at the school. I hope that one day, I will have half as much knowledge of colour and how to reproduce it.

Happy New Year!

Doesn't that look lovely? And nasty? I'm sure that it is not the hardest puzzle going but thanks to mom and dad and Christine for doing most of it. Somehow, I wasn't particularly in a puzzle making mood this year.

One thing that we were in the mood for was food! We had a few people over for New Years Eve and Bill went all out with the food preparation! Starting in the upper left near the green CD case, mushrooms in puff pastry, chicken samosas both hot and not, coriander hot sauce, potatoes in garlic mayonnaise, sour dough olive bread, spinach and feta filo triangles, chicken tikka, black bean dip both hot and not, and corn chips for dipping. What is not seen is the flan that was going to be for desert. Seriously way too much food, but I didn't have to cook a single thing yesterday.
Sarah brought over a game that her brother bought her for Christmas called "Dirty Minds" if memory serves me correctly. It features rather risque clues to mundane things that you have to guess, IF you can get your mind out of the gutter. Some were easy, some rather hard. No pun intended. We laughed and laughed and Bill has said many times that he really like the game.

I have found that lately it has been getting increasingly hard to write blog posts. The lead up to the Christmas season was particularly brutal this year and I took a while to recover. I didn't feel like doing much of anything beyond the usual things that need to be done at home as well as what needed to be done at work. That left me with little to post about and no energy to try and be entertaining. Typical post from December would have probably gone something like.....

Work today, cleaned dye kitchen, again, fixed the Clement, vacuumed under looms, put new warp on for media class. Couldn't think about supper so left it up to Bill, again. Did laundry. Homework with kids. Fun fun. Read for a while, went to bed.

Not riveting reading.

But I have had a break from many of the usual routines and I am feeling a little refreshed. I hope that this will lead into a new surge of creativity. I started a new felt vessel last night so I think that the year has started off on the right foot. I also plied the yarn that I spun at the spinning retreat two months ago. I have had both Bill and Mira asking to be taught how to spin and so my excuse is that I needed to clear my bobbins. The real reason is that I needed to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing some of the UFO's that are sitting around. But more on that later.
Happy New Year everyone!

The kids took may pictures of the tree, but I think that this one is my favorite. It is like one of the old style trees with the candles instead of lights. Either that, or an Ent who has had enough and is getting ready to leave.

The kids decorated the tree again this year and I have never heard such squabbles. Nobody was putting anything on in the right place, everybody was in the way, no one was choosing the right ornaments, or conversely, everyone wanted the same ornament to put on. I have put on the 2010 calender at the beginning of December, " Decorate the tree ALONE" And I just may stick to it.

It seemed to be the year of big presents. I was the giver of small presents but the aunts and uncles and grandparents were givers of big presents. Mamoo and grampy gave a big tent that the kids can use camping or at the lake in the summer, Uncle Sandy gave sleeping bags to all the kids, and Aunt Christine and Uncle Joe gave the kids a Telescope. A real on that Joe found second hand from a woman who's husband apparently said "you have too many telescopes so you have to get rid of a couple". Unfortunatly, the photographer was asleep behind the camera. either that or she gave up trying to get a good photo of the animals around the kill (aka: kids around the presents)


And here is the nasty puzzle that I dumped at the farm. Hmmm. Maybe I should have said "brought out" to the farm. I once had a fellow tell me, upon hearing that we liked to do puzzles at Christmas, that if I wanted, he could get me a 15,000 piece puzzle.
I told him thank you , but to take a long walk off a short pier. I did puzzles for pleasure , not for the challenge, and definitely not as a thing of torture. 15,000 pieces. Jeese!


Mom said that she didn't think that such a puzzle existed so I did what any one would do and googled something along the lines of "nasty large puzzles" and found a puzzle that was 24000 pieces. NO THANK YOU!

So mom, how has the puzzle progressed.

Vacation

It is 9:23 and the kids are all still sleeping. There is no need to harass any one to get up, get dressed, have breakfast, make lunches, wash faces, brush hair......you get the picture.
We had a great day yesterday. Opening presents here and then off to my parents house to eat freshly made waffles (thanks Joe) and more presents.
There was great conversations and too much food. Mom and Christine worked on one of the two puzzles that Christine gave me last year. I did one last year, the one that I thought was the easier of the two and it was devilishly hard. So I thought that we would all do it this year. Bwahahaha!

NOTE: The next day......

So life happened around me and here we are , the next day. December 27th. I did a little cleaning and rearranging yesterday while the kids spent the day watching movies. Bill made flan in preparation for New Years and we discussed what else needed to be prepped ahead of time.

I am starting to think about my next felting project.

There is no need to haul kids out of bed again this morning!

Vacation is grand!

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas all!
I am posting from my new I-pod touch!
It is a lot of fun,but it takes a little more time than using a regular key board so I don't think that I will be posting with it too often. But it is a really neat new toy!
Thanks papa for the awesome present!

pounds and pounds

Of meat?
A couple of weeks ago, Bill went to pick up our yearly allotment of beef. It is raised by a fellow that Bill's brother went to school with. It was a full side of beef that weighed in at about 400 pounds. It was all pre-cut and labeled into steaks, various types of roasts, stew beef, hamburger, and a couple of bags of brisket. I had never heard of brisket before and the first year that we purchased a side of beef (a quarter actually) I really had no idea what to do with it. Eventually, I decided to treat it like a roast and cook it slowly in the oven. WOW! It was the tastiest and most tender meat that we had eaten in a long time! Lots of fat and bone, it is true, but the flavour was amazing.
When you get a whole side of beef, it is really amazing how many T-bone steaks there are! I think that we are set for the next year. It is really wonderful to know that the meat that we are eating had a good life, lived out doors, and was slaughtered as humanely as possible near the place where it was raised.

Art Trek

A few weeks ago, Fredericton Arts Alliance had an Art Trek. The basic idea was that practicing artists and crafts people would open up their studios and the public would be able to drop in and have a look around and purchase you wares if they were interested.

My studio (a small corner carved out of a messy room) is NOT where I want to be inviting people so my friend Karen said that she would host any of our fiber group that was interested. Trish and I took her up on her offer.
Karen has a beautiful house over looking the St John River. She has sunny windows and a husband that dressed up and played doorman.
Trish is a felter of hats and garments. The garments take a lot of time and I think that she has much more fun with the hats so she had many hats. Many many different hats.
Here is my corner of the room. You can see a couple of Trish's scarves and her large vessel that are also made of felt.
Here is Trish working on her needle felted world ornament. She has family scattered all over and has given some of them a felted world. The idea is that each Christmas pins with the other family members names are placed on the world in the correct location.
Eric is taking a break from being the greeter with a quick look through the paper. Doesn't he look spiffy?
It was a fun weekend and I even made a couple of sales!

Hmmmm......

So I guess that it has been a while. I have been super busy weaving, dyeing, and getting ready for shows. Not to mention the other things that fill up one's day when one has work and a family. Unfortunately, a lot of what I have been producing have not been among my favorite things. Don't get me wrong, they are fine, but they are not spectacular. No pictures of anything. But the list goes something like, 8 shawls, 5 (soon to be 6) scarves, and 20 odd skeins of yarn (dyed, not spun). My spinning wheel has been sitting rather silent lately except for one wonderful weekend.

The spinning retreat.
Halloween weekend, Fredericton hosted the 9th annual spinning retreat. It was in a hotel that is located in the heart of downtown Fredericton and not to far from the craft college. About 60 people attended from the Maritime Provinces and some people even came up from Maine.

There were about 8 informal mini workshops that were included in your registration fee, and three larger workshops that had a bit of a cost attached to them. I taught a dyeing one where the students all dyed 100g of merino roving. A good time was had by all. Did I get pictures? Nope.
But I did get some pictures of one of the mini ones. This is the crew who did needle felting.
I brought Victoria with me and I worked her hard that weekend. Every spare second that I wasn't eating (and eating well, I might add) I was spinning up some dreamy 50/50 silk/merino roving that I bought from the Yarn Source. I also picked up some mohair locks from the Black Lamb. As well as some bamboo/merino/alpaca from Legacy Lane. All together there were many more vendors (about 13 or 14) but with a limited budget and a lack of desire to deal with raw fleece, I limited my spending.

Check out the carpet in the ball room that we were in! You should seen all of the fluff and stuff that was left behind when we packed up our wheels and went.
It was great to spend a weekend with like minded people. Where talk of fibre content and ratios and favorite wheels were the norm and not the exception. There were people who had been spinning for years and others who had never spun before but wanted to learn. Some had very modern wheels, others that were showing their years, and one woman had a huge antique one that she had refurbished. Next year's retreat is in PEI. If anyone out there is interested, let me know and I'll let you know the detail when I know the details.

Edit: So after talking about what I bought, I forgot to show you! Silly me!

To the left, the white stuff is 80 merino, 10 cashmere, 10 nylon. At the low low price of $10 per pound! So I got 2 pounds. Wouldn't you? Next, a mix of (I believe) merino and bamboo. Then merino, bamboo, alpaca. The small green bag is merino and silk, and the small orange bag is merino locks. Yummy! And it is all displayed on one of the eight shawls that I wove in the past few weeks. This one is destined to go into the Crafts Council show "Snow".

There. That's better!

Children BEWARE!!!!

From the comic Luann......


Has a certain kind of appeal, doesn't it?

Sorry for the long absence. I'll be back soon with some FO's! Including knitting. Life has just been crazy busy and couple that with a slow computer and you have some serious posting issues.

As they say in the TV business.....Please Stand By.....

Bitter Sweet

Almost two years ago my friend Charlotte died of ovarian cancer. She left me her large loom. I had (and still have) no place to put it. Not even in storage.
Last May, her husband and I took down the loom and put it in storage in his house. At the time he told me that I could have her yarns. Two things prevented me from acting right away. Again, I had no place to put them, and it also seemed like desecrating a shrine. I asked if it would be alright to wait a few months. He said that that would be no problem.

Fast forward more than a year. Bill cleaned out some of the stuff in the back shed, we got rid of the couch and moved the chair that was stored in the shed to the living room. And I saw vacant space. That could be filled with yarn. I would have loved to put it in my studio, but unfortunately, that room, at this time, does not exist.

Last Wednesday, John and I bagged Charlotte's yarns. I has a day full of errands to run so I borrowed my dad's truck. We managed to fill the back of the truck with yarn. I had no idea that there was that much there.
And it all had to come into the house.

It made the first stop in the living room. This was, as I mentioned, on Wednesday. After the yarn was dropped off, supper needed to be made. Homework needed to be done. No time to sort yarn and no place to put it when it was sorted. I needed to make a trip up the hill to buy some plastic containers. I bought 5.

Silly me.
I didn't get back to the pile until Friday. Nicole wasn't feeling well, so I had to leave work early and pick her up. It turns out that she couldn't have felt too badly because she became upset when I told her that we were going home and not, as she wished, out to eat at a restaurant.

I fed her lunch and put her in front of a movie so that could start sorting. Things got much worse before they got better. I sorted all afternoon Friday. And more on Saturday. And I finished up the sorting on Sunday. I also had to make a couple of more trips to buy some more bins. The final bin count was 19.
6-60L bins of DK weight skeins of yarns, mostly from Briggs and Little, a local mill (and mostly in browns), 1 mohair, 1 linen, 1 with silk, rayon and the extra cotton that wouldn't fit in the cotton bin. 3 of fine wool, another of superfine wool.
One that I called "boucle and fun stuff". It will be interesting to open up that bin again. One that has a lot of Fleece Artist and Henry's Attic yarns. One that I called "Odds and Ends". Again, it will be interested in seeing whats in it.


One that is full of full bobbins.
Charlotte was a tapestry artist and used lots of colours and made a lot of her own bobbins from paper. This was a practice that she continued with her other weaving. There are some regular bobbins that have yarn on them too. A surprising amount actually. So between the paper and regular bobbins, there is a 45 L bin full. I have a few idea about what I can do with them.

I also found out that Charlotte had inherited the yarns of another weaver friend who had died a few years ago. Nel was from the Netherlands and was also very active in the weaving community. I have a lot of her handspun yarns too. All in natural animal colours. Maybe enough for a blanket.

There was also a couple of bags that I passed on to others. The bag of acrylics and other types of synthetic yarns that I knew I would never use went to the salvation army thrift store, and the bag of yarns that were perfectly fine but things that I, again, knew that I would never use, I brought to the school for the students to pick through. I might go through some of the bins again later so that I can give a bit more to the students.

I'm sure as I haul things out to use, I'll let you all know that it was from the "Charlotte Yarn Collection". I have already used a few bits and pieces in my latest shawls. The shawls are hanging off the back of my chair begging to be fringed and have their ends sewn in. I'll get a round to it. At some point.

So as you have now may have guessed, the sweet in the title is from having a whole new stash to play with. And the bitter comes from the fact that I really would much rather still have Charlotte around doing her magic with her yarns.

How many men does it take....

...to raise a tent?
I never did get a final count, but I now know that it also takes one woman....

Over the summer, the barrack square between the school and the casemates was home to a tent that was used by the EdVentures program. It wasn't big enough to serve as a venue tent for the Harvest Jazz and Blues festival, but it worked fine as a beer tent, so the tent builders unlashed it and walked it over to its new location.
Then one fellow needed to remove the pegs that the tent had been lashed too. I was wondering how this was going to be done and then he started to work with this odd contraption.
Next the poles for the new tent were laid out and the workers set to building the roof.
once the roof was all framed in, they needed to put the tarp on. It was laid on in sections and pulled into place.
and then lashed together
Once the roof was all on and secured to the base of the roof frame, they had a tent raising party! All the workers gathered at one end and on the count of three, most lifted while one went to work inserting the legs.
This was repeated all around the tent. Here you can see the woman in blue placing a leg pole.
Then new pegs had to be put in so that the tent could be lashed to it. They used a jack hammer with a cup like attachment to pound the pegs into the ground. When they came to the asphalt, they used an attachment to drill the hole first.
It was one of life's small mysteries that I now have an answer too.

cleaning up

my desktop. Here are some yarns spun this summer. If you have seen them before, please forgive my forgetfulness. It happens sometimes.



And some dyed roving.

Now that I have shared, I can get them off my desk. Just a few more things to clean.
Like the garden. We are suppose to get a hard frost tonight. Grrr. Guess what I am off to do?

Goodbye lake......

Mira harvested lake grass again.
My little wheel inside one evening.
The kids made a fish holding pond.
And Liam caught a fish to put in it for a little while.
Kid fishing in kayaks.

Kids pushing Uncle Sandy
Front porch with the red truck on the side ( I have to admit to a serious amount of guilty pleasure derived from driving that truck. It is so big that it beeps when it backs up, but it was great to drive and we all fit! Thanks Dad for the loan for the couple of weeks that we were away)
Look who came to the fire one night!
Well marshmellowed kids around the fire.

There may be a few more random lake picture show up when I am up to my neck in snow. Just to remind myself that this too, in time, shall pass.