Rolling On One

On the way from Northampton to Casco (Sunday May 24) we went north on I-91 to Greenfield to get on route 2. We had told Jo and Lorenzo how easy it was to be in several states in a day in the northeast. In the western US, where states are bigger, it’s unusual to be in more than two states in one day. Jo seemed particularly interested in that idea. It seemed a shame to be only a few miles from the Vermont border and not go into the state, so I stayed on I-91 past Greenfield to the last exit in Massachusetts, got on old US 5, and went north until we saw the “Entering Vermont” line. Lorenzo and Jo got out and took pictures of each other at the state line signs.

On my way bicycling (for the first time in several weeks) to work yesterday, I saw a big snapping turtle in the parking lot by the canoe launch area in Nahanton Park. It wasn’t really remarkably big for a snapping turtle, maybe with a shell the size of a dinner plate, but even that’s much too big to want to mess with. I got a couple of good pictures with my iPhone:

Look at these legs, when it decided to get up and move off! I didn’t realize those things could stand up so high off the ground. That’s more what I expect from a land tortoise.

Last weekend Arlene and I went with my mom and two of her neighbors to her 70th college reunion. Let’s see —

Thurs 21 May – drive from Newton to Northampton via Lexington, Concord, Greenfield.

Fri – attend alumnae college classes in AM, go to Old Deerfield in PM.

Sat – alumnae parade and meeting in AM, art museum in afternoon, illumination in evening.

Sun – drive from Northampton to Casco via 50 yards of Vermont, Hampton Beach NH

Mon – Lorenzo and Dean plant 11 tiny black walnut trees

Tues – We get my mom a new pair of shoes at the New Balance outlet in Oxford, visit the Shaker village, and drive back to Newton.

When I was a kid the cub scout handbook had directions for making a willow whistle. The idea is that the bark will slip right off a willow stick, and from there you can go on to make a whistle. I never met a willow tree that I could cut a branch from, and never made a willow whistle, but I’ve wanted to.

Last year I found that it doesn’t have to be willow. Moosewood, or Striped Maple, also has branches that you can slip the bark from, the web article said. We have plenty more Moosewood than we want in Casco. In fact, it’s considered a weed tree in many circles; it never grows big enough to use for lumber but will fill in clearings, take over, and crowd out trees which do grow big. So I’ve been cutting down a branch every weekend for a month and trying to get the bark off, with no success until two weekends ago. It’s a seasonal thing; the bark will only come off when the sap is running well, which is when the leaves are starting to grow.

So, here are two Striped Maple whistles that worked, out of five I tried to make:

I need more practice. I hope the trees will cooperate, next time I get a chance.

Maybe it would still really be spring even if I weren’t planting more fruit trees. I’m still a glutton for punishment in the form of tree planting, though. I have, however, found that a mattock is a good supplement to a spade for digging holes to plant in, especially in northern New England ground. I say “ground” rather than “soil”, because to me “soil” is something made of clay, sand, and loam, not rocks. Ground is the natural stuff you can stand on, including rocks. In this case, consisting largely of rocks.

As I did last year, I posed for a tree-hugger picture:

That’s six trees, two cherries, two Seckel pears, and two — all right, it’s four trees and two bushes; the last two are beach plum, which is going to be more of a bush than a tree.

The cherries are one White Gold and one Northstar. Maybe I’ve lost track of which is which, but I think this is the White Gold:

… and this is the Northstar:

I definitely forget which of them is a pie cherry and which is a sweet cherry, but I do know there’s one of each.

The pears I’ve wanted to grow are Seckel, little tiny pears that you can eat two or three of for a snack. I put in a tree two years ago, but it’s too close to the driveway and was damaged by the snowplow. I bought two more trees this year and planted them closer to the other pear trees — maybe too close, if they really grow, but it will be a long time before that’s a serious problem. Here’s one:

Here’s the other. It arrived broken. I looked up “grafting fruit trees” on the internet and followed these directions as best I could. That black splotch halfway up is the repair, taped with electrical tape and sprayed with an asphalt pruning sealer paint. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I’ll be surprised if the tree really makes it.

By now I’ve put in seven pear trees. One of them was much more severely damaged by the plow than the first Seckel, so I’ve almost given up hope for it. Two of the first batch, a Bartlett and a Bosc, are doing very well. The Bartlett even has a couple of blossoms this year. Eagletree, the Colette pear I planted last year, looks good. That leaves the three Seckels. We’ll wait and see!

Besides the fruit trees, we had over 25 baby Fraser firs to plant. We had put in about 50 evergreen seedlings in the fall, 25 Fraser firs and 25 Colorado blue spruce. The spruce all look good, but none of the firs seemed to have survived. The nursery (nurseryman.com) replaced them and we planted them. They’re small, about six inches above the ground and a foot or 16 inches of roots, so they’re lots easier to plant than the fruit trees.

I neglected to take pictures of the beach plums. I put in two beach plum bushes last year, much later in the season than this. They looked like dry bunches of sticks for months before they put out any leaves, but did eventually start to grow. The new ones should be in better shape than the first two were when they went in, so I’m optimistic about them.

Charley sent me this link to a British video about a hi-tech unicycle. It’s too much fun not to post! The presenter rides up to a marina somewhere in Italy for a demo of an electric powered unicycle that’s only a little harder to ride than a Segway scooter, and maybe more comfortable because you sit down on it (as my juggling teacher Steve Aveson said, one of the only three useful things people told me about unicycle riding, “sit your butt down on the damn unicycle”) whereas you have to stand on a Segway.

Here’s an update on the discharge-printed shirt I’m working on. I took a break this weekend to work on income tax, but after two nights of printing during the week the front is all done. Remind me to zigzag around the edges before I work on the back; washing the shirt in between bleaching sessions (I don’t want to leave the bleach on the fabric the whole time until I’m done printing it) is fraying the edges back to the very limit of the 1/4 inch seam allowance that this Kwik-Sew pattern has.

Arlene showed me some pictures of Adinkra fabric, from a book on African fabric in her vast art library. It’s done in smallish rectangular or square patches, separated with other motifs. She suggested using masking tape to define the rectangles. Since I’m printing it after sewing the front facings on, I could overlap the fronts to match the center lines, so the patterns on the two fronts will match perfectly when it’s done.

After just a few stampings:

A closeup of that state:

I used a junky oil painting brush to brush the SoftScrub onto my stamps. A styrofoam meat tray is a good disposable palette.

I limited my set of stamps to about six motifs of similar size. Actually there are two sizes of stamp, one half again as wide as the others.

After two sessions I had the whole front done. This was the end of the first session:

I’d recommend working in a well ventilated room for this project. DAMHIKT.

Two weekends ago it was the second day of spring. I was set to grill supper even though there was a foot of snow on the deck in Casco. Arlene shoveled a path to the grill.

The best part was, usually I set that charcoal starting chimney down on three pieces of firebrick to cool off. That day, all I had to do was plunk it down in the snow. There was a brief hiss of snow turning into steam, and it was safely cool.

Last weekend, I mean March 21-22, I started a short sleeve shirt out of some of the least expensive yardage I’ve bought off the bolt in years, indigo cotton called “homespun” from the Windham Wal-Mart. We bought four yards of it when we bought four yards of black “Cotton Club” there for Arlene’s discharge printing class. I think the cotton club was $2.77 a yard and the homespun was 2.24. Whatever, it was ridiculously inexpensive. I’m figuring on discharge printing on the shirt with adinkra stamps. I practiced discharge stamping on scrap of that fabric last Wednesday evening. It doesn’t look too bad, at least some of it doesn’t look too bad. I tried Soft Scrub on an uninked ink pad, Soft Scrub padded on from a paper towel, Soft Scrub painted on the stamp with a small brush, and bleach diluted two to one with water on the uninked stamp pad. The impressions from bleach on a stamp pad were the sharpest, but not so clear as the ones from the Soft Scrub applied to the stamp with a brush. It needs more practice before I start stamping on the shirt itself, which has the fronts, yokes, and back all together. That’s all I want together before I start printing. I’ll leave the sleeves and collar solid indigo and put them on after I’ve discharged the part that will have pattern.

Hah! The first Stitch and Release shirt is all fished.

I didn’t mean “finished” because I’m still thinking of writing “Stitch and Release” and putting it somewhere like a brand name on that. I’ll have to learn how to machine embroider first. It may be a while, or never. The shirt was on deep markdown at Reny’s, I think $5 for an undistinguished but just fine shirt. I have one or two blue work shirts that would be improved by applique fish also.

This fish has its tail and fins flapping in the breeze. I probably should have made them two sided, with raw edges caught in the middle, but I just turned the edges over and stitched the hems down. Most of that fabric is remnant Marimekko from the Crate and Barrel outlet in Kittery.

Also from the Crate and Barrel outlet remnant barrel — they sell pieces of Marimekko by the pound, material that Crate and Barrel has used in store displays — is another shirt which I started yesterday and got up to the point that the indigo one is. It’s the same silk screen as the one which is most of the fish, that sort of flower-petal pointillistic pattern, but in gray-blue with a bright blue patch pocket and orange to pumpkin yoke.

The trouble with that remnant fabric is that it used to be stapled to displays. You have to work around staple holes, so there’s not nearly as much fabric as it looks at first; or, of course, you can just shrug and fuse a little patch of interfacing behind the holes you missed when you cut out the pieces. Since you’re getting it for about 1/20 the original price off the bolt, it’s worth the annoyance.

If you’re keeping track (and really, I know perfectly well that I’m the only one keeping track) I still have two unfinished short sleeve shirts that I started at least five years ago. They’re both a little farther along than either of these two new ones, but I’ll probably finish these first, just because I have some momentum and enthusiasm going on these, and they’re different from anything else I have.

Saturday night we went to see the Windham Community Stage Theatre production of the musical 1776. At the cost of being patronizing, I need to say that I was impressed by how much better it was than several community theatre productions we’ve seen in Needham and Newton. Maybe it’s because they have a professional as the director, the woman who directs theatre for the Point Sebago resort in the summer. It’s hard to imagine that there are that many Windham area residents who are better actors, actresses, or singers than the community theatre organizations in the Newton area can find.

The show was in a multi-purpose room at a school, a place with the stage on one side of the gym and the lighting booth across the basketball floor. The pit orchestra, drums, keyboard, string bass, violin, and one-woman woodwind section playing clarinet, flute, and piccolo, was off to the left of the audience. The show, one of three performances each of three weekends, was almost sold out — at least, there were only a couple of empty chairs among the 80 or 100 folding chairs set up in the gym.