Rolling On One

We went to the Maine Fiber Frolic last weekend. We had skipped it last year, but I wanted to go again. Two years ago it was a cold day, I think even drizzly. This year was warmer and overcast with a prediction of clearing. There were many more people than last time.

This time I was as interested in the woodworking aspect as in the yarn itself. One of the vendors confirmed that — he said something like “there are lots of things fiber people use that I can make as a woodturner.” Right! Between spindles, nostepindes, niddy noddies, crochet hooks, and even knitting needles, there was lots of woodturnery on display. I got to talk with at least two turners and pick up some tips, as well as seeing inspiring work. I had a long talk with a woman who was selling gorgeous crochet hooks and knitting needles she had turned, and gave her the name of a place I’ve bought exotic wood dowels (all right, teak, it’s exotic because it doesn’t grow in the US) from that she wasn’t aware of. She told me about how she turns the knitting needles, using something called a spindle rest which supports the wood while it’s turning, and how carefully she has to measure the wood all the way along the needle to keep the diameter uniform. It’s like drawing a straight line — people say they can’t draw a straight line as though it’s the simplest possible thing to do, but if you try to draw one and then compare against a ruler you see that it’s a lot easier to draw a graceful curve than an accurate straight line. She says that because of having to carve the hook in a crochet hook by hand it takes about as long to make one crochet hook as a pair of knitting needles.

Here’s a little exhibit showing some steps in making a spindle shaft:

… and the display of amazingly gorgeous finished spindles by the same guy. These are Forrester spindles. I think they were at the A Touch of Twist booth.

Arlene got a kit to make four needle-felted birds. We haven’t done needle felting before, so it’s going to be an adventure for both of us. I got one skein of worsted weight yarn in greens and browns, thinking just a camo colored watch cap, and enough Bartlett fisherman two-ply to make the Aran sweater in Knitting With Balls. I felt a little bad buying from the Bartlett booth instead of an LYS, but they’re a Maine business and a smallish supplier compared with Cascade or Berrocco. And really, I didn’t see that much appropriate for that sweater at the individual farm booths.

The Maine Llama Drill Team was performing in the afternoon. Since we knew what to expect we weren’t laughing as hard as we had been the other time we saw it, but it was still lots of fun. This woman was still studying the script for the routines. She was a last minute sub because her friend (or sister?) was home helping birth some lambs.

Over the long weekend, besides planting blueberries and grapes, taking apart that broken table on the deck, seeing Indiana Jones and Ironman, and doing a little fishing, I did a mini wood turning from some of that maple I picked up from the curb in Newton. I was very pleasantly surprised at how nicely the bark worked as well as how good the real wood looked. I’m considering the result a weed pot. Here you go —

There on the ground are the two big chunks of wood I was talking about a few days ago. I’ve painted the ends with a wax coating called Anchorseal which is supposed to help the wood dry slowly so it doesn’t crack.

Meanwhile, I cut off the broken end of the maple log and cut part of it off to turn. Half of the broken end is still just raw wood which I may or may not do anything with, and the weed pot, finished with walnut oil straight off the grocery store shelf, is next to it. I was surprised at how well the wood worked and sanded without any particular drying time. The grain is nice and fine. Now, of course, so is beech, and there’s lots and lots of it in our woods.

We’ll start with a couple of flowering apple trees and move on to pictures that are mostly of interest just to me to document where the various trees are right now.

MacIntosh apple tree in bloom:

Crabapple tree in bloom:

The bees were buzzing around all of the apple trees, but especially the crab. Good. Go, tree. Go bees. Let’s have lots of crabapples to feed the grouse and attract any pine grosbeaks that may come around next winter.

Various blueberries are blooming. Arlene bought two small blueberry bushes which we put in along the rear edge of the lawn behind the house. There are other cultivated blueberry bushes farther back which we put in two years ago that aren’t doing much. Last summer I made an effort to cut back trees shading the most productive patches of wild blueberries, and this weekend I went out on the trails and spread some Holly Tone fertilizer, special for acid loving plants including blueberries, around the wild blueberry patches. Maybe it will help, unless they take the fertilizer as an affront to their essential wildness.

At the same time we put in the blueberries two years ago, we put in some grape vines. Five of eight have survived, but only two or three are thriving. We put in two more, bigger, this weekend. Somewhere here is one of the old ones.

Don’t expect grape jelly from my grapes this year, nor next year. Maybe the year after?

The pear trees from last year are a mixed bag. The Bartlett is doing great:

The Bosc is also in fine shape:

The seckel pear, the one I really want to produce because I like those the best to eat, survived its burial in the snowbank and has new growth:

The new pear tree, Eagletree by name, Colette by variety, has some growth:

The red anjou pear, the fourth of the ones I put in last year, took a terrible pounding from the snow. Arlene says she can see buds on it, but I’m not positive. I’ll keep an eye on it.

The rhubarb here in Casco is doing well, but there’s not enough to pick for pie this year. What stalks there are look nice and red:

The walnut trees have some signs of leaves. In fact, this evening this one was considerably more open than when I took the picture earlier in the weekend. If you think it’s hard to find the walnut tree against the background, you’re right. How do you think it is tracking down the six of them out there where they’re planted? I cut down vegetation around all of them, partly along the lines of weeding and giving them room to grow, but also to make it easier to find them.

Oh, and the new Gala apple seems to have taken and is putting out some leaves.

We first thought this one was real Solomon’s Seal, as opposed to False Solomon’s Seal, which we hear a lot about. Nope, Solomon’s Seal has paired flowers, but this plant has single flowers. Our A Field Guide to Wildflowers suggested Bellworts, genus Uvularia, but none of them seemed really correct. Another book showed Oakesia, a closely related genus. I did a google search for that and it seems plausible. The scary thing is that now that I’ve said Oakesia (twice!) in my post, the next time someone does a google search for it they’ll find this. And I don’t know wtf I’m talking about. Whatever it is, there are lots of them near the house and lots more out on the aspen trail. And this is a better picture than I found on the U MN web site from that search I did.

This one, though, I’m comfortable calling starflower:

When we heard on the news a couple of days ago that a Mars mission was scheduled to land today, we said, “Matt is going to know all about that.” He’s interested in space exploration. Sure enough, he had the NASA site on his computer, and I watched the video feed over his shoulder as the lander got closer, the people in mission control were saying “1800 meters .. 1600 meters .. ” and on down. It’s pretty amazing to be in the Maine woods and watch people in Houston or Pasadena, wherever it was, watching a spacecraft so far away that it takes fifteen minutes for the radio signals to get here.

There are thousands (I don’t think that’s an exaggeration) of knitblogs on the internet, I mean, blogs that talk either mostly or at least often about knitting, what the authors are doing at the moment, patterns, yarn, and so on. Since getting interested in woodturning, I’ve been looking for woodturning blogs. I’m amazed how few I’ve run into. Most knitblogs link several others. if you find one, you can find a hundred within six clicks of the first. That doesn’t seem to happen with the woodturning blogs I’ve found; they may link to the American Association of Woodturners site, or Silicon Valley Woodturners, but pretty much leave it at that.

Are there fishing blogs? Fly tying blogs? I haven’t started to look for them, but I’m not really optimistic. Are there that many more knitters than woodturners, or is it something about men and women and communication styles? I suspect the latter.

By the way, I just got a crown installed on my left upper last molar. It’s been in the works for months, being right behind an implant that got its crown six or eight weeks ago. This one should have gone on at the same time, but the dentist wasn’t happy about how he had prepared the tooth for it and the crown was redone after he did more work on the base of the tooth. That tooth had had a root canal years ago and there was no nerve in it, so all that work could be done (and was done) without novocaine. It was just a nuisance going back to the dentist so many times before it was finished. That long lunch in Boston was the crown’s first encounter with food.

Last weekend when there was about an hour left of Open Studios and nothing much was going on at our site I went out to look at another site, where the husband of one of Arlene’s teacher (really, I think, a school librarian) friends was selling miniature wood turnings. I wanted to talk about turning with him and see if I could get any ideas on the subject.

It turned out that he makes really tiny things, some bigger, mostly wooden bowls two inches high and two inches around, some wooden cups as small as thimbles and almost as thin. It’s beautiful work but probably smaller than I really want to do, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to do that without years of practice. Besides talking about lathes, how he had learned, what he uses for tools, and suppliers, he said, “This one is made from wood from the maple tree in our backyard.” I said that when I see fallen branches on roadsides I think “turning stock.” He said, “Exactly.”

Armed with that, on Wednesday night I stopped on my way home from work (It was about 10 PM, because I had stuff to get ready for a system build deadline the next day) where a big maple limb had fallen a few days before. I had packed along a bucksaw. I cut off a sixteen inch length of five inch diameter maple to dry and use for turning. Yesterday as I left for work I thought, maybe I’ll stop again and cut another length of that if it’s still there.

There was a small traffic cone in the road across the street from the fallen limb, and a mini front end loader was digging out a yew hedge. More wood! I parked, got out the saw, and went over to talk to the construction (or destruction?) people. They said, “Sure, you can have as much as you want. We’re just going to throw it all away.” The boss had the loader operator drop the tree he had just taken out, and I got to work with the saw. So besides the maple, I have a similar size hunk of yew to work with. You have to get this stuff when you can. It’s not something you can find at your local lumber yard.

A friend from junior high school recently wrote about rhubarb on her blog. She’s more particular than I am about how red rather than green the stalks are. To document what kind of rhubarb I’m happy to consume, I took step-by-step pictures of the pie I made last night. I used three big and one small stalks of rhubarb from the backyard in Newton for this, and had a serving’s worth left over after filling the pie shell.

OK, three of them are mostly green. I’ve never noticed any ill effects from eating  rhubarb stalks that look like these. Rhubarb leaves are supposed to be poisonous, I think because of the oxalic acid they contain, so stick to the stalks, and don’t take my word as definitive on the stalks, but you can add this to all the information you’re weighing together. By the way, those are Tony’s portuguese muffins in the background. Building 19 almost always has them. I love ’em for toast for breakfast. And I do not buy Gevalia coffee; I got that canister with a free trial offer years ago.
When I was a kid we had rhubarb growing in the backyard in Flushing, NY. My grandfather used to go fishing in Sheepshead Bay, off Brooklyn. He would give us more flounder than we wanted to eat, and my parents used to put the excess in the garden under the rhubarb for fertilizer the way Squanto taught the Pilgrims to grow corn. We used to get a good rhubarb crop in those days. We have some in Newton, enough for one or two pies a year, which is really adequate. I dug up a few plants last year and set them out in Casco. Two weekends ago they looked almost as big as the Newton crop.

Here they go, in the pie shell. Rhubarb pie is really one of those “easy as pie” pies, as opposed to lemon meringue which is not so darn easy, or even apple which takes more work in preparing the apples and more ingredients by the time you think about spices. Rhubarb is just make the piecrust, cut up the stalks, mix a couple of tablespoons of tapioca (in this case) or flour or cornstarch in with a cup of sugar, and sprinkle that over the chopped stalks in the crust, cover, and bake.

And done, voila. I get a little fancy with my lattice crusts, just because it’s fun to weave them rather than lay them out as a plain lattice.

Gina of Mad Love Knits was in Boston this week for a graphic artists convention. I met her —

and Judy of Mrs. Hammer’s House for lunch across the street from the convention center.

Judy was the first of my readers I ever met. I had gone to Circles, a yarn shop in Jamaica Plain, for a book signing by Stephanie. A woman at the door who seemed to be helping run the event said, “Oh, are you the guy who makes his own knitting needles?” That was Judy. If she was going to read me, of course I started looking at her blog. I saw her again the next September when I went over to Circles again, and then the next day when I went to the Boston Knit-Out on Boston Common (which I only knew about because they told me at Circles).

I’m not sure how I started reading Gina’s blog; probably from a link on Judy’s. Gina designed the adinkra bag that I made for Arlene this winter.

People who don’t have internet friends don’t appreciate the reality of internet friends — that is, that they really count as friends. When you’ve been reading about what someone’s been doing, what they think is important enough to talk about, what’s happening in their life, and they’re commenting on your blog about what you’re doing, you know them better than people you see often but never have a serious conversation with. So when Gina said she was coming to a conference in Boston and wanted to get together with Judy and me, I definitely wanted to be there.

It wasn’t a surprise, knowing how she writes, and seeing that big grin, but Gina is (or was that day) enthusiastic and bouncy, clapping her hands and saying, “Yay!” about things that are going well. If I weren’t an old married man I’d want to grab her hand and go skipping down the street with her.

Here are the three of us:

Gina had sent an email saying, “Here’s my cell phone number. Text me any time.” I had only sent one or two text messages ever before, just to see if they worked. I spent some quality time with my phone manual on Sunday and learned how to input upper-case letters and what the shortcuts are to get to the messages without all the levels of menu, just for the occasion. So we set it all up by text. I got to the restaurant about a minute before the appointed time, and Gina was already there. Basically, I got there, the waitress/hostess said, “Can we seat you for lunch?”, and I said, “I’m supposed to be meeting someone here — I think I just did!” because Gina was the only other customer there.

Arlene had a print in an art exhibit at the Hynes Auditorium, the convention center back across the street. She gave me good directions to find it. That’s hers on the left.