Rolling On One

Back in Pocatello (over a month ago) one day we took my mom downtown to have her portrait painted. There’s an artist who’s working on a project “Faces of Pocatello” or some such. If you walk into his studio on a Thursday he’ll spend an hour starting a portrait of you in oil paint. He takes a few digital photos to start, so he’ll have something for reference after the hour, and gets a good start in an hour. He’ll work on the painting for at least two or three more hours some time later without you being there. When it’s done, if you like it you can buy it; if you don’t, he’s happy to have it in his collection. So my mom figured she’d give him a try. Here’s the artist, and his dog, and the view of Old Town Pocatello out the window, and the portrait after the first hour.

In between shoveling snow this weekend I finished the adinkra bag. Here it is before felting (under incandescent lights in the living room),

… and after about three 12-minute cycles of small hot wash all alone in the washing machine (under the fluorescent light in the cellar):

It shrunk from about 8 1/2 inches wide down to 7 1/2, and more than that proportionally in height, and got lots firmer and nice and felty. Also, I really don’t think it wants to curl at the top any more. This picture was taken as soon as it came out of the spin dry cycle, and I don’t know for sure how it will be when it’s dry.

Again, the yarn was Cascade 220. The saleswoman at Black Sheep Knitting Co. said it would felt, but I wasn’t sure she was directing me specifically to wool that would felt as opposed to just “aw, get some wool, it’ll felt, all this section is wool.”

This project was kind of a milestone for me:

* First intarsia project. I like doing it fine. I’ll look more seriously at Kaffee Fasset books if I see them on markdown in the future. Maybe at full price, even. Maybe not.
* First i-cord. It really is as easy as people say. I did this on 2 DPNs. I tried some on a knitting spool I had made a couple of years ago but never really used, also, to compare how fast the different techniques were. The spool knitting was more uniform, except for one really bad spot. I couldn’t decide which was faster. The trouble with the spool is that you can’t see what you’ve done until you’ve done three more inches.
* First successful felting. I’m a believer.

Here are a couple more pictures from last weekend (I mean weekend of Dec. 8/9) in Maine. We were in Newton this weekend because of dire weather predictions — a severe weather alert for southwestern Maine that said “cancel travel plans for Sunday.” And indeed, we had a good winter storm in the Boston area today that started with a good six inches of snow and turned into snow pellets, sleet, and rain later. It can only have been more snow farther north, and I was very glad not to be driving through it — and even more than that, glad not to have to shovel out the driveway after getting back.

But anyway, last weekend we walked around our trail and saw, besides some snowshoe hare tracks in the snow, a maple tree that I had marked as such with an eraser-carving-printed plaque:

and a snow-covered Sleeping Rhino:

Arlene yelled, “Pine grosbeak!” from the kitchen in Casco.

That’s a bird we’ve never before had a good look at. Once or twice on group birding trips someone has called them, we’ve gotten our binoculars on something kind of far away and said, “OK.” Normally they live farther north, but people have been seeing lots of them in both Massachusetts and Maine the last few weeks. This one was in the crabapple tree outside the kitchen window.

After I looked for a while, I checked the bird book. The photo checked perfectly, and the book said they were very tame birds. Hey! Maybe it won’t mind if I walk out and try to take a picture. It didn’t. I got the following four (plus others less good):

We saw three female pine grosbeaks at the top of two trees on the far side of the driveway later, too far away to try to photograph (and I had downloaded these photos already at that point.) Oh, the ruffed grouse that had been in the crabapple last year? There was one in the heritage apple tree outside the other kitchen window. And a red-breasted nuthatch at the window feeder.

I’m making good progress on a small project, a to-be-felted handbag for Arlene from Gina’s pattern.

It’s in Cascade 220 that we got last weekend at Black Sheep Knitting Co. in Needham. This is my first intarsia project. I’m surprised at how much faster the rows with pattern seem to go than the rows of just one color. Of course they don’t go faster, but they seem to. Maybe you can see some tension problems towards the beginning? They seem to be getting better as I go. Swiss army knife because I keep cutting lengths of yarn for new blocks of color. I don’t think this will be done in time to be a hannukah present. Maybe Kwanzaa :-).

My mom doesn’t drive these days, since she can’t see well enough. Although there are plenty of people who will drive her to medical appointments, it’s hard to just get out and see friends. One person she wanted to see was Dorothy. The two of them used to go out to lunch at the restaurant in the Holiday Inn regularly. With neither of them driving, they hadn’t got together in a long time. We drove, picked up Dorothy, all had lunch, and took her home. That’s my mom on the right.

On our way home we stopped in old town Pocatello to see an art exhibit at the Walrus and Carpenter bookstore. A woman has been doing weavings with strips of newspaper for the weft, sometimes with a few carefully chosen words showing to make her point. Besides those, she had done a piece inspired by the troubles of their senator. We had been wondering before the trip what we would hear about the Idaho reaction to the Senator Craig story.

As we walked into the bookstore, we found a string band playing. There were maybe three guitarists and a string bass doing folk music. “Did you bring your guitar?” they asked. “You could join in.” Of course, my guitar was 2000 miles away and I’m way out of practice on it, since I’ve been concentrating on brass instruments for the past 20 years.

We walked to the art gallery area in the back of the shop. The piece about the senator didn’t disappoint us. A photo of him was framed in a toilet seat cover. Above and to the side was a toilet paper roller from which hung a streamer of newspaper clippings like an out-of-control strip of toilet paper: Craig arrested for disorderly conduct, Craig pleads guilty, Craig thinking about resigning, Craig will try to withdraw his plea, Craig won’t resign after all, the whole thing. I sort of wanted to take a picture, but I didn’t think it was OK to take photos in a gallery.

I walked back to the front of the store to listen to the music a little. The bassist had put down the bass viol and started playing the mandolin. “Here, play the bass,” he said to me. “It’s just like the lower four strings of a guitar. Here’s an A chord, this is D, and here’s G.” I’ve never played the string bass before, but I have a high tolerance for making a fool of myself, so I tried. After one song he said, “Not too bad. You got some of the notes right.”

Oh, and how about that hat? I got it at the Fort Hall Trading Post. It’s pre-scratched leather. There’s nothing a Maine blackberry bush can do to it that hasn’t already been done.

You might have gathered from a couple of remarks in the November posts, that Arlene and I were out in Pocatello visiting my mother for a week, something like November 10 to 17. We got off the highway in Malad, Idaho, (I don’t know how it got its name. Maybe the first settlers were all ill when they got there?) to look for a bottle of water (to replace the water that Arlene wasn’t allowed to take on the plane.) There isn’t a lot to Malad, even though it’s the biggest town on I-15 between Pocatello and the Utah border. Arlene was wondering where the residents of Malad can do their grocery shopping, until we came to a reasonable sized market on the far side of town. Outside was a big wooden sculpture, entirely astonishing for the location:

Now, that seems like a strange subject for me.

I can’t figure out why, but when I heard his obituary (on NPR no less) a week ago I said, “I think I want to do a memorial postcard for him.” I started looking around the web for images. I found a quote I liked in an obit from a newspaper from Melbourne, Australia and an image I liked, and his name in a big balloony font from a poster. I laser-printed the quote and his dates and carved two eraser stamps (really, soft block printing blocks, from NASCO Saf-T-Kut).

After I had printed up a couple of dozen postcards I posted a message to the erasercut exchange email group offering a card to each of the first dozen people who answered. If I try to post from the wrong email account Yahoo won’t let my message through, so ten minutes after I sent the message I checked my email to see if it had bounced. No! There was already a request for a card.

Requests did not exactly flood in, and in fact I don’t think I got the full dozen requests at all, but I was surprised by how many people out of that small mailing list did say something like “I was always a fan,” or “I had that toy of him on the motorcycle,” or “He was a part of my childhood.”

I’m not really surprised that the eraser carving artists were interested. After all, one of the jobs of an artist is to expand people’s imagination. It seems to me that Knievel did more to expand the American imagination than most artists have.

As with my other carvings, I won’t post a scan of it until the postcards have had a chance to get where they’re going, but check back here in a week or so. Or if you’d like a copy in the mail, email your postal address to me – deanlie at yahoo dot com . Limited time offer, while quantities last (but I might print up a few more if I feel like it).

[added Dec 13: postcards have got as far as Oklahoma City so far. I’m still waiting to hear from any recipient in California before posting the scan.]

[updated Dec 16: It’s more then two weeks since he died. Any longer and it’ll be old old news. Even if some people haven’t got their postcards, it’s time to post the picture. Here you are:

]

A couple of days ago I think I finished this sweater —

I say “I think” because I’m not at all sure it fits. The sleeves are awfully tight, and the sleeve caps are very lumpy. I’m somewhat tempted to redo the sleeves, but only somewhat — because as you can see, they were plenty of work.

Here are some details:

Yarn, purchased at the Maine Fiber Frolic in 2006 from Ruit Farm North, four hanks of natural dark brown and two hanks of light natural tan Coopworth yarn, something like DK or worsted weight; by mail order from Hatchtown Farm, two hanks of natural white and one hank of natural silver gray maybe a tiny bit thicker than the other yarn. At least, the gray seemed a little thicker than the rest. All lovely lanolin-smelling wool. I have a bunch of all but the silver gray left.
Pattern, for the fair isle pattern I followed the charts in Knitting in the Old Way, Gibson-Roberts and Robson, pp 164-166. For the sweater pattern I tried to follow this pattern on the Garnstudio web site. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. In spite of Theresa’s lessons on reading Norwegian patterns, I don’t think I got it all. Mostly I didn’t increase the sleeves properly, or maybe the gauge was wrong. Or of course, maybe it’s just that my fair isle gets too tight. I keep trying not to let it pucker, but it’s always a struggle.

Well, I wore it out in public tonight when I went to the library to renew Landscape with Reptile, which is an entirely other subject. At least it’s big enough that I can get my arms into the sleeves.

It can be kind of quiet at my mom’s house. I had brought a knitting project for the airplane and a long circular needle and the Fiber Trends “Magic Loop” booklet, intending to start socks. On Tuesday (Monday being Veteran’s Day) Arlene and I went out to Florence’s Attic, a LYS out in Chubbuck (that’s adjacent to Pocatello, to the north, the big direction the city is growing), to get yarn for that project. The booklet called for 320 yards of worsted weight yarn for a pair of winter socks. I got two 165 yard hanks of Andes yarn, cast on, and knit what seemed to me to be a lot. I had one sock done and a second almost down to the heel flap by the time we came home. I finished the second over Thanksgiving weekend. Here’s the whole story:

Hmph, the colors look a little wimpy on my screen. They’re brighter than that, though not to the point of garish, in reality. The Fiber Trends pattern knit up quickly at 48 stitches to the round and about eight rounds to an inch.