Rolling On One

The Fryeburg Fair has a big fiber exhibit. Of course Arlene and I wanted to spend some time there.

One (well, perhaps not; we’ve spent a lot of time around Maine by now) strange thing is that we’re beginning to know people around this state. One of the exhibitors at the fiber center was the woman from whom I bought the super-bulky hand-dyed yarn from Montana at the Denmark sheepfest, so I said hello and told here I had made a good warm hat from it.

Linda Whiting of Pinestar Studio was setting up the first row of weaving on a tiny tapestry loom, using a crochet hook to make a chain to weave against. When she showed me a 4 x 5 inch tapestry she had just done on that loom, something clicked and I said I had seen her merino ram tapestry somewhere on the web. She had a big display board standing on the floor next to her table with pictures of the tapestry in all stages, from the original photo through a picture from the back showing all the loose ends.

Someone we hadn’t met yet, Karen Smith of Shearbrooke Farm, 400 Saco Road, Standish ME, 642-3067, email shearbrooke at adelphia dot net, was weaving on an inkle loom. Arlene’s Aunt Lee had taught us about inkle looms 35 years ago, and I used to build them to sell in Cambridge. We had a long talk with Karen about them. We didn’t buy a book she recommended about them, but at least we have her contact information here.

In the crafts building we saw Sharon Deerfield of Black Swan spinning & knitting. She was too busy plying some violet yarn on her wheel to notice us the first time we went around, but when I went back to try again to say hello she was looking up. She’s been at the fair all week and hasn’t done a lot of business.

Also in the crafts building was Lisa Pyburn of Rolling Knolls Farm, 137 Hampshire Street, Hiram ME, 625-7198. She had some beautiful hand dyed yarns. Her exhibit had several scarves that I couldn’t figure out at all. They looked almost more woven in a twill weave than knit. That didn’t make sense, because looms don’t weave on the bias. Crochet? No, they didn’t look like that either. She showed me the pattern, knit on size 15 needles: purl 2 together but don’t drop the stitches off the needle, then purl back into the first stitch, then drop both stitches, all the way across; on the knit row, knit the first and last stitches, in between, slip, knit, knit back into the slipped stitch. I watched her do a whole row in each direction and maybe I can do it. At any rate, I had Arlene pick out a hank of her yarn so I’ll try to make one of those scarves. She worked on 30 stitches and used 200 yards of yarn. The hank is more like 170 yards so she thought maybe 26 stitches to get a good length scarf.

Charley, Nicole, and Emma are up in Maine this weekend with us. Charley and Nicole were thinking of going to the Fryeburg Fair last weekend, but decided against it in the end. They had talked it up to Emma, who was really psyched for it.

We set out for it after a long slow morning here. Traffic was backed up around Bridgton and opened up again on the road between there and Fryeburg. I expected a traffic backup near the fair, but not like what we found. Around 1:45, after we had gone two miles in half an hour, I said, “If we don’t get there by three, I’m going to turn around.” At 2:43, and I checked my watch so as to know how much time was left on my time limit, we pulled into the parking lot of the Jockey Cap store and motel to step out of the car, buy a snack, and use their port-a-potty. Arlene spotted a Chinese restaurant across the street.  We pulled the car into that parking lot, had lunch, and felt a lot better. When we were done, Arlene went into a food store in the same strip mall for a jug of water and Charley went into the drug store at the other end of the strip mall for cough drops. As we were checking out of the food store, we were talking about the traffic. The people ahead of us were saying they had NEVER seen it so bad, but that if we were going to the fair there was a short cut up a dirt road along the power line a couple of hundred yards past where we were. They invited us to follow their car, but we had a kid to get into a car seat and didn’t want to ask them to wait for us. They went over the directions again for me. About that point a man on a motor scooter came over and said, “I overheard you talking. I’m going that way, too, and you can follow me.” He waited until we had everyone loaded in the car, and led the way up a very rough dirt road, almost more of a 4-wheeler trail, along a power line that we recognized from a couple of years ago when we hiked up Jockey Cap. Sure enough, after a quarter mile of bouncing through ruts and potholes we ended up on a residential street where everyone was operating their front yard as a parking lot for the fair. We were happy to pay five dollars to park there (why insist on paying the same money to the fair?). We were positive that it had taken less than a quarter as long to get there as it would have if we had stayed on the highway.

On Heath Road, along the ridge approaching the intersection of Mayberry Hill Rd. It was in the road, crossing from right to left, when I saw it. Then it looked right at us, evaluated the situation, turned around, and walked off into the woods to the right from whence it had come.

What do you do with all those apples? Maybe one day I’ll have a cider press; but for now, what we don’t make pies or apple crisp of, or give away, or just eat, is probably going to be applesauce. We started last night.

I’m not normally that big a fan of applesauce. If I’ve put in all that work pruning the trees and spraying them, though (and when I wear long sleeves and safety goggles and a mask over my mouth and nose on hot summer days, it’s some work) I’m going to make myself enjoy the apples! So I’m committed to liking the applesauce.

Fortunately, this batch, just two pints to sort of test the idea, was very good. We started with a two-quart pot full of cored, sliced (but not peeled) apples, half a cup each of water and (purchased! that’s an anomaly) apple juice, and four one-inch cinnamon sticks. Note to self: one four-inch one would be easier to fish out when it’s done boiling. We cooked that until it was pretty soft, then added 1/2 cup sugar, maybe 1/4 tsp grated nutmeg, grated rind of half a lemon, and juice of — now, I think it was half a lemon, but maybe it was the whole one. We cooked that all a little, mostly just until the sugar dissolved, ran it through the Foley mill, and packed it into hot pint jars. Our intention is just to keep it in the refrigerator, not to treat it as canned stuff, but we pretty much tried to sterilize the jars and lids. There was just enough left over after filling two pint jars for us each to get one small serving. And it was worth the effort!

Oh, that was mostly the Heritage apples, maybe a Baldwin or two and a Mac or two.

Here’s a link to the comic strip Chicken Wings. The banner shows pictures of and from the firefighting helicopter Panaca Jane that one of the authors flies for his day job. Go to their forum, Roost Air Lounge, Aviation Related Topics, the adventures of Panaca Jane, for pictures of wildfire fighting in Nevada.

I finally finished Everything is Illuminated. We saw the movie about a year ago, and I started the book sometime over the winter. This was really too slowly to read it, because I didn’t remember enough of the start by the time I got to the end. But I did get to the end!

Then, I started OOTP. The Harry Potter, Order of the Phoenix. I’m about at page 120 by now. There’s hope I’ll finish it. This is, I think, my first hardbound Harry Potter book, so I get to read the author’s biography on the back flap of the dust jacket. Anne bought this book in the UK when she was on her honeymoon three years ago, and I haven’t read it (to say nothing of The Half-Blood Prince yet. But there’s hope.

I’m a week benind on this one! I’m talking about Sept 26 now.

Barry had to pick someone up at the airport, so he arranged a substitute for klezmer class tonight. It was Dena Ressler, a clarinetist. She says she knows me from somewhere, but we couldn’t figure out where.
It’s almost always good to have a substitute at klez. It’s not that the substitute would be a better permanent teacher than the regular teacher, but it’s good to get a different point of view and get some fresh ideas. Besides a few specific critiques on particular pieces, Dena said, “Listen to the dead guys and try to reproduce their sounds. Try to figure out what they’re doing, and see if you can do it.” She gave us names of particular klezmer players from the ’30s and ’40s whose recordings have been reissued recently on CD. She had brought in a couple of CDs and played selections for us to listen to.  Overall, it was an excellent class.

As we drove up our driveway last night, I looked to the right, at the edge of the headlight beam, to see if there were deer eating our Cortland apples. Jim, the previous owner, had told us that was something of a problem, and the Cortland got the worst of it because it was farthest from the house. I was about to say, “Well, we don’t have any deer eating our apples tonight,” when there was movement close to the house and a big buck walked away from the Heritage tree over to the far side of the yard. Arlene saw another one in the shadows.

This morning, from the window right behind me as I write this, Arlene saw a doe in the garden, maybe as much as 30 feet away. We all (Charley & Nicole are here this weekend too) came to look. There were two smaller deer with her, probably the young of this year having outgrown the fawn spots. Charley got a better picture than I did and posted it on his blog.

At lunch yesterday I was watching a butterfly migration. Close to the time I sat down I noticed two monarch butterflies fluttering around the parking lot between the building where I was sitting and the parking garage. They circled, gained altitude, and drifted off southward over the garage. Half a minute later another butterfly flew across the parking lot, up, and over the parapet of the garage. A minute later a fourth came along. They were all monarchs and all heading roughly the same direction. I realized that it wasn’t a coincidence, so I kept a close eye on the parking lot airspace. I didn’t see any butterflies come over the parapet towards me. By the time I had finished my lunch twenty monarchs had crossed the parking lot. I’d like to know what’s going on about now at Point Pelee in Ontario. I wonder if they have a monarch migration webcam. (I didn’t find one, but check out the link.)

Over the weekend, I think it was Sunday, I dragged our old Singer sewing machine out of the attic to see if it would work well enough to be worth taking to Maine. We haven’t used it in fifteen or twenty years — we replaced it with a Necchi that has a free arm, which is really nice for sleeves, and a very easy way of doing buttonholes. When I tried the Singer it was running, but didn’t have enough oomph to get started by itself on more than one layer of medium-weight fabric. I took the end plate off and found that the belt was loose and looked as if it was getting set to break. I let Google do the walking and found a replacement belt on eBay. I figured it was worth risking $10 or so on it rather than paying someone who knows what they’re doing to fix it, or to buy a replacement.
The belt arrived today — pretty good for $2.50 shipping — so I tried to put it on. It was too tight. After some struggling with it I realized that the machine just might have an adjustment for the motor position to allow for variation and stretching of belts. Sure enough, when I took the bottom off the machine I found an eccentric wheel holding one side of the motor. Moving it allowed the belt to fit on.

When I put it all together and tried it, the machine ran and could handle a couple of thicknesses of heavy fabric, but ran very slowly. It had been running nice and fast, though weakly, when I tried it on Sunday, so I figured the speed problem was something I had done. I sighed, took it all apart again, loosened the belt adjustment a little, and now it’s running up to speed. So maybe it’s really fixed. Maybe now it’s too loose. I’ll find out the first time I try to hem a pair of jeans with it.

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Indexed a bunch of stamp mounts for orders that came in recently, and five new designs besides.

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My injured finger is enough better that I’ve been able to do two-color stranded knitting. I’m up to the start of round 9 of a 24-row block of pattern. That’s maybe four rows in the last couple of days.