Rolling On One

The wedding proper was on the bank of the Rappahannock River, on land belonging to the groom’s family. We joined a car caravan at his house, ending up in a grass parking area at the end of a gravel road, still 2000 feet from the river. They had a golf cart for people (like my mom) who couldn’t walk the whole way. That sign says “wedding 2000 ft.”

.. partway there

… and at the river. It was worth the walk. It’s a lovely spot, with enough rapids to make a nice babbling brook background sound. This is the river, not the same spot, but not far, that George Washington is supposed to have thrown a silver dollar across. Towards the end of the ceremony a great blue heron flew along the river across the middle of the picture.

Musicians — the violinist, the groom’s uncle, plays with the National Symphony. He did a Bach two-part invention, basically playing two parts at once, amazing.

An ivy semicircle for the bride & groom to stand inside —

Ed escorting Elyse up to the altar (as it were)

The groom’s parents

The bride

And here, everyone is smiling. L to R, Mara, Elyse, the uncle who officiated, Robert, best man Adrian (Robert’s brother), and a little corner of Walda. I like this picture a lot because you don’t need to see much of Elyse nor Robert to see how much they’re smiling.

My son-in-law liked the sweater I made for Charley enough that he asked me to make a replacement for a favorite (but now threadbare, dirty, and moth-eaten) sweater of his. I bought yarn two days ago, Peer Gynt DK weight wool from Norway, at Puttin’ On the Knitz in West Newton, and did a swatch last night. I’m thinking sort of Norwegian ski sweater, navy, light gray, and a little red. Number 5 needles came out just a little too small a gauge; I’ll try again with 6s.

(Friday morning: I did another swatch, on 6s, between Thursday evening and Friday morning. It seems to be just about the same gauge. Maybe the reason is that I didn’t do normal Fair Isle carrying the yarn back to the other edge, but tried knitting left-handed back the other way. It was slow, about 1/3 the speed of regular knitting, because I haven’t practiced it, but I can do it (holding both colors?! Just to establish that it’s possible). I’m going to figure that it wasn’t as accurate an indication of the gauge I’ll get with that size needle as the first swatch, but at least shows that 6s won’t give me an extremely different gauge. I guess I’ll do the project on 6s.)

The music system at our local supermarket was playing a Beach Boys song while we were shopping this evening. I had to think, that’s so not me nowadays (if it ever was). By now I’m ten years older than her daddy was when he took the T-bird away.

While we were driving southward, Arlene got a couple of cell phone calls from my stepsister Luanna, the mother of the bride. One was just making sure that we were getting there OK, and the other was to say that we were invited to meet at the groom’s family’s house (we had directions to it) for the rehearsal dinner that evening around five. Since we weren’t in the wedding party per se we thought it was a bit much to go to the rehearsal dinner, but we left the inn and got to the house a little after five.

That whole area of Virginia is Civil War battlefields. There was a battle at Fredricksburg itself. On the way to Locust Grove we went through the Chancellorsville battlefield, through Spotsylvania, and through the Wilderness battlefield. I’m not a Civil War buff, but I still would have liked to see the exhibits at the various visitor centers and gotten a better idea of what had gone on there.

It turned out (though it wasn’t obvious even after we got there) that there was no restaurant in the picture, rather a big buffet at the house; so it felt just fine appropriate for us to be there.

The house was fairly new, big but not a monster house, mostly one story but with dormer windows showing that there were some reasonable rooms upstairs.

It was full of antique or at least collectible stuff. The kitchen had a hand-cranked telephone that had been retrofitted with a rotary dial so it rang (loud!) and could make outgoing calls. There were musical instruments all around the living room, mandolins hanging on the walls, something from Afghanistan with sympathetic strings like a sitar, a banjo-like instrument from Turkey.

The groom’s mother breeds Arabian horses. She designed the stable herself, after asking all her friends, “If you could rebuild your stable, what would you change?”

It has a center aisle wide enough to drive a truck through for unloading feed and hay, a stall with a movable wall so it can be two stalls or one big enough for a mare and foal, space to put in a bathroom, and more.

Here we have the womenfolk of the wedding party, my stepsister Luanna, mother of the bride; my mom, step-grandmother of the bride, Elyse, bride; Walda, mother of the groom; and Walda’s mom.

Luanna and her husband Ed, aka parents of the bride. They live in Spokane, WA.:

My other stepsister Lara and Luanna. Lara lives in Las Cruces NM. The rest of her family didn’t come because of the expense.

The closest city to the wedding is Fredricksburg, Virginia. I’ve been in Fredricksburg once before, during Christmas vacation week of 1967, staying at the home of the guy with whom I shared an office the summer before when we were teaching math in the  pre-freshman program at Tuskegee Institute. I don’t remember much of the town in general, except for playing pool at a pool hall downtown and going out to drink (a lot of!) beer one evening.
I’m sure the Fredricksburg area has grown tremendously in the last 40 years. It’s about sixty miles south of Washington. There are strip malls stretching for three miles out from it in all directions, or at least all directions that we went. If Nashua, New Hampshire, is the outermost suburb of Boston, Fredricksburg plays that role for Washington. Traffic was crawling from the point where I-95 left the Washington Beltway  all the way to and past the Fredricksburg exit.
We stayed (on Friday night) at the Fredricksburg Colonial Inn, a long two story motel-shaped building that’s totally unremarkable from the outside but not at all like a motel inside. It’s all furnished with antiques and decorated with pictures of the Civil War — Robert E. Lee at four different ages, for instance. I’m sure every room is different, because, after all, you just don’t find thirty of the same antique dresser to furnish every room the same.

The pictures of Robert E. Lee are right in character for the city. To find our way to the groom’s family’s house, we had to turn left on a main street, Jefferson Davis Avenue.

We went to Virginia, about fifty miles south of Washington, for my step-niece’s wedding last weekend, taking Friday and Monday as vacation days so we could do the drive in two easy (hah!) stages instead of all in one day. I took 96 pictures, of which over 30 made the first cut, so I’m planning to do at least two graphics-heavy posts in the near future.

On Thursday we left here after I got home from work and drove to my Aunt Mimi’s house in Mamaroneck NY. It’s just off the Hutchinson River Parkway, which makes it very easy to get to. Mimi and Bert have lived there for fifty years — Bert says my cousin was the first baby on the block when all the houses were new, and she just celebrated her fiftieth birthday. I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years, including several vacations from college and the night before my own wedding. We got there around eleven and went to bed almost right away. After a big breakfast we left around 9. Mimi and Bert were playing golf at a 9:24 tee time so we all left about the same time.

Just for a quick outline, I should write about

Fredricksburg and the inn

rehearsal dinner – pictures
wedding itself – pictures

reception – pictures

the evening after

drive back to Mamaroneck
at Mimi’s

Bent of the river – pictures

I finished (well, there are ends to weave in) my first pair of socks this morning, Regia 6-ply “Oslo” colorway, grays, maroon, and rose bands with white/dark gray bands in between. Picture below. I did ’em the two socks on two circulars technique with 56 sts to a round on Susan Bates #3s. I think I’ll spring for Addis before doing another pair, because getting the stitches past the join was always a nuisance. Also, that wasn’t really enough stitches, I don’t think; the socks are just a little tight. Maybe 60 next time if I use that yarn again. But with 56 stitches two balls of yarn were exactly enough for the pair of socks.

One thing about two socks on two circs that I don’t remember seeing in the online tutorial is how to keep the yarn from getting caught in the wrong place between the needles. I was forever having to pull the whole ball of yarn through to avoid tangling. It took me almost the whole project to work that out. I finally learned to move the yarn so it was behind the working needle after doing the last stitch of the first sock of a round, to hold the yarn in front of the working needle (except right where I was forming the stitch) so it wasn’t caught inside the loop, and to pass the needle around over the left-hand sock yarn end when starting a new half a round. I don’t think any of that will be clear without pictures. All I can say is, I wish I had been more systematic about figuring it out at the start of the project, because it would have saved me a lot of time and aggravation.

Disclaimer: if you want to learn chair caning, this isn’t going to do it. Get a book like The Caner’s Handbook, or take a class. But at least I can tell you what’s involved.

This chair, with a broken seat, cost one buck at a yard sale. I got it just to learn caning on. Anne likes the old distressed look of the green finish and asked that I not refinish it. No problem! Of course I want to do a careful enough job to learn what’s involved, but I’m not going to be fussy.

0. You need to get the right size cane, depending on how big the holes in the chair are and how close together they are. Too wide a cane won’t fit through the holes, as you have to go through each hole several (six to eight or more) times. Too thin a cane won’t be strong enough to hold people up. With holes closer together, there are more lengths of thinner cane to share the weight.

1.The cane comes in a coil. Soak the coil in warm water and hang it up so it can straighten. Pick out a few strands. This actually was a long part, because I had a pretty good tangle of cane to deal with after it had been hanging for a while and should have been straight.

2. Cut the old seat off the chair with a mat knife and clean the old cane out of the holes with an awl or ice pick.

3. If necessary, round off the edge of the seat so the cane will be going over a curved edge rather than a sharp corner, just to reduce the chances that the cane will crack at that point. That tool is a wood rasp, sort of a file with very coarse teeth specifically made for shaping wood. It’s not as scary to handle as it may look. I used sandpaper after the rasp to get a good smooth rounded edge.

4. Find the center hole, or if there are an even number of holes, the hole to the right of the center, along the back rail, and mark it with a peg. Ditto on the front rail. Put one end of a soaked length of cane in the center back hole with about four inches sticking out the bottom and fasten it with a peg. The cane has a right side and a wrong side, and a head and tail end, which you need to pay attention to. After I did the first length, I realized that I had been working with a much longer piece of cane than I needed. That had slowed me down a lot. The cane is so inexpensive compared to paying someone to cane a chair that I’d recommend cutting each piece of cane to the length you’ll need — count the holes, measure the chair, allow maybe three inches per crossing for the up-and-down part and the underneath part, be a little generous so you don’t cut too short a length, but don’t use the full length as it comes.

I bought these pegs when I ordered the cane, but you could use golf tees or whittle pegs out of dowels.

5. Lead the cane down to the center front hole, being careful to keep the right side up and the cane not twisted, pull tight, and fasten with a peg. Thread the cane up the next hole, being careful not to twist it, pull tight, and move the peg to hold the cane in this hole. Continue back and forth to the right-hand side of the back. This is slow, if you have a long strand of cane, but the only hard part is being sure the cane doesn’t get twisted.

6. Similarly on the left-hand side of the seat.

7. Starting at the rear hole on the left, go crosswise, keeping the cane above all the front-to-back strands. Doesn’t it look official? I haven’t gotten to any tricky parts yet.

8. After you have gone fore-and-aft once and crosswise once, you go fore-and-aft again, starting with the center hole in the FRONT this time, and carefully putting the cane to the right of the first fore-and-aft strand, ABOVE the crosswise strands. You will start weaving with the next crosswise set of strands. If you’ve woven with yarn, you can see that this step makes the second half of the warp and that you already have half the weft in place where it belongs.

And that’s as far as I got last weekend.

So on a rainy Saturday afternoon (we left the Bridgton art show in decent weather, did a little shopping at the farmers’ market and Reny’s, then stopped at the new big Hancock Lumber yard across route 302 from Hannafords, got a pound of 4 penny finishing nails to make a triangle frame loom, then stopped at the True Value hardware store further down 302 and found some japanese beetle traps. It started to rain fairly hard as we left the True Value) as I was saying, so on a rainy Saturday afternoon there wasn’t much chance to do things outdoors. Arlene suggested getting started on my chair caning project. I took lots of step-by-step pictures that I haven’t got ready for the web yet, but here’s one she took of me with some progress already made:

Bridgton was having an outdoor art show on Saturday. We like Bridgton anyway, so it was pretty logical to go. The show was at Shoney Park at the far end of town, sort of right at the outlet of Highland Lake. After about four booths we walked over a pedestrian bridge that crossed the brook coming from the lake, down the other side, and back to the booths on the other side of the side street. We probably got to see all the booths, as well as get a close up look at the brook and dams between the lake and the brook.

I didn’t count all the teeth on the gear wheels that control the spillway of that little dam, but there were three big gear wheels with tiny driving cogs on the inside and driven cogs at maybe four times that diameter, and a big rack-and-pinion at the end to lift the dam gate.

Most of the art was paintings, predominantly landscapes and flowers. There were a couple of photography booths that I liked a lot. The most interesting booth, to me, was Eve Abreu’s rustic furniture. Eve, a small woman about my age, was wearing a very disturbing name tag, a little piece of wood with “Eve” carved in it with the head and a quarter-inch of the shank of a 10-penny nail sticking out of the front. At first glance it looked as though the nametag were nailed into her, until you figured out that the nail was cut off flush with the back of the tag. She shrugs and tells people, “Yeah, it hurts”, or “We’re pretty tough around here.”

Eve is somehow in cahoots with Tim Spotted Wolf, native american flute maker. Tim gave a workshop on making flutes back in February and has another scheduled for October, at Eve’s place in Bridgton around the corner from where the art show was. I have a flute kit that I bought at Fort Hall last summer at the powwow. Chances are I should do one of the workshops. But can I get up early enough on a Saturday morning to be in Bridgton at 8?