Rolling On One

It’s the slowest rush job you’ve run into lately. On Saturday Anne came over, and the three of us went to her friend Marcy’s house to look at furniture that Marcy wants to sell before moving to Hoboken. We’re going to buy a lot of it for the house in Maine — coffee table, side tables, armchairs, armoire, and I forget what all else.

On her way back to Cambridge, Anne dropped me at the caning shoppe so I could get some rush to re-rush the chair we saw on the curb a couple of weeks (or was it months by now? I think weeks) ago.

I started working on the chair last night. It’s looking exactly like a rush seat. I think the chair will look great when it’s finished, but that will be a couple more days. I have some progress pictures in the camera, but not ready to post yet.

So Zum Gali Gali Rubber Stamps went to the Celebrate Newton crafts sale yesterday. We didn’t pull in as much business as we had at the same event last year, but it was a very successful day for us anyway.

We were right next to where the musical groups were performing.

First on was a flute septet, including one bass flute. They had a beautiful sound — the bass flute was almost like a cello — but some balance problems. It took almost all the way through the first chorus of “Jingle Bells” before I recognized the tune. They did a French Christmas carol, “Il est nee, le devine enfant” that I remembered from singing with the Tamalpais High School French Club 45 years ago (! scary !). Yes, I do still know all the words.

There was a high-school jazz group that was really good, especially on “Caravan” and a song I was sure I had on an old LP — I thought Bobby Timmons, maybe Horace Silver. When they were done I looked at a music stand, and, sure enough, “Moanin'” by Bobby Timmons. It was a Bobby Timmons concert at Howard University when I was there on a student exchange program for a week in April 1962 that got me interested in jazz. My date, Violet Cameron, was jumping up and down in her seat with excitement over the music. I thought, this is a pretty cool girl, and if she likes the music that much there must be something to it. I never had a lot of jazz records, but I listened to the ones I did have when I was studying math in grad school.

There were two a capella groups. They also tended to have balance problems — the harmony parts didn’t let the melody through in lots of places — but it was really nice to have the music there. Both groups did the ’50s Rock ‘n’ Roll song “Lollipop”.

The best part was seeing people. The Phys Ed teacher from Lincoln-Eliot, someone Arlene was close to at work, was there with her baby girl. A co-worker of mine and fellow bicycle commuter from Dragon was there. Felter Susan Tornheim gave me advice on how to get those mittens to felt, if I want to try any more but I don’t think I will. Best of all for me, Melba, my walking companion from when I worked in Waltham, had come with a list of stamps she wanted. I hadn’t seen her since my old company moved to Burlington in July.

And, besides lots of stamps, we sold two pairs of knitting needles. I have a big stash now, birch, cherry, walnut, and teak, if anyone’s interested.

Is there a Murphy’s Law about felting? That woolen things that you don’t want to felt will, and ones you want to felt won’t? I tried cooking my big mittens this evening, wringing and mushing them, and dumping them in ice water, but they don’t seem to have felted. I’ll settle for having knit mittens big enough to go over gloves, though, so I’m not awfully upset. And I guess I should wait and see what happens when they dry, anyway.

Finally, after three weeks and a little, I’m starting to do something constructive at my new job. Under close supervision, I fixed one bug! The guy (Ken) who was looking over my shoulder knew just about what to do to fix it, but I did search one more time for a variable and found a place where we had to make a change that he might have overlooked. I have a long way to go before I know my way around that code the least bit, but it’s a good start.

I finished knitting those big mittens this evening. It started going very quickly, partly because I’m getting more effective at continental style knitting.

While I like the idea of two tubes (socks, sleeves, or mittens) on two circular needles, I think I’m faster with double-pointed needles, at least for fair isle stuff. With four strands of yarn coming off the needles, it takes me lots more time to get set up for the next half a round on circs. There’s just too much to untangle and there are two many ways to get the yarn stuck between needles in an inefficient place. With DPs I can keep the yarn on my fingertips while passing the freed needle over to the other hand for the next segment of the round. Even though there are lots more needle changes, each one takes less than half as long as with two circs.

Here’s where I was on November 20 —
— and here are the all-knit mittens —
You’ll notice some differences in the pattern between the thumbs and the palms, and between the palms and cuffs. I’m keeping ’em anyway. Also, notice that I’m following Anna Zilboorg’s approach to pairs of mittens — don’t worry about making the mittens of a pair identical mirror images, just tell the world they’re a pair, and they’ll be a pair.

Also from Zilboorg (the mittens are from, sort of, Magnificent Mittens; this is from Knitting for Anarchists) comes the idea for continental style purling carrying the yarn around the needle in the opposite direction from usual (because it’s really hard to purl with the yarn coming in the normal direction) and undoing the twisted stitches by purling the next row into the back loop. It’s easy and quick and seems to work fine.

Some time last year Charley salvaged a bureau from the trash. It looked just like one he had had as a kid, a ’70s Scandinavian type design chest that we had got at Children’s Workbench. This one was on the curb, had lots of loose joints, and had “JUNK” spray painted in red on the top. It looked salvagable to me, though, and we put it in his basement.

We have our new vacation house in Maine to furnish, now — we had the inspections done two weekends ago, got the report saying we needed a fire door in an open doorway between the garage and the basement, a fireproof access panel to cover a hole in the garage ceiling, and that one pane of skylight had a failed seal in the thermopane and should be replaced; so we asked for a reduction in the price to cover those repairs, decided that since we know the house isn’t new we couldn’t ask for adjustments because the roof and furnace may or may not need replacement in the next few years, and sent in a form to amend the purchase and sale agreement. Our realtor called back last Tuesday and said, “It’s a deal”. — so after that long digression, as I said, we have it to furnish. Bureaus salvaged from the trash will do, at least for the duration. But not with “JUNK” spray painted across the top, and not without being glued back together.

We brought the bureau here from Charley’s yesterday. I have a power sander, a reciprocating, not belt, kind, that Charley and I had started to use on the bureau about the time he got the thing. I tracked it down and got psyched up to sand the paint off the top. But!! the sander didn’t start when I turned it on. The trouble wasn’t in the power cord or the connection. After much mumbling, I decided to take the sander apart — after all, if it wasn’t going to work, what was there to lose — and see if a good cleaning and lubrication would get it going again.

Well, at this point you should know, or recall, that I started a new job about three weeks ago. I haven’t done one single constructive thing there yet, unless you want to count writing a twenty-line Emacs Lisp program to reconstruct something useful I had at my previous job; I’ve been spending all my time with web-based training classes learning the product I’ll be working on. The product is a mechanical computer aided design program, something engineers can use to design their companies’ products. The web-based training uses an imaginary company, Cordless Power Tools, that’s making a gasoline powered drill. I’ve been spending all my time at work for the last two and a half weeks looking at power tool parts.

So, in short, opening up my sander and taking it apart was like old home week! Look, there’s a gearbox to reduce the speed and increase the torque coming from the motor, just like on the CPT drill! There are sub-assemblies that I have to put back in the proper order! It’s just like the exploded view of the drill on the drawing I did two days ago! I had a ball. Well, getting the brushes back into the motor and getting the core of the electric motor back together was a little tricky, but I did get it together. Of course there was lots of sawdust to vacuum out of the works, and I put a couple of drops of oil on the motor shaft. I didn’t see anything specific that had been keeping it from working, so I wasn’t at all sure I had done it any good. But there weren’t any unused parts left over, so I plugged it in and tried it. It ran!

I took it back to the backyard where the bureau was waiting for its red paint to be removed, turned it on (and it still ran!), leaned down on it, and sanded and sanded. The red is gone and the bureau is waiting for some glue and clamping. So excuse me while I go back to the basement with some Q-Tips to get glue into the little spaces.

Sorry there’s no “before” picture. When it’s all together I’ll try to remember an “after” picture. But you can believe me that the bureau looked like JUNK in the “before”.

I brought in to work a poster for the Celebrate Newton crafts fair (Sunday Dec 4) that we’re taking Zum Gali Gali Rubber Stamps to (and however many homemade knitting needles I can have by then) to put up on a bulletin board there.

As I was looking for a push pin to put the poster up, a lovely young woman walked by and asked what I was looking for. I said, “just a push pin to put this up.” She said, “Oh, I have some in my office, would you like me to get one?” Normally I would have said “No thanks, I have some in my office too,” but I stopped myself in time and said, “Yes, please.” I consider that a small but significant growth in social skills, being willing to accept help. I don’t know if I can make it a habit.

Chris Fitzgerald, one of my eraser carving net friends, sent me this email about the coptic binding. I didn’t realize until after I posted that bit in the “Big Mittens” post, how good the blockquotes look with this blog template. Here they go again!

I don’t know how often you check the comments on your
blog but I promised a formula for calculating binding
thread. So I called my friend Jean and here it is.
Lay the thread out along the full height of the
assembled book. One length for each signature, one
length each for the front and back cover. One length
for luck plus just a bit for knots, etc.(not much)
I’ve taken classes with Jean and this works.

… are what I’m working on. Anne at She Ewe Knits wrote me a while ago (after I thanked her for her web page of directions about handling long floats in fair isle work)

My favourite project — make very large mittens, loosely knit with 100% wool

(just the pull on type no cuff ribbing or anything — and felt them!

Then you put them on over your good gloves (that you need to be able to grip the wheel to drive with) clean off your car and let all of the snow go on your large felted impervious to snow mittens, and when you get in the car —

you take the mittens off and your hands are still nice and toasty warm (and dry) in your nice gloves!

So I’m trying that, with some leftover Bartlett Mills yarn from my first sweater and some leftover Lopi from Charley’s, and a very simple color pattern from Magnificent Mittens.

I used the ball winder that I got at the Newton Boys and Girls Club rummage sale to wind the Bartlett Mills yarn from its hank. It worked great! That’s right up there in the running for the best 50 cents I’ve ever spent at a rummage sale.

When the retired Newton art teachers got together with their old boss earlier this year, they planned to meet again for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Falmouth. That was for today.

We drove down there about an hour earlier than we had to, so as to have a little time birding around Falmouth. Siders Pond is one of the best spots in Eastern Massachusetts for ducks in the middle of winter, because it hardly ever freezes. Birds looking for open water end up in it. This, you probably noticed, isn’t the middle of winter yet. There wasn’t much on Siders. Besides that, the wind was blowing towards where we were, on the back yard of the town hall. It was the last place birds trying to stay out of the wind would want to be. We walked around the Salt Ponds area on the bike path a little and saw lots of hooded mergansers, some goldeneyes (I think — they were pretty far away) and a few loons; also a cardinal that was closer than we’ve ever been to a cardinal except one at a bird feeder.

All of the fourteen people at lunch ordered a main dish. We passed them all around and, to everyone’s surprise, finished most of them. Then we went over to Susan’s house for dessert.

Here are several of the main characters — Susan, old boss Al, Pauline, and Carolyn. Those are Susan’s paintings on the walls.

Charley took a picture of himself in his new lopi sweater. As you would hope from a professional photographer, the picture is a lot better than the one I took yesterday: