Fiber Dreams

Knitting things

I was browsing around a bit and saw this Elegantly Simple Baby Blanket pattern, free from Jackie E-S. Here are some other freebies from Jackie.

The forget-me-not socks are pretty well-behaved, but if I’d known about this a month or two ago some serious sock threatening would perhaps have made the Conwy socks go a little faster. Thanks for the link, Kim!

I’m sure you’ve heard about Ravelry by now. I finally got my invitation late last night. It’s every bit as addictive as they say. I just wish our Internet connection was faster. Though we have DSL, since the last phone company merger our connection’s been going at a snail’s pace. Especially some days. Dave has something in the works to get this fixed (back to a cable modem again), but until then… Well, let’s just say that while I wait for Ravelry pages to load I’m getting a lot of knitting time in.

Melanie announced the the Mystery Stole 3 knit along over the weekend. I love most of the shawls she designs, so I signed up for this one. Don’t know right now what in the world I’ll knit it with, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. Just in from Melanie: there are already more people in this year’s KAL than in last year’s and she’s weeks away from closing the signups. Love it. She must be tickled to death. I don’t know about her, but knowing that many people were waiting for my charts would make me a bit nervous. And excited.

The summer Knitty is up. Hoping to get some time to take a look later today.

Not much sock knitting got done over the weekend, except when I was waiting for Ravelry pages to load last night, but I made a concerted effort on the green shawl, and now only have five rows left before I can start casting off. Woot!

Flowers

I saw some pictures Earin took of some of her gorgeous penstemon recently. I must look these up in my Western Garden Book to see if they grow here.

The blue dresser

Meanwhile, Dave worked on getting more of the blue paint off his old dresser over the weekend. He’s decided that he definitely wants to paint it instead of staining it. The difference between all those woods would be just too strange for him.

Part of the restoration job is to rebuild and re-glue parts that have become a little weak over the years. I don’t have a picture of it (bad blogger!) but there’s currently a strap clamp around the top of the dresser, holding it together while the glue dries.

The old wood casters were all removed yesterday, so they can be cleaned up before the whole thing is reassembled. Check out the reverse side of the caster. Molded into the metal is the name of the manufacturing company and the patent number. These days they’d just put a sticker on it, if they bothered with that at all.

Roasting

I’ve told you about Dave’s new coffee roasting hobby—he’s loving it, by the way—but I haven’t shown you what he goes through to roast the stuff. The roaster is set up so that if you put it under the hood on your stove and turn on the fan, the smoke generated will be whisked out of the house. One problem. We have a down-draft that’s between the burners. No hood. This is what he came up with. Cracks me up. He puts a cutting board on the burners, the roaster on that, and then this metal tube contraption to get the smoke down to the downdraft.

Feeling squirrelly

There are plenty of squirrels in other parts of southern California, with the distinct lack of the right kind of trees in our neighborhood we have a lack of the cute little guys. Or, at least we thought we did. While waiting for the coffee to roast yesterday evening, we were out on the deck, looking down at the yard, and saw something that was definitely not a rabbit race across the yard. While Dave ran in to get the binoculars, I saw him appear in the neighbor’s peach tree, then I raced off to get the camera.

We could see him a lot better with the binoculars than with the camera, but I did what I could. Here. Let me enlarge the important part a bit for you.

This adorable gray squirrel is joyfully eating a peach. After a few minutes he dropped this half-eaten peach on the ground and grabbed another one. There was a very curious bunny on the ground under him, who seriously checked out the peach that fell on the ground. I wish I could have gotten a shot of that for you, but I simply can’t zoom in enough. Drat old camera.

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