knee

I'm recovering from my knee surgery. My knee hurts. There is hope that it might be a bit better, since I can sometimes move it from bent to not bent, without shrieking in pain. It's not all better, because removing a torn meniscus from a knee with bone on bone arthritis is not going to change the state of the arthritis. But some better is better than not at all better...which is what I was hoping for.

So I'm sleeping a lot and being boring. It takes me about a week to get over a general, I've found. No point in rushing it, because it just won't be rushed.

The only interesting thing? I can't stand grey on grey on grey. So I made my crutches more interesting:


Back to sleep....

Finished Tallit

I just realized that I didn't post the final done photos.

Here are the cute little corner reinforcements.


You can see the wrong side, there...it's a bit of a pain to end off the ribbon, you have to sew it in place, knots would distort, come undone, and be nasty.

Here is the atarah


And the corner with tzit tzit


See? DONE!

Fishy yarn!

Ok, well Nora calls it Ocean Yarn. But that is ok ;-).

I love me some Nora Yarn...

This is the skein I got.



Isn't it totally gorgeous? You can just about see the fish in it, but it's hard to get it spread out just like Nora had it originally. But I can see half a tail (she does each painting in pairs, so each skein is a half fish). When you look at the sock being knitted up on the Holiday Yarns blog (linked above) it's quite clear that that yarn is OCEAN! Nora is amazingly talented...how does she get that from painting a fish????

As I was spreading it out to take my pictures, Wendy started oohing and ahhing over it. "Mummy, won't you make me socks out if it? Wouldn't it be great for me to be in the frozen artic of Philadelphia, and wear this socks so I don't freeze to death? Can't you just see me in college, going like, 'Oh, yeah, I'm that cool!' "

So it looks like I might just have to make Wendy some fishy socks. She wants a shell pattern, like TheGeorg used (and I meth Georg today, at NHSheep and Wool!!!), on the Holiday Yarns blog.

Hats, hats and more hats!

I should really put in all my links from the Sheep and Wool Festival. But I don't feel like it...so I'm going to talk about hats.

We have too many hats.

I have several modern hats, a Tilley Hat for sailing and going being a tourist. My sons have them too.

I have some modern hats, like the one I'm going to wear to Barry and Elise's son's Bar Mitzvah.

(bad photo booth photo)

Abe has a small collection of baseball hats.

Wendy has a few of her own, mostly go unworn.

But we really have a lot of colonial hats.

The prettiest is Wendy's Purple Silk, made by the Fairy Godmother, Hallie.


See? Here is the shelfohats


There are bonnets,


And straw hats galore,


We have foolish looking, mostly dead, old tricorns, (I hope he actually threw that one away!)


and nice tricorns (that always need brushing),


And you can see my nice hat boxes that I make...lots of carefully cut cardboard taped together with the kind of paper packing tape you have to wet with a sponge to get to stick. I hope to get more made, and color code them by type of hat and person they belong to...

But, really...we have too many hats!



The funny thing is...they all get worn!

Atarah and Town Meeting tie for finish.

I'm sitting here in the kitchen, hot! I'm sooooooo glad to be hot! I spent the winter freezing. I was always cold, Abe was in short sleeves, temp was 67 or 68 and I would be wearing a long sleeved shirt and at least 2 sweaters, wool slippers, and I'd still be cold. Today I'm hot because I was virtuous. Abe, the boys and I took our bikes to the rail trail and rode from Bedford to Lexington and back...with ice cream in the middle. It was a nice ride. I helped some teen fix his chain. It was really tangled, and he was walking the bike home, so I fixed it for him, I think embarrassing him, because I did it easily, but it was very tangled, I'm just pretty good at untangling yarn, very practiced at that, and chains are similar to yarn. Teddy loves his new bike, and he would ride off for a while, turn and ride back to us, then go on again. That way he got a lot more miles in than I did.

Now, as for the embroidery.

The atarah got blocked. I soaked it thoroughly, then it needed to be hung, over something without edges, to drip dry. I didn't want to use the regular rack, because it's not clean enough, so I rigged this up in my sewing room. It was pretty stable, but I didn't trust the cats, so I taped it in place.



It's dripping into that bowl.

Here's a close up:



You can see the fancy support system I rigged up. It worked, it didn't budge until I took it down!

I'm really pleased with this, it's just coming out so pretty!

At the last night of town meeting, I started sewing it on.


See? You can tell it's at Town Meeting, because we have our voting slips on the table. Town Meeting is a pain, but I love it, too. We are the legislative body in the town, all the adults who care to register and show up. There is such a long tradition of doing this, I just love being part of that.

The corners make me happy.

They aren't that hard to do, as long as you do it right...you have to snip off the extra across the corner, so that you only have 1/4 inch beyond the point, then fold that in, crease it, then fold in the edges, and match the folds to the middle, and then the tricky part is keeping it that way until you stitch it! Basting the wrong side folds together would work best, but I usually just use two pins, carefully, and tweak it with my needle when I get there. Nice sharp points make me happy.

Sewn on:


Isn't DONE nice?



I finished stitching the atarah on as the the Head Teller and Town Clerk were adding up and checking the results of our last vote, which needed to be counted (most votes are just "hold up your ballots" and if it's not absolutely clear, we do a "standing, counted vote" where the Tellers go up and down and count every row/table and right it down. This takes a while. I like that, too, since I am a teller, and walking around counting is fun. You do it in pairs, and have to be very careful To Get It RIGHT! We have lots of tellers, from as many different areas of town, age groups and political leanings as possible, so that we get it right!

Blogging at Town Meeting

I'm at Town Meeting, paying enough attention to know what the article is about, and how it works, but keeping my distance enough so that the contention of this article doesn't bother me! TM is at our high school, with school-wide WiFi. I had some difficulty getting on, but finally got network diagnostics to tell me that I had a bad network account being used, so I told it to set up a new one, and that worked. (the questions are getting to the place where I'm really glad I have this to distract myself!).

Now, as for the atarah, it's off!



All of a sudden it looks much better, doesn't it? That is always reassuring. I always worry that when something comes off the frame, that it will shrivel up and look like crap. It didn't!

I was also worried that there would be a crookedness problem, because I did this in my preferred "folk style" method, rather than the modern overly drawn, "perfect" stitching version, which I hate working. My method is more fun, but there is a bit of a sense of living dangerously!

I had to do a bit of tweaking, but it worked.


It's pretty straight! I wish I could take a photo of the whole thing!



I love how the colors just glow on the blue background.



This works! I love not seeing the raw edges...

I basted the edges under and now, it's all wet. I used a washable chalk pencil to mark the flower spots and the stem shapes. There are a few white areas here and there. So I gave the atarah a good soaking, and it's hanging to dry in my sewing room. It'll need steaming after that to puff up the petals, which got somewhat crushed while wound on the the frame.

Tonight, I have a large piece of white silk to hem, then I get to knit!

Atarah embroidery is DONE!

At Town Meeting tonight, I finished the embroidery!

I have something of a reputation...people alwasy come over to see what I'm working on, at TM. I've never brought a frame quite this big before. One year I fit my DD with an en fourreau 18th C gown, I've knitted, done bobbin lace (smaller stand for that), sewed, made buttons, but never lugged something quite so large! Yes, this photo really is at Town Meeting, from tonight! It's in the Caf, at CCHS. The main moderator is in the Auditorium, but that room has uncomfortable seats, too formal, and bad light. So I sit in the Caf which is slightly less formal, people can bring an infant, or a quiet school aged kid, and it's lighter, and you can eat. So I sit there, spread out whatever project I've got, and get lots of work done! Lots of people bring laptops, now that the school has wifi.

But the really great thing tonight (other than the embroidery, which follows), is that my daughter, Wendy was there. She's 18, so this was her first real TM. She went a lot last year, and helped out, running errand for her dad (who is the Head Teller) and anyone else involved in running TM who needed something. This year, since Abe needed more tellers, Wendy got drafted. That means that the first thing she actually did at her very first TM was stand to get sworn in to count votes impartially! I saw her on the monitor as we got sworn (I'm a teller, too, and she sat in the auditorium), and was no end pleased.

Just at the end of the last article, I was redoing that too larger flower. I had to finish it off at home, but I had finished the last hex, unrolled it all, and then remounted it to fix the too-large flower in the second hex. Everyone around me was watching...it was boring...school stuff that was clearly big cuts, was going to pass, but we had to sit through the presentations. Sometimes it's just the process that counts, that knowing we had to do it this way, makes the schools do a careful job with their presentations...doing it is important, but it's still boring! So people watched me paly with my pretty flowers.



It looks ok, here, (bad iPhone photo...too fuzzy), but really, it's bigger than the others.


See? It's the second hex from the left, upper left. Ick.

So...this is what happens to icky flowers:


Take that!

Now that I've redone it, twice, it looks fine. Photos tomorrow. Way too late to touch anything that I can screw up, right now!

At TM tomorrow, I imagine I'll be hemming and appliqueing, unless I get that done during the day, in which case I might be embroidering the little blossoms on the corner squares. Then appliqueing the squares down...the end is in sight!