Pick Up The Pace

The nights have suddenly gone from warm and humid to cooler, the geese are flocking, the goldenrod is out, and the fall fairs are starting. Summer is nearly over, and the next little while is always a whirl, harvesting, preparing, storing things, and taking advantage of the last of the warm weather.

See that sky?

That's Saturday evening, which snuck up about the time I was cleaning up after supper, taking the corncobs out to the compost, and the grey water out to the tomato plants. (I noticed today that one of my tomatoes is starting to ripen, so I'm excited.)
I've not had much idle time the last few days, it seems. A lot has gotten done, though. I stripped the gooseberry bush Thursday, got a colander full of berries. I got about half the top-and-tail cleaning of them done this afternoon, and will try to do the rest this evening, with a cup of tea and a musical on the VCR for entertainment.

A few of the gooseberries did get cleaned right away and thrown into fruit salad for an indigo dyeing morning Friday with the Fleece Spa group, before I went to work. I also brought Wensleydale roving and commercial yarn previously dyed yellow, and they are now drying on my shower curtain rail, considerably bluer than they began.

Julia woke me earlier than I considered necessary this morning, but it turned out I needed every minute to finish dressing, eating and packing before my ride showed up for the demo today at Navan fair. We had a lovely day for it, a little warm perhaps, but it did cool down after a shower in the afternoon, which made the tin-roofed building we were in very noisy for a while. Half a bobbin of cria got spun, and it was a nice chance to see exhibits and check out exhibit categories and ideas at a different fair - normally this weekend I would have been home at our local fair. I still did send some knitting for entries there, though, so I'll hear how that went tomorrow night.  In the meantime, I think the teakettle is my next stop.