Hot Off The Presses

Remember a while ago I got two patterns accepted to Storey Publishing's new 101 Wonders book? It's just about due to come out. I got an e-mail this week with a picture of the book cover.

See the red shawl at top left? That's mine! Really pretty damn cool, as far as I'm concerned.

My advance copy of the book arrived today, and I've been flipping through. There are some nice patterns in there I've got my eye on already. Worth checking out, guys, even if I do say so myself ;)

I'm guessing the book should be out for real within the next month, because Judith Durant, the editor, is booked for Rhinebeck, and they've got the same cover photo up on the NY Sheep and Wool site beside her profile. My mother's already planning to get Judith Durant's autograph on the book when she goes...

Looking Forward

Last week at school, our technician (I don't know what else to call her, but she's the one who does all the day-to-day stuff like fixing the machines, feeding the cat, and taking care of plants in the greenhouse) said she felt like she had wasted half her life.

Now, I'm sure she's younger than I am, and I haven't hit the halfway mark for my biblical threescore-and-ten yet. So I asked her what she meant. And she said that most of the people she knew didn't do much after they hit 60. I'm afraid I may have snorted a bit disbelievingly, and I told her she must be hanging out with the wrong people.

Done at 60? In this day and age? Most of the people I know who are that age are more active and involved than half their juniors (and could probably run circles around me).

It's not even a modern thing, though. A lot of great ideas and inventions and books and talent have come from people who were seniors. Last week, coincidentally, I was reading a book about Mary Granville Pendarves Delaney that I came across randomly in the library. It was titled 'Mrs. Delaney (begins her life's work) at 72'.

Mrs. Delaney was born in 1700 and lived into her 80's. And when she was 72 or 73, after she had outlived two husbands and a sister, she essentially invented a form of mixed-media collage, making pictures of flowers and plants so detailed and realistic that I had to look closely at the pictures in the book to assure myself they weren't paintings. But no, they were cut from paper in little pieces and glued to a background, and a few have leaves of real plants included. She managed to make close to a thousand of them (which she called Flower Mosaicks) before her eyesight became too bad for her to continue. Plantsmen sent her specimens to copy. The mosaicks were recognized by royalty, some were presented to royals and celebrities, and she herself was mentioned in poems by some of the writers of the age. They are now collected and housed in London, and people can still see them to marvel over.

Think of it. This old lady, in the era of the American Revolution, sitting at her friend's house in Britain and doing all this detailed dissecting of flowers and fine cutting of paper to reproduce their portraits. Think of the fine, sure cutting to get the fringed petals of a passion flower or the tendrils of a pea plant, the tiny pieces required for the spots on a lily (she even cut multiples for those to get realistically raised dots).

Nope, I think our tech's got it backwards. By the time we get to 60, there'll still be a lot of possibilities for beginning.

Fiber, Various

A week since I taught my first dye class, and I'm finally getting around to showing off the pics of the day, and the newest member of Johanne's flock. We all went to see baby Achai before class started.

It's cute to see how all the females in the pen are kind of protective of him, and they would all move in front of Achai to keep us from seeing him, in case we were dangerous. 'He has a lot of aunts', Johanne said.

Thanks to Jo and Chantal's organization, we were ready to start promptly on time, with neat booklets of information and skeins of yarn for everyone. And all the students had a great time, getting into chopping plants and straining dye baths, ending up with a lovely row of samples to go home with.

You know it's a keen class when one of the comments from a sort of survey and discussion after was "You should have dye supplies for us to purchase so we can go home and do some more!"

This afternoon there was a bit of fiber fun of a different sort. Fibrefest is on in Almonte this weekend, and I snagged a ride with my mother and a friend. What I really wanted to see wasn't even as much the vendors as the exhibits at the museum (the MVTM, textile museum). I will say right now, definitely worth the trip. Go soon, before they're finished.

One exhibit was by a Peruvian tapestry artist, and while I'm not usually big on modern work, the colours and technique were incredible, as if the tapestries were painted.

(detail of the tapestry above)

The other exhibit I really wanted to see was a display of Coptic weaving, dating from the 4th-10th centuries. And they were amazing. Most of the pictures I had seen of Coptic weaving previously was monochrome, like the first picture, so to see a few colored pieces was exciting. This particular colored piece says it was likely a piece off a curtain. Think of it, these fibers were all handspun (spindle-spun, since spinning wheels were still hundreds of years in the future), natural-dyed, and handwoven, and they've survived for 1500 years since they decorated someone's clothes or home...

Bunny!

Last fall at school, we spent some time digging a trench at the fenceline and putting a foot or so of hardware cloth underground, aimed to discourage the rabbits from getting in and nibbling the produce.

We now have evidence that we either missed a spot or have very determined, Peter Rabbit-type bunnies. A few of us went to the garden to check on things for our crop reports, and saw this little guy sitting right there.

He didn't even move until we were pretty close, even let me rummage for my camera, and just kept on munching the clover, so a daring sort of rabbit as well as a super-cute one. At least it was the clover and not the veggies!

Despite possible rabbit raiding, the gardens are producing well. We picked well over 20 pounds of beans Monday! Plus there are tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, greens, summer squash, and herbs. The peppers are starting also, and I think we will be pulling carrots soon. For anyone wanting to get some fresh veg at good prices, drop by the M Building at Algonquin, near Woodroffe and College, around lunchtime. We have our little garden center and produce stand open every Tuesday and Thursday from 11 to 1.

Sometimes the produce we don't sell goes to the culinary program at school, and they turn it into tasty meals to sell at their store, Savoir Fare (H Building, and definitely worth a visit). Today though, because the extra veg would all be sitting around for several days, we got to buy them at a deep discount. So I came home with a bag of tomatoes and one of summer squash and eggplant and a head of lettuce, all for under 3$, and I have some beans from earlier this week. There will be tomato sauce and bruschetta in my future this weekend!

Wild Fare and Local Fair

Had I mentioned we'll be taking a class trip to visit an enterprise that grows and sells wild and weedy edibles? A few of us in the class are already into it, nibbling purslane in the garden and such. A classmate and I walked along the bike trail near school one day and found a bunch of edibles - a whole patch of wheat or barley, just about ripe, sumac heads for making drink (it's supposed to taste a bit like lemonade, but I found more of a resemblance to iced tea), some catnip for our cats, and lots of chokecherries.

The juice I extracted from mine tastes different than the jelly my mother made with her chokecherries, so I shall be curious to see how my jelly turns out. Need to pick more first, though, since that picking gave only half of what I needed.

The last couple days, though, it's been the wild life out at the parents', in either sense of the word. Wild in the primitive sense, because the new pump they put in the well last year broke down a couple weeks ago, so we are hauling water in pails from the old well or the rain barrels, and hiding behind bushes when Nature calls. (Thankfully, it is isolated and forested enough that there are absolutely no worries about anyone seeing us.) Kenny, who is pretty much the only guy around here who can install the new pump, has been run off his feet busy, but he should come in a day or so. Doing four loads of laundry yesterday was an interesting process. It takes 10 buckets of water to fill the machine, and we used the same water to wash all four loads, lights first, then spun everything out and refilled the machine to do the rinsing the same way.

Wild it has also been in the busy sense, as it is Fair weekend. Baking and handicrafts can be done further ahead of time, but flowers and vegetables kind of have to be picked, arranged, scrubbed, etc., either the afternoon before or the morning of. Mom and I started Thursday evening about 7 when we got home, cut flowers until it was too dark to see which were the best ones, arranged flowers, tagged vases, and packed handicrafts and jams until we had done all we could, went to bed at something like 1 or 2 am, set the alarm for 6, scrambled to finish flower and vegetable stuff the next morning, packed the car full, and made it to town with about 5 minutes to spare on the 10:30 deadline...then came home in the afternoon and did the less rushed prep for the Saturday Flower Show, to bring the next morning. OK, it could be less intense, but we tend to enter everything we can, to help make the tables look full, and it's not like there aren't enough flowers around here. Plus, the arrangement categories are a fun chance to be creative within the guidelines - there'll be categories like 'an arrangement in a hat' or 'an arrangement using foliage only, in a cup and saucer'. The pantry ends up looking like a florist's shop by the time we're through!  

Summer School

Well, two days into school, we pretty much know what to expect. Just watch me disappear for a while again, I think. Lots of projects to do - at least they'll be interesting, even if they do take up a lot of time.

Our first little assignment in Urban Agriculture was to plan a garden based on the premise that we want to have a BBQ for 40 people, and get the veg and herb ingredients for the planned menu (given to us) from said garden. Not so bad, I've got most of that done already. But there will be more assignments. And, you know, the usual. ID quizzes, midterms and finals, outdoor lab time and logbooks.

The kicker is going to be the five (count 'em, five!) big projects for the Construction and Maintenance classes. To be done in the next 2 months - most are due the week before exams, so end of September.

Number 1 is a group project, which involves surveying (with theodolite and measuring rod) an assigned area of campus, drawing the scale map and two overlays, one noting possible drainage issues, and one drawing up recommendations to improve it.

  Numbers 2 and 3 kind of go together. For number 2, we have to design a front yard, using our CAD program, then do all the estimating for materials and labour to complete the project. For number 3, we have to put together a maintenance package for the homeowner in our design, with information on care for their new plantings (minimum 12 different plants).

Numbers 4 and 5 both involve creating manuals. One is a safety manual for 10 different types of equipment of various sizes, powered and not. The other is a quick reference manual for growth, description, and care of 25 of the plants we will be studying this term.

There's going to be a couple trips off campus, too. One is to a farm that grows and sells wild food - I forget what the name is, but they were profiled in the Citizen earlier this summer, so that's pretty exciting. A few of us are already into wild stuff - we were nibbling on purslane and serviceberries and stuff while weeding the vegetable garden yesterday. I think there's more purslane than legit veg in some spots; maybe we can add it to our market offerings (the class garden center is open Tues and Thurs, 11-1pm, offering plants, and vegetables as they ripen).
Our second trip off campus will be to the Cancer Survivors' Park near Hurdman Station, to do maintenance, then we're stopping at the Arboretum in the afternoon to do an ID quiz walkabout.

So, yeah. Lots to do. I think my policy is going to have to be to start on as much as I can right away, and just keep plugging. Apparently there were a lot of stressed students in the final stretch for the first group...

In Pictures

It's been a crazy month or so. Work, dyeing, getting ready for the Corn Festival back home (my first show of the season), Tour de Fleece, picking and jamming berries (made a raspberry/peach orange combo that turned out real tasty)...Tomorrow is back to school for me, so yay for not being out of the house 12 hours a day. On the other hand, now I get homework, and volunteer work, and prep for teaching dyeing classes, and Huntingdon Fair  is in two weeks, have to get entries ready...

Now, I'm not going to blither at length about everything I've been doing since my last post, and make all those imaginary blog entries I've been planning into reality. But here's a few pics and notes.

Tour de Fleece: Good choice with the Lanterne Rouge group. I was doing all right until the last week or so, when I kind of fell off my wheel, as it were. Total spun: 3.5 skeins. I finally finished the second half of the last skein (another purple one) yesterday.

I didn't show off the last dye batch, did I? It's pretty. I figured some semi-solids would be nice for a change, being more versatile than variegated.

Remember the little wrens we had raising a family in the plants at work? No sooner did they fly off than two robin families took over hanging baskets. (Next year, if I go back, I'm going to change the sign to read Canadian Tire Garden Center and Bird Sanctuary.) The first ones hatched only one of their three eggs, but the baby is kinda cute, in an ugly way. Daddy robin was very suspicious of the camera. I'm glad I got to see the baby before end of work term, though.

There's been knitting too...a baby sweater I don't have a pic of, a pair of blue-and-white mitts in progress that I think of as my 'china' mittens, since they're rather like cobalt and white dishes, a pair of cabled mittens. Now there's a shawl in progress - a commission, in alpaca/silk laceweight, dyed coffee brown with walnuts.

 Next thing on my list? Make sure all my school stuff is ready for tomorrow. Janice has us at 9am for Urban Agriculture, so it looks like we'll be digging in the veg garden before afternoon theory class. Can't wait to see how that's doing, and say hello to Ginger the cat again.