Camping, Recital, Rain, Roofers... And My First Weavebird Project

My card reader is working again! Hooray! (Was having trouble reading the memory card from my camera, and I just don't like posting photo-less blog entries.) So, brace yourselves, lots of photos to follow (including a weaving-related one at the end!).

Our campsite at Pawtuckaway State Park (everybody in jammies still) - we were right on the water! A mama duck with eight ducklings would visit every day - and we saw tons of egrets and heard loons and built a campfire every night, it was lovely. Apart from the rain (every day except one). And the fact that I came down with a terrible flu that basically knocked me out for 10 days (mostly at home).

The kids loved having the water right there - and nobody fell in!

Home again, and it was time for Bella's dance recital...


(These pictures are actually from the Dress Rehearsal - but she did wonderfully both days!)

And, we went to Kimball's Ice Cream with Ginga (my Mum) after the recital. Yum! (Isn't that a cute bag she's carrying?)

Notice the sun? About the only days it has been sunny for the entire month of June have been Saturdays, it's been awful! We are getting our roof replaced (as I type they're up there banging away) and we've been waiting forever - we signed the contract in May. Crazy. The poor roofers must be losing their shirts because of the weather!

And, finally, something weaving-related. I had to use my flash, so the picture doesn't really capture the colors, I don't think, but this is my first project from my Weavebird, going into the sink to be washed - it's a 16-shaft advancing twill (with a 212-shot treadling repeat!!) - in bamboo.

I figured I had enough to get used to on the first project (Texsolv heddles, which I like, very quiet), an overhead beater (which I also like, just a bit different motion to get used to, but also very easy), and a new treadling method (because the Weavebird is a compudobby - my brain kept expecting an open shed on both treadles, lol, but, no, one open the shed, the other closes it). So I stuck with a familiar yarn - Bambu7 sett at 20 epi for the twill - and am really happy with the end result.

I was a little afraid that I would find weaving on a compudobby a bit boring - I've always enjoyed the physical action of treadling, it reminds me of playing the organ, which I did sometimes back in the dark ages of my youth - but I loved it! The colors and pattern were just so much fun to look at, I didn't get bored at all. I've got enough warp left to do another scarf in this colorway, I'm hoping to get in to the studio sometime after the 4th...

Speaking of which - Happy 4th of July to everyone! Here's hoping for sunny weather for us Northerners and a bit of a cool-down for the South!

Camping!

Cute little picture. We are heading out camping this afternoon! This is a picture from the park we're going to in New Hampshire - not sure if it's our site or not. But we do have one on the water... Just for four days, we're coming home on Tuesday afternoon, but it should be fun. I camped a lot with my family when I was young - my dad would close his bakery for three weeks every summer and off we would go, all over the Northeast. I remember spending a lot of time in the Adirondacks (upstate New York) and loved our trips to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (and visiting Green Gables, of course).

I took some pictures of my soggy (it's been rainy here all week, clearing up, thank goodness) little garden to post, but my computer has decided it's not speaking to its little built-in card reader. Argh! Another thing to straighten out after we get home.

And, lastly, the white/green/grey pinwheel scarf that I posted below was bought last night! It's going to go live just outside of Paris as a present for a very lovely customer's father for his 70th birthday, how fun.

Home Again!

We are back from camping in Maine! We had a lovely time, killer mosquitoes notwithstanding. (Maine skeeters make Massachusetts skeeters look really wimpy in comparison).

We camped near Camden, in Camden Hills State Park. Camden is so lovely! A beautiful little port town, complete with Windjammers (have to wait for the kids to get quite a bit older, but I've always thought a Windjammer cruise would be a fun thing to do...). A picture of Camden Harbor:


Bella had a great time finding snail and mussel shells right near here (where a river empties into the harbor over some lovely falls, so its a pseudo-fresh water/marine environment).

We visited the Owl's Head Lighthouse, too:


We also hid in the really nice Camden Public Library quite a bit on Wednesday and Thursday - it was WICKED hot out and the (excellent) kids room had air conditioning...

OK, one more picture...

Yup, that really is a stripey cow. :) They are Galloway Belted cows and they live on Aldermere Farm in Rockport, Maine, next door to Camden.

On a fiber-related note, I tried to stop by the Hope Spinnery to check out their yarn, but nobody was around - probably should have called first, but my phone was dead, rats. I really like the idea of a wind-powered spinnery... Maybe I'll order their color/sample cards.

Preparing for Camping...

So, when I was little, my family went camping every year, mostly in the Adirondacks, but also in Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI (Anne of Green Gables lived here!), even to Nickerson State Park on Cape Cod (great bike trails on the Cape). My Mum was a school teacher before she retired and my Dad was a baker, so he would close up the bakery for three weeks and off we would go. How fun! We were quite the sight, I'm sure, especially when all my brothers came along too (I have four older brothers). We would use the van that my father had for the bakery, pull a tent trailer, bring a kayak (a Folboat that we made ourselves! it was untippable, great for kids, but really easy to paddle, too), a little Sunfish sailboat, bikes for everyone, army surplus hammocks and a huge tarp... Crazy, lol.

We stopped going when I was about 13 or so (parents divorced, I was the only one left at home with Mum at that point) but I have great memories. Which means I now drag my family camping!

We're heading up to camp near Camden, Maine the end of June for a week and are running around finding equipment. We've been with Bella before, but now that Conall is along, too, we needed a bigger tent (hooray for LL Bean) and a rooftop carrier for our little Subaru WRX (no SUV or mini-van for us) (though if we had another kid we'd need one [I like this one]. Why do they make car seats so darn HUGE? no way could we fit three in the back seat, argh; I'm sure some manufacturer could come up with a smaller but still safe car seat in the name of decreasing the number of SUVs on the road for goodness' sakes... I digress, lol). Our sea kayaks will continue to languish in the garage, alas, until the kids are bigger (very tippy, unlike the Folboat).

I'm having all sorts of fun making lists of things to bring. I'm a list kind of gal, lol. And I'm knitting, too, just in case it's cold. Check it out:



Little Man Conall in a funny bulky sweater. I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Bulky in Cape Cod and a basic sweater pattern from the Yarn Girls Guide to Kids' Knits, and it knitted up lickety split. (Good thing what with my short attention span for knitting projects...). It even has simple ribbing throughout, whoo-hooo. And I actually sewed it together! Good grief! I hate seaming! LOL. I'm making one for Bella from the same yarn, a raglan sleeve sweater (for some reason I find raglan seams easy to sew neatly). Hooray for bulky yarn for kids sweaters. And hooray for Knit Picks for making affordable yarn - nice not to spend a fortune for a sweater that the baby is just going to drool all over anyway.