ducks like rain...

Onward!

2009-07-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

A bit of an administrative announcement: after almost five years of using Blogger, I’m switching to Wordpress. Update your bookmarks! My new blog is http://slw71881.wordpress.com.

I’ve been delaying this decision for months, hoping that blogger would come out with specific new features, but now it’s only weeks until the baby arrives and it’s time to make the change. I started this blog a month after I moved to Seattle (mostly due to inspiration from other knitters), and it’s turned out to be a great way of keeping in touch with family and friends. I’m always surprised and pleased when I see someone in person and they reference pictures or posts, and I love when people leave comments. For a while at the beginning I’d been trying to increase the number of readers and commenters, but I’ve come to appreciate the fact that I know most of my regular readers in real life. There are a handful of people I don’t know who visit regularly, which I think is neat. It’s a public space, and so I’m still wary of the boundaries – I don’t post about work and rarely post about friends, politics, religion, or any of the deep and emotional subjects. But I love my blog as a record of the day-to-day, all of our projects and trips, and seasonal milestones.

That said, our day-to-day is going to be changing, and while I’m fine with posting the occasional baby or family photo (especially to show off hand knits!), it just doesn’t seem like a great idea to broadcast all of the little details to the whole world. That left me with three choices: keep things the way they are and just don’t post about the baby (sad – we want our family and friends across the country to be able to check in), switch to a private blog where you have to log in to see anything (sad because I love getting the occasional dropins from knitters and quilters), or leave blogger for one of the platforms that allows you to have a public blog with occasional private posts. The third option was the clear winner.

So, I’ve been moving the blog over to the new spot (including all 805 posts of the archives and everyone’s comments). The private posts probably won’t start in earnest until the baby is born – to see them, I’ll have to give you a password which I’ll email out with the birth announcement. After you’ve typed the password in once, you should be able to see all of the private posts – careful though, because if you enter it on a public machine (at the library, say), everyone else will be able to see the private posts, too, which will rather defeat the point.

Let me know if you have questions and see you on the new site!

Owls

2009-07-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

I’d been working fairly steadily on my blue and yellow short rows baby sweater, but my attention keeps drifting elsewhere – to quilting, sewing, and little knit vests. Then a vest pattern caught my eye with little owls cleverly constructed out of cables, and I had the perfect amount of Cotton Ease in my stash. So now I’m officially taking a break and knitting owls instead.

The work has been flying. Many of the finished versions on Ravelry have beads or buttons as eyes – I’ll have to start looking. I’ve been so pleased to have a use for this yarn, and it’s an added bonus that I’m finding the knit result to be so cute. The yarn has been sitting there irking me for over a year (I’d bought a single skein, thinking I needed it for a project and then I didn’t after all), and this is such a great pattern for it.

Encroachment

2009-07-01T21:40:00.000-07:00

I haven’t posted about the fishtank in ages. All the dudes seem to be hanging out and doing well. Over the winter the tang had been acting increasingly neurotic, and was having scale issues, but we moved his food clip a few months ago and it seems to have helped a lot – he’s much more social and is looking and acting like a completely different fish. Kevin’s also been quite disciplined about filtering the water that goes in the tank and about nightly kalkwasser supplementation, and that seems to be having a noticeable impact as well. We’re still talking about a bigger, quieter, automated tank but we’re still probably a ways away from installing it.

I wanted to post, though, about the leather. Since I last posted in February, it’s grown another few inches up and out – truly a monster. I’ve been very worried about the Ricordia below it (the pretty green and blue corals), since it’s increasingly blocking their light. However, apparently the ricordia decided to take matters into their own hands, and have started climbing to a better location. Unfortunately, they chose to move up (instead of over), which means they are now slowly marching up the trunk of the leather!

Here’s a close-up:

This is less than ideal. First, they won’t get any more light because they’ll still be under the lip of the leather. But more importantly, soft corals have limited defences – they move very slowly and don’t have rigid structures to retreat into. Their only real defence mechanism is chemical warfare – trying to sting or annoy away anything that encroaches on their turf. You can see that both the leather and the ricordias look a bit the worse for wear – the ricordias aren’t fully out (they pull their little nubs in at night or when they’re feeling attacked), and the leather is pulling away from the rock and is susceptible to a reddish algae around its base. We’re probably going to have to intervene by both paring back the leather and removing some of the now-embedded ricordias, but I need to gear up a bit more before undertaking that high a level of coral surgery.

Summer colors

2009-06-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

In the “it’s the small things” category, we have a new mat for the back door and it’s beautiful:

It looks nice with our interior green walls in the living room, and each time I go out to water the plants I admire it. Our old one gave five years of steady service, but it was so worn that you couldn't see the pattern anymore. It’s so nice to have the bright, pretty colors on the step. :-)

Fun family visit

2009-06-29T22:58:00.000-07:00

My sister is in California for the summer on an internship between her two years of business school. We were so excited when she suggested flying up for a weekend. Great to see her, and fun to show off our house. This is her fourth Seattle trip so we skipped the touristy things for normal weekend activities (the farmers market, the bread store, a walk around the neighbourhood and Grasslawn park, grilling). It was a treat to see her.

The weather finally cooperated, and she saw both Rainier and the Cascades. (The Olympics were hazed over, but we went down to Lake Washington and the sun on the water was at least pretty.) We have a handful of photos. At the farmers market:

And some of the pretty flowers:

Sharon with the bounty (including the mysterious kohlrabi):

And all of us at dinner, thanks to the tripod and camera timer:

It’s so nice to think that the next time we see her, the baby will be here, instead of just a kicking, hiccuping presence, and Sharon will be an aunt!

Harvest

2009-06-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

The plants on the patio are actually producing! The first bit of a crop, picked while Sharon was here:

The strawberries are doing great in their pot. Last year they didn’t really produce, but there are a lot more berries and flowers in the wings, and I’m feeling very pleased with them.

The beans are a bit confusing to me. I feel like the plants should be spending their energy growing and they can produce later, but I don’t know how to convey this to them. Each plant (I have two) put out a few beans when it was so hot a few weeks ago. The plants are still mid-to-small in size, and now they each have several more baby beans. Any ideas on whether to cut off the baby beans now, or just let them grow?

The pea vines are the most pathetic. They’re each about a foot tall, and they also produced 1-2 peas each during our hot streak. So you have these sad little vines (with half dead leaves from our hot week) with a big plump peapod on the upper end.

They seem happy (green, firm) in a stunted kind of way, but if anyone has thoughts on magical pea growing tricks, I’m all ears.

We'll need some practice

2009-06-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

We are slowly starting to accrue more baby things. I’d made a series of spreadsheets, with links, a few months ago, but aside from placing an order for the crib and myriad knitting and sewing supplies, we’ve just been waiting. My parents offered to buy us a baby carrier though, and our moby wraps have now arrived! We’d gotten to try them out in our baby class, but we’d both managed to forget just how long they are – high amusement value.

They come with a thick booklet of possible wrapping strategies, and we both managed the basic without too much trouble. Can’t wait until there’s a baby to put in them!

Roundabout

2009-06-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

Here’s a late-night photo of the beginning of the quilting.

I love the way the rings are turning out. I had to run out and buy a compass to build my circle templates, and this is as far as I could get with it (it has a max diameter of 13 inches). I’m thinking I should be able to eke out a few more with a longer pencil, and then I’ll start using a string/pen homemade system. Each circle’s radius is an inch greater than the previous one. The sewing went very smoothly, except for the tiniest circle (the size of a quarter) – I just can’t turn the fabrics quickly or smoothly enough to make it circular. I keep ending up with misshapen ovals. I’m going to need to practice until I can manage a better version, I think.

This was my first time using a fabric pen – rather a success. I found a purple one that has disappearing ink. The package said it would disappear within 48 hours, but my experience has been more like 10 min to 2 hours, depending on the weight of the line I drew. It’s hard to consistently trace the stencils hard enough to get a heavy line that lasts. Instead, I started tracing a circle or two at a time and then sewing it before it disappeared. Not entirely efficient, but the end result is great.

A bit more coordinated

2009-06-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

Since I finished my Olympic Mountain comforter a year and a half ago, I’ve been meaning to use the extra fabric left over from the trim to make a matching bed skirt. For a while we had a ruffled white lace thing, but it did not look nice with the dark quilt and wood bed, so we’ve just had a bare box spring. Not the most attractive option.

The sewing for the bed skirt was not hard (straight seams, cotton fabric), but there have been a slew of delays. First I didn’t actually have enough of my patterned fabric (amazingly, three years later Joann’s still had it in stock!), then I was dragging my feet on measuring and cutting the pieces. On the whole, I’m good at designing things to fit a space or an object, but when the measurement is larger than my arm-span, I always seem to get a bit off. Luckily, a bedskirt does not demand the same precision of measurement that trim does (and this one doesn’t even require perfectly parallel lines, since the skirt bottom is going to be tucked behind the base of our bed frame), so once I finally got started last week the project moved pretty quickly. The biggest issue was actually just that I’m getting ponderous enough that doing all of the measuring out, pinning, etc. on the floor was harder than it would have been normally. I made three long panels (one each for the two sides of the boxspring, and one for the base), and four squares to wrap the corners. I still have my bed sheets from college, though the twin extra long isn’t a useful size, so I used one flat sheet for lining the panels and the other for the piece that lies between the box spring and the mattress.

Here’s the empty box spring after we’d removed the mattress and bedding:

And here it is with the new bedskirt in place:

And the made-up bed in the morning:

It looks so much more polished, and it’s a great long-term item to finally have off the list.

Quilt sandwich

2009-06-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

I basted the baby blanket this morning, and I’m so happy with the medium blue/turquoise bali fabric that I found for the back.

The quilt front came out to what seems to be a perfect 36" square, without any trimming. I cut the batting and backing about an inch and a half bigger in case pinning it out revealed some sort of stretch or slant, but now I just have a neat border to trim once I’m done quilting. I was having trouble settling on a quilting pattern that felt right, but I’ve come up with a concentric circles plan that I really like. Can’t wait to see how it works out. I found a fabric pen to mark out the lines (a bigger achievement than it sounds at first glance – there are so many different options), so that’s on the docket for later this afternoon. We’re going to see Up for a Father-to-be Day evening out, so I’m curious to see how much I can get done around that.

New footwear

2009-06-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

On the bright side, pretty new shoes, and they were even on sale!

On the flip side (no pun intended), it’s a good thing that I like them so much because they’re my only option right now. In the last week or so, the foot swelling has graduated from occasional to constant. There are about two months left (this was week 32), so at least they can pass for pretty summer shoes instead of a desperate pregnancy choice. :-)

And NOW it's summer

2009-06-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Our first CSA bag of the season came today!

Like last year, the first bag is on the small side, but it was still very fun to unpack. They included a bag of lavender – I'm torn whether to try some of the lavender recipes that they included or just dry it and make more of the great hot/cold bags with it. The strawberries and cherries are great, we have tons of apriums (one of the reasons we chose this CSA over others is that they grow a lot of stone fruit and hybrids), and we pretty much finished the lemon basil last night. (Yum.)

A question for you: do you have any recipes/strategies for radishes? They included a pesto recipe for the greens which looks like the plan for tonight, but I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to the radish itself.

Progress!

2009-06-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

The quilt top is done for the Bento Box baby blanket!

I'm wishing that I'd used a little bit more of the medium blue, but I think that once the blue binding is on, that will do the trick. I'm still wavering whether to use the fabric I have for the back or to see if I can find a coordinating Bali print, and I don't have great ideas on how to quilt it, though the size (36" square) will make the quilting so much more manageable than the daybed quilt was.

Here's a close-up on one of the corner squares:

Several of the fabrics are the remnants from my Olympic mountains log cabin quilt (that lives on our bed), and it makes me happy to see them in this context.

Newborn sweater

2009-06-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

Here's the beginnings of a new sweater – the last one I'm planning to make before the kiddo is born. (Two more endless months still left, but at a 7 st/in gauge, the sweater has the potential to take all of it.)

(I'm working sideways, so the button band is down, the neck is to the left, and I'm knitting across the chest towards the left sleeve.) The pattern calls for garter stitch throughout, but after trying that for a few rows, I decided that such tiny stitches deserve at least some stockinette. Now I'm thinking that I'll do this yellow stockinette/blue garter stripe pattern for the front and sleeves, and use garter on the back? It's quickly becoming the indecisive sweater.

Favourite baby sweater

2009-06-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've barely posted about this project at all, which is such a pity because I've loved working on it. I started about a week before we left for PA, then continued working throughout the trip, and finished the hat and bootees once we got home. The pattern is cute, but the part that pleased me the most was how wonderful the yarn is. It's a bamboo blend, machine-washable, and so very soft and drapey. It just feels snuggly.

The back is simple, too – there's something to be said about a pattern like this that just works the way it's written and comes together well.

So now it's off to go live in the cabinet with the pile of other baby things for a few more months.

Flower help?

2009-06-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

10 points to anyone who can tell me the name of this flower:

They're big (a good 8-10 inches across), and the name has been on the tip of my tongue for weeks now. Whatever they are, they're beautiful. The blooms are far too heavy for the stalks, so they tend to drape themselves languorously over the nearby azaleas, and in some cases just rest their heads directly on the driveway.

Sensational, showy things, and such a pretty color.

Quick sewing

2009-06-07T22:24:00.000-07:00

The bento box quilt top is coming together so quickly, which is nice because I seem to be getting so sleepy again in the evenings and haven't had that much time to work on it. I have the right panel finished (shown here on the chair), and am getting closer on the two remaining panels.

I needed to rip and redo some of my seams so that the blocks would all make nice points (it seems that even with my ¼" foot, I still managed to get pretty far off on some of those seam allowances), but it's gratifying to have such a fast, pretty project.

A Work In Progress

2009-06-06T23:23:00.000-07:00

I was only trying to get a photo of all of the new flowers we chose for the patio containers, but the pictures turned out to also be a pretty good before/after comparison of the weeding of the rock wall. In this one, you can see the total chaos that is the rock wall plantings, plus copious forget-me-nots, pansies (with runners), vinca, dandelions, mint, and assorted weeds.

Meanwhile, in this view, you can see the lovely lack of weeds in the rock wall, plus the attractively pruned japanese maple. :-)

The "after" photo constituted a good four hour's worth of work, and unfortunately my back doesn't tolerate a moment more than that these days. The hopeful news is that we are in the middle of June sunlight hours (well past 9 pm!), so I could conceivably divide the remaining wall into chunks and buzz through it after work.

I'm mostly happy with the way the containers turned out. I think they need a little bit more orange and pink – between the creeper (left over from last year, and I can't find the tag) and the snapdragons, it's a little bit too much of that lime yellow. Pretty from the top, though!

Irises

2009-06-04T17:13:00.000-07:00

I have more of Kevin’s macro-lens photos of our yard – the first of the irises bloomed!!

A coworker gave me these when she was thinning hers out three years ago. We had one summer of blooms, and then they sulked all last year. I’d forgotten how beautiful they are.

I love the amazing closeups that are possible with the macro lens – the colors are great.

Two years!

2009-06-03T22:52:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was our second wedding anniversary!

We went out to eat at one of the restaurants on the Kirkland waterfront, with a pretty view of the water and Olympics, and great strawberry basil margaritas (mine was less fun than Kevin’s, but still delicious). We had a table outside right at the edge of the balcony, so our view of all of the boat and swimming activity was perfect, and the sunset was lovely.

I remember thinking this last year, too, but it’s such fun to finally have an anniversary. We met seven years ago (crazy that it’s been that long – a quarter of our lives) while we were both out in Seattle for a summer internship at Microsoft. We didn’t know each other at the beginning of the summer and we were definitively together by the end, but the closest we’d gotten to putting a date on it had been the fortnight between our birthdays in the last two weeks of July, and generally it was more just the summer season. Actually having a day to remember, take stock, appreciate, and celebrate is quite fun. Even better that it holds all of the memories of our wedding, which was such a wonderful, happy day. As nostalgic as the day is, it also feels like we’re standing on the platform about to leap – pregnancy is one thing, but knowing that with next year’s anniversary we’ll be a family instead of a couple, the world feels like it’s about to get so much wider.

Weekend quilting progress

2009-06-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve been looking at lots of bento box quilts trying to decipher what makes some blocks work so well (clear center rings), and some so poorly. (For a reminder of what the pattern looks like, see my old post here.) Each square contains an internal L against a background color, and you assemble four squares (with the Ls rotated appropriately) to make a block with a ring. From what I can tell, there seem to be four rules:

The two background parts should have the same fabric.

The diagonal squares of a block should not have the same backgrounds/Ls.

The diagonal squares of adjacent blocks should not have the same background.

The L and the background need to be different colors or tones.

The tone vs. color issue is interesting. I took a picture of my fabrics and transposed part of it in black and white so that I could see the darker vs. lighter fabrics. Isn’t it kind of surprising that that yellow on the far left is one of the darkest fabrics? And that that second green is so much darker than the two to the right of it?

Since I need 36 squares and I have 12 fabrics, I started by cutting pieces for three backgrounds and three Ls per color. (There was some fudging, since I didn’t have enough for three and three of all of the fabric options.) I love the way the piles of pieces look, waiting to begin sewing.

I cut all of the pieces for the quilt top on Saturday morning, and then sewed the squares together in batches on Sunday.

Next up is figuring out the placement of the squares and seaming the top together. It’s so satisfying to be making progress so quickly – it’s a speedy pattern, and the small size helps, but I also think I’m getting better at organizing my sewing before I start.

Inching closer

2009-05-31T10:32:00.000-07:00

The second most popular baby question I’ve gotten, after "have you thought about names?", is what our nursery theme will be. I feel terrible to have to let people down when they seem so interested, but I wouldn’t say that "themes" have ever been my strong suite. (Luckily, I’m not sure how much the baby will notice.) Theme-incompetence aside, we are making progress on the nursery front. After all of the furniture mayhem three weeks ago, we finally have a plan that we’re both excited about for how to free up one of the bedrooms. We have our great glider, have ordered a crib, and have our eyes on an IKEA bookcase that will complete the furniture. We’re planning to use the second vanity in our bathroom as a changer, and the preexisting closet shelves (with baskets and/or hangers) instead of a dresser. I found a pattern online for crib bedding that looks like extremely quick and easy sewing – I just need to find elastic and fabric. There’s the quilt. And then the only major decision-making left is what to do about the walls and floor.

We picked up paint samples after work on Friday – such a cheery pile of potential.

(The two vivid orange squares aren’t really contenders, they were just too pretty to leave there.) It's been months since we painted anything (last project was the bathroom in January), and while I can't say that I've exactly missed it as an activity, the color is a fun choice to make.

Also, we’ve been planning to replace the carpet in the two front bedrooms (one of the last remaining projects from our initial list), but it wasn’t a high priority item. Since we’re moving all of the furniture anyway, now seems like an ideal time. So we’ll need to find carpet samples, too.

No theme, but I think that both front bedrooms will look extremely pretty by the time we’re done, and it’s not that much work left. :-) Good timing, since last week finally marked the beginning of the third trimester!

On your mark...

2009-05-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

Before we left for our trip, I finally went out and found fabric for the bento box baby quilt I've been mulling. I found two spools of ribbon that seemed like ideal color inspiration: lemon, lime, turquoise and light blue.

I'm delighted with my fabrics for the front.

And I love my back fabrics, too, (shown here with the iron for size reference) but the jury is still out whether they are too saturated. My thought was that I’d make little orange and yellow nine-patch grids scattered across the blue, but it may be too bright. I'm thinking that I'll make up both the front and back and if it's not working in combination then I can sub in a lighter color for the back panel.

The fabric is all ironed and waiting for me to start cutting -- I can't wait to see it come together.

Our welcome home

2009-05-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

We arrived home to find the yard brimming with brilliant flowers.

Our azaleas and rhododendrons are all beautiful, and we managed to catch the tail end of the lilacs (I have a nice big vase of them on our kitchen counter, and they smell wonderful).

Kevin went out with his macro lens, and had fun snapping photos of the bumblebees enjoying the rhododendron blooms.

The bush is right next to our front door, and the pink flowers are spectacular. It's right outside Kevin's office window (soon to be the baby's room) and every time I walk along the path or through the hall, the size and sheer pinkness of the flowers is amazing.

We were quite delighted to see that the grass seed appears to have sprouted as well! It's still early, but the lawn already looks impressively better. Kevin put in lots of time the week before we left raking up the moss (more than a yard waste bin's worth! A herculean task) and then raking in the seed, so it's great to see that a healthy amount of it took even without us here to coddle it. Also, apparently we had cool weather and sufficient rain while we were away so that the container plants didn't bake -- they all look happy and bigger.

Eight buttons shy of finished

2009-05-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

My travel knitting for the trip was the Sirdar Baby Jacket. I managed to leave the patterns for the matching hat and booties at home, but the ribbing took much longer than anticipated and so I didn't end up casting off until midway through the trip home anyway. The yarn (a bamboo blend) is wonderful -- so soft, great stitch definition, and allegedly machine-washable. I wish I'd found it earlier -- it's a great option for baby knits. I still need to get the buttons sewn on, and clearly this needs to be blocked, but here the jacket is in its nearly-complete state: