Monthly Archives: January 2010

Shafted!

Oooh, lookey!  Another weekend!  More Quality Time with the Baby Wolf.   I managed to thread the heddles on the shafts, in the appropriate order, and get the warp threads actually attached to the front and back beams. 

top down

treadled

And — treadled! 

Don’t look now, but this warp is ready to be woven!

You Sley Me!

On the weekend, I finally had the opportunity to spend some Quality Time with the Baby Wolf.  I measured 120 warp threads (in 2 colours), and got as far as getting the reed sleyed.

sleyed

Still a ways to go — have to thread the heddles on the shafts, in the appropriate order, and get the warp threads actually attached to the front and back beams. 

sleyed wolf

I’m following the excellent, detailed instructions in Deborah Chandler’s “Learning to Weave”.  While it’s slow going, it’s making sense so far, and seems like the sort of thing that will get faster as you learn what you’re doing.

Of course, actual weaving may be an entirely different matter!

Mother Nature Rules…

… and don’t you ever forget it!

We were driving by Castalia Marsh at high tide, the other day, and were astonished to see that it was completely flooded.  It’s winter, high tides tend to be at their highest, and we did just have a wicked storm system come through, that did significant damage in Port Elgin, NB.  But, still — this was a couple of days later, and we’d never seen the Marsh as anything other than, well, a marsh, with small tufted islands and channels of water.

Instead (click for slightly bigger) — in the image below, you can see the picnic area almost overrun, and the remains of a couple of duck blinds poking out of the water in the distance.

flooded marsh

And, as you can see below — the causeway/breaker wall between the Bay of Fundy and the Marsh was completely overrun.  The 3 pictures below show progress along the causeway, on what used to be the access road.  It’s now strewn with football-sized rocks, tossed up by the surf at some point.  (While we were there, someone came by in their F-1Million pickup truck and tried to pick his way along — he gave up and retreated).

road to now where

4 wheelin

island

It always impresses me what the simple forces of nature can wreak on our carefully engineered, man-made interventions (like, say, roads).

A slightly different perspective — looking back at the exit from the picnic area parking:  the road just stops:
curtailed

The water was still somewhat stormy that day — lovely winter colours.

scene

I dug through my old photos to try to find some useful comparisons.  It seems that the things that were photogenic in the wintry, flooded, stormy state were not the same as the things I thought to snap when it was in its seasonal prime!  But, a few comparative pictures of the surrounding shorelines, below (click for bigger pics).

Before January 2010
house before house after
island before
island after
ferry before ferry after

Cats in Amsterdam

Many buildings in Amsterdam are old.  And they have a “native population”, that survives transfer of ownership.  To help deal with this, it is not unusual for restaurants to employ “peace keepers” of the four-legged sort.

I recently met Mavis:

Mavis

Mavis was not above supplementing her rodent-chasing diet with handouts from the restaurant’s kitchen:

a good thing going

While I’m not naming the restaurant above, it should be noted that I have actually seen mice running across the floor in a (different) restaurant in Amsterdam, and Mavis was not the first resto-cat I’d encountered in that city.  Sometime back in 2003, I met this “greeter”:

earlier

unnamed

Double-duty mouser & maitre d’? 😉

Happy 2010!

Best wishes, from Grand Manan.

And, by request — socks in the window:

socks window

Those are, in fact, new socks (old feet).  There’ve been a few end-of-year Finished Objects here at KnitBot central, and they are duly posted up on in the KnitBot Yarn Gallery.

And, for fun — here is the year in review (all objects finished in 2009 — some were certainly started earlier).

Knitbot’s 2009 FOs Blackberry Shawl Summer Diamonds Top
Blue Diamond Socks Petra of Many Colours Blue Crochet Stole
Rainbow Baby Blanket Blue Melody Socks Grey Mouse Scarf
Black Jacket Triple L Tweed Sweater Very Pink Socks

In that, you can see that there were 7 travel projects (i.e., projects that could be worked on while in transit and/or in meetings).  That’s not too surprising, given the type of year it was…  It’s a little surprising to me that I managed to finish 4 non-travel projects in the year — the sweaters/top.  Three of them were pretty easy knits — the diamond modular top, the diagonal (Petra) sweater, and the black jacket.  The Triple L Tweed sweater was the really big project for the year — in December 2008, I was swatching with the yarn to get some ideas.  The rest of the year was about working out a plan for the whole sweater, and then constructing the various bits of it.  I might go as far as to say I think it’s my most successful sweater design yet (not that there have been many…). 

And, it’s a new year.  Not that I’m formulating any formal resolutions here, but let’s just say it would be good to see as many projects, fewer of them travel projects, this time next year.