How was your day?
photography
How was your day!
A ski in the woods
Skiing conditions were perfect. The snow was soft and plentiful. I skied through the woods with friends to lunch!
Blue skies even peeked through for a moment.
Ausable Chasm ice
The temperature is gradually turning warmer but ice abounds. I had heard the ice jams at Ausable Chasm were at their peak. I may have missed it by a few days, but it was still pretty spectacular. There were both frozen and flowing waterfalls.
This is the view from the road. These amazing rock formations were purchased and made private in the late 1800’s, even before the Adirondack Park was formed. It is one of the oldest “attractions” in the United States.
Can you pronounce chasm? I usually mispronounce it and our neighboring town, Schroon Lake. Think school not shroom.
My first moebius cowl
To frog or not to frog? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the…
What fun and magic to knit a moebius cowl. The ingenuity of knitting a long-did I say long?- beautiful piece of fabric with a twist. The pattern was Sivia Harding’s Harmonia’s Rings
I enjoyed Cat Bordhi’s video, which showed me how to cast on for the moebius to get one twist in the round. Magic!
I didn’t pay enough attention to the part that describes how to count these double stitches. Instead of casting on 100- 200 doubled stitches, I cast on 240-480 doubled stitches. Don’t ask me how. I thought it took me a while to knit a round. So long, in fact, that I never bothered to count the number of stitches in a round. There were too many.
Because it was worked in the round, with a twist, it was hard to get a sense if what I was working on.
Now I have a beautiful piece of fabric, twice as wide and half as long. The yarn was from Zen Garden. Did I mention I ran out of yarn 2/3 through my bind off. I had some leftover sock yarn, which miraculously matched perfectly. That miracle still occurred within a mistake though.
So now, I have a beautiful, useful cowl, which only I will know has a moebius twist. If I loop it twice around my head the twist is lost. It feels so smooshy and soft though and can also form a hood.
Is that enough? Or do I frog? Is this a problem or an opportunity?
Seeking warmth
With cold weather, I want the warmest mittens. Scandinavian countries and other northern regions have their own unique styles. I am a firm believer that wool is the best insulator. Sheep seem to agree.
We went for a several hour, cross-country ski explore last weekend when the temperature was in the teens. Here’s the view from up behind our house.
On the trip, I tumbled, toppled and fell flat on my face – literally, when my skis came to a stop under a fallen log. At least I can get up again without a problem now. My mittens
were caked with snow, damp on the outside and frozen – yet they remained warn until the end of the trip. They were stranded colorwork – knit with two yarns at once, when one isn’t used, it is carried behind the work and forms a loose, double layer fabric. Plus those mittens have an additional alpaca lining. The lining felted a bit from my sweating palms, and that is part of the process. The felted fabric, think boiled wool, is denser and warm.
The thrum mittens I sent to a friend use extra strands of wool roving to add a soft, cushy lining on the inside – and they match her jacket beautifully.
These various mittens are warm, with designs or techniques often unique to their region.
I visited the Lake Placid library the other day and stumbled upon two beautiful books about warm knitting techniques – and someone who knew me by my knitting and this blog!
The first is <a href="http:// http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js“>Twined Knitting: A Swedish Folkcraft, published by Interweave in the 1980’s. Used copies now fetch more than $50; it has become a collector’s item because it sold for $19 new. It has the history of twined knitting, techniques and patterns. I am working on a sampler mitten and live the fabric. It’s a dense, double layer, stretchy fabric.
The texture techniques were usually worked in one color but I found some beautiful Koigu yarn while on my trip to Lake Placid and am playing with it. Some successes and some not.
A lot of time is spent in untwisting the twist which invariably builds up. Twined is roughly translated from two-ended because when worked in one color, you knit from both ends of the same yarn. Here’s the technique, which works for me.
I tied both balls of yarn together like a package and secured them with a half hitch knot. To untwist, I dangle the yarn and let it unwind on its own.
Next I am going to knit and felt some Danish mittens from techniques in Felted Knits. When the temperature drops to minus ten Fahrenheit, on more than one occasion, I seek warmth – and indoor hobbies (obsessions).
Here’s a link to a filmmaker, Andrea Odezynska, a friend just told me about. She has recently made a film, Felt, Feelings and Dreams, about Kyrgyz women who returned to felt making after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is on my must see list. Here’s a review from an early screening.
The path home
After a lovely cross country ski in the woods, I returned home.
The chop before the storm
Preparing for a storm is different in the north country. We don’t run out to buy milk or gas. We make sure the snowblower is accessible, the generator starts and the wood is stacked.
I split a stack of poplar the other day and it was a delight. No knotty, gnarled roots. It was very gratifying. It went so well, I decided to video the process. I imagined it would be amusing, in later years, to look back and watch myself, capably, reducing logs to firewood.
Not so much. I was capable, I did split the wood beautifully but I also grunted, breathed audibly and sniffled a lot (the temperature was in the teens). The video remains in my private library.
When I was done splitting wood, I walked down to the river to straighten out my back. The river was frozen in spots but running elsewhere.
There were signs of summer where the snow had melted. A beachball (?) in the culvert
a purple, plastic flower in the grass
and a rings of gold along the road.
Mother Nature’s hot flashes
She’s experiencing them now. We’re in the middle of our January Thaw. It’s a well accepted phenomenon at mid-lattitudes, and here in the North Country, that the week surrounding January 25 has higher than expected temperatures. It’s described as a sinusoidal pattern, the curvy line from highs to lows. The swings in the temperature increase during the January thaw to more than 10 degrees above normal. It’s more unusual when it doesn’t happen.
Our weather station reports that yesterday hit a high of 51. And the wind blew all night, with gusts to 37 mph ( which beats all of 2012, with a high wind of 36 mph) the birches swayed, the house creaked, rain fell in buckets, and I was tucked happily inside.
Two days ago, this was my view.
A sweet little cabin in the woods
Today I see this out the window.
I’m pretty sure this will come with a rainbow sometime today because it’s sunny, cloudy and snowing lightly. The temperature is already dropping and is supposed to fall to 7 degrees f by tonight. The good news is six months from now, July 24, is predicted to be the warmest of the year.
How to avoid cabin fever
Cabin fever comes in two forms: the hyper-energy from staying indoors too long; and the flu, from venturing out in to winter crowds.
We noticed the latter when we went to a concert in Montreal around Christmas. It sounded like a TB ward. Everyone was coughing, sneezing, blowing their noses and unwrapping noisy candy. I shudder to think about it. One thing a moderately isolated life provides is less germs and more health. I’m not exactly a germaphobe – yes, I taught my kids to wash their hands before putting them near their mouths; and yes, I loved the scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm, when Larry David washes his hands to the Happy Birthday song (as recommended by the CDC); and no, I never eat from buffets. OK so perhaps I am a bit of a germaphobe. I like people, I really do, just not as much during the winter. Despite the flu vaccine, the flu is hitting hard and I just don’t feel like getting it.
So I mostly stay in the cabin or venture outside. I avoid movie theaters, or other venues where a bunch of sick people pack themselves in. I do however, work in a hospital one day a week, so I make up for it the rest of my time. Yesterday, we went for a lovely cross country ski tour in the woods around the house to prevent the other sort of cabin fever.
Conditions were perfect. The temperature was in the 20’s and the fresh snow was lovely. Of course I fell on my first little downhill but was mostly fine after that. We saw the work of beavers and coyotes.
It looks like they tried to dam this lovely river without success, or perhaps they had in the past.
We often hear coyotes behind the house, especially at night. We found the remains of one of their dinners in the woods. A well picked deer skeleton and lower jaw.
We capped off the day with a soak in the hot tub when the temperature was about 10 degrees, the air was crisp and the stars were abundant. You don’t catch cold from being outdoors, you catch germs from being inside.
Island and North Country Life 