Author: Susan

Pretty, but gone

Kevin and I apparently had a bit of a miscommunication about the wasp nest in our backyard. (I think I posted about it, but a quick recap: I’d been out in the yard in early July trimming bushes, when I decided to go deadhead the poor, ugly rhododendron in the backyard. I was only a few flowers in when all of a sudden there were bugs everywhere – I thought they were horseflies at first – and I ended up with 7 stings. Ouch.) Of the two of us, Kevin’s demonstrated quite a bit of success as the bee-fighter, and the whole poisons and late pregnancy thing confirmed that he would be the one to take on the nest. While I was calming down after the stings, I thought I’d said something along the lines of “you don’t have to eradicate them this instant, but of COURSE the nest needs to go”. For some things, I’m live-and-let-live, but there are definitely limits (like spiders who find their way into the house, and wasps that sting me in my own yard). Kevin heard something more along the lines of “bees are our friends, we’ll just avoid the area”. I was trying hard not to pester him about it, but finally asked, and we were both so pleased to realize there had been a misunderstanding.

So after work, Kevin went out with his telephoto lens to assess the situation and find the entry hole that he’d be spraying the killer foam into. The nest is an amazing thing.

It was built right under one of the groups of leaves. You can actually see in that photo where I’d removed one flower completely (center bottom), and gotten most of a second one (right above the nest). Since I was working with both hands, no wonder they went after me – I must have nearly had both hands directly on their home.

I think the colors are so pretty, as is the wavy construction. It’s pretty impressive, too, the way they just add more layers in spite of the things in the way, like the leaves that you can see being encompassed by the growing nest.

I was so glad that Kevin got the neat photos, and even happier when Operation Wasp Removal was a success and Kevin emerged victorious without any stings.

Bento Box Baby Quilt

With all of the hot weather, I’ve dedicated a lot of time to sitting with my feet up in cool places (love those comfy Starbucks chairs!). For my birthday, I got a Kindle (wonderful little thing), so that’s been a good source of amusement, but I’ve also finally committed time to sitting down and finishing the bento box quilt – adding the binding, and finally sewing in all of the loose ends from quilting.

You can sew on one side of the binding with the machine (generally to the front, but I forgot and sewed it to the back instead. Oops. Luckily, I think I’m the only one that will ever notice.), but the second side needs to be sewn by hand. I am so slow at that kind of work, but the effort is worth every minute – I love the way the binding looks when it’s done.

So smooth and finished.

Here’s the finished quilt, all washed and crinkly:

And the back, where the quilted circles are more visible:

Kevin took all of the photos. He was playing with his new flash, umbrella and other photo equipment, and managed to get an amazing shot of the texture (from the quilting and the crinkly, washed cotton) of the front:

I am so happy with the way this turned out. I think the quilting was a perfect choice – continuing the geometric theme started by the square piecing, but not too rigid. Somehow it doesn’t seem like a baby quilt should be all right angles – I like that the circles soften things a bit. The choice to use three groups of circles was mostly stylistic, but a sentimental part of my mind also thinks of them as representing the three of us as a family.

Finishing the baby’s knitting didn’t seem to convince him it was time to appear, but perhaps he was waiting for his quilt? I’m still a week shy of my due date (August 10th) so maybe he’s just biding his time in there, having too much fun with all of the stretching and hiccupping, but we’re very eager to meet him. 🙂

New territory

Sometimes the crafting is for the baby, and sometimes the baby is just an excuse to try something new. 🙂 Today was completely a case of the latter. I bought a lightweight jersey fabric, and decided to try my hand at sewing a baby hat and pants. The hat was from the SouleMama pattern here, and the pants are based on the instructions here. All of the stretchy stitches on my sewing machine are uncharted territory for me, so it took a lot of reading the manual before I felt confident in my stitch, needle and presser foot choices. For the hat, I sewed the side seams using the serger stitch. I have thought for ages that you actually needed to buy a serger to manage this – I didn’t realize my machine was already capable of it until I sat down and read the manual for the nth time. Very exciting!! I used the overcast presser foot, which is a marvel. It’s the oddest looking thing, what with the pair of center bars and the little fronds on the right side, but I’m so impressed at the cleverness of it.

To hem the edge, I used an overcast stitch right at the edge. (I had to rip my first effort where I’d tried to set the seam in about a ¼ inch – the stitches and hem margin couldn’t have been more variable if I tried – straight seams and stretchy fabrics aren’t a skill I’ve mastered yet, apparently.) I should have hemmed first, then sewn the side seams so that they would have lied flatter – something to remember for the future.

The pants were much faster, since I didn’t have to rip and redo nearly as often. The casing for the elastic is a little bit wonky, but they’re pretty good for a first attempt, and as Kevin pointed out, we don’t think the baby will notice that the stitches aren’t perfectly even. 🙂

A pretty cute set to go over a onesie!

I have a few more cuts of jersey, so I may make more if I feel inspired. The biggest question mark from the whole experience is whether my tension was off. The serging stitches pulled through a lot to the back, and the fabric was puckered together in a ridge under the stitches. I’m curious if using the zigzag foot would have prevented the pucker? Or different tension? The jersey was extremely light-weight, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the settings I used would be ideal for a stiffer fabric, but just not for this one.

Marvelous Additions

Our house doesn’t have great cross ventilation in the living room, fish room and kitchen. The bedrooms manage to move some air with the windows open, and the family room is great with all of those big screened windows and the ceiling fan, but the main rooms of the house get hot and just stay that way. When we went back to Kevin’s parents’ house in May, I was impressed at the retracting screen door that they’d installed in their kitchen. We decided to get quotes for them, and now we have screens on the front door, and across the double door in the living room. You can just see the white frame around the edges, and the handle on the far right:

When the doors are open, we get an amazing corridor of air flow through the living room. With all of the heat this week, the air outside generally doesn’t start to get cooler than the house temps until around 9 pm. By that point, the house is hot and stuffy, and we’re wild to get new, cooler air through. The guy came and installed them right before the worst of the heat hit, and they’ve been an amazing addition.

I think they’re going to be just as exciting once the heat finally breaks (supposedly Tuesday or Wednesday of next week?) and we can keep them open during the day for nice breezes through the house. (Again, I know these aren’t great photos – it’s hard to photograph something that’s effectively see-though – but at least you can at least see the white trim around the edges and the handle on the far left. You can also see how scorched the poor yard is.)

Those double doors in the living room are so appealing when they’re open – our back yard is one of our favourite parts of the house and it’s nice to feel like it’s even more accessible. I’ve sort of felt like we haven’t gotten to take advantage of our Seattle summer this year, since time on my feet or out in the sun hasn’t been as appealing as it usually is. We both have parental leave (Kevin’s taking two months, and I get five), and I’m having visions of how pleasant August and even September might be with our new screens. Hopefully that won’t doom us to another cold, rainy August?

Hot

It has been wildly hot here. When we first started telling people that I was pregnant and the baby was due in August, many people were quite theatrical (I thought) about the prospect of heat during late pregnancy. My line of reasoning was that Seattle was a 70’s-in-the-summer kind of place and how bad could it be? Well, yesterday we set a heat record for the highest temperature ever recorded in Seattle (since they started keeping track 115 years ago) at 103° (and it was higher in some of the outlying towns). Oops — I understand now, and I’ve been moving impossibly slowly, mentally and physically.

Everyone and everything else appears to be struggling with the weather, too. Apparently wildfires are a huge risk right now so they’re very worried about thunderstorms. Our lawn is scorched and our bushes all look pathetic with drooping leaves. I was amazed this afternoon to see that the greenery that we’re generally surrounded by has turned brown and gold – not Seattle colors, and it’s incredibly startling. So far we’ve managed to avoid the brown-outs, which is very fortunate, and while the humidity has been high at night, it’s stayed below 40% during the day, so that’s helping too.

We’ve been on a mission to keep the house as cool as possible, partly for ourselves and partly for the fishtank. Step one was tarping over the kitchen window – not terribly classy, but it keeps that room at least ten degrees cooler in the afternoon and evening. I meant to follow that up by finally making the curtains for the picture window, but I lost steam after buying the heat-blocking lining. (My major block was that it’s just too hot and I’m too ungainly to measure, cut and sew large pieces of fabric.) So, we used blue painters tape to at least hang the lining over the window – again, not the most stylish thing but very effective.

I bought extra lining, thinking I might try to figure out some sort of roll-shade option for the kitchen garden window, which is now taped over our living room windows.

Right after taking this photo, I found a bedsheet to tape over the remaining windows to the left.

The fish are doing pretty well. We started with our fans and making fresh water ice cubes, but that wasn’t keeping up. I mentioned the problem to my new boss (knowing that he also keeps tanks and could probably relate), and he suggested filling a cooler with ice and running coils of airline tubing through it, then pumping tank water through the tubing to cool it down. A *really* smart idea. So now the tank looks like this:

With the two fans, lots of fresh water, and the cooler system, we’ve been managing to keep it under or at 82° — not too bad when the house is over 90 and the outdoor temps are over 100! Ideally, we try to keep it at or under 80, so it’s been a little warm for the dudes but they seem relatively unphased.

Art!

On Sunday we had a nonstress test (which the baby passed and then some – he was moving so much that they were having a hard time establishing a baseline for his heart rate), and then we braved the heat to go over to the Bellevue Art Fair. The second booth we stopped at had a painting that we both just loved, so we bought it.

It’s a print on canvas of the Bellevue skyline with the Lake Washington in the foreground and the Cascades in the back. It actually fits well in several spots so I’m not sure the fish room will be its permanent home, but we’re both enjoying it there for the moment. When we first put it up, we just sat on the couch and admired it and said all of the things we liked about it. It took us several minutes. 🙂

It’s obviously not photorealistic, but it captures so much of the way it feels to live here in the summer, complete with mountains towering over the view, the greenery, all of that blue sky and water, the outdoor activity, and even a crane on the skyline. It’s unusual to find art or photos of the eastside – usually you see either Seattle or nearby mountains and national parks. It’s such a pretty place to live and such a nice thing to have a permanent rendering of it.

Baby knitting: Check.

The Yarn Harlot has a theory that babies don’t come until their knitting is done, and so with that in mind I made a concerted effort to finish the hydrangea sweater this weekend. I finished binding off the last few stitches during the 9th inning of the Red Sox game, and immediately took a few more minutes to sew on the buttons. So just in time for 38 weeks, the knitting is all wrapped up. 🙂

I was starting to deeply resent this sweater while working on it because it was moving so very slowly (the hazard of knitting at 7 st/in.) and I wasn’t loving the colors. But now that it’s all bound off and the lime buttons are on it, I love the colors again and the pattern strikes me as cute.

The pattern calls for garter stitch all around, but I was feeling iffy about knitting at such a tiny gauge without being able to see the stitches, so I changed the yellow on the fronts and sleeves to stockinette. I left the blue in garter throughout, so it provides some textural contrast. You can see the stockinette on the backs of the sleeves and the garter on the back of the body here:

Next project will be something for me – I’m thinking a lace cardigan. Something big/fussy enough to be impossible to work on with a newborn. Perhaps we can use the jinx of a big project attempt to lure him out?

Indecisive Hydrangea

The hydrangea by the driveway is flowering, and we’ve been impressed to see that each bloom is a different color.

The range includes dark blue, light blue, purple, lavender, and pink (sometimes in a gradient across one flower), and while the effect is slightly Technicolor, it’s also exceptionally pretty.

I’ve heard occasionally that the color has to do with the acidity of the soil, but I thought that applied on a bush-by-bush basis, not a branch-by-branch one. If anyone has insights into the mysteries of hydrangea flower color, we’re fascinated.

Decorating

We ended up with quite the stash of plain white onesies. A few years ago, I’d needed some sort of baby clothes as a size reference for a sweater I was knitting for a gift, and the packs of white onesies were the cheapest option by far, so I bought five short sleeve and five long sleeve. Then Kevin’s mom sent us two more packs of four in newborn and three month sizes, and it started to feel a little bit too institutional. My original plan was to applique cute things by hand.

But it took way too long and looked sort of wonky, so v2 was geometric shapes and the sewing machine.

Here’s the first batch:

And the second:

Not professional grade sewing, but colorful and happy. I realized after the fact that I probably should have used a walking foot (or something along those lines?) because it was very hard to keep the stretchy onesie fabric lined up properly with the non-stretchy cotton. Oops.

Vibrant little things

A month into our CSA program, we’re doing a much better job than last year of keeping up with things as they come in. I’m particularly loving the fruit right now – peaches, nectarines and plums – but the vegetables have also been great for the most part. We’re starting to fall behind a bit on the cucumbers, and I’m still not entirely sure what to do with all those radishes, but we’re doing well on the whole.

The exception so far has been beets – they keep sending a handful of different varieties, and I’ve been completely at a loss. Last year I tried to make soup but it wasn’t really a success – the beets stained everything else bright pink and I didn’t like their flavour. On their own, they aren’t appealing to me – they smell like dirt. And they keep piling up.

I mentioned the difficulty to our friends Shawn and Sanna (veritable foodies), and they were raving about how great beets were for you and how they boil them down with honey and a bit of butter, a la mashed potatoes except using the water you cooked them in instead of milk. So I gave it a shot. They’re such bright and lovely colors when you prep them (I was so careful about not getting the juice everywhere, since it really does stain impressively).

They’re wiry enough that they don’t really boil down to anything smooth (or, at least, I got bored of adding more water before they got that far), but the end result was surprisingly good. So, success, and I know how to cook a new food!