Author: Susan

We had an amazing sunset a few nights ago, with blood red clouds stretching from the horizon to overhead. I tried to take a picture from the upstairs window, which turned out blurry and pink:

then from my parking spot, which was less blurry but still pink:

Mildly thwarted, I turned to go back in the apartment and saw that the sky was reflected in our neighbour’s window. The flash didn’t go off this time, and the colors are actually true:

Rather end of the world…

I’ve started a new project! It’s the Twist Front Top (scroll down) from Adrienne Vittadini.

The yarn is called Handwork Cora… I found it on Elann for $16.92 including shipping and handling last spring when I was still feeling broke from my work sabbatical. It’s a Cotton/Acrylic blend, and feels a bit odd, but it’s machine washable and I love the color (and only $16!) so it’s fine with me for this project. The pattern didn’t really show for the first few rows, but the further I get the lovelier it looks. Four-row-repeat lace patterns are so addictive. 🙂

PS, in other knitting news: remember Janell’s sunset socks? She’s clearly been living in the Pacific Northwest too long — she overdyed them a cloudy grey. 🙂

In another major step forward for the apartment, Kevin spent all of two weeks ago sanding, staining and varnishing his bookcases, and now they’re gorgeous and done! There was just enough time before our out-of-town friends showed up for a long weekend to air out the apartment, truck them back downstairs and fill them up with the stacks of books.

He started with some unfinished pine cube shelves from the furniture store next to our fish store (so convenient!):

After two coats of stain, one coat of varnish, and four days of semi-ventilated fumes in the apartment (we were both thinking that having a garage would be nice…), here they are drying in the sun:

My only contributions to this project were carrying them upstairs and setting up a work area, then carrying them back downstairs when he was done, so I’m appreciating all of his work. Here’s the lovely view as seen from the couch:

Now that room is a funny combination of really nice, matching, stylish furniture (the new couch, bookshelves, and my pretty wood end tables), college furniture (lots of particle board office furniture that’s seen one too many moves), crazy electronics (kevin’s computer, newish huge tv and xbox) and large item storage (yoga mats, empty poster frames, camping gear and sundry).

The shelves are a huge step in the right direction.

Really not so attractive:

vs. a protein skimmer cozy!:

The protein skimmer is essential to the health of our tank, as it removes nastiness and waste from the water, but it sits in the middle of our living room. Unsheathed, I don’t think it adds much to the character of the room, so a little hat for the collection cup was in order for when we had company over. A bit of Cascade 220 later, voila!

Not the most interesting or involved project ever, but it will perform a great service. It also reminded me how much I don’t enjoy being a monogamous knitter. After the Olympics, I launched into a clapotis, and have just been plugging away on that. I think it’s time to branch out a bit. 🙂 Ought to make for more varied and interesting knitting content on the blog, too. 🙂

Since I’ve been posting about the rest of the plants (yay and thanks for the comments), and since it’s still raining so the color bursts appeal to me, here’s my planter on the front porch:

It’s been going strong with various assortments of plants since we first moved here in August ’04. (Here’s the earliest photo record of it on the blog.) The evergreen (looks like palm fronds), elephant ears (flat, broad red and green leaves to the front-right) and now-unidentified light green variegated trailing plant are still originals. I put in new bacoba (pretty, tiny white flowers) two months ago, and the red snap dragons have been in for a month and are now gorgeously blooming.

The drama, though, is due to a few bulbs I stuck in here way back in February. I think they’re called Zantedeschia, but there may be a more common name. The label, with picture, was this:

They lay dormant for months but recently have taken off. The tallest sprouts are well over 8″ tall in less than two weeks, and with their forked tops are quite striking.

There were three bulbs, which didn’t seem like much at the time, but given that just one bulb has put up six shoots, I’m now glad that there weren’t more in the pack.

I’d love if they’d bloom in time to complement the red and gold snap dragons, but since the package puts them at mid-summer and the snap dragons have been blooming for three weeks, I’m trying not to count on it.

The elephant ears have also sent up a bud.

I remember the flower being pretty garish last spring, so it will be interesting to see whether this year’s plant assortment is a better foil for it. (It’s also interesting that last year’s blooms arrived a month-plus earlier. I wonder if that’s due to the weather or if something else changed?)

Since it’s worked before when my plants have perplexed me, I thought I’d host another Q&A, where I pose confused questions, and the gardening experts out in the blogosphere tell me how to fix my problems. 🙂

I bought a hyacinth a few months ago on a whim, and it looked very pretty on the window sill for quite a while. By last weekend, though, the leaves were shedding and it was looking pretty dead, so I decided to reclaim the pot. I was completely tickled to find out that the bulbs had been actively spreading:

Instead of the five bulbs that I expected, each large bulb has 3-5 little offspring! Very cool. The only problem is that I don’t know what to do with it now. There’s a pretty serious root structure, so I just put the whole thing in a short vase of water for the moment.

I don’t have any yard to play in, so I can’t just plant it out back, and my pots and sunny spots are at a premium, so I’m not going to use one on a non-blooming thing, even if it’s cool. If I cut off the roots and put it in a dark, cool cupboard, could I replant it next winter and have it rebloom? Should I gift it to someone with a yard? Perform a random drive-by planting? I’m at a loss.

Question two continues the bulb theme. I was picking out an onion for dinner from the bowl on the counter when I came across this confused specimen:

I really enjoyed planting the garlic that sprouted a few months ago. Does anyone know if planting an onion would have a similar effect? And do you know what it will produce? Just a stalk? Oniony flowers? Baby onions? This guy has quite the lust for life, so it seems like planting might be in order, but I don’t really know what it would entail. Thoughts?

I’ve been meaning to take a picture of the chives for a few weeks now, because the one flower has been persistently blooming. Somehow the thing is still going, so I was lucky enough to remember in time to get a shot:

Isn’t it pretty? I had no idea what to expect, and I’ve been enjoying seeing it whenever I go out to the back deck.

In other back-deck plant news, my strawberry plant survived the winter and is now positively laden with flowers and tiny green strawberries. Neat! My indoor plant is slowly labouring over one misshapen berry, so it’s nice to think the other plant might yield some. I was going to go pull off one dead leaf, though, when I noticed foam all over the plant. I’m suspecting that some insect was here:

Do any of you know what is causing this? And any idea why? And most importantly of all, any idea of what I should be doing to fix it, or whether I can just leave it alone and the plant will continue unphased?

UPDATE: It looks like I have an infestation of aptly-named spittle bugs. (See the second and third paragraph here.) According to this and several other similar sites, I have to remove and squish them or the fruit will be tiny and the plant stunted.
:-/ Good to know.

The protein skimmer cozy took a bit of a detour. I decided to use the Traveling Leaf pattern from Knitting on the Edge, but after the first eight rows, things looked a bit wrong:

Compared with the crisp neatness of the original pattern, clearly something went awry:

Slightly closer inspection revealed that there were some knits where there should have been purls and several cases where they told you to use color B when they must have meant A. There’s probably errata on the net somewhere, but I just went to work with the crochet hook, and managed to repair it to this state after an hour or so:

Much better, but now I’m irritated with the whole book. The good news is that now I visually “get” the pattern so I don’t have to look at it anymore, but my tension is off for the “leaves” and the lack of attention to detail by Ms. Epstein and her editors has made me cranky. I’m not giving up on the project since I’m only a few rows from the end of the color and the all-black stockinette round-and-round part will be fun and quick to finish, but still. I bought the book this winter, and it’s very lovely, but this first pattern from it makes me wonder what the point is in showing pictures of patterns if the instructions are a disaster?

Given recent events, you can all imagine my chagrin when I found myself, once again, in the plumbing aisle of Lowes, shopping for PVC. I had decided to DIY instead of buying a woah-expensive freestanding vertical kayak storage solution. In classic “if you have a hammer, every problem’s a nail” style, and since PVC seemed possible after seeing this design, I thought I’d give it a shot with my own plans. I wanted to be able to lie one kayak flat on the floor, then put another in slings directly above it. My original vision was that I’d be able to pick out some folding things with slings (kind of like a luggage rack) that would cost about $40 and be tall enough to place over another kayak. When, like so many things I plan to buy, this didn’t exist and all of the alternatives were expensive, I whipped up this model of questionable stability, went to Lowes, and started working:

I bought a hack saw to cut the 1 1/2″ PVC, which at $5 turned out to be an excellent investment. Our old PVC cutter is more even but wouldn’t cut anything much bigger than an inch, and despite the multitude of cuts required, this moved pretty quickly. I bought nylon webbing and used the ever-appreciated sewing machine to make loops to fit them on the side supports. In typical PVC-wielding fashion, I bought one incorrect piece, so had to wait for the replacement a day later before I could continue. The stands are wide enough that they won’t fit through our door out to the deck and since we still haven’t decided if this is an indoor or outdoor solution, I don’t want to use the purple primer and PVC cement to weld it all together. It all bent alarmingly when we first put the kayak on but appears to be holding stable since.

Stacy and Andi “admiring” the PVC handiwork:

(We had all the Brown kids over for dinner, so the picture above shows some posing with the still-suspended kayak. With luck, it’s stable enough to last till morning.)

While I’ve always been a projects person, I’ve never been an engineer, so I’m pretty skittish about the potential for success here. Kevin-the-MIT-grad vetted my plans before I started sawing though, so at least if the ship goes down (ha ha.) I’m in reasonable company. 🙂

P.S. For the knitters who wonder about the status of the protein skimmer cozy, we were all correct in supposing that I would not finish within 24 hours. I’ll have pictures in a few more rows. 🙂

When I arrived at knitting last week, Janell held up her nearly completed sock and declared that it was hideous and she was over-dyeing it. I realized as I protested that the colors were pretty that this had already been a long topic of discussion, and everyone had reached a consensus that the variegated salmon and lavender colors were, indeed, disgusting. I’m still unconvinced, since to me they looked like that grey-blue-purple that the mountains get against a pink sunset. We happened to have just such a sunset last night, so here’s an illustration:

Blurry, since I had to take the flash off, but the colors are true. So pretty! See, Janell?