Twisp of Fate

Knitting

Nymphalidea shawl by Melinda VerMeer (first published in Knitty Fall 2013, but also a free pattern on Ravelry).  I used about 2/3 of a ball of Noro Silk Garden Sock – she recommends a sock/fingering weight yarn with long slow color changes for the colored yarn – plus a slightly heathered blue/purplish sock yarn I had hanging around, for the welts.  I did more repeats of the pattern (32 instead of 28 I think) to follow the color progression to where I wanted it at the end.

Nymphalidea pinned out with blocking wires

detail: short row lace sections at outer edge

Weaving

I put a second warp on Kingston for more of the doubleweave check towels.  The first batch is washed and ready to hem and finish, but not ready for photography yet.  They did turn out nice and soft and cushy, though.

For this time around, I used a silver marl (soft gray and white) in the 8/2 cotton doubleweave areas, and a black/olive green marl in the 16/2 cotton for the plain weave areas.  I am quite happy with how these are turning out!

Airstream Upgrades

Back in 1973 when our trailer was built, they put in double-pane windows.  From reading the Airstream Forums and other sources on the internet, we find it is a well-known problem to have the seals on these break down.  There is a UV film between the panes of glass that crackles and shrivels up, basically.  So most of the windows on the sides of the trailer look pretty bad – the ones in front and back are still mostly OK.

window over the galley

galley and bedroom windows from outside

There is debate (on the internet, can you imagine?) about how to best deal with this problem.  Some people advocate removing the entire window, carefully taking them apart, cleaning it up, re-sealing and putting them back in.  Well, for one thing they are riveted in.  Even if you manage to get the window out, I then found via a YouTube video that “taking them apart” is a process fraught with peril of breakage, and using lots of solvents etc.  And then the folks at Airstream of Spokane said there is a good chance they will just have the same problem again (breakdown of seals) because double-pane windows were just not a good idea for a trailer that will be jiggling and bouncing down the road.

Replacement windows cost a fortune (to buy and to have installed) and are probably Plexiglass these days.  So, they convinced us that we should just break out the inner pane of glass (using a punch to get started), clean up the film and outer glass pane, and go with single-pane windows from here on out.

Rick made a start yesterday with the windows beside the door.  First thing he ran into is that these particular windows have Plexiglass on the inside, we assume for safety reasons given their location.  He did manage to get them out though, using a special cutter/saw thing he has to get started.  They cleaned up beautifully, with some razor blade scraping etc.  The upper window is one of the “Vista Views” (kind of a skylight with a shade that pulls over it when you don’t want that much light) and these are the curved ones – it was actual glass on the inside and he broke it out with the punch.

3 cleaned windows next to the door

cleaned windows from outside, looking towards the next victim

We still need to refine our cleaning technique and find some gasket material to fill in the channels on the inside.  But overall, this is encouraging and we feel we can do this ourselves.  Since the screens are removed to do this,  I will also clean those up and replace the “fuzzy bug seal” where the arms to open the windows go through the screen frames.

Onward!