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16 Scarves

Posted in family & friends, weaving on January 23, 2011| 2 Comments »

After we returned from Christmas on the coast, I wound 4 warps for the plaited twill scarves – that is, 4 different colorways, 2 of which were new ones I had in mind but hadn’t tried yet.  I can get 4 scarves from a 10-yard warp so I have been weaving away and now have 16 scarves woven:

but not finished.  I still need to twist the fringes, darn in ends and wash and press them.

I wanted to get this many done because I sold most of what I had before and during the holidays (not complaining!).  It saves me a lot of time if I can tie on each new warp and pull it through the heddles and reed, so I don’t have to re-thread etc.  But I am going to have to take this warp setup off the loom I am using because I need it for a workshop I am going to the end of next week.

The workshop, which will be held over in Seattle through the Seattle Weavers’ Guild,  is with Margaret Roach Wheeler, a native American of Chickasaw-Choctaw descent.  Do check out her website (Mahota Handwovens) –  I think her work is stunning.  She will be teaching us how she uses the Summer & Winter weave structure to interpret native American beadwork and quillwork patterns in her clothing line.   There are many beautiful examples on her website.  I am really excited to have this opportunity to learn from her.

Speaking of the loom I am using, I was having a fit around scarf # 10.  It is my Macomber “workshop loom”, the model CP portable.  Tie-up hooks were constantly popping off the lamms (the hooks connect the pedals or treadles to the lamm, which is a bar that connects to the jacks which raise the harnesses).  Also the harnesses themselves were hanging up and not dropping and I was getting messed up areas in the pattern and having to take work out and fix it constantly.  And it kept making a lot of loud creaking and squeaking noises.

Finally the light bulb went off in my head and I looked on the Macomber Looms and Me blog (also in my sidebar at right).  Sure enough there were a couple of entries about cleaning old grunge and dust off the jacks, and about Spiffing up your Loom.  I am not sure but my loom may have been sprayed with some WD-40 during a workshop last fall at our guild room – turns out this is a big No-No for Macomber looms.  So anyway, I cleaned up the jacks and the wooden slots the lamms slide in as best I could with a warp on the loom, using acetone and a rag, then applied silicone spray and vaseline (recommended for wherever brass parts touch steel parts).  The result was a much happier loom and a much happier weaver!  The last scarves went off without a hitch as fast as I could go.

I also include a picture of the handspun yarn I finished up a week or so ago.  This was from a multi-colored grey Corriedale fleece I washed, carded into layered batts (dark, medium and light in 3 layers to preserve some color variation in the spun yarn) and then spun over a period of time, mostly during the last year.  I finished it up as a 3-ply yarn and definitely have enough for a sweater (maybe 2700 yards of sport weight).  I am thinking traditional gansey style but need to do some swatching.  It is the most yummy, squishy and springy, soft yarn – I love it!

We will have 2 sets of visitors this week, so glad to see them!  Our first visitors arrived Friday night from Seattle.  Yesterday was a gorgeous Methow day and we went snowshoeing up in the Rendezvous area out of the Gunn Ranch.

Kristin is with child, due mid- to late-March, but she looks just like…. Kristin with a basketball on the front!

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Last Post for 2010

Posted in family & friends, Methow Valley, pets, weaving on December 31, 2010| 3 Comments »

We returned from 6 days on the Coast last Sunday, and our dear friends who are currently living in Southern California joined us here for 3 nights before heading back south.  We celebrated a 59th birthday:

They brought their 2 new cats, Tatti (a Maine Coon, still an adolescent and a big, sweet girl) and the Siamese kitten, Neko.  I’m not sure why my best picture of Neko was taken when she was asleep, because that was rarely the case!  She was very playful and hilariously entertaining.

There was only one “moment” when Tatti sneaked upstairs past our barrier and encountered a hostile Teasel (our female Bengal cat).  There was a lot of hissing, screaming and scrambling around.  We raced upstairs to find Tatti cowering in the bathroom, little fluffs of Tatti fur on the landing, and Teasel puffed up to about 3 times her normal size.  No harm done, though.

Rick and I went out for a fairly long ski on Monday which took us onto the Winthrop Trail and a view back down to the house:

Since then it has turned really, really cold – but clear and beautiful, especially in the mornings.

The carport is finished and we have both trailers (the Aliner travel trailer, and Rick’s utility trailer) and both our vehicles safely parked out of the snow now:

carport finished Dec 30, 2010

While away on the Coast, I finished the fourth of the swirl top hats.  This time I used a mosaic pattern from Barbara Walker’s Mosaic Knitting for the band and I am quite pleased with the result.  The yarns are Noro Silk Garden (the one showing color graduation) and Rowan Kid Classic in the same dark brown I used on the first hat.

And this week I warped up my small loom with a new scarf warp colorway that I had prepared before we left for Christmas.  I have finished the first 2 of 4 scarves I will get from this warp, and am working on the third one today.

Autumn warp with eggplant chenille weft

Autumn warp with black tencel weft

Tonight we go down to Twisp to join a group of friends for potluck dinner and ringing in the New Year at the Methow Valley Inn.  Safe travels to all who are similarly out and about tonight, and Happy New Year!

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Random Road Trip Notes

Posted in family & friends, travel on October 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

We have returned from a road trip with our little camping trailer, down to Sacramento and back for a family wedding.  It was great to get away for a while, see some sights (even though we had to keep moving each day) and have what amounted to a family reunion down in Sacramento.

Near John Day, Oregon (southeast Oregon) we pulled into a state park, circled the loop to find a spot, and spotted another Aliner trailer.  So of course we decided to camp in the adjacent spot.  After we set up, I walked over and realized it had Florida plates.  Gosh, didn’t the guy we met at Capitol Reef National Park in Utah (back in 2007) come from Florida?  The one who gave us the grand tour of his Aliner and more or less sold us on the idea?  And didn’t he tow his trailer with a Jeep Cherokee…HEY, this guy has a Jeep Cherokee the same color!!  It’s the same guy!!

Aliners at Clyde Holliday SP near John Day, OR

That’s us on the left, Jack’s rig on the right.  He is a retired schoolteacher and travels the country for months and months at a time, doing a lot of digital photography.  We had a nice visit and all marveled at what a small world it is.

Also in John Day, we visited the Kam Wah Chung & Co. Museum. To quote from the link I gave,  “Preserving the legacy of the Chinese workforce in Oregon, the museum contains artifacts and displays that share some of the trials of everyday life of these people.  Chinese businessman Lung On and herbal doctor Ing Hay worked out of this building. Dr. Hay administered care to the Chinese gold-mine workers, pioneers, and others from the John Day area and beyond by using traditional Chinese remedies.”  Part of the museum is actually the building where they lived, operated a general store, medical office and apothecary, social center for the Chinese community, quasi-bed&breakfast, etc for decades, and when it was locked up in 1948 everything in there remained untouched for decades more.

So what you see now is what was actually there, although cleaned up and protected now, of course.  Even dessicated fruits and glasses of juice that Doc Hay left on the altars throughout the little building, the day he left.

John Day also had a wonderful knitting, spinning and weaving shop:

The owner’s tastes and mine definitely align.  The knitting yarn selection was good but not tempting to me, but I did get into some trouble back in the book department:

Came away with some new weaving titles, and a great little book called Twist & Knit, self-published by Miriam Felton.  Follow my link and read the review from Knitter’s Review.  It’s geared to handspinners who want to get the most from a few hundred yarns of a special yarn, or those of us knitters who may indulge in a few skeins of something fabulous but worry about starting a project with it and not having enough to finish.  Very well done little book.

Down in Sacramento, we met up with my Dad, both my siblings and their spouses, my 2 nieces (one of whose wedding we were celebrating!!) and a whole bunch of other folks, some of whom were from the groom’s side of course.  We had three days of fun together, including a visit to the Old Sugar Mill out on the Sacramento River delta, which now houses a collection of wineries.  We brought a picnic lunch:

On our last evening there, the bride and groom hosted a lovely outdoor reception and dinner at their new home:

Dad and us "kids"

Three of my favorite men

The Shaws with a new addition to the family

Also, Rick showed them how we open wine bottles up in the Methow Valley:

A particularly stubborn cork doesn't stand a chance....

On the way back we camped near Mt Shasta, visited Gretchen and grand-kids and great-grand-kids in Medford, then wandered up through central Oregon and Washington to home in our little valley.

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Labor Day Weekend 2010 – and beyond!

Posted in family & friends, knitting, Methow Valley on September 11, 2010| Leave a Comment »

It’s been such a varied week, I thought I would just do a kitchen-sink kind of post today.

In anticipation of the upcoming Okanogan County Fair, and also a new round of teaching the top-down raglan sweater class, I finally got the little cardigan finished that I knit over the summer.  I still needed to darn in the ends, sew on the buttons, and block it.  It was knit using Rowan Yorkshire Tweed (about 7 sts/in), which sadly is a discontinued yarn.  I only had so much of the main color and couldn’t find more anywhere, so I had to get creative towards the end.  It is knit in one piece from the top down, and for the borders I used a mosaic pattern called “Sanquar Check” from one of the Barbara Walker books (1st Treasury of Stitch Patterns I think, am too lazy to go out to the studio and check…)  I had to go with 3/4 length sleeves due to the running-out-of-yarn problem, but I think I actually like them that way.  So, finished object:

On Sunday of the Labor Day weekend, I set up my booth at the Winthrop Artisan Market.  It was very windy, overcast, and a little cold!  We had to tie all the pieces of my display down so they wouldn’t blow over.  I did sell one rug and 2 shawl pins, so it wasn’t a complete bust…but nicer weather would have helped, I think.

Also that Sunday my Dad came over from Anacortes in his little Rialta motorhome, with his cat Squeaky, and spent 3 nights with us.  Sadly, the weather remained cool and rainy, with occasional sun breaks, so we couldn’t do much outside.  But still, we had a good visit.  Took Dad up to see one of the houses Rick built cabinets for last year, and also went up to see the job site for an upcoming job this fall.  It’s in a beautiful location up the Lost River valley.

Tuesday was Dad’s 91st birthday and we went up to Sun Mountain Lodge for dinner.  We had one of the best tables with a beautiful view up and down the valley below, and it had cleared up some so the views were spectacular.

Thursday was the opening day for the Okanogan County Fair over in Omak.  A group from our guild, Methow Valley Spinners & Weavers, had organized a “fleece to shawl” event.  We had a loom already warped for a shawl with handspun yarn that several of us had supplied.  We brought a washed fleece, a natural colored Romney from The Pines Farm in Maple Valley (south of Seattle).  We hand-carded the fleece, spun the rolags into singles, then I was the “designated plyer” and made a 2-ply yarn.  This was handed off to the weavers, who wove the shawl.  We actually finished it in about 5 hours – I was amazed!  Thursday was also the day that a lot of school groups came through, and the kids were really interested and asked a lot of questions.

That’s our guild display on the wall that my friend Diana puts together each year (with some help, but it is mostly her effort).  We usually show what the guild challenge project was for the year, and as I last blogged about here, this year it was to “do something” with some emerald green and camel brown cotton yarn that we had been given an abundance of some time in the past.

The rest of this week, I’ve started on a new round of scarves on my little workshop loom.  Last night we worked late and decided to go down to Twisp for dinner at Tappi.  It turned out one of our favorite groups was playing jazz:

And here’s John with part of our dinner just out of the brick oven – it’s the “Malandrino” burger.  Calling this a burger is more than a little misleading.  And yes, we split it.  It’s a full pound of beef, with grilled onions and grilled tomatoes, melted blue cheese, on a homemade pocket bread.  Best eaten with knife and fork!

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Family Photos

Posted in family & friends, home life on July 23, 2010| 2 Comments »

Here’s a family:

These three went through a lot together earlier this year, when Clara fell and broke her arm.  It’s great to have everything back to normal!  This was taken at a birthday dinner a couple of weeks ago (Rick & Kathy).

Clara – 91, Rick – 62, Kathy – “59” (same as Jack Benny)

And here’s another family that wandered by off our back deck a couple of mornings ago:

So cute!

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Tuesdays are for Hiking

Posted in family & friends, Methow Valley, outdoors on July 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I finally seem to be back in the groove with my hiking group.  For many reasons, Tuesdays have been hard to schedule for the last couple of months.  Anyway, last week we went up to Goat Peak, a hike I have not done before.  This is a manned lookout up above Mazama in the upper valley.  Specifically, it is manned by Lightning Bill Austin, who is a poet among other things!   Unfortunately, Monday and Tuesday are his days off, so we were not able to visit with him (which evidently often involves a poetry reading…)

This is a short but very steep hike.  If memory serves, we started at 5600′ after a longish drive up from Mazama, and ended at 6800′.  My valley floor lungs were suffering.  But, despite the warm weather of late, at that elevation and fairly early in the morning, it was not really hot.

Beautiful views at the top (knoll before final ascent to lookout).  Individual photos do not really do justice, so I made a rather amateurish panorama for you:

That’s the lookout on the left, on top of the peak in the foreground.  The mountains are in the North Cascades to the south and west.  We did not continue the final 1/2 mile or so to the lookout, since there were still significant snow patches on the north-facing side of Goat Peak, and we had achieved our other goal, which was to deliver a “travel bug” to its final destination in a geo-cache near the peak.

What is a travel bug, you might well ask?  Welcome to the world of geo-caching – I still have a lot to learn!  Here are the Travel Bug FAQs, but basically it is a trackable tag that is attached to an item and logged into the Geocache.com website, so that it “becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online”.

This particular travel bug originated in Chicago, and it took 3 years for it to reach its defined goal, which was to go to Lightning Bill!

This week, yesterday actually, four of us made it to Black Lake, which is a 5-mile hike up the Lake Creek trail in the Pasayten Wilderness (accessed via West Chewuch Rd out of Winthrop).  Our group thought this hike is in the area burned in the 30 Mile Fire back in 2001, but this trip report from the Washington Trails Association website says it was actually burned in the 2003 Farewell Fire.  It also says it is only 4 miles.  Hmmm… felt like 5 miles!

Anyway, the trail has little elevation gain and follows along Lake Creek most of the way.  Despite all the burnt trees, it did not feel really desolate, since a lot of the understory is coming back.  In fact, the trail could use a good brushing-out!

After the very hot temperatures of last week, we were glad it had cooled off, and we had high overcast as well, so what could have been a long and hot hike was simply a little long.  But it felt good to get out and get that much exercise!  And to our surprise, there were really NO BUGS – amazing!

Our final destination, Black Lake:

It was actually kind of cold and windy at the lake, enough so that we had to put on our windbreakers to eat our lunch.

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Road Trip, Part 2 – Friends Time

Posted in family & friends on July 3, 2010| 2 Comments »

After we left Ashland & Medford, we drove up to Portland, OR.  No trip to Portland is complete (for me) without a visit to the Pendleton Mill Outlet Store in Milwaukee (SE of Portland, on the other side of the Willamette River).  This is where I forage for materials for rug weaving.  We barely got there on Thursday before their closing time, and I picked up some blanket selvage material, but also found out their weekly shipment from the mill comes in on Thursday night, and the pickings would be even better on Friday morning.

We did go back the next morning, and I took quite a few pictures in their new tapestry gallery, which I will save for the next post.

We stayed the night with our good friends who own The Real Mother Goose Gallery in downtown Portland (with a second store at the Portland Airport).  Rick had built new cabinets for their living room last summer, and since I had been there last they had finished the fireplace installation, and furnished it with books and lots of beautiful pieces of art and crafts from their collection:

On Friday we returned to the mill store, and also did some other shopping, at which point the car was so stuffed full of things we could barely move!  By early afternoon we headed north to Lake Quinalt on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula, between Aberdeen and Forks.  This is where our friends own and operate Lochaerie Resort on the North Shore of the lake, actually inside Olympic National Park.

Lochaerie Resort is a real gem – 5 housekeeping cabins that were mostly built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, with one that was built in the 1960’s.  The main house was originally used as a boarding house, and to say the whole place had fallen into a state of disrepair when our friends bought it a couple of decades ago, is an understatement.  They have done what they could over the years, with marked improvements since they bought out their partners.  But they have always had an onsite manager, as they were still living and working in the Seattle area.  This year, they are rebuilding the main house to be their home, and will be living there and managing it themselves from now on.

Once a year, around the end of June, they invite a group of friends to come out, stay in the cabins, and participate in the Quinalt Rain Forest Bike Ride to benefit the Lake Quinalt Cancer Fund.  It’s a 31-mile ride which takes you along the north shore, up the Quinalt River valley to a bridge, back down the south shore and then a couple of miles along the highway in the vicinity of Amanda Park.

We actually had gorgeous weather, sunny with temperatures in the 60’s and low 70’s.  This seemed like blessing given how wet the spring and early summer has been (and, they call it the rain forest for a reason….)  Rick and I made it from Lochaerie around to the Rain Forest Resort on the south shore, just north of the Lake Quinalt Lodge.  That was 20 of the 31 miles.  This was better than we expected to do, since it is the first time we have attempted this ride on our little folding Dahon bikes instead of mountain bikes.  At least half of the ride was on dirt/gravel road so our little tires and our legs did quite well.  Our behinds, not so much.

Here we are about halfway around, at the bridge over the Quinalt River:

Sunday we drove home to the Methow, about 7 hours of driving from Lake Quinalt.  As always, glad to be home!

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Road Trip, Part 1 – Family Time

Posted in family & friends, travel on June 29, 2010| Leave a Comment »

We returned Sunday evening from a fast-paced road trip to southern Oregon and the Washington Coast.  We had a great time, despite all the driving – and there’s nothing like a good audio book to help with that!

We stayed one night in Sisters, Oregon on the way down.  This is a pretty little town, with restaurants and art galleries, in the eastern foothills of the Oregon Cascades to the east of Eugene.  We didn’t roll in until almost 9 pm, so everything was closed, but we have been there before.  I found a nice little motel on-line before we left, the Sisters Motor Lodge, a 1930’s era motor court that is nicely updated but has the original flavor.  Their motto, “Cute as a button, neat as a pin, clean as a whistle” pretty much says it all!  Our unit had a nice kitchen, so we were able to fix our own breakfast.  I would definitely stay there again for several days, especially if we wanted to cook our own meals and not eat out.  Plus, there was a wonderful view of the Three Sisters out the kitchen windows:

We drove across the Cascades along the McKenzie River in sunshine with blue skies, then on down to Medford on I-5.

The first evening we were treated to dinner at Pasta Piatti in Ashland, where grandson Brandon is executive chef.  We had a party of fourteen, and 4 generations present.  I didn’t get a lot of pictures, but here is great-grandaughter Eva, who is two years old now, with her mom Sylvia and aunt April:

After dinner we went to Lithia Park so the kids could play in the playground and the adults could visit.

The next day was great-grandson Aidan’s fourth birthday.  The family had a lot of activities planned, so it was a jam-packed day!  We started off at a wonderful farmer’ market in Ashland, where they picked up some food for a picnic and dinner later.  Then we met at a small Ashland city park where the kids could run around and play, and we had a nice leisurely picnic lunch.  Then it was off to the the Family Fun Center in Medford, Aidan’s pick for a birthday activity.  The inside arcade was a bit much for me (lots of noise and flashing lights) but the go-kart run was fun to watch.  Rick took Aidan in his go-kart:

Then it was off to Gretchen & Duane’s house for the rest of the afternoon and evening.  Brandon and Sylvia cooked a wonderful dinner, Aidan opened his presents and we had birthday cake.  Rick even played Wii (bowling and golf) which was a first.  We didn’t get back to our friends’ house in Ashland until almost 11 pm, happy but exhausted!

The next day, our last in Medford/Ashland, started out nice and slow.  We slept in, went for a walk, and visited with our friend Denise, who is a print artist (see her website, Drawing on the Dream).  Around noon we hooked up with some of the family and headed off to a wildlife refuge north of Grants Pass called Wildlife Images Education and Rehabilitation Center.  This proved to be a fun and interesting outing not only for the little kids, but the rest of us as well.  We went on the tour, where we were able to see the animals that are permanent residents because they cannot be re-introduced to the wild for various reasons.  Many of them had sad stories, and I was glad to know they had at least wound up in a safe place with a reasonably natural living environment.

I would have more pictures of us with the family, but at this point I need to wait to get image files from Gretchen’s camera.  Here’s Rick coloring with Aidan, though – he’s a very sweet, good-natured little boy (Aidan, that is…)

Thursday we headed north to Portland, OR for the second phase of the trip.  Stay tuned

//

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A Big Week

Posted in family & friends on June 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I’m having one of those “I can’t believe it’s Friday already” days.  It’s been a big week.  I started a part-time job in Winthrop at the Pacific Biodiversity Institute – I will be the new bookkeeper, and also see to some computer maintenance tasks around the office.  The bookkeeping position will entail some training with an accounting firm in Wenatchee, but we are still figuring that out.  I am pretty used to Quickbooks, but there are plenty of things to learn both about that software, and bookkeeping for nonprofits in particular.

Then on Wednesday my Dad came over in his little Winnebago “Rialta” RV, which is a 15-year-old low miles rig that he bought from someone in West Seattle.  He is going home via Wenatchee and Stevens Pass (Daroga State Park and Lake Wenatchee State Park) on a shake-down cruise.

Also my brother and sister-in-law came over from their home on Camano Island, and so we all had 2 nights and a full day yesterday together.  The weather actually cooperated, and we had a nice sunny day.  Here we are up the West Chewuch at Falls Creek:

Dad brought his cat, Squeaky, along in the RV and she seemed a little cowed by the whole experience, but yesterday afternoon I did get her to sit on my lap and be petted for a while (in the RV).  So we all hope she will get used to the idea eventually.

I did get 3 rugs woven last weekend, and am planning to be at the Winthrop Artisans Market this coming Sunday.

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Elizabeth Freund Carr, 1921 – 2010

Posted in family & friends on April 30, 2010| 5 Comments »

I don’t usually post really personal information on the blog, but my small readership consists mostly of friends and family, and I think it is appropriate to let you all know that my Mom, Betty Carr, passed away last Sunday night.  She would have been 89 this August.

I find it helps me to look back and remember earlier days and the good times we had as a family, often centered around adventures in the outdoors – camping, hiking, boating, summers at the beach.

I have a lot of pictures but not many are digitized.  But I did find this one, which my friend Sybil used in a video she put together for my 60th birthday last year.  That’s me on the right, my sister on the left.  Not sure who is in the background, but surely my Dad took the picture.

Mom and the family in the 1950's

So this is how I like to remember my Mom (well, not with the cigarette – she and Dad quit smoking a long, long time ago!)

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