I totally forgot that today is Wednesday. Good thing I remembered in time! So…what’s in progress around here? For starters…I’ve been working away at my spinning:
That’s Crown Mountain Farms Corriedale Pencil Roving in “Stonehenge”, for those who missed the last post on the subject. I’m enjoying spinning this stuff up, even though it’s not as soft as the last couple of skeins I worked on. It’s a change, and change is not a bad thing!
Speaking of skeins, I took myself off to Home Despot yesterday and picked up some PVC pipe, a few T-Joints, and some endcaps. Those supplies combined to form Voltron a new Niddy-Noddy for me!
I’ve been spending a little time reskeining some of my past projects, as my old method resulted in some pretty fat and hard to manage skeins. I can see that using the Niddy Noddy will definitely save me some time and energy when trying to wind plied yarn off bobbins. Also, it winds yarn at 2 yards around, so it’s going to make calculating my yardage a lot easier.
I’m also one bind-off away from finishing the last HitchHiker scarf that I cast on back in April. This means that once I’m done with it, I can consider casting on Zoe’s Shawlette.
I wasn’t certain whether or not I’d be able to squeak out another repetition of the pattern, so I’d put in a lifeline with the black sock yarn I keep in my bag these days for afterthought heels. It looks like I didn’t need to worry, but better safe than sorry! As with any project, it’s a matter of just knuckling down and getting it done. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been working on it in an air-conditioned building. Because as soft as the yarn is, this has definitely been “too warm for knitting” weather.
You may have also noticed something new in these pictures…my deck is blue!
We finally managed to get a stretch of really nice weather over the weekend, and managed to get the basic staining done. The railings are pretty much done, and the surface of the deck itself requires just one more coat. After that, it’s the stairs and any other trim we want to paint. Being almost done with it is a liberating feeling, that’s for sure. This is the first deck refinishing for both of us, and it wasn’t an easy job. The experience was valuable though, so if we have to do it again, we’ll be prepared.
The main thing, though, is that it looks good. It’s an attractive colour, and fairly unique for our neighbourhood – most of the decks we can see from our house are either stained to look like redwood, or match the generically putty-coloured siding on the house. We were somewhat inspired by the fact that our deck is made of pressure-treated wood and thus has a slightly greenish cast. We figured that the blue would cover that nicely and offset nicely against the dark-blue trim around our back door. Interestingly, our patio tiles are somewhat pink in colour, so the pink and blue actually work together quite well. The next job, once we have the second coat on the deck surface, is to move the BBQ up to the deck and get the patio clear. That way we’ll be able to put up our gazebo next summer.
Lots of things happening around here!
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