Our third annual living history this past Saturday was a big success. As always, Dale did a lot of work to pull this together. And, as always, we had fabulous friends and volunteers who helped us with everything. But there was one thing we had this year that we haven’t had before – blue sky!

Thank you all so much for your good thoughts, prayers and positive energy. It worked. Despite the forecast – which was for showers and clouds – the weather was perfect. I truly believe we owe that to the power of the knitbloggers!

If you had been a visitor on Saturday, here are a few things you would have seen:

Soldiers drilling. These guys put on a fine demonstration for the spectators. They even taught some willing participants how to be a Civil War soldier.

Me spinning. The wheel was a huge success. People had a lot of questions about it and I think I was able to teach them a bit. I plan to talk more about this tomorrow.

A fashion show. Hannah volunteered to speak about the various women’s clothing and she did a terrific job.

Campfire cooking. We ate a wonderful meal of pot roast, potatoes and carrots, along with chicken cooked on a spit.

Laughing and talking! Here is Blogless Sharon and she’s having a terrific time – can’t you tell?

And at the end of the day we went to bed. Exhausted but satisfied. Our tent never felt so much like home.

You’re my blue sky, you’re my sunny day

Please keep sending those sunny day thoughts my way for our living history tomorrow. Thanks and have a fabulous weekend!

Sometimes I have great success plying from a center pull ball and sometimes I wind up with a tangled mess. I’ve heard that letting the singles relax before winding them onto the ball winder can help but I’m usually not patient enough to wait at that point. So, I was thrilled when Laura shared a tip that she had read on Spinning Spider Jenny’s blog.

Jenny’s method, which comes from her good friend Rita Buchanan, involved a flower pot and a felted ball. Laura’s recap of the technique was a little simpler. In her words, “You take the inner strand and the outer strand which you will ply together. Hold them together and make a ball of yarn with the entire bit so that you have a 2-strand ball of yarn, just not plied and twisted together. THEN, when you now have this new ball of yarn, which is in a ball like wound around a felt ball or something like that…. THEN you start from the outside, which is supposedly the center point of the original center pull ball and is just the loop/bent piece and should be on the outside of the new ball, that’s what you start plying with. It’s already all there held together, no kinks that can’t be worked out as you go, no clumps.”

I tried it Laura’s way on Monday night and it worked like a charm. No kinks, no tangled mess, no waste! Woo and also Hoo. I did have one issue, though. Sometimes when I’m plying, my singles either break because they are over spun or fall apart because they are under spun. When I’m plying with regular ole wool I just spit splice the ends together. However, that doesn’t work with super wash and I’ve had to tie the ends together. Is there a better way to handle this situation? Other than spinning singles that don’t break or fall apart, that is? I’d appreciate any advice you have on this.

Joining problems aside, I wound up with two skeins (260 yards each) of this beautiful superwash from Crown Mountain Farms in the colorway “Let’s Hang On.”

I love it! The colors, the barber poley-ness of the whole thing makes me happy.

And happy is good.

~Thanks so much for all your nice compliments on the Bloomin’ Feet socks. A few people asked about the sock label so I thought I should link back to the post I wrote about how to make a sock label. Go here and read. Simple but a very nice touch on a pair of gift socks.

~We are having our Civil War Living History in memory of East Bridgewater native Frank Harlow this Saturday. I’d appreciate any thoughts for sunny weather as we have had pouring rain at this event the last two years. And, if anyone is going to be in the neighborhood and would like to come and see what we do, just let me know and I’ll send you directions and information.

~I shouldn’t even tell you this but I won another contest. I got a fabulous box of prezzies from Kirsten last week. There was candy and roving dyed by Kirsten as well as Koigu and Misti Alpaca yarn. Thanks for the terrific prize package, Kirsten!

~I like that when I see the national weather map on the morning news I can picture so many of you and know what type of weather you’re having. I worry about tornadoes, storms and wildfire, and rejoice when you’re having sunny, pleasant weather. It’s a great way to feel connected to our knitting community.

~As Lolly mentioned the other day, it seems like “going green” is becoming trendy. That can only be a good thing, I believe. I urge you to find one thing that you can do to make a difference in your carbon footprint. Change your light bulbs from incandescent ones to compact fluorescent ones, wrap your hot water heater with an insulating blanket, turn down your thermostat, use reusable grocery sacks, recycle more – there are lots of very simple things you can do. Something new that I found last week is www.greendimes.com and they will work to eliminate your junk mail AND plant a tree in your name every month. It’s only 10 ¢ a day and for a great cause.

~My current sock in progress. The pattern is Mad Weave from Sock Madness Round Four. I may be out of the competition but I’m still knitting the patterns and this one is very cool. The yarn is from A Piece of Vermont and I love the way it looks with the pattern – which I changed around a bit because I can now that I’m not knitting these competitively. And yet, I’m bored as hell with it and I don’t know why. But you know me, I’ll be plodding along and they’ll be finished soon. I’ll love them again when fall rolls around and there’s a brand new pair of wool socks in my drawer.

Have you read The Thirteenth Tale yet? You need to read this book. It’s got all the elements of a great gothic novel and the author sucks you right in with the first chapter. This book had me reading last weekend instead of knitting and you know how unusual that is these days. Really, read this book. You won’t be sorry.

~This profusion of daffodils is by my back door. They make me glad every time I walk by them. Why not order your fall bulbs now while you’re inspired by their beauty everywhere? You’ll receive them automatically when it’s time to plant them in the fall and next spring you’ll be glad, too.

I finished the socks for the Bloomin’ Feet Sock Swap at the end of last week and blocked them over the weekend. The pattern is the Merino Lace Socks from the Interweave Knits Favorite Socks book.

Aren’t they pretty? The yarn is Schaefer Anne, which I’ve knit with before for my Swallowtail Shawl, but this is the first time I’ve actually used it for socks. It’s very soft and very fine and has a nice halo from the mohair content. It sort of stripes but not really and the colors blend together in a lovely fashion.

I chose this particular pattern because of something very specific my sock pal said. I’m not going to give it away but, if the recipient is reading this post and remembers what she wrote in her questionnaire, well, this picture is a pretty big hint. As for the pattern, there were some details that were kind of wacky. Beth wrote about the heel issue and Anne clued me in that there was an error in the charts for the foot. But even more than that, I felt the directions were lacking a bit. I’ve knit plenty of socks on circular needles before and that’s a good thing because the pattern didn’t really provide great instructions on that technique, even though it was written for that method. I took good notes and moved forward because I liked the design so much but be warned, there are some glitches.

I made one of my standard sock labels – the name is blacked out so no hints there – and will be shipping them off with some other goodies today.

Hope you like them, sock pal!

Hannah went on a school trip with the history club last week. You may recall that she made a similar trip last year. Anyway, she left our town on Saturday morning at oh-dark-thirty and headed south to tour some Civil War battlefields and museums as well as Washington, DC. She was in Virginia last Monday. Did you hear me? Virginia. On Monday, April 16th.

Now, I had an itinerary and a vague idea of where she would be each day. But I’m not real big on geography and certainly not the geography of the Commonwealth of Virginia. So when the news broke about the horrible tragedy at Virginia Tech I kind of panicked a little bit. I grabbed her itinerary and saw that she was visiting the Museum of the Confederate Soldier. I had no idea where that was. At that moment, as far as I was concerned, it could have been on the campus of Virginia Tech. I may have freaked out a little bit while Dale and I googled to find the location of Virginia Tech and then checked a map to find Blacksburg in relation to Richmond. When I saw they were miles and miles away from each other I was able to speak again. But for those few moments I was a wee bit frantic. If you asked Dale about it, he’d tell you I was absolutely fine. Calm might be a word he would use to describe my behavior. And yet inside I was freaking out. Call it not-wanting-to-jinx-things or denial-it-ain’t-just-a-river-in-Egypt but outwardly I acted like Hannah being on this trip (and then being in Virgina on April 16th!!) was no big deal.

Inside, though, part of me was holding my breath until this moment.

Home. Safe and Sound. Thank you, God.

Sand and sea grass along a fence at the beach. Cold and deserted now, but not for long.

I live in a really old house. We’ve never actually done research to confirm the age of this house but we’re pretty sure it’s at least 150 years old. People back then didn’t have a lot of clothes and therefore they didn’t have need for many closets so you shouldn’t be shocked when I tell you that my entire 4 bedroom house has only 3 closets. Total.

We’ve done our best over the years to find creative ways of storing our stuff but the one thing we had never dealt with successfully was our bedroom closet — until now. We bought one of those expandable closet organizer things at Lowe’s months ago and it has been sitting in the garage, mostly because I was dreading dealing with the closet. Dale is off this week for school vacation and he finally took the hint and started the closet project himself.

I don’t have a “before” picture that shows how disastrous and messy our closet was so you’ll just have to imagine an overcrowded rack with a shelf above loaded down with bags and boxes. The floor was covered with shoes and discarded clothes and empty bags. It was a pit, I tell you.

Just like “clean sweep” the first thing to do was empty everything out. I did get a picture of that. Like most home improvement projects, things had to look worse before they could look better.

Then Dale swept and painted while I sorted through clothes and shoes and junk. He said the unit was pretty straight forward to install. It took longer than he thought it would but I think that’s true of most projects.

While he worked on the installation I mostly sat around knitting. When things got close to being done, though, I sorted through shoes and clothes and stuff. I made some tough decisions, including getting rid of a sweater that I wore the weekend we went away to celebrate our engagement and the shoes I wore with my wedding gown, but when you have limited space you have to be brutal about how you allocate it. By the time Dale was finished installing the unit, I was ready to “move in” to our new closet.

I was a little disappointed that the “full length” side of the unit is wider than I had hoped but it was important to get the shelves directly in front of the doorway and this was the sacrifice we had to make. Everything fit and the shelves are a wonderful addition to our space.

The trick, of course, will be keeping it this neat.

I got nothing today – everything is not-quite-finished. My Bloomin’ Feet socks are almost done, I tried plying from a center pull ball and wound up with a tangled mess and we are Dale is in the midst of a major closet overhaul. And, it’s still raining. And gray. Blech.

So, I’ll do what knitbloggers everywhere do when there’s nothing to talk about. I’ll show you a picture of Mason the Wonder Cat.

Even he looks unimpressed. It’s boring as hell around here, I tell you.

As you may have heard, we’ve had some wild weather lately here in New England. Yesterday’s Nor’Easter brought lots of rain and wind, local flooding, and very high tides. So, when the rain let up, Dale and I went out for a drive to see what we could see. What we mostly saw was water.

First stop:

My front yard. New daffodils blossoming. Note the water droplets.

Next stop:

The Herring Run in Pembroke. The herring aren’t running yet and it’s probably just as well because the water was rushing in extra rapid fashion. Those fish would have a hard time going up stream, even with the help of the fish ladder. The ground was very soggy but we did walk around a bit. Hopefully we’ll get back when the fish are heading upstream to spawn and I’ll have pictures to show you.

Final destination:

Duxbury Beach. The waves were huge and the wind was blowing like crazy. It was totally worth it, though, for the smell of salt water – it’s been way too long since I smelled that. A few of the roads were slightly flooded but nothing we couldn’t drive across easily in the Jeep. We saw lots of tree limbs down and some pretty substantial local flooding but it was much less severe here than in other places.

After our sight seeing expedition we headed to Plymouth for lobster rolls and then it was home for knitting and vegging in front of the television. All things considered, it was a damn fine day.