This week a friend and I went to a showing of a 124-year-old house. We had the best time going through every room, seeing what remained from the original build, wondering what could be kept and what used to be there, and thinking about how the whole place could be restored to glory. Alas, it wasn’t the right time for us to put in a bid on the property, but the experience led me to doing a bit of research on the skills and tools that would be necessary to restore such a house. So, for now, we’ll work on that.
This weekend I added another mid-century Smith-Corona to my collection. The seller had another typewriter that she (and her granddaughter) loved to type on, and this one was a bit extra. So, to a good home it needed to go — which it has now done.
I’ll try to do my free-typing with this machine for a while to help me figure out what makes it tick and what it needs from me. Unfortunately, its T, G, and N keys tend to stick and those type bars need to be manually pulled back down before I can type the next letter. I suspect that there’s just a lot of grease and dust involved and that everything will need to be cleaned out.
But the carriage return works! Sometimes it’s a matter of what failings you’re willing and able to tolerate.
With regard to the Impossible Read, I am now on page 274 of The Mists of Avalon. I’m now digging into the stories behind the story and I look forward to each stretch of time when I can curl up (sometimes literally) with the book.
Knitwise, I completed the knitting portion of the current Secret Knitting Project. I’ll give all the pieces a little photo shoot before and after I wash and dry them; the pieces are different colors, and I want to be careful that they don’t bleed onto each other or anything else. This may help a couple of the pieces, which were made from a rather stiffer yarn than the others, soften up. I have my fingers crossed that everything will shrink at about the same rate.
After the “laundry” step of the project comes the final step: assembly. Here’s where I will need a good block of time in which to concentrate, test, experiment, and think things through before doing anything I can’t [easily] undo.
At this point, there is no new deadline for the finished project. If I can do the washing and drying this week, though, I’ll be more prepared for whenever a new deadline is established. When that might be is completely beyond my control, since this is a gift tied to an event I’m not helping to plan.
But this means that I can start Actual Knitting on a new project, and I think that I’ve found one.
Last weekend while I was out of the house on an errand, SecondSon stopped by with a couple of belated birthday gifts. One is a beautiful lined, hardbound journal that I will probably start writing in next week. He had no idea that I was so close to filling up my current journal; the universe must have whispered something in his ear. Ironically, I have been actively searching for the Next Journal for the last couple of weeks, and I have rejected everything that I came across.
The second gift is a yarn bowl hand-turned, carved, and polished from a glorious chunk of butternut wood. I have no idea where he found it, but it’s amazing. When you see it, you want to stroke it and cuddle it.
Of course, now that I have such a lovely accessory to use, the yarn that goes inside it must be worthy. This isn’t a vessel into which I’m going to pour Red Heart.
It is, however, a vessel in which I’m willing to pour two cakes of black Peruvian alpaca/wool blend that I snagged at Goodwill somewhat recently. And I found a pattern on Ravelry called Cozy Cables, for a set of wrist warmers that feature not only cables but owls. It’s a free pattern by Amanda Jones; check it out!
The weather here keeps swinging between beastly hot [right now] and downright dangerous [later tonight], so a 41-row flat-knitted project feels workable even if it’s using a dark alpaca blend. The only thing I seem to be lacking is a set of US 8 single-points. (Then again, I always seem to be lacking those.) Fortunately, the pattern calls for me to cast on 38 stitches on US 7s and knit K1P1 ribbing for 14 rows before switching to the larger needles. I think I might be able to handle that, especially if I knit in the air conditioning.
Chocolate Sheep 
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