It was a productive weekend in all sorts of ways, except for the amount of pleasure reading — sorry, Tolkien. But I am slowly making my way through The Two Towers. I’m not to Isengard yet, but a lot of folks are on their way.
Most of the work I did this weekend was in the house. Earlier this year — spring? summer? — I may have mentioned a cedar chest that we acquired when Eldest was able to unlock it for the previous owners. We didn’t necessarily want it, but we couldn’t find anyone we knew who wanted to have it. So we stowed it in the garage until this weekend.
Saturday was the last warm day that southern Wisconsin might have until…May. The high temperature dropped 20 degrees between Saturday and Sunday, and I have to assume that literally everyone I knew was spending Saturday doing those final chores before the approach of late fall and early winter. I can’t verify that because I was at home doing some of those very chores.
I had thought about using the chest in my bedroom, but it was a bit too wide for that. After I spent more time thinking about it, I saw that I could put it at the upstairs landing and use it to hold the extra blankets that we might need in the winter.
The only (!) problem was that the upstairs landing was already completely packed with all sorts of things. I would need to remove and triage all that, as well as vacuum the stairs and landing, before I could put the cedar chest there. Which was…dusty and needed to be cleaned inside and out.
It was a multi-phase process over the whole weekend, but on Saturday we were able to move the chest from the garage to the deck, where it could get a quick cleaning and dusting. While it aired out, I moved everything from the landing, treated and vacuumed the carpet, and started laundering the blankets that were being stored in boxes and bins. Before the sun set, we were able to put the chest in place.
Kind of invisible, isn’t it? That is a LOT of woodgrain. I thought about hanging something up behind the chest to break up the colors, but since there is an overhang that wouldn’t be the easiest thing to do. But I remembered that I had a metal quilt rack I was using downstairs.
And that’s kind of…blah. Maybe I have something else I can put there to break up the woodgrain and create some [calm] visual interest.
That’s more like it.
Since then I have refolded the quilt (which has one made for my grandmother, but not by me) so that it no longer shows a binding on one side and a fold on the other. And it now contains several freshly laundered blankets.
I’m still trying to figure out what to do with everything that had previously been stacked at the top of the stairs. But that’s a matter for another week (or so).
I’ve been doing more steady work on my research project. Right now I’m taking genealogical data gleaned by the prior biographer and using it to fill out family history and five-generation charts. This gives me a better way to visualize the family — or it will, when I can add all the members of the families to my records. The prior biographer had a habit of writing things like “she was about three years younger” or “he came from a large family” without actually specifying the birthdate or the number of siblings in question. I think I’ll need several sessions with the library’s Ancestry account before I can collect all the data that she didn’t share in her book. I realize that she was focused on our mutual research subject and the direct family lines, but I sure wish that I had access to her notes. I want to take a wider and more comprehensive view.
Last week I watched a Zoom webinar about a printing press that was donated to a museum. It had been used for decades in a family printing business, and the owners had kept copies of hundreds of the posters, invitations, and other items they had printed for their community. Recently, some graduate students reverse-engineered the picture of a vibrant multicultural and multilingual (English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish) community from the events for which printing had been done.
I would like to do the same thing with genealogy to solve some minor mysteries in my research subject’s ancestors. Why were he and his siblings born in a small town in Scotland when his father had lived near London? Well, his mother’s family lived in this small town, and she had two sisters and probably a raft of cousins. Something about the structure of the extended family made this something sensible instead of unusual.
Knitwise, the rows of the Palm Frond scarf have gotten so wide that I only found time to knit full repeats on the weekend days. On both days, I knitted while watching YouTube videos about working with analog planning systems (shoutout to Rachelle In Theory). After knitting two more repeats I measured out the rest of the yarn, and only half the cake is left. But I also have just four 10-row repeats left before I bind off the project. That’s how quickly it’s getting wider. When I wear it, that width will become length… oh, forget it. I’ll just show you a picture.
I was a little bit more diligent at working on the Cottontail scarf this week than I was the week before. In the photo below I have folded the scarf at the halfway point, where I joined the second ball of yarn. Though I didn’t measure the work, you can see that I’m a bit more than 75 percent done. It’s not close-to-done enough to check my stash and see what I might work on next, but it’s close enough that I’ll have a warm scarf to wear while it’s still cold.
Chocolate Sheep 