Cabin Crafted

Blog

  • Turtle toes

    Well, my knitting has added one new pair of socks to the sock drawer.  Most of the socks I have made, have been for my daughter or one of her kids.  I have two pair of handknit socks of my own, not counting the newest ones. One pair I made for me, the second pair I made were too small and I ended up trading that pair for a pair a friend made that were too large for her, win/win.

    For my non-knitting friends, handknit socks take about 20 hours to knit, a skein of sock yarn costs $15 and up, and  yes, I know you can buy socks at Target, Sears, Penneys, etc, for a couple of dollars, but knitting is relaxing, handknit socks are awesome.  Now the reason, I don’t usually make them for myself, is I am hard on socks and wear them out way too fast.  I have worn out a couple of pairs way too quickly, like after only a dozen wearings.

    This is a new pattern for me, an after thought heel.  This means that the heels are knitted after  the cuff and instep and I used a contrasting yarn for the heels and toes, so that when I wear them out, I can remove the heels or toes and reknit them with the remaining contrasting yarn, hopefully doubling the life of the socks.

    The pattern is After Thought Heel Socks by Laura Linneman, the yarn is TurtlePurl Yarns Turtle Toes stripe  with the heels and toes knit with Regia.  They were knit two at a time from the top down and since the TurtlePurl is wound double stranded in order to knit two at a time, the stripes match exactly.  I rarely worry about whether they match exactly, so this is unique for me.

    Now to see how they actually wear!

  • Sunday Thankfulness {2}

    Today I am thankful for many events from my week and Mother’s Day.

    I have wanted a spinning wheel for a couple of years, since I got fairly proficient with the drop spindles.  I keep putting it off because they aren’t inexpensive and I haven’t wanted to let hubby bust the budget that much for a gift.  I have not been the lucky raffle winner at a fiber festival.  Midweek at Knit night, one of the young gals was telling us about her recent vacation to a knitting workshop and she won the grand prize of a new spinning wheel.  She already had one that she had purchased cheap on Craig’s list and she and her boyfriend repaired it to an again usable state.  She is going to sell it to me for what she paid for it and it’s repairs.  Yay, I am going to get my wheel without breaking the bank.

    This week the weather has been seasonable and dry for the latter half of the week, thus allowing me to finish planting and mulching the vegetable garden, to weed the perennial beds around the house, plant more perennials, week wacked around the vegetable garden, the house and the fruit trees, all without having heat stroke.

    We have managed to get in nearly daily walks on the local trails with the puppy, still enjoying the wildflowers blooming.

    We added a treadmill to our rec room, so now I can get up in the mornings, go straight down and put in an hour exercising before the daily schedule gets in the way of taking care of myself.

    I have actually spent some time working on two knitting projects, both two socks at a time, adding some socks to my winter wardrobe once they are finished.

    Grateful that my hubby took me to Mountain Lake Hotel (where they filmed “Dirty Dancing”) which is only a few miles from our home for their decadent Mother’s Day brunch this morning.  This was slightly dampened as we had no kids with us this year as we have in years past.  But, on the up side, all three kids have called to wish me a happy Mother’s Day, so I have had a special day and week.

  • Remarkable Days

         A friend posted his five remarkable days and challenged his readers to share theirs.  As he is a reader of my blog, I am going to take him up on his challenge for today’s post.  Like him, they may not be chronological, nor can I place any one of them above another.

    1. February 14, 1978, before our family and friends, my husband and I married. This was a small simple ceremony planned in a matter of short weeks.  He had proposed on New Year’s Eve right after a ski trip where I had injured my shoulder and continued to ski for 4 more days, declaring that I was “a keeper.”

    2. May 27, 1980, birth of our first son one day before his due date.  He was a beautiful, long, slim baby born quickly and he has grown into a handsome, intelligent man, the father of our first grandchild.

    3. November 29, 1982, birth of our daughter, a week past her due date.  This was my easiest birth in spite of her 9+ pound size.  I actually was encouraged to and allowed to “catch” her and bring her to my chest.  What a memory to hold.  She is a beautiful woman, a wonderful mother of two of our grandchildren.

    4. February 20, 1987, birth of our second son, way past his due date.  He weighted in at over 11+ and his birth was very memorable in his difficulty and complications that almost cost me my life, thrice, during delivery, a week after his birth and two weeks post birth.  I healed, and he grew a delightful young man, the father of two more of our grandchildren.

    5.  December 25, 2007, we were awakened in the wee hours to find our daughter with her 11 month old son, had driven from Florida to join her younger brother who was in cohoots with her to surprise us for Christmas.  Our eldest son and his family were living with us at the time and we had our whole family together for a delightful few days.

    It was difficult selecting only 5 days as I had 37 years as an educator, many years as a scouting volunteer, both generating memories that I cherish.

     

  •      Today was the first day this week that we haven’t seen rain.  The day was cooler than it has been, but the temperatures are actually seasonal.  In spite of the rain, we have had a few play sessions at the dog park, finding that our “puppy” is now the size of a full grown boxer which proves quite comical as he tries to run and romp with the agile adults.  His feet are as large as my fists and his coordination is both giant dog and puppy awkwardness.  His favorite “friend” is an old 130 lb German Shepherd who is slow and not interested inspite of the puppylike attempts to intice him to play.
         This week is the end of the town population surge, as the students at the local large university have been taking exams and packing up for home.  Tomorrow will be crazy in town as graduation is held, then the town will be returned to the locals for a couple of quiet months.  This has its advantages, such as actually getting in to the local restaurants, but we  miss the young folks when they are gone.
         This weekend is Mother’s Day and since our move here, we have gone to Mountain Lake Hotel for brunch each year.  This tradition we will continue, but this will be the first year that we won’t have any kids with us when we do.

  • Morning fog

    I love the pockets of morning fog, obscuring the peaks and gaps of the moutains.

  • Sunday thankfulness

    Last Sunday, I posted a list of what I liked about last Sunday morning and thought maybe I would make it a weekly tradition, at least for a while.  It might be text, it might be pics, maybe a bit of both from the past week.

    I love that we are enjoying true spring weather, lots of sun, some rain, warmth.
    I’m grateful that we are still experiencing good health, a few age related aches aside.
    Thankful that our remaining puppy is well behaved and healthy, he was the least distracted at intermediate training yesterday.
    Blessed that I have friends that delightfully surprise me.

    gift

    Pleased that we live near a small town where they have parades not just for holidays;

    and that has pleasant walking trails with wildflowers bordering the path.

    Thankful that I am loved and thought of by my family and friends.
    To borrow a phrase from a friend, I am truly a fortunate woman.

  • Career project

         These socks seem like a career project.  In truth, I haven’t been knitting much with puppy walks and gardening, but it seems like I have been working on them forever.  The pattern is After Thought Heel Socks by Laura Linneman.  I thought maybe if I made them and used a contrasting heel and toe, that when they wear out there as they seem to do way too quickly on my handknit socks, I can rip the heel and toe and redo them, making them last longer.  The yarn is Turtlepurl Striped Turtle Toes, The origins of purple colorway.  Maybe I will finish them before the weather cools off again for sock wear.

  • Little fog feet

    Morning. damp, gray, warm.
    No view, low blanket
    Clouds hide sun and mountain tops.

  • Sunday morning

    Things I love about this morning:
    Sun skipping in and out of the gathering clouds.
    Temperatures warm enough to sit in porch rocker with my coffee.
    Cool enough to need a sweater to do it.
    Creek sounds from all the recent rains.
    Bird sounds surrounding me from the woods.
    Puppy playing in the recently mowed grass, that smells so good.
    Garden weeded, awaiting the last of the first seed planting.
    The beautiful views from our home in the mountains.
    The leaves on the trees blocking the sketchy views of our only two neighbors’ houses a quarter of a mile away.
    This is indeed an idyllic place and I feel loved and blessed that my love made it happen for us.

  • Faint of heart

    Building a house is not for the faint of heart.  Buying a neglected farm and building a house when you are retired is a short step from being declared mentally unstable, however, we took on this challenge almost 7 years ago.  For decades, each time my dear hubby asked what I wanted for a holiday, I always gave the same answer, “a cabin in the woods.”
    Seven years ago, several things came together to allow it to happen. Well, it is a cabin and we do have a few acres  of woods around the edges, but the house sits in an open field.  We found the property on a whim  midway through our youngest son’s senior year of high school.  I had retired as  school counselor and was working part time for a non profit organization to cover the family health insurance.  Hubby was reaching retirement age and trying to figure a way to retire from his law practice.  We decided to research log homes and begin the planning stages of putting a house on the land.
    In order to facilitate this, we decided to sell the home we had raised our children in, and again, on a whim, put out a FSBO sign on a day some neighbors were having a yard sale.   We were painting inside as we really weren’t quite ready to sell yet, and much to our surprise, we got calls.  Quickly, we designed a brochure, decided on a price and signed a contract with a FSBO organization that gets the listing on the web and in a weekly booklet and by the next weekend, had sold the house, just before the real estate market went south.  This meant we had to move with no where to go and a 90 lb old dog to move with us.  Apartments weren’t large enough for a 4 bedroom house of furniture and the dog.  We lucked into a 3 bedroom rental house with a small yard, stored some stuff and moved in for a year.  Once settled, we purchased a log home “kit,” hired a contractor, who turned out to be a loser, to do the log erection and rough carpentry, convinced our eldest son to move with his partner and their newborn son to the area where we were building to oversee the contractor, help make decisions and ultimately take on all of the finish carpentry and stone mason work.  With monthly visits to select the house site, have the perk test done, hire a well driller and see the progress, we plodded through that year.  As the year was ending, my part time job was going to have to become full time and I applied for a job in the county near our property, returning to a school counseling position to pay into the retirement system instead of drawing from it.  This meant that I would be living near the house and could help with carpentry work or more often, babysitting so the kids could work.  It also meant that hubby and I would be living 6 hours apart in separate apartments, me alone in the mountains, he with youngest son and dog on the coast. The new job was an all year position, not just during the school year, so moves were made, goodbyes said and we started what turned into a nearly 3 year long distance relationship until hubby put all the steps in place to leave his practice for retirement in the mountains with me.  At this point, we had been moved into the new house for almost two years on a temporary certificate of occupancy.
    After I moved in, along with son and his family, they continued to work on the house, building the interior doors, the upper kitchen cabinets, doing hand grading and stone mason work when the weather permitted.  When hubby moved up, son and his family moved to an adjacent town for him to earn his Master’s degree at the local university, working on the house during holidays and summer time to finish the foundation stone work and last summer, getting the cistern system that the contractor put in improperly to actually work,  continuing the fieldstone fireplace down into the basement in preparation for the contruction of the 4th bedroom and rec room that was in the planning stages.  He and I also, finally finished the breezeway/utility room that joins the house to the garage.
    While this work had been done with some labor on my part, the restoration of the fields to a condition that will allow for hay production and grazing of animals, has fallen to my hubby and me.  The fields had become very overgrown with weeds, brambles, invasive shrubs and cedar trees.  We purchased a tractor and a brush hog and commenced  regular mowing of every inch the of 30 acres that we could take the tractor.  Last summer, after our poorly constructed gravel driveway had reached a nearly impassable state, we hired a neighbor excavator contractor to take on regrading the property so that it would drain properly and reconstructing the driveway, this making several more acres mowable.  While he was working in front of the house, son, partner, hubby and I were digging a trench hundreds of feet down the south slope, laying a water line from the cistern, installing a yard hydrant and recovering the trench without damaging the water line.  This involved much hand shoveling, picking up and moving many tractor buckets of rock that we had uncovered.
    Early in the mountain project, son and partner, put in a huge garden, but in later years of the project, the garden was not as totally utilized and 3 summers ago, I undertook to restore as much of it as I felt I could manage on my own.  Son and family have since moved on several hours away to further continue education.  Hubby loves the produce from the garden, but gardening  is not one of his interests.  I have boxed beds, dug weeds, tried to foil the deer with a temporary monofilament fence  as of yesterday, with the aid of a neighbor friend, finally put an electric fence around the vegetable garden portion of the gardens.  We also smoothed areas for safe working and mowability.  Over the years, we have planted fruit trees, berry bushes, and grapevines.  Last fall we finally landscaped the front.  This winter, the basement project was completed.  We are nearly to a maintenance phase, but with 30 acres and plans for raising some animals other than dogs, it will continue to be muscle taxing, bone weary work,…but there is a good night’s rest at the end of those days.