Tomato Tuesday: Deeply Rooted

 The tomatoes from last year did extremely well. I'm very proud of them for the children they left behind.  The biggest one in this pot is a volunteer of the tomatoes from last year.  I pulled it because it was too close to the sidewalk, but it will go back into the ground soon.  The smaller ones are volunteers from Juliette's garden.  Since I got last year's tomatoes from Juliette anyway, they're distant cousins.

This year's tomatoes got planted, finally.  They waited in their little 4x4 cells until I was ready.  Their new homes are perfect: deep, wide, and filled with Potting Mix and Bumper Crop (potting soil and something manure-like.)  There's a tiny bit of dolomite lime at the bottom, mixed in to the dirt, at the suggestion of the cashier at the nursery.

Three well-rooted tomato plants, joined by a jalapeno, way at the end, by the rusted oilcan and the wooden bridge.  At least 60% of each stem, from the top of the 4x4 cell, is beneath the surface.  Tomatoes have the ability to turn their entire stalk into a root system, so I'm taking full advantage of that fact to give them the best roots possible.

On the right side of my front door, the mint keeps spreading as far as it can. I keep pulling roots out of the areas it's not supposed to grow, but it keeps sending out new roots and shoots.  Here it is crowding the new kid, basil.  

 I love mint. But it has no sense of propriety.

Swatching for Featherweight

Sometime earlier this spring I decided I wanted to knit a Featherweight, which is a cardigan knit from laceweight.  I chose Alpaca Cloud, a very fine laceweight made of baby alpaca.  I have Dill and Stream, and I'm planning to knit the cardigan out of Stream (a dark denim color).

Last Saturday, I started a swatch, before I bought the pattern, just to see if I liked knitting laceweight on size 6 nickelplated needles. I put the needles and yarn in my purse, and started at a baby shower, after I took it to the zoo but didn’t take it out of my purse. The next day, partly to show off, I worked several rows in church.

Today I measured what I had so far.  The stockinette section came out an even 5 inches, so stitch gauge is right on the money, but row gauge is a bit long, 12 the only problem I can see is to make sure arms don't grow too long, I guess. The fabric is airy, but with a sort of net-like effect. I feel like this is maybe a lighter laceweight? I like this yarn. I can see myself burning through miles of it.

The swatch has a garter border and a stockinette section inside. I cast on 40, for a more accurate check, and always knit the first and last 5 stitches.  The pattern page called for a gauge of 24 st/in and 36 rows/in, and my central 30 stitches measure an even 5 inches, which is exactly right.  I haven't gotten more than 2 inches into the swatch, and my row gauge isn't right (yet!) but it's on the side of too long rather than too short.  I wonder if alpaca blocks well.

Tomato Tuesday: Digging the Holes

Partly Saturday and partly yesterday, I dug the holes for my tomatoes.  During the process, I found three volunteers from last year's rotten tomatoes that fell from the vine before I could pick them.

Today I almost did nothing but the yarn sampler. Over 100 minis in the last 24 hours.  Which sounds good, until you realize that there are 500 minis in the worsted side. I have to do the exact same feverish pace all week to finish before Matt gets here.

WIP Wednesday tomorrow: Kwalla socks, a storied life.

Tomato Tuesday

This afternoon, I replanted a plant (some kind of oregano) that was drying out too quickly into a shadier spot.  I replanted it deeper, and put in hydration bottles (water bottles filled with tap water and rapidly plunged upside down into the dirt).

I have watered my tomatoes, and the first yellow flowers are starting to bloom.  It's almost worth having tomatoes just for the hopefulness of those yellow flowers.

Hi. Been a while.

I keep knitting when I have time. I've done 6 socks now, of which 2 are pairs.   Working on another 3, one of them will match one of those already done, and the other two are 2 at a time and will match each other.

Learned to spin.  Pretty proud of my efforts; once plied, the yarn is really nice and I would knit with it. My first effort is about a worsted weight plied on itself.  My second effort was just to see how thin I could spin. Yesterday morning I plied it into a Navajo ply and it turned into a very even fingering-weight purple yarn.

Can't figure out how to post pictures right now. Hopefully I will be able to in future posts.  It may just be an issue on my tablet.

Coming on Tomato Tuesday: picking the spot and digging the holes.

WIP Wednesday: Dragonscale Shawl

Yesterday, I bought 6 skeins of acrylic yarn: two pink for my daughter, two grey, and the last two in shades of yellow, lemon and vanilla.  I'll talk more about the yellow ones on Saturday, because I don't intend to cast on before then.

The grey skeins were Simply Soft (hey, I'm a beginner, and a broke college student to boot) and they were intended to be for charity knitting, since my friend from church C--- loved my Palindrome in green and suggested that I make one much wider for a charity shawl.  However, when I cast on, I didn't have my cable needle on me, and it's such a wide cable that I didn't feel comfortable just trying to knit them out of sequence.  I was going to try to use a smaller DPN as a substitute for the day.  I cast on for 6 repeats although I really should have cast on for 8, as it turns out.  It's not nearly wide enough even at 80sts.  When I got 4 rows in, I liked the look of the abbreviated ribbing so much, that I decided to knit the whole thing in what I'm calling dragonscale, or abbreviated rib.  It's 2x2 rib that alternates on every third row, and that's what gives it the scaled appearance: the third row of purls bumps up, like it sits on top of the next row up.

The biggest problem I have is that it seems too narrow, only 15 inches, to donate as a prayer shawl, and yet it's very much too wide to be classified as a scarf. The saving grace, why I didn't rip it out at 2 inches in, is that I was absolutely in love with the pattern and wanted to just keep going.  (Also that the twist in Simply Soft sort of disintegrates if you rip.)  It's an absolutely gorgeous silver grey, and I'm already starting to plan the next project in Dragonscale in my mind.

For the future:
I bought a pretty supported spindle, and it's coming packed in fiber. When my friend J--- heard about this, she and her daughter gave me a huge bag of undyed wool.  Spinning Sundays, anyone?
Also, I think I'll produce a new section called F.O. Fridays, where I show you the completed work, a few weeks after the WIP Wednesday. And maybe, if you're lucky, Cast-On (AKA Pattern Search) Saturdays, which is where the yellow will come in.

For now, I'm sick, and feel like curling up with hot tea and my knitting.  And maybe watching TV.

WIP Wednesday

I decided to create a new feature, to help me update more regularly, called WIP (Work-in-Progress) Wednesday. The idea comes from redknits.wordpress.com, who has Covet Wednesdays, but I like the alliteration of WIP Wednesday better, and I have several WIP to document, anyway.

When I post a WIP here, it will be something that I'm actively working on. Today, I'd like to document my blue Fleegle socks, in Stroll Sport, that I began in early spring and recently began to actively knit again. They were meant to have a contrast short-row heel, but it evaded me for long enough (despite knitting a short-row toe adequately) that I sought out a new method.

I think the Fleegle is an elegant, but hard to measure heel. I'm using kfb because they're easier for me. My sock is probably going to be too long for my foot. She only tells you to start the increases during the period when "the sock reaches the part where your ankle meets your leg" but for some people, I suppose, that's too far back. I'm going to try it on when I get well past the turn, and if it flops around, I guess I'll have to rip back. But these *will* get finished. Pictures to come.