A Wine Bottle Border and Finally Something Happening in the Flower Bed

We now live so far north that it seems to be quite difficult to get flowers in the growing season unless they are wild (we had 6-foot floxglove a few months ago!) or started indoors first. And I suppose that doing a better job than I've been able to do of keeping the deer and woodchuck at bay might help as well.

I always admired dahilas like the one above at the Brooklyn farmers' market. I'm so excited that my bulb worked out reasonably well. Even if the flowers from seed had a more difficult time and the volunteer roses caught some kind of disease or something and stopped blooming after about a week.

Here are the sachets I've put up in an attempt at deer control. Unfortunately, the cats find them quite appealing and keep pulling them over. You can also see my little concrete mushroom back there. Can't have a flower bed without some sort of cutesy little tchotcke. I saw little ones like this in England but had no garden or space in my luggage for a concrete thingy. I found this one here in Sullivan County! Just behind the mushroom are the most unfortunate hollyhocks. I love hollyhocks but so, apparently, to do all of my garden pests. Oops. I doubt that I'll get any flowers from these guys this year.

But at least a few of my snapdragons (started from seed) are blooming now. I think I should have thinned them a bit more to get more blooms.

And here is the wine bottle border. I don't remember where I originally saw this idea. But it certainly stuck in my head! I suspect that it was before we even thought of buying a house or having a flower bed that I saw this idea and filed it away in the back of my mind for "some day".

This whole how-to is fairly self-explanitory. All you do to "build" one of these borders is to collect wine bottles (it helps if you have European friends to save their bottles for you) -- preferably of approximately the same size/shape/color, dig a trench about the same height and width as the bottles, and then to bury them upside-down. We liked the way our border looked best when we removed the labels from the bottles (so that tiny bits wouldn't be peeking up) and buried them with only about 3 inches above ground -- it looked a too obtrusive to us with more than that -- we were going more for the look of green stones or something along those lines.

Painting the Panelling

During our initial house-hunt last year, we noticed one sure constant in houses in our price range -- wood panelling. Wood panelling everywhere. We even saw a house with wood panelling in every room. Don't get me wrong, wood panelling can have its time and place. Just not in a dark room in an already dark house. Which is where it came in in our house.

The panelling is only trying to take over 2 rooms but the house is fairly dark even in the rooms without dark brown walls. The panelling had to go. But, without a budget for gutting rooms and putting up new walls, we decided to go with painting. Which was actually far easier and had a more pleasant result than I'd expected!

All we had to do was to wash the walls (we used Murphy's but I'm sure there are all sorts of things they could have been washed with)

Prime with Smart Prime, latex acryllic primer

and paint our chosen color which, due to the darkness, was "Pearl". Here I can't help but be reminded, every time I mention the color, of Mrs. Blandings and her request for "not a cold, antiseptic, hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white."

In the end, I surprised myself by actually liking the painted panelling. As in it is a look that I might have chosen to have, rather than just dealing with it out of necessity. Patrick agrees.

These photos are a few weeks old -- this room no longer has blue carpeting and it has some furniture in it. I promise to take some new (and better) photos soon to post here.

Bedroom Curtains

The house was festooned throughout with 3 layers of rotting, 1970's frilly, flowered curtains. Which would be okay if the house were not also covered on almost every side by scrubby bush-trees and on the side of a mountain. It was really dark in here. Some of the windows have just had a layer or two removed but, for the bedroom, I decided to finally splurge on the beautiful vintage fabric I'd had my eye on at Brooklyn General (which, luckily, I still work near and so will not have to give up) and make new curtains. They were inspired by this photo from Wiksten on flickr.

I just seamed the fabric and the lining inside out, as if I were sewing a pillow, but left about an inch and a half open at the top of each side seam. I pulled the fabric through to right-side-out through one of these holes, sewed a line straight across from the bottom of one hole to the bottom of the other hole, and put the curtain rod through the tunnel created. Simple!

Also, in honor of finally having a bedroom large enough for 2 nightstands after our 6 ft x 10 ft bedroom in Brooklyn, I purchased my own alarm clock!

Valentine Swap

Although I've not been blogging for such a long time, I've been in high gear on swaps. They're just so much fun! This time I'm working on Valentines for the Crow and Canary swap I found through the BPS. I won't put the photos of the finished cards here so as not to ruin the surprise for my swap partners but I will post the directions I worked out to crochet hearts for the valentines (just a small hint won't hurt their surprise -- I hope!)

These instructions could be used with any gague of yarn and its corresponding hook although I used a very small hook (I found it in my house -- left by the previous owner, Elsie -- so I'm not sure about what size it is) and white crochet cotton. The fun though is that it doesn't matter what size the heart turns out to be -- it doesn't have to fit anyone!

ch 5

sc in 2nd ch from hook

skip next 2 ch's

3 dc & next ch

without turning, ch 3

2 dc & last dc made

3 dc & same ch as 1st 3 dc made

without turning, ch2

dc 8 evenly across triangle side

turn, 5 dc in top of 2nd dc from hook

sl st in 2nd dc from hook

5 dc in top of 2nd dc from hook

sl st in last dc space

End of Sock Week

It seems that Sock Week is a short week. I had fun though!

To make up for the short week, I have a basic sock pattern for you (.pdf), should you feel so inclined.

Two Finished Scarves

I know it's been in the nineties in New York this week but you just can't stop a knitter! No amount of heat seems to discourage me from knitting away. Or from getting out on my stoop to have the projects photographed (you should have seen the looks we were getting!)

Cream of Spinach Scarf

How do you like the little t-shirt, bulky scarf look? Maybe I'll start a new trend (or not!) Don't ask me what I was doing with my arms. That's just how they fell.

This scarf began in early May and finished yesterday evening. It is some very nice, semi-solid Blue Sky Alpaca which seems to work well with the pattern to have a nice drape. Or at least that's how I choose to see it! I hope my grandmother likes it. In 6 months. Well, now there are only about a dozen or so more gifts to make. . .

Jury Duty Scarf

This is the scarf that I was using to demonstrate the double-knitting tips. I think it's one of my favorite scarves I've ever made for myself. I'm sure it will be getting some use. When it's a little colder, maybe. Like it was at the courthouse this week. It was jury-duty time for me on Monday and Tuesday! And, if you've not been before (as I hadn't), let me suggest an engrossing pattern to work on because you will find yourself sitting for hours. Not that I have a problem with jury duty, in theory. Just with all of the waiting about that is involved. But look at the work that got finished! (I think I did at least 1/3 of this scarf during those 2 days — not to mention reading about 100 pages of Posession which is fantastic so far.)

I've included a chart this time, just in case anyone is enamored with my pattern and would like to give it a shot. Also, I'd like to add a tip on how to set up the double knitting: you should cast on the number of stitches, based on your gage, for how wide you'd like for your piece to be. Then, on the first knitted row, knit into the front and purl into the back of each stitch. So the purls will become one side of the scarf and the knits the other. This chart has to be knitted on both sides simultaneously (so, in other words, knit each box of the chart twice, once with the knit [in color A] and once with the purl [in color B] in each pair of stitches — Each side will be the exact reverse, color-wise, of the other side).

Daffodils!

This post must be started with a love letter to Paper Source. Not only is their "do something creative every day" slogan tempting, it's just the most fun place. Even though I don't have ready access to one of the stores, I still love ordering things from them and thinking of how cute the stores that I've been to are. So I couldn't resist getting one of the paper flower kits.


As I have a wreath for Christmas and one for the fall and the fall one tended to be up all year, I decided that the time has come to have a summer wreath. And thus the paper flowers became a paper flower wreath. And it's so simple! All you do is make the flowers according to the package directions and then fashion the stems into a wreath-shape. And this is my new-and-more-welcoming front door:

Double Knitting

Double knitting has been to me and I'm sure it has been to others as well, a very difficult task. It even sounds confusing — what does "double kniting" even mean?? I've done several double knitting projects in the past and have consistently ranked them to be some of the most difficult things to knit. And in all of those cases, I followed very good instructions, step by step. But I never understood what it was that I was doing, exactly. Well, last weekend, I decided to get past that. And, like so many knitting problems, I find it to not be nearly as difficult as I was making it. As a result, I have made some serious progress with a scarf that I bought yarn for on that aformentioned trip to Cape Cod in February (Lobster Pot camel yarn, no less!). And I made a "tutorial" to post here with some tips on what I've found to be helpful and a (hopefully helpful) video of me doing the double knitting to show the basic concept.


(The other side is just he exact reverse of this side but I can't get it to photograph so well as all of the blue is replaced by yellow and looks VERY yellow in all of the photos)

1) Just as in normal fairisle knitting, pick a hand for each color and STICK TO IT (whenever I am teaching anyone anything in knitting, I cannot say enough times that consistency is the most important thing) — I have been using my left hand for the yellow and my right for the turquoise.

2) The left hand should knit Continental Style while the right hand knits English Style (throwing)

3) Each 2 stitches should be viewed as single stitch, with the purl (or the knit) always first and the knit (or the purl) always second

4) (This one is directly related to #3) — the stitches should alternate kpkpkp all the way across — in other words, unless you are crazy enough to try a stitch patter in combination with the double knitting, there should be no two of the same stitch type in a row

5) Purls are the opposite side from that which you are working on and knits are the side that you are looking at — in this way you will be knitting both the front and the back at the same time — purls for the "back" and knits for the "front"

6) MOST IMPORTANTLY: Bring both strands to the front to purl, even though you'll only purl one of the strands and bring both strands to the back to knit even though, again, you'll only knit one of the strands. This prevents twisting.

Good luck!

Repeating Drawing

This is not the remedial art class that it may sound like. This is a really great project as posted by Julia Rothman, guest blogging on Design*Sponge. You can follow her tutorial here. But the whole guest blog is pretty great so be sure to check it out.

I was so taken with this idea when I read about it yesterday that my husband and I spent all evening drawing and cutting and taping. It's like the MC Escher tesselations in high school geometry class without having to make a shape first and fill your design in within those contstraints!

This one is mine.

I plan to watercolor in the blank spaces and then laminate the design for a placemat. I'd been planning to either make or find some laminated-type (read: not absorbant) placemats and this will just fit the bill!