It’s that time of year. Burlap is smelly and sheds and I hate storing it in the house, but when you need it, you need it. Makes a great tree-wrap for mimosas and new Japanese maples. But we’re out. I wrapped Jane’s better of two mimosas and the new Emperor One Japanese Maple, and now I need at least a few more yards. We save the stuff year to year, but when it gets ratty beyond use, it gets tossed. And I fear last winter did in our stock. Our poor roses were caught by surprise in the storm that did in the koi, but they survived. THis year I have a de-gasser for the pond, a new floating heater, and we’re getting set for winter. Scott (our very tall carpenter) is going to help us get the canvas off the pergolas so that the snow weight doesn’t bow them—it was a close call last winter.
We have a guaranteed week of near 50 degree weather to get this done, but beyond that, I’m not laying bets.
That would be ‘burlapping’ but it’s such an unusual word it looks weird.
Winter is icumen in, WHOOSH goe Heeter.
My heater thermostat is set to 68F (20C) and it was coming on last night and a couple times today. It got down to 32F (0C) last night and hasn’t gotten much above 50F (10C) all day.
You know it’s cold when I start wearing socks indoors instead of going barefoot. I’ve even put my lap robe on. The fat(cat)boy has poked his head under the laprobe a couple times with a view toward hoisting himself up under it and onto the foot rest of the recliner to curl up between my shins, but he’s so heavy that his hind legs don’t have the oomph to get him airborne, and every time he tries it, his weight folds up the foot rest and dumps him off. Gets my attention, I can tell you.
I need to go bring my hoses in and put the little styrofoam doodads over the water spigots. I’ll need to take a wrench with me, as the hose connections are probably calcified to the spigots again. We don’t have hard water here sitting as we are on top of a couple hundred feet of limestone caprock or anything like that . . . .
They say we’re going to have a La Niña winter here in the southern US, which means cool and dry but not really cold. My pocket book could do with fewer $90-$100 gas bills. (That’s just for the heater and water heater. Everything else is electric, and electricity has gotten higher than giraffe’s ears, too.)
Hope you can source the required amount of burlap and bundle your delicate trees and shrubs up. I think you are supposed to get a seriously wet, cold winter up there in the PNW.
They’re stripping and ginning cotton here and the air is awash with particles of dirt and plant material liberally laced with Roundup and Quick Pick, not to mention cotton fibers and gin trash from the ginning. Symptoms include hacking cough, sneezing, runny nose, runny eyes, burning eyes, blurry vision, diarrhea . . . We have cotton 360 degrees around the city so no matter which way the (pretty much constant) wind blows, we get it. Oh, what fun. Not.
We knew people who left town for the corn harvest as well as the cotton stripping and ginning. They had some pretty solid allergies.
(We were out in the country, and the house had a good air-handling system. Fans pulled it in through filters, then ran it through a couple of hundred feet of pipe buried at basement-floor level, before it got to the house inlets. Warmed the air in winter, cooled it in summer.)
I still miss west Texas at times. (Santa Anas aren’t the same.)
Next year rub the threads with petroleum jelly before attaching the hoses. This works with light bulb threads too.
I bought a tube of glue that said to do that with the threads on the tube.
I’d just posted this in the “Ouch … cold fingers” thread, but I’ll post that bit again:
It’s finally cool enough here to think of maybe wearing a sweater. We’re supposed to have two nights near 50°F, then back to 60’s/70’s lows, and who knows how warm or cool or cold it’ll be for Thanksgiving; though it looks like both holidays may be extra warm this year.
If my favorite sweaters made it into the storage space as planned, they are still stuck there, somewhere, and I have no idea if I’ll find them before Thanksgiving or even Christmas.
It occurred to me to wonder how many skeins of yarn and what gauge are needed for an adult male pullover sweater in a medium to large standard size. If I knew this, I could scout Michael’s or other stores for a color and style I like, and I could commission someone to knit a sweater. (WOL, I think it’s you who does the neat knitting, though I think there are a couple of others here on the blog also.)
The sweater I’m really missing was store-bought in the mid-80’s, probably all acrylic, and the yarn was a brindled or marled (variegated) yarn going from a chocolate dark brown to almost white, so that the overall color was a light brown, with the marled effect completely at random. So if I could find a yarn about that color, I’d be thrilled. I’d presume there’s something similar around now, but I know companies change color availability for what’s in fashion fairly often. The color was a light cocoa to burnt sienna brown, not quite as reddish or pinkish as, say chocolate milk.
I have no idea how long it takes to do a project like that or what the cost would be, but I’m curious to find out, in case I don’t find my sweater.
The other sweater was new, and looked great, but I could likely find something similar in stores, if I don’t find it while emptying the storage space. — Or I might decide I’d want another commission.
BCS, look for ‘Red Heart’ Super Saver Shaded Browns yarn; it’s a medium weight and commonly available. I’m not sure how much it would take to make you a sweater (my fiber arts skillz are more in the sewing department, not knitting or crocheting) but 3 skeins are up on ebay right now for a reasonable price. See also Bernat Super Value OUTBACK Camouflage yarn variegated brown or CLOVER LEAF VARIEGATED BROWNS.
After the storm 2 weeks ago, my yard was a wonderland of weeds, so I broke out the e-mower on Sunday and had at. Then for the rest of the day nursed a case of heat exhaustion *rolls eyes at self*
Size 7 or 8 needles, 5 to 8 standard skeins.
Thank you, all of you! I’m saving this for later. — Haha, I have no idea how to knit (etc.). My mom and grandmother both liked knitting / crocheting sometimes; my mom more so, but of course I don’t have any of her supplies. — I have no objections: if Rosey Grier (spelling? wow, back in the day!) could do it, I can, probably, but oh, would I be starting from zero. So, hmm, if I do this, there could be a starter project before trying a nice sweater. Dunno yet if I will try knitting. 😆
I recall one scene in Merchanter’s Luck or Finity’s End; the former, I think, where one of the main characters (haha) specifically needs to buy socks. Not sure why it stuck in my mind among the other events going on as they were in port. Funny how we need basics on budget as well as any food and extra/fun stuff. That reminds me of at least one of Andre Norton’s books, maybe in her Solar Queen series, where the ship’s crew do carvings and other crafts/handiwork for sale in port, because those are specialty items and have a good market. — I have no idea how I’d do as a merchant trader, but I’ve always loved the genre.
Yarn, knitting needles, patterns, hmm. Well, if I take the plunge, I’d be learning a practical, useful craft. (Why did I never try this when my mom and grandmother were around? Heh. Missed opportunities. And not particularly a “guys versus girls” thing. (Pretty sure it wouldn’t have raised too many eyebrows at least with my dad and uncles, haha. But I was mostly lucky in that regard: neither side of the family believed much in that “women’s work or men’s work” idea. If the other kids needed raising or chores needed doing, they were supposed to help. Farm folks. And on both sides, stories of the girls being proud of picking and carrying 100 lb. sacks of cotton or other crops, and the boys had to help raise their siblings in self-defense, I think, lol.)
Thanksgiving is likely to be quiet here. Quiet being a relative term; pun intended, as some of the neighbors have relatives or friends in, with kids playing, so there is a mix of English and Spanish outside while I do laundry and get ready to cook whatever I’m gonna cook for tomorrow.
Here’s hoping you all have a good holiday, or a good weekend for those not in the USA. 😀
We had a couple of nights of chilly 40’s weather, then it’s back up into 50’s and 60’s at night, and 70’s during the day. We have not hit even remotely seriously cold for any length of time yet this season. Expecting warm and sunny weather tomorrow. But we could turn around and get (increasingly rare) snow at Christmas, _if_ it gets cold. So far, it looks like we are in for a mild to overly warm winter. We might break records again. Global warming, yeah.
Never to late to learn how to knit… Or on too complicated a pattern to start on if you have stellar stick-to-it-avness. I started knitting (on a washcloth pattern) about 12 years ago now. My mother-in-law started as an adult too… With an Irish Fisherman’s cables and fanciness all over sweater!
Mind you, she also taught herself to crochet by doing a 30″ by 50″ or so inch replica of Da Vinci’s Last Supper… And had never even quilted before she agreed to teach a quilting class.
And, yes, the Andre Norton merchants who sold little carvings for pick-up cash were one of the Solar Queen crew, Mura the Cook, I believe.
A couple of easy (and FREE) patterns from KnitPicks, for which any yarn of similar weight would work:
http://www.knitpicks.com/patterns/Christmas_Stripes_Set__D55978220.html
http://www.knitpicks.com/patterns/Checkerboard_Throw__D55966220.html
“Christmas Stripes” is a Hudson-s Bay-type stripe, and the checkerboard throw is a simple reversible texture pattern.
Sweaters require a pattern, and the pattern says how much yarn is required. How much it would cost would depend on the kind of yarn and how much yarn was needed. Never done a sweater. No way I could get it done before cold weather hits, though.
Does Uber do rides from drivers with pickups? If you could get a deal like that to take you to your storage building and get 6-8 boxes at a time, as funding permitted . . . Might be worth a call to see.
Internet-places like ravelry (free membership needed for anything beyond a few basic results), yarnspirations and garnstudio dot com have lots of free knitting patterns and advice – look at the neckline that you want, and check the relation between yarn weight, needle gauge, and how much you need for the size and kind of sweater you want.
Lion Brand yarn has free patterns – you have to create an account to get to them, but that’s okay – and so does Knitty [www.knitty.com] (roughly quarterly updates, no account required).
I have a yardaage estimater (Nancy’s Knit Knacks cards), and it works for different yarn weights. For a womens’ 40-inch, long sleeve, round neck, it’s about 1300 yards of worsted-weight.
Absolutely what WOL said: you need a pattern, which tells you how many skeins of what type of yarn (and how many yards/meters of yarn in that type’s skeins) and what the gauge (# of stiches/inch) it is knit in. The size of the needles depends on how loosely or tightly one knits. I knit very loosely and generally start for figuring out my guage at two needle sizes smaller than the pattern suggests.
The amount of time it takes to knit a sweater and the cost of (decent quality) yarn makes knitting rather than buying a sweater almost always cost + time prohibitive unless, yes, you really want just that exact pattern look and yarn feel.
Or something like Elizabeth Zimmerman’s percentage system – where it’s all proportional to the number of stitches you need to go around. (I did a seamless raglan-sleeved Aran using it. I was a lot skinnier then.)
Yes, her system would work too, but not unless you are an experienced knitter and have access to it. My main point for BCS was that, unfortunately, one can’t easily say “I want a new sweater like my favorite, old one. Given that it is a sweater, I will go buy X number of skeins of any old yarn, as long as it is the right color, and presto– my sweater can be cloned!”
At the time, I wasn’t an experienced knitter – it was my second real sweater (the previous one was from a commercial pattern book). I still have the charts for the seamless one (advice from experience: don’t start the round where you’re going to have to do part of the pattern from the wrong side).
It’s a lot of number-crunching at the start, but otherwise not difficult.
I’ve never used Elizabeth Zimmerman’s method for making a sweater: nice to hear the voice of experience on it. Come to think of it, I’ve only made one sweater—I tend to make more vests as they are a bit cooler and I can wear them in my hot, work place.
Some Uber advice from my own experience.
With Uber pickups it’s important to:
a) Find a good pickup location.
b) Speak with the driver on the phone if necessary.
It’s better to give the pickup address as ‘corner of X street and Y street’, rather than a street number. It’s better to specify a place on a quiet side street, rather than a main road. Walk a short distance to a good pickup point if necessary.
Look at it from the driver’s point of view. If you give the address of a large shopping mall, for instance, then it’s going to be very difficult to find each other. The mall may take up a whole block and may have several entrances and more than one parking area. If you specify the pickup point as ‘XYZ Mall’ there will definitely be problems before you and the driver can find each other. Rather look for a good, unambiguous location nearby and walk there.
If you specify a busy road with two-way traffic and a traffic island in the middle, it will also cause problems. The driver may arrive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road, and have trouble finding you and turning round. He may have trouble stopping to pick you up in busy traffic. Rather specify a street corner away from the main road, where he can stop easily and you can immediately see each other.
Plan ahead before you go. Look at Google Maps and find a good spot to be picked up for the return journey.
There is also a facility in Uber to call the driver and speak to him. If Uber says that the car has arrived and you can’t see it, then just call the driver and find out where he is, and tell him where you are.
If a driver cancels, simply put in the trip request again. Another driver will probably be there in a few minutes.
It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Once you get the hang of it, it’s very easy and convenient.
All good points. Down here in Adelaide we use Uber in preference to taxis, because the taxi system became highly unreliable, particularly in busy periods. Uber has proved to be far more reliable, faster, easier, cheaper (mostly), and easier. The fare coming from paypal is also a bonus.
Most of our use is suburban, where pickups at street addresses work fine (at least here), but you need to check that the address Uber thinks you’re at is actually where you are, and change it otherwise.
One warning though is that Uber really needs the passenger to book the trip on their own cell phone. We’ve run into some strange things happening where this wasn’t the case.
Before the car comes you can see the make of car and driver’s name (and picture). Ringing the driver is easy – you just click the button.
On our last vacation, we had a friend who works for Lyft be our primary contact when we needed to get from A to B in LA (may as well pay a friend rather than someone else). He showed us the phone app that would let us get a Lyft driver no fuss no muss. We were agreeably surprised when we got a ride from Lyft in Salt Lake City at 3:30 a.m. after disembarking from Amtrak within 10 minutes.
While I’ve got my pen out and on the subject of passwords …
When you make a new password you should add it to your password collection *before* entering in the webform, then use copy/paste to create it. This ensures that the password’s what you saved it as. It also ensures that you *do* store it.
Oops! — when I said “drivers with pickups” I meant “pickup **trucks**” — If BCS could get an Uber or Lyft driver who has a pickup truck to come take him to his storage building, he could bring home a bunch of boxes at a time.
I understood that! 🙂
I was responding to BlueCatShip’s account of an Uber driver arriving at the wrong place and being unable to find him. Uber uses the terminology pickup and drop-off.
They have vehicles of different sizes available. It varies from city to city, but I haven’t heard of them using pickup trucks.
I thought of one crimp: while an Uber or Lyft driver may *have* a truck of some type, I bet moving services are not included in the ride. You will need to make your own arrangements for schlepping items from the storage unit into and out of the vehicle.
They’ve introduced UberASSIST in some cities. This is a service where the drivers are trained to assist people with disabilities to get into the vehicle, and they will take along folding wheelchairs, walkers, service animals, and in some cities scooters. It’s also the same cost as the normal UberX (cheapest) service.
Lyft and Uber require their drivers have four door vehicles capable of carrying a certain number of people. There is no requirement to be familiar with the area. Pickup trucks may not be allowed. If I was a woman in a skirt I definitely would not want to be trying to get into a vehicle with high ground clearance. As useful as a pickup truck would be, the gasoline mileage would make it difficult for the driver to make a living wage.
I’ve never used Elizabeth Zimmerman’s method for making a sweater: nice to hear the voice of experience on it.
They’re seamless, so you don’t have to deal with knitting shaped pieces and sewing them together. Body and sleeves knit from bottom up, joined at armpit height (the underside is sewn/grafted together later) and ended at the neck. Several styles of shoulders, too. (If you’re adventurous, the shirt-yoke shoulder is fun. You can do them cardigan style, also, by starting the body at the center front.) See “Knitting Without Tears” for the instructions.
I hate sewing seams. And half the point of knit sweaters is the stretchiness, which seams spoil.
That sounds like the way my sister knits her Icelandic cardigans: she knits them in the round, from the bottom up.
She turns the sweater patterns into a cardigan by knitting back and forth (alternating knit and purl rows) from the front centerline, and adding on a border with buttonholes and buttons later.
She loves the feel of Icelandic wool, and the look of their sweaters, so she ordered a big box of Icelandic wool skeins and several patterns from there. She explained to me they have 3 different yarn weights, each exactly half the next thicker yarn, so it’s easy to make blended colours by using two halfweight yarns together as one thread.