Mending and Making

I just read about a great idea in Sweden to boost reuse.  The article is about offering tax breaks for those who seek repairs on clothes rather than just discarding them.  It's not called Make Do and Mend but it should be!  Meanwhile, I have not even paid anyone for doing my mending.  I started with hand-stitched patches to deal with the normal knee rips that every pair of little kid jeans gets.

Then I had a good reminder about how much time I spent on it---and a suggestion to get iron-on patches.  $20 later, I had what seemed like a life time supply of boring matching colors and fun kid-friendly decals.  I am going through a surprising number of these (I put a boring patch on the wrong side and a fun one on the right side) and now wish I got that tax break on the iron-on patches instead!  I've patched three pairs of pants today...and it's the second time I've done it in the last week or so.  Twins=twice the number of jeans...

Things are well underway over at the Red River Exhibition for the 4th annual Manitoba Fibre Festival.  While I've been at home, corralling twins* and preparing for my classes,  I've heard that the festival was on TV this morning and everything!!  I'm going to be teaching two classes: One on knitting styles--Explore our Diversity and a second "Spinners' Tasting: It's NOT Wool!"  I am slowly transporting loads of supplies out to my car so I will be ready.  (Office is on third floor.  Car is on ground floor.  I am getting in my exercise.)
  

I also still have a few stray copies of Fiber Gathering and Knit Green available if anyone wants a signed copy....so I am shlepping those out to the car, too. :)  No special signing table or anything, but if you are at the festival, track me down before or after my 9-10:30 class or my 1-3pm one.  I'll be happy to sign it for you.

As part of my preparations (and fruitless search for one tiny tahkli spindle....) I have tidied up a bit.  It was a reminder that this (like all years) is a good one to mend more and make more from scratch!  I sure have the materials on hand.

  If, like me, you are about to celebrate 5777, Happy New Year!  May it be a sweet, happy, healthy, productive year for you.  L'Shanah Tovah!

*This week, the Professor has been off in the US doing fieldwork and attending a conference.  It's been all me, twin five year olds and two dogs.  Thank goodness for kindergarten so I get some breaks!  We've just about made it through (He should be flying home today) but I am really looking forward to a day off (even though I am teaching, it's like a special holiday for me...) at the festival!

the Cubby Imp

On Sesame Street, there is a segment called Abby's Flying Fairy School.  The one I can't get out of my head is called "the Cubby Imp."  Essentially, there is this lonely guy who lives beneath the cubbies at school, and he steals people's stuff.  The characters at the fairy school have to get into his little lair and retrieve all their belongings.

The thing is, our household is usually pretty good at keeping track of our stuff.  I have the same keys my parents gave me to their front door when I was eight.  I hate losing things.

When I was pregnant, over five years ago, we did a bunch of painting and moving stuff around.  Substantial parts of my fiber arts life got moved around, including my floor loom, and I was just not physically able to sort it out then.  Plus, a lot of it was still in boxes from when we'd moved the year before, because that was how I'd stored it in my office.  It's a pretty easy leap from there to conclude that I have not had loads of time to tidy since having my twins, either. :)

Since then, things have been shifted and reshifted.  I am preparing to teach at the Manitoba Fibre Festival next week.  (Please come!  It will be super!)  I have all my students' bags stuffed with goodies, and all is well except for one thing.  I cannot find my tahkli spindle.  Now, you can teach about support spindles and cotton spinning without this spindle, but I just don't wanna.  I have this spindle and its little bowl, dang it.  I do.

I think the Cubby Imp took it.  AHHHH!  Actually though, I know that I have brought it as a demo spindle to other classes I've taught.  I wonder if it got left somewhere, like at a spindling class I did last winter.  Or, more likely, I brought home everything after the workshop and dumped it in my office and thought...I'll just sort this out later.  The thing is, I am exhausted after my workshops are over, and then I have to jump right into Mommy gear, and I lose track of things.

This never happened before I had twins!  

(Clarification...I was tired after teaching workshops. I had clutter... but I cleaned up and knew where things were...nearly all the time.)

A kind friend (the one that reviewed the spindle, above) is going to bring hers so I can show everybody what one looks like at my class.  AND, I still have a week to look for the darn thing.  However, it seemed like a good opportunity to start cleaning up.  I am trying.  Still, I am plagued by feeling like this darn spindle has disappeared because of fairies, or cubby imps or something.  It kills me that I have lost MY tahkli.  I don't even want to buy another.  I want to find the one I misplaced, you know?

--If you were a student in one of my spindling classes recently and read this blog (like, in the last few years...), did you see my brass tahkli spindle with the little brown pottery bowl it spins in?  When did I last have it!?

Kindergarten, summer's end, new and old projects

We're still playing outside every chance we get...it is still warm enough, too.  While the twins are at the same school for starting kindergarten, they have been absolutely worn out by the start of school.  In fact, we've already had our first virus, which involved one fever, a lot of nose blowing, some coughing, and use of our new plaid handkerchiefs (a gift from Daddy, the Professor).

As the temperature cools, we will have to start going through all our very special treasures.  These involve "dinosaur bones," shells, rocks, and more, all piled up on the windowsill of the porch.  Pretty soon, we'll be either taking in the most special ones, or redistributing the ones that need to find some rock friends in the garden somewhere.

It would be a bad idea to leave these on our porch (near the glass window) in the wintertime.  The winds are big, and nobody wants to sort through rocks to play when it is -20 or colder anyhow!

  We also migrate in our plastic animals:
We do a lot of categorizing, sorting, playing and reorganizing our animals.  It is amazing how interesting this is to one of our twins:  Do you think his dad is a PhD in Zoology who spent a lot of his grad. school time sorting fruit flies?

I have been knitting (forever!) it seems on a ribbed cardigan.  This is a design I did for Knit Picks in 2006 or so.  The copyright long ago returned to me, and I decided to reknit and republish the design in a different yarn: Berroco Remix, a recycled yarn that is really interesting.

However, the design, while not complicated, has been hard to do while chasing boys this summer.  It has shaping, and a stitch pattern, and button bands.  The short version is that I have already knit THREE button bands because one was just not up to par.  Turns out that in August, supervising twins at the wading pool-- is a hard place to make a really precise and tidy button band.

Keep your eyes out for the design --coming soon! --though its release has been slower than I'd hoped. It's called "Plum Ribbed Cardigan."  It is, indeed, plum in color, but the joke is that I meant it as a Southern phrase...it's full of ribbing. (plum ribbed)

After all that purple, you might just see a pair of small socks, worked up in Patons Kroy sock yarn.  These guys travelled around in my purse for months, and I'd knit a row or two when I had a moment.  It's always good to work ahead on the little boy wool sock front...because winter's always coming around here. :)  Might as well cherish this late summer/early fall sunshine as long as I can!

Gimli-a week away at the beach

We slipped away from Winnipeg for a few days in August to visit Gimli.  There was a lot of confusion amongst twin five year olds about where we were going.  Most of our travels are across the border to the US, to visit our families.  So,  although the drive was only about an hour and a half from home, one of our guys kept asking....Is this Canada?  The other kid got Gimli mixed up with Italy somehow, perhaps because I was reading a Food & Wine magazine about Italian food that we'd been talking about.

The short answer?  Nope, not Italy!  We rented a cottage to experience it.  Most of the locals here seem to go away to a family cottage in the summer time, so we wanted to try it.  On the plus side?  We had more room than a hotel, we had access to a deck, grill, kitchen, washing machine and dryer, etc.  On the minus side?  Mommy  (and occasionally Daddy) is in charge of all the food at the cottage and all the clean up, just like at home.  That part was a lot of work.  Luckily, we tried out several restaurants in Gimli, and greatly enjoyed eating out.  I think we ate fish every single day--Gimli is on Lake Winnipeg, which is an enormous resource for fresh water fish.   including, by the way, most of the fish that goes into the jarred gefilte fish in North America...

We also did a lot of exploring.  The guys went fishing for the first time, and the spot the Professor chose just happened to have a big copse of plum trees.  Not sure if they were wild Manitoba plums or "feral" trees that had sprung from one planted tree, but I picked plums, washed,and froze them, and can foresee chutney happening once school starts.

We went to the attic of the local Municipal building, (which used to be the school building) to visit with the Huldufolk, Snorri and Snaebjorn.  These are the little 'hidden' people, derived from Icelandic folk traditions, who raise mischief and are only seen by children and 'true believers.'  We read a story about them by Kathleen Arnason.  The lights flickered, the floor creaked, and it was definitely magical.  At least one twin told us he did not believe in these things on the way there.  On the way back to the rented cottage?  He was a true believer in the Huldufolk. :)

We participated in the annual "treasure hunt" on the beach, too.  Kids search the sand for toy coins (with help from their parents) and a list of local shops all agree to take the currency.  We scrounged up a total of $4.50 or so, and with that and a twenty dollar bill from Mommy and Daddy, everyone got a special toy from Tergesen's, the 100 year old general store.  (I returned later, by myself, for a luxurious 20 minute shopping spree-- to buy one gorgeous canvas messenger bag, a skein of Icelandic Einband yarn, and copies of these huldufolk stories that had so captivated my kids.)

There are murals out on the Gimli seawall and we passed by this one of our new friends Snorri and Snaebjorn (and their friends from Iceland, Freya and Fjiola) and had to pose.  I think you'll be able to figure out who the huldufolk are and which ones are the twins?

Finally, we spent some time out on the beach.  The winds were pretty brisk, which caused a lot of waves.  (This is a seriously big lake.  It has waves.)  So, twins did a lot of digging in the sand and searching with Daddy--the professor-- for fossils and lucky stones.  Mommy (me) spent most of the time parked on the sand, using every body part to weight down our beach umbrella, play tent, and other sand toys and belongings.  There wasn't a lot of swimming, although there was wading on one calmer day, with two sets of fancy floaties involved.  I strongly suspect that all the boys had a better time with the rocks, since the professor can identify a lot of the fossils, and at least one of my twins is a budding paleontologist...

We've been home now for a couple of weeks, and things have been busy.  Packing and unpacking for this trip, keeping everyone fed and occupied and safe from his brother, has been a pretty full time occupation.  Plus, we fit in apple picking, trips to the zoo, visits to the little free libraries and more... I'm pretty worn out.  However, tomorrow is the 'meet your new teachers' day at school, and we start back for real, for our first day of kindergarten, on Wednesday.

I think the boys are ready for school, and it definitely will be like vacation for me to have a few twin-free days when school starts.  Work--back at my computer-- or getting our household in order again?  ...begins to sound like paradise.