Here’s the closest I’ve been able to accurately represent the color of Cascade 220 #8013, Walnut Heather. Of course, it’s reasonably accurate on my monitor, but might look a bit different on yours. It’s an ashen gray-brown – which may not sound thrilling, but I’m absolutely in love with the color.

A lot of knitbloggers have been discussing their Kryptonite lately. Their one fatal flaw as a knitter. I think that mine, like that of most other knitters, is my unwillingness to rip back and correct a mistake. I also have this problem with denial. “It’s not that bad, no one will notice, heck, I don’t even notice!”

Why should this be? If I do a drawing, I erase 95% of the lines as a matter of course. If I write a paragraph, I delete and re-write at least half of it before clicking Save. If dinner turns out badly, I eat what little is edible, and throw the rest away.

I try to tell myself that ripping back is just part of the process of knitting, but it doesn’t really help take the sting out of having ripped back the Mistake Rib Scarf three times in the first six inches.

First, I started out with four rows of garter stitch, which seemed like a good idea at the time. But of course, the mistake rib scrunched itself up, so the garter stitch flared out in an unattractive fashion.

Next, I knit about four inches before there was a mysterious skip in the pattern (like that use of passive tense?) and everything shifted over by a stitch. I didn’t notice this for three rows.

Finally, I valiantly managed to knit about eight inches before I realized that the entire thing was only about 3 1/2 inches wide. That’s a pretty narrow scarf, no?

I’m starting to think it was bad luck to pick a stitch named “mistake.”

Third time’s a charm, right?

P.S. Do you like my incredibly cool needle/stitch holder arrangement? I couldn’t find my 5mm circular needles when I went to cast on, so I just grabbed two bamboo DPNs and a pair of rubber bands.

The rubber band is wrapped around the far end of the DPN, to serve as a stitch stopper (because the needles are a wee bit too short, and otherwise stitches would fall off the end, as I learned to my dismay). When it’s time to bang it into my purse, I hold the needles together nose-to-tail (as it were) and wrap the last turn of the rubber band around both needles. It’s actually working pretty well, although I admit it is rather lacking in the “style and panache” department.

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Those of you who still access the site from http://erika.fisherking.org may have had some trouble earlier today. Every year without fail, for the six years I’ve had that domain, on September 28th I am startled to find that its registration has expired. (But I just paid the annual registration fee last year!) I pay up, then drum my fingers impatiently for 5-6 hours while Dotster gets around to turning it back on. No worries!

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This is the post where I jumble in all the assorted photographs from the weekend, without any real coherent thread to join them.

Apple Tree #2 is ripe! (Tree #3 should ripen next month. They were chosen to ripen in series, so that for three months in autumn, you’re never more than a week away from a total apple overload.) These are small and tart, yet also juicy and crisp and not too astringent. If you stand next to the tree on a sunny afternoon, the perfume of perfectly ripe apples is enough to make a person swoon with delight.

Okay, I had to get a picture of this. Eight years, and I’ve never seen Brady sleep with his face smashed into the blanket like this. How can he breathe? Does he do this kind of thing on purpose, just to weird me out? (I don’t half suspect that he turned on the kitchen faucet, sat there for a while watching the sink overflow, then turned it back off again and sidled away, chuckling to himself.)

“You’re taking pictures of me asleep again, aren’t you?!”

These little buggers are everywhere at the moment. They’re the Fraggles of the caterpillar world. The best word to describe them in action is “cheerful.”

The monster dill tree is going to seed! It turns out I love dill more than anything. I love the smell the plant makes when you brush against it, and I can’t get enough of the taste of the seeds. I like to mix them into a jar of mayonnaise to create my own tangy sandwich spread. Oh, they’re good!

Progress on the RPM sock continues. Also pictured: Brady gnawing on the cast-on tail.

I’m smitten by RPM. The pattern was written to take advantage of handpainted yarns, and I really think it’s perfect for that use. (Cat hair pictured for, uh, scale.)

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The hydraulic log splitter totally saved my bacon, in a big way. Here’s how the log splitter came about:

1. Firewood Guy dumped a pile of wet logs in my yard.

2. D., happened to stop by just after Firewood Guy left. Eyeing the pile of wet logs, D. said “I know someone who has a log splitter, if you want to borrow it.”

3. D. contacted P., owner of the log splitter, who brought it over the next Friday afternoon.

As I was being introduced to the log splitter, I asked “So… how much do I owe, and to whom?” The answer: nothing. Just a loaner, a neighborly sort of thing. Are you serious? Yes.

When I learned this, I got weepy. And I am not a weepy person.

D stopped by the next day to find out how things were going. Well, they were going great, because I’d split the entire cord the day before. (Ha! How awesome is that?!) I said, “You’ll have to let me know if there’s anything I can knit for you as a thank you!”

He blurted out “Oh I know exactly what you could knit for me!” Then he caught himself, and you could almost hear him thinking “Oh crap, this is one of those things where you’re just supposed to say “Sure, thanks” and never actually follow up on the offer.”

I made a “C’mon, spill it!” gesture, and he explained that for ages now, he had been wanting what he called a “muffler” – a short scarf, only about three feet long. Long enough to wrap around the neck, with one end tucked in front, and one end tucked in back. When queried on colors, he said grays and blues. Fiber: 100% wool all the way. And added that P would definitely want one, too. I can totally do that!

Hmm, but then again, there’s this whole “no yarn until October 1st” thing.

You know what?

Eff the yarn diet. Close enough, right?

I made a quick run to Wild Fibers in Mount Vernon, where they have a Wall ‘O Cascade 220. Oh yeah! That’s the stuff! I bought four skeins of Cascade 220 (a bluish gray, a grayish blue, a grayish brown – and a skein of bright red, for the Red Scarf Project). And some bright spring green Regia sock yarn, for good measure.

Four skeins of Cascade 220 is an armload of fiber, which I hugged happily on my way up to the register. It was soft, and pretty, and represented about 120 hours of knitting joy, and all for about $30 – seriously, how can you top that?

I’ve fallen extra in love with the grayish-brown shade of Cascade 220. This is color #8013, Walnut Heather. The picture makes it look browner than it is in person; it’s very tricky to capture the shade digitally.

For some reason, lately I keep falling into conversations about disaster planning. How much water you should have on hand, how many canned goods, how much un-ground wheat, and in what sort of container. I swear to you, I never start these conversations, but as a disaster scenario nut, I find them irresistable.

It’s not at all unusual to lose power for a few days at a time out there, nor would it be too out of the ordinary to be snowed in for up to a week before the road can be cleared. Then of course you have the long tail, zombie takeover, unforseen layoff, cylon attack, bird flu-type scenario. So I certainly want to have at least a week’s worth of supplies on hand, anywhere up to six months.

This means water, food, cat food, candles, batteries… but what about the yarn? How much IS a week’s supply of yarn? What is six months’ worth of yarn? I tell you one thing I learned from my Yarn Diet 2006 experience: sock yarn is the way to go. It’s so small (thus easily stored), and it goes so far (at least 20 hours of knitting per skein).

Until now, I’ve been fairly fascistic with my yarn stash. Buy yarn for project; knit project; do not buy more yarn until project is complete. But really, what if you can’t get to the yarn store? What if there isn’t a yarn store to get to? What if you got laid off and couldn’t afford to buy more yarn? I have decided that it’s good to have extra yarn, just in case. (I recently heard someone say that the proper yarn stash size is “not so big that it would kill you if it fell on you.”)

New to the stash is the yarn I won from Domesticat, five skeins of this beautiful tweed. It, too, does not photograph well – in person, it’s a sublime olive green, with a greenish gray stripe.

It also has wee little red and blue flecks, which you can see in there if you look closely.

I swatched it up this weekend, to see what it wanted to be. It knit up nicely at 5 st/inch on 3.25mm needles (the label suggests “4″ but it doesn’t say if that’s size 4 or 4mm, but since I have neither size on hand, it’s academic). It likes to be stockinette more than anything else – it resisted the manipulation required to make cables, and the cables got a bit lost in the tweediness at any rate.

One surprise is how well it shows off a knit/purl pattern.

Cat hair shown for, uh, scale.

This is why it’s important to do a free-form test swatch when working with a new yarn. I wouldn’t have guessed that the knits and purls would look so different, but you can really see how the tweed effect is “directional.”

I love this yarn so much! Now I’m on the hunt for a pattern that will show it off to its best advantage. Forecast? Cinxia? Revolution? Or maybe just a simple EZ Seamless Hybrid with contrasting hem facings? Mm, so many options!

Apropos of nothing, I think fair food may have finally hit its peak. Another knitblogger reports having visited the Puyallup Fair and encountering “kosher hot dog cut open, with cheese stuffed inside, wrapped in a tortilla shell with yet more cheese, wrapped in bacon and fried”. Dayum!

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Pile of wet logs, prepare to meet your doom.

Meet the Troy-Bilt LS27T Hydraulic Log Splitter, with a 5.5hp gas-powered Honda engine that produces 27 tons of force.

People, this thing was so f*cking cool, you would NOT believe it. Log splitter and I are totally BFF.

Lunch break – 1/3rd of the cord split.

The only down side is that I was half deaf from sitting with my head next to an outboard motor all day, and I was totally and completely covered in bark dust. You power up the motor, roll a log onto the bottom plate, and set it in place.

Then you pull a lever on the side and watch the axe head slowly descend, RM-RM-RM-RM.

POP! The log is split. Now rotate the log and split it into smaller, stove-size wedges.

And there’s your split wood. Now toss these over into the growing pile, and roll up another log.

If I could do one thing differently, I would have worn a dust mask. When the log pops, there’s a POOF! of bark dust, and I’ve been coughing it up for days. Not so good for the lungs, most likely.

A pile of cedar splits, from giant rounds that had proved too hard to split by hand.

It took almost the entire day, but I split the whole cord (plus some extra logs that were lying around the property) all by myself. Do you have any idea how long it would take me to split an entire cord of wood by hand? It would take me until never, that’s when.

This pile is too large and sprawling to be represented well in pictures. It’s about four feet high, and maybe 15 feet long, and it curves off at the end, following the line of the original pile of wood. Did I mention that the logsplitter is built onto its own trailer? This means that when you’ve run out of all the logs you can easily reach by hand (from where you’re sitting, on an upturned bucket, beside the logsplitter), you can just pick it up by the trailer hitch end and carefully roll it over a few feet more, to catch up to the pile.

The wood is W-E-T, so I did manage to find the strength to stack some of it up on the ledge in “pens” so that it will dry faster. The ledge faces west, so it gets plenty of sun, and also faces into the prevailing wind.

The rest of it is just going to have to wait until next weekend to be stacked properly. Believe me, after splitting a cord of wood by yourself, even if a machine does the heavy work, you are DONE.

Stay tuned tomorrow, to learn how all this relates to KNITTING! (It really does!)

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