Thursday, June 26, 2008

Cross-dressing

My beekeeping equipment does double duty. My hive tool is a great for puncturing packing tape on packages sent by over-zealous wrappers. The garden boots I bought to use in the beeyard have taken me over muddy trails on hikes. And I use my helmet and veil when I am in the buggy, buggy Garden pulling garlic mustard and buckthorn. I secure the rig on the back carrier of my bike, using velcro straps, and it has worked well in the past.

But yesterday after a few hours in the muggy, muggy hot, I was careless when I strapped my gear to the rack. After shifting, or trying to shift, a couple times, I pulled off the bike trail and looked at the rear hub and saw this. Only the veil material itself was also wound into the gears.

Was I upset. A little. I sat myself down and began to puzzle out what to do. I began resolving the tangle by getting the veil fabric out of the gears. I then had one loose end to the cord to work with. I have to admit, I enjoyed, yes enjoyed, removing the 10 ft long cord from the works. Untying knots is a pleasure for me. It was a nice day, I had been cooled down by a careening tear down the steep, smooth road down from the Garden and now, here I was, sitting in the shade on a soft lawn, untangling cord from the gears - darn it I had fun! The dirty grease was a pain, and I still have to figure out how to get that off the veil. Also, I have the gash in the netting to stitch up.

I am helping a friend out with some writing she is doing, and working with a new client, both of which have been taking my time away from knitting. Which is a problem, since I have a number of summer projects that need to get done if I am going to wear them this summer.

One thing I did get done was to wash a summer sweater I made in the late 90's using the cover pattern from Dale's 84B, and my own color choices of their cotton yarn (at the time) called Kolibri.
I had worn it to breakfast with my folks on Sunday (we meet most Sundays at the Downtowner in St. Paul), and they did not remember seeing it before and complimented my work. Which was gratifying since their taste runs to St. Croix Knits. This sweater was so fun to make because of all the different patterns, and different colors, but never more than 2 to a row.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I can definitely picture you happy as a clam, undoing that cord.

Rediscovered knitting - what fun. It is very nice. I hope to get to see it soon.