I’m still cruising along on my Spring Things shawl – I’ve finally gotten to the exciting bits:
And I’ve also started a Radiance Shawl, using a skein of Schaefer Andrea in “Renata Tebaldi”.
I wondering, though, if I should rip it out and restart with a smaller needle. I’m using the needle size called for in the pattern, but my yarn is thinner since it’s 100% silk instead of the alpaca/silk/cashmere blend called for, and won’t bloom as much. Tough decision.
I went out of the house the other night to find my husband sitting in the driveway, watching three kittens sitting in the street, silhouetted by the street light. They were like four statues – one in the driveway, one in the gutter, one on the shoulder, and one in the middle of the street. They were like scattered Russian Nesting Dolls. I went in to grab my camera, but by the time I got back, the kitten that had been sitting in the middle of the street was on the move.
The kittens and their mom are strays – I think the mother was getting fed occasionally by a woman who used to live across the street, but she moved a couple of months ago. The mother cat is pretty friendly and likes to be petted, but the kittens are very wary of people. They’re a couple of months old, and this is the first time I’ve seen them, though I knew they were around.
Their mother “Smokey” came over for some petting, and a little patience brought the kitties a bit nearer, but they were still too skittish to let us touch them.
Once again, America’s Test Kitchen drew me in with a recent newsletter. This is their Dutch Baby (German Pancake). And it was definitely tasty.
The recipe calls for a 12″ sloped-sided skillet that is oven-safe to 450F. Since mine are not oven-safe to that temperature, I used a 12″ fry pan with straight sides, and it worked fine. Definitely do not try to use a smaller pan.
Although I definitely want to make Audrey in Unst, I also want to make that Bergere de France pullover, and I’m not sure which one I’ll do with the white Silky Wool. I have some light beige natural sportweight wool in my stash which might also be a nice choice for Audrey:
I’ll probably want to swatch some of that, as well as do some swatches of the Bergere de France pullover using the Silky Wool just to see if I’ll like how the stitches look in that yarn before I make a final decision.
Since I’m still on the fence over that one, I decided to start on the Drops 111-33 cardigan using the rust Silky Wool.
I’ll be taking a trip up to Boise soon, and I need to have something started. This should be a good project, and if I happen to finish Spring Things, I may start on the Radiance Shawl, using this:
Remember our Floor project?
We’ve finally finished the sealer and polyurethane finishes. We decided to just go with a clear finish, and used Bona Mega waterbased finish, plus the Bonaseal to seal the wood first. We’re really happy with the product so far – it was easy to apply and looks and feels very nice. I know it won’t stand up to abuse as well as the oil-based finishes, but it’s much better for us and the environment, and we could put on multiple coats in hours instead of days. We’ll just have to see how it holds up.
This is what it looks like now:
The finish made the wood quite a bit darker and richer looking. On the plus side, it gave the wood a gorgeous color. But on the negative side, it made the blotchiness of the wood stand out more (it’s more obvious in person than in the photo).
We’ll just say that it’s showing off it’s well-earned wrinkles and age spots.
We were able to lighten the really bad stains (along the edge of the wall on the right side) quite a bit by using hydrogen peroxide on them (thanks for the tip, Sue!), but I didn’t want to try lightening them too much and end up bleaching the wood instead of the stain, so I didn’t lighten them up as much as I probably should have.
And of course, we still have the issue of the back 2 feet being much darker. Maybe we should have tried staining the wood – we might have been able to even out the color changes a bit. But who knows – it might have just made things worse, and I really like the color that it turned out. (It matches the cat!)
The areas where the wood was in practically like-new condition are gorgeous. It’s a shame we couldn’t get the whole floor to look like that. I suppose a professional with a drum sander would have been able to sand a bit deeper and maybe get rid of more of the blemishes, but I suspect even that wouldn’t have gotten rid of them all.
Here’s what the wood looked like before and after the finish – it’s amazing how much difference even a clear finish makes:
Here’s a reminder of what it looked like after we uncovered the original floor:
And what we started with – after we ripped off the awful carpet (you can still see some of it on the left side of the photo), but before we removed the subfloor and that little patch of tile and discovered the original wood:
 Cabled Sheep lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she enjoys knitting, cooking, and munching veggies out of the garden. She never tires of Utah's glorious landscape. |
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