Goin’ West

For Project Spectrum, I headed West to the land of tall buildings and the fictional home of JR Ewing. Back again, without extra yarn. I’m hoping the pictures I took will come out and I’ll be able to show you the few blue skies I got to see during a short visit to Dallas. There was great food, I got to see people I see once a year, and I wasn’t in the office. The bad part — I’m exhausted, I’m not sure I have something appropriate to wear tomorrow morning, and the cats were very very angry.

No, I did not go to the museum about Kennedy’s assassination. I did get to see an amazing Asian art museum (if you’re ever in Dallas, check out the Crow Asian Art Museum to hear calming beautiful music while getting to look at some of the most splendid jade from China and interesting marble temples from India). It’s weird that I got to go West to see mementos from the East. But here we have East brought to the West by avid collectors; and the old within the modern world of skyscrapers.

Noodling about, thinking about a dreamswatch shawl

I have some Koigu that I’m swatching today. I will see how the swatch(es) knit up (size 0 needles, but they’re square needles so the gauge is really small), and then think about what I want to do next. It may all depend on what the yarn feels like when it’s washed. Options include:

• Dreamswatch (7 to 15 repeats of the pattern) for a kind of shawl or stole if the yarn does not wash up to be as soft as I hope
• Socks (that’s a ravelry link — it’s for the Interweave Knits Windowpane socks, and would need a background color)
• A baby hat (no pattern in mind, but it needs to be soft!)

I kind of wish there was more olive in the yarn, because that would have made it visually fight less. It’s always interesting the difference between the nicely coiled hank and the yarn balled up or knit up. Of course, it’s always interesting to knit up items that have marinated for a long time in the stash drawer. I can’t remember which pattern I originally thought I’d do. So, think the dream swatch shawl would be a good idea?

Rowboat and boat on banks of Lake Champlain

There are lovely places to hike near Lake Champlain. These boats were pulled up on a rocky ledge on the banks of the lake. I’m going through my pictures of sunsets over the water, woodsy trails, wildflowers, and interiors from the Inn I stayed at. All very lovely. Some of them are appropriate for Project Spectrum and I’ve put them up on my flickr account on the sidebar. Some may show up on these pages when they seem appropriate.

I guess it’s the sign of a good trip if you’re already hoping to go back again and figuring out ways to avoid lots and lots of driving.

Red berries in the north woods

It’s hard to believe these were real — but they were. Lovely red berries that captured the light and made me think of beautiful, clear jelly. This photo was taken during a short trip to the woods surrounding Lake Champlain. We saw many many rowboats as well as sailboats on the water. Dodged a couple of rainstorms, and survived one huge thunderstorm. Luckily, not that many mosquitoes saw me.

BTW: Lake Champlain is skinnier than I remembered. I must have been near it in the past and just thought it was a wide, huge river. Of course, that would have been riding with the family in my teens, when I probably had my nose in a book reading about ancient Egypt or Sumeranians.

Lobster spotting

Here’s a lobster in an unusual location — right outside Baltimore’s Penn station.

No, not the one in NYC. And sometimes people refer to all the stations on the Pennsylvania line as being Pennsylvania station, so I’m always in a perpetual state of confusion about which station is which. (NYC or Philadelphia or Baltimore or Wilmington, Delaware or even D.C.)

Seen during ArtScape. This was one of the art cars. Hopefully this red lobster (who was animated enough to drive over, even though it’s evidently been cooked) will head off to Massachusetts, where it will fit in better than in the blue crab state.

The fiberglass claw on the door was a great touch.

Looking Back East

Gail Tsukiyama’s book, “The Samurai’s Garden” was a dense, well-measured, spare book with beautiful imagery. I was drawn into the story from the minute that I read the first line, that began, “I wanted to find my own way…” I read very, very slowly, dipping into a totally different world, of a young, Chinese man living in Japan during the eve of the Second World War.

There were so many filters/screens here for me — time, gender, and the eyes of someone from another culture discovering Japan. From the blurb on the back cover, I worried that the story would be dulled, like one’s vision looking through rice paper screens. However, there were also themes of writing, art, appreciation of nature, and the rhythms of events beyond one’s control, that allowed me to follow the story and appreciate its still voice.

Your mileage may vary. But it was quite a relief to be carried through to the satisfying closure of following the seasons through a year that begins with Autumn.

Railroad

Found on a recent roadtrip out into Western Maryland — a red caboose from the days of the Western Maryland Railroad. It’s part of a park in Hagerstown, MD. Lots of steel for PS4 Fire there as well….

These are the wheels of the engine that they’re trying to salvage after years of abuse, when it was used as a piece of playground equipment, etc.

Red

Red is an attention-getter — a glowing stoplight in the dark, a showstealer among a crowd of black dresses, the promise of ripe fruit, the glow of embers in a campfire that emphasize the night. And, sometimes, it’s a big old flag of “do not touch”.

In this case, our friend Virginia Creeper. Some people can touch it. Not me. But I will admit that it’s very very pretty. Of course, so is poison ivy.

Lets go down to the sunset bridge

Let’s go down to the sunset bridge

And watch the working barge go by

And watch the mosquitoes bite people,

And stare up at the maroon sky….

– with all apologies to Don Henley

Yellow Art Deco

This is an interior from a theater. Yellow walls, ochre curtains, and an amazing metal Art Deco motif.

I wish I had gotten some of the faux tortoiseshell torch light fixtures on my camera, but I had to leave and didn’t have time to figure out how to get the lighting right.

The only other thing I seemed to have done that is blogworthy is attack the krynoid-hedge that’s making the back fence into a horrible mess. And knit more on my PS4 project from the green cycle (the back is up to 8.15″ and counting). It looks like PS4 yellow cycle will be mostly photos, unless I manage to finish one of my projects that’s been on a backburner since I was first on Ravelry.