The Scullery

I Will Not Buy a New Knitting Bag, I Will Not Buy A New Knitting Bag, I Will Not....

Oh, I have SUCH a bad case of knitting bag lust! I've had it for a few weeks, since Offhand Designs came out with the  Susannah. I wanted the Times Square, but managed to hold out til they'd sold out of that fabric. Now I'm in love with the Astoria, and my favorite online yarn store just got that one in stock. But I have two knitting bags that I really like. But they're not like this one, and this one is just so gorgeous! Spendy; I've never spent that much on ANY bag. The company has a great reputation, though, and the bags are really sturdy and well-made.

I Will Not Buy a New Knitting Bag.

...but it's soooo gorgeous! Maybe I can sell some stash.

Stash-Diving, and Other Adventure Sports

It's that time of year that the List of Things to Knit for Christmas Gifts needs to start moving quickly from concept to reality. I've had the list for a couple of months now, and two items have been completed, but one was gifted early and needs to be replaced on the list. Everything else was still in concept stage. So this weekend I've been fine-tuning the pattern queue and stash-diving for appropriate yarn. The best thing about stash-diving? Finding stuff you forgot you bought. Like the gorgeous yarn I got at Estes 2 years ago to make a scarf for my sis? Now wound and on the needles. (Sis, if you're reading this, yeah, you're getting a scarf for Christmas. Surprise!) I've got two more skeins that need to get wound tonight, and on to the needles in the next few days. Yes, there will be some Extreme Knitting required before December 25th, but I'm still in the qualifying heats right now.

The flip side of that "best thing about stash-diving"? Finding stuff you forgot you bought, and wondering just what in the world you were thinking at the time. Some of those things have been added to the Trade/Sell page in ravelry, and three of them have already sold. Yay! But there's more to be added. (Emerald green mohair boucle? Really?)

What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

One of the many nice things about the new job is that I can knit during conference calls. There's a long one tomorrow, so I'll get more done on Dad's Christmas socks. I'm making Thuja in Dream in Color worsted weight in the Black Parade colorway, which in this particular skein is actually a very dark green. Appropriate, since a Thuja is a dark green tree.

The downside to knitting at work is that one of my co-workers asked me if I could knit a pair of tights for her daughter. Well, of course I can! Tights for a pre-schooler should be no problem at all! Except that upon searching ravelry, I discovered all the patterns for kids' tights are in Norwegian. Not one of my languages. Fortunately, I remembered EZ's Nether Garments, the September offering in Knitter's Almanac. So now we have a pattern, and we have measurements, all we need is yarn. uh oh. Nothing in the stash will do. My stash consists of fingering weight and worsted weight, and I need sport/dk. I'm thinking Knitpicks Stroll in the sport weight - anyone have any reviews of this yarn? I'm not a huge Knitpicks fan, so I've never used this yarn, but they have the color we want in the correct weight, for a price that won't make these tights the most expensive thing the child has ever worn. What the heck, it's an experiment. That's doomed to repeat itself if it works out. sigh. Maybe knitting at work ISN'T such a great idea.

Finished stuff!

 

Traveling Woman in Dream in Color Starry, Colorway Some Summer Sky. A Christmas present for a friend.

And...a pair of fun socks for a fashionable young lady. Regia, in the basic picot hem, top down, plain vanilla sock configuration. I knit these on a 9" HiyaHiya circ, just to see if it was fun, or totally annoying. It was mostly fun, and I only had to switch to dpns for the last few rows of the toe.

More About The Parks

Anyone watch the Ken Burns series on the National Parks this week? He did a great job! My list of parks I just have to visit just got a whole lot longer.

A couple of weeks ago, when I posted about Walmart, and the problem of inappropriate development on lands adjoining the parks, Cathy posted a comment asking about the sellers' responsibility for protecting the land. That brings up a really important issue concerning the parks. The park service's budget does not include money for land acquisition, even for acquiring privately-held lands within the boundaries of the park. Money for land has to be authorized through a separate Congressional authorization for each particular parcel, and it can take years, sometimes decades, to get those appropriations. There is one national park in Texas that was not actually open as a park for more than 40 years after Congress authorized it, because it took that long for Congress to dole out the money to acquire the land. A willing seller may not be able to wait that long, and ends up being forced by financial concerns to sell to another party. And, when a big corporation like Walmart is buying land for a store, they generally do the purchase through another entity so that the seller does not know who the buyer actually is.

Some parks are mostly or entirely donated lands: most of Acadia National Park and all of Virgin Islands National Park were donated by the Rockefeller family, and most of the Civil War battlefield parks were purchased by state or non-profit organizations and donated to the Federal government as parks. Many of the big parks in the West were carved out of Federal lands managed by the Forest Service, and they're still mad about that!

A while back (1960s, I think,) a separate fund called the Land and Water Conservation Fund was established which can be used to purchase park lands (and lands/water rights for other federal agencies to manage) without going through the whole Congressional appropriations process for each land. It's supposed to be funded from revenues from oil/gas/mineral development on the continental shelf, but those funds are frequently repurposed by Congress. If that fund got the revenues designated for it, that would go a long way toward preventing the really egregious cases of inappropriate development in or near the parks.

Okay, if you've read this far, you deserve pictures!

This is Calypso Cascades in the Wild Basin section of Rocky Mountain National Park. I went up there last Sunday. It's an easy and very social hike - loads of other hikers with their cameras out every step of the way, just like me.

Friendly wildlife, too. Umm, actually, I'm not sure this one was friendly so much as demanding. My sis would NOT have been happy about how close he got.

And....last but not least:
The aspen are turning.

Knitting and Cats, 'cause I Promised!

There has been knitting progress on several projects this week, but ya know how lace looks like a disaster til it's blocked? Yeah, I won't be showing you the lace projects just yet - one shawlette, one sock. But my second successful venture into the world of toe-up socks is coming along nicely, so you get to see that one:

The second one is past the heel and on the leg, so I hope to finish them this weekend. Which is a good thing, because they are for an early-October birthday girl! They are also my entry in the rav SolidSocks September KAL, so have to be done by Sept 30th for that. The pattern is Wendyknit's Cabletini (free on ravelry) and the yarn is Regia silk. I have one pair of socks I made out of this yarn a couple of years ago, and it wears really well. And its machine wash-and-dryability is a big plus when gifting.

In other yarn-related news, I made an exciting score at the local outdoor adventure emporium last night. I went in search of a new work bag - needed something sporty (so that leaves out all my Vera Bradley,) smaller than the big honking messenger bag I've been carrying for school the last couple of years, but big enough for my dayplanner. My Overland Equipment Donner bag (old style, not quite the same as the current model) will hold the planner, but there's no room for anything else. I ended up with this mini-messenger from Mountainsmith - last year's model in green and blue and on sale - yay! But how is this yarn-related, you ask? Well, on the way to check out, I passed a shelf of sale sweaters, and scored TWO lightweight alpaca sweaters for HALF PRICE! One is a Nordic style pullover in lavender and white, the other a hoodie cardigan in chocolate brown with blue stars on the sleeves. I don't do stranded colorwork or intarsia, and probably couldn't even buy the yarn for what the sweaters cost. Ha! Score! Since the temp in my office never gets above the mid-60s with the heat ON, double bonus points for layers that don't make me look like the Michelin Man.

And just in case you were wondering about the status of feline relations here at Chez Harley & Cyra,

What Do All The Different Names Mean?

Sylvia asked a good question in the comments: what's the difference between a National Monument and a National Park? There are two differences, mainly: the acreage and the number/variety of resources protected is one (Monuments are smaller, and generally protect one resource or group of related resources,) and the second difference is how they are created. National Parks are created by an act of Congress, and National Monuments are created by presidential proclamation applied to lands already in Federal ownership. The President's authority to proclaim a National Monument is authorized under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which was enacted primarily to protect Native American sites from looting and destruction. National Monuments are under Park Service jurisdiction, even if they are created from lands managed by other federal agencies, such as the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management.

And that concludes today's history lesson! Back to knitting (and/or cats) for our next post.

National Park fun

oooh, we got some excellent park faves in the comments! I love when someone introduces me to a park I don't know about - have to run right off to the website and check it out. If you go to the National Park Service website, there is a "Find a Park" feature, but I'll clue you in on a shortcut. NPS uses four letter abbreviations for the park units, and if you add that on to the URL for the main website, www.nps.gov/ it'll take you right to the webpage for that park. If the park has a one word (before the "National") name, such as Acadia National Park, the four letter abbreviation is almost always the first four letters in the name: www.nps.gov/acad. If there are two or more words in the name, the abbreviation is usually the first two letters in each of the first two words. So Apostle Island National Lakeshore is www.nps.gov/apis; Assateague Island National Seashore is www.nps.gov/asis; New River Gorge National River is www.nps.gov/neri; and Wilson's Creek National Battlefield is www.nps.gov/wicr. Check them out! 

The Earthloom Project

My mom sent me a flyer about The Earthloom Project. Our little town library where Mom volunteers did the first weaving in the project. I'm excited to see what they did when I go home at Christmas. This is such a cool idea, and the design of the loom is so beautiful, I'd want to keep it forever and just put on a new warp and start again.

I Should Probably Warn You....

...the content of this here blog is going to be changing a bit from the past. There will still be knitting, and cat pictures, but there will also be posts related to my work. This is the first one of those.

You may have read recently about the controversy in Virginia over Walmart's plan to build a SuperCenter within sight of the Civil War battlefield The Wilderness. A significant portion of the battlefield land itself is protected from inappropriate activity or development within Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania County Battlefields National Military Park, but the viewshed of the battlefield is threatened by Walmart and other encroachments. How can a visitor to the battlefield understand what it was like to be a soldier in the middle of that battle, with a forest fire raging all around and seemingly no escape, if Walmart is looming over you?

Sadly, this is not the first time Walmart has shown such disregard for our heritage, and it isn't just Walmart doing it. This article from the Institute for Southern Studies describes other such instances. Most of these other sites don't have the protection of National Park status, but as we see in Virginia, even that may not always be enough.

I'm not suggesting you boycott Walmart. But think about this: when we collectively decide something is important enough to all Americans that it should be designated as a unit of the national park system, is that designation just for a certain acreage of ground and nothing more, or is it for the totality of what that place represents? ALL of the stories, ALL of the meanings, even if they conflict? And not just the acreage, but the whole ecosystem that belongs to it, complete with the sights and sounds, the air and the water, the plants and animals, the cultural and archaeological sites? National park status isn't enough to protect all those elements.

Do you have a favorite National Park? Tell me about it!

Back to the Blogiverse!

Hey faithful readers, remember me? Since my last post, there was a small matter of an exploding gall bladder, which nearly derailed my last semester of grad school, then a crazy summer working two very intense projects. But now I am getting settled back into adult life: no more homework, new job with a normal schedule, didn't even have to move - yay!

Still knitting, still knitting mostly socks:

Two of those pairs are for me, the rest are for other people. Note that the burgundy sock in the middle is knit toe up. Yes, I'm expanding my knitting horizons.

Doing a little spinning, but nothing exciting to show for it right now. More on that later.

Harley says hi.

Cyra says whaddya want, I'm busy!