stripy

The stripy sweater grows. I've made it up to the armpits which means that I need to sit down and figure out how to plan out a round yoke. I'm hoping that after the great steek affair, it won't be too bad. It's knobbly and slightly uneven and definitely hand spun, but I like the effect. More importantly, so does she. Evelyn keeps checking on the progress of "the pink and purple and orangey sweater."

The white stripes are made of kid mohair which has the peculiar habit of feeling vastly different at different points in the spinning/knitting process. When it was just loose fiber it seemed billowy and soft, like a cloud. While spinning it it felt slippery and kind of prickly at the same time. While I plied the yarn I thought it might be too stiff but now that I'm knitting it it's lovely. Soft and silky and bouncy. I want to knit all sorts of things with it which will be difficult as I'm running out quickly. Time to order another bag.

The colored yarn fascinates me. I love watching it change as the stripes progress, orange and then purple and then orangey pink and so on. Most of the time the color has handily changed right about the time a stripe ends so that each stripe is its own unique shade. Love.

I'm impatient to have all the unpacking done. Inpatient to have it all in place, all put away, so I can sit down and knit without feeling like really, I should be doing something else. Ah me. We'll get there. I keep telling myself we will get there.

the hardest part was the piano

We are, at last, unloaded.

Not unpacked. Nooo, not even close. The sunroom is so full of things that I had forgotten we owned. Boxes that have been labeled and relabeled over multiple moves to the point that I'm not sure what is in them. So crammed with things we have lived, (mostly) happily without for a year. Which means that a lot of it is stuff that we want to keep, but that we don't actually use on a daily basis. I took the lid off of one bin today, just one. It had tiny blue jumpers, a big straw hat that a two year old Briton wore for Easter pictures, a pair of bitty rain boots, the ones he wore every day for a year. The first sweater I ever knit was in there too. That sweater was the garment that caused me to swear off knitting for good, until it found me again (and thank goodness too).

The hardest part, was the piano. Predictably. We have never had a piano before, have never had room for one. But the day before we left to retrieve our things from Charlottesville I came up with the brilliant plan to find a free piano on Craigslist and bring it home, we'd have a moving truck, after all. And it was brilliant. We got a great piano, with a bench, in not too shabby condition (although there are plans to spruce it up, aren't there always?) Except we also got a truck that was TWICE as big as we needed which, never mind the enormous amount of gas it guzzled or the fact that it really didn't go faster than 40 miles per hour which turned that the 12 hour drive into 17, did not fit into our driveway in a way that made moving a piano off of a very high truck and up three steps onto a porch and into the house very easy. I hurt to my fingertips. And I didn't even do the hardest lifting.

But the truck is empty, waiting to be returned in the morning. We are unloaded, which is half the battle. I'm not sure if it was the easy half or not, but at least it's half.

No matter what I say, my friends, never, EVER let me move again. Ever.

unpacking

There are levels of unpacking. On one level, we are 90% unpacked. As in, there are only a few boxes still sitting on our sun porch. Pesky things like office do-dads and tidbits that we threw into boxes right at the end when we were packing. I'm doing by best to NOT just shove those in the basement to be dealt with "later" because I know from experience that later might be a few years from now. So if you looked at the porch you'd think we were pretty close.

Except that we still have half, maybe a little more than half, of our worldly belongings in a storage unit in Virginia, which will shortly be dragged up here and, inevitably, onto the sun porch. This is part of the reason I'm trying to get things OFF of the sun porch now,  so there is room for the next load when it comes.

Unpacked is also relative. Things are out of boxes. They are not in boxes and therefore they are technically unpacked, but they aren't really put away. We have lots of piles. Piles of clothes that need to be hung in closets. Piles of toys that need to be put onto shelves or into bins. Piles of art that needs to be hung.

Secretly, I kind of like unpacking. In general, when we move, I unpack. Not because Will is lazy or unwilling but because it's just how it happens. He goes to work, I stay home and unpack. And really it's the best system because I like to figure out where things go. I try things out and shift them around and try more things out. When Will comes home we move furniture and hang art because that's what he cares about, not where the plates are or which cupboard holds all the extra sheets. It's exhausting and tiring and sometimes dusty work, but I do sort of enjoy it. Although figuring out what goes where in this kitchen might just drive me insane. It's not that I don't like it, I do, but I've never had a kitchen with absolutely no cupboards under the counter. I have drawers drawers, drawers, aplenty, but no places to hide away the less pretty things that are better stacked on shelves. Ah well, in time. For now it's just another pile.

the "before" tour

Last time we bought a house I only took a few "before" shots. Mostly because we were sort of aghast at the state the house was in and didn't really want anyone to see it until we had at least gotten the worst of it taken care of. In the end I wished that we had taken more. Because we did a lot to that house and it's fun to look at how far we came.

This house won't need the same kind of crazy overhaul, but it needs a lot of updating and brightening. New paint, new fixtures, new flooring. So on Saturday, before we could test paint on the walls or start hauling in boxes, I went through and took lots of before shots. I wont share them all here but I'll give you a little tour. Forgive the phone quality photos, I forgot the real camera and wanted to make sure the photos got taken before the house filled up with boxes. The exterior of the house is strangely hard to photograph, it's tucked up in the woods so much that you can't get a good angle, but this is the main entrance.

You enter through a big glassed in porch (which needs doors, instead of windows, across the front.) and into a mudroom. Yay! A mudroom. I'm sure we'll need it here!

 Most of the downstairs is one big open space built around the chimney. So we have the kitchen

 And the dining/living area.

At one end of the kitchen is a desk, which overlooks the living room. I think this will be our family computer space, perfect for homework, paying bills, all that jazz.

In the kitchen there is a walk through pantry that leads to the downstairs bathroom.

 Up the stairs we have an interesting combination. In the real estate pitch they called this room an "open bedroom",  but we plan to use it as the den/upstairs living room where the TV will be.

We also have this funny sleeping loft. At first I didn't know what to do with it but I think we will turn it into a reading nook with floor cushions and shelves along the wall. It has a little escape hatch to Briton's loft above.

Briton's loft room is the room that needs the most work and is the first that we will tackle. It needs some drywall in spots and a lot of trim. Oh, and flooring. Although he seems to think a rug over plywood is just fine.

Down the ladder we have the main bedrooms.

Evie's is the slightly smaller one but has a great window that she already loves to perch in. As you can see we are already trying out paint for her room. Blue, with lots of roses. Per her request (of course)

Our room has two closets (yay!) and a private deck with scary rails. Another thing to fix ASAP.

The bathroom is, without a doubt, the most hideous room in the house. It's really the only room that I find cringe-worthy. While I want to change things in other rooms, I can live in them as-is pretty happily. This room. Yuck. But on the plus side it's pretty big and the laundry is upstairs in here, which makes my day. No more basement laundry!

And speaking of the basement, we have a good sized one that's dry enough to finish out. At some point. I'm thinking craft room.

Down the hill from the house, closer to the creek, is our cabin.

It's rustic in a RUSTIC kind of way and needs to be totally redone. I think Will is most excited about that project. There is still some debate over what, exactly, it will be, but we'll figure that out.

So that's the ten-cent tour. Today we start unpacking the things that we brought from New York before we head down to Virginia to retrieve the rest of our belongings. Ah, unpacking is not my favorite thing. I hope, hope, hope that I will not be packing or unpacking again for a LONG time. Because, man, it's tiring!

into the woods

There is a little house in the woods, on the side of the mountain, that has been waiting, just for us.

It is not too little, but it's also not too big. It's neither old or new. It's not perfect and ready to go, but it's also not, ahem, quite the dump that our last house was when we bought it.

If someone had asked me what kind of house I wanted to buy, I would not have described this house. And yet...

It's perfect. When we went to look at houses here, we sped through most of what was for sale, knowing instantly that they weren't right, and then we drove down a hidden driveway through the trees and saw a half shingled house tucked into a sea of green, and we knew. All of us. We knew.

Our realtor hadn't even seen it, which seems improbable, even impossible, given the fact that it's been on the market for two years and there are very few houses for sale here. But I guess it was just waiting for us. It knew better than we did, or at least than I did, about what we needed. A desk nestled into the kitchen, a wood stove in the living room, a room that can only be reached by ladder-just the thing for an almost ten year old boy.

There are plenty of things that need doing on this house. Walls that need to be painted, carpet that needs tearing up, a little cottage by the brook that will, with some work, be an excellent work space for me, and also a guest house for our friends. A garden needs to be planned and built, a deck needs railings that you can't fall through. But even with the work that needs doing, maybe because of the work that needs doing, we love it. There are river rocks set into the chimney and windows that look out onto nothing but green and a workshop for Will. There is a convergence of four brooks that all meet at the perfect spot for a fort. There is a fairy house.

And at last. We are home.

knit swap

Before we moved to Vermont, before we even knew we were moving to Vermont, I signed up for a tea-themed knitting swap through Ravelry, my first ever. What, exactly, possessed me to commit myself to a swap when I knew we would be in the middle of graduation, job hunting, packing, moving, buying, renting, car shopping, school hunting and all the other lovely chaotic things that come from moving a family from one place to another, I'm not really sure. But I did, and with the swap due by the end of the month, I put together my package last night and now I'm afraid I'm hooked. Because as much as I love receiving gifts (who doesn't), thinking up fun ways to treat a perfect stranger on a set budget - this swap had a max of $15 - was really, really fun. If you happen to by my swap partner, look away! I don't want to spoil the fun. But for anyone else who might be interested in what went into my box, here we go.

Because the swap had a pretty low max spending point, I had to get a little creative in order to fit everything I wanted to send into my budget. This is my first swap so it's possible that this is cheating a bit, but one of the tricks I used was to buy things that came in larger amounts and then split them up so that only part of them went into the package. So instead of sending a $10 box of tea, I just packaged up a few tea bags in little fabric bags that I made from larger pieces I needed for a project for Evie. I was trying very hard to stick with locally made or purchased items for my swap, which often means the prices were higher, but by splitting it, I came in just under the wire.

So, into my box went four tiny tea themed stitch marker (these were the only non-local thing, but I found them on etsy so I was supporting a local artist somewhere) some chocolates from Lake Champlain Chocolate Company, yarn sold by the local yarn store and milled at a farm on the Vermont/New Hampshire boarder, tea bags from the Groove Tea Project, which has a great mission,  and a project bag made from fabric I picked up in Burlington at the fun and fabulous Nido yarn and fabric store.

I wrote little tags describing where things had come from and, other than the project bag and the yarn, wound them, along with the corresponding items, into a surprise ball. I'd never made a surprise ball before but it was a lot of fun, I think I'll have to put some together for the kids. They would love the idea of unwinding a ball and finding little treasures as you go. 

Have you ever done a swap? Since it's my first, I have no idea if what I put in is what usually goes in, but I had a great time with it, so I'm not too worried. I think I'll have to make a habit of making a project bag for every swap. I find them so handy and they are fun to make. This time I tried out using a french seam for the edges so that there would be no fraying inside the bag. Ah, I miss having a serger. One of these days...

day camping

We had great plans to make our first foray into canoe camping this weekend. Alas, it seems that everyone else also had the same idea and by the time we tried to reserve a campsite, there were none available. In the whole state of Vermont. And also New Hampshire and the easily drivable part of upstate New York. Ah well.

With all our gear ready and camping food packed (BBQ jars!) we set off for the Green River Reservoir to do a little day camping and to check out the rustic canoe camping sites for next time (When we will book well ahead. Ahem)

Compared to Blueberry Lake, the reservoir is huge. We paddled past island camping sites to a day use area at one end of the lake and spent most of the day swimming, fishing, sunning and swinging on a rope swing we found tucked along the edge of the water.

With no motorboats allowed, the lake was quiet and peaceful. Before the sun went down we cruised around the edges, watching campers set up for the night and loons diving for their dinner. By the time we got home, the kids were asleep and our arms felt a little jelly-like but oh, we've found the perfect campsite. And also a snack-bar with 60 flavors of creemes (soft serve) conveniently located at point in the drive where we all realized we were starving. Perfect.

Although having hauled in everything we needed for day camping, I'm not exactly sure how we will add a tent and sleeping bags. And more food. And clothes. And a dog. Maybe we can load up Will's float tube and pull it behind us. Anyone ever canoe camped? Advice?