Fiber and Faucets

Saturday, we went to a little fiber festival in Mason, MI, featuring fiber from four different local farms. I purchased about 12 oz of wool roving for spinning, shown above. The green is hand dyed Romney, and the brown is natural-colored Blue Faced Leicester from a sheep named Snickers. I believe it will match the handspun I made Scott a hat from a few years ago.

Mason is just a few miles south of Lansing, so we spent the rest of the day with a couple of friends who live there. We saw the house Bones bought earlier this year, and then went out for sushi, followed by a trip to the MSU dairy store, where we bought some interesting hard cheeses to try and ate some ice cream.



Sunday, Scott installed a new goose neck faucet in our kitchen. I am very exited about it because I can now get our big soup and canning pots under the faucet to fill them properly, plus it's much more attractive. Unfortunately, getting the old faucet out was a major ordeal. The shut-off valves under the sink were not functional, and once we turned the water off, they were stuck so hard on there that Scott was forced to cut them off with a hacksaw. He also struggled to unbolt the existing faucet from the sink, even with the help of penetrating oil. All of this unforeseen trouble led to several trips to the hardware store. Eventually, the faucet came off, and all of the new fittings and fixtures went in like a breeze. The pretty, new faucet is working great.



Inspired by our trip to the fiber fair, I spent a lot of Sunday spinning and plying the yarn pictured above. Sadly, my photography skills are a bit lacking, and the skein appears a bit washed out, but on the whole it is much more washed out than the original fiber was. I think I regret my choice to divide it into three sections and ply them together for a marled yarn. The result was a subtly variegated sage green yarn with an overall feel like an elven cloak from Lothlorien. My sections weren't quite even, so once I ran out of the first single, I navajo plied the remaining yarn. You can see the resulting small skein sitting on the table in front of the main skein. The difference is marked between the contrasts in this skein and the blends of the other. In retrospect, navajo plying all of the yarn would have created an effect that would have made the yarn better resemble the roving. I am not entirely sure what made this not as successful as other marled yarns I have made in the past, but I suspect it was a combination of the width of the roving and the length of the color sections. This has certainly been a lesson in controlling color results from my spinning.

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Kitchen Before and After

While I didn't really take before pictures of the entire kitchen, here is the summary so you can see what we finished last week. Remember the before, peachy-pink with stenciled ivy?



See the result after the jump.

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Paint Progress

Today should be my final day of painting. Good thing, too, since we are having a lot of people over on Friday for a Halloween party.



I did end up thinking that the Benjamin Moore Buxton Blue was too light. In our house full of dark colors, it ended up reading as baby blue, which wasn't good. On Monday we went to the closest hardware store and got a gallon of Dutch Boy Founding Father.



Remember, here's my inspiration, from Plain English Designs:



I'm really frustrated with myself because I think it isn't right either. I think if I hadn't been so impatient, and we had gone to the other hardware store and gotten the Benjamin Moore Jamestown Blue, which is the darker version of the Buxton Blue, then I would have had exactly what I wanted. I should have trusted my original instinct in the store that the Buxton Blue would be too light. And I should have brought home a color card and thought about it all more. I didn't have a color card at home when I decided to go darker, and I would have had to drive to the store to get one before I made my decision, whereas the other store was right around the corner, and I had a couple of colors I was looking at from there, plus I had tried to go to the other store the day before, but they were already closed. I was just too impatient, and now I think the color is too dark and kind of a boring plain blue whereas I wanted a greener, grayer blue. It's good enough, I suppose, and if the walls weren't primer white, it would probably be better. It's definitely not exactly what I wanted, but I am not going to do any more painting now. I am far too frustrated about having my kitchen and entire living area turned upside down, plus the price of paint is really adding up.

What I am totally pleased with is the repair job that Scott did on the cabinets over the sink.

As you can see, there was a stupid gap between the end of the top moulding on the side and the end on the front. This was on both cabinets on either side of the sink.



Scott filled it in beautifully with wood putty, perfectly mimicking the molding itself.



I am painting the final doors today, and I will show some after photos when have put them up.

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Progress and Inspiration

Over the last two days, while I had no internet access, I painted more of the kitchen. On Monday night, we went to the hardware store and priced some things and purchased others. One thing we got was a new light for the kitchen to replace the cheesy chandelier that was there. Scott installed it last night.



He also very kindly sanded the rest of the spots that I had plastered, since sanding is one of my absolutely least favorite task. Today, I primed the rest of the walls, except the one behind the appliances because I was unable to move them.

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Progress and diversions

Friday morning, I was distracted by looking at other people's design blogs, and I was just getting to working on plastering and sanding when we had a brown out. I ended up doing two stupid things: going to the grocery store while hungry and going to the hardware store while feeling bad about my house.

I was lucky, though, in that the hardware store was having a half-off plant sale.



I brought home some green-edged hostas and daylillies to provide some contrast to the white edges hostas in our front yard.

Yesterday, we went to the Eastern Market, a farmer's market that has been held every Saturday in downtown Detroit since 1891. According to the website, it extends for six blocks. It is a very interesting place, with local farmers, and people who bring in some produce from elsewhere, bakers, florists, and spice vendors in the main buildings, surrounded by shops selling food, drink, and candy. A lot of those buildings are butchers and fishmongers who clearly cater to restaurants, as they sell huge slabs of meat that a typical consumer would buy a slice or two of. Some of the adjacent buildings were restaurants, and some were both butcher shops and sandwich shops! We had a great time exploring, but I forgot my camera. We plan to go back next week for the beer festival, so I will try to remember then.

After we got home, Scott had to do some work for a deadline at his office. While he was doing that, I went outside and planted the things I bought Friday.

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Paints and dyes

In many ways, this week has been very frustrating for me. I have been preparing to paint our kitchen, which means that I have spent a fair amount of time scrubbing the walls and cabinets. This is a task that leaves very few visible results, which can be discouraging at the end of the day. Sometimes I feel like I have done little other than looking at other people's logs about what wonderful things they have done at their houses. That might be inspiring if I actually needed ideas rather than having more ideas than I can implement.

The main reasons that I haven't posted this week is that I hadn't finished anything, and for a while there, I didn't have anything to show for what I was working on.

Scott has been planning to rework his kitchen, but it still has the decor that it had when he moved in, because his plans are the ambitious kind that he is not ready to start yet.



Those of you who are familiar with my taste will guess that I am not a fan of the light peachy pink walls, and I am more likely to be found freeing a tree from being strangled by ivy than using ivy in any decorative or horticultural capacity.

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