Latitude 61...Land of the Midnight Sun

Tour de France Time

I have been watching the Tour de France constantly so not getting as much color knitting done as usual... just working on socks since I don't have to look at those while I knit. I'm almost finished with my husband's socks and here is a picture of how the yarn looks. He chose the colors and actually found something he likes, so that will be nice.

(Gratuitous Alaska scenery shot!)

We have been riding our bikes constantly because watching the Tour is such good motivation. I haven't taken many pictures though because our summer weather this year has been heavily overcast, dark, and gloomy.

We have had 2 sunny days... truly dismal! I did get some good pictures on those two days.

We have taken two trips to ride our bikes. The first one was to Talkeetna again, as we had so much fun there in May and it's not very far. I had planned to take the Loopy Ewe postcard to try to get a good picture of Mt. McKinley to enter in their contest for distant locations. When we visited Talkeetna in May, McKinley, as usual, wasn't visible. It's almost always wrapped in a blanket of clouds, especially in the summer. This time we lucked out! It was a completely clear day and we could not only see Mt. McKinley, but the whole range was visible; Mt. Hunter, Mt. McKinley, and Mt. Foraker!  Jackpot!

The lighting could have been better, but I'm not complaining.
Unfortunately, I forgot my Loopy Ewe postcard! I can't believe how forgetful I've become. Last May, I forgot my knitting... and now I forgot the postcard! Well, I took the picture anyway... at least I have the Loopy sock bag. Please ignore the bad hair day... bike helmets are not kind to hair!

Besides, even if we go to Talkeetna again this summer, odds are that McKinley will be hidden again.

So, I am posting some gratuitous Alaska scenery pictures for those out-of-state readers who have asked me many times what Alaska looks like.

Here's one of our best "May in Talkeetna" pictures where we had lots of clouds and no view of McKinley.

Spring and Summer have been so cool this year that May still looks like winter with lots of ice still on the river and no leaves on the trees or bushes.

Here is our second sunny day of July... we went for a bike ride and got a nice "sunny lighting" picture. This picture is taken about 10-15 miles from our house and shows the local mountains, The Chugach range. All the trees in the foreground are dead because the ground sunk after the great 1964 earthquake, flooding this meadow and turning it into a wetlands.

I had intended to post these pictures in a more timely fashion coinciding with the month in which I took them, but we have had a lot of internet connectivity problems and I was really tied up in June with Marathon training.

Finally a Finished Object!

Happy Fourth of July to everyone!

I am celebrating by finally finishing one of my too many WIP's... but at last I have one of them finished.

With all the time I have been spending walking, it's been hard to concentrate on the larger projects so I have been working on socks. I had the finished pieced of Irish Beach set aside and ready to sew, so I just decided to get it done.

The sewing went quickly, although one of the sides came out crooked and I had to rip it out and sew it again. I forgot that seed stitch tends to produce a fabric that stretches on the bias, which it did! The crookedness wouldn't have been noticeable except for the nice, defined horizontal pattern which draws attention to anything wonky. The sun came out briefly today enabling me to quickly take a picture. I didn't realize until I had taken the sweater off the wooly board that I had it set up backwards, so here is the reversed picture of Irish Beach. Luckily, the front and back are the same anyway except for the neckline.

 Interesting....Typepad redid their blog process of images and I haven't learned their new system yet... this is larger than I expected.

Now an update on my marathon effort which I neglected to post. I did finish the entire marathon course... 26.3 miles! No records here though... although I'm a fast enough walker, I don't run, which makes for a slow time. I'm still pleased... I wasn't sure if I could walk that far, since it was my first one. All this to get fit and lose weight!

Summer Solstice

 Solstice... my favorite day of the year. Now we have almost unlimited daylight which is very exciting.
The sun rises now at 4:20 AM and sets at 11:42 PM although it doesn't really even get dark; just stays twilit.
Now if it would just be sunny, instead of just daylight. This summer has not only been unseasonably cool, but it's been overcast almost every day, either with clouds or with fog.

I haven't done a post for a long time... trouble with Type pad and lots of summer chores to do.  So, I haven't been doing as much knitting as usual. This is the time to do all the yard work that accumulates all winter under snow. I didn't weed as thoroughly as I should have last summer, so now I'm paying the price... probably twice as many weeds as last year! I will be weeding, since I do it only a little at a time until September, I think. I got a late start gardening too, as we took our vacation in May.

I was able to finish knitting the socks that I took on vacation... nice lacy ones for summer.

I also have a good start on the Rosarie de l'Haye vest.  It is going well so far, although I may have to add some length to it... I have a long torso and I don't like the fit of short tops.

I have set Abalone aside until I feel ready to take on the challenge of having to rechart the shoulders. After I knit the shoulders twice; once without the perie pattern that didn't match, then once with the perie pattern which should have matched, but still didn't; I did the 3 needle bind off on the shoulders to see if it would look OK... or not.

NOT! I can't stand the way the shoulder join looks, so I'm going to frog it and put the perie pattern back at the top... this time it will hopefully match. So Abalone is hibernating while I get over my anger, exasperation and disappointment.

Much of my knitting time has been taken up with marathon training. While I am certainly not a runner, I  have decided to walk the Mayor's Marathon this year. The training during the week hasn't been too time consuming, but the week-end walks have eaten up my Saturdays taking more and more time as the distance increased. I completed a 20 mile walk a couple of weeks ago, so I should be as ready as possible for the marathon which is tomorrow.

Now... an anniversary to my blog! It is one year old today!

A Very Short Trip!

We started our vacation yesterday, drove to Talkeetna, and when we arrived... I discovered that I had forgotten to put my knitting into the truck! Well, I was very depressed because even though our vacation is mainly to ride our bikes somewhere warm, what good is a vacation with NO knitting!

So, we spent a delightful sunny night in a very cute little cabin and then had a wonderful bike ride today with a view of this!

Even though it wasn't very warm yet, one advantage of our late spring is, there weren't many mosquitoes about yet... the plague of Alaskan summers!

We rode about 20 miles and while riding, my DH suggested that since we had only driven about 125 miles, we should just go home and get my knitting and start again tomorrow. I wasn't even going to ask! I figured that forgetting my knitting just topped off the unlucky, disorganized kind of week I have had.

So, here we are home again tonight, then off again tomorrow so I won't have any more interesting vacation pictures for about a week.

Also, I posted my last blog entry in such a hurry that I forgot to include the picture of the Mary Tudor yarn, for those of you knitters actually interested in the somewhat "raw materials".
So here is the yarn I bought from She Ewe Knits for a very authentically colored Mary Tudor, which is the way I always wanted to knit it. Thanks again, Anne!

Death of an iPod

     If someone had told me how I was going to kill my iPod, I would have laughed and thought, not too likely!
Nevertheless, this is how it happened. I have been doing contrast therapy for my knee all week; ice, then heat, then sports cream and exercise. Instead of applying a heat pack, I have been standing on the bench in our hot tub. This morning, some of the water had leaked out, (We have one of the old, California redwood tubs and it leaks after awhile) and the water level came only up to the bottom of my knee so I decided to stand on the bottom of the tub. Well, it was a bit deeper than I thought and was almost up to my waist, but it felt really nice, so I stood there for the 5 minutes prescribed happily listening to my IPod. Then, when I climbed out, I noticed that my fanny pack had submerged itself below the water line with my iPod in it!
It was still playing, so I hadn't noticed, but it didn't play for long. It was quite full of water. Of course, we leave on vacation tomorrow so now I have to buy a new one and get it loaded!

This whole week has been full of mis-adventures. I haven't been "up" to blogging because I felt rather discouraged. All last week I tried to finish Abalone to the shoulders but then after knitting late Saturday night discovered that the shoulders didn't match! I thought I had made a mistake at first, but after reading the directions again... no mistake. It's probably the only size with directions for unmatched shoulders!

Feeling very exasperated Sunday I tackled knitting the perie pattern onto the top of the body thinking that I could at least get that to match. NO MATCH either!!! I was so upset and so angry by then that I had to just put it away. I know I can get it to match eventually, but I need some "space" from it first.

Doesn't look too bad from the front, but looks can be deceiving.

Here it is in it's terrible hideousness!

One high note of the week... I received the yarn from She Ewe Knits for a very authentically colored Mary Tudor, which is the way I always wanted to knit it. Thanks Anne!

So tomorrow we are off on our biking vacation and hopefully we'll have sunny and warm weather; unlike here! This is the coldest, latest spring that I can remember having for a long time and it's beginning to get a little depressing.

Put a stick in it...

Put a stick in this... it's done! At least I hope so. We got 21 inches of snow... again, Friday night through Saturday morning.

By Saturday afternoon is was melting away and had decreased to a mere 18 inches!

Sigh... I am so tired of snow. It's not that it would be too much for, say, December; it's that it's just too much (more) now!

My daffodils had sprouted up to about the height of six inches, and are now buried... probably victims of terminal frostbite.

However, such pristine snow should not go underutilized!  It made the perfect back drop to show off progress on Irish Beach, and with all the snow I did quite a bit of knitting this week-end.

    I am knitting both sleeves at once and they are about half finished, so this should be finished soon.

Hello Moose!

This morning we had a local moose enjoying what remains of our snowy yard. I'm not sure if she wanted a cool place to rest, or a bug-free zone, as our mosquitoes are beginning to emerge with the grass.

Usually, I like to vary my knitting working on different projects daily, or even alternating several per day, but lately, I have been knitting only in Abalone. I find these colors and pattern so interesting that I just don't want to knit on anything else, just yet. I am "up" to the neckline steeks now, although I took this picture yesterday when the lighting was good, and when there wasn't a moose "parked" in my favorite snow bank! So, once again, Abalone on ice... Maybe next time I can pose it on grass... that would be a nice change.

An Ode to Wool...

When we first moved to Alaska, I was excited about the invention of synthetic Pile clothing, discovering the coats and jackets from Patagonia. Since we never lived in a town with a dry cleaners, keeping our old, bought-in-California wool clothing clean was an impossibility. While I loved my warm and toasty wool shirts, socks, pants and coat, keeping them from smelling like dogs, wood smoke, cats, cooking odors, or worst of all, leaky baby diapers was impossible, and putting really rank smelling clothing on was less than attractive to me. Over 15 years we lived in many towns without a dry cleaners: Gakona, Kenny Lake, Kotzebue, and Bethel. During that time, I replaced most of my wool clothing with synthetic fabrics which were warm and washable.
New problems cropped up with synthetics though. While washable, certain unpleasant odors never seemed to come out. They tended to turn into horrible, pill covered messes after many washings and dryings. Worst of all, every thing touched indoors or out after moving around wearing pile, generated such strong static shocks, that you might think that you had been electrocuted.
So, when we moved to Anchorage, which had not only one, but many dry-cleaners, I was ecstatic. With attrition, I slowly replaced my pile clothing with my beloved woolens. That worked really well for awhile, until about 2 years ago when I took my favorite winter coat to the dry cleaners to be cleaned. I was stunned when I got the bill... $23.45 to have my coat dry cleaned. There must be some mistake, I thought.  After all, if I paid that to clean it several times, and I might as well buy a new one!  I checked prices around town and they were all about the same. I guess I am just frugal, but I kept thinking it would sure be nice if I could just wash it myself and save a lot of money, but I knew it would be hopelessly shrunken if I did that.

Epiphany! Why not knit sweaters to be worn as coats and wash them myself? Of course, what I didn't realize then was that I would enjoy knitting the sweaters so much that I would "need" a lot of them!

So, after a long boring story, I fairly recently bought 2 new sweater kits to wear as coats. The first one, which I haven't knitted yet, is Guinevere from Twisted Traditions. I have no excuse for not having knit it yet except I always seem to plan (dream) way ahead of what I can actually knit.

The second sweater planned to be a coat is the Flora jacket in the Glen colorway from Virtual Yarns.

Now, of course I really didn't need another one. But after admiring for the bazillionth time the wonderful "finished objects" of Marina, I notice that Flora had a collar! Perfect for Fall or "warm" winter weather.

Why hadn't I noticed the collar before??? Well, it is just too perfect, so I ordered it a couple of weeks ago. (So when my husband asked me about the new box marked "royal mail" I just fessed up. "Marina made me do it... it's all her fault!" I don't know why he didn't believe me... he seems to have some warped sense of personal responsibility.

So, for those readers who want to skip all the wordy text and get right to the pictures, here is the "before" picture of Flora which will soon, meaning sometime in my life time, be knitted into a sweater/coat.

 

For all of you readers who want to know how Fulmar, Abalone, Luskentyre, Marihone,  Irish Beach and Keava are progressing, progress seems to be microscopic, so I didn't take any new pictures yet. You can see mostly up-to-date pictures on Ravelry under CarolyninAlaska.

Sunshine on snow...

Yesterday was an absolutely brilliant day! There's nothing as bright as sunshine on new snow.
Unfortunately, it wasn't as warm as it looks, so not much melted.
Still, even cold, this is better than the day before...

So dark and gloomy it looks like December again.

Now, time to post my knitting progress.

I was asked to show progress on Abalone and Fulmar, so I managed to take some new pictures.

Both are outdoors where the light is better, so they got a little snowy.

Here is Abalone now:

It's so much fun to work on that it's hard to resist gobbling it up and ignoring every thing else!

Here's Fulmar now: very slow progress indeed.

(Bad typepad... crashed again and messed up my spacing!) I'm not going to try to correct anything because it keeps timing out! This must be a bad time to try to post anything!)

When it takes three rows at about 30-45 minutes a row to add up to one centimeter of knitting... well, do the math. I guess, someday, I'll have a sweater to wear!

So Dominique, these pictures are especially for you. You can look at the snow and then enjoy your time somewhere very warm and sunny soon!

And I thought is was spring?

Yesterday, we had an unusually late spring storm that dumped over a foot of snow on us, and still counting.
It's still snowing now, although it's starting to finally taper off... I hope!
Almost all the snow in our yarn had melted and the "small glacier" on our deck was finally gone, and now this!
Back to winter in a single day. I thought the snow picture looked so unique for this time of  year, but scrolling back through my photos, I realize that it looks like every other snow picture I took from October until now. When will winter ever end?

Well, I didn't even leave the house yesterday as the roads were terrible, so I finished one of the sleeves of Luskentyre.  I really did get a lot of knitting done.

I'm going to work on Fulmar and Abalone for a week to take a break from the second sleeve. Mentally I'm ready for different patterns.

Now this picture is proof to my friends who think all I ever do is knit, that I like to do other things too.
This photo was taken last week-end before the big storm...
We just bought new studded tires for our bikes and this was the easiest part of the trail that we rode all day. I discovered that I am not the competent mt. biker that I thought I was, at least not on snow, and I fell once. I need lots more practice!
Of course, there is never a shortage of snow in Alaska, so I will probably get a lot of practice.
(I'm not riding today though... it's still snowing and riding through loose, deep snow is too much work, so I'm going to be a wimp and knit all day!)