Solas na Cruinne

“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”
~ Dale Carnegie, American writer and lecturer

This is our first year of gardening and we are finally getting in our first plants for the season. :-)

Thanks to Serge’s great research we are planting our organic garden by the moon (check it out here and here.) And, thanks to both of our physical labor, the first beds were tilled and filled and planted today.

Serge had a blast coating his potato starts in natural sulfur and placing them in the 2×2′ potato boxes. Box #1 in named Grawp and has big Kennebec potatoes in it. Box #2 is named Hagrid and has Yukon Golds in it. We’ll see how they turn out.

I am also very interested in companion planting so we are mixing carrots, onion and lettuce in the 8×4′ bed which is named Joy. Yes, we know it’s weird to name our beds instead of numbering them but, so what!

Not all of the beds are built yet but the root veggies which needed to go in during the 3rd quarter of the moon, are in their beds sleeping tight tonight.

We will plant some more onions and carrots out of their proper moon phase to see the difference in how they turn out.

Garlic will have to go in late for this one first year of gardening because our local farmers co-op was out of them already. We also had to drive halfway-across the state to another farmers supply to find potato starts. I guess we needed to buy them by the end of April according to the helpful lady at the second farm supply. (Lesson learned.)

Tomorrow we have a little helper in the form of our roommate, so hopefully more strides will be made in building, tilling and filling beds as well as towards tearing down that huge pile of loam/peat/compost mix in the back yard! Yippee!

Of course, I could have figured out myself how to change a bicycle tire :o) But there is something reassuring in learning it from an expert, especially a local one. Parker Ramspott has owned and operated a bicycle store in Amherst, Massachusetts for over 20 years, which just an hour drive from where we live right now.

The video below explains how to install a new bicycle tire, plainly and simply. Be sure to check out the rest of the series: Repairing a Bicycle Tire.

“Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.”
~ Arnold Henry Glasow, American Thinker & Humorist

I did it! I did it! Check it out…a successfully turned sock heel. No tears. No tragedies. No runs. Just a heel…simple.

I have finally made a sock that is shaped like a foot! Imagine that? Lil’ ole me? How cool!

I told the harrowing tale of my lack of sock-making prowess in a previous post. After nine tries with several different techniques, patterns and yarns, I have achieved sockdom! Yay for me! Two pairs complete now.

Anyone who doesn’t knit is probably thinking, “Okay, so this chick is crazy.” But anyone who does knit and has tried to graduate from flatness (ie. blankets and scarves) to shapeliness (ie. sweaters, teddy bears, gloves and socks) can probably grasp my joy.

Making a thing rounded, and knitting so that it turns corners etc., is essentially easy. But if you’ve never done it before you don’t KNOW that.

The directions for heel turning, and necks and armholes and other such things, seem counter-intuitive to the first-timer. Hence the problem. You don’t want to do exactly what the directions say, you want to interpret them, through the mind if a flat-knitter.

All I can say is: “Don’t interpret, just do!”

Once I figured that out, it actually worked! Imagine that? Directions that work? LOL.

Now that I have done it a couple of times I feel really confident about sock-making. There is no longer anything about socks that I am unable to do, but I must admit that I don’t particularly enjoy the picking up stitches after you’ve turned the heel. I can do it though, just not as enjoyable as, say, doing the toe.

I promise that once you’ve turned ONE heel (or maybe TWO,) you will have it mastered. :-)

So here is to self-striping yarns, yummy dye lots, squishy alpaca, shiny silk, curly mohair and, oh yeah, Happy Knitting!

By the way, you can find me on Ravelry as owlsocks. ;-)