Trees

I just noticed the "kind of" theme of my latest busy-ness. Trees. Mostly. Sort of.
My brother has a huge volunteer of a climbing rose. I decided to try a nifty trick for propagating roses I'd heard about to see if it would work.

Cut potatoes in half. Puncture them in the middle. Then, sprinkle the potatoes with cinnamon and put the end of the rose cutting in the potato. Cover with soil and keep moist for a couple of months. ...We'll see. And I'll let you know what happens!

On a lovely spring day, I went outside with my warping reel to prepare for my next weaving project. All of these "ends" (pieces of yarn) follow the same path over and over. That way each is the same length as the others. Then, onto the loom.

 

More specifically, onto Sophie's drawloom! What fun! Trees!!! I just copied this pattern from the teaching video by Becky Ashenden. Then, I took about three days, with the help of the Ravelry weaving community (it's kind of like Facebook for fiber nerds), to work the kinks out.  

Almost. I've been told that weaving with the drawloom is slow going, but the only thing slowing me down is this. Note to self. Don't use newspaper for "quills" (like bobbins, they're what you wrap the yarn around). Way too fragile.  Using the drawloom is  like weaving a simple piece of [ground] cloth while overlaying it with a woven design...all at the same time. It's kind of like two layers, only not.

 

There is no "kind of" about this. I taught myself to double knit. Here, I'm actually knitting a separate front and back of this afghan at the same time! In this picture, you can see white for the front and black for the back. Those yarn colors are switched for the pattern.

My youngest son chose this tree design from an old pattern book. It looks like an inkblot of trees to me. The original was only knit as a single layer with a crocheted border. To make the afghan longer, I added more rows in the center area. And I knit the border as I went along.

Trees!