fibergarden

New Years’ Resolutions: I usually don’t do it, thinking (in advance) that I shouldn’t make promises I won’t keep. So after mulling it over and waiting until January 4th, I am making a few, public resolutions that I have good intentions of keeping. Here goes:

1. Lose 10 pounds by making better choices and exercise. No earth-shaking goal here, just a reasonable one that I really need to do for my own self-esteem, comfort and health.
2. Feed my family more vegetarian meals.
3. Waste less, especially food. I have a bad habit of buying too much and then we get distracted, end up getting take out or eating out and then there’s icky food to chuck or compost. We are not doing CSA veggies this year, so that will immediately help us not have weird veggies around that we don’t like and are too difficult to use (like how much freakin’ KALE do they think an average household eats? Blech). Otherwise, I just need to learn to use the big chest freezer we have better…if we’re not gonna eat it, freeze it asap. Then make sure to use the frozen goodies within a month. Just takes some better planning, really. I can do this!!!
4. Be a better friend. Just make an occasional phone call and be more accountable with thank you cards in a reasonable time. This should be easy but I hate hate hate the phone and have been really bad with birthdays and thank you’s for the past year and a half or so. Having a new baby was an excuse but he’s 1yo now and that is wearing thin, so I will try. I also want to get in touch with a few “long lost” friends. After going to my 20 year high school reunion in November and having a really good time, it hit me that I need to reel some old friends back into the fold.
5. Patience and kindness..with others, especially with little A who is so lovable and yet so hard to understand, with energy I never had and never will have, with her unusual issues, sensitivities, and strong will to boot. Gotta be more patient with her and I know she will respond well.
6. Make our home liveable again. It’s not dirt, it’s not too cluttered (more than most, but still reasonable), it’s just in need of decorating style work, really. I am going to bite off small “feel good” projects and make progress on this disaster of a house. We are dying from the non-renovated, “old and yucky” style and some minor work will make it 50% better. This is a “do what I can, on my own” attempt and hopefully will lead us to get the big projects worked on (like the back room that’s been under construction for 3+ years now). I want to be able to invite friends over without being embarrassed by this place. I started by getting a new beautiful lampshade for our antique lamp to replace the old, stained one, and ordering a few light fixtures that need to be replaced….good progress already, gotta keep it up.

And fiber resolutions…wouldn’t be right without em:

7. Shop from my stash first. I am a sucker for pretty hand dyed fibers from certain vendors on etsy/on-line, and just keep stashing fiber away. I don’t have a ton of yarn (yet), but loose fiber is building up around here and I just need to use my drum carder and either blend it and spin/felt it, or start to liquidate a bit by selling some batts. I am NOT going on a fiber diet, just vowing to slim down how much I have stored here, and also plan to wash and dye the couple of fleeces I bought in the fall at Rhinebeck.
8. Fibery resolution #2: Make more gifts in 2008. Craig is always telling me he’d prefer that I give things away that I make instead of selling my stuff, and while this resolution is not for his sake, he’s really right. The few things I did manage to make and give away were hits at Christmas, and I need to do more of this. I’m not gonna stop selling as I can’t shake the entrepreneur bug, but I am going to use my talents to make friends and family some nice unique gifts.
9. Finish some needlework UFO’s. For a while I was going strong on this, and lately I am much better at seeing projects from start to finish, but I need to go back to my “finish an old before I can start a new” item diet, which worked for me for a while.
10. Learn new techniques and do as much knitting-spinning-felting-weaving-crochet as possible in 2008! This is my easy goal, thrown in to make an even 10.

There, I’ve made a public list, now I hope I can live up to much of it in 2008!
Happy New Year to all!
Carrie

I dunno…here, there, everywhere. Too busy to blog in too long. Here’s the dirt, quick updates, a few pics:

Home and Shelter Island, shuttling back and forth for weekends by ourselves, with friends, and my parents before they head south to FL for the winter. Up to Rhinebeck for the NY sheep and wool festival in late October, where I bought a ton of fiber, a few tools, and a test run on that Ashford country spinner that is now on my want list for sure:

In laws visited on a weekend in late October for a quick fix to squeeze their grandkids and go home. We got to go to a really muddy but pretty cool halloween display (2000 carved/lit pumpkins!) at the Nassau County Museum of Art…

Working my arse off spinning a selection of yarn to get some into NYC for the first time ever, which is very exciting for me. Some of these yarns can now be found at The Point NYC!! The rest are available at Handmade (my web shop) and/or etsy shop for great last minute quick holiday knits, or just give a skein to your favorite knitter:

Kindergarten…PTA meetings, school, wow. Keeping track of homework, permission slips, school paperwork. Little A is learning so fast and loving K, thank goodness! Also managing the Feingold diet to see how it affects her behavior…the jury is still out on this one, I’m afraid.

Hugging baby O, who is almost a year old now. Time flies. He is currently on a nursing strike and I don’t know how long it’ll last. I sneak him some mama milk when he’s half asleep, but otherwise he won’t take it. He got mad at me when he bit me and I yelled “NO!” at him (not really, more like raised my voice a fair amount, but ouch, he was really hurting me!!!), we’ll see how this situation resolves soon enough, I guess.

My Sister has opened up a gallery in Greenport and has some of my finished fiber art wearables on display there with her beautiful photos of the East End of Long Island, so I’m currently scrambling through all my UFO’s for things I can finish up and put there. This is keeping me busy, along with an ever increasing array of new projects, feeding my kids, keeping the house in order (not really), holiday planning, etc.

Aaaaah…the life of a fiber-artist-mama is busy but fulfilling. Aside from not having enough hours in the day, and no longer being able to keep my eyes open late into the night, I can’t complain really.
xo

Sorry I’m still not posting about fibery stuff, but I have to get this one out there. Mattel is recalling 92 (YES, you read it right, I count 92 product numbers on their recall page–horrific!!!!!) children’s and baby fisher price toys that have lead paint on them. Here’s a link to the CPSC page about it. Most of them are Dora and Sesame Street characters, and all of them seem to be aimed at kids under 6 or so–the ones most likely to get brain damage from lead poisoning.

I’m on the CPSC mailing list for recalls, and every week it seems that I receive 2-3 emails of toys or kids’ jewelry that contains or is painted with lead paints. Remember the lead pvc lunch box scandal of two years ago? The recent Thomas the train recalls? Why can’t these companies have quality control? You know they would turn the stuff away if a shipload arrived in the USA painted green instead of orange. Why can’t they attempt to keep their customers safe? It makes me sick to think about it. I paid $2 apiece for good-quality lead testing swabs to check my house. Why can’t these companies simply test samples of this stuff before they make billions selling them to our children? I think that corporate lead testing needs to be a law to protect our kids. It’s simple and can’t cost more than a few bucks per item. Enough is enough.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I believe that PVC is an evil toxic product and that much of it is tainted with lead (no real science behind it yet, but from a little reading I’ve done I’ve come to this conclusion…apparently lead is often used as a stabilizer in vinyl–remember warnings not to drink from the hose? That’s one of the reasons!) Beware and be suspicious of all PVC products, and all items that come from places where manufacturing standards are questionable. Think of those poor people who painted all that stuff, probably not wearing any protective gear, and then going home to spread the lead onto their kids. No doubt the recall won’t protect them. Blech.

Off to throw away anything suspicious while little A isn’t watching, and to pray that someday our corporations act responsibly, sigh.

Sadly, I have to add this bit, from today’s Reuters news, 8/13:
China recall toy factory boss hangs himself IMO, despite the lead painted toys being his fault, and that he does bear responsibility for the safety of his workers and their families, ultimately the burden for this horrible crime rests elsewhere. If they had simply done routine and cheap testing (as I suggested above) when the toys left the factory/entered the US, the whole problem would have been avoided. At the heart of it, corporate execs in charge of quality control at Mattel and Fisher Price are responsible for this mess. So sad…

Craig’s truck made some nasty noises last week on his trip back from working at Brian’s house, and it was labeled ‘condemned’ when he dropped it at the shop–too many things wrong and rusting to drop more money into. Digging through for the title, I found the original window sticker. The old F150 cost us $14,000 and lasted 14 years for us, and I am sure we got our money’s worth from her.

We donated her to The Mothers Center today. The guy came to get the title this morning, and a salvage place picked it up later in the day, complete with the perfect background music blasting out the flatbed tow truck windows: Willie Nelson, singing “You were always on my mind”:

“Maybe I didn’t love you
Quite as often as I could have
Maybe I didn’t treat you
Quite as good as I should have…”

It was a melancholy but bearable goodbye until little A, standing on her chair at the front door began yelling/crying “I don’t want Daddy’s truck to go away like this.” Then we all got weepy. Craig caught the sad goodbye on video to share with the world:

It’s the end of an era for us, the last piece of equipment that belonged to our long-dissolved landscape company. Old truck, I could hear you coming down the road, transmission whining, from a mile away. In recent days, you often smelled of spilled coffee, fish and bait. In your heyday you hauled tons of stone and mulch and compost, plants and tools to many a landscape job. You transported half of our belongings from upstate NY to Long Island over several (usually rainy) trips. You picked up many a tag sale treasure and curbside trash for our collections. You were scratched, your upholstery was ripping, your radio tuner was broken and had to be tuned with a golf tee that stuck out of the dashboard. Your second gas tank couldn’t be filled any more because it leaked. But you were our first purchase of something major, “new”, together, way back then. Little did we know that just two weeks ago, when you hauled that load of debris to the dump on Shelter Island that it would be your last. Now we say good bye as you ride off to be recycled, going to some salvage yard to sit and be pulled apart into useful remnants to keep other old trucks running for years to come.

Saying goodbye was bittersweet. Rest in pieces, old friend.

A rant on how artificiallly colored mulch is now yet another symptom of a failing, sick society. Two recent mulch ‘incidents’:

1. Craig went to Home Depot to buy some bags of soil amendments and mulch. After much searching, he discovers that the only bagged mulch they sell is all DYED. Choices being Ronald McDonald Red and Black. They no longer offer natural brown or natural reddish-brown cedar mulch.

2. A friend who is an organically minded, natural living enthusiast purchased 3 yards of mulch, bulk, delivered to her house this week. Her goal was to mulch her gardens without the waste produced by all those bags. She consulted with me a few times–here’s a loose interpretation of one of our conversations:
S: They said it’s triple ground
me: that’s good, that means it won’t have a lot of stringy bits in it.
S: They’re delivering it today
me:fast service–good, what kind of mulch is it?
S: I don’t know, they said it’s black
me: natural black or is it dyed?
S: OH NO! (click, hangs up phone)
S: (calling back 3 minutes later) It’s dyed black aargh!
Of course, the mulch company had already charged her credit card, loaded the truck and were on their way to her house, so she spread it around, probably grumbling quietly to herself the whole time.

My point in this post is this: What the heck is wrong with society that we need to add color to mulch? What is the source of the pigment? Is it water based or will it leach out and eventually poison the groundwater some more and kill all the plants around it with yet more petro chemicals? Are we so vain that we need ‘designer’ mulches to match our designer lifestyles? What is so wrong with the plants being the important element in our gardens? Mulch is meant for weed suppression and moisture conservation. It is not ‘makeup’ designed to dress up lost cause landscaping. If your yard looks that bad, I promise you that orange mulch isn’t the answer to your problems, really.

IMNSHO, this is yet another symptom of a society that is really, really ill. I realize that nobody’s perfect. We all have things that we do/buy/wear/eat that are maybe not the best for us and the earth in different ways. Some of this stuff is just part of living in this society, some is unavoidable, some of it can be chalked up to the choices we make as individuals for whatever reasons. For example, I understand if you want to wear purple. It happens to be my favorite color. It takes dyes to make clothing in colors, and without some color, life would be boring. There is a long standing tradition of dyeing cloth. Food coloring is another example. My family chooses not to ingest this poison, but I realize that it is an old product that people find difficult to eliminate, or are so used to thinking is benign that they don’t realize it’s a petroleum product (yeah, really–makes you think twice, doesn’t it?). What I don’t get is why NEW products that are perfect the way they come (from nature) are adding to the list of pollutants and chemicals in a day when the effects of this stuff is so brutally obvious…terrible allergies and asthma, rampant cancer rates, global warming, trash piling up all over the planet. Honestly folks, why can’t we just put natural stuff in and on our yards? If you need something exciting, plant something that actually BLOOMS in your garden, instead of that buttload of ugly evergreen shrubs sheared into pompoms and gumdrops and cubes. And keep your nasty chemical dyes the hell out of the mulch. It really burns my britches, my eyes, and the earth. Can you just give nature a chance this one time? I beg you.

I’m reading the most amazing book, borrowed from good friend-mentor-mama-midwife Susan–her SIGNED copy (what faith she must have in me to allow me to borrow it, yes??). Joan Dye Gussow’s “This Organic Life, Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader”. This passage put a smile on my face and a tear in my eye:

“A week after Halloween this year, I went out and picked raspberries to put on morning cereal, an act that seems nothing short of erotic in November. I have remarked to friends more than once over the years that I am often trapped between personal happiness and existential grief. I mourn for the rapid decline of the natural world–to which I am deeply bound. At the same time, I experience irrepressible joy in tending to and eating from that part of the natural world to which I have bound myself.”

After reading this book (not finished yet), I vow that we will do our best to fill the veggie garden beds this year. We have neglected our front yard (to the disgust of the neighbors, I’m sure). We’ve slowly worked on shrub and perennial borders on the East edge of our 50×184 foot plot in the back, with some success. But our vegetable garden was painstakingly designed, laid out carefully and built from the very beginning of owning this house. It is a fantastic part of the yard that can only be improved upon by fully utilizing the space therein–something we have failde to do in recent years. Two years ago, good friends Dan and Cindy sent us a packet of Soybeans (edamame) which I still have sitting here. I failed to plant them, thinking that I couldn’t devote enough room in my suburban plot to the crop to make it worth planting, especially in beds that I already had plans for. We then proceeded to leave nearly half of our raised beds fallow for that season, a fact that made me feel guilty on so many levels.

So spring of 2007 is coming. We proceed with garden plans, purchase seeds, decide what plants to buy from the local garden center, what to start from scratch, and order blueberry plants to fill in our last edge space in the ‘produce’ area. In the 2006 fall/winter that was unseasonably warm (one that most of us believe was caused by the climate change that allows raspberries to be eaten in NY in November), Craig made excellent progress preparing all the beds with fresh compost that will be ready to turn in when the time comes, so we are ahead of the game. It will be my job to get things planted, as he promised to help weed and harvest this year. With our desire for locally grown, organic food, and newfound knowledge and interest, we push ahead.

Wish us luck. Now go buy some seeds, join a CSA (www.localharvest.org), go to your farmer’s market, and support LOCAL food. It’s critical to the sustenance of the earth.

I lovelovelove this song and can’t get it outta my head lately, especially this part:

“…blessed are the ones who make peace,
blessed are the ones who scrape by.
Blessed are those living holy lives,
And here’s to the rest of us who try.”

from “Jesus Shaves” by Paranoid Larry and his imaginary band. You should be able to listen to it here.

OK, can anybody explain to me how adding one member to the family (from 3 of us to 4) makes the amount of laundry that needs to be done multiply by about 3? I am now doing at least one load of laundry per day, some days 2-3 loads. And yes, I am doing cloth diapers for the babe (mostly), but even before I finally got my arse in gear and got that going, the amount of laundry was just insane.

And I don’t even do Craig’s laundry–he does his own (thanks honey, I love that you do your own laundry, btw).
This is just crazy. Talk amongst yourselves and somebody please get back to me with an answer to this crazy cosmic question, OK?

Sorry to all who wrote comments lately. My email notices stopped coming to the right place, so I had a pile up of spam and some great comments just sitting around waiting to be approved and/or deleted. They’re all posted now, thanks for the blogging love everybody!

OK, it’s a lame excuse for a post, but it’s what I’ve got for now. Too difficult to think and write my own commentary lately because it requires thinking clearly. Since I’m not at the top of my game right now, it’s easier to comment on these questions in the interest of letting friends know I’m still here! So here goes:

1. Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 123. Find the fifth sentence.Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog:

“The maneuver to be performed was of the simplest–point to point in space in a region which sould be treated as free of gravity strain since the two ships were practically the same distance from the Sun and Mars was too far away to matter. There were four simple steps: cancellation of the slight vector difference between the two ships (the relative speed with which the War God was pulling away), accelleration toward the War God, transit of the space between them, deceleration to match orbits and lie dead in space relative to each other on arrival.
Steps one and two would be combined by vector addition; step three was simply waiting time. The operation would be two maneuvers, two blasts on the jet. But step three, the time it would take to reach the War God, could be enormously cut down by lavish use of reactive mass.”

From Robert Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones”, a 1952 sci-fi book intended for teens (really, I think the publisher felt that Heinlein’s young adult writings were intended for boys, since many girls at that time were not generally thought to be interested in science fiction. Honestly, though, I doubt Heinlein himself could agree with that attitude. His writings about women were very liberal for their time–one of the reasons I love his books. In this book for example, the mother is an M.D. and the Grandmother is an engineer.)

2.stretch your left arm out as far as you can…what do you touch first?
a stirring stick in a ziplock bag, saved for color matching–from our latest painting adventure

3. what was the last thing you watched on tv?
the Yankee game

4. without looking, what time is it?
9:30am

5. what is the actual time?
10:06am

6. with the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
little A stomping around the back room that she’s not supposed to be in, cicadas buzzing outside in the trees, the sound of hammering and a nail gun, putting a new roof on a house a half block away.

7. when did you last step outside?
last night on our way home from the ‘good’ ice cream shop, yum!

8. what are you wearing?
an old white T-shirt from a wholesale nursery in the Chicagoland area, and big ugly stretchy gray knit maternity shorts.

9. when did you last laugh?
this morning when A studied the calendar on the fridge and proclaimed “…we’re going to go boating soon” as if she was planning our family social events for the next week.

10. seen something weird lately?
two stunningly beautiful goth lesbians kissing tenderly at the airport yesterday…you don’t see a sight like that too often around here.

11. what did you dream last night?
i have no idea

12. what’s on the walls of the room you’re in?
salvaged “temporary” (3 years old?) paneling that is in place to cover the bare studs until we remodel the back room someday. It is covered with little A’s art work, crusty old white plaster on one wall, a very large portrait of my parents with some of the packing materials still on the frame until I can find a proper home for the photo. A gold charger (large plate) with oak leaves from a beautiful 150+ year old tree our neighbors removed for no good reason, a watercolor painting of maple leaves that I did a long time ago.

13. what do you think of this survey?
interesting–thanks for posting it Natasha.

14. what was the last film you saw?
in the movies, like the real theatre? I have no idea–yeah it’s been that long.

15. if you became a multi-millionaire overnight what would you buy first?
Pay off our two mortgages, buy some land in upstate NY or PA or both, and hire a property manager, construction crew, and cleaning service to be available at a moment’s notice. Buy a biodiesel or new fuel efficient car. Help family and friends with their finances…who knows really…

16.tell me something about you that i don’t know.
I can’t stand ground beef. Give me a good steak, no problem, but ground beef disgusts me…it’s a texture thing, I guess, blech.

17. what would you change about the world?
I would stop the takeover of the world by huge profit-taking corporations who trample on the rights of everyone. If huge corporate profits didn’t control government, I believe that the world would be a cleaner, safer, more peaceful place where individuals would be able to maintain our privacy and freedom.

18.do you like to dance?
no, not really, though someday I’d love to learn to swing dance

19. imagine your first child is a girl, what do you name her?
already came true…it starts with A

20.boy?
according to our very recent ultrasound, the 2nd child on the way is a boy. My husband thinks he should be named Zeus, and I think not. Still working on this one.

21. would you ever consider living abroad?
probably, though it might depend a lot on #15. Craig lived in Hong Kong as a teen, and that fascinates me, as does the idea of living in a villa in Italy, but honestly, I’d have to try it out. I really do love the Northeast of the USA–NY and PA in particular. I think it would be hard to tear myself away from this area, friends and family too. It would be nice to live somewhere truly safe, where we could walk or bike to everything we need. Somewhere that has a weekend market with fresh farm products and handmade goods would be my preference as well, and it would have to have definite seasons–nothing tropical or frozen solid!