Mossy Cottage Knits

How to Make a Relationship Stronger

My vision of what our four-day Thanksgiving weekend would be like: It would start with this, our usual Lilliputian but sumptuous, two-person Thanksgiving (er, most of the food was still in the kitchen; despite appearances, we did not have just gravy, cranberry sauce and butter for our Thanksgiving meal)...

...and segue into three more days of tea-drinking, cribbage-playing, dog-walking, movie-watching, video-game-playing, knitting, and the consuming of copious amounts of Thanksgiving leftovers. Followed by more tea. And more walks. And movies. And video games. And knitting. Oh, and sleeping. Lots of sleeping.

The Mysterious K’s vision of what our four-day Thanksgiving weekend would be like:

“Hey! Let’s paint the guest room!”

(I think I have mostly Elaine and Leslie to blame for this insanity since I believe their detailed descriptions of the improvements they’ve made to their house rekindled the home-renovation fire under TMK.)

After 19 years, I thought TMK understood. I’m a princess. I don’t do home renovations. Which is why I was so baffled to find myself standing on a ladder taping off the ceiling. And even more baffled to find myself on my knees taping tarp to the baseboard. And to find myself with a paintbrush in my hand. And to find splashes of Portsmouth Olive green paint on my face and my hands and my clothes. And to find myself putting Liquid Nails on the back of some wainscoting. And to hear a nail gun going off a foot from my head while I held the wainscoting in place. I’m a princess, damn it!

The admittedly uninspiring storage closet room as it looked on Friday:

The room as it looked on Saturday, torn apart and taped and tarped to within an inch of its life:

What to do when you run out of tarp, you still have to cover the entrance to the room, and your partner happens to be a graphic designer with an endless supply of 11” x 17” paper:

The first coat. The paint is a really lovely green, sort of a dark sage.

Because we planned on putting wainscoting up, we didn’t need to paint all the way down to the baseboard…which meant we needed a handy-dandy reference point for figuring out how far down the wall we could stop painting. Come to find out that that handy-dandy reference point was, in fact, our belly buttons. This meant that, had you been a fly on the wall, you would have heard frequent mutters of “Belly button. Belly button. Belly button,” and seen us poking bizarrely at our midsections and then to the wall and at our midsections again and back to the wall as we gauged yet one more time how far down we needed to paint. (Of course, after the fact, we discovered that our belly buttons are at two completely different heights. Need I say one side of the room needed a little more paint?)

Thank Gawd for the four-hour drying time between coats, because that’s when I managed to squeeze in some knitting. I finished the second of what could best be called the Cloud Mittens since they follow the mohair-additive principle of the Cloud Hat:

Thanks to freezing temperatures, I personally had many opportunities this week to test-wear the Cloud Mittens, and I learned that the itch of mohair is directly proportional to the temperature. At 40 degrees, you just want to tear the frickin' mittens off and scratch your skin raw. At 35 degrees, you find you can live with the itch. At 28 degrees, you feel nary a scratch and are grateful for their surrounding warmth. Methinks these are going to work very well for our Mongolian brethren.

I also started designing this, a hat using one of the leaf patterns from “Poetry in Stitches”:

The rim of the hat, my first attempt at a braided edge:

But don't get too attached to the hat; it has already been frogged. Apparently smooth machine-washable Dale Baby Ull, very smooth metal circular needles, and stranded knitting do not go well together. Knitting the hat was a slippery, sloppy process and my stitches varied wildly in size. To make matters worse, I grabbed the needle, pulled in the wrong direction, and half of the stitches went sliding off. Not fun. There will definitely be a Round 2, maybe just not right away.

(Welcome back to Lisa in Oregon and Devin, returning Dear Readers! So good to hear from you! And my apologies to anyone whose comment I deleted in my too-eager attempt to get rid of spam. You have no idea how much I hate it when that happens.)

Posted by Ryan at November 28, 2005 02:07 PM