Meanwhile, it's been awhile since I showed the projects I've been working on. The prettiest is this shawl for a friend to wear at her wedding (might wear it as a shawl, might pin it in her hair as a veil). It's a handspun fine wool/silk and weighs about two ounces.
On the other end of the "pretty" scale is this scarf--a little over half finished now. Store-bought yarn for this one. Each color represents 5 degrees of temperature--so it was pale blues and purples in January and February, and oranges and reds now. More yellows and greens than it would have normally been because it rained for about 6 weeks in a row and it kept the temperatures down a bit. I knit one line a day--so it should be finished by January 1 and show the year in temperatures.
Now that Ella the Hawk is more-or-less trained, the next step is to teach her to get into a carrying box--that's going to be a challenge. The first challenge was that we didn't have a box for her. Normally we carry the birds in dog crates, but she's so big that a dog box big enough for her to sit upright in would be too big to carry. There are falconry sites where you can order hawk boxes, but they're 1) expensive, and 2) heavy. I found a site that gave instructions for making one out of coroplastic (the sheet plastic used for political signs). One sheet of recycled plastic, some tape, and contact cement later and I have this:
Unfortunately Ella doesn't seem to like it as much as RiverSong.
I was asked to put up a couple of dresses for display at the Lemoyne Art Gallery. That would usually be an easy thing--but one of the dresses was from the 1890s and was impossibly tiny, so I had to build a display form for it. I didn't take a picture of it undressed (it wasn't very impressive) but here's the finished product--and another picture with me in it for scale.
In a May post I mentioned that I was going to keep track of my reading--that's three months, and have I posted a single book? Oops--here's the catch up:
The four books in the Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett. Like all of Pratchett's books, it's fluffy on the outside with a serious undercurrent.
"A Tramp Abroad" by Mark Twain
"The Forgotten Planet"--a rather cheesy 1950s science fiction
William Shakespeare's "Last Hope." Utterly brilliant. The concept is "how would the Bard write Star Wars as a play." Elizabethan iambic pentameter--and kept the Star Wars flavor.
And some reading on pre-Columbian Textiles
And now some cats:
Apache took it in stride when we tossed a paper bag onto his basket on the counter.
RiverSong managed to wiggle between Bob's feet when he was sitting on the floor.
And Pookha and Nazgul on the Art Shelves, gazing at . . . . ?
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