Estonian Lace

This is what happened after I bought Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia.

I’ve done a few simple lace scarves starting with Branching Out and had some scary times so decided to make life easy on myself. I picked the Lily of the Valley scarf and chose to make it in Knit Picks merino and silk white fingering yarn on size seven needles.

The yarn is terrific - - maybe because of the 30% silk content. Even frogging the same row ten times didn’t make the yarn look funny, a handy quality for a beginning lace-weight-knitting-wannabe.

There are some mistakes here and there, and I only did one repeat of the central motif and three instead of five of the lace edging.

Unfortunately Knit Picks was out of the bare (white) laceweight merino/silk blend yarn so I got this magenta for the next version of the same scarf. I wish I had used the seven loop knupp instead of the five loop knupp, but I’ll do that in the future.

The pattern is going much easier and managing the laceweight yarn is also going a bit better than I expected - - am still making mistakes, but maybe by the next project…..

I really wish I was making the scarf in white. To me lace just needs to be white. Oh well, they’ll have more in November. BTW there is an Estonian Lace group on Ravelry!

FALL ABUNDANCE

Summer’s ending and fall is almost here. The Endless Mountains Fiber Festival was last weekend. Saturday it was misty and overcast, but nevertheless more people came out than we could have expected. My personal favorite souvenir from the festival was this amazing Canada goose done in crochet by Janet Povlock of Unadilla, NY. Her booth was right behind ours and I couldn’t go home without one of her geese. She also makes them in other versions, but all are exquisite.

There was a threat of frost last night so I made a last batch of basil pesto, picked a bunch of flowers and covered the eggplants up. After the tomatoes and potatoes were hit with late blight I thought it would take out the peppers and eggplants too, but that didn’t happen. I never grew eggplant before and they were a great addition to the garden. Almost every recipe for eggplant talks about sprinkling the slices with salt and letting them drain to get the bitter juices out of them. If they are sliced, dusted with flour, dipped in egg and fried in olive oil immediately from the garden there isn’t a trace of bitterness. We have been enjoying an orgy of eggplant parmesan at least once a week and have frozen the fried slices for later.

Even the late blight hitting the tomatoes was not such a horrible tragedy. I quickly learned that green tomatoes plus a bit of sugar and tomato paste makes a fine tomato sauce. The neat thing is that there is no need to peel or seed the tomatoes because the skins are tender and the seeds are tiny. That is going to be my plan for next year’s green tomatoes at the end of the season.

Judy also gave me a very nice green tomato relish recipe that we like.

Fred wrangled the winter squash this year, keeping them mulched and weeded. They were far happier than under my haphazard care and produced such abundance that there were more than enough for us.
I still need to shear two more white lambs, but the other three ewes and the grey lamb are done. The grey lamb’s fleece is so pretty and soft. I can’t wait to spin it!