First soup of the season

 

Leek, potato, tomato, chickpeas, chicken broth. Seasoned with sea salt, basil salt, long red pepper, smoked paprika.

Six more meals to come.  It's not very cold yet but I thought I could handle a bowl of soup.

I finally wrestled a huge container of lemon balm out of its place on the patio and emptied it. I have to put away the pot and dump the contents. I had thought I'd contain it in this pot because it's invasive. 

What happened was that I gave it an hq from which it sent out tendrils everywhere. So I'm trying to get rid of the main supply. 

It's a relative of mint, so you can see what this means. Now, the peppermint and spearmint I'd like doesn't do well at all. I'm nursing along a little pot of peppermint now and the spearmint has vanished. 

I'll never lack lemon balm though. Tiny plants everywhere.  And it's certainly resistance exercise to drag that massive thing over and empty it.

Happy day everyone, my Wi-Fi is very dodgy today, constantly going out, so I'm writing as I can.

New starts, health update, skirt pattern

 Yesterday I put some sprigs of lemon balm into the rooting teapot, and noticed it has tiny flowers I'd never spotted before.

Why, you wonder, do you want to start a plant that currently runs wild, choking everything in its path, escaping the supposedly restraining pots? Because like the other mint relatives, it vanishes completely over Fall and winter, and I fancy trying to keep it as a houseplant, to have some available in winter.

Also I'm just starting to see improvement in my neck issues, where I can think about eventually starting with my fiber projects again. Not yet.

So I needed to create a paper pattern for the woven/knitted skirt. This meant tracking down a newspaper, which I don't have. Gary promised me some ready for recycling, and I went next door to collect.

There followed a lovely chat with a visiting family member I'd met before, where we established we: both alter thrifted clothes to suit, both add pockets where needed, both make clothes without patterns, both use newspaper where we need to make a pattern. Nice convo, punctuated by Gary exclaiming I don't know what you're talking about!

Home again, ready to measure, make paper pieces to try on 

Here's the Notebook Of Thinking, which was also the Notebook of Learning Hindi

The Hindi was an ill-fated local adult school class where the somewhat inept teacher went back to India after three weeks, and we all got refunds.

Anyway the notebook being one I'd made, it's gone on being useful, and here's the current project with math.

The original idea was to weave straight panels (note that panel means vertical strip, horizontal pieces having different names), and knit wedge shaped pieces to alternate with the woven panels, to create an A line effect.

This involves figuring out the measurements of the wedges,  top and bottom and doing some tricky decreasing to get a smooth narrowing. Hm 

Then a rush of brains to the head! Why not just knit straight pieces, the width of  the hem end, here 2.5", and do the adjustment when I stitch the parts together, slanting the woven sections together at the top to create the wedge shapes. This will increase the bulk at the waist and I have an idea how to fix that. 

So here's the nyt, more useful than usual

I've tried this around me, and it seems to work. The two sides come around to meet. One big advantage of weaving and knitting to size is; all selvedges, almost no seam allowance needed.

So much easier. Now all I need is the neck to calm down -- it's already buzzing and jabbing from yesterday's pattern making -- and I'll be off. This feels so great, to be making again. Everything else feels like treading water.

Today's Handsome Partner birthday celebration will be an indoor event, owing to endless thunderstorms and inches of rain. We did escape the local tornado warning.

Happy day everyone, whatever the weather.

I have some Handsome Partner birthday thoughts which I'll save till tomorrow, there being a limit to how much I can stuff into one post. I marvel at bloggers who comment that they have to look for material. Mine's like the lemon balm of ideas, escaping all over.