It's all Diane's fault

 My sweetie keeps ripping holes in his socks. Not his fault.  The tack strip holding the carpet down on the stairs occasionally pokes through to the surface and grabs his socks. We've hammered the nails down but it just keeps happening, and it's usually the new socks fresh out of the package. Socks that we've had to order online because we can't find dress socks to fit his dainty size 13 feet in the stores. Consequently I've been thinking of  just knitting him some.

That brings up 2 problems. First off, Id hate to invest the time and effort to knit him a pair of socks just to have a hole ripped in them the first time he puts them on. Secondly, I don't knit. I know how to knit but every time I try to knit a tube for socks I end up with a rectangle. Don't ask me how, it's just what happens. Knitting which is supposed to be a meditative and relaxing pastime, sends my blood pressure into the stratosphere. Hence, I DON'T KNIT. Give me nice calming tatting any day.

After watching Diane crank out reams of knitting I took a look at the circular knitting machines and decided to order one. I had no idea what size it would be or if I could do socks on it, but I decided to give it a whirl. When the 48 needle Sentro arrived it wasn't the sock size machine I had envisioned. The broad head of the needle is about a quarter inch across and it's better suited to knitting worsted than the fine yarn used in dress socks. The diameter of the machine is more hat size than sock size. It is fast though, and I whipped out a couple of hats and scarves in an afternoon.

The small 22 needle machine is referred to as a sock machine so I contemplated ordering it. 22 stitches seemed kind of small, but what do I know, I don't knit. When I checked online, it looked like you should cast on about 70 stitches for socks. Some You Tube videos suggested that the 22 needle machine worked fine for ladies socks, but not more robust men's socks. Of course in viewing these videos an ad popped up showing a 32 needle machine.

I DON'T KNIT and I bought a knitting machine, now I'm contemplating buying another one. I mentioned this dilemma to my sweetie and his solution was - buy both. So I did. I now have 3 knitting machines and I DON'T KNIT!

Both of the smaller machines arrived on the same day and I quickly ran up a pair of tube socks on the small machine. I used some knitting worsted I have in my stash and asked my sweetie to try them out. He could have stretched them to fit, maybe, but his first comment was that it was like walking on popcorn. He didn't like knitting worsted at all.

I bought some Kroy sock yarn in both variegated  black and white and solid black using the 32 needle machine. I had visions of solid black toe heel and cuff, but I started using the variegated making a tube sock. The machine wasn't happy with the finer yarn and kept wanting to drop stitches, but I persisted and he tried them out. He still says it's like walking of popcorn and the fabric it made was so loose it was full of holes so I ripped it back. I could fix the full of holes issue by using 2 or 3 strands of yarn, but I'm sure he'll still hate the texture.

By this point I'm so sick of doing things in black and dark brown I needed colour! I  decided to use some of the baby pink yarn in my stash to make a mobius scarf  to go with my grey coat. It's baby yarn so it's soft and squishy with a strand of  shiny thread to give it a slight sparkle and I've been using it ever since.

Then I thought I'd try making a matching headband using the 48 needle machine, but I thought I might try combining it with the reclaimed sock yarn and it made a nice thick warm...I can't call it a headband as it's wide enough to be a hat, but I'm sure I'll be glad of it when it's snowy and blowy because it sure keeps my ears warm. 

I went looking for something softer to make socks and I picked up a Caron Cloud Cake which is lovely and soft but not in any colours he'd like. The reddish, pink had orange in the middle of it, so I selected a mostly blue called Moonlight, but smack in the middle of it is a pukey pea green that puts me right off the yarn.

Before I got to the pukey green I cranked up a couple of headbands  on the 32 needle machine because I noticed that with the cooler weather the wind whipping by my ears on the scooters was leaving me with and earache. The first was way too big and the second better but a little loose. Sweetie was complaining the other day of a headache and I jammed the headband over his ears. The headache went away and he's claimed my headband so I had to make another for me! 

Then I switched to the 22 needle machine to make a headband just to hold my hair back. It works but the yarn is a bit too soft to control my mane so I may have to make another.

One thing that was a success. I needed a roller pillow and most of them are too soft to give any real support. In trying out a couple of test hats I realized that the tubes would make a great casing for a roller pillow so I rolled up a towel and stuffed it in a hat and closed off the open end. Instant roller pillow. I took it into hubby's computer room to show him and promptly lost my pillow. So I had to do another one.

I'm cranking out lots of things, just because it's so fast, but I'm getting a sore shoulder from cranking. I'm also getting frustrated with the panel setting as it seems to drop stitches at the beginning, or at the end, or in the middle, but never the at the same point on any attempt. I will master this darn thing yet.

It's all Diane's fault. She started this.

Thread, thread and more thread

Decades ago I used to do a lot of petit point, and I acquired hundreds of different colours of floss, which I kept in a 36 drawer storage box and I'm still working through the stash.

However, I'm noticing that in spite of having lots of colours most of which have several shades, I still don't seem to have what I want and the thread that used to cost $.30 a skein is now $1.50. That doesn't seem very costly until you consider how many colours you need to do a landscape. The last one used about 30 shades of blue and about as many of green and about 15 shades of brown and 15 more of beige. That's about 100 shades of colour.  

It's not just having that many colours, it's having 3-7 shades of some colours to get the variations right.

So I need more thread colours, but I don't really know which ones, just that I again have a lot of river, a lot of sky, a lot of grasses and reeds and flower leaves and tree leaves and rocks, lots of rocks. So in addition to the greens and blues I need lots of browns and greys. 

I went looking for thread and while I can buy lots of assorted threads cheaply, I don't like using cheap threads. The cheap threads are dull, coarse looking and rough feeling. The DMC floss has slick threads with a nice sheen to them. They're also more expensive and harder to find.

I went online looking for bunches of colours and found lots in groupings of home decor (what the heck is home decor colour?) or exclusive (!?) or popular colours (!?) or variations (!?) Generally these were packs of 36 colours for about $40.00.  None of these bundles seemed to have a lot of blues and greens and certainly not browns and greys. 

I finally opted for a pack of 100 random threads that, with shipping and taxes cost $163.00 which is a whole lot more than the thirty cents a skein I used to pay. It came today with 25 greens, 15 blues, 15 browns and a couple of greys along with 43 other assorted colours.

I used to split the threads between Coats and Clark Anchor and DMC. In petit point there were subtle shading differences between the two brands and some charts used threads from both manufacturers to get the best combinations. Then I sorted each brand into blue greens and yellow greens.

While the blues got sorted into red blues and yellow blues. Some blues lean toward purple and some toward green.

 Coats and Clark Anchor is gone, replaced by J P Coats and while I have some of their threads, I find that the quality of the floss has gone down the the thread has more of a dull finish than it used to. So I'm sticking to the DMC threads for a more consistent product.

There weren't a lot of browns and they ranged from beige and peach to chocolate and  bronze, while there were only 2 greys.

I'm not sure I can use my typical sorting practice and I think I'm just going to shove them in drawers sorting them into light and dark.

At least I have a few more options now, or maybe not, they might just be duplicates of what I already have, and wouldn't that be a bummer.

The hazards of riding on popular trails

We're fortunate to have a number of well maintained trails with beautiful scenery to enjoy close to our home and we've been using them for ages. Over the years I have observed a number of issues that are even more pronounced now that we use the electric scooters more than our bikes. You might even say they're sort of pet peeves.

Now I know that pedestrians, roller bladers, bike riders and scooter riders need to share the space but there are the road hogs. They don't keep to one side or the other, they just walk down the middle of the road. If you ring a bell to let them know you're there, they just ignore you. They don't move to one side or the other, they just keep on going at the same pace wandering down the middle of the road, forcing you off the trail into the brush to safely get around them. It's not too bad going around these folks when you're on a bike, but when you try it on a scooter with 3 inches road clearance, it's a different matter. 

I do realize that the issue might be that the pedestrian is a little bit deaf, but in that case, for their safety's sake, you'd think they'd have the sense to keep to the side of the trail just in case. Since they don't keep to the side and don't move even when they see you, you can only assume that they are just plain ignorant.

Since bikes and electric scooters are silent I always ring my bell or say "beep beep" so that I'm not startling folks. I have no objection sharing the road, but one of the things that I find frustrating is the family groups or other clusters of pedestrians that sprawl across the trail, blocking progress, particularly when some of the group are small children. Most of the time none of the adults are really paying attention except to make sure that the little ones don't wander too far away. 

Invariably when you come up to the group whether you approach from in front or behind, which ever direction the adults go, the little ones go the opposite direction. Having successfully blocked your progress, the rascal will suddenly realize everyone else is on the other side of the trail and they'll turn around and toddle back across the trail in front of you. If you're travelling at any speed, making an abrupt stop is likely to send you "ass over tea kettle". I find the scooters go faster than I generally pedal, so it's even more problematic on the scooter.

Repeatedly ringing the bell to let people know I'm there often leaves me feeling that people are thinking I'm trying to push them out of the way. I kind of am being a bit pushy, but I have a right to use the trails too and people walking 5 abreast on a trail wide enough for 3 gets kind of crowded. I always smile and say thank you when they move over, and most people smile back and say no problem, but there are always those few who give you dirty looks. (Need I say, they're generally the ones who don't pay attention to their kids?)

Then there are the dog walkers. People walking their dogs is perfectly fine, but there are those few who don't have the sense God gave little green apples. The parks aren't dog parks or off leash parks. Off leash would probably be better. There are quite a few people who use extensible leashes which are great to let the dog run over to the edge of the road and lift it's leg in the grass while the owner stands on the pavement. What creates difficulty is when the owner is on one side of the trail and the dog is on the other side of the trail with the leash stretched between them. Can anyone say garrote? 

These are just a few of the issues I've had when we've been riding our bikes on the popular trails. What I've noticed with the scooters is that they're really quiet and they can be really fast which just compounds the problems. The posted speed on the trails used to be 10 KMH which is impossible to maintain going up and down little hills even on a bike. With the electric scooter you need to accelerate to get up even little hills and going down little hills you pick up speed. Go too slow and you stop all forward motion and fall off. That's just physics, which is why I think they've removed all of the posted speed signs. 

The result is that even while we don't ride fast, some of the folks we share the trails with can be really, really irritating. 

I'm getting off my soapbox now.

Stitches and punctures

The embroidery is coming along slowly. I decided that I wanted a big chunk of flowers in this next picture and chose to work in 3 shades of purple with some olive green leaves. I used satin stitch for the petals in a light mauve and a thinner border of satin stitch in a darker shade. The centres were done in large french knots It's hard to suggest different shapes of leaves when they're so tiny, so I decided to work with a basic daisy stitch in a 5 stitch grouping. More or less.

The picture had 2 different types of flowers, with a smaller flower type clustered around the outer edge of the first group and I chose to use yellow for them. I did a basic daisy shape in a lighter yellow and switched to a darker yellow for the centre which I did in a large french knot. A lighter green was selected for the leaves which I did in rows of fly stitch.

I started the reeds in a different shade of green using a couching stitch, but now that it's started I'm not happy with the colour. I want more of a contrast between the leaves of the yellow flowers and the reeds, but I don't think I've got the colours I want in my stash.

Since I patched together pieces from different colouring pages, there are places where it's hard to figure out what should go where. When I'm looking at the execution of the project I'm going to have to wing it in a lot of areas. That's not so bad when you're colouring a picture, but it's very disheartening to have to "erase" hours of stitching because it didn't work out the way you wanted it to or it's not looking quite right.

We had the scooters out again trying to finish off our tour of Professor's Lake. We started the first part of the trip when we'd just got the scooters and we didn't know how far we could go until we'd run out of power. Like most rechargeable devices you start out with full charge, in this case 5 bars, but the bars at the full end have more power that the ones at the low end. The bar at the full end means I can go uphill fast. The one at the low end means I might not make it uphill at all. We started with an almost full charge, but half way around the lake the scooters got very sluggish and we didn't want to get to the point where we didn't have enough juice to get home. Hubby has a bad ankle and walking any distance is painful so we didn't want to take a chance and cut the trip short.

The Professor's Lake trail goes three quarters of the way around the lake. The other quarter is bordered by the street. The Rec centre is in the middle of the trail and accessible by car. We approach the trail from one of the ends and usually ride our bikes or scooters from one end to the other of the trail and then turn around to come back. On our attempt to finish the trip around the lake my sweetie got a flat tire. No apparent puncture, we didn't run over glass or anything else, it was just suddenly flat.

Fortunately we were close to the Rec centre so hubby switched scooters with me and took off home leaving me to sit in the shade waiting while he zipped home and grabbed the car. Our scooters are foldable so it's easy to pop them in the trunk.

When we got home we inspected the tire and couldn't find and cut or puncture so we re-inflated the tire and it seemed to stay inflated. We took a quick trip around the block and the tire stayed up, but a couple of days later when we went to take them out for a ride, the tire was flat again.

It was necessary to disassemble the rear tire to change the flat, which is a bit of a pain in the butt. We had already invested in the lever tools that help with changing the tires when we had our old scooters which made getting the tire off the rim fairly easy. 

Inflating the tires is  an exercise in aggravation. See the picture? The wheels are so small that it's hard to get the end of the air hose attached to the valve. The straight end is too long to fit in the space available and we really needed a right angle end to fit it. We ordered a right angle extension hose which fit nicely into the valve space, but the opposite end didn't fit the compressor air hose. GRRR! We also ordered a small manual air pump, but the end of the pump hose didn't want to attach to the valve either!! However, the end of the manual pump hose did fit onto the end of the new extension, so we now have a way to manually pump up the tire if we run into a similar situation while on the road.

What's really frustrating is that unless you have an air hose with a gauge you don't know if you've put enough air in. Then when you try to attach a manual gauge to check the air pressure, you have to mess around with the valve so much in that tight little space, that you let out all the air you just put in! At this point we remembered that we had the portable compressor in the car with the built in gauge and right angle end. Thank heaven!

Our TurboAnt scooters came with spare inner tubes so we replaced the inner tube, then realized that the position for the valve hole in  the rim was off centre between the spokes and the way we inserted the inner tube positioned the right angled valve up against  the spoke instead of away from it making it impossible to attach a hose to the valve. Fortunately we noticed that fact before we had reassembled the tire. We finally got the new inner tube in and the tire inflated. There is a leak in the old inner tube but it's on the side of the tire so I'm wondering if it was just a defective tire.

Enough of this nonsense,  I want to get honeycomb tires.

One thing leads to another

I've been sewing a little bit, but lots of hours work isn't making much of a change. So if you're looking for lots of updates--- they aren't happening.

In other news, one of the latest videos we took with the GoPro camera took 14 hours to convert 1 hour of raw footage into something we could post on the web. After several days of leaving the program running overnight, we started looking at ways to speed up the process. One of the first requirements was a more robust CPU, then it also needed a lot more RAM and of course a much bigger and better graphic card and...

If you know anything about computers, you know that this is a recipe for not just an overhaul, but a complete new computer system. So we went shopping. We went from an old quad core computer to a 16 core, 24 thread PC Intel 13th gen Core i7 with 32 GB RAM, 2TB SSD and a RTX  4070 graphic card for about twice what we intended to spend. The up side is - conversion of the same files with the same parameters went from 14 hours to 3. Yay! I think...

Having sorted out that little problem, hubby decided he was tired of filming quiet trails and looked for something different. He thought filming the stores in our local plaza would be an interesting change. So we went up the road and began riding along the fronts of the stores. Not knowing if the camera mounted on the handlebars was getting a good picture or cutting off the store names, he tried to face the stores head on. Repeatedly pulling away from the curb and turning toward the store fronts.

Did I mention this operation was done on a Friday evening when everybody and his brother was jammed into the parking lot?  Did I mention that the plaza in question is formed as a square within a square, so that you are consistently pulling out into traffic? Did I mention that I'm not fond of driving a scooter in traffic? Every one of those cars is bigger than me and I've already been hit with a car once this summer.

After an hour of dodging cars we came home and looked at the replay, only to discover that that camera hadn't been turned on!!!

You know what that means, don't you? Yep, we had to do it all over again. Only this time I insisted that we do it in the morning on a weekday when there was little or no traffic. Know what we got? An hour of driving around a parking lot. You can see the store fronts, and the cars and asphalt. You get an idea of the size of the plaza and the stores in it, oh and cars and asphalt. For variety there's cars and asphalt.

So much more interesting than trees and flowers and water. Right?

Sorry, no pictures as I find parking lots full of cars and asphalt less interesting than a blank page.

Close-up

Lavinia mentioned that the picture of the tree wasn't very clear. I guess that's what happens when you take a hurried picture with the tablet rather than getting out the camera or the scanner. This time I scanned the tree to give you a better idea of the effect of using more than one colour of thread at the same time. 

The tree trunk looks like tree bark without any extra effort. The single thread is sometimes on the top, sometimes on the bottom of each stitch in an utterly random way, making a realistic effect.

I used a single colour in a couple of places for the tree boles, like the one on the bottom right, just to make them a little more obvious.

What type of hoop do you like?

I've been embroidering since I was a kid and there is only one type of embroidery hoop I know; a round wood one with a screw for tightening it. 

When I was talking to my sister today she was lamenting not being able to find her favourite hoop. So, I figured I'd just bring up the same round hoop on Amazon and send her one. At one time I had a set of steel hoops with cork inlay for holding the fabric, that had a spring on the outer ring so there wasn't any tightening adjustment, but it has disappeared. It didn't hold as tight as the screw type, but it was real easy to use especially for older people who might have difficulty tightening the screw. (Who am I lidding, I'm starting to have trouble!)

I just went online to look for the simple little hoop I'm accustomed to and WOW have times changed!

There is the typical wood variety:

Then the more modern plastic ones:

The same thing in oval:

There is a square type:

There is a rectangular variety with the screw on the corner:

Then there is a peculiar spring type hoop:

Have you ever tried a clip frame?:

I wonder what different types people use and what they like or dislike about them? Comments? Please? Inquiring minds want to know.

Tree trunk

We've either had weather too hot to go outside, or too much rain to go outside. Either way we've been mostly stuck in the house instead of out on the scooters. We uploaded some videos that we did with the cheap body cam, but the movements were choppy even after applying stabilization software and we're dying to do them again with the GoPro because it's just so much nicer. We'll just have to wait for better weather.

Of course bad weather means I've had some time for stitching. I decided to start the embroidered landscape with the large tree on the right, working with 3 strands of thread. To get a more realistic tree trunk I used one dark and one medium brown. I cut the same length of thread for each colour and separated each of them them into 3 strands giving me 2 sets of medium and 2 sets of dark threads. I put one set of each colour aside. Then out of the second set, I pulled 1 strand out of the dark thread and 1 strand out of the medium thread. I paired 1 strand of dark with 2 of medium and 1 strand of medium with 2 of dark. 

That gave me two multi-colour sections of thread of similar but different shades. Then I used a split stitch on the trunk and limbs. When the first two sections of thread were used up, I repeated the process on the sections I had laid aside. It resulted in a nice effect on the tree trunk.

I don't really want to work on the tree leaves yet, so I think I'll start on the flowers at the bottom next.

The beginning of the second landscape picture

I mentioned that I was planning on more embroidered landscapes and I purchased several adult colouring books of landscapes for this purpose. I wanted pictures that had something to draw you in, like the first one with stepping stones leading up to the gazebo. After perusing the 4 or 5 books I bought, I was thoroughly frustrated. 

Many of the pictures had faded mountains in the background, which are easy to colour, but not so easy to realistically stitch. Others had large sections of rocks, rocky cliffs or other boring sections that wouldn't lend themselves to interesting stitching.

In lots of pictures I liked the right side, but not the left, or vice versa. Many of the flowers were depicted as one or two oversized blooms surrounded by lots of non-descript leaves.

One of the old mill pictures was interesting, but the river was flowing at 90 degrees to the mill wheel!?! The only way to fix it would have been to draw the bottom third of the picture free hand. If I could draw anything somewhat realistic I wouldn't have needed the colouring books to start with.

The birds and animals were totally unrealistic. I mean REALLY unrealistic. I though some of the ducks were odd shaped rocks. One of the ducks had 1 leg under the beak and one under the tail. What's up with that!

I finally decided to take the portions of several drawings and amalgamate them into something I liked that I could reasonably stitch. I took the left side of one drawing and flipped it to make the right side of the page. Then I took the top portion of another left hand page, replaced some of the trees with something that worked better. I added in a more interesting shoreline from another picture, and a cluster of flowers under the tree on the right, as well as some reeds along the bottom of the page.

I went back afterward to mark which pictures I used, so that I'd have a clearer reference page to stitch from, and I can't tell which ones I used. Some portions were flipped to mirror image, some re-sized, and some drawn free hand to connect the pieces together.

This is the image I ended up with. Some of the trees on the left are probably meant to be done in fall colours, but with the cluster of flowers on the lower right, that would be out of season. 

The  little pink mark denoted the centre of the page. It let me pin the centre of the fabric to the centre of the page for tracing.

 

Being injured has made me feel far less energetic and the project is kind of stalled, but as I heal up my energy is returning, so I hope to have a little something to show soon.

Troubles upon troubles

As if getting hit by a car wasn't enough, the following Saturday we noticed that although the air conditioning was on, the house was getting hotter and hotter. Then we noticed that the fan in the air conditioner wasn't turning. The unit was only 9 years old with a 10 year warranty. Being under warranty is great, but try getting a technician to come out and look at it on the weekend. It was going to be $300 for a house call, just to look at it and see what needed to be done. 

Hubby, being smart, asked how much taking a look at it would cost on Monday. If we waited, the cost would only be $100, so he told them to come on Monday and we suffered through the heat. In the interim, he pulled out all of the paperwork and emailed it to them, letting them know that it was still under warranty.

On Monday the technician arrived bright and early, checked out the fan to see that it still wasn't turning, made sure the fuses were still OK, and the thermostat was correctly set. Hubby had already checked for the obvious things, like wrong setting on the thermostat or blown fuse, but the guy had to see for himself before he started work on the unit.

He removed the side of the machine and told us he could see right away what had happened. So could we. Two little electrocuted mice.

After removing the offending rodents, he checked out the rest of the unit and replaced a slightly rusted capacitor. It was still functioning, but I think that in order to have the visit covered under the warranty he had to replace something, as mice aren't a warranty issue.

In the end, the visit didn't cost us anything except a sweaty weekend.

Uh oh! and look what we got!

Not too long after we got my hubby his scooter we were T-boned. The passenger side of the car was crumpled in, all of the air bags deployed and I ended up with a couple of broken ribs and a bruise on my thigh the size of a basketball as well as bent frames on my glasses. The car was a write off and since it was an older vehicle we didn't carry collision insurance on it.

Hubby was shaken up and ached all over, but otherwise unhurt. Initially all I felt was the impact to my leg, and when we were asked by the paramedics if we needed to go to the hospital, we both declined. The driver and passengers of the other car were likewise shaken up but not seriously injured.

I noticed the next day that I was having trouble taking a deep breath and I figured that my ribs were bruised or possibly fractured and knowing that even if they were broken, nothing could be done until they healed on their own, I wasn't too worried. However, every time I coughed or sneezed, the unexpected pain made me yelp so my, ever solicitous honey, insisted on calling the doctor, who sent me for x-rays. Yup. Broken ribs. Thus ended out scooter rides for a while.

That really bummed me out because scooters don't put any pressure on ribs! My honey wasn't taking chances, so I got to sit and do nothing. For days! I was going stir crazy.

The enforced inactivity was good for one thing. It left a lot of computer time to search out used cars. We had been thinking of buying a new electric or hybrid vehicle, but after some investigation, decided to go with gas. The Impala we had been driving gave my tall hubby lots of leg room, and lots of power for passing on the highway, so we were looking for something similar. My family is mostly in Toronto and his is mostly in Windsor, which means lots of highway driving. After looking at the specs on thousands of cars, we finally bought a 2011 Chev Malibu. 

Sixteen days after the accident we had wheels again, and hubby immediately bought me my own TurboAnt because my old scooter couldn't keep up with him.

While waiting for our new (used) car we received our order for a small wearable camera. It's hard to take pictures of what we see on our scooter rides because by the time you realize there'd a family of ducks waddling along the trail and get your camera out, they've already flown away or you've zipped by and missed them.

We tried it out clipped onto a t-shirt, but it flopped around a lot and mostly took pictures of the road. So hubby added a fixed position mount onto the top of an old ball cap, which worked really well. 

There were some problems though, like pink leaves that were actually green.

Also, every wobble of the scooter or the camera resulted in headache producing bouncing as the camera was jostled up and down. The files created were huge, and running stabilization software took forever and produced an on again off again black border in places. That was fixed by adding a black frame around the video. Each one of the changes took huge amounts of time to adjust for the camera's limitations.

Part of the reason for doing these videos was so that hubby's brother, who has MS and can barely get out of bed, let alone get out of the house, could get to join us on our scooter rides and enjoy some of the sights and sounds of summer. So we bit the bullet, and ordered a GoPro camera.

AMAZING!

No pink leaves, no wobble when going over broken pavement, no bouncing up and down over speed bumps. Just steady, level, images with decent quality even on the lowest resolution.

Here's a link to a short, speeded up video so you can see for yourself:

www.rsbriggs.com/gopro/mp.mp4

TurboAnt

 For Christmas 2019 hubby and I bought each other folding scooters. (Folding scooters mean that you can fold them and carry them in one hand to go into a store, or store them in the trunk of the car.) Before you think that we must be rich to afford such luxury items, let me just say that they were on sale with a deep discount and the store we bought them from gave an additional 10% discount if you signed up for their newsletter, which we both did. We've had them for several years and they've been a lot of fun.

The scooters with 8 inch wheels had a maximum rider weight of 220 pounds, went a maximum speed of 20 kmh and a maximum distance of 12K. They were perfect for quick little trail rides except that my sweetheart being 6 foot 3 hit at close to the maximum weight and the specs are based on a rider of about 110 pounds so he went slower for shorter distances and a few times his unit conked out before the end of our ride. He only had to walk about a block, each time, but that sure put a damper on our fun.

Last year his battery seemed to drain really fast making our rides shorter and shorter and the charging time seemed longer and longer. We tried to get a replacement battery, but none were available for this specific unit, so we tried buying an aftermarket battery of the same type and he built a box to house the new battery mounting it on the stem with a switch to go from the original battery to the new one. The new one with the same specs as the original battery worked for about 2 minutes at full speed, then it needed a rest before it could run for another 2 minutes. Not fun.

Before all this trouble I was wishing that we had units that were just a little better. I wanted just a little more clearance between the deck and the road so that we could go over the many speed bumps on our crescent without scraping bottom. Just a little more speed so that hubby could go up minor inclines without having to kick all the time. Just a little more power so that we could take them to the store AND back. We used them when we had to take the car in for repairs and they made it back home OK, but they needed hours for a full charge so that we could go back and pick the car up again.

I started researching folding scooters, this time looking for a manufacturer that readily supplied replacement batteries. Most scooters have the battery in the deck which puts the weight on the bottom and allows for better balance, but it also means that when you go over bumps and scrape the bottom, what's hitting the road is the battery. I found a scooter that had 10 inch wheels, which gave ample road clearance. The battery was detachable and mounted on the stem, not in the deck, and you could buy the unit bundled WITH a spare battery. It was also rated for a little more speed and a little more distance on a single charge. So in March I insisted hubby get one for his birthday.

Yay! we can go on trips without hubby having to kick all the time on his sore ankle and his scooter doesn't conk out before we get home. The TurboAnt scooter was pricey, $729 (the base unit without the spare battery was $529 Canadian) including taxes and shipping but it's specs are 30 Miles (48 km) Max Range, 20 mph (32 km/h) Max Speed 10-Inch inflatable tires, 275 lb (125 kg) Max Load and 6-Hour Fast Charging. Best of all, delivery took less that a week (3 business days) and they included a spare inner tube as well.

Bicycle riding is healthier, but since my sweetie has trouble with his back and some issues with the bones in his ankle, bicycle riding is a bit of an ordeal for him. I'm not much better as my knees protest with even short rides. We used to make a 5 mile round trip by way to the trails down to the park and back almost daily. This year we made one trip and both of us spent the remainder of the evening propped up with ice packs. The scooters let us get some fresh air and a change of scenery without as much pain.

Landscape embroidery

 I have just realized that a post I thought I had done some time ago is still sitting unpublished on my computer. During our enforced home lockdown during the pandemic, I amused myself by embroidering 5 large floral pictures, but I thought about doing a landscape picture to hang on the wall. I looked at adult colouring books and found some possibilities and ordered the most likely books.

While waiting for the books to arrive I went out and purchased several frames (five). After the butterflies, I'm not getting caught again without appropriate size frames.

I found one or two realistic landscapes I could use and selected one with a stream in the foreground with stepping stones leading across to a gazebo surrounded by trees and fields.

I pre-shrunk some cotton material. I've learned my lesson after ruining one tapestry size project, always wash the fabric first. Then I cut out a large rectangle, laid it over the selected picture and traced the image in pencil, omitting some parts I didn't want and modifying others. 

After I had my drawing done it was time to select colours. I have over a hundred shades of different colour skeins of threads, both the old Coats and Clark Anchor threads and the DMC threads from when I did petit point. I needed to sort out what colours and what shades of colour I wanted to use for each element. I used 3 strands of thread throughout and selected stitch types that best allowed following the natural contours of the object I was working on.

Selecting colours took several days as I planned things out. When you need to blend shades of colours, you have to make sure that you have enough of the colours you want to use for the entire project, not just the segment you're working on.

I think I used 7 colours in the stream, which I then couldn't use for the sky. I had several trees and bushes each of which took at least 3 shades of green. When you have grass, overlapping flowers, overlapping bushes, overlapping trees, overlapping more trees, the colours have to have enough contrast so that you can distinguish one from the other.

I decided to do the gazebo in white, which in terms of thread colour, was white, light cream, dark cream, beige and pale brown. I started with the bottom of the roofline doing rows of couching stitch in white, then the pillars also in white using a romanian couching stitch. for the caps of the pillars did a short row of fly stitch. I used an outline stitch for the roof and segments. The fill-in for the dome was done in long and short stitch using thread shades in light and dark with the palest shades in the middle of each segment.The base of the cupola was done in chain stitch followed by several rows of couching stitch and topped with tight rows of fly stitch and a few sraight stitches for the peak. The lower part of the gazebo was done in chain stitch, with long and short stitches for the inner part of the gazebo and satin stitch and split stitch for the floor and stairs. That's 9 different stitches just in the gazebo.

I didn't stop to take in progress pictures, but while I was working on it, my sweetheart was posting some things on our website and he took pictures of what I was doing and uploaded them. Grr! I don't mind the picture taking, but I don't like displaying half done work. At least that means I can show you what I did in detail.

The stepping stones and rocks at the water's edge, parts of the daffodils and the crocus flowers were done in satin stitch. The water, sky and background grass were all done in long and short stitch, blending two to seven shades of colour for each area. Long and short stitch works really well for blending colours.  There are 7 shades of blue in the water and 6 different shades of blue in the sky. The daffodils were done in daisy stitch, satin stitch, split stitch and straight stitch. The grass in the foreground used 2 shades of green in fly stitch.

The tree trunks were stitched in 3 shades of brown using a split stitch and the leaves were sewn using a daisy stitch in either 2 or three shades of green. I thought sewing every individual leaf was time consuming, until I had to go back and fill in the spaces between the leaves with tiny straight stitches. Doing those fill in stitches took me a whole week and I'm not even sure if it wouldn't have looked better just to fill in the large areas and leave the itty bitty one tiny stitch areas blank.

The original image called for lots of background shrubs and trees and fields which don't lend themselves to stitching, so I opted to replace them with a field of grass. I chose 2 shades of a bright green that would stand out behind the shrubs, trees and flowers and filled in the area with vertical long and short stitch, which contrasts with the horizontal water and sky. Since I omitted the shrubs that were in front of the trees on the left, I had to extend the tree trunk to come down behind the gazebo so the it didn't look like the tree was floating in the air.

The low lying shrubs to the right of the gazebo were done with rows of  open daisy stitch. I kept on debating whether I should fill in the open area, but it felt like it would bring more attention to an area I wanted to fade into the background so I left them blank.

The original diagram had tulips along the water's edge, but they were so much smaller than the daffodils in the foreground, tulips didn't make sense so I changed them to crocuses. The weird little lumps that were supposed to be on the right didn't have definite shape or position so I replaced them with evergreens that I did in a vandyke stitch that lent itself to an evergreen shape.

The rest of the picture was filled in with long and short stitches in six shades of blue. Now that it's done I wish that I had worked with lighter shades of blue for the sky. 

I also wish that I had paid more attention to the size of the picture. The image is 6.5 inches across. I stitched some extra so that the stitching would go under the mat in the frame. The interior size of the mat is an opening 8 inches wide. I added about a half inch on each side  which left me with a finished size of about 7.5 inches, which was not quite enough. I can fix it by sewing a little more along the edge, except that I'm not sure which colour I used where. I started out keeping track of which colours I was using, but stopped at the last couple of shades, which just happen to be the ones along the right hand side of the picture. It will be easier to just swap out the mat for a wider one.

If you were counting, that's 12 different stitches in the whole picture. Thirteen shades of blue, twenty one shades of green. Twelve shades of brown, five shades of cream, four shades of yellow, one shade of pink and one shade of purple. 

I bought 5 frames and only one is filled. I just went on line and ordered some more colouring books. I wonder if I have enough thread or if I should order more colours just in case.

3d Tatted Flowers

I've been busy. Really. I have. I just haven't taken time to blog about it. Way back when the pandemic started I decided to embroider several large pictures of flowers. I bought frames first and then made pictures sized to fit the frames. I was able to complete the set of 5 I had planned and immediately hung them on the wall. I even managed to find a frame to fit a picture of a bird with flowers that I did some time ago and hang it too.

Then I sat gazing around the room covered in my embroidery and realized there wasn't a single bit of tatting sitting on the wall. Can you imagine that?

I did some small 3D fuchsia flowers in the book Summer Tatting and I thought  they would drape nicely so I did them in a dark red. I added some small pompom shaped chrysanthemums done in a dark gold colour to off set the deep red and then added sprigs of 4 ring forget me nots and a bit of greenery tied together with a satin bow.

The picture turned out pretty good, although the photo is crappy because the glare from the glass made it a stinker to film. I couldn't do just one...could I? 

There is no way I was going to use the same flower or the same colours. So the next one used a wild rose in bright red. A branch of trumpet flowers in pink and a spray of violets in blue. These were all shapes I had done before and I was just winging it on the design.

I managed to find three small 7x9 inch shadow box frames for these pictures, so I just had to do one more, but I was running out of ideas. They had to be 3D and small enough not to get squashed in the shadow box which meant they couldn't stand out too much. For the sake of doing something different, I tried a stalk of delphinium in bright blue. I added a spray of yellow daisy type flowers with brown centres, then finished it off with some purple lily type flowers. Not the most realistic but it works for me.

Now the problem is where to hang them. I've run out of wall space!