Wednesday Twofer

We will fight them on the beaches...


My (slow) war on Scotch broom continues.  It's a war of attrition and, I figure, in another 10, maybe 12, years at most I will have won.  ;)  Being an aging product of the 60's, I don't like using herbicides.  Honestly, there's several reasons I don't like using chemical treatments on plants:
1. We have a well.  If it goes on the ground, it's likely to wind up in our water.  Yuck.
2. We live on a lake.  Ditto the yuck to anything winding up in there.
3. We encourage wildlife to make their home here.  They don't need to ingest that junk.

All that being said, I've been using the plant's own nature against it.  Plants, by and large, build up energy to survive the winter, set bloom in the spring and then fruit.  I wait until the plants in outrageous bloom and then...cut it to the ground.  It's used up a large amount of its stored energy surviving winter and then blooming and then I come along and take one of its primary energy sources away--its leaves.  Yes, it'll still obtain some energy from its root system, but this year, instead of cutting down tree branch-sized Scotch broom, I'm cutting down small branch-to-twig-sized plants.  Slowly but surely, I'll win this war or at the least keep it from spreading all over without endangering our health, the health of the lake, the fish in it, the wildlife and whomever decides to fish here.  (Oof.  Fisher-folk.  A post for another day.)

Pooling, flashing (no, not that) and hey!  Bunny pics.


I've come to the conclusion that the Tina and the rest of the folks at Blue Moon Fiber Arts are psychic.  Well, I would if I believed in that sort of thing.  Two years ago at the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival, I hit up the BMFA booth and scored some Little Bunny Foo-Foo in medium-weight sock yarn.  At the time, we had a small black, lion head house-bun.  This last February, he passed away.  By March, without a house-rabbit to keep us in line, we were going nuts from grief.  A trip to the Tacoma Humane Society brought us a new bun to love and exasperate us.  That bun is an almost perfect match for the LBFF yarn.  Here's the bun:

The Right Worshipful House-Rabbit is dark brown, mocha, cream and (though you can't really see it in this picture) equipped with pink bunny lips.

The yarn looks like this:

Dark brown, mocha, cream and pink.  A perfect bunny match.  And, for some reason, these colors make me very, very happy.  So happy that one of my skeins is currently becoming socks and that leads to the hand-painted sock thing.  Here's the sock in progress (this is from a couple days ago, so it's about twice this size now and I'll be doing the heel flap next):

And here's the other side:

Notice that the colors are pooling (I guess it would be), slowly winding their way around the sock?  Does that sort of thing drive you nuts?  Personally, I kind of like it.  I like that the sock's doing its own thing, much like a certain house-rabbit I know does his own thing.  I've decided that instead of "pooling" or "flashing" that these are "eddies" and I like the idea of the rabbit's colors forming a pink eddy here and a brown eddy there.  I have no clue how the second sock will turn out; it'll probably stripe neatly just to annoy me, but I'll let that one be the way it wants to be, too.  Maybe the next time I use LBFF, I'll get all nutso-controlling on it, but for now, this just seems right.  Does that sort of thing drive you nuts or do you just let it go?