I’ve been approached by a museum about including my wedding-dress in an exhibit they are doing in spring 2013.  I’m amazed, and honored!  I’ve been walking on air since I got the email.

Nothing much has happened on any front for the last two days; I spent Tuesday helping out with the Special Sample Service for CNCH, and had a quiet evening at home yesterday, reading through Edible Landscaping by Rosalind Creasy.  It’s a really interesting book, though I suspect that we’ll probably go with a more traditional (=less beautiful) garden.  Still, we are trying to think what to do with our front yard, and it will be interesting to read about how to make a vegetable/herb garden beautiful.  (Mike and I are agreed that we’d rather have the front yard be useful as well as decorative.)

I’ve also been reading up on how to kill your lawn.  OK, in this case, there’s very little lawn to kill: the previous owners didn’t bother keeping up the lawn (or, apparently, watering it), so the front yard is mostly weeds.  But we need to kill off the remaining weeds before replanting.  Common wisdom says several layers of newspaper or a layer of cardboard, topped with four to six inches of mulch, will do the trick.  But I’ve been thinking that compost might work better than mulch – we can plant immediately in the compost, whereas we’d have to wait for the mulch to break down, and the breakdown process would deprive the soil of nitrogen while it decomposed.  I’m currently researching where to find several cubic yards of compost cheaply in Sunnyvale.  (You can get up to three cubic yards for free, but you’d have to haul it – and we’d need more than three cubic yards to cover the yard sufficiently.)

Today the plumbers are coming to do various plumbing stuff, including roughing out the plumbing for my dye sink. Mike and I will still need to hook up the sink and brace the drainboard, but the bulk of the labor will be done.  The plumbers are also going to do things like replacing our shutoff valve, installing a pressure reducer and expansion tank, and so on – much more prosaic and much less interesting.

I’ve also been designing/searching Handweaving.net for appropriate drafts for my cross-dyeing project.  So far I have a collection of 4 shaft twills (birds-eye and regular), 8-shaft crepes and twill blocks, and various 24-shaft fancy twills.  I need to translate these to 24-shaft drafts on a straight draw threading, which will be tedious but not (I hope!) difficult.

I spent most of yesterday working on the garden.  I dug up four out of five beds (each bed is about 2′ x 15′) and planted a variety of vegetable starts:

• three varieties of tomatoes (Sungold, red Brandywine, Marvel Striped)
• Sharlyn melons
• one heirloom variety of cantaloupe (the exact name slips my mind at the moment)
• Sugar Baby watermelon
• Waltham butternut squash
• Okra (a red heirloom variety), because it looked interesting
• two Japanese eggplant (the long thin type)
• two habanero peppers
• yellow bell pepper

Still to plant are the cucumbers (two varieties), and the herb garden: parsley, thyme, chives, garlic chives, and two kinds of basil.  Those will go in tonight, hopefully.  (Rosemary – in the form of our trailing rosemary bush – and sage may go in next, so we will indeed have “parsley, sage, rosemary and  thyme”.)  And I need to plant two more rows with as-yet-undetermined varieties – carrots, perhaps, or beets.

Here’s a pic of three of the five beds:

garden beginnings

After that it’s not really clear what I will do next; the flooring won’t be happening for at least three weeks, so nothing much can be done on the interior of the house except installing the dishwasher, which requires delicate surgery on the cabinets and is largely Mike’s job.  And installing the electrical circuits, which requires skilled labor, so Mike is doing that as well.

Which means I may go back to weaving, and working on the book, if I can’t figure out something else to do.  I will likely do some more work with cross-dyeing – a publication has expressed interest in the technique, so I want to do some more experimentation.  I’ll probably wind up weaving a couple of scarves, so a narrow warp, in heavier yarn that I normally use, seems to be in order – weaving it off should be a snap.

(I’d really rather be weaving a 12″ wide sample in 140/2 silk, but that will take a lot longer and would probably conflict with the move.  Too bad!)