Osborn Fiber Studio

Sometimes life goes according to plan, and sometimes you take left turns. Our month of June was supposed to be about finishing school, cabin visits, time with kids, and finishing my book. And it was that, for a couple weeks! Then the unexpected happened. Well, not so unexpected.

We desperately wanted to get out to the cabin to do some much-needed repairs on two of the sunroom windows. We managed to get out there the week after the kids finished school. The window job was a lot harder than we expected, and we didn’t know what we didn’t know as far as tools we’d need. In the end we got partway done and it was going to rain, so we didn’t finish the caulking, but everything is covered up safely. Lord willing, we’ll finish the job in August.

We spent one busy week together, doing activities with the kids and pecking away at my book. The girls and I worked away at a mini-painting project, which I’ll wax poetic about at the bottom of this post. But after a week, the other shoe dropped. On Saturday June 14th, the day before Father’s Day, my grandmother passed away.

Flo Strub, known to us as “Grammy,” was a fixture all my life. As a young child we lived only an hour away from my grandparents and visited them often. Then, when I was nine, they gave my parents their back three acres, where my parents built their house. So I grew up going to early morning church with them, going shopping with Grammy, taking voice lessons from Poppop and going to choir with him. They quit smoking in their 50s, but not quite soon enough – we lost Poppop to lung cancer when I was in college. Grammy and Poppop were best friends, and had all kinds of adventures together, so it was terribly difficult to lose him.

Still, Grammy stayed active and healthy as she had all her life. That made it seem unfair that the last ten years of her life were drastically changed by a neurological disease that took away her ability to walk. But she was able to stay at home with her family, and my mom and uncle took care of her all those years. Her condition slowly deteriorated, and for the last six weeks of her life she was on home hospice care. She was 88 years old.

My mom and dad at the burial. 110 degrees an 100% humidity, but a beautiful spot.

It was important to me to be able to be present for Grammy’s funeral. Living far away means we miss a lot of important family events. Jared had some non-negotiable travel right when the funeral was planned, so instead of going by myself, we shifted our travel plans for me and the girls to leave a week and a half early. It was my first time traveling alone with all three girls. It wasn’t that hard – Jared planned and arranged everything very carefully, and the girls are easy travelers – but being the only adult who had to remember everything was a new and stressful challenge. The travel days themselves went very smoothly, covered by a multitude of prayers from our loved ones.

Leaving Nunavut, still ice on the bay, but lots of melted water on top.

Landing in Maryland. The rolling hills and trees of my homeland.

My in-laws kindly put me and the girls up for a few days so mom didn’t have to host us in the middle of funeral proceedings. The wake and funeral were special opportunities to catch up with family members and share memories about Grammy and Poppop. We also got to meet several of the caretakers who have worked with Grammy over the last many years. She was picky about who worked with her, but grew close to those she connected with. A surprising number of people joined us for the service. My brother and I were asked to give the eulogy and behalf of my mom and uncle, and two of my girls were up for helping as ushers. It was truly exhausting, but I’m so glad we were there. It’s allowed us to be present for other family stuff as well – I’m no saviour, and they don’t need me, but it’s nice to be able to feel one has offered support. Especially when you’re as bad as I am at keeping touch over long distances.

Above: me and my siblings

On the 28th, we moved to my mom’s house, and on the last day of the month, Jared joined us from his travels, and we’re fully in vacation mode now. Plans have been made, pools have been scoped out, and we’re ready for a reset in the land of green that is Maryland in the summer.

Basketball lessons at Mimi & Granddad’s house, with cousin E

Dooner riding the same swan ride at the Clarksville Picnic that has been running there for my entire life

Climbing wall at the Clarksville Picnic: the one new attraction after 145 years

Making

I do like to summarize my making in these round-up posts, so I’ll do that briefly!

In spinning, I finished my last sock spin for a while. I detailed this crepe sock yarn, along with all the other Breed Blend and Colour Study yarn, in a blog post.

Remember the gorgeous Wensleydale I was hackling into combed top last month?

I finished combing it, and spun four of these 1.4-oz bumps onto four bobbins.

I even turned those four bobbins into two little sample skeins. I wanted to see the difference between 3-ply and 4-ply. A real surprise to me was that, since the twist angle is so low, there’s not really an appreciable difference (to me) between the 3-ply and 4-ply. Usually the 4-ply would be noticeably rounder, but it was absolutely not to me. This is a relief, since with the singles I was making, a 4-ply was a solid Aran weight, and I want more like a DK. I was also able to calculate the grist, to project getting over 1000 yards with a DK, so hooray! Hopefully I’ll at least get a vest’s worth, if not a small sweater.

In between the above two projects, I spun another skein or two for the Qiviut Blending project. One is here. Both combined the thel (downy undercoat) from a black Icelandic lamb with dark grey pedencal silk and Qiviut. The results were gorgeous, and have me really primed to accelerate the Qiviut Blending Project during these last couple of phases.

This is everything I have prepped to work on while I’m traveling, which includes all of Tour de Fleece.

The yarn caked up is the remaining five pairs of socks in the current two batches of sock experiments. I am not bringing any other knitting, and I have high hopes for knitting them all while we’re traveling. Optimistic? Definitely. For spinning, I’m hoping for five skeins for the QBP. The braids are 100% wool which I have previously blended with Qiviut; I plan to spin those on my Canadian Production Wheel at my mom’s. The bottom two bags of rolags are blends of equal parts qiviut, silk, and wool, which will come together on spindles. The really black bag of rolags is Icelandic Thel, which I’ve been spinning as a warm up for the Tour.

The Icelandic Thel, which blended beautifully on the drum carder with wool and silk, is behaving very badly when hand-carded. The finished two-ply is going to be very thick and thin. Thankfully, it’s so dark it will hardly matter! I’ve timed my spinning so I’ll finish on July 4th, and be ready for a new skein at the Grand Depart on Saturday.

For knitting? Erm, I haven’t been knitting as much as usual, because often my evening knitting time was replaced with spinning (since kids at home means less spinning time during the day), and even then I’m at least 50% likely to be taking a turn driving the keyboard as we continue to play Blue Prince. But I did finish my silly Hogwarts Castle Cowl:

Apart from that, it’s been socks forever.

Hero Quest Minis

I know I’ll be too busy to give these their own post, so I’ll just talk about them briefly here. Long story short: my mom got Jared this board game called Hero Quest for his birthday, and I offered to paint the minis. I found some youtube videos that detailed every step of the process, and we had tons of fun doing it.

Washed, and trimmed, with some texture added to the bases, ready for priming.

Some of the thirty five pieces of furniture

It was a lot of work. But it was really nice to have a big project to work away at during our time off school, especially since we had clear directions to follow. It’s a craft I’ve wanted to try literally since I was a teenager, so I can tick that box on the bucket list. Who knows, maybe when we get home in August we’ll even play it?!

That’s been our month, with all the ups and downs therein.

We’re unbelievably thankful to be with family and have a nice long season of rest and play together. Here’s hoping we don’t get too sunburned, and get to connect really well with our loved ones. Happy belated Canada Day, and happy early 4th of July!