Knitting in the Shadows: A Look at Vermont

August 01, 2009

A Look at Vermont

Deep Breath.

First, I'm home. It was a long road home, and I arrived exhausted. But now that I've slept a couple of times, I'm ready to review the last few days of our trip.

On our first full day in Vermont, we went to the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum (Ethan Allen's last home). These black locust trees are a couple hundred years old.

This is the "kitchen garden". It's lovely and huge, and full of all sorts of interesting things. Even so, it's much smaller than it was in Ethan's time. (Ethan, for those not in the know, captured Fort Ticonderoga at the start of the Revolutionary War, and was the leader of the Green Mountain Boys, a paramilitary group that was integral to the formation of Vermont as a state).

And this, is the view from Ethan's home. That river you see is the Winooski River.

One final shot -- Ethan Allen's bed. I love hangings around beds. I know they were there to keep the bed warm at night, and are not really intended to be lovely. But I still think they're pretty.

It was an interesting museum, I suppose. Especially if you're interested in American History surrounding the Revolutionary War and/or the formation of Vermont as a separate state (the land used to be controlled by New York and/or New Hampshire). My father .was very interested in it all. The girls, not so much.

To counteract the history hit, we went to see G-Force on our second day. Very silly movie. Lots of fun. The phrase "poop in his hand" will cause laughter for weeks to come.

There was also knitting.. of course.

While I was knitting, Kitty was learning to whittle.

On the knitting front, I finished a sweater for Bookworm, and came to a decision point in Natalia. I'm not following the exact color patterning from the design, because, well, they don't make a nice DARK teal to work with the main color of the sweater. Here are the two options I considered for the corrugated ribs on the sleeves.

Option A

Naturally, having knit this one, I second guessed myself, and knit a different version.

Then I sat there looking at the two sleeves for a while before deciding on the final version. Since I'm a snotty blogger, I'm going to let you guess which one I chose.

However, since I'm not a completely nasty blogger, I'm going to fess up to which yarn I bought in Brunswick:

I chose the Tomato. I might have chosen differently, had I not really wanted a deep red when I bought the French Twist. The second skein is not nearly as deep a red as the original. The new one now looks a bit like this: