Chicago's Millenium Park

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Millenium Park is new since my last visit to Chicago.

Here is the Cloud Gate (it looks more like an enormous drop of mercury than a cloud!). I love the way it curves the reflections of everything around it to match its shape. Note that when you stand close to it, your reflection is perpendicular to your self.





A small person pondering a reflection:





As you might guess from the "Gate" in its name, you can walk under it.





Here is what you see if you look up from underneath:





The amphitheatre is also very cool. It is enormous. The curled-back metal bits over the stage can be seen from quite a distance.





There are theatre seats near the stage, and then there is a huge lawn. All around the lawn are large shiny pillars supporting speakers, speakers, and more speakers.





They were rehearsing opera when I was there. As I walked around the periphery of this area, looking at the gardens, I could hear very clearly. Cool.





Speaking of gardens, the Millenium Park gardens are very nice. Large groupings of large plants. Informal. I heard lots of birdsong in the gardens, and saw a butterfly.....







I like the way the shadows are as eye-catching as the flowers.







There is a very cool-looking (but oven-like, even on a mid-80s sort of day) bridge over one of the big roads, heading mostly easterly toward the harbor. The bridge is covered with shiny metal tiles or scales or shingles. It was so bright (and I was so hot) that I didn't try to take its pic.

Chicago has a big harbor. The Great Lakes really are very large indeed, and some states that border them have a lot of coast. Michigan has more coastline than all but a handful of other states. Just not of the salty sort. In this view we are looking east toward Michigan.





In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these Chicago posts, a link to
the next one is here.

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Chicago, day 1

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Here's our hotel, in the middle of this trio. Yesterday's "view" pic was taken from the building on the right in this pic. This is the block of West Wacker that is just west of the intersection with Michigan.





These are in one of the planters on the sidewalk right in front of the hotel. Isn't it cool how the leaves are so many different colors?





There are gorgeous planters like this one all down the middle of Michigan Avenue.







These planters are on the sidewalks along Michigan Ave.





Here's a petunia in one of the sidewalk planters.






In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these Chicago posts, a link to the next one is here.

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Chicago

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I was lucky enough to be able to visit Chicago this week. Chicago has amazing architecture, lots of art in public places, and tons of flowers. I'm still trying to figure out how to get my pics off the borrowed laptop and onto my photoshop-enabled desktop....

In the mean time, here are a couple of pics that were still on the camera....

The first one is looking west from our friend's 35th floor hotel room, and the second is from a planter in front of the hotel.








In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these Chicago posts, a link to the next one is here.

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myrtle

This is something that is very happy in my yard, which is welcome like the daylilies, but which was here when I came (unlike the daylilies, which I planted). I love myrtle's glossy leaves, evergreen, even as far north as southern Michigan. It has blue flowers in springtime. As far as I know, no one thinks myrtle is a weed.

I wish I had more myrtle and less grass in the front yard.

edible

This is the only stuff in my yard that I eat. I used to have a vegetable garden, but one of the neighbors' trees grew up and shaded it too much. (A trashy Siberian elm, too, not a nice tree. Sigh.)

I've never picked enough lambs' quarters to cook it. I just pick the ends of the stems, with a few big-ish leaves as well as the tiny ones, and eat them when I'm out with the dogs. They taste ... green. Not good, not bad. I assume they have lovely vitamins and things, which is why I eat them, rather than because they are yummy.

clover

Here is something I actually invited to my yard. No, not the creeping Charlie! (Though it, at least, was here in the yard when we bought the house, rather than showing up on my watch as a bunch of these other Incorrect plants have done.)

My parents' backyard had a lot of clover, when I was growing up, and I know it's good for the soil. I sowed clover seed in my back yard, and here it is, several years later. From time to time I think I see a four-leafed one, but so far I never really have.

grapevine

Here's something else I shouldn't give space to. I believe these are "fox grapes," which are not good for human consumption, as far as I know. They certainly taste nasty, when there are grapes. Mostly there are just vines. With big leaves. And LOTS of grasping tendrils.....

I love the way the tendrils look when dried. The sinuous curls.........

mulberry

I seem to be on a streak of publishing weeds, or perhaps I should call them "volunteers."

I guess the reason for that is -- I'm inspired by FoodieFarmGirl, who posts daily pics of life on her farm.

If I'm going to post pics of my yard, it's going to be almost all things that I didn't choose in the first place. My yard is very jungly, full of rampant plants which LOVE my climate. Naturally, most of those would be plants I didn't invite.....

Mulberry trees have no place in small suburban yards, as they are very big, very messy, and VERY determined. Once you have one, you may never be rid of it.

They do have their virtues. In addition to feeding silk moths, if one had any silkworms, they fruit copiously (the "messy" part of the description above). The virtuous aspect of this is that they fruit at the same time as raspberries. If I had a big yard with a plot of raspberries, I would surely plant a mulberry, as they draw the birds away from the raspberries. Mulberries, alas, have very little taste. They are bigger than raspberries, and are a lovely dark purple color, but full of seeds and basically tasteless. You knew that anything as easy to grow as a mulberry couldn't possibly have delicious fruit.

They do have cool leaves. Lobed and with fancy edges. One side of a leaf is often much larger than the other. This leaf is more symmetrical than many.

seeds, seeds, seeds, seeds

This would be why I'm not all that fond of maple trees.....

Quantity over quality is a strategy that has been pretty successful, over time, but the world is getting awfully crowded. I wish more energy went into quality, and a lot fewer were produced. Of a lot of things.

They're cool looking, though, don't you think? Individually, and severally......

lace

Queen Anne's Lace is not a native of this continent, and it thrives on neglect. Lots of people call it a weed. Ok, it does have a weedy tall habit, with blooms only on the ends of long bare-ish stems. But have a look at the wealth of blossoms, the mysterious darkdark purple flowers (just barely visible) in the center, the exuberant arangement of the flowers.... These are very good for all sorts of welcome beneficial insects, in addition to being beautiful.

red velvet

I love the old-fashioned daylilies, and I love the new fancy ones, too.

The new ones aren't as tolerant of non-optimal growing conditions. Only two of my newer ones survive....

grass

Grasses have such graceful shapes.

What I did to this pic: I was working so hard to get my nose near the ground to get the bottom of the plant that I didn't notice how tilted the camera was, relative to the siding. Straightened. I also wasn't paying any attention to the blue-green hose between the plant and the house. Hose color desaturated. Plant's greens' saturation raised. Poster edges added, which does nice things for the plant but makes the house look horrible. Understand that this is an attempt at Art, not Documentation, ok?

(Why didn't I just go back out and get a better pic? Pouring down rain, that's why, in addition to curiosity about what I can do to make pedestrian shots more interesting....)





















Update: July 14, 2006

The more I looked at that previous pic, the less I liked it.

I've cleaned up the noise on the house, and have cropped it a lot tighter. I don't think this is great, but I like it better....

shallow

Playing with Photoshop Elements some more..... I admit it, I'm shallow, it's easy to attract my attention. I like just about anything better if it's orange.....

Here is the original. Pretty boring.























Let's start by squaring up the house boards.

Now let's bump the contrast. Well, that's a bit better. What happens if we bump up the yellow? A lot, like 100%.....

Ooooh, orange! Gotta love that.

(ed. note: the Chief Housepainter is appalled at the notion of an orange house, but I rather like the idea.....)





















And now to sharpen it up with some poster edges........ Better. The flowers are too blown out to sharpen. Their whiteness is just going to have to carry them.






















Let's straighten out those stems. Hmmm. I think I prefer that.....

I like this a lot better than the original, but then orange and chartreuse are bound to please me. Isn't it cool to be able to do all this?????

cardinals

You may recall that I blogged the cardinal nest on the back of my garage. I'm not sure if that nest was productive; the mom disappeared from it shortly after I took that pic.

I was very pleased to spot a dad feeding a chick yesterday afternoon. These are crummy pics, but they record successful fledging of a new cardinal. (I wish I'd thought to take the camera out of auto-focus, but I didn't think of it while the birds were still in sight.....)

ball and string

This guy is one of those ball-and-string toys. His head swings off, connected by his body by the string, and you're supposed to swing it up and catch it on his peg neck. He is one of my earlier thrift shop purchases, chosen for his face and form rather than his function. I like his teeny tiny red mouth.

another doll

I don't know if this little character is someone in particular, or just cute. She hangs out on top of one of the printer's drawers that have Fisher Price people in most of the slots.

there are always surprises

I am nearly always surprised when I first look at my pictures on the computer screen. I know what I was trying to get, in a gross, macro sort of way. But the details of what will be captured often are completely unexpected. The daylily pic I posted on the Fourth of July is one example. I took a whole bunch of pics of daylilies that day, but it was that one flower that had curled its petals around the blooms-to-be in what struck me as a fetching way. I hadn't see that, at all, when I took the pic.....

I took these pics of correopsis that same day. I didn't begin to see the teeny red bug, which obviously had places to go and things to do.......
























One of the things I love about digital is that I can take a dozen (or two dozen) shots of what is essentially the same thing. Lots of them are always blurry (probably my bad, who knows), but of the sharp clear ones, some are nearly always better than others. The more I take, the more likely I am to get something interesting -- and -- how perfectly lovely to be able to do that at no added expense and no more pollution of the environment, etc, etc.

I resisted digital for a long time, largely because of the speed at which my equipment will become obsolete. Having tried it, I am a total convert. I would never go back. I look forward to my next camera with delight rather than resignation -- I expect it will know a whole bunch of engaging and exciting new tricks.

round barn

My grandpa's sister and her family built this barn. Her decendants still own the farm. There is a large reunion held here each year, attended by relatives from all across the country. My immediate family has been attending since long before I was born. Not everyone has the opportunity to know their third cousins, or their first cousins, twice removed. I'm grateful that I know some of mine.

As you can see, this year the field behind the barn is planted in corn (or maize, as it is known in other parts of the world).

Rex

I have been updating my post on fixing a miscrossed cable to answer questions people have asked. Knowledge really is power. Understanding the way a knitted fabric works is enormously liberating. That knowledge brings the freedom to not need stitch-by-stitch directions for new construction, in addition to allowing changes to an existing fabric (fixing mistakes, repairing garments, later)....


I have loved dinos for decades. Stegosauruses are my favorites. I'm not as fond of the meat-eaters, but make an exception for this version of Rex....

miscrossed cable, continued.....

I wonder how many people read the Harlot's blog. After she graciously mentioned my cable wrong-way-twist repair, I got hundreds of hits more than usual. She is a Major Force in the Knitting Blogiverse!

Welcome, all.


[blush], and thank you, to those whose comments were compliments.


To those who said they'd NEVER take scissors to their knitting, I say:

Steeks scare me, too, because I know how often I must rip, and once all those strands have been cut, there's no turning back.....

The difference, for me, between cutting a steek and this sort of repair, is that the worst thing that can happen with the repair is that you have a couple of extra joins in your yarn (and on a cabled fabric, those are pretty easy to hide....).

If you should have to rip, you could, and you could easily re-knit, because your continuous strand is still there (with a couple of extra joins, one of which you could eliminate, if you had to rip....).

I'm thinking that it would be a major service, on the part of every LYS, to teach basic repairs. Once I understood how the knit fabric *worked* -- how those loops interacted with each other, I was much less worried about dropping a stitch, accidentally, and then was willing to deliberately drop stitches to rip just a small section back to fix a mistake. Similarly, understanding the way the fabric works makes this cable repair less scary.....

As Elizabeth Zimmermann said, I am the boss of my knitting. I recommend her book Knitting without Tears -- if you don't have it, check it out of the library and see, and I bet you'll want to add it to your library.



Tbird, you are right. I assumed the joins, rather than describing them.


What I do, generally, when I join two strands, is work both of them at the same time for two or three stitches, and come back after a few rows and weave in the ends. When I join two balls of yarn in the same project, that's what I usually do.

In this case, what I did was unpick just to the edge of the cable, but I began the kitchenering a couple of stitches further into the knitting. I worked duplicate stitch (in the same row as the cut strand) for a couple of stitches, then kitchenered the ends of the cable, then worked another couple of stitches of duplicate stitch at the other edge of the cable.

With a really slippery yarn, I bet it would be a good idea to have a knot. I've never used a really slippery yarn.... The test yarn was partly wool, and I guarantee you that those joined ends aren't going anywhere. Wool is a nice friendly fiber and wants to help you. It won't sneakily unravel itself, out of sheer meanness.

I urge you to knit a tiny swatch, and cut one thread in the middle. Then pull, pull, pull, viciously, in every direction, and see what happens. It's not anything like nylon stockings, which *zip* a terrible run while you watch in dismay. You may find that one stitch unravels, or two, and maybe one or two will run a few stitches in either direction, but you will need to work to make them do so. With wool in your yarn, I promise you it will be an annoyance rather than a disaster to mend. Not that you want to mend the swatch, though it would be excellent practice for mending a sweater, but *if* you wanted to mend it, it would be relatively easy, as the hole is small.




And now for something completely different.....

These were taken just a few minutes apart. The dark one breaks all the rules about not putting things smack dab in the middle, but I think it works, anyway......

Happy Fourth of July

As my yard gets shadier and shadier I have fewer and fewer flowers. Luckily daylilies just keep on going.....

Despite their non-red-white-and-blue color scheme, they make me think of the Fourth of July because they bloom now, here in southeast Michigan. I love their easy-going ways, and, of course, I love the *orange*ness.

hippos

We began our visit to the Toledo zoo with hippos, and we'll end with them.


What you can't see here is that his head is resting on her bum. This couple has been together for a long time, and seem to be quite devoted. They have raised several children over the years.

















The lady of the house (well, of the hippoquarium). Hippos are really very big, when you come face to face with them. Isn't it exceedingly cool that we *can* come face to face with them, safely for all parties?




















That's all, folks.

Convergence

Convergence is a big fiber conference put on by the Handweavers Guild of America every other year. This year it's in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and today, my friend e and I went to check it out. We had fun petting all the yarn -- more kinds of yarn than I even knew existed, and I've been paying attention to fiber for a long time -- paper, and banana fiber? Of course we saw every kind of silk, bison, camel, alpaca, cashmere, angora, mohair, umpteen different kinds of cotton, linen, hemp, wool, wool, wool, wool, and a lot more I have forgotten. Lots of bead vendors, too.

The exhibits right on site at the convention center were small. I am used to big quilt shows, like the one in Chicago and Houston, and was surprised to find so little in the way of work-on-display at Convergence. There are lots of shows at other venues around Grand Rapids, but on a day trip (about two hours each way), I don't want to spend a lot of time driving around to other venues; I like having it all under one roof. The venue was certainly big enough to have accomodated more exhibits right on site.

We did some retailing, of course. I was pretty circumspect (thinking of the way-too-much of nearly everything I already have), but allowed myself a pair of socks worth of beautiful yarn, and some dynamite ribbon. Lisa Souza not only dyes some gorgeous yarn, but is very personable and nice to talk to. Laura Nicholson designs amazing ribbon. It was hard to choose just one..... Laura, also was fun to talk to. I had run across both of these women and their work on the web, and I recognized the work immediately when I saw it in person.

It was a good day.

another penguin

I sent you, before, to see stills of the little girl giant, and now my friend
e has found video. Do go see it!


I have been struggling with this penguin. It seemed to me that I ought to be able to do something interesting with him (her?). I removed the distracting identity tags from her flipper, desaturated the color, and fixed an anomaly in the surface on which she stands. I raised the contrast. I poster-edged her.

I'm still not sure I think this image works...... I'm not sure what I think should be different but........ ??

(contemplating a series: "almost black and white at the zoo" -- the zebra, the polar bear, the penguin.....)






















Here's another attempt....... ??

Maybe half-way between the two..... I do like the slightly tighter cropping in this next one, but maybe there's too much contrast between the penguin and the surface on which she stands..........

mallard

Here is the only critter in these pics who came to the Toledo zoo by choice. This handsome guy was hanging out in the rhino enclosure.

Fisher Price people

I knew I wasn't the only one to decorate with these.

Check out beetlegrass's wonderful studio.