Long Lake Yarns

Illusion knitting is the trickster technique of the knitting world.  It can’t be new.  Nothing can really be new in knitting, can it?  But my first experience of it was  knitting Elizabeth Fallone’s Shadow Spider Scarf in Shelridge Farm’s worsted weight yarn.   Knitters would say that yarn has a wonderful hand. I knitted most of [...]

I feel uncomfortable about this. Why is that Golden Retriever wearing a shower cap?  Is that Bailey…because Bailey told me they brought her somewhere to wash off that last skunk.  She told me it was a lot worse than the bathtub and the baby shampoo and the hydrogen peroxide.  And I don’t smell nearly as [...]

Long Lake is surrounded by a mix of pine, birch/aspen, cedar and assorted hard woods, including  maple and oak.  This means our fall is a combination of yellows, oranges, and reds, all anchored by the steady green of the pines.  The fall colors were spectacular this year.
Today, November 7th, the deciduous trees are mostly bare.  It was [...]

The sunsets on Hillman’s Long Lake are most often beautiful in an understated way.  Yellows and delicate oranges melt into the almost night  shadows.  About now the fishermen would mostly be off the lake.  My dad would have stayed out a little later, though, trolling for bass in the shallows until night settled in.

You look at the flames of your little firepit.  You look at the sky and the sky reflected in the lake.  Everything rattling around inside your head quiets.   Soon we’ll spot the first bat of the night.

So, this is our Long Lake garden. No, our Long Lake garden is mostly hostas and a few other low maintenance perennials.  This is the sunflower field of a farmer on M-33 between Fairview and Comins–about 30 miles from the cottage.  Helianthus Annus.  When their buds are flowering, sunflowers  face east at sunrise and then [...]

This is the place. Nothing too fancy. This is the view from the lakeshore. Our Wilderness System Pungos are waiting for the next paddle. My aunt and I were peddling back from near the narrows, on the paddleboat, when it started to gently rain. As we were almost home, we [...]