My new technique for spinning seems to be working well. I am using the larger gear on the spinning wheel which puts in less twist for the same speed of pedaling. I am learning about the different fibers and what works best for each. I have this
roving that I want to spin next. This roving is unbelievably light and fluffy for its size. It is in the same colors (mostly) as the tam.
This weekend I did a little hand work to finish up a small quilt. I thought I would share a little about why I have more than one thimble!
I like this Roxanne thimble because it has an opening at the top that allows air circulation and also a place for my finger nail to be. Switching to this expensive and elegant thimble made quilting much easier and more fun for me. I can quilt for hours without my finger tip getting sweaty. I can also push the needle through the fabric with the end of my finger which is much easier on the finger joints. I actually have two of these, a small size for winter and one size larger for summer when my fingers swell a little. I have had mine for years. I just linked to the source and they have gone up in price a bit. Still I won't quilt without one.
For other sewing and applique I use a different thimble because I push the needle with the side of my finger.
This thimble works well for that. I also run my sewing thread over a piece of beeswax to keep it from knotting. I find that I feel more regal when using beeswax that has been formed in a fancy mold. I get beeswax from the neighboring farm, melt it in a double boiler, and pour it into candy molds.
Here is the little quilt. It is an interpretation of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" painting.
I made this basket over 20 years ago, when I was in college.
We use it to collect eggs and bring up potatoes and onions from our basement storage area.
My basket is made in the same design as this one, which was made by my great grandfather. I only use this basket for display now, as I am afraid it will break. It is old and brittle.
Both baskets were used at our wedding reception. I lined each with a cloth napkin and put birdseed in them. Before we left the reception a couple of children walked around with these baskets and offered birdseed to the guests who wanted to toss some on us when we went to our car.
I have been thinking about family heirlooms and how they get to be "heirlooms." My great grandfather probably made more than one basket to be used on the farm. This one happened to last long enough for my mother to save it after it fell out of regular use. I doubt is was more special than the others he made except for the fact that this one lasted. I am using the baskets I made years ago. In fact, we used one so much that the reed weaving on it has broken and fallen out. That one is no longer usable and I have it in the basement with the idea that someday I will reweave it.
This makes me wonder about what things will be passed down in my family. Which things that I have made will reach future generations? Will it be the "ugly" quilts that don't get used that end up surviving or the things that are very special and only seldom used? The family favorites will be very worn, maybe even "worn out" and thrown away. I am sure there is a bit of luck involved too. What is it that we learn about our ancestors from the items they pass down? I would like to know about the much loved heirlooms that didn't last. What stories could they tell? What treasured family memories are lost with the items that helped make them special?
My camera and computer are tools I use daily. I am still learning how to use my camera. It is not easy - the book that came with it is only written in French. My previous camera died while we were on vacation last spring. I could not have a vacation in France with no pictures so I bought this little Panasonic. D may now know enough French that he can translate the book for me. I would like to know more about the light settings. Maybe then it would be easier to take pictures of yarn and fiber items and have the colors be true.
I used to take pictures of things that I made with the idea that I would have a notebook of photos with some writing about why I made a particular thing, who it was for etc. That never happened. I have a lot of pictures but it always took too long to finish a roll of film and have it developed that I would forget what I wanted to write. Or the pictures would sit in a pile until I found the notebook. Things are soooo much easier now with a digital camera, computer, flickr, and a blog.
My laptop gets a lot of use. It is where I organize our family photos, photos of my creations, write my blog, and keep in touch with family and friends via email. I also enjoy sharing things on flickr and visiting other blogs.
This is also where the boys write their papers for school. They email them to themselves and print them out at school. It is also how we watch videos as the computer is our only DVD player. We can hook it up to the television but we have noticed that we end up watching the computer screen because the picture is so much better. Now, we just put the computer on the coffee table and all get very cozy on the couch. Last night, B and I were watching a movie so D had to type up his English assignment on the back up equipment you can see there on the right.
Now, all I need is a faster internet connection. It is painfully slow to upload pictures to flickr, keep an etsy shop, and blog with our #@* dial up connection.
Yesterday, the snow that blanketed us almost two weeks ago melted enough that we could see areas of ground. It always amazes me that snow drops can come up and bloom under the snow.
P is like these snow drops. She is changing and learning new things when we are not looking. The other day she and I were drawing together. She wanted to draw Humpty Dumpty. She tried several times and was frustrated with her result. We turned the paper over and she amazed herself. First the egg shape, just like she wanted. Then she added eyes and a mouth. On to arms, hands, legs, and feet. She paused excitedly and then added eyebrows. Lastly, she said, "I going to give him hair too!"
Then she had to draw more
and more.
These are cats.
I can't wait to see what's next.
I have to say that my KitchenAid mixer is the most used tool in my kitchen. I bought it when we were first married. B was in graduate school, and we lived in government subsidized housing. It was a very extravagant purchase at the time, but I have used it almost every day since, so it turned out to be a wise investment. I even use all of the attachments.
I make bread with the dough hook. The two bread recipes I make most are the French Bread and English Muffin Loaves in the recipe book that came with the mixer. I use the dough hook to knead the bread. Then, I oil the bowl and replace the dough and it rises in the same bowl. That makes for easy clean up.
I use the whisk attachment to whip butter, cream, and sometimes egg whites.
The flat beater is used the most. I use it for anything that needs to mixed. Mostly cookies... but also for pie crusts, scones, cakes, quick breads, and even meatloaf. I use it so much that I have worn through the white coating on two beaters. I am on the third beater in 20 years. I think creaming the butter and sugar that does that. I remember creaming the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon when I was growing up; that was a lot more work. Now I can measure other ingredients while the mixer does the work.
P is growing fast. I made her two pair of pajamas this weekend. I used the pattern shown here. This is a well used pattern I picked up at a rummage sale when the boys were little. I made pjs for them and also for some of my nieces and a nephew.
I like that I get to use this favorite pattern again. This pair is out of a soft flannel with a rosebud print. P loves them. The other pair is a cotton teddy bear print. Both fabrics were given to me by a friend when she cleaned her sewing room.
I think P is trying to show you that it has an elastic waist. Either that or she is trying to tell me she is tired of pictures and would like her breakfast.
True left handed scissors- if you are right handed you probably have not thought about the difference. Try this, hold your right handed scissors in your left hand. Now, try to cut out a shape drawn on a piece of paper. Not so easy, is it? The first thing you will notice is that you cannot see the line you want to follow unless you rotate your hand toward you and crane your neck to look over the scissor blade. The other thing you might not notice right away is that the natural tendency when using scissors is for the thumb to push out and the fingers to pull inwards. On the left hand this forces the blades apart instead of keeping the cutting edges against each other.
True left scissors have their blades reversed so that the natural tendency to push out with the thumb while cutting keeps the blades together and cutting well. You can also see where you are cutting much easier.
A few years ago I treated myself to these pairs of true left handed dress making shears and pinking shears. Now, I wish all of my scissors were true left hand design so that I wouldn't have to switch back and forth. If you are lucky enough to be left handed like me, get yourself some true left handed scissors. You can avoid hand strain and callouses on your thumb from pulling the thumb blade towards your hand with right hand scissors! Switch soon, you deserve it!
P is officially signed up for preschool. She will be attending the Chelsea Children's Co-op just like her brothers. Of course, it was very different when the boys attended. I was a much younger mother then. We did not have email. The school was in the basement of a church and one of the parents had to come in and set up the school every Sunday evening. Other parents packed things away every Friday afternoon. The parent helper jobs are easier now. The school is now housed in the first floor of this building.
For many years this was the parochial school for St Mary's Catholic Church. In 1998 the church sold the building to actor Jeff Daniels and his wife who then donated it to the Chelsea Center for the Arts. The preschool has three classrooms on the first floor. Thursday, P and I attended the open house and got registered for the fall. She really loved her play time there. She enjoyed play dough, snack, puzzles, art, rice table, the indoor slide, and the play kitchen (where she called Dad on the wood phone). She also got to paint at an easel - where they have APRONS! They even have a library and the teacher let her check out a book. It will be a long wait until September. She is already asking to go to preschool again!
She will have to keep busy with her books here.
She already spends a lot of time on her "homework" after the boys are home from school. She can concentrate very hard on her serious pencil and paper work.
I like to make cookies. With this tool, I can make 6 dozen oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in under an hour! I have this recipe down to a science. Really. This 1 1/4 inch scoop makes the scooping go very fast. I can quickly make 6 staggered rows of 4 cookies on the baking sheets. I load the second tray while the first is baking. When the third tray goes in the oven I wash everything up. Total time in the kitchen after the butter is soft is less than one hour.
When I am not in a hurry, I can make fancy cookies. These are especially fun with a large collection of great cookie cutters. I picked these up years ago at a rummage sale.
I get them out every spring. P and I recently made some sugar cookies with these.
Baby bootees are fun to make for new baby gifts. They use up little bits of super-soft yarn. These are made from Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino (oh, if only I could afford an afghan out of that stuff...) from a pattern in 50 baby bootees to knit by Zoe Mellor.
While looking through the book, I saw a great pattern for fair isle socks. The pattern used fine yarn and made socks for a 3-6 month old. P and I liked the design very much. I decided to knit them from my recent homespun yarn.
I didn't want to knit the same sock again (there's that second sock syndrome showing up again), so I knit the second one as a negative of the first.
Since my homespun was thicker, the socks turned out bigger. They are a bit large for P now but after the photo shoot yesterday morning she did not want to take them off and wore them all day! They will be great snow socks for next winter!
I will be sharing some of my favorite tools for all sorts of things throughout the month of March. I have been trying to declutter my life and my home so these tools will be things that I use very frequently or that I feel are the must have tool for a particular task or something that just makes me happy when I use it.
My favorite tool for knitting is my collection of double pointed needles, or "knitting sticks" as P calls them. These range from size 0000 to size 13. Double pointed needles are a must for knitting some of my favorite projects like socks, mittens, and hats. The shorter bamboo ones really make the knitting go faster. I also use the double points for knitting sweater sleeves on many sweaters. I like that double points were the way very early knitters knit larger garments in the round. Before there were circular needles they just used more double points to go around the sweater. This technique is pictured in some very old pieces of art.
These little stork scissors, a gift from a very dear friend, are also a favorite tool. I love using this elegant tool to snip my yarns or embroidery threads. I had seen scissors like these when I was small and I fell in love with the clever shape. It was like a secret childhood dream come true when I was given these scissors. Yes, sometimes it is the little things that mean a lot.
Here and here are some other tools I adore using but have already mentioned.
When we woke yesterday it was 50 degrees. A lot of our snow had melted; this was what our upper garden looked like. This garden is sort of a saddle of land between two bowl like depressions.
We live on a glacial moraine, the pile of rubble pushed ahead of an advancing glacier. We have two kettle holes on our property. These were formed when large blocks of ice calved off the front of the receding glacier and were buried under glacial outwash or sediment. When the ice finally melted a depression was left in the land. Kettle holes filled with water are called kettle lakes. Ours only hold water for a few days in the spring.
This is what the smaller kettle hole looked like in the morning.
By the afternoon it looked like this.
This morning it is cold again and there is ice on the kettle pond.
You can even slide ice chunks all the way to the other side. If it stays cold it may be thick enough for skating tomorrow. Too bad we don't have skates.T
hey have predicted 6-8 more inches of snow. This is the way of early March.
Over the weekend I did a little inventory of the freezer. I wanted to see how much jam and pie filling was left. While I was digging around I found a bag of cranberries and had to use them in cranberry bread right away! This is a favorite with the boys. I usually get a few bags of cranberries and put them in the freezer in the fall so we can enjoy this bread in the winter months.
Cranberry Bread
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
2 Tablespoons shortening
2 Tablespoons hot water
1/2 cup orange juice
1 cup raw cranberries cut in half (I use the whole bag and leave them whole)
1 cup nuts (optional)Mix dry ingredients
Cream together the egg, shortening, water, and juice. Add berries.
Fold the wet mixture into the dry ingredients.
Turn into a greased 9 inch loaf pan.
Bake for one hour or more at 325 degrees F. (If the berries are still frozen you will have to bake longer.) Bake until toothpick comes out clean.
They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb but I never hear much talk about the rest of the month. What is it that happens in between?
Mud. Here, March is Mud Month.
This was taken March 10, 2007. P and M enjoyed the pond that formed when the snow from the "sledding hill" behind them melted. Notice that M took P out in a dress and not pants because, as he said "the pants would just get muddy."
March his when the snow melts and we get lots of water but the ground underneath is still frozen. Sloooowly the ground thaws and that water soaks in. The top part of the earth becomes saturated with water. Our driveway turns to mud, a growing layer of mud. The boys used to play out there when they were little. They would dig channels with sticks and float boats in the driveway. They would ride their bikes and come back in with brown stripes up their backs. I often wonder how many shoes have been swallowed by that little area of earth. Even a truckload of gravel has been eaten by the mud.
The ground will eventually thaw completely and the water drains away as if someone had pulled out a plug. That is March for us.
Happy March.
For our extra day of February we are enjoying MORE SNOW! We went out to shovel the walk before it got too deep and then went for a little walk.
P is flying like the blue jays she sees ahead of her.
Here's hoping that March brings a little bit of spring.
I am hopeful. I just saw a bluebird out the window.
This morning I took my new knitting book, Favorite Socks 25 Timeless Designs from Interweave Press, to the coffee shop to meet the aunties
.A and I were flipping through the book and drooling over every page. We both wanted to make them all. We came up with a plan- together we will knit through the book. The root of the plan is that we will each knit only ONE sock from each pattern. The best part of the plan is that we have cured second sock syndrome!
Here is how it will work. We will take turns with each pattern. The first person will choose the yarn and keep both socks. The next will do the same. That way we will get to try all of the patterns and will still get a pair of socks for each two socks we knit! We will call this project “Two Make a Pair.”
We believe this is a clever project for us as A will be moving about 5 hours away in the near future. This will be a neat way for us to keep in touch and have fun mail.
P was playing with our Fisher Price Little People; she dug in the bin to get just the right people, matching tables, and matching chairs. Then, she said they needed dishes. I handed her some coins and pony beads to use for plates and cups.
After arranging those on the tables, she said, "They need silverware." She ran out of the room and returned with some real, life size forks from the kitchen and seemed surprised that they were too big for her little play scene. It made me laugh and reminded me of when I was small, and the boys too. I remember getting gifts and thinking that ANYTHING was possible. A tiny little box could hold a pony or a bike. The package size or shape gave no clue to what was inside. I remember that feeling of mystery that everything is possible. It is sad that we lose that innocence when we grow and learn. Of course, we need that knowledge for grown up tasks, but wouldn't it be nice to keep that feeling of wonder and amazement?
This morning we woke to new snow on our old snow. This was the view north to the road from the top of our stairwell.
This was the view from our bedroom window. The small trees to the left of the chicken barn are plum and apricot trees. The chickens like to roost in the plum tree closest to the barn.
I almost finished knitting the popcorn hat for P last night but I ran out of yarn that had been wound into a ball. I knew she would want to help wind the last hank of yarn so I waited until this morning. We got out the swift and ball winder and went right to work. A little fast knitting and out to the porch for photos. OK, I admit this was probably not the best day for an outdoor photo shoot of a 2 year old in a sweater.
The snow was still blowing.
P declared herself cold and we came back inside.
How could I pass up a book with this title? I found this great little book at a used book store. It was printed in England around 1910.
It contains directions on how to do many kinds of needlework, embroidery, and lace making. It also has several very practical chapters. The one called "The Mending Basket" is particularly interesting. The author, Flora Klickmann, talks about preventative mending: "We have heard that in China it is the custom to pay the family doctor to keep his patients in good health rather than to call him in only after illness has laid the sufferer low. Many of us applaud this system, but have neither the opportunity nor, perhaps, the courage, to defy conventions in our own country.
But why not pursue the same wise course in dealing with household mending? It works admirably.
Take the proverbial stitch that "saves nine" in very good time, even before there is any apparent need for it, and you'll find it will work miracles."
Flora did not think highly of "ready-made frocks" either. She recommends that you resew all buttons and reinforce sleeves and hems "before the garment is worn for the first time, to overcome the little deficiencies that we may expect to discover in the 'ready-mades.'"
I think she was also not a fan of the "modern laundry." It is the cause of much of our mending! "Where our mothers could keep their under clothing in good condition for years, ours is torn to shreds, and some of it comes home ragged and tattered most weeks from the average laundry. Knicker frills go very quickly, and often need replacing." She then explains a simple way to renovate the knickers.
She talks about choosing quality materials and techniques for your work."
I want to urge those of you who have any time to give to needlework to remember that this is as much an art as painting and music and architecture. You can be blunting- or elevating- your artistic sense (and that of other people) by the type of work you produce and display, just as much as by the type of picture you hang upon your wall. You will be lowering your ideals by doing shoddy work and false work, just as you will be raising them by doing work that is thorough and conscientious."By false work she means "the sort of work that strives by cheap tricks to look like something that it isn't."
The chapter called "The Educational Value of the Doll" is also very much worth reading. "The child who has helped to put together her doll's combinations, will have no difficulty in making her own later on, neither will she be perplexed when she in turn has little people to sew for."
"This instruction as to the doll's wearing apparel is only the beginning of the educational possibilities of the doll. The next step is to encourage the little girl to see to the household linen and general furnishings of the doll's house."
Show her how to make the small feather bed, and how to stuff the pillows. She can make a little mattress from small cloth clippings; this will teach her the value of tiny waste bits of material..."I think a lot of what Flora wrote is still applicable today. Her notes on quality are right on the mark. Along the same lines I remember my mother saying "if something is worth doing, it is worth doing right!" I agree with her thoughts on the dolls too. There are many life skills to be learned from caring for dolls. I do a lot of mending too but I have to admit I don't often mend undergarments.
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