I had my first little experiment with salt dough ornaments last week. They looked pretty sloppy going into the oven but they shrink up a bit and look much tidier when they come out. Next time I want to flip them half way through because they didn’t dry evenly. I’m thinking I need a straw or something to make a larger hole as well.
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Tagged crafts, ornaments, salt dough
Upcoming Illumination Night is Wed, Aug 15, 2012. It has always been my favorite event of the summer
Going to Illumination Night is a thrill for me no matter my age.
I think I was 2 and 1/2 the first time I went, I’m embarrassed to say that even with my annoyingly good memory, I don’t remember it. My first memory of Illumination Night involves wearing a particularly pretty dress so I’m thinking I was around three or four.
My dad, mom, god-mother and I would have an early supper and then walk to the Campground. My dad and I would stroll around looking at all the beautifully decorated gingerbread houses while my mother and god-mother would chat with friends and relatives.
At 8 o’clock the Vineyard Haven Band would begin playing and the always fun community sing would start. Patriotic songs like, America The Beautiful, Yankee Doodle, Battle Hymn of the Republic are always stirring and emotional. It took me a couple of years to learn the words to all the songs and I still get messed up on a couple of the rounds like John Brown’s Baby. The band playing the Star Spangled Banner and the rousing Stars and Stripes Forever are always crowd pleasers.
But as much fun as that was it was only a precursor to the main event. The Tabernacle and Campground go dark… the crowd cheers. The lighting of the first lantern and then all the gingerbread houses are simoutaneously aglow with Japanese lanterns. Everyone oohs and ahhs and stream out of the Tabernacle to walk through the magical fairyland the Campground has become. My dad would carry me on his shoulders so I could see everything… I felt like I could touch the stars.
After seeing all there was to see we’d head out onto Circuit Ave to either the Frosty Cottage for ice cream or Darling’s for popcorn. Always a tasty ending to a perfectly enchanting night.
Like I said, no matter your age, Illumination Night is fun for everyone. Just look at these faces from 1998…
Links.
Martha’s Vineyard Campmeeting Association
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Tagged Campground, Family, Illumination Night, Martha's Vineyard, Memories, Photographs, Tabernacle
This is a good-looking skirt that I’m thinking of trying to make pretty soon, but it’d require a trip to Richmond to buy the fabric (which, well, not at all a downside).
Geneva’s blog is absolutely addictive and 100% inspiring.
Two weekends ago, I went with Dianna to Kristen’s place in Vermont to hang around with friends and dye fiber and yarn. It was a blast! We had pots going outside for natural dyeing, including an indigo vat, and there were acid dyes on the porch… we experimented with kettle dyeing, painting and steaming the fiber, crock pots, dyeing with plants and fungi, overdyeing what we dyed, overdyeing bleh fiber we brought… Chaos, but great fun, and great folks to spend the weekend with. Many of the same folks as were at shearing in May, but we missed Sara!
All the photos are here in my flickr set, but here are a few highlights…
Everybody hanging on the porch, getting ready,
The indigo vat… the fiber comes out of the vat green and turns blue on exposure to oxygen. Way cool!
Acid dyes, Toby handpainting, and fiber wrapped and ready to steam:
Simmering weeds, and rinsing Phaeolus dyed yarn,
Some of our results:
The rain held off until we were done with the bulk of it all! We got to visit with Kristen’s flock, and I got to help with the foot rot treatment (just a few of the goats, they’re all doing far better now).
The calf thought Toby was made of milk. He started on her hand, moved to her crutch, and then her knee! Little Blue (see the shearing link, first paragraph) has gotten bigger, and he’s a little fatty, but he’s still the smallest goat!
And here’s the stuff I dyed:
Couple of mystery skeins dyed in indigo. I think they both are from Friends Folly; the top one is a mohair/wool blend and the other is angora or an angora blend.
Some old gray icelandic called Georgetown that I used to make DH a sweater years ago (rav link), and some Aarlan alpaca/wool/silk that was a brownish to start with. The icelandic took the “paint”, the color is more subtle on the other yarn. These are on the bottom, on the right, and here,
I also overdyed some charcoal mohair in indigo… only one half of the skein. It’s subtle and hard to see in the photo, but I like it. This is hanging in the middle on the bottom of the big pic.
Pretty sure this was dyed initially with goldenrod, and then into the indigo. Much better! It’s just domestic wool roving from Halcyon.
Tencel and Seacell out of the crock pot and acid dyed. The fiber went from being smooth and silky straight to somewhat kinky. I think it’ll spin up well. I can tell which is which by feel, but not in the photo.
The photo doesn’t do this color justice… It’s a fabulous grey/green/sagey color. It’s handspun romney that a friend picked up for me. Dyed first in tansy, giving a really “meh” pale yellow, so we added some iron, which saddened the color and made it kinda greyish green, and then we added what was left of the goldenrod to the pot, which deepened the grey-green.
There’s also some pink/purple romney roving (it’s in the top photo). I was stepping outside of my usual color scheme with that one. I think it may go to somebody who will love it more than I will.
Pappus of some seed…
You can see I was screwing around with the macro on my little point and shoot,
Seems like everywhere the damned Japanese beetles are mating…
What was interesting, though, is that many of them would assume some weird posture when I got too close… legs out and up at an angle, and both the male and female would do it, as would the ones near them.
The morning glories are doing well, as are the sungolds behind them,
And DH was away for a week, and I didn’t pay any attention to the cucumbers… oops,
We’ve managed to squirrel away most of these in neighbors’ and coworkers’ cars…
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Tagged creature feature, dyeing, life in maine
It’s happened, you guys!!!
Sometime this afternoon between 2 and 4 pm, Luna walked into the copse of trees in our front pasture and delivered a beautiful baby heifer. Around 4, Zac walked into the pasture to check on her and found her with her baby.
She looks exactly– uncannily– like Luna. Same kohl-rimmed eyes and the same black-tipped ears, the same black muzzle and speckles.
Luna’s softly mooing at her to encourage her to stand up, licking her all over, and generally acting like a textbook new mother. It’s such a relief to see that all’s well with mama and baby!
We’re leaning pretty heavily towards naming her Stella.
I just am so grateful that a) it happened and b) that it happened so easily! Stella’s just as jaw-droppingly gorgeous as her mother. She’s about the size, I guess, of a medium-sized dog– maybe 40 or 50 lbs– but with long little fawn-like legs.
My heart is just melting. We are all so happy!
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Tagged Calves, Luna, posted by Caroline
Well, when I’m in the barn and looking out. More to the point, the glass won’t be falling out of the panes any time soon.
This was a rather large project for only 3 windows, lots of work to get the old panes out, clean up the wood, sand, paint (primer and two coats, both sides), get the new glass in, and get them up.
To start with:
Windows out, panes out,
Variety of points I found,
Kinda not a lot to work with in places,
Between waiting for things to dry, and having to do things like work, and going away for a weekend to play, the project took almost 2 weeks,
Done!
(the photo on the right was waiting for 4 replacement panes).
And now I have to do the ones over the deck.
I learned a lot in this process…
It is easy to break glass getting the panes out. It is hard to cut glass when there’s only an inch or half an inch to trim off. I ended up having the hardware store cut it for me.
Only after I set the glass in the smaller windows with narrower mullions did I learn you can trim the ends of the points (not the pointy end, the flanges).
I bought a glazer’s putty knife, and it was really helpful, because it’s so stiff.
I was extremely frustrated with the local hardware store. I went to them first to get more DAP 33 glazing compound and points. They didn’t have points. And I waited 20 minutes while the single person available helped another person, and then another helper came out. He couldn’t find the points either. So I left the compound and went off to Lowe’s, where one can buy a whole gallon of the stuff for only $6 more than the quart cost at the local shop. And they had lots of points.
Apparently the DAP can be very variable. I’m used to it sometimes being a tad dry (add a drop or two of linseed oil while you knead it). But the new gallon was wet! It was unworkable! I found one reference online where they talked about adding whiting to stiffen it up so it’s workable. This is calcium carbonate, or lime. When I asked for whiting at the local hardware store, they didn’t know what I meant. I said what I wanted it for, they still didn’t know. So I said “calcium carbonate”. She says “something a little less Latin please?”. Sorry, hon, not Latin. Anyhow, I told her “you know… lime???” Oh, we have that, but you have to buy 50 pounds. Cripes. I needed about 3 ounces.
So I used cornstarch on my hands. It helped. And I kneaded some into the compound. Probably beetles will get into it, but we’ll be gone by then.
Also, I re-glazed the windows over the deck about 10 years ago, and they are in sore need of it again. I learned this time around that it helps if you either put down linseed oil on the mullions (I didn’t do this, but if I had oil paint, I would have), or prime and paint them (this is what I did).
I did take the windows out and had them flat to work on. I can’t imagine doing all these little panes in place.
There, now you know.
We think they’re living on the unoccupied 3rd floor… in the past 5 weeks, we’ve had 5 bats in our office areas… one was flying up and down the hall. These two were just hanging out. One in a doorway, where it wasn’t there the 5 minutes before, and then it was. It was squeeky/noisy/unhappy about being moved. The other I discovered under my gym bag. It was pretty sleepy.
Claire thinks they’re cute, and they are. It’s nice to see they don’t appear to have the dreaded whitenose syndrome. We think these are little brown bats.
Good thing Claire has such long legs (she’s a few inches taller than me!)… she hardly got any burdock on her.
All the bat appear to be behaving normally, so we don’t really worry too much about rabies. But I tell everybody not to touch them!
I have loads more to post, but it’ll have to wait for another day… dyeing! spinning! dinosaur bra!
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Tagged creature feature, life in maine, projects, work
I have been blogging to you in my head as just about every day of the week, especially on days I don’t get a chance to blog. I have been having so many new ideas!
You see, I am now gainfully employed, instead of just-barely-sustainably employed, which opens up a lot of new opportunities. I can now seriously entertain the idea of one day owning a car that can haul all my yarn and supplies to craft shows. I fantasize about my future yard and future giant garden with a real sense of attainability. I can pay my bills and use my debit card without cringing for fear of it being declined. What will happen first of course, before any of that other stuff is acted upon, is that I might finally be able to pay off my debt. I don’t have a lot, bit it’s enough to be an encumbrance for attaining a decent car or a yard or a vacation. To have the opportunity to finally make more than minimum payments on my debt is a staggering prospect. It’s freeing. It’s a whole new world, as it were.
And the crazy this is, I really like my job. I think I have said this before, but even that fact still surprises me. I thought for the longest time that if I wanted to work for more than minimum wage I would somehow have to compromise my integrity. While I know this assumption is wrong on many levels, I also don’t believe it to be uncommon. Perhaps it’s a collegiate-inspired disillusionment? I am fortified know that I can go to work each day and do my job and not be dishonest. (I think, working in the service industry requires an amount of dishonesty in that it requires a person to assume some complacent anonymity to get through the shift and not annoy customers.)
At the same time, the new schedule and the new environment is an adjustment. It is all new, and I have a lot of new work-related things to think about. So much so that sometimes I have trouble shutting these things off throughout the day and into the evening. Sometimes, I wake myself up in the night thinking up clever merchandising plans for one of my retail sites that have nothing to do with reality. (One recent idea/dream had to do with feigning a haunting, which involves a level of dubiousness that I do not possess.) Because of this, my fiber art energies have been diverted into as much knitting as I can handle. With two sweaters and two pairs of socks on the needles, I am in my knitting element. I have not been dyeing any yarn–except for one special order. I have not been attending the farmers market. I have not been spinning or weaving or designing. I have been knitting items that are not for sale as fast as my fingers can move.
All the while, I have been fantasizing about owning my own yarn store and what about my new job I could take with me to do that. Now, don’t get too excited. Remember the beginning of my post where I was excited about some very simple, generally attainable things? Without a serious financial backer, there would be no way I would be able to open my own retail operation anytime in the foreseeable future, but I have been applying these fantasies to Tiny Dino Studios.
In the past, I have tried to sell knitted good along with my yarn. I have had good luck with these products, bu t I don’t enjoy the process. I am selfish with my knitting. I do gifts of course, but when knitting to sell, I sometimes get angry that I can’t knit what I want. Taking frustration out on knitting is not a good place to be.
As fall approaches, I have been feeling pressure to create winter items like scarves, hats, and mittens for sale at the farmer’s market. I am not going to give in to that pressure. I have other knitting goals that are more important to me to meet. I want to teach knitting classes and eventually design my own sweaters and mittens and socks. There is a lot of work I need to do to be able to reach that goal. I am working through projects / books that I believe will get me there.
Focusing down to only just selling yarn from now on takes a lot of pressure off of me and gives me the motivation to move forward with my dyeing business where lately I have been feeling discouraged and confused.
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Tagged Almost a Business, business, Hand-dyed Yarn, retail, Tiny Dino Studios
I was really excited to use the first onions from my garden this week and I am just managing to keep up with the serrano peppers.
Basil Chicken Curry
2 pounds bone-in chicken parts
1 cup diced onion
2 tablespoons fresh ginger, minced
4 serrano peppers, minced
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon red and black pepper blend
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
salt to taste
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 can coconut milk
1 28-ounce can crushed fire-roasted tomatoes
1 bunch basil leaves
hot cooked rice
Brown the chicken well on all sides. (I had the breasts still on the bone with skin). Add the onion, ginger, and peppers and cook until just soft. Stir in the garlic and spices and cook, while stirring, about a minute longer. Add the coconut milk and crushed tomatoes and just enough water to rinse the cans. Bring to a simmer. Remove half the basil leaves from their stems, chop and add to the pot. Cover the pot and transfer to an oven preheated to 350F, bake 1 hour. Remove chicken to a cutting board. Shred chicken, discarding skin, tendons and bones and return to the pot. Remove remaining basil from the stems, chop. Serve curry over hot cooked rice, topped generously with basil.
So, remember how were super-hungry and tired the day we made shakshouka for dinner? That’s because I’d been gardening all day, and Zac had been building this fantastic potting table for the greenhouse! I swear, it belongs in Country Living.
It’s quite shallow, but runs about 2/3 the full length of the greenhouse, and is exactly the perfect height for me. There’s a lower shelf for storing flowerpots, seed trays, and other big things. But the best part is the slatted section for potting, which features a drawer to catch and reuse any extra potting soil. Just another reason to look forward to winter– I’m in love!
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Tagged Features, gardening, posted by Caroline
