A few specific pics of my Hoosier cabinet for a fellow owner

This post is for a person who is fixing up an old Hoosier cabinet which is just like mine. They requested a few specific pictures to help with their restoration, so here they are:

Here, I've put a dark color behind the glass to make the etching stand out more:

This one is looking up from below the sifter in its pulled-out position, just so that you could see sort of how it's attached (don't mind the weird patch in the lower right corner, that's where I did a botch job of removing my face from the picture (this was barely after my morning cup if coffee, not a pretty sight):

If you'd like more pictures, let me know!

A little bear for my grandniece

Here's a little bear that I just finished knitting for my grandniece. She'll be born in March. The little scarf is made with the two ply, stripy yarn that's pictured in the previous post.

And let's just say that I'm a better spinner than I am a knitter and embroiderer ; )

Two ways of plying yarn

There are different techniques you can use when plying colored yarns, and they will give you different results.

I will sometimes ply the regular way in which the two singles are twisted around each other. On yarns with varying colors, such as those made with hand-painted rovings, this will result in a candy cane stripe effect.

Most of the time when I'm plying these hand painted yarns, I'll use the Navajo plying method. This makes a triple-plied yarn in which the colors match up with very little striping.

In the picture the Navajo- plied yarn is on the left and the regular two-ply is on the right. These were spun from the same hand-painted roving.

Murder and Seed Savers

Today the mail brought me my order of seeds from Seed Savers Exchange, a place to buy heirloom varieties. I bought quite a lot of seeds, don't know where I'm going to plant everything.

But quite by coincidence, today I also began reading The Heirloom Murders, by Kathleen Ernst. I'm only a few pages in, but Seed Savers is mentioned and I think plays a part in the book. The heirlooms in the book may refer to seeds, or antiques, or both, because we've been introduced to a gardener who saves seeds, a house full of gathered antiques intended for a museum, a lady who works at a local museum, and a possible murder.

Ah, to snuggle down with a book and await the coming of spring...

My first attempt at trying to knit the reindeer tattoo

This is my first attempt at translating this reindeer tattoo design into a knitted article:

 It's done in handspun alpaca yarn:

I think it turned out okay for a first attempt. I may only make a couple of minor changes.

My white alpaca fleece

Last fall, I purchased  a white, first shearing fleece which came off of a 10-month old alpaca named, "Powdered Sugar." I finally have the time to process it. Two days ago I unrolled the fleece and sorted it. Here it is, shorn side up: 

I have to apologize ahead of time for the quality of the pictures. I took them one-handed with my cell phone, and the flash was off, so they all came out a little blurry.

My cat, Freki, wanted to help:

As soon as I got my hands on the fleece, I knew it was going to be something special. It was really soft and fine. It was so fine, in fact that the unshorn side was full of vegetable matter (hay, feed, bits of weeds from the edges of the pasture). It turns out the Powdered Sugar's fleece is so fine that it's spider web grabby.

But I was able to get most of that off during sorting, and then yesterday I washed a few ounces, and today it was dry and ready for combing. During combing, most of the rest of any vegetable matter tends to fall out, or get left behind in the combs at the end.

Here is some of the washed fleece on one of the wool combs:

There are two wool combs to a set, and here is how the fleece is combed, off of one comb and onto the other:

You do this for a while until everything is all nice and combed and ready to be pulled off (there is one step I haven't shown, called, "planking"). At that point you pull the fiber off of the combs through a small hole in a tool called a diz :

This turns the fiber into a kind of rope of aligned fiber, which is called top, or sliver:

When you roll that up into a nice little ball for storage, a tiny bit of twist goes into it, and then it's called roving. These balls of roving are ready to spin:

There is always a some stuff left behind in the combs:

It's full of things that you don't want in your yarn, like vegetable matter, tangles and lumps:

I said that as soon as I got my hands on this fleece I knew it was going to be something special. It is. It's incredibly fine and soft. I think it may even be as soft as the paco-vicuna I have. I'll compare the two when I've spun this up. I'm so excited to have a whole fleece of this stuff! And from a local farmer!

Silk, Alpaca, Reindeer Tattoos

I recently got some silk to spin. I'm planning on blending some of it with part of my nice, white, first shearing alpaca fleece I purchased last fall. I still need to sort, dehair, wash, and comb/card the fleece, but I will start attacking that project this week - along with various other fiber-related projects.

I still need to spin the fiber up and knit two pairs of texting mittens, one for my husband, and one for me. They'll be made with yak. I want to put a pattern on my pair. I don't know if I can, but I want to try to make a pattern for this design to go on the backs of my mittens:

It's one of the tattoos on the Ice Lady Mummy, found in the Eurasian Steppes. I will attemp to create the pattern with the help of the KnitPro application found here.

The whole reindeer-people culture is very interesting. Frozen mummies often have all sorts of intricate tattoos:

This book is a wonderful way to find out more about The Reindeer People.

On to the New Year!

I have so much to do, I'm glad I have a whole new year to do it in!

I've got fleeces to sort and wash and comb/card/possibly dye, and then spin. I've got several knitting projects in the queue, I've got some herbal products to make, and I've got my Etsy shop to put in order. The Esty shop is in vacation mode until Jan. 9th, but I'll probably be pushing the date back. I've got product pictures to take and descriptions to write, and other things to sort out. It all takes time.

And then there's my husbands department party, held at my house, coming up. And of course he told everyone that I went to cooking school in Paris, so they are now expecting pasrtries and croissants.

And the problem is, I'm sooo tired. I could probably sleep until the New Year is rung in. Well, it's better to be busy than not, I suppose.

I hope everyone is enjoying the afterglow of the holiday season and is looking forward to the new year. I think I'll enjoy the afterglow with one more cup of coffee, some Christmas carols, the Christmas tree lights, the dog laying nearby and a cat in my lap.

A little something to take away the humbugs.

A young girl from my nice little town, blind from birth, wrote and sings this Christmas song, Night of Our Lives:



Merry Christmas!

Texting mittens made from Yak yarn

Here are some pictures of the finished texting mittens that I knitted with handspun yak-down yarn. Yak down is the fine, fluffy undercoat on a yak that keeps it warm in the frigid winters of places like Tibet.

These are natural colors, a brown and a gray. I made them for my son, but I almost kept them for myself, they're sooo warm and cushy and soft. Here are the palms:

And the backs:

Here is my son modeling them with the tops flipped off:

And back on:

I used a modified version of the pattern found in the Fall 2010 issue of Spin Off magazine.

Notre Dame at night

Here is a picture of Notre Dame in Paris under a full moon and with a Christmas tree.

A couple of pictures

Here are some pictures from Paris! By Notre Dame, cooking school (an anniversary gift from my husband), and holiday decor around Montmartre.

Going on a little trip

I'll be gone for a while. Hubby and I are getting away for a couple of weeks starting tomorrow. He'll be working part of the time, but I'll be sightseeing for the whole of it and he will join me when he can : )

Some of the places we'll visit are Paris, the Christkindlesmarkt in Nuremberg, and the medieval walled city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. I'm so excited to see these places during the holiday season. And I'm so looking forward to lebkuchen in Nuremberg!

If we happen to have Internet access while we're away, I'll post some pictures when I'm able. So far, the weather over there looks about like what it is here - 40's and rainy.

Well, off to pack now and run last-minute errands!

Roots, herbs, yarn, and mittens

I've been busy lately drying roots, putting the last of my dried herbs away, spinning yarn for my sister, and knitting texting mittens for my son out of handspun yak down yarn.

Roots have to be dug up, washed off with a preliminary hose-dowsing or bucket dunking, then scrubbed up inside nice a proper, sliced, and then laid out to dry in a barely warm oven. I've been drying two types of roots from my garden, which are harvested from two-year-old plants: elecampane and evening primrose. I use them in various medicinal teas.

My kitchen smells so wonderful when I'm packing dried herbs away. The last of my harvest was mostly culinary in nature, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sweet marjoram. But I also had some late-harvested lemon balm to put away, and some things harvested over the summer which hadn't been put away yet, like heartsease (violas), and peppermint. I've never used heartsease before, but we had so many volunteers spring up between the pavers on my patio - little gifts left from a potted viola I had sitting on the patio table the season before. I let them grow and bloom for some time, until we were having company over for a barbeque and they finally had to go. I gathered them and dried them and will try mixing them with goldenrod to make a salve for eczema.

The yarn I'm spinning for my sister is fingering weight. I'm making a three-ply, so it's spun really fine and takes a long time. Each bobbin takes a couple of hours. I've been spinning a bit, and then going off to take care of other things, and then getting back to it when I can. The project has stretched out over a couple of weeks, but I'm on my last bobbin. Then comes the plying. I like plying best.

The yak down yarn is scrumptious! I really love yak. And the mittens are turning out really nicely. I almost want to keep them for myself : ) I'll try to remember to put pictures up when the texting mittens are done.

What have you been up to lately?

Cranberries in the bog

My husband and I recently visited Triangle Lake Bog State Nature Preserve, which is near Kent, Ohio. We wanted to see what the cranberries looked like this time of year. Here's where the cranberries are in the bog (click on any of the pictures to see them larger):

A bit of a closer view:

The cranberries add color to the greens and browns:

Thanksgiving must be close if the cranberries are this red:

Carnivorous pitcher plants grow alongside the cranberries in the bog:

Ooh, this one would go well with turkey and gravy:

Some of the sphagnum moss was turning color, too:

Here's the boardwalk through the bog. The bog would be too treacherous to walk without it:

The ferns have run their course:

The pitcher plants are turning mostly red from their usual green with red accents:

It makes them seem even more unusual:

This one's eating late-season mosquitoes:

The pitcher plants are pretty viewed from the side, too:

Where the bog ended and the trees began, we spotted beaver damage:

This mossy path led us out of the bog:

Thanksgiving will be here soon and I'll think of the bog while buying cranberries from the grocery store and making cranberry sauce.

Me with my Christmas book in The Learned Owl Bookshop

My husband and I went out to eat in our quaint little downtown the other night. After our meal we strolled down Main Street to The Learned Owl Bookshop where we found my Christmas book on display in their holiday section. I was so excited, I had hubby snap a photo with his phone:

In other news, I planted 26 cloves of garlic yesterday in hopes of a good garlic crop next spring and summer. I bought the bulbs of garlic from an organic garlic grower at the farmer's market this past summer. Last year I planted about nine cloves, only to have six of them dug up that same night by some animal because I forgot to put a thick layer of mulch over top. I mulched them really good this time!