Fiber Arts and Equipment – Page 2

Still here, I think

Toward the end of October, my love tripped over the base of a broken sign on a public street and broke his collarbone enough to displace it 2 cm. It took them 11 days to schedule surgery to put in a plate to hold it together. It has been a week since surgery and he is still only minimally functional, requiring lots of assistance. Fortunately it was his non dominant arm, but is still very uncomfortable for him. He is 18 days in from the injury and facing several more weeks of wearing a sling. We hope that the pain settles soon so we can begin to get him out and walking again. He had just finished a 5.5 mile walk when the accident occurred. We don’t want him to lose all of the good he had done for his health since last spring.

The 18 days have mostly been home confinement and as I don’t want to leave him here alone while he requires assistance, my ventures out have been short and necessary such as picking up online ordered groceries or prescriptions and bandage material for the daily incision care.

This has allowed a lot of reading time and crafting time. A gal that does history education with me at the museum is a self published author and I have gone through 3 of her historical novels. I finished spinning a skein of yarn, spindle spun the start of another, knit about half of a Nordic star scarf with wool my daughter and SIL brought me from their honeymoon in Iceland (I was the teen supervisor for her kiddos), and started a hat from some previously spun yarns.

The weather has turned from mild and dry to cold and wet this week. The rain is much needed, though we only got a little more than an inch. There is some more predicted in the next week including our first snow shower possibility. As Thanksgiving approaches, the seasonal cactus is showing it’s beauty.

This is the month of family birthdays, with Thanksgiving crammed in the midst and a wedding to add to the festivities. We are hoping that though hubby will still be in a sling, he will feel well enough to fully participate in all of the celebrations. It will be fun having everyone together here and at daughter’s home.

So life goes on here, though my blogging as been sporadic.

All Good Things Must End

Yesterday was the beginning of meteorological autumn, not the autumn marked on your wall calendar if you still have one. And right on cue, we started seeing the trees beginning to show their color, or at least we noticed it. The first to turn are the Tulip Poplars and the Locust trees. This Poplar acts like a Ginkgo and turns yellow all at once in a matter of a couple of days.

And loses it’s leaves first.

After being away for two weekends and hobbling around for 7 weeks, I finally got out into the garden this week. The heat and time of year ended the cucumbers and bush beans, but the tomatoes and peppers are producing wildly.

Every day a basket like this is brought in and frozen. Once they are all ripe, I will make a pot of sauce. Two pounds of peppers were cut and put in the fermenting crock to make into hot sauce in about 5 or 6 weeks.

Yesterday afternoon, the popcorn was harvested, shucked in place and brought in. It is now in two crisscrossed layers in two large baskets to finish drying for about 2 or 3 weeks, then we will have more than a year’s worth of popcorn. It is fun to put a cob in a brown paper lunch bag and pop it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. Then you have a bag full of air popped corn.

Fall is also the time to make soap. Soap for gift giving, soap for a friend who loves my soap, soap for us for a year. There will be 8 or 9 batches made over the next week and cut to cure in a guest room. The first two batches were made yesterday, cut today, and set to cure. I am awaiting an order of essential oils and shea butter to continue the process, but the first two batches are unscented.

Today it much milder outdoors and as my foot still isn’t allowing exercise walks and since I did have my physical training session this morning, I tackled some garden chores. The cucumber and bean plants were pulled, given to the chickens, the bed that grew the peas in the spring and has been idle was weeded and the weeds put in a large tub to die off before being added back to that bed as compost. That bed also got a wheel barrow of chicken coop cleanings a month or so ago and it was spread out over the surface. There are now two and a half idle beds. One will likely have some fall veggies, the others covered in straw unless I can get a cover crop in quickly. The corn stalks won’t be cut until the Tithonia and sunflowers planted in a row up the middle of them finish blooming. There are so many hot peppers already canned that the rest will be allowed to turn red. The Ghost peppers will be infused in olive oil with sage and garlic, the jalapenos and cayennes will be crushed once dried for crushed red pepper. There are two tiny ornamental Thai pepper that are full of red peppers but they are very hard to harvest, though hot if you can get some.

The chicken tunnel has been mostly a success. There are a few plants that grow into the tunnel they won’t eat, but do keep mostly scratched down, and the creeping charlie and smartweed that are reachable through the wire, they ignore so another day will have to be spent clearing the blueberry bed. The raspberry and blackberry half barrels were mostly a failure, though I see some volunteers outside the barrels. With all the wineberries and wild blackberries that are on the property, I should just not bother with the barrels. There are also several you pick berry farms around here.

Not much spinning was done last month. Reading, a little travel to visit Son 1 and then to a retreat where I did spin both on my wheel and spindles, knit, and took both a wet felting class to make a small bowl and a project bag sewing class occupied my time with visiting friends I see only rarely. If I ever finish the knitting project, I will finish spinning the fiber I have worked on for two months slowly. I got a lovely braid to spin as a door prize at the retreat and a bag of felting wool from the gift exchange game.

So you see from this, I am alive and well, not posting much here, on Facebook, or Instagram, but still here. Take care, enjoy the fall colors if you live where they occur, and get ready for another winter.

Sunday ramblings of the mind

There isn’t much physical rambling going on with me right now. The boot is off, though the tendonitis isn’t totally gone, and wearing the boot, threw off my gait, and caused plantar fasciitis in the other foot. I hobble around like Tim Conway’s character after I sit for a little while or right after I get up in the morning. I am still going to work out with my trainer once a week and we are working on core and upper body on machines, balance and stretching with squats and other stretching exercises. On a good day, I can walk about a mile, not the 4 I was doing 6 weeks ago. It is so very frustrating.

The July Jenkins spindle challenge is our scavenger hunt for Tour de Fleece. A social media friend proxy shopped for me at Black Sheep Gathering in Oregon in late June and purchased a lovely Salmonberry Chickadee spindle, Ed Jenkins’ newest model. Slightly smaller than my other favorites, the Finches, and with a thicker body. It has been my spindle of choice for the past 10 days or so.

That fiber is finished and the 8 golf ball sized cops have been wound into a ply ball and will be plyed on my spinning wheel as soon as the bobbin of Shetland now on the wheel is full. I find that I can spin for hours on the spindles, but only about an hour on the wheel.

The pullets are almost all laying now. It is interesting trying to figure out who lays what these days. The 4 older hens lay an olive colored egg, a chocolate brown egg, and two that I called blue, until the newest Americana began laying and hers is robin’s egg blue, making the other two appear greenish. The Calicos all lay a light pinkish brown egg.

Suddenly, I have more eggs than daughter’s family and we can eat and with no pups in the house to share eggs with, I have a couple dozen being shared with the spinning group or visiting family members. I did get their coop cleaned out this week in spite of the heat. A good addition to one of the idle garden beds that was weeded before adding the cleaning to the bed.

The garden is producing copious quantities of cucumbers and jalapenos, though they aren’t very spicy. A gallon of pickled peppers is in the refrigerator as well as 4 quarts of dill pickles. The first crop of green beans are not producing many now and the second crop hasn’t begun to produce. Every now and then, a cucumber evades my daily search and gets too large and yellow for us, but the chickens love them when I break them in half and toss into their run. Yesterday, I found 3 tomato horn worms on the plants, the chickens gobbled one up and ignored the other two, each as large as my thumb around and about 4 inches long. Maybe they went back to them later, at least they are off the tomato plants.

The milkweed that creates a fairly large patch on the edge of one of the areas that get’s hayed was mowed down with the hay, but has come back up again and is beginning to bloom.

The daily thunderstorms we were having have stopped and again we are reaching drought level dryness. The last two or three thunderstorms came right after VDOT graded our state road and the run off caused serious gullies in our driveway. Using the blade on the tractor, I was able to improve the drive surface to a safer level. It has been a year since I asked VDOT to clear our culvert and it hasn’t been done. To replace the culvert with another or a cattle grate requires a permit and to hire someone to do it.

We have several more days of brutally hot, humid weather before we get a reprieve for a few days. We need rain.

Take care and stay cool. Be safe from the newest round of Covid. I guess we are going to live with it and hope it doesn’t get worse.