Cabin Crafted

Author: Cabincrafted1

  • How I came to be here on the blog, Part 1

    A few of you may have followed my blog from the very beginning, however, I changed blog platforms and lost many of the earliest posts, then did an adjustment to Son 1’s server and we lost another chunk.  So, some of this may be familiar to some of you, to others, brand new.

    For at least a decade before we relocated to our farm in the mountains of southwest Virginia, and we still lived on the east coast of Virginia where I grew up and where we raised our three children, DH would ask me what I wanted for various gift giving times, and I always answered, “A cabin in the woods.”  Several “cabins” entered as a result, a cabin similar to but smaller than ours on the edge of a lake under a mountain as a painting, a log cabin bird house with pine cone trees, a wood pile and a tiny axe with a sign in the front that says “A cabin in the woods.” 

    We talked about mountain property, but were still both working and were not in the tax bracket that would allow a vacation second home.  Then I retired from the school system, totally burned out, but too young to get Medicare by a decade, so I went to work part time for an educational non profit to keep us with health insurance. 

    Around that time, DH had inherited from his father’s estate and we had begun looking for land or a house in the mountains, much farther south and west of where we had originally thought we might retire, and after two trips to meet with two different realtors, we found our farm, no house and three times more acreage than we had thought about buying.  With the second realtor, who took the time to research and locate properties, emailing us links to look at, we had a list of about 10 to look at one mid December weekend in 2004.  This property was the third of the day and we almost didn’t look further, but he had gone to so much trouble that we continued looking (all the while listening to an interminable stream of Christmas music from his car radio).  We never found some of the properties, one, we liked was being leased out to a cattle raiser that didn’t want to lose his pasture, so he kept taking down the signs, but we came back to this land, made an offer, returned to Virginia Beach, and a week later, left for Florida to see our daughter for Christmas.  The offer was accepted and the following month we returned to close on our new farm, giving the prior owner a couple months use to prepare to move her herd of miniature horses to new pasture.  We decided if we liked the property in dead of winter, we would love it in spring and summer and we were right.

    We now had land with no well, no electricity, no house and a house with a mortgage we were living in. At that time FSBO (for sale by owner) was a big thing and there was a small company in Virginia Beach that would put your listing on MLS and published in a FSBO biweekly magazine for a relatively small flat fee.  We did some painting, some serious clean up of lawn, beds, and listed it for more than we hoped to get, and it sold the first weekend.  Now we had no house on the farm, jobs in Virginia Beach, no house in that area and started looking for a rental.  We found a small 3 bedroom house to rent and moved in.  It was during that year we made monthly trips to meet with well drillers, figure out how to get the power easement, decide where the house placement would be, meet with the design team for the log home company, buy the logs, have them delivered, and construction begun, and I found out that to keep working, it would have to be full time.  An idea was tossed around that if I was going to have to work full time, I should go back in education and applied for a position here in the mountains, for which I was hired.  Son 1 and his family had relocated to this area to supervise construction of our log home and do all the stone work and finish carpentry after the shell was erected.  During the time they were waiting for it to be at a point they could begin the stone work, they worked on the land, dug trenches for buried electric lines, and water pipes from the well, and made the garden, much larger than I ended up using.

    Logs delivered almost a year to the day from the purchase of the land. DIL and me hanging out while Son 1 tallied everything off the trucks (4 flatbed semis) that took a toll on the driveway and nearly put one of the in the newly poured basement foundation.

    To be continued …

  • “Reading” and spinning

    I blog when something pops in my head or when I have progress on a project to report. Right now, because of a text conversation with a friend, two very different ideas are bouncing around, so I will address one and refine the other off line until I am ready to put it out in the world.

    Many of the books I read are because of recommendation of friends and family. When my Dad was alive, we had a weekly phone call, usually on Sunday evening, and part of our conversation was about what we were reading, and many, many books I have read and enjoyed were his suggestions. Once in a while there would be one I just couldn’t get into. I miss those conversations and suggestions. When we last had a socially distanced meet up with Son 1 and Grandson 1, two weeks ago yesterday, Son 1 told me he was reading a book that he thought I might like, though he wasn’t too far into it. During that week, I checked the electronic library app for our public library, and it was available, but only in an audio book. I have several friends who swear by audio books, especially when travelling, but I do most of my reading at night before bed and I like holding a book, either paper or electronic, immersing myself in the story, and creating the voices of the characters in my head, so I had never listened to an audio book before. I checked it out on my tablet that lives by my bed and began listening to 30 minutes or so each night. The loan for was 14 days, the book just over 5 hours of narration. The book, “The Housekeeper and the Professor” by Yoko Ogawa, translated into English and narrated is a wonderful story, beautifully written and the narrator had a very soothing voice. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, but I still prefer to read not listen. Some of the names in the book would have given me trouble, but so did some of the names in Tolkien and that never stopped me, but the math references would have been easier if I could have seen them instead of hearing them. At any rate, if you have the chance to read or listen to this story, it is worth the time.

    Yesterday, while hubby was watching play off games of football, I sat with headphones on listening to a knitting podcast and working on the last block of my January challenge for the Breed Blanket Project. I finished knitting it and proceeded to make such an amateur mistake I was kicking myself. To save time, I chose not to bind off the block on the side that had to be attached to the cast on edge of the adjacent block and to use the live stitches to graft to the cast on edge. Somehow I managed to twist or fold or some foolish mistake and since it was bunched up in my lap, I didn’t notice until I was done. The yarn is a longwool with lots of halo and trying to pick it out without losing the live stitches was a challenge and once done required that I bind off and sew it on like I should have done in the first place, tripling the time it took me to do the finish.

    That puts the January portion of the challenge in the books. The 4 quadrants this month included the one from last year’s yarn that was the test knit and became the base, two quadrants of the dyed BFL soft fiber that DH gave me for Christmas, and one quadrant of the light gray Masham longwool. Not every month will have 4 squares, but to use 24 breeds, there will be at least two squares added each month. I am hoping for a blanket that is large enough to be useful but not so heavy that it just stays folded on the bed.

    To give me something to spin for the rest of the month as I can’t begin my new breed until February 1, I am spinning a Coopworth/Alpaca blend that can be knit into something for the shop when it is finished. Today, I await the mail as I sold a spindle to a new spinner and bought a spindle at the last update, so one is flying north and my new one is out for delivery by our rural carrier.

    As I took the one I sold to the local village post office and pulled in next to a man with a hand full of mail, he got out with no mask, entered the post office to be greeted by the attendant who also had no mask. I didn’t even go in. As we had to deliver a form in town, we went to the larger USPS there where everyone inside was properly distanced and masked. It is such a simple solution. Our little county is only about 15000 people, many older as is the case in many rural areas, and we are approaching 1000 cases. So much resistance to something so simple to save a few lives. Generally when I have a package to mail, I print the postage at home and don’t have to enter the post office, however, our printer quit over the weekend and the new one ordered won’t arrive until tomorrow or the next day. And I still await a call to get my first vaccine and hubby awaits a call to schedule his second.

  • Another Week Closes

    It was a glorious winter day, bright sunshine, no clouds, and temperatures that remind you that it is winter. We have some cold rain, maybe a real winter storm being threatened for mid week. As that forecast firms, plans to be ready for snow, ice, and potential power failure will be made. A couple of meals prepared that can be reheated on the wood stove, a bathtub filled with water for dogs and toilets, the big 5 gallon water jug we used when camping filled for cooking and drinking water, loads of wood brought in to the basement and garage for heat. These plans are usually in vain, but we did have an ice storm a number of years ago that took our power out for a week and those preparations were necessary.

    We ventured in to town today to pick up our curbside grocery order and as usual, a few items not available and substitutions that were not acceptable offered, but not items that were vital.

    The second fiber I was spinning for the month was finished today and more knitted on the square that I pulled off of the blanket when it had been knit as a strip.

    I think that I will aim for a 24 breed blanket so that each month there will be an official breed and an unofficial. This month, the official breed was BFL, a very soft wool, the unofficial one is the gray Masham, a longwool that is drapey but to me not next to the skin soft.

    Each day this week, there have been two Houdini hens, two of the Oliver eggers. Usually by the time I went out to try to lock them back up each day, it was either time to prep dinner or it was too dark to figure out where they were getting out. This morning before I let them out, I walked the perimeter of the run and discovered that they had tunneled out near the far end of the run. I large blocky rock was wedged in the hole and today they were foiled. They are finally providing enough eggs for the household each week.

    So far it is just the Olive Eggers, the pinkish ones are the oddball Olive Egger that doesn’t lay Olive eggs. The lighter green ones are still fairly rare, but the dark Olive and pink ones are coming with regularity. The Welsumers and the reds aren’t back in production yet.

    Today marked 4 weeks since I set up my Christmas hydroponic herb garden. Time to rinse the reservoir, refill and feed the young plants. They are all growing, not enough for cooking with yet, except the dill, but they are large enough to pinch off bits and taste them.

    I think the dill is going to need a pruning, so a recipe that calls for it needs to be planned. My favorite recipe other than making dill pickles is to use dill in sauteed carrot coins.

    To add to the household goods and car that have failed this week, the Epson Ecotank printer that was still printing black but not color decided tonight to not print black either. I have looked for repair around here, but there is no one that works on household printers. We still have the laser jet, but it isn’t networked, it has to be plugged in to the computer, prints only black, and doesn’t copy. I thought the Ecotank would save us money in the long run and I haven’t had to buy cartridges in two years, so that may have paid for the printer, but now it is a paperweight.

    We have begun the process of researching cars, not something I wanted to have to take on at our ages, but necessary. Still no call on the vaccine for me, an email was received, asking for patience and letting me know that they were working through the current groups but focusing on 75 year old and up and essential workers, so I wait.

  • Another day on the farm

    Yesterday too much time was spent in front of the television watching history and pagentry unfold. As I was preparing our dinner I took the kitchen scraps to the chickens and the one that wasn’t thriving had passed away in the run. Yesterday morning, she was tucked in a nesting box facing the wall with her tail toward the coop and that didn’t seem right. She was one of the 3 Welsumers that lay the dark brown eggs. That reduces my flock to 8. Perhaps in the spring when chick days arrive, I will buy a new flock of chicks so they will be laying by molt time next fall. The Olive eggers, at least two of them, have started laying again and I have gotten 10 eggs in the past week. I was going to go back to a pure flock of Buff Orpingtons, but having hens that lay most all year round is nice, even if it is only a few per week.

    This morning, I woke to another morning of snow showers, lightly coating the ground and other surfaces, but by late morning it has stopped and what had fallen was gone. There are no more days of that type of weather predicted for a week or so.

    It seems that the local Health Department is as disorganized as the national Covid task force was. About 9 days ago, DH registered for his first vaccine dose and received a call the very next day, getting his dose a week ago today. That was the day the state changed the guidelines that would have allowed me to get mine too, but they said they weren’t taking anyone under 75 unless they were first line essentials. I immediately that day registered for my first dose and still await a call. Today, he got another call to schedule his first dose, but has never been given a date for his second. The guy that called gave him a phone number, but of course it went to voicemail, and he told DH that they aren’t giving them to the group I am in yet, though the state is encouraging it. I think husband and wife if close in age should be on the same schedule, but who am I but a lowly citizen hoping for my turn.

    I finished the hat I was knitting using the second half of my Christmas fiber and it is so soft and warm.

    And I began spinning some gray longwool to be the next band on the blanket, but decided I did not like the log cabin idea and pulled out the teal band and reverted to the block idea, so I am reknitting on a block instead of the band and will continue by adding the gray longwool after I finish the teal.

    Because the miter of the first two squares are not properly aligned, I am working off the edge of the gray square and will finish that mitered block next month and add to the Parrothead block in the opposite direction to make the miters line up correctly. This will result in two large squares offset by a block so I will have to figure out how to deal with that to make it look right in the end. I think the braid you see in the photo above will be next month’s spin on my spindle flock and I will pick another solid to extend off of the colorful block.

    While typing this, we got a call that the Xterra that failed on us last week requires repairs that are greater than 3 or 4 car payments on a new car, so the mechanic is looking for someone who will buy it for parts and we will have to figure out the next step. And the dishwasher has self destructed at 15 years old. I guess we are all getting old and breaking down.

  • “The End of an Error”

    I suspect that if you are reading this, you are of like mind, or at least tolerant of differing opinions. The title was seen on a social media platform this morning and I think it says it all.

    It distresses me that 45 has caused such division in this country that the inauguration of the President will be before fields of flag instead of people, behind high fences with armed National Guardsmen as the only “spectators.” He is out of Washington, lacking the class to politely and civilly transfer the power as has been done throughout history. But he isn’t out of office for another 2 1/4 hours. He abdicated his power months ago and the VP has had to try to pick up the reins.

    On 45’s way out, pardoning his cronies and those wealthy who might give him a boost. Issuing executive orders to undermine the new administration, lifting travel restrictions to countries hard hit by COVID. All attempts to make the transition more difficult.

    The events of the last two nights have been class acts, the lighting of the mall and the 200,000 flags, the memorial to those who have died of COVID that was so grossly mismanaged by 45 and his administration and the lighting of 400,000 lights along the reflecting pool in their memory.

    I hope that Biden’s administration doesn’t discover too many disasters. I hope they will meet with a smooth transition, but am already seeing some of the same players in Congress who tried to block the certification of the Electoral College, trying to block Cabinet member certification. Players who obviously don’t take their oath to uphold the Constitution seriously, instead playing to their own political agenda.

    The last 4 years have made me tired and stressed. I hope the next 4 are less so. I have lived through a lot of historical events, some to cheer for, some to stress over, some to mourn, but never did I think I would live through a President impeached twice in one term that has tried to removed rights of the citizens, block immigration, and tear our country apart.

  • The days lengthen slowly

    We were given a winter prediction of warmer than average and average rain (not snow). Things are not as predicted, but I am ok with that. It has been cold and we have had lots of “snow days.” Not block you at home snow, just pretty to watch snow. I awoke this morning to a new coating on the yard, the third morning this week. It stayed at or near freezing all day and snowed off and on all day. The cover would thin or nearly go away as the sun came out, then it would cloud and snow again. When I went to get the mail at the top of the driveway, it was snowing hard and the sun was out. I looked for a snowbow but didn’t see one. As I went out to secure the hens at dusk, it was coming in again.

    The lengthening days have all of the hens preparing to start laying eggs again. After buying a dozen at the Farmers Market last weekend, I got 4 from the Olive Eggers this week, 2 dark olive and 2 lighter green, so both of them are laying. Today there was a green one and a brown one (might have been the pinker color, it is too difficult to tell by house light). As I stood by the coop waiting for them to coop up so I could lock their door for the night, I noticed that 8 of the 9 have healthy red combs and wattles again. One is always reluctant to go in at night, she isn’t as healthy looking at the others and she has a very small, pale comb. I fear she may not be well, but she is a chicken, not a pet. If she shows real signs of illness, she will be isolated from the others to prevent spread, but if she is just not thriving, she will live out her life with them until the flock is replaced next fall or winter.

    It is about time to sort through the seeds and see what else needs to be purchased as garden planning begins. After letting the chickens have garden time at the end of the season, they kicked most of the good soil out of several of the boxes, so some early spring work will have to be done to get ready, but not while the ground is mostly frozen. I have accumulated a good pile of cardboard to prepare the area that wasn’t planted last year after digging out the mint. That area will give me another 4 by 8 foot bed to use. As I plan to move the compost pile back to the northwest corner, I have started using that area between the fence and the bed planted with the garlic to put kitchen scraps until the garlic is harvested and that box moved. I need to get daughter and grand daughter on board to decide what they want to plant this year as well.

    After my post yesterday, the state announced they were opening up Covid vaccines to the federal guidelines and I have pre-registered for mine. Now I await the call that will send me to the designated location to get it.

  • As the week ends

    The car still sits in the lot at the mechanic, no diagnosis nor estimate provided yet for us to make a decision on it’s fate. The pen is still missing. Unless it fell out of my bag and is the car at the mechanic, it is truly AWOL. The snow from early in the week is mostly gone except in shady areas under trees, north sides of hills, and the north shade of the house. Today’s forecast calls for snow flurries turning later to rain, but so far, no precipitation of any form has begun. The windshield leak on the older car was sealed after it had dried, but in the snow early in the week, a drip from closer to the center of the windshield top edge was seen, so it was parked in the garage to fully dry and more sealant was applied farther across the top. I think that when the windshield had to be replaced many years ago, it wasn’t set in enough sealant. If it does rain today, we will see if my repair has taken care of it. If not, it will be pulled back in the garage to dry again and another attempt made to fill the gaps with silicone.

    So far, there have been no further disasters this week. Early in the week, hubby registered for the first vaccine for COVID and yesterday he received a call and within 90 minutes had received his first shot. With his age and immune compromised system, I am glad he was able to get it. Hopefully they will get to my group, the next down the list before too much longer. The federal guideline dropped the age to 65 for now, but the State is still going with a stricter schedule.

    The mitts that I partially ripped out and started a reknit are done. They need to be soaked and blocked, but it got cold overnight and is headed into a cold snap for many days, so that will wait so I can wear them. Twenty or so years ago, I broke my right wrist roller blading with my daughter. It healed 15 degrees out of whack and has caused issues since. The resulting arthritis sent me to a hand specialist about a decade ago and he performed a Trapeziectomy to remove a bone in my wrist to help with the pain. It may have helped briefly, but overuse from knitting, gardening, or just about any other activity causes pain in my wrist that moves up to my elbow and then to my shoulder. I know that as it begins, I tense my shoulder that contributes to the pain. Either the poorly healed break or my arm’s musculature to compensate causes a circulation issue that causes that hand to be extremely cold when the weather is cold. I tend to wear a fingerless mitt even in the house except when cooking, so I’m glad for the thicker, warmer ones that I just finished yesterday.

    They are longer than I usually make and with the 2 x 2 rib the entire length, they are thicker and more comfortable. The fibers pictured with them are some I purchased for my breed blanket and three lovely 2 ounce packages of different wools I got in trade for one I had that I wasn’t planning on using. They arrived in yesterday’s mail. I now have 18 breeds of wool lined up, some dyed, some natural so I can work on my breed of the month and another that can be used to create additional blocks or added to the log cabin pattern to separate dyed ones from each other with solid natural colors.

    Sometime ago, I wrote a post about “the chair.” Well, the chair wasn’t the only furniture mistake we have made. We bought two reclining loveseats, one didn’t quite match the living room furniture so we moved it to the loft and bought a second that looked better. And we bought me an imitations “stressless” chair. These weren’t all purchased at the same time, they were added over several years, but all were made of “pleather,” a nasty product that shouldn’t be on the market. The loveseat in the living room deteriorated first because of it’s heavy use. I tried covering it, but the cover would not stay on and you couldn’t recline it with the cover. The one in the loft went next, it was used fairly heavily at times too. Eventually, daughter and I hauled them out of the house, loaded them on our utility trailer and removed them to the dump. This week, I realized that my chair is beginning to fail in the same way, the plastic “leather” separating from the fabric it is applied to. It will flake and more will fail until the chair is as disreputable in appearance as “the chair.” Hubby’s chair was replaced with a real leather chair, the love seats were not replaced with additional furniture, just rearranged some rocking chairs to provide seating. I guess my chair is going to have to be replaced sometime in the future, but “pleather” will not enter our home again.

    Maybe I will get a real leather Ekornes stressless chair this time. It will last the rest of my life.

  • A Rough Start

    This week start has not been a smooth one. For some time, we have observed the “newer” of our two vehicles, it is only 13 years old compared to the almost 16 year old one, has been not running well and leaking oil. We wouldn’t drive it farther than town and kept our fingers crossed that if it broke down, that daughter would be available to get us home or to a rental car location. Because it is the larger vehicle, we loaded the trash and recycling in it yesterday morning to take down to the “Convenience Center.” Don’t you love that as a name for the fenced in area with the dumpsters and recycle trailer boxes in it? As soon as hubby put the beast in reverse, I could smell the clutch and suggested we take both cars and leave the Xterra at our local shop for diagnosis and state inspection. The decision was made to take it the next time we had to go out and not yesterday. The garbage was dispatched, the package I had that needed to be dropped off at the USPS was dropped off, we drove into town to get lunch and a birthday card for a grandson, but didn’t make it home. As we started up the first hill, the smell got stronger, the car got slower, and before we got to the top, there were no gears that the car would go in. A call to daughter, but she was an hour away headed home. A call to the local mechanic and he sent a masked driver in their “Shuttle” van and another driver in the tow truck to haul it in. Once we get an estimate, we have to decide if a 13 year old car, leaking oil, with 246,000+ miles on it is worth the repair, leaving us at least for the moment with the 16 year old car with 240,000 miles on it as our sole transportation.

    Last night as I prepared to address the birthday card, I realized that one of my favorite pens was missing. I can’t find it anywhere. Usually it is clipped to the small leather notebook cover that I carry in my bag, but it isn’t there. Isn’t in the bag. Isn’t stuck down the cracks of my chair. It has at least temporarily gone missing. I’m sure it will turn up at some point, in a car, a pocket, or some place I normally wouldn’t set it down.

    Also yesterday as I continued to knit on my fingerless mitts, I realized that somehow, I had crossed yarn balls and both mitts were knit from one ball, linking them together with a piece of yarn too short to just cut and weave in, so I had to begin tinking (knitting backwards) for a row on one mitt and another row on both. After doing that, I decided I didn’t like the thumb gusset on the fingers down pattern as I tried one on for fit, so I pulled the needle and frogged (ripped out stitches) for many rows to get back to where the thumb stitches were picked up. Then tediously and carefully picked up the stitches again in an order that would still allow me to knit two at a time, knit a couple of rows to make sure there were no missed stitched and all the stitches were turned the right way and decided to work the wrist up vanilla pattern I always use with a classic thumb gusset that will allow me to knit a real thumb. I am probably back about to the total length I was before yesterday’s error.

    During this reknit project, the television was on to the news and talking heads that analyze everything going on and I was appalled at how a congresswoman who had been in the Capitol during last week’s siege would throw a toddler tantrum over not being allowed to carry a gun into the chambers, and how dozens of the rioters from last week and people interviewed at Trump’s bazaar charade of a visit to the Alamo and his incendiary speech there yesterday, exactly parrot his language to the exact phraseology. And they call those who don’t agree with them sheep. They call themselves patriots and true Americans, yet they attack our halls of government and threaten our lawmakers.

    Next disaster, a relatively minor one today. Lunch was prepared, just grilled cheese sandwiches still sitting on the griddle pan on the stove, the plates with pickles served out beside them and I called hubby down to eat. In reaching up to get a glass for my water, he knocked another to the Silestone counter below the cabinet and it exploded sending glass shooting across the stove top, the adjacent counter where the plates were waiting, and all over the floor. After glass was cleaned up, lunch tossed in the garbage, counter tops and griddle and dishes washed, I started over.

    On the positive side, the hydroponic herb garden that Son 2 and family gave me for Christmas has sprouted all 6 herbs. I check each day to see how much growth has occurred. The dill, thyme, and parsley are putting out secondary leaves, The mint and basils are above the rims of their planting baskets. That was such a great gift for a gardener suffering the off season doldrums that houseplants just don’t satisfy.

    Back to chores, knitting, and spinning. Hmmm, I wonder where the pen is?

  • A Spirit Lifter

    After not seeing Son 1 and family for almost a year due to COVID, we arranged a socially distanced meet up on the Skyline Drive in the fall. We met again at Natural Bridge State Park just before Christmas, and again today, this time at Douthat State Park. Each of these meet ups has been around lunch time with a picnic where we both provide part of the food and condiments, and the two state park meet ups also included a walk.

    We walked along the creek at Natural Bridge to the falls and back and today, we hiked around the lake at Douthat.

    Son 1, Grandson 1, and Hubby after lunch, letting the meal settle in a bit before our walk.
    Hubby and me at the top of the dam as we walked around the lake.
    The beach on the opposite side of the lake is where we had our picnic.

    Son 1 took a couple of selfies of us lined up down the path with all of us in the photo, but I haven’t gotten any of them yet.

    The drive was just a couple of hours, with about 3 1/2 hours “together” outdoors to visit and share a distance picnic spread out between a couple of tables. We took a totally non Interstate drive home which took a bit longer, but was a pleasant drive getting us back to the town near home before it got dark.

    The after dark lock up of the hens provided a pleasant surprise.

    After having to buy eggs for about a month, it looks like production might be ramping back up. It will be nice having eggs from our own flock again.

    On the way out the door I grabbed a skein of yarn and a long circular needle, hand wound the skein into two equal balls and cast on a pair of fingerless mitts for me. I was going to knit them with the second half of the Parrothead BFL, but it spun up too fine for the pattern and I had plenty of gray Jacob spun last year and they can be worn with any coat or jacket. I didn’t get a lot done, but I’m doing them two at a time so when one is done, they both will be done.

    These meet ups, even without being able to hug are spirit lifters for hubby and me. Weather permitting, we will look for another meet up at a park somewhere between their house and ours in February. Sandwiches and chips shared, a walk or hike together, conversation, and just knowing that they are ok is wonderful.

  • A Year for me?

    When I resumed knitting about 16 years ago, it was because the first grandchild was expected and I learned a lot knitting soakers, shirts, socks, and other baby items. I have knit several adult sweaters and vests along the way, a few for me, a few for family. Hats, fingerless mitts, some mittens, a few scarves for family and a few for me, but then most of my handspun yarn and nearly all of my knitting has gone to my shop for sale. The inability to have craft shows and slow business in the online shop have meant that the stock isn’t moving and more doesn’t need to be added, but spinning on my spindles is soothing, destressing, “serene” as the spindle maker’s wife posts.

    I spin about 4 ounces of fiber a month, that is one skein of yarn, a dozen or so in a year and I don’t need to add more to the supply, but I need the craft and activity, so the year long challenge to spin 12 different breeds of sheep wool, one per month, on Jenkins Turkish spindles and making a blanket from them is just what I needed. I can spin and use the wool spun on something for the house, for us. There will probably be a bit extra spun and used for hats or fingerless mitts for family, the shop, or me, but most of the effort will go to the blanket. It isn’t going to be a heavy, weigh you down blanket, the yarn is going to be fairly fine, but being wool, it will be comfortable to provide a layer when an extra one is needed on the bed, or laid over a snoozing body in a chair.

    The gray square and the colorful square are about 10″ each, the gray one doesn’t count as it wasn’t spun this year, but it will be part of the finished blanket. The colorful square and the green above are a single breed and fiber that hubby gave me for Christmas. I am going for a log cabin type blanket.

    What a great and fun way to keep up my spinning and knitting.