Cabin Crafted

Author: Cabincrafted1

  • In the dark

    It rained and rained and rained, all day yesterday. We had just finished eating an early dinner when the power went out, no good reason we could see. Yes it was wet out, but we never did have wind. The predicted repair time was 12:30 a.m. today, so I dumped the ice from the icemaker into a huge bag and a cooler, turned off the icemaker, so we didn’t end up with water dripping through the basement ceiling.

    By battery lantern, I spun on my spindles for a few hours to try to finish the fiber that I have been working on since the beginning of August. The last 20 some grams were spun last night before I turned in with the lantern and my book.

    The morning brought thick fog, but the rain had stopped. We made a quick run to the Farmers’ Market for my preordered goodies but again, two of the vendors I shop weren’t ready, one was before I left, but the other was still setting up. I was hoping for some carrots, but came home without.

    We drove back home, unloaded the goodies into the refrigerator and freezer, loaded the trailer on the Xterra and returned to town to pick up the mowers. They are home, but the grass is too wet to mow with it as tall as it is. When I start, I will have to raise the deck as high as it will go and mow half width passes and repeat at a lower deck height in a couple of days.

    The fiber I spun last night was plied this afternoon and again is a very fine lace weight yarn.

    That full bobbin gave me 475.5 yards before it is washed. Once it is washed and dry, I will remeasure both skeins to see how much yardage I actually got. It should be in the neighborhood of 900 plus yards.

    This afternoon I attempted to attend the virtual Shenandoah Fiber Festival. It just isn’t the same. I sought out the three vendors I would have sought in person and ordered a “Shenandoah” colorway Falklands from Wild Hare, a vendor I have purchased before. The colorway was dyed for the event and I ordered some Coopworth/Alpaca blend and two color Coopworth from Hearts of the Meadow Farm, a friend who vends there. Trying to browse was frustrating.

    As the weather chills, again I am noticing my right hand, the side from the broken wrist years ago gets colder than the left and the cold is causing more arthritis pain in that arm especially when I knit. This is going to be an issue as I have a Christmas stocking to knit for the newest grandson and a sweater for a grand daughter. It is good that I have all of October, November, and half of December to get them done.

  • Lost events

    This weekend marks another lost event and another event at which I will be represented by some of my crafts, but not my person. For several years, we have gone north to the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, spent the weekend at a hotel with lots of social time with Son 1 and his family. Together, we all go to the Shenandoah Fiber Festival, visit a couple of vendor friend, see all the wooly and furry critters, and always leave with goodies. Yarn to knit first birthday sweater’s for a granddaughter that turns 4 this year, a spindle one year, fiber always.

    That yarn became the sweater below for granddaughter.

    Last year I was in the area to help Son 1’s family move into their house and we didn’t go to the festival as there were too many other things on the agenda that weekend.

    This year it is virtual. There is no festival to attend. I have trouble buying fiber or yarn without seeing and feeling it, I don’t need any more spindles or wheels. I will miss the trip, but understand the safety of not holding it during the pandemic.

    The second event is at the Museum where I do living history. They are having a fall festival with reservation only tours of 6 per half hour and 6 allowed to wander the outbuildings and grounds per half hour, but I am still not comfortable staying in a closed area other than my home for any length of time and wearing a mask in costume wouldn’t work, so my crafts are there on an honor system sale, but I’m not. I am hopeful that everyone will be honest and if anything takes a walk without payment, that it is really needed and will be loved.

    We daily check the department of health’s website and see that the number of cases in our rural county have jumped more than 10 fold in about a month. For a very long time, there were only 7 or 8 cases here, then the students came back to the Universities in the area, the public school kids returned to a modified face to face school week, and we now have 88 cases and more reported each day (about 15 of them are public school students and/or staff). That doesn’t sound like a lot, but this is a small rural county with a handful of small towns and villages and no cities. This is also a mask resistant county, so we only go out when necessary and generally go to the next county to a larger town with more mask compliance, where we can get curbside delivery of groceries.

    Today our adventure is to go get our curbside grocery delivery in pouring rain from Beta. I watched the pups this morning go quickly into the rain in belly deep grass to do what pups do first thing in the morning. Last evening, I called and the mowers are ready, but they have to be closed today (not that I want to load mowers in the rain), so we will go over in the morning before they close at noon. The weekend is predicted to be drier, so maybe set on the highest setting, I can reduce the height of the yard growth. We keep putting off going to get the brush hog because we will either have to pay for delivery or I will have to drive the tractor down the mountain road, about a mile down the highway edge, then return trip after we attach it to the tractor. I really should do that and have them change the oil and transmission fluid while they have it, that is a job I haven’t learned to do and have no interest in getting on the ground under the tractor to learn.

    Until the deluge slows to a trickle, the chooks will stay in their coop with food and water. I will have to toss down hay in the run when I can get out there just to keep from sliding down the hill and to help keep them from taking mud baths. Chickens are stupid. I am toying with the idea of repairing the chicken tractor, removing it from the collapsed log raft and setting it on 4 blocks so the chickens can use it as a safe shelter when free ranging. It would give them a place to go if a dog or hawk threaten. There is no floor in it as the log raft was the floor, so they could get up into the perches or dust bathe under it.

    The trees are beginning to color, we are seeing the yellowing of some and reds of some of the “trash” trees. I’m not ready for the woods to be bare yet.

  • Spin, knit, cook, read, walk, and vote

    The bulk of my time with the garden in Autumn decline is to spin on my spindles.

    Knit on a project I can’t share yet, as it is a gift.

    Cook at home. When you want Lasagna and it makes way too much for two, get creative. If Stouffers can do it, so can I.

    One for the oven, three for the freezer to be enjoyed on other nights. Made with local cheese, my pasta sauce.

    Re-reading for about the 10th time my favorite book that recenters me each time I read it and reinforces my belief in buy local, eat local, grow it yourself if you can.

    Take walks at the pond, there is always something new to see. The wildfowl have been absent for the summer, but there was a pair of ducks, an 18″ long garter snake, the usual plethora of turtles, and lovely light play in the woods.

    One of these causes seasonal allergies, one does not, do you know which?

    We had decided to vote absentee ballot this year due to the pandemic, but today when they came, we drove them straight to the county seat unopened and voted early in person.

    No crowd, no line, two masked workers behind a shield wall, so safe and no chance that our ballot would be dismissed for whatever reason. Then we got home to find an article from Forbes on how the Trump Campaign is actively considering how to bypass the results if he doesn’t win. What happened to free and fair elections in this country? What will happen to this country?

  • Another Glorious Day

    It is clear and crisp, cool enough for a light wool in the mornings and evenings, and a light long sleeved shirt when working outdoors during the day. This is my favorite time of the year, after it cools off, but before it gets cold.

    The Asian Pear Marmalade was made yesterday afternoon. It took forever to cook to jam consistency, but it is thick and a beautiful golden color. The 3 pounds of pears and an orange, filled 4 half pints plus a quarter pint jar with just enough left over to enjoy warm on a biscuit remaining from Friday night’s dinner.

    Last week, I began a ferment of some of the small Eggplants that I had gotten at the Farmer’s Market. It has been sitting on the back of the counter all week with the ferment weight and ferment lid, all covered with a small towel. I hadn’t even peeked at it all week and decided to check it this morning. What a gorgeous color it turned and the ferment is so good. I have to thank a local friend for introducing me to fermented eggplant many years ago, and a distant online friend for reminding me of it now that I ferment so many good foods. I bought zesty salad mix and radishes at the Farmer’s market yesterday and a block of goat milk Feta cheese last week. I think a salad with those items and some of the eggplant and a tomato if I can find a ripe one will be a nice addition to dinner tonight.

    As soon as the morning sun and wind dry the garden leaves, I will pick beans and any other produce ready to come in for the freezer. Soon, the remaining beans will be left to mature and dry to save for planting next year. I have planted this variety for a couple of years and they perform very well here. Last year I didn’t save the seed and had to purchase seed, but bean seed is so easy to save. When the peas start producing, I will harvest to enjoy and also let them mature and dry for saving. Some packages of seed I use have so many seed in them that the package will last two or three years, and some seed is so tiny and difficult to save, I just purchase when I need more. I suspect I will have volunteer tomatillo all over the place next year and have in the past, dug them and relocated them where I wanted them to grow.

    Since my newest spindle arrived during the week, I have been spinning mostly on it to get used to it’s size and weight and because when it spins, the wood grain of the figured Bigleaf Maple makes the most interesting concentric circles, very mesmerizing. This is the second turtle of fiber on it. It would hold a lot, but I am trying to keep the colors of the braid consistent enough that the plied yarn will be similar to the first half of the braid that I finished last month.

  • Another week gone

    Where do they go, it seems like yesterday that we went to the Farmer’s Market, yet today was market day again. This week we arrived about 10 minutes before opening time and I stood in line with about a dozen other people to pick up my preorders and see if there was anything from other vendors that I don’t have pre-order info for and who aren’t on the market’s pre-order site. Several of the vendors were still setting up, but I came home with goodies for the week. I hadn’t pre-ordered figs this week, but still purchased a half dozen to just eat and enjoy and while talking to the vendor, she said there would be more later because of the late frost last spring, so I came home and checked my fig and it has about a dozen figs growing on it! I’m very excited, and to protect it from the midnight marauders, I decided the flimsy wire fence ring standing loosely around it was insufficient and set about to build the mini greenhouse to protect it this winter, but alas, the corrugated plastic sheets on the chicken tractor are too brittle to reuse. Not to be thwarted, I had some green erosion fencing and step in posts and with 8 posts and the erosion fencing cut long enough to hang over the tops toward the center, it is now well protected from the deer. Grass was cleared back away from it again and a new layer of hay mulch put around the base.

    This structure is more stable than the wire ring, so I may just wrap it in heavy mil translucent plastic for winter. Maybe the 7 foot tall posts I used for the tall tomatoes can be arranged in a way to make a teepee shape that can be wrapped.

    When you still don’t have mowers, but you have to be able to get to the coop and gardens without getting wet to the knees by the tall grass, you just do what you have to do. The line trimmer to the rescue, again.

    I can get to the coop, the gardens, and the bird feeders. Maybe the mowers will come home this week. I actually went all the way around the house and walled garden and most of the way around the vegetable garden as well, all on less than one battery charge. That trimmer was a good purchase.

    At the market, I found Asian Pears and bought enough to make some Asian Pear Marmalade. I will have to go scrounge jars to can it, but that is on my agenda for today or tomorrow while the daytime temperatures are in the low 60’s (mid teens celsius).

    Also taking advantage of the nice day, the little rose was given an in ground permanent home. If necessary, I will cover it with a feed bucket if a hard freeze is threatened until it is fully established by next summer.

    My second string of Thai peppers was started for drying. The first one reached the end of the doubled floss and is hanging on the end of the kitchen cabinet until the peppers are dry and needed. There are hundreds of them out there and each day another dozen or so have ripened red and come in to be strung.

    I received an email that the fall garlic was being shipped, I will keep an eye out for it and keep it cool until it is time to plant it here. I think I should thin the salad mix I started in the house and put some of the seedlings in the a garden.

    I’ve had a break, an apple and goat cheese, now back to work. I love the cooler days, but dread the cold of winter.

  • Autumn is upon us

    The sunflowers are gone, the tomatoes have stopped producing with a few green ones left, the corn stalks are browning. The asparagus ferns have been cut back and the bed weeded, to be burned after it has all dried and nothing is growing near that bed. Peppers, beans, peas, and ground cherries are loving the cooler nights. Most of the locals have already plowed under their summer gardens, I’m milking mine for every veggie and fruit it will provide. The Autumnal Equinox is in 3 days, meteorological autumn arrived 18 days ago. This time of the year is bittersweet as by now, I’m tired of weeding, but not ready for the end of fresh vegetables from my own gardens. We are facing 5 or 6 days of cooler days and chilly nights.

    Ground cherries forming
    The sole pumpkin found when the corn patch was cleared.
    The pile of cornstalks, sunflower stems, and asparagus tops to be shredded or burned.

    The hunters are beginning to ask permission to hunt on our farm. This I also have mixed feelings about. I enjoy seeing the wildlife and the safety of not having hunters walking about our property, but good community relationships are important too and we often get small tasks that I can’t do offered in return. One of those tasks is to repair/re-level a sagging gutter in the back of the house. I won’t go up a tall ladder any longer, I can’t risk a broken hip or worse if I have an incident.

    We still haven’t gotten our mowers back and I am afraid the grass is so tall that they won’t be able to handle it. I may have to wait for the first real frost to hit it before it gets mowed down again, unless we get the replacement brush hog. I will just continue to line trim paths and around the foundation and gardens.

    The chickadees, tufted titmouse(s)/mice, and cardinals are returning to the feeders with the finches that have continued to feed. The hummingbirds are still visiting their feeders and checking all of the remaining flowers. They usually leave by the end of the first week of October, then their feeders will be brought in washed, sanitized, and stored until spring.

    When it isn’t raining, we take an evening walk, usually at the pond as it isn’t as crowded as town. The wild Asters are blooming, the one below was much more lavender than the photo, fungi of various shapes abound, and I love the reflection on the water.

    For now, we will enjoy the cooler weather, safely but sadly alone.

  • Olio-9/17/2020

    Olio: a miscellaneous collection of things

    We are seeing and feeling very mild symptoms of other’s woes. The smoke from wildfires of the west has extended beyond the east coast, I have read, all the way to Europe. We are a few hundred miles west of the east coast, but this was our sun yesterday early evening.

    That is not light cloud cover, it is smoke in the upper atmosphere. We can’t smell it and I don’t think it has affected our air quality but it is devastating to think of the infernos that can produce enough smoke to haze the skies of the east coast and beyond. Today we are getting the very outer bands of what was Hurricane Sally that deluged and flooded the Gulf Coast. We have no wind and mostly light rain which is welcome. After a very wet summer, it turned dry and it hasn’t rained in a couple of weeks, crisping the falling leaves, those ones that drift down before the Autumn colors begin, still a month or so off.

    The recommendation is not to leave houseplants out when the temperatures fall below about 45f. It hasn’t gotten there yet, but the next few nights dip into the low 40’s to upper 30’s. The larger plants will be gathered near the door and covered with a sheet or large plastic bag, the succulents have been returned to their winter locations in front of the south facing French doors and the kitchen window sill. They will probably go back outside in a week or so when this hint of fall passes. There are two large hanging planters of Spider Plant. I may cut the babies and root them to restart those pots next year and let the winter cold kill off the parent plants. They are awkward to bring in to the house for the winter and look pretty scraggly now anyway. There is no threat of frost, which would be record breakingly early, so I’m not concerned about the vegetable garden, it should have another month or more of growing time. For our Anniversary last February, hubby gave me a thimble sized rose in a little Lady Bug holder. When it finished blooming, I repotted it into an 8″ ceramic pot and it has lived on the back deck steps all summer and has produced two or three blooms repeatedly. I need to plant it in a garden bed so it has time to produce a good root system before the first frost. I fear if I bring it back in for the winter, I will lose it. The grape vine that was stripped of all of it’s leaves is fighting back and not ready to settle in for the winter.

    There are new leaves coming out all over the vines. I’m sure as soon as they get any size on them, the midnight marauders will find them again and strip it bare. It wouldn’t be difficult to run the hot wire out around the plum and grape vines, but would make mowing that area more difficult and I would have to develop a new habit to change my path to the chicken coop and then be careful not to back into it when gathering eggs. Maybe I could use step in posts and turn off the solar battery when I need to mow and just move the wire temporarily, that is if we ever get our mowers back from the repair shop.

    After thinking that the winter had killed my fig planted last year, it has grown vigorously and is now about 4 feet tall and full. Before frost, I will shelter it better than last year. Last year I filled a wire ring around it with old hay, but that wasn’t enough. When it loses it’s leaves, I will hammer in 4 T-posts and use the translucent corrugated plastic that is on the failing chicken tractor to build a temporary greenhouse around it then fill that with hay and cover the top with burlap or an empty feed sack. I really want it to produce next year. On the driveway hill, we planted forsythia, lilacs, peonies, a dogwood, and a crepe myrtle at least a dozen years ago. The crepe myrtle has never done anything, looking like a foot tall mass of twigs, until this year. This year it actually grew to about 6 feet and bloomed. If the weather prognosticators are correct, we are going to have a wet, mild winter. If that is true, I should get figs next year, another sign of the climate change that so many deny is occurring. Maybe my grandchildren will be planting olives and citrus in the mountains of Virginia when they are my age.

    When walking up to the mailbox yesterday, I saw my first “woolly bear” caterpillar on the driveway. As legend goes, the longer the black band, the colder and snowier the winter and if the tail end is black, the end of winter will be colder. He was less than a quarter black on the head end, so if I were to believe in his prediction, the weather prognosticators are correct.

    When I posted yesterday about returning to my beginnings on spinning, I failed to post a photo I had taken.

    The top skein is my very first spindle spun yarn. At two ply, it is a gnarly, knobby 2 or 3 wraps per inch. The red skein below is the most recent spindle spun skein I made, it is smooth, even, and 24 wraps per inch. I will never give up that first skein.

  • And There She Goes Again

    Fiber equipment, I think I am settled then stumble on to a spindle or distaff that just yells my name. I keep my flock/herd of spindles to 5, 3 that I use regularly and two that live in my living history basket to demonstrate the different types and styles. If I were doing more living history, which is on hold during the virus, I would likely have several other styles that people could handle. The three I use are all Jenkins Turkish spindles. I have had others, but if I find one that I like the wood more, or the weight is in my preferred range, one leaves for the new one to come. They vary in size from tiny to small with one in the middle. The tiny lives in a 4 ounce tea tin in a custom made drawstring bag in my “take it everywhere” tote and gets used when I’m passenger in the car or waiting in the car during dental or doctor’s appointments. The medium small is my go to spindle, used with my first ring distaff holding my fiber. The new small one is the size I ply on and maybe since this one is lighter than the one I sold, I will be able to spin on it as well. The second distaff is because I have learned to use the ring distaff and it takes strain off of my wrists as I spin, so I wanted a second one to put with the tiny spindle in my bag.

    This is a return to the beginning as I first learned to spin on a drop spindle, long before I purchased and learned to spin on a wheel. It has become more difficult for me to knit without pain, but spindle spinning doesn’t bother me. Now I just need an outlet for the yarn I am creating.

  • Sunday, Sunday

    Our television is in our loft which has three windows plus two double dormer windows across the vaulted ceiling over the living room, so the large open space can be very bright when the shades are up. As a result, the Roman shades on the loft windows stay closed. Yesterday was the first NFL games of the season and hubby had the TV on from 1 p.m. until long after I left for bed. I’m not much of a football fan, or television at all. I played in the garden for as long as the heat and humidity allowed, weeding and harvesting, bringing in a very full basket and an armload of produce and basil.

    I sat at the dining room table and stripped the basil to dry in another basket, sorted out the beans from the peppers, tomatoes, and tomatillos. Then brined a quart of Jalapenos, strung the Thai peppers to dry.

    Then filling my iced tea cup, I came up to spin or knit while football played on. I mentioned that the shades stay drawn so there is no glare on the TV which makes for poor lighting for knitting, but it was just basic ribbing on for the bottom of a grand daughter’s sweater. I alternated knitting a few rows, then spun some yardage on the spindles. The old wrist break and the arthritis it has caused, prevents me from knitting for very long any more. Spinning on the spindles doesn’t seem to bother it.

    After the first game series ended, I went down to make hubby’s favorite meal, homemade enchiladas and tacos which involves frying tortillas into taco shape, shredding cheese, dicing onion, making the enchilada sauce, so a fairly intensive and time consuming meal, as the football games continued above.

    After the meal was completed and cleaned up, left over beans, sauce, and taco meat packaged up for the freezer, I returned to the loft. Only I put on my headphones to block the games and continued with my crafts. As it got darker and more difficult to see what I was doing, I realized that three rows back, about half a round in, I made an error, knitting when I should have purled and thus the ribbing was messed up. Too tired to continue with it and not wanting to try to rip back three rows and picking up 134 stitches in the dark room, I tossed it in my basket, spun for a while longer and retired to bed with my book.

    This morning in the brighter light, I surveyed the damage.

    For some odd reason, it was half a round and only in the row down three rows, so this morning, I dropped each stitch back three rows one at a time and picked them back up correctly. It may have taken longer to do that than to just frog three rows and pick up the stitches, but the yarn is superwash, so slick, the knit not very tight and I didn’t want to risk having to frog all 2 1/2″ and starting over. At any rate, I can continue knitting the rib for another half inch then begin on the body of the sweater. This sweater has a pouch and hood like a hoodie sweatshirt, so the fiddly pouch will have to be picked up soon. I have knit this sweater at least a dozen times in various sizes for daughter and her kiddos, but that pouch always causes me pause, plus I need two needles the same size and only have 1 so I will borrow one from daughter, after all, the sweater is for her daughter.

    The eggplant purchased at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday was salted, wept, and brined to ferment on the counter for several days. I had fermented eggplant a few years ago at a fiber retreat, it was made by a friend and I hadn’t thought about it for a while until an online friend made some. Since eggplant is like a sponge and absorbs flavors, I used fresh basil, fresh oregano, minced Thai and serano peppers, and crushed garlic to flavor it. It should be delicious in a salad with Mediterranean food in a few days.

  • FEAR

    I have just finished listening to a very thought provoking Podcast, hinting on a topic my husband and I have often discussed.  Though the Podcast was not directly on the topic, it sent me here.  The topic is societal fear, the Podcast actually was on the history of public bathrooms and how we got where we are now with sex separate facilities and the issues they cause for transgender, non-binary, intersex, and disabled people.

    It takes me back more than 3 decades when as a  Mom with young children, I was faced with having to take a son into the women’s room or hubby having to take our daughter into a men’s room because we didn’t want them going into the other facility on their own or leaving them outside to wait while we went in.  Even then, the idea of single the sex bathrooms seemed absurd to me.  You don’t have them on buses or airplanes.  We share bathrooms in our homes and in some small businesses that have a single facility, why can’t we have bathrooms that accommodate everyone.

    The answer is fear, unreasonable fear.  It has been pervasive in history.  When bathrooms were a privy, everyone used them without regard to gender or color, then indoor bathrooms came along with water and sewage infrastructure, but women were basically kept at home.  As women entered the workplace, the system changed, but only for privileged white America when we unnecessarily segregated a whole population out of fear.  Building code was written to mandate separate sex bathrooms. Then after desegregation, the fear switched to AIDS, could you catch it in a bathroom?  Then more open acceptance of same sex marriage, or has it just fomented more irrational fear as the issue of which bathroom a transgender, non-binary, or intersex individual must use.

    I think most of what drives today’s issues is fear of change, fear of what people perceive they can’t control but shouldn’t control.  Fear caused by generations of ignorance by people raised to believe that anyone of a different race, religion, gender identity, or nationality is alien and suspect if not outright dangerous.

    Back to the Podcast, the code, through the efforts of lawyers, researchers, and architects who are themselves in one of the categories in the first paragraph or at least open minded and not driven by fear, has changed to allow new building to have one large bathroom with grooming areas, hand washing areas that vary in height and are  long “sinks” angled away from the user, and toilet areas with stalls of varying sizes to accommodate everyone regardless of size or disability.  This would work, it would be as they put it in the podcast, “more eyes” to prevent unwanted behaviors, but unfortunately the code doesn’t mandate this change, just allows it and as long as the FEAR is there, it will continue to be a problem in our society.

    It is time for our small-minded fear to be cast away and recognize that we are all humans on the same planet and can benefit from each other’s cultures, beliefs, ideas.