Cabin Crafted

Category: Fiber Arts and Equipment

  • A Break

    With thunder pounding, lightning flashing, and torrents of rain falling, the heat dome finally broke. We are expected about 10 degree cooler weather for the next 10 days and nice cool nights. We try to go out to dinner about once a week and were in the next town west, a small town, but bigger than our village. They have a great Mexican Restaurant that we enjoy, and we got in before it started. Electricity flickered during dinner. We left running to the car only three spaces from the exit and got soaked. The highway had ponds of water on it and every driver was proceeding at a snail’s pace, except the fuel tank truck that dangerously barreled past, like his product had an expiration date of yesterday, sending rooster tails of water down on those of us who realized the lack of visibility was an issue.

    Monday, the young neighbor that mows our hay for his cattle came and cut the fields in the 96f heat. It sat on the ground Tuesday, and when we got home from errands and a walk on Wednesday, he and an older gentleman were raking and baling it.

    The heat and the mowing activity increased the field mouse activity and living in a hayfield, we keep traps set year round. The other requirement is to keep the attractants like bags of nuts, sugar, pasta, in jars.

    A second quart jar of cucumbers were started to ferment for dills, so 2 are in the works now.

    My chicken coop has a small pen with plastic mesh over the top, and a 2 foot wide tunnel (also covered with plastic mesh) that surrounds about 4/5s of the vegetable garden. The coop has a battery powered pop door that raises at about 6:30 a.m. and was closing around 9 p.m. About 10 days ago, I went out in the morning and two hens were missing. The hay mower found their remains halfway to the lower field. I started monitoring whether the hens were getting in before the door closed and found two hens in an apple tree, one on the coop egg door, and one on the mesh pen cover. They were rounded up and the timer on the door changed to give them until 9:30 to get in. Yesterday morning, I went out to find 2 more hens dead in the tunnel around the garden. They must not have gone in before the door closed.

    The cost, responsibility, and loss are taking a toll on me. I have been using only about half a dozen eggs a week except during holidays for years and the remaining eggs have gone to my children’s families, or neighbors. It is time to give it up, I think. I can buy eggs at the Farmer’s Market when I need them. The coop will be repaired, restained, and maybe I will try again in a year or so.

    The garden is smaller this year, but the area not designated by raised bed boxes is a mass of weeds. The overall fenced area can’t really be reduced as the blueberries are at one end and the asparagus at the other. A solution to stay on top of the weed mess needs to be found. I thought planting pumpkins there would cover and smother the weeds, but they are growing very slowly in the dry heat.

    In the past week, two spinning projects were finished and yesterday at the spinning group, one was plyed, and the other plyed last night. They need to be wound off the bobbins and soaked. Both have tentative use plans. The darker one was the small amount of Dorset wool roving I bought in Skagway, Alaska on our cruise in May and it was plyed with a multicolored strand of BFL that I had spun. The lighter one is Rommeldale and Bamboo and it will be the border on a shawl I am knitting slowly.

    Today’s walk should be less onerous with temperatures only climbing into the mid 80’s. Sunscreen and a water bottle to prevent a burn and dehydration.

  • Colonial History

    The school year is winding down here and so, the class groups at the museum are coming to an end. Today, we had about 40 second graders visit us. Not as many rotations, fewer volunteers, but the kiddos did very well.

    It is a bit more challenge with the younger students as they haven’t had the history in their Social Studies classes in any depth, their attention span is much shorter than the middle school aged students, so my presentation takes a much simplified form.

    I start with asking them, “How many outfits do you think you own?” Answered by 10 to 1,000,000. “Where do you get your clothes?” Answered by Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc. From there, I try to get them to imagine having only 1 or 2 outfits, having to make them, including making the cloth they are made from, and wearing that same outfit until they outgrew it and handed it down to a younger sibling. They have a hard time with that idea or having only a handed down outfit themselves. How no handmade cloth was wasted, that worn garments were taken apart and the cloth reused for bags or quilts.

    Trying to get them to imagine living in a 10′ x 10′ log home with parents and several siblings with no kitchen and no bathroom is also difficult for them to comprehend.

    There are some good questions, some wrinkled noses over how few baths they could take and how that process works. How they had to help shear sheep, skirt and wash fleece, help card the wool, then help spin it on spindles. I have a handful of small spindles I have made for them to try and for them to see how difficult the process is initially, as I have been spinning on a spindle the entire time I have been talking to them.

    There are lots of flax, hemp, and wool samples to pass around. Some woven pieces, box loom tapes, and lucet cords to see what even as kids that young would have helped make.

    It is fun to have the various ages and drawing from my teaching skills with them.

  • News from the Blog

    If you are a subscriber that gets the blog in your email, it will direct to here. If you have gotten it from Facebook or Ravelry, you now should use Fstafford165.wordpress.com and it is secure. Subscribing will sent it to your email each time I post.

    The blog looks a bit different as I have updated to a newer format, but it is still the same blog.

    It is that time of the year when I dress up and present to local elementary and middle schoolers what it was like to have to make everything you needed to live on the frontier and to trade and barter with neighbors, provide your extras to the community store for the wagons moving farther west into what is now Kentucky and Ohio. The cabin was originally built in 1769 on Peak Creek and moved to the Wilderness Road in Newbern in 1830. When it was moved, a loft was added, you can see the stairs in the background. The footprint of the cabins in the “planned” community were 10′ X 10′ some with a loft. A fireplace for heat and cooking. The barn loom behind me, similar to the one that was in this cabin for an enslaved woman who was the village weaver. The walking wheel also behind me is one I made functional at the museum and demonstrate it and the drop spindle for making yarn to be used for the fabric needs. Last Wednesday when this photo was taken, it was dreary and chilly, about 47f and the 100 kiddos moving between the 8 stations every 15 minutes had to hustle and pack in tight for some of the stations. They huddled in every porch and building that had space to eat their lunch. I thought I was going to freeze and it took several hours once home to thaw out.

    That sent me on a quest to make or find a historically accurate cape because this week’s groups begin on another chilly but dry day. My quest turned up a navy blue wool reenactment cape with hood used, on ebay, for a very good price and quick shipping. It arrived today and I won’t be cold again when the weather does not cooperate.

    The cold night last week was hard on the new flower starts I put out, I guess a day too early. Today we bought marigolds and petunias as well as some flower seed that mostly will go in a ground bed once I get it cleaned up from winter and the hardier starts were put in the spots in the pots on the deck that were hit the hardest by the 25f night. Also some zinnia and nasturtium seed were interspersed with the small plants, so hopefully the pots will fill in with color as the spring moves on. There are no near freezing nights for the next 10 days and I will cover the pots with row cover if we get threatened.

    The vegetable, herb, and flower seed under the grow lights haven’t sprouted yet, but they aren’t due to go in the ground for at least a month, maybe 6 weeks.

    I hope you enjoy the new format.

  • Chores and Crafts

    Yes, I am a senior in the upper half of my 70’s, but I can still work when needed. We have a couple of days of thaw and temperatures in the mid 40’s and we have about 25 fireplace logs unsplit from dead Ash trees that our south neighbor took down when he was fencing along the south border between our farms. A lot of smaller branches were cut by him and stacked for us, but the logs were in 10 foot lengths. Our young hay guy, a great and helpful man, came to remove an oak blow down that was in one of the fields he hays. While he was here, he cut the Ash into fireplace lengths and stacked them where they had been laid. We have some brutal cold expected Monday through Wednesday or Thursday of next week with single digit daytime temperatures. To be prepared to assist the heat pump and hopefully just be a supplemental heat (as long as the power stays on), I tackled the stack today and managed to get about 6 of the logs split, hauled down to the house and stacked on the front porch. The rolling wood rack was filled with older wood from the wood stack and also moved to the porch. This was an additional workout as there is still snow and ice from the past couple weeks of nastiness which makes doing anything a bit of a hazard.

    This pile is about twice as large as when the photo was taken and the rolling wood rack is on the other side of the doorway.

    All of this effort was followed with a coop clean out. They spent about 10 days without ever even peeking outside. Every day has required carrying a 3 gallon bucket of water over to them and bringing the frozen one back to thaw. The coop is a few feet higher than the garage with a several foot dip between so it was trekking up the hill without slipping on the ice. As that is the east side of the house and the house blocks the hill in the afternoon, the ice lingered.

    The driveway is finally thawing and more ground and gravel is seen every day. With today’s slightly warmer temperatures and sunshine, the ice is becoming mud. Tomorrow evening we have rain then a couple inches of snow, but hopefully warm enough to not turn to ice.

    The cold icy weather has allowed a lot of crafting time. The December “Fibre Snack” scarf has been the primary knitting project and is now about 2/3 finished. The base color is running out, it is wheel spun and there is more unspun that I will have to tackle it soon to finish the scarf. It is going to be generous, warm, and colorful when finished as I have used the daily December snack in the order they were spun.

    It has gotten too large to take to hubby’s appointments, so it is an at home only project. Spindles and fiber travel to entertain me while I wait. And it often entertains many others in the waiting rooms as well.

    Tomorrow before the rain begins, more wood will be split and covered to keep it dry in case it is needed next week.

    Stay safe, stay warm. Take care.

  • Snow and Ice, Spinning and Knitting

    This week has been true winter. Night temperatures have been in the teens, day temperatures in the 20’s. We had a snow and ice event that turned our driveway into an ice slide. We had to get out one day during the first storm and drive to Roanoke, nearly an hour away, it took about twice that long. The cover was still snow at that point. Once down our mountain road, the roads were fairly clear, but there was heavy fog on the way there and snow on the way home. I attempted to walk up to the mailbox on Wednesday and ended up sitting in the snow and ice and eventually sliding down the hill seated to get back to the house without getting anywhere near the mailbox. Getting over to the chicken coop with water and scratch each day has been a challenge as it is an uphill walk with a 4 gallon bucket on ice. With effort, and driving half on the driveway, half in the grass, we were able to get out this morning for hubby’s PT and back home before today’s snowstorm began. It isn’t supposed to be quite as cold tonight and may actually get above freezing tomorrow and up to 40 on Sunday and Monday, so we may see some thawing. I hope. We won’t attempt to get out again until the sun comes out and the temperatures rises above freezing. Hopefully it will thaw before the next Arctic blast midweek.

    During the first 25 days of December, the Jenkins Spindle group participated in a fiber sample exchange. In October, 59 of us mailed 4 ounces each of a fiber of our choice to one of two “Elves” who spent a couple of days together dividing the fiber into 5 gram samples, packaging, labeling, and wrapping each sample. The 25 samples were then mailed back to us to be opened one each day on the day of the sample’s number.

    Each of the samples were spun on one of my Jenkin’s Turkish spindles then plyed on a spindle and skeined into a mini skein that I labeled with the sample label adding the day and yardage. After finishing the spin, I returned to the knitting of the Icelandic Nordic Star scarf that I was making with the yarn daughter and SIL brought me from their honeymoon in Iceland.

    When it was finished, I started knitting the scarf that uses the spun samples and a skein of handspun Shetland wool that I had on hand. I am on Day 8 of the samples, knitting them in the order they were spun, alternated with the gray Shetland. This is a fun project, using up the little skeins about 1 each day.

    We are looking forward to returning to more normal daily routines, getting back to my trainer for my health and flexibility, and hoping to see an end to the healing of hubby’s clavicle break. Spring outdoor walks are still a dream and wish.

  • Indulgence

    Almost two decades ago, I began my trip into the fiber world rabbit hole by taking a beginner drop spindle class. I was already a knitter and crocheter, though both of those now are secondary as they aggravate the osteoarthritis in my almost 8 decade old hands. The drop spindle fascinated me and making yarn was absolutely magical. Of course I quickly wanted a spinning wheel and have owned several over the past couple of decades including the antique great wheel in the header.

    Along the way, I discovered Turkish cross armed spindles and the rabbit hole deepened as they were so very portable and because of their construction, allow the spun wool cop to be removed without having to wind it off the shaft of the drop spindle. Several different makers spindles were tried until I discovered the Jenkins spindles and over the years, a number of them have entered my supply of tools. Several as gifts from my husband, my fiber indulger. He also buys me wool.

    During the shut in period of Covid, I returned to spinning mostly on the spindles, including a very inexpensive plain top whorl one that I use when I am at the museum doing living history for class groups. Spinning yarn on the spindles slowed my production down to a manageable level.

    Recently, while demonstrating at the Fall Festival, since I was outside on uneven ground, I spun almost entirely on the top whorl and realized when I got home with a spindle full of singles, that my yarn ball winder would wind it off the shaft quickly, making a ball I could ply from both ends or if I wanted to ply with a second strand, I could slip a toilet paper tube over the ball winder shaft and wind it on to that.

    There is a maker of very quality top whorl spindles, Golding, and I stumbled on one I loved. With a November birthday, my love purchased the spindle with it’s bright brass ring and brass heart on the whorl as a gift for me. The spindle came with a generous sample of wool blended with silk and I have had a glorious cold snowy day using it to spin the sample and then ply it using the two ends of the ball of singles.

    This morning, before devoting myself to the new spindle, I finished knitting a pair of fingerless mitts, and spun for a while on one of my Jenkins Turkish spindles. The basket with them in the picture is a spindle basket by Susan Preuss that was a generous gift from a friend a few years ago. It is perfect for holding a top whorl spindle and some wool, or tucking a small Turkish spindle inside with some wool.

    Today has been a quiet, peaceful day of crafting, and preparing a delicious, easy dinner of mushroom and butternut raviolis in sage and garlic browned butter. Topped off with the most decadent dark chocolate truffle cakelet that was gifted to me by another friend. A good day.

  • 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.

  • Summer before the Solstice

    The weather is hot. And dry. We did benefit from some rain a few days ago that was spotty around the area, but did give us a little respite from the heat and the dryness.

    Yesterday, I was sitting on the front porch with Randy. Randy was our postal carrier for most of the years since we built and moved here, but he retired a few years ago. He also runs cattle with two younger men, men about our sons’ ages. He had come over to let us know that they were going to mow our hay today so I wouldn’t let critters out that might be harmed by huge mowers and we were just sitting and visiting when he looked beyond me and asked if that was a snake on the porch rail. Sure enough, a black rat snake about 6- 6.5 feet long, just chillin’ on the rail behind me. Black rat snakes are our friends as long as they stay out of the house and out of the coop. He probably had been feasting on the chipmunks that have taken over since the dogs and barn cats have all passed away. The snake had been hanging out up near the barn, but had moseyed on down to the house. I went through the house, grabbed leather garden gloves, a 5 gallon bucket, and lid and came back out to relocate it. Randy looked at me like I was nuts and said, “Don’t ask me to help.” He did take the photo though.

    This is the 5th one that we have relocated from the house or coop. The bucket was taken a couple miles away and the snake turned loose in the woods by a field.

    Last night I did finish the June spinning challenge and finished plying the rainbow yarn.

    It ended up 558 yards almost 4 ounces done totally on the spindles in the photo in 18 days. A project has already been begun.

    The mowers did arrive this afternoon, two mowers and a tractor with a tedder to fluff up what was mowed. They will return Friday and bale it. I don’t think they are going to have a very good harvest as it didn’t get mowed in the fall and it didn’t get fertilized this spring. Randy said they are already about 60 bales short of what they usually get before reaching us, so he may not have much to sell this year, hopefully enough for their cattle.

    The dry heat had caused the pea vines to yellow, so while they mowed, I harvested peas, the potatoes that were in one of the pea beds, a handful of Jalapenos, and a basket of plums. There are about that many more plums still ripening. They sure are good, not very large, but very sweet. And I also pulled the pea vines to be chopped up and put in the compost. My clippers are old and dull and wouldn’t do the job, so I may ask to borrow my daughter’s.

    It took 3 hours to shell all of those peas, filling a bucket with empty pods, and yielding several quarts of peas. We enjoyed some for dinner and the rest frozen for meals when fresh veggies aren’t available except trucked across the country. In a couple of days, the tiny green beans will be large enough to start enjoying them and freezing more for later meals. The tomatoes have flowers, but no fruit yet and flowers on the cucumbers, but again, no fruit yet. One of the pea beds will be planted with more green beans, the other covered with old hay until cooler weather allows fall greens to be started.

    We saw the doe with the singleton fawn, still a tiny one after the mowers left. Probably wondering where their tall grass covering had gone.

    While I was talking to one of the younger mowers, we realized that a large branch in the top of one of my Asian pears is totally dead with pears on it, so recently dead. It doesn’t look like a lightening strike, but at some point it is going to have to be cut out. I don’t know what caused it. It is concerning as that is the tree that produces the most pears.

    More heat and no rain for the next 10 days. At least the grass doesn’t grow fast when it is hot and dry.

    Take care, stay cool, be safe.