The snow began around 9 last night and dumped about 7 inches on us overnight. We have had some flurries today and are expected more through part of tomorrow. It is pretty to look at, but other than a couple trips out to give scratch to the cooped up hens, filling the bird feeders, and clearing snow from the satellite dish, I have stayed in spinning with my feet up in front of the fire.
After posting yesterday, the mail brought me a form that caused hours of stress and tears as I had to go back a year and find every item I had sold and used Paypal as a means of receiving money and then trying to find when and how I purchased it (or received it as a gift or trade) with date and cost. That on top of a year where I spent way more money in personal property taxes and fees for Etsy than I made on Etsy resulted in me making a decision to close the online shop. I haven’t decided if I will do any live events after Covid allows or whether I am done. My experience with Paypal has had too many unpleasant moments, so I am done with it as well.
I did finally get most of the seed I was seeking for the gardens. We have a nice local nursery that gets their plants from a local grower and will get the tomatoes, peppers, and anything else that requires a good start from them. it seems odd to be planning a garden when you can’t even see where it is today. But it is nice to have a day with no where to be and the inability to go there if there was. Dinner will be simple, just stuffed baked potatoes and a salad. If I had planned ahead, I could have made a loaf of bread, but I didn’t.
Time to go throw logs on the wood stove and fireplace to keep the home fires burning, not because they need to, but it is nice.
This has been an interesting week. It started out moderately warm, then snowed. Of course it snowed the night before I was finally scheduled for my first COVID vaccine and I feared that we wouldn’t be able to get down the mountain and to the center two towns over in time. We did get a few inches over a thin layer of ice and I got an automated call that the vaccine was delayed by 90 minutes, so we left almost as early as we had planned to allow time to go very slowly down the mountain, trusting that the highway would be in good shape and allowing us time if we had no issues to run a couple of errands to the bank and a USPS drop off. Our road up to the paved road and the paved road to the highway were a bit dicey, but we made it and got to the center set up by the health department in plenty of time. I walked up to pick up the paperwork from a volunteer handing it out near the door, just as they allowed us to move inside, 20 minutes earlier than they had said they would begin. I had my vaccine before the time they had rescheduled and was in and out within 30 minutes. I have an appointment for round two the end of February.
The frozen precipitation from the last storm hasn’t all melted yet because it has stayed between the low teens and 30 for several days and we are expecting 8-12″ of snow and ice beginning tonight through Monday morning. After the usual Saturday morning run for drive through breakfast and the Farmer’s Market, it was time to prepare for a cold, snowed in couple of days. A good supply of wood was hauled in to the basement for the woodstove. The rolling wood cart and wheelbarrow were filled for the living room fireplace, and put in the garage which currently has lots of room in it because the car that died was sold as is and we haven’t gotten a new one yet. Later in the day, I will scrub out the downstairs tub and fill it with water for dogs and toilets and hope that it isn’t necessary.
Week before last, the Olive Eggers started laying eggs again, then at least one of the big red hens has also begun. I get from zero to 4 eggs a day right now from 8 hens, so I am no longer having to purchase them from the Farmer’s Market.
Yesterday, in response to an email to daughter and her kiddos about their garden this year, they called and we discussed what I had seed wise, what I needed to get for us, and what we would buy already started. I figured that getting seeds in January would be a breeze. NOT. Much of what I wanted from one company was sold out, but they will send me an email when it is available. The other seed company I use isn’t even taking orders this weekend. I was able to get some of what we wanted from the Natural Foods store in town this morning. We will make it happen somehow. I thought that onion sets and seed potatoes would be bought from one of the reputable organic companies, but only perennial onions which produce tiny onions were available and seed potatoes were much more expensive than buying many pounds of potatoes at the Farmer’s Market, or were out of stock. Last year’s potatoes were from organic potatoes from the local grocer that had sprouted and I have a few pounds of Farmer’s Market potatoes in the basement that have sprouted, so I will plant what is locally available and keep looking for the onion sets. The bush winter squash seeds, 2 packages, cost a bit over $10 and they wanted to charge me $8 to ship them, I finally found them from another seed company, seeds and shipping are reasonable. This process is getting more difficult by the minute. Last year, I saw some really clever plastic templates for spacing seed in a square foot garden for about $10. I almost bought it for my grand daughter that I help with her garden, but didn’t. I looked for them today and they are now $27 for the exact same tool. I think a DIY event is in order. I can envision a 12″ wide acrylic/plastic cutting board, one of my power drills, and a few small jars of model paint and I can make the template for a few dollars.
The month is about to end and I have accrued or reserved 23 breeds of fiber for my breed blanket. I know what one of my February spins will be, I have to decide on the other. This week, I began combing locks of Gotland, so I may just go on with that.
If the power doesn’t go out during the storm, some obligatory snow shots will be shared in a few days. If the snow isn’t wet and sticky, I may haul out a sled and my ski clothes and play in it. Until I visit again, stay safe, and stay well.
I moved into an apartment between the house under construction and my new job. We moved DH and Son 2 into an apartment in Virginia Beach until DH was ready to retire and we visited back and forth across the state every three or four weeks for almost 3 years.
In the meantime, the house was being built with Son1, DIL, and anyone he could enlist including me on occasion installing the wood siding in rooms and closets, baseboards and the interior side of the logs oiled with boiled linseed oil, floors laid, homemade floor wax created on a hotplate on the back deck. Much of the stone work had already been d one by him and DIL, what was left was finished after we moved in.
The house wasn’t quite finished, but their lease and mine were up and we began an interesting couple of months subletting, house sitting, and other alternative living arrangements while Son 1 was struggling to get the house to the point where we could get a temporary move in permit. That day came almost 16 months after I had moved here and I was still working, hoping to retire again in the next year or so. Our exploration of our area showed us that the farm that we bought is only a few miles from the farm on which my maternal grandfather was born and raised.
Once DH retired and we moved the rest of our furniture to the mountains, I worked for another 7 months and retired with him and the farm blog was begun. First, we planted fruit trees, beyond the coop in part of the area that had been garden, the garden was reworked to a size I thought I could handle on my own. Then we bought a coop and I got the new chicken owner syndrome and went from a few chicks to way too many and too many of them turned out to be randy little roosters.
The coop and part of my learning curve. You can’t let them stay in your egg boxes.
Most of my life from my late teen years on, I had a vegetable garden of some form, usually just a small corner of the urban yard, but that was the extent of my farming experience. So here I was on 30 acres with chickens, at least half of them young roosters that couldn’t stay, fruit trees that the deer were eating, a huge vegetable garden that I couldn’t keep up with and lots to learn. We had thought about raising horses and enough cows to keep us and family in beef, but we never got the fencing done. We did take riding lessons. Fortunately, for the first few years, Son 1 and his family still lived in the area and he was more than willing to dispatch the young roosters while I learned to help. It still isn’t something I like to do, but I can get much more involved in the process, preparing them for the freezer.
Over the years, the garden has been altered, fenced, and topped with hot wire to keep the deer out. I have learned to buy only female chicks and limit the number to no more than 9 or 10. The success with the garden encouraged me to go beyond making jam and learning to can and freeze the bounty.
During the period prior to DH retiring and moving here, I connected with a knitting group and learned to spin. One of the friends I made through knitting, made soap, and she generously taught me one afternoon, leading me to make more of our self and house care products, and Cabin Crafted Shop was born. And the spinning skills connected me with a local Historical site and my adventure in living history as a spinner during the Revolutionary War period began.
That brings us to the present, living in social isolation during the pandemic, enjoying the spoils of the garden and orchard, the eggs from the hens, practicing the skills I have learned to make gifts and to try to earn a little bit of pocket money from these skills. This has been my journal over the years, my record of success and failure. I hope you enjoyed this walk down memory lane.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cabin Crafted 