Merry (late) Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone, even though this is a bit late! Mom and I had to work through Christmas and we got today off as compensation (though I had to fight for even that). Melinda has asked me to post about the projects that I work on occasionally and Mom and I had a big one this year. Felted Slippers! Now that everyone has opened their gifts, I can fully post about their creation. I had read on another knitting blog about these super cute ballet flat looking slippers and bought the pattern last year. In July I emailed all those that I thought would enjoy a pair of slippers to find out their favorite color for their feet and their shoe size. Mom and I worked from then on knitting ridiculously large slippers and sewing them together in preparation for their baths. At the beginning of December we felted down 8 pairs of slippers (plus one set for Tony that weren't ballet flats). Then we sewed on the flaps and buttons to finish them off, of course getting down to the last minute before they had to be shipped! Before they headed off to their new homes, I did a sexy slipper photo shoot.

If you were one of the lucky recipients and your slippers were too big, don't despair! If you have a top loading washing machine, set it to the hottest water setting and the smallest load. Add a touch of detergent and throw your slippers in. Let them agitate for 2-5 minutes. Pull out a slipper, ring it out, and put it on to see if it is small enough. If not throw it back in for another 2-5 minutes. When your slippers fit well, rinse them with cold water, ring them out, shape them back into slipper form and set them somewhere to dry. Just remember that when you shrink them you can't go back! They will probably stretch out a bit in time, but don't go so small you cut off circulation to your foot. We hope you all enjoy them...and we are already planning for next year!

What a Hoot!

So tonight Mom went out to tend chickies really late and she heard a sound in their fenced-in run. She thought maybe it was the little pheasant hen that hangs around trying to find a way in all the time (people who raise birds in a pen and then set them free should know what it does to them psychologically.) But instead she found and caught this:

I know!














So Cute!












It was a pygmy owl! She told me to run and get the camera and held the poor baby while I took pictures. When you stroked his little head he would close those big eyes and his eyelids were covered in downy feathers that looked like long lashes. I asked him if his name was Pig (from Harry Potter .. Ron's little owl Pigwidgeon?) and he would bat those eyes, so I took that as a yes. Mom said his talons were very very sharp and he would try to nibble her to let him go. After the photo shoot she just set him on the porch rail and he took off into the night. We were in awe.

Always Playing Catch-up

Well there have been many times that I planned to sit down and blog, but either the pictures weren't off of the camera yet or that time got eaten up by other things. So here are the escapades of Cindy and Carrie over the last few months.

In late September we harvested our first big crop of tomatoes and ended up stewing and canning most of them and tried our hand at some spaghetti sauce. It was pretty thin and maybe a bit heavy on the spices, but it was definitely too bland. After much researching I found out most spaghetti sauces contain sugar to make them taste better...who knew? Then I found a website that promoted a packet that contained all the spices you needed, a bit of a thickener and had you add sugar to the processed tomatoes to make sauce for canning. Yea!!! So we were ready for our next crop to come off the plants. Well by that time the weather was flirting with lows that were closing in on freezing and that wasn't going to do anything good to our vegetables. So in mid-October we harvested everything...in one day. We picked every tomato off the plants, green or red cause they will ripen just fine in the house, all the carrots, potatoes, peppers, squash, pumpkins and melons that were still out there. I even cut the heads off the giant sunflowers we had planted to dry for roasting seeds. The wheelbarrow was brimming! We had about six bags of tomatoes to process, though since most of the tomatoes were still green it has been slow waiting for them to ripen. We froze the carrots, have been eating slowly on the potatoes, put three of the pumpkins that grew out on the porch, took two sugar pumpkins in the house to ripen for making pies, hung the sunflower heads to dry in the shed, and ditched most of the squash and melons. They were just too slow growing, or nutrient deprived, and ended up small and mostly inedible. Thanks to Pam at work though, we have been eating plenty of really yummy acorn squash that grew in her garden too vigorously. Once we had another good supply of ripe tomatoes we took 'em to the press...as in tomato press. I had purchased one earlier in the summer thinking of homemade sauce and it definitely got a workout. We pressed enough tomatoes to fill a huge stockpot plus more and made and canned some pretty delicious looking sauce. Once again the counter is filling up though and we will probably be stewing these guys again.

Also in mid-October we cut all the herbs in the herb garden before the frost could touch them too. I love the way cut herbs look when they are hung for drying, especially when hung from eco-friendly and Martha Sewart-y branches nabbed out of the yard. We hang them in the pantry to dry and it makes it smell amazing in there.

Since we were in the preserving mood, Mom got the idea to get some apples for cheap at a You-Pick place out of the newspaper and make apple jelly and apple butter. We live in the heart of apple growing country so it wasn't hard to find an orchard selling off their less than perfect apples for cheap. We ended up getting two giant boxes full for $7.00 each! All this craziness started when Pam from work gave us some apples that they had picked at a You-Pick that was just too many for them. She figured they go to chickies as treats...we saw possibilities. First it was a couple of baked apples, then an apple crisp, then another, then an apple pie. Finally the apples were getting low and on the edge of usability so we sat one night and peeled, cored and sliced the rest and froze in aluminum pie and crisp pans enough for 4 more crisps and 6 more pies. While our boxes were sitting around waiting to be made into jelly and butter there was a dessert pot-luck at work and since we had the apples I decided to make an Autumn Apple Cheesecake out of our Philadelphia Cream Cheese cookbook. Omigosh....so good. So then Mom froze apples for 4 more cheesecakes, one of which will be appearing on our Thanksgiving menu.

Think we're crazy yet? Read on.

Meanwhile we had been on the hunt for the perfect storage solution for our craft room. You see we have an enormous amount of craft projects and items with which to weave, knit, crochet, sew, paint, etc. I wanted a better storage unit for the copious amounts of yarn we have to weave, knit and crochet with, especially since the current solution was to put them in bags, boxes, Sterilite bins and shove them haphazardly in the room. Since we can't see any of the yarn, we just keep buying what we need rather than using what we have. I really wanted something that looked like the storage at yarn shops that makes the yarn look attractive and makes you want to knit it. We tried a few things that we had but ended up finding out they wouldn't work for everything that we wanted to store or would take time and energy we didn't have to fix up. We finally ended up going to The Pine Shop in town with a drawing of mine and they came back with a dollar amount we could afford. The units would be unfinished, but ready for us to put a couple coats of varnish on, which was perfect. We didn't stain them and they are really pretty in their natural color. It took us a while to clean out the space for them to go into but once they were in nothing else would have been as beautiful. We got all the yarn we had stored, along with books, magazines and other knitting and weaving accouterments and found out we have enough room to still buy more ;). The room holds my mom's floor loom in the middle of it and with all that stored you can finally get all the way around it, which is a good thing cause she'd really like to be able to use it one of these days!

So hear we are in the middle of November. We put up some Christmas lights today because the dark has gotten so long already. Mom needs lights to go out and feed chickies in the evenings cause if we get out a half-hour or hour late from work it's already getting dark. We are also sick of looking out the windows into blackness, so our fence lights and the kids cabin icicle lights and snowflakes went up along with the deer. I hear it's not too long before we see real snowflakes falling outside...if you can see.

Happy Halloween!

Tomatoes and a Bit of Summer

The tomatoes have finally arrived! At the beginning of the summer it was so cold that the tomato plants refused to grow. But thanks to lots of warmth and sunshine they have exploded! We eventually had to put some rope around them to keep the tomato cages from falling into the aisles. We tied from one picket fence post to another and I later went out and pruned them a bit to keep the indeterminate plants from getting out of control. You can see that they are as tall as I am now and are happily turning out tomatoes. This bowl was our first harvest and we tried out my brand new tomato press, which removes the skins and seeds and leaves you with tomato paste. We boiled it down and tried our hand at making spaghetti sauce...which was....okay. We have a second whole bowl of tomatoes in the refrigerator and we are going to try just stewing and canning the tomatoes for adding to sauces for some extra chunky tomato-ness. The rest of the garden is doing well. We have four pumpkins growing, some squash and a few cantaloupes coming along. The potatoes will need to be harvested soon too as fall is starting to make it's presence known. A couple of nights it has gotten down to the low 40's and there has been dew covering the windshields of the cars in the morning. A few more weeks and that'll be frost.



The third week of September we went to Cannon Beach. I have to admit I am very proud that I used only cash for the hotel and all the stuff I bought while I was there. No credit what-so-ever. Trying to break that habit and get myself back to a sustainable lifestyle. The weather was fantastic the first half of the trip with sunshine and clear skies. The day we arrived it was so warm that Mom and I walked in the water the whole way down and back on the beach. It rained, of course, the last couple of days we were there, but it is the Oregon Coast. The puppies had a great time as always, getting undivided attention without any cats around! I picked up yarn for 3 sweaters while I was there! One was just a few extra balls of yarn for a summer cardigan which was a challenge to get. I had bought the yarn for another project in March and found out I hadn't calculated correctly for the amount I'd need. I bought different yarn for that project and emailed the wonderful lady who runs Coastal Yarns in Cannon Beach to see if they could hold 4 more balls for me for when I came down. It turns out they didn't have anymore and that the beautiful rain blue color had been discontinued. She put out a message in a forum for small yarn store owners and a lady in Indiana or Illinois had four balls of that color in the exact lot! That means I could finish my sweater without any color variations!! It was like the stars aligning in the knitting world. I also purchased enough balls of Dream in Color Classy in the colorway Beach Fog to make this wonderful sweater. Later when Mom and I headed home we went to Yamhill, OR and visited Woodland Woolworks. They had some lovely periwinkle sale yarn that I bought to make this sweater and I got online and picked up a dark blue and a tan to make the fair-isle pattern around the neck after I got home. I am pretty much set for winter! More to come on what we are doing to our craft room to organize our stash of yarn and fabric!

Some peppers and Lady Gaga...

Our garden has still been doing well although I manage to thoroughly ignore it for weeks. I am seriously looking forward to winter when all those summer activities will be done and I can sit and knit when I come home, rather than run from here to there constantly. I will miss the fresh produce though. The peppers decided to grow and grow and grow and finally last week I noticed that they were getting pretty big. I harvested a huge bowl full that when diced filled 4 1/2 sandwich bags to freeze for yummy things like spaghetti sauce this winter. There really is nothing like the smell of a pepper you grew yourself. The store simulations are sad once you've smelled a real pepper. Also a zucchini decided to hide under the foliage and grow to about the size of my forearm. Oops! Can't let those things get that big cause if your a good friend you never pawn off arm sized zucchini on others (or so I am told). We were going to harvest them when they were about 6 inches, but this one looks destined to be a couple of loaves of zucchini bread with some leftover zucchini to batter and deep fry...yum.

In other news Mom and I went to the Lady Gaga concert at the Tacoma Dome in late August. It was freaking amazing!! We stood for most of it, but when Mom's foot got to hurting too badly she found a nice spot that she could see the big screen from and didn't miss anything. The costumes were spectacular and I never took a picture of the one I thought was completely gorgeous...sniff. I recorded a video of Bad Romance and I want to put it up, but I think it will be too large for the blog. The dome was packed and they said there was something like 20,000 people there. There were a whole bunch of people that had dressed up like Lady Gaga in crazy outfits which made people watching an entertaining activity before the concert began. She is such a good singer that all of the songs sounded like what you always hear. At one point she sat in front down at a piano and just sang and played while the piano burned...seriously...look at the picture. All in all it was an awesome concert.

We also buried my aunt at the end of August. She passed away in January but was cremated and we could pick a time that was easy for everyone to get together. We even closed the grave, which was new for us, but I think very healing for her son David. Afterwards we all went down to Spring Canyon and had a picnic and a little get together. Glenda and Earl Bloom who are cousins were there in Wilbur and came to the burial and get-together. It was great to see them again. David and his family and Mom and I stayed overnight at the campground and it was bloody cold of course. I keep forgetting how much I dislike camping but am reminded every time by Mother Nature that I am a house/hotel/motel kinda girl.

How does your garden grow?

On Tuesday we turned this...










Into This!











And then we did this!!












Yes, apparently 4 raised beds is not enough. We had planted strawberries in one of those Topsy-Turvy planters and a couple other knock-offs and they had been slowly trying to kick the bucket. The plants were not producing anything and their leaves were slowly turning brown. We didn't seem to be able to keep the soil moist enough or something. The other thing is that strawberries don't seem to hit their stride until the second or third year after they are planted. Well there wasn't going to be much of a first year the way they were heading. You evidently have to mulch (cover up and keep 'em from dying) the strawberries with what else but...straw! So our little strawberries needed a nice place where we could keep them from dying until next year and thus the strawberry bed was born. We actually built two, because you know we need to keep the asthetics up ;)



On another note I finished my first felted knitting project. This super awesome messenger bag was a gift of yarn and needles at Christmas time and about 7 ole months later it is a fabulous and chic bag that can show off all my nifty buttons from Cafe Press about Twilight. My favorite is the little blue one that says "Forks, WA ... Where it Sprinkles so you don't Sparkle". I'd have to say my second favorite is the one with a pink spoon on it that says "Meanwhile in a little town called Spoons..." Get it!? Forks...Spoons...It's okay, I'm a nerd.

Oh Dear!

Good heavens but it has been quite a long time since I blogged about anything. Life has of course carried me away again. Well I guess we'd better start back at Memorial Day. Mom and I managed to get the weekend off and we did what we always do...went to the cabin. Uncle Fred, Patrick and Jonathan met us up there on Friday and David, Leslie, Justin and Tayla joined us the next day. We hiked, we explored, we picked through rocks and also froze and managed to stay dry between the passing showers. We made it all the way up to Captain Mabbutt's cabin and the mine in the side of the hill a bit above it. David drove all the way up beyond the mine and found a giant grate set into the ground where the mine had caved in from above. He thought it was strong enough to lay and/or stand on, though the rest of us weren't so sure. We of course had a wonderful relaxing vacation completely off the grid.










Then in June my garden really started to take off. The warm weather helped the tomatoes to finally look like plants and not stalks with puny leaves on them. The peas continued to climb higher and the cucumbers seemed determined not to grow. The corn gets half a foot taller every day. The broccoli decided to grow into ginormous plants with leaves longer than my forearm. Then in the very center one day a baby broccoli appeared. We kept our eyes on it and finally we harvested it a couple of days ago, though probably a bit later than we should have cause a few of the flowers started to bloom. Who knew you pretty much only get one broccoli head per plant?? I have definitely wasted too much broccoli in my life. We cut it up today and put it in a teriyaki chicken and pineapple stir-fry. Yum Yum!












On the third of July we traveled to Wilbur for the internment of my Aunt Grace, who was actually my grandfather's sister. It would have been her 100th birthday and so we tried to celebrate it as a birthday party even though there were plenty of tears. We got to see a lot of family we don't see very often and made connections with family by marriage we didn't know we had. We also traveled out to the wheat land we own and got to see how very beautiful and prosperous it is looking. Mom bought some air-tight buckets to give to Mitch, the farmer that makes all that gorgeous wheat grow so fantastically, so that she could get some of the wheat when it harvested this fall. I believe that she has now spent so much time in the chicken coop communing with her 50 or so chickens that she has decided to live the story of the Little Red Hen. She has been working all summer on making homemade breads and has gotten REALLY good at making it. My taste buds say "Yummmmmmm" while my waistline reaps the majority of the calories. So now that she can bake her bread, she wants to grind the wheat to make it too. Actually you can't make yeast breads from the soft wheat we grow, you can only make it with hard wheat that contains the glutens. Instead we will probably throw ourselves into the world of pasta making....I am pretty much in heaven. I LOVE pasta and soon we will have bunches of tomatoes to make wonderful sauces. Geeze, I am turning into a real foodie. And I am also going to have to start a serious exercise plan...