Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Tiny Needle Tuesday

 

I finished the pyramid thingy on the Village Quaker. This week I have to tackle a vase full of flowers that I just started. 




I made some progress on the side border of Patchwork Printemps and stitched the little quilt thingy in the top square. 





I finished the biggest sheep in the Sheep Heap and started its mound and some of the berries that will be embed in it. 




And.......I found these beautiful insect needle minders on Amazon. I needed one more for the Sheep Heap but found this pack of three for the price of one. Not only are they beautiful-they are STRONG. I've got two doing nothing right now which is making me want to start two more projects....but I won't. I'm not that crazy-at least not today anyway. 



Monday, March 18, 2024

The Leftovers

 

What do you do when you send The Mister to the store for some buttermilk to make soda bread and he comes back with a half gallon of the stinky stuff? 




I could have baked more things with it but I didn't want to so what I did was make soap with it. The only problem was that the table in the craft room I use looked like this.





I didn't want to clear it off and put it all back for one day of soap making so I turned the downstairs bathroom, that no one ever uses, into a makeshift soap workshop for the day. It was a little cramped but having running water in the tub was pretty sweet. I might have to do this again in the future.




Every time I post about soap making I get a comment on how great my house must smell. Not yesterday. I made two of the stinkiest soaps imaginable. The buttermilk soap had an odor I can't even describe. It wasn't good.  Before that I had made a batch of Laurel Berry soap formerly known as Sludge Soap. It smells like dirt.





It's an acquired taste but one I happen to like. Don't worry. None of these soaps are for public consumption. I had an itch I needed to scratch to see if I could pull these off using a weird assortments of leftovers and a very expensive bottle of laurel berry oil. 




24 hours later and the Buttermilk soap smelled like.....nothing. It's unscented and that nasty burnt milk smell that came from the chemical reaction with the lye was gone. I was also very happy to see I didn't get a gel ring in the center that you can get with milk soaps if they get too hot. I even dared to add a dollop of honey so I was really taking a risk with the sugars heating up on me. I did keep the lye solution in an ice bath and soaped when it as at 56 degrees. I had my doubts but it seemed to have worked. 




And......the Sludge soap seemed to have also turned out better than expected. The original Aleppo/Laurel Berry recipe calls for all soft oils but it takes a 6 month cure. This time around I used my regular hard butters and some extra hard kokum butter. It's already a rather hard bar so I'm hoping 6 weeks will be long enough.










Sunday, March 17, 2024

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Duit!

 

This is the very first St Patrick's Day that I can celebrate while knowing that I am 14% Irish. I had no idea. I was pretty sure I was plain ole English but it seems I'm not. 16% Scottish. 9% Welsh. How interesting. 



Having your DNA done still doesn't fill in that family tree. I've been banging my head on the wall trying to figure out the connections between my DNA relatives and the ones that seem to belong on a branch. What I have learned is that families are very complicated and keep a lot of secrets.




Today we will be eating yesterday's leftovers. I started celebrating early because I decided that since I'm now somewhat Irish American I can have the whole weekend, right? 
Happy St Patrick's Day!





Saturday, March 16, 2024

Sticker Shock

 

I haven't been to the MDSW in quite a few years for one reason or another so when I got an email from the festival this week I was surprised as heck to see that admission was $15 dollars per person per day this year. If you want this catalog it's an additional $5.  



The last time I attended it was a $5 suggested donation and for the past 20 plus years before that it was always free. Catalogs were found all around the grounds, in boxes for the taking. 




It's a wonderful festival and I can imagine it takes a lot of effort and money to make it happen so I don't begrudge them a penny of it but I can still feel a little shocked. I hope to be there this year but I'm all too aware that life seems to happen in ways that I can never predict anymore. I don't need a thing to add to the stash but I could use a dose of inspiration. That's always in short supply these days.




Friday, March 15, 2024

Quelle Horreur

 

Look closely at this official photo of Riddari. Notice how the colors change in the yoke? The dark brown changes to a tan, right? Well, I didn't exactly notice that on the chart and I knit three long rounds in the WRONG COLOR. 



Oh, but that's not the worst part. While tinking back one blessed stitch at a time while untangling all those wraps MY NEEDLE BROKE and all my stitches went flying out into the universe like rats jumping off a ship. After staring at the mess in shock for what felt like hours, I managed to get them all rounded up onto another circular AND then discovered that I DON'T have that size needle tip in my needle stash AND Knit Picks doesn't make the nickle tips in that size anymore. I'm done with the wood ones since this seems to be happening with my old kit more and more. I had to buy a whole starter pack of needles just to get a size 7 tip in nickle so I can finish this dang thing. Now I have to WAIT until it gets here before I can do anymore work on it which isn't really a problem since I still have days of nasty tinking back to do. 
It's always something. 





Thursday, March 14, 2024

Can You Dig It?

 

Guess what we did again yesterday? As soon as we could move our old bodies we took off to a big name hardware store that had a bigger garden department than our mini Walmart has. It didn't disappoint. $150 later I had a few more fancy shrubs, some perennials, some pansies and three more little pots of narcissus to put in the ground. We spent the day once again digging holes and hauling bags of dirt and mulch. Whew....it didn't help that it was sunny and in the high 70's. That's crazy for March around here and too hot for me.



Our old bodies are not having a lot of fun with all this bending and lifting so the only crafty thing I've done is to spend an hour or so downstairs playing with paints and inks while hiding from a wind storm we had earlier in the week. 





I really liked making that paper quilt so I wanted to make more paper to cut up so I could make another. I wanted this paper to look like fabric so I made a background print and then stamped on top of that. 






See where I'm going with it? This was a test run and it was too big for my little journal so I'll be cutting those hexies smaller before I do any more gluing. 




And....when I was digging through my art junk I found a folder full of these watercolor swatches I had made years ago. They look an awful lot like batik to me. I could definitely do something with these....when I recover from all that digging. Ouch. Everything hurts. 







Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Wednesday WIPs

 

I'm going to show off some knitting progress today but I can assure you NO knitting happened yesterday. You know all those bags of mulch and dirt in the back of our truck? They are on the ground after a day of planting shrubs. It was a long, hard day. Before that I managed to bind off the ribbing at the bottom of the Worsted Gray Blob so it's now the sleeve's turn for attention.



Over the weekend I continued my battle with Riddari. I am still hating on those three color rows. I am free of them for a while now thank goodness but there are plenty more to come. 





I'm working my way down the 4th row of Audun which is always a pleasure to pick up. 




I got that shipment of sock yarn from WEBs yesterday. This will be the warp for a scarf I am going to weave-when I can catch my breath from all this yard work. 






And....yet another Barbie showed up for my collection yesterday. Meet the Empress of China, Wu Zhao. I had almost all ethnic groups represented by Barbies but I was missing an Asian doll. She's so beautiful that I hate to disturb her and take her out of her lovely box but it has to be done. Maybe tomorrow-when I'm not a dirty mess from working outside all day.