and no, I am not currently knitting, but still looping and cutting tiny rainbow tassels
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~ no good idea is wasted ~
I'd not realised that six years ago was that I made the grey linen gauze cowl, with the multicolored tiny tassels inspired by the colorful varied pom poms on this designer scarf And even longer ago that I made my basic black pom pom cowl back in 2012, when that concept was making the rounds of the sewing/crafty blogosphere.
"Whilst out and about ... I had cleverly packed up this project (the grey cowl tassels) as transit handwork, but somehow forgot to include the 5mm knitting needles that are the suggested spacers. A handy fallen twig, and a bit of whittling made shorter spacers which are actually easier to use than the long double pointed knitting needles."
...in fact the little sticks proved so handy that I tucked them safely away in the drawer full of knitting notions, where they patiently waited until I needed them, worthy once again!
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A girl came up to me in the drug store while I was waiting on line and told me that she had seen me out riding my bike, and hoped that someday she would be able to dress as delightfully as I do! gesturing at my frilled plaid flannel petticoat and denim pinafore...
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~ F is for fungi ~
In the center of the hollow tree stump I noticed these small and delicate mushrooms growing. Very different than the ones that grow in the lawn.
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I need to figure out how to clean out the lint from my tumble dryer. I suspect it is going to be a Most Unpleasant Project, but I also suspect it is long (years) overdue. And it would be a good idea to do so prior to the rainy season requiring all laundry to be dried indoors instead of on the line outside.
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today's gratitudes -
1. It was a sunny day, and I walked over five miles.
2. I found someone outside the local houseless shelter who was painting on the new mural, and was able to hand off the gifted bar of scented soap to somewhere that can use it. (It probably had cedar in it, or some other woodsy scent, which was setting off my allergies something fierce, like I had to put it outside)
3. Vesta gave me the most amusing handbag, it is a large wicker acorn! If I make it a fabric lining, I can use it as a sort of traveling sewing basket, and it would be a perfect accessory for a Brambly Hedge tea party
in which our plucky heroine considers the fungus among us...
Ive never seen these growing in the wild, though I have seen Aminita muscaria
Mushrooms are a bit of a design motif this year (for me) as I have chosen several mushroom print fabrics for garment sewing... I've made a cotton blouse in a brown-and-cream print, I've plans for a knit top in this pale turquoise jersey with multicolor mushrooms, and this denim Cotton + Steel japanese knit is probably going to become a new turtleneck for next winter...
Would it be overkill, do you think, if I were to also create a mushroom stencil for an Alabama Chanin style knit top???
today's gratitude - the memory of assorted mushrooming adventures, including finding edible brain mushrooms on a neighborhood walk with Bill years ago, a chantrelle hunting adventure with Rois and Chance before they moved over the hills, and the one time I found a whole backpack full of morels growing in the bark mulch outside University Hospital in Seattle!
in which our plucky heroine remembers that, despite everything, there is still beauty in the bright world...
at Green Zebra (a local grocery), I saw the most beautiful display of oyster mushrooms...
and a closer look at one of the clusters: ※※※
I seem to be doing a lot of mending and repair this month, despite my desire to be making and doing. Whilst beginning on the large task of mucking out the textile room, I found some knitted fabric that lent itself to renewingone of my favorite knit tops, the stripey grey and black turtleneck. While mostly in good shape, the cuffs had become worn away in spots, and so this very narrow knit stripes in black and white were added to the ends to get a bit more another few years of wear out of it. I am considering also adding some Alabama Chanin style applique as well, since it is becoming a bit more "bohemian" a garment...
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Now that the library zone is done, I've moved on to tackle a much more challenging part of Acorn Cottage: the textile zone! The small bedroom here serves multiple functions, it is a combination guest space and stitchery workspace, at least in theory. However, my fabric stash has rather taken over, primarily due to my inabilitydifficulty in discarding smaller pieces of fabric that "might be useful". My intention here is to make the space be orderly enough so that guests will feel comfortable staying here, that I have space to work on projects for myself and on commission sewing jobs, and that I am able to easily find, among my supplies and tools, whatever I need from the things on hand.
I expect this to take a bit of time, as it is more complex than dealing with books and magazines; I also am resigned to it looking worse before it gets better, since all the small bits tucked away in bins or drawers will need to be sorted through and recombined into a not yet created system that makes sense to me. For right now, though, here is a picture of one wall with the newly orderly piles of larger fabric pieces, those with enough yardage to create garments:
Today I am the windshield, yesterday was definitely the bug. After a night of sad and troubling dreams, decided that an early morning bike ride to the grocery store was just the thing to clear away all the mental cobwebs. Riding home, someone had put out a big bucket of flowers in their parking strip, with a sign "free flowers - take just one so more people can enjoy them..." So our plucky heroine picked out a lovely sprig of Alstroemeria and pedaled back towards the cottage.
Almost home, and saw that there was leaf raking in progress at the big house on the corner, so I stopped and asked if they wanted their leaves, or were sending them away as yard waste... End result was the hens got a whole trash bin full of leaves, and I am welcome to rake up and keep any of their leaves in the future. Hope this positive momentum keeps going!
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Whilst out and about, I noticed this unusual fungus growing on a neighborhood tree... it is over 6" across, and a bright yellow orange. Not your usual local shelf fungus, and looked at from the side view, it seems positively architectural. Online consensus seems to be that it appears to be sulfur shelf polypore, aka chicken of the woods. (edible with caution, so I decided to simply leave it there to enjoy observing it, rather than take a chance on possible digestive dismay)
. side view and top view :::
Whitewash for chicken house improvement was mixed up last night. 1 gallon H20, 7 cups hydrated lime, 2 cups salt. Rather than use my kitchen measures I simply used an 8oz canning jar, because glass is impermeable and non reactive. The whitewash sits overnight, though the lime and salt seemed to dissolve really quickly, and some online info says the overnight rest isn't needed. Later today, the brush hits the coop... This is the stick I used to stir up the whitewash last night. I thought it would be interesting to see what it looked like once the whitewash dried... color me pretty impressed
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This afternoon Freydis and I took brushes in hand and whitewashed the chicken coop, after I had cleared out all the former bedding and cobwebs and suchlike. The chickens were more curious about what the people were doing with the back of the hen house removed than about the new color of the walls...
Whitewashing is really messy to apply inside a confined space, and doing the inside of the roof meant that there was quite a lot of whitewash on me, up my sleeves and in my shoes. Fortunately it is non-toxic and water soluble. As it dried, it did brighten up the interior of the chicken house quite a bit; it goes on as a barely visible very drippy liquid but becomes more opaque as it dries...
There was quite a lot of whitewash leftover after doing the interior, so we whitewashed all of the exterior we could reach, which included half of the front. The difference between the right and left side is impressive, and I still have at least a half gallon or more of whitewash leftover. Not sure how long it keeps, as there is not much information online other than some recipes and a bit on how to apply it.
Next time I mix up some whitewash I will not start with a gallon of water, but about half as much, the little chicken house here is so much smaller than what most folks think of as a livestock shelter. I may just go out back and whitewash the rest of their house, there is certainly enough of the liquid still to cover it several times over!
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In addition to todays whitewashing of the chook house (and the hopefully-soon future new improved hen habitat) some improvements to the feeding and watering would be a nice addition. One of the imported "Grampa's Feeders" would be foolishly extravagant, (and overkill, for there are only two hens that live here). I actually like the "Chooktred" feeder better, the design of the hinge and panel seems better to me as well as the size:
Unfortunately they do not seem to be available here in the USA. There are some less spendy and less elaborate domestic models; another option would be building something similar, possibly like this one though unsure as to how well wooden feeders would hold up in this climate. I wonder about the possibility of building a metal feeder... Another option would be this sort of "peck to release pellets" system from Trigger Happy Chickens.
While my hens seem quite satisfied with the basic large double wall galvanized waterer, the zinc coating is wearing off the drinking portion, and the water can get sort of rusty, which can't be ideal. I am considering some sort of either "nipple" drinkers or cup drinkers attached to a bucket reservoir, as that would keep the benefit of a large quantity of water, but keep the drinking water cleaner. Of course, in the winter, I have two smaller chook drinkers that I rotate in and out of the house to keep them from freezing, since running a very long electric extension cord into the backyard seems more troublesome than simply checking on them from time to time...
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Refilled the chooks oyster shell feeder this morning, and topped it with a nice helping of crushed baked* eggshells they came running over and started digging through it, a sure sign of laying hens that want their calcium, and that the eggshell calcium is more desirable than the oyster shell variety (I rinse and then bake the eggshells before crushing them and feeding them back to the hens, because that helps keep them from thinking oh, these eggs that somehow show up here in the chicken house are made of food...)
This morning I noticed that my kitchen counter was sticky-damp, which was a little baffling since I'd cleaned last night after dinner... Then I saw a small puddle beneath my kombucha brewing jar: a gallon-size widemouth glass jug that sits at one end of the countertop year round, that for the last four years has been a good home to the scoby, that commensal life form that makes tasty healthful drink in exchange for regular feeding of tea and sugar.
There was a forked crack in the side of the jar, and as I watched, tiny droplets of liquid seeped out and down the side towards the counter. This is sad, but fortunately the jar did not completely shatter while the house was asleep, I'd rather deal with a damp counter than a gallon of sticky "fungus-juice" everywhere. I managed to carefully slide the jar into a large mixing bowl, so as to put off dealing with it until after breakfast.
Fortunately I think I have several large glass storage jars that Nicole passed along to me, one of which will surely make a new kombucha home, but alas, since the glass is broken, I need to discard any and all contents, not wanting to ingest any glass shards! I shall have to start anew...
At the teaparty on Sunday I had the fun of encouraging my friends to try freezer paper stenciling*. Elfreda and Sam both tried it, while Connor had the suggestion of running the freezer paper through the computer printer to eliminate the step of tracing out your design. I think they will be trying that out, (my printer is a bit cranky); it would be a great option if it works. My experiment was to see if I could cut out multiple identical stencils at one time, by stapling together 8 layers of freezer paper blanks ... it worked, though doing eight at once made it a bit difficult to get clean cuts. I'll be making sleep sachets filled with hops and lavender from the stenciled linen, which is now printed with the kanji for "rest and relaxation".
~ ♥ ~
Earlier this year I knit socks, which promptly and immediately wore through. Now granted, I was using stash yarn which surely was not intended for socks. So I darned them, and on the next wearing they promptly wore through right next to the darn. So I felted them and turned them into this flock of birds. My needlebook kitty is sure that he is having a wonderful dream...
~ ♥ ~
Just a hint for better picture taking - I discovered that my camera has a very useful feature: the self-timer. I thought it was just for taking pictures of well, yourself, as in set the camera up and quickly run around to the front so the photograper is the photographee. But on experimentation, I discovered what is for me much more useful... it is a great way to stabilise the camera when taking closeups in natural light. Simply switch on the self-timer, press the shutter release then carefully hold the camera steady until it "takes the picture". Since I discovered this I haven't had the dreaded "picture is blurry - save picture?" message, which was the inevitable result of point and shoot without the flash. (I do have a tripod, somewhere, in one of the cupboards, but that would require more setting up than I am usually interested in)
~ ♥ ~
When I saw this tutorial for acorn mushroom ornaments, I was enchanted. Lisa, of Lil Fish Studio News, is one of my creative inspirations, transforming recycled wool and natural objects into small objects of beauty to delight the eye and decorate the home. But I do not live in the great north woods, but rather in the heart of urban Portland, and despite the name of my beloved little house, there are no oak trees at Acorn Cottage (the yard is far too small)... Consumed by a great desire for tiny acorn mushrooms, I wondered where to find acorn caps. I even looked on Etsy, where I found that they could be purchased from a clever entrepreneurial forager from upstate New York. But buying acorn caps and having them shipped cross country seemed so very very inappropriate... so imagine my delight when I was out running errands yesterday, and I happened to be looking down while walking between the post office and the bus stop. What to my wondering eyes did appear, but the perfect acorn caps, not very many, scattered in the mulch under the leafless trees. I scooped them up and stuck them in my pocket (and they are now drying out on the countertop, having been washed of their wet debris); soon to have the pleasure of making some acorn ornaments of my own, for me and maybe for the ManyHands Holiday market, which is in eep! two weeks...
~ ♥ ~
*for those who missed the teaparty: here is a simple tutorial for freezer paper stenciling.
On Thursday, friends arrived to stay here this weekend, and from Olympia brought these beautiful homegrown shitaki mushrooms. My Mud Bay compatriots are a great inspiration in turning yard into microfarm; one rather unusual thing they've done is inoculating logs with mushroom spawn, with delectable results. I'm thinking about a mushroom quiche, with some of the new eggs... after all, it is Pi Day!
~ :♥: ~
And yesterday, there was a small package on the front walkway under the mailbox...it was... my package from the mushroom swap!
What fun to unpack: a knitted mushroom, just starting to ripen, with the gills showing, made by Sonya of knitsonya herself, our inspiring and inspired coordinator; and a most curvaceous dancing mushroom, from feathergirl, complete with a tiny handmade snail
And my remaining morels are delighted to meet a long lost needlefelted cousin, from east of the Cascade Range, thanks to Sara M of ibbyskibby; The morels are accompanied by a charming vignette of mushrooms on a moss covered slice of log from RaynaAnd centered on my front windowsill is a lovely patchwork handsewn beauty that came halfway around the planet from the UK to find a home here in the Pacific Northwest, (should settle in well, we have a very similar climate!) Thank you Sandra of miaumau I am just delighted with the five mushrooms I received, all so different from one another and all so creative. This has been a great swap; if you're interested in seeing all the amazing variety that was created, check out the "Field Guide" flicker collages here and here.
~ :♥: ~
Now back to my regular pre-teaparty activities: baking housecleaning and sewing
