Home Projects Galore!

The weather is cool and inspiring here right now so we have been busy bees doing our respective projects. Since I covered Paul's major project last time, I am only including one picture here of him working on the same project. Now he is sanding and painting, hoping to complete this weekend.
I have been doing field work the last two weeks in Kinston, NC. So I stopped by my favorite antique store: Some Like it Old. I bought the cute blue table, coffee pot and oil lamp shown below.

And also the table behind the couch here..

And a piano bench and lamp. The deals were too good to pass up.

But yesterday, we had the most unique, impulsive experience. A furniture distributor showed up on our street with his 18 wheeler, selling boxed furniture right out of his truck. They had cabinets, coffee tables, dressers, couches and these beautiful grandfather clocks which excited me very much (I love clocks and old pocket watches). Well, we bought one, and I didn't even have to plead with Paul too much. The guy brought it in, got it started and gave us some operating instructions and we were proud new clock owners in about 15 minutes from start to finish.

Another exciting thing that has happened is that I finally finished the bedroom curtains. I have been working on them each weekend, doing only one curtain each week, and only portions at a time. For example, I did the side seems on one curtain each week until that was finished. Then I added the heading tape (which I had to buy online from England because I couldn't find it here) to one curtain each week. And lastly, I hand sewed the hems, one curtain each week. Finally a few months later, they are done!

Yesterday, I started painting the basic outline of my tree design on the dining room ceiling. I have been designing and contemplating this for a long time, and with the curtains finished upstairs, it was time to get started. I had drawn out the basic forms on graph paper to the scale of the ceiling and so it was pretty easy to get everything sketched on (last weekend) and then painted. I decided to do a rough outline in dark brown first, and then next available weekend I will do a blue wash of the sky with clouds. I'm hoping the brown trees will show through so then I can pick back up with the trees once the background is in. I didn't think it would work to do the sky and then try to sketch the trees over the paint.

Yesterday, after painting, I went to pick up a bushel of apples from a lady I know through church. She had taken orders from anyone that wanted some and was taking a trip up to an apple orchard to bring back everyone's apples (out of the kindness of her heart). So, being that this would be a big event, I also borrowed Shauna's steamer again and apple peeler/slicer/corer. Paul helped me with the peeler contraption and together we canned 14 quarts of apple slices for apple pie. The blueberry pies have turned out so well from our spring blueberry-picking extravaganza, we decided to give the apples a shot.
Earlier yesterday I put all the jars and lids in the dishwasher. Once I brought home the apples, Paul peeled, cored and sliced.

Then I had to blanch the apples for 3 minutes, one batch at a time, in hot sugar water to stop discoloration and preserve flavor.

The next step was to pour the water used for blanching into the jars.

Then, the lids that had been simmering in water had to be placed on the jars with the rings tightened finger tight. 7 quarts at a time were placed in the steamer and steamed for 20 minutes. The jars were removed and the rings were tightened all the way. Lastly, the jars were flipped upside-down on a towel, as per Marie's secret advice. She says this is the trick to making sure that none "pop" overnight (or become unsealed).

The last project that has been ongoing for a few weeks, is I'm spinning my very first 5-ply yarn. The yarn is a blend I've created on my drum carder from Merino wool, opossum down, yak down and soy silk. Each batch I've blended on the carder consists of 3 grams of the Merino/opossum blend, 1 gram of soy silk and 2 grams of yak down. I bought all of these from The Woolery online. I've spun a very fine yarn and wound onto 5 toilet paper rolls. I learned from my online research that to keep the yarn strands separate you need to use a template with 5 holes or a spice jar lid with the holes. I was excited about this because who doesn't have one of those in their kitchen? So, I have mine placed between my fingers on the right below (you can't really see it), and I'm gradually spinning the strands together while keeping a firm grip on the strands to keep them from tangling.

A few weeks ago I had fun time volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in Charlotte. My company was provided half the labor of volunteers and a local bank was providing the rest of the volunteers.
I was assigned to help with the roofing crew- very scary. The floor of the roof wasn't up yet, just the trusses. So my job was to partner with Joe to put the plywood flooring onto the trusses.

Joe was a banker and so none too experienced in roofing either. So we had some good laughs.
Actually, I was the only one from my company that was able to make it that day so everyone except me was a banker. But once Joe and I got the first row of the roof down, the rest was much more comfortable. The rest of the day was just swinging a hammer to get the rest of the kajillion nails in. I was moaning and groaning all the next day since I hadn't been this sore since I ran a half marathon in 1998ish.

Here I am above, and here is the house we were working on. The future home-owner was also there working on the house.
Oh my goodness, I forgot about these pictures. Well, this is one of our new dinner combos: Yorkshire Pudding by Paul and Zucchini cakes with tomato sauce by Yours Truly, compliments of the internet for the recipe. I had some zucchinis that weren't going to last long and Paul was wanting some Yorkshires something fierce, so we comboed the two into a surprisingly tasty dinner! As I've been blogging for a fair bit of time, I'm not going to post the recipe now, but I'll try to remember for next time.


An embroidery project that I'm working on for Darla. I'm making a sweatshirt with cheerleaders and football players for her dad for Christmas and this was a practice run of a few of the characters to figure out where the problems might be. I'm learning heaps on this project!

Oh it's the Weekend!

Here is my bike in the back of the car in the parkinglot a few miles from work (last Tuesday). I never did the bike ride again last week as I ended up working from home on Thursday. I'll be trying the ride again on Monday.

I finished my first skein of yarn! Notice how different it looks in different lighting.
This was our 4th of July morning- staining/sealing the deck. No rain was in the forecast for the day so we needed to seize the day. Plus, our barbeque is on 5th rather than the 4th so we wanted it looking nice for Saturday.

Color Blending

The Sweater II is coming along nicely-- I spent the last few nights in the hotel room weighing out colored fiber (notice the new antique balance on the left).

I added each color one at a time to the carder

After removing the batt with all the layers of color, I folded it in half lengthwise so that the red alpaca fiber was sandwiched in the middle between the different colored wool. Because it has a different texture than wool, the alpaca has a harder time blending with the rest of the fiber. It seems to blend better if sandwiched between two layers of wool.

The batt was carded a second time.
Believe it or not, this is the finished color! Notice how all the balls match pretty well. This was near impossible (I tried) to achieve without a scale. For example each ball is a blend of 2 grams of lime green, 2 grams of bright blue, 1.5 grams of dark blue, 1 gram of seafoam green, 1 gram of yellow and 0.5 grams of red.

I still have a lot more fiber to blend so it will probably be a few more weeks before moving on to the next stage!

Busy Drumcarding

Well this pile of colored fiber looks quite impressive when it's all together on the table! It did take me some time to card each color separately, as I worked on one color at a time while watching movies and talking on the phone. This was over the course of a few weeks, but it seemed to go pretty fast even though when I add up all the movies I watched, it took me many hours.

Now I'm working on getting the right amounts of each color to get the perfect color blend, and each batt will go through the drum carder a few times to get everything evenly blended. I don't particularly like having the "barber pole effect" which is a look you get when you have sections of individual colors. I like subtle color variations in sweaters, especially if it's for a man.

By the way, I'm back in Virginia for a week of work and I decided to bring my drum carder with me this time. As I had mentioned a few months ago, I had surprised the hotel staff with my hat box spinning wheel and I didn't want them to think I'm a complete nut job, so I concealed my drum carder (which looks like an instrument of torture, especially because it's homemade) in a duffel bag and snuck it in. We finished work early today so I have a few hours of blissful drum carding and the Food Network to watch. :-)

Dyeing Wool for The Sweater II

Last week I had mentioned The Sweater II that was in the planning stages. I had actually done quite a bit on getting started once I realized the mistake with The Sweater (I). The weekend before this last, I went through my fiber stash and found all kinds of wool and alpaca that were possibilities for use in this new project, as I had decided to set myself the challenge of using fiber I already had rather than buying more. Also, to increase the challenge I chose a specific color theme using Deb Menz's book, "Color in Spinning."

I chose to use one of her described methods of using the color wheel and combining different colors to get an overall desired effect. The method I chose was the split complementary which is using a color (red in this case) and the two color groups on either side of it's opposite (complementary) color which is green. This means using red, blue, blue-green, yellow and yellow-green, but not green itself. By being selective on how much of each color you use, you pick the overall color of the blend. In this case, I hope the overall color will turn out to be a dark foresty green with hints of red, and yellow-green.

To start with I used the leftover dark brown merino roving (not shown here) from The Sweater (I) project which I chose to over dye with blue in the hopes of getting a dark, dirty hue of blue. Notice on the color wheel you can use any hue in the same color family. I also had 4 4oz balls of a white merino, rambouillet and alpaca blend which I chose to dye yellow-green and yellow. The blue shown below is a ball of merino that was given to us in a spinning class that I attended at the Greater Los Angeles Spinning Guild last year. The green wool of unknown type pictured below is also from the same class. I also had some leftover gray alpaca from The Sweater (I) project which I chose to over dye with red and some scrap white corriedale wool which I also dyed red to get two hues of red.
I used three colors of Jacquard Acid dyes to blend and get the colors I needed. Red was used as is, and blue was used as is, but to get the yellow green I used about 8-10 parts yellow to one part blue. Now that I tried these dyes, I would have to say I prefer Cushing dyes over Jacquard's for desired color effect (not saying they are better in the color or light-fast category as I haven't really compared these qualities.

Here are the balls of fiber drying on the deck in the hot humid great outdoors. They dried much better once I brought them into the air conditioning! The upper left dark mess is the dark red alpaca and the upper right mess is the dark blue/gray merino. I am skeptical as to whether or not this is going to give the dark foresty green I hope for. Paul is skeptical about all the yellow-green which he says is a bit to girly. I am showing more confidence to him than I feel that it will all work out alright in the end!

The Sweater Saga

The Sweater, near completion with T minus 10 rows left to go on the collar, has switched from being Paul's sweater to mine. This is how it happened:

I was reading my new book, "A Fine Fleece" and was on the sizing section which was describing a scenario uncannily like mine: if the person's chest measurement is 41"..... it went down hill after that.... then you should make the sweater 46-47" to allow for ease and comfort. Uh-oh.

Paul is 41"around his chest and so therefore I had made The Sweater according to the pattern for 41." Dang it! No wonder The Sweater fit like a glove. I could see it in his eyes when Paul tried it on, "Gee, it's a bit snug." But he didn't dare say it, knowing how many many hours have been poured into it. But not to worry, "no biggie either way," to quote Dad, I was ready for a new spinning/knitting project anyway, and so it all worked out in the end.

I have already made some progress on the new sweater, The Sweater II, but I will post pictures later. I tried to tonight but I'm in a different hotel here in Virginia than in my favorite Hampton Inn and the internet connection is lousy. I waited 15 minutes to upload one picture, then wrote my long drawn out story and it all went ca-put and got erased. So the rest will have to wait until I'm back home again!

Update on The Sweater and other projects

I've kept The Sweater under wraps lately even though I've made slow but steady progress. Who wants to see pictures of the same sleeve with 1" improvements made each week? So here it is with the sleeves done and the neckline in progress. This has been my favorite knitting project on the large scale because it was such an easy pattern that didn't require sewing pieces together. I don't like knitting in the flat and then trying to make sure it all matches up. This knitting in the round makes so much more sense!

However, I recently bought a book called "A Fine Fleece," which teaches how to plan knitting projects based on handspun yarn characteristics, and how to spin a yarn for a specific design. This book has way cool sweater patterns that are knitted in the flat and sewn together. So I will have to give them a try because the patterns are worthwhile.

On the wheel right now I have some very very fun fiber that Trish from Tanglewood Fiber Creations sent me as a special project. This is yak fiber that I'm to spin with thicker portions (aka "slubs") intermingled with thinner portions. It has been a big challenge to keep the thinner sections from overtwisting and keep enough twist in the thicker sections so they don't come apart. But I love that it's something new for me. This is a big batch but it spins up really quick compared to what I've been working on for Trish in the past.

A Day of Rest

Ah, Sunday. I love to take Sundays off from chores and work, although it seems it hasn't worked out that way much lately. But today, despite the fact that I had to be at the site at 7:00am, it happily was sleeting and raining all morning long. We finally gave up (with smiles and goodwill) and called it a day. I wanted to shout for joy of having a much needed Sunday afternoon off.

So I'm back at my hotel with a cup of hot chocolate (a packet of Swiss Miss with Marshmallows from the hotel breakfast bar brewed in my hotel room coffee maker) and my neglected spinning wheel at my beck and call. I even have a choice of a few good movies to watch on my laptop: "Sabrina, " "Finding Neverland" which I haven't seen yet, and "Never Been Kissed" also haven't seen, and "Uptown Girls" which I really like.


My Louet Hat Box in action.
Cashmere and silk from Tanglewood Fiber Creations. I love spinning this blend. Oh so soft and silky running through my fingers. It's going to be a fine evening indeed!

Fiber Lift-Off

A batch of fiber is on the way to you, Trish, as of Saturday. I forgot to mention it as we had so much going on this weekend and then I flew up to Delaware for training Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. So keep your eye out for it! By the way, just out of curiousity, what combo of fiber did you send this time? It felt like silk of some kind mixed with wool (perhaps)? It was a pleasure to spin, but it took me some time to get used to how to handle it on the wheel.

Fairy's New Home (amongst other things)

Saturday was one of those days that you wake up with a list of to-dos by the side of the bed. I marched Paul out of bed at an early hour and we got ready to do a number of errands, some of which I would have done during the week if I wasn't riding my bike. Paul, being the organized one that he is, organized our list into two circuits. Trip one: cleaners to pick up ties, Target to return an item (Star Wars), Trader Joe's for groceries, come home to drop off groceries. Trip two: K-mart to return an item (Star Wars, of course), Parrot University to get seeds and treats, and Costco to get more groceries.

We conquered the list, and in the order outlined by Paul, with one slight deviation: we came home with a new home for Fairy from Parrot University. All cages are on sale 20% and we found one perfect for her with wheels (big plus). We had been planning this for about a year because although she's a small bird, she's got a big personality and needs lots of toys to keep her from being bored stiff. She's been looking a little stiff lately, when we leave for work, clinging to the side of the bars and staring at us as we leave. She doesn't play with her toys, and so we figured maybe there wasn't enough room to hang the number of toys she needs to stay occupied. A nice thing is that this cage doesn't take up any more floor space than her last one - it's just taller.

Do you see her in the back near the top? Notice how the doors are all open and she's happy inside.

Coming out to say hi....

With a chow mein noodle in hand, she is the happiest of birds!

She practically leaped onto her new home when it was assembled and she has been so happy playing. Today when I left for work she didn't cling to the bars, but was sitting on a toy ringing the bell and swinging. Tonight, when I let her out as usual, she didn't come running out like she usually does, but sat in on one of her perches quite content. What a relief she seems happier!

On Sunday, we were going to intersperse the day with trips into the spare bedroom to pull out boxes and search for Christmas decorations. But in the end, the day was busy enough without that upheaval so we have to save it for next weekend. Instead, after church I cut Paul's hair because he was complaining he looked shabby and we just putzed around. I did get some spinning in for Trish and some spinning in for The Sweater, but Trish will be pleased that I did two of her skeins to 1/2 of The Sweater skein (my "recreational spinning," as she calls it).

Oh, and I thought I'd say that we are still plowing through that Butternut Squash Soup that we made before Thanksgiving. Did I mention that it was enough to feed an army? Poor Paul gets more for his lunch tomorrow, because today afterwards he made the mistake of saying that it was "tasty with some cheese and bread to go with it." Wait till he sees that he's got it packed in his lunch bag for day 2!

Tanglewood Fibers, Sweater and Beef Stew

Check out the beautiful superwash merino wool sent by Trish at Tanglewood Fiber Creations. This is my next batch to spin for her and I always enjoy it, especially because it funds my recreational spinning! You can tell I like the colors, because look it matches my couch fabric.

I'm going to get started on this right away, but had to get a few more rows in on The Sweater. It's coming along pretty well, although the seed stitch stripes at the bottom don't show up very well with the woolen style yarn (as opposed to worsted). Worsted yarn, from what I understand, is very sleek and spun from combs without much loft and fluff. My style has always been more lofty, woolen yarn produced on a drum carder, but it does not show the details of the intricate stitch patterns as well.

I'm looking forward to getting the sleeves done because I really don't like the short-sleeved sweater look. But, according to the instructions, I will finish the body first and then go back and pick up the sleeve stitches and finish the sleeves, and then the collar band.

As mentioned earlier today, I made beef stew last night from a new recipe I got from Whole Foods. As usual, I made my own alterations but mainly because I had to do without some of the ingredients called for because our fridge needs re-stocking. This was a really, really good stew, the rutabaga adding a bit of sweetness and flare to what seems an ordinary stew. And in my opinion barley adds such good flavor.

Here is my version of the recipe:

Beef Stew

~3/4 cup of flour

1/4 tsp. salt

1/8 tsp. pepper

2 lbs. beef brisket cubed

2 Tbs. grapeseed oil (or olive or vegetable oil)

3 large carrots chopped

1 large rutabaga chopped

3 stalks of celery chopped

1 onion chopped

1/2 cup of pearl barley

1 1/2 cups of mushrooms sliced

1 qt. beef broth

1 qt. vegetable broth (or another quart of beef broth. I was out)

1 bay leaf

parsley

Mix flour, salt and pepper. Toss cubed beef in the mixture to coat all sides well. Save the rest of the flour for later. Heat 1 Tbs. of oil in a soup pot or dutch oven. Brown all sides of beef and set aside in a separate bowl. Add another Tbs. of oil to pot and add vegetables, cooking for two minutes, scraping the brown bits off the bottom of the pan. Add barley and cook for an additional minute. Blend in a little beef broth into the rest of the flour until smooth and add with rest of the broth and the beef into the pot. Bring to a boil, and reduce heat to simmer. Cook uncovered, sirring occassionally for about an hour or until thickened. Remove bay leaf, and garnish with parsley.

Try it! I'm sure you'll like it if you like a hearty stew. The leftovers are even better!