summer continues

We turned over a new, exanded garden plot behind the tractor barn this spring.  Keith had fun trying to plow for the first time on the tractor that my parents gave us for a wedding present.  The first attempt was less than perfect, but the tiller covered up the little mess!

Now the garden is in,  and we are in a constant battle with weeds.  The front garden is 30 X 85 and the back garden is 30X 25, so we have a lot of ground to cover.  I let the weeds get ahead of me. Now I am paying for it. 

Also, I gave up on weeding the carrots because they came up so spotty I couldn't justify all the time in weeding them for such a bad showing.  Then on Saturday I went out there to till up the whole mess and found all kinds of carrots up in amongst the weeds!  Dumb carrots!  Now I have to clean them out.

We are very excited about getting chickens in the next month.  Keith's grandmother had chickens when she was a girl.  So when we talked about getting chickens, she jumped right in and offered to pay for us to build the coop and get a small flock started.  We have a good start on materials for the coop from sifting through the barns and sheds.  We found some great old windows with character and wood we can plane down for siding.  We went to the Habitat for Humanity resale store and found some new shingles and a beautiful door.  We will buy new for the foundation, frame and flooring.  

The chickens are ordered and will be picked up from a farm in Ionia.  Our girls, Silver Laced Wyndottes, will be ready to lay around the last of August.  I did quite a bit of reading before deciding on Wyndottes. Wyndottes are very hardy in our climate.  They are layed back and easy to handle and more importantly, they are a great dual purpose bird.  We can get good egg production, but they also make yummy meat birds, so the cockrel will keep our little flock growing so we can have meat too.

I'll be posting pictures as we start building.  We are not carpenters, but we will have some help from friends and family that have a little more experience.  I bough a book, the librarian thing to do, but the hands-on help will make things go smoother and the end result much better.

We finished planting the garden last weekend, well that is not exactly true. The first rotation of crops is in, but we are looking forward to a second planting of beans and putting in a few crops like chard and bokchoi for fall. But it isn't too early for me to begin dreaming of the canner jiggling away on the stove and the musical ping of jars sealing.

This last week I actually got a head start on canning. Seeing strawberries in my future, I froze 9 quarts of rhubarb in preparation for jars and jars of strawberry/rhubarb jam. Last fall my father insisted on juicing gallons of grape juice so I could make him grape jelly, 27 pints of grape jelly to be exact. Now he refuses to eat grape jelly and only wants strawberry jam....go figure!

We are completely out of canned tomatoes. 24 tomato plants will get us caught up, but we have salsa coming out our ears from last year! I think that has something to do with my husband getting on a habenero kick and making the salsa so hot he is the only one who can eat it! This year I will have to be vigilant in guarding the salsa while making a MILDER recipe.

Then there are the green beans, the peas, the cabbage to be made into kraut....on the endless, wonderful list. Starting a root cellar this fall too.

So while the rain comes down today, and I have to stay inside, I can dream of rows and rows of jars to be filled by the growing veggies come harvest.

Shibori experiment

I've been experimenting with shibori knitting. I did a pillow top first, and I loved the results. I am still working on beading the pillow and choosing a backing.

The scarf turned out really fun. At first I wasn't sure if I liked the results, but once I added the holes...fabulous! I tied in buttons from my vintage button box to create the bobbles. I was so excited to see how it turned out I sat in front of the washing machine for 20 minutes waiting for the end. Then I used a hair dryer to speed up the drying. I could hardly wait to pull out the buttons and see the final results. I'm very pleased with the end product. I think I will be doing more shibori. I have ideas for several other projects.

reuse and recycle

A couple of months ago I made a total failure of a bag. The colors didn't work. The design distorted in the washing machine. The yarns did not felt evenly. Everything went wrong. But never throwing anything out, I shuffled it around while I tried to come up with some way to salvage this disaster. Then, an epiphany on Wednesday! (que angelic choir)

On Monday I made a little turquoise bag to go with some lining I had bought in a random moment at the fabric store. I happened to set this new bag down on top of the disaster, and there was a Bob Ross moment ~ "In my world, there are no mistakes, just happy accidents". I cut up the disaster purse to make applique flowers, and suddenly a plain, little purse with okay lining, made perfect sense design-wise. Woo Hoo! And...I got to use some of the vintage buttons I dug out last week!

The good purse mojo continued this morning when my first box of wholesale yarn arrived. So, I off to grab my needles and go crazy.

Button Box

Glad to say my shoulder is back to normal, and I am knitting again! My recovery prompted a visit to my mother's button boxes for some inspiration in finishing the little, cream purse that has been sitting dejectedly on the dining room table for a month.

My mom and I spent an enjoyable couple of days sifting through all of the buttons. We found some really interesting vintage finds that may be inspiring some new designs in the near future. I am please with the little collage we came up with after several failed attempts at embellishing this latest bag.

The name is not really what I was going for, but it works. I wanted to name it "Lunch at Woolworths", but everyone said that was too obscure. I guess the bright red buttons reminded me of the red of the Woolworths decore. But "Dancing Barefoot" was a pretty good compromise. The buttons reminded me of Mom making me a new dress when I was little and the excitment of getting to model it for Dad before church on a Sunday morning.

Now I am back to knitting. Working on something new ~ a neck warmer made from some of my handspun yarn. I know it isn't the time of year to be thinking of winterwear, but the mood struck me....

Roots

Keith and I went for a drive one evening last week and ended up on a winding dirt road far from our usual trek. Around one curve we came upon a broken down barn and an overgrown farm yard. Back in the brush was what was left of the farm house surrounded by an over-grown garden of flowering trees and bushes.

It made me wonder about that homestead. Who had built the house? What hopes did that farm wife have when she planted her yard with forsythia and roses? I wondered about their dreams for a good life, their family, their marriage. I wondered why a home that had been so obviously loved had been abandoned and not passed on.

It made me realize how blessed my husband and I are to live on the farm my grandfather and grandmother purchased in 1930. We live in the house my aunt was born in, my great-grandmother died in, we have all gathered in for holidays and birthdays. We preserve fruit from the orchard my grandfather planted. We grow and can vegetables just like my mother taught me. Even my love of the homely arts comes from my grandmother. (Someday I will learn to weave baskets in her honor, since it was something she always dreamed of doing.)

Keith and I have our own dreams of a more self-sufficient and sustainable life, but those dreams are built on the dreams of others before us.

No Great Flash of Artistic Insight

Keith and I went for a walk though the back fields this morning. The sky was a perfect springtime blue. The turkey were parading through last years bean-stubble. The wild apples made the fence rows a strip of white lace. I was feeling very poetic and creative. Ideas of yarn wrapping into perfect confections swirling through my head....and the pain shooting through my arm, reminding me that knitting or beading are out of the question for the next few days! My body and my brain are not in sync. I have tons of new ideas, but can't do much about it for a while.

So the above pictured purse may be the last listing for a week or so. I am pleased with how this purse turned out, but it was not some great flash of brillant, artistic insight. Orange is my favorite color, and I wanted to use up the Squiggle fringe in my stash. I found the beads on sale at the local craft store this weekend. Sometimes using up odds and ends brings about very satisfying results. I am sort of proud of the name too, Fawks in Felt. A little tribute to J.K. Rowling.

Hopefully my arm will be better in the next few days.