Yes really, I *am* serious.
19 May, 2012Yo soy gallina me oyen rugir!!
1 May, 2012
That’s Clucky, the one that went broody 6 weeks ago. Today I heard her crowing suspiciously and went up to see what she was doing. Sure enough she was in a nesting box, but I was too soon. So I waited until it was suspiciously quiet and went to check again. And she had *just* laid an egg! Yay Clucky, especially since when I whipped it out from under her she just hopped out of the box and went to look for food. I *knew* that as soon as we bought a dozen eggs they’d start laying again.
Come on Cluckster, your turn now! Everybody’s rooting for you!
An 18 on the membrillo scale?
23 April, 2012
There must have been a tremor last night. And it was an 18 on the membrillo scale.
Today’s baking
22 April, 2012There were a couple of slightly shrivelled courgettes in the fridge, so I have turned them into Zucchini Bread. Somehow Zucchini sounds better than Courgette in these circumstances.
This could all be displacement activity aimed at putting off dealing with the membrillo (quinces).
You have to admit that’s a bit daunting. And I’ve already given away huge amounts. And there’s at least that much left on the tree.
And I love quince. I will make jam (using this recipe here) and syrup, and also freeze the pulp for doing something else with later, but right now I just can’t face it. There’re too many of the damn things.
However, I won’t be able to do much baking either, we’re down to the last 3 eggs and this pair aren’t exactly earning their keep at the moment. I think they are moulting given all the feathers lying about. However, the boys cleaned the coop and run today, so maybe they will be willing to do the deed in their lovely fresh nesting boxes soon!
The Blue Glass Bottle of Mucha Suerte
17 April, 2012This blue bottle, which originally contained Eiswein from the Okanagan Valley has now survived 2 big earthquakes. It lives on top of a kitchen cabinet. Two years ago it had shimmied forward to the edge. Last night it fell to the tiled floor. And it’s still in one piece. Our lucky blue bottle.
It’s time to for me tackle Fair Isle. Really it is.
13 April, 2012I’m not scared of many things in knitting, in fact fair isle and felting are probably the only things. I have done one little fair isle project, Bill’s hat, which was, you know, too big and all that. I could have tried to felt it, except with my luck it would have ended up too small for the cat.
I’m thinking of doing a machine knitted fair isle sweater, but I always tell myself I have to master a skill by hand before I do it by machine. (The fact that these days I can knit ribbing with the pros with 2 needles and still haven’t worked out how to hang the ribber on the knitting machine is by the by.)
Anyway, other than the hat, which was knitted too loosely in super chunky that woulnd’t unravel if you tried, I haven’t attempted any other fair isle. It’s almost Winter here in Chile, and I see gorgeous stranded colourwork appearing in the shops and on people’s heads. I have a couple of books with great patterns in them in my library, the inspiration is there, but I’m lacking in the oomph to go ahead and try it.
So I’ve decided to learn to knit fair isle using Liat’s course on KNITfreedom. I met Liat last winter when she visited our knitting group here in Santiago, she kindly gave some of our group a lesson in magic loop knitting, and while I don’t think I will ever be a convert to magic loop, being too wedded to my two circs, I liked her teaching style.
So I’m off to dig in the stash to find some yarn to do the project, which is a felted bag. See, I’m not scared of anything!
If you’ve never looked at the KNITfreedom site before, it’s worth a browse, as well as the paid content, there is a lot of free stuff, videos and tips there for the using. If you are a visual learner, I really do recommend the videos, they are well made and well edited – unlike a lot of things I’ve seen on youtube and been unable to follow. Or maybe that’s just me..
So this Fair Isle knitting course is mostly video, with just enough text to take you from one video to the next. The videos themselves are in bite-size chunks, so you don’t have to pause and re-start – each new step or new section is a new video which makes it easy to follow.
There are different versions of the videos for the course depending on how you access them, I will probably mostly be using my beloved tablet (ASUS Eeepad Slider) which is not the most common tablet out there, but the downloaded videos work brilliantly, they are clear and the sound is good which considering the crappy speaker on the tablet is actually surprising. I had to download the videos, even sitting in the same room as the wireless router, I can’t watch them online, but I think that’s more to do with my equipment than the videos, since I can watch them fine on the laptop. I need to dig out a pendrive though, since I can’t spare the space for the 2.5GB on the 16GB tablet.
I will keep updating on my progress. If anyone wants to work on this along with me, the Ebook is released tomorrow, 14 April. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek for review purposes.
Complete Video Guide to Fair-Isle Knitting
Book Cover
Not planning, just reporting
10 April, 2012I was inspired by yesterday’s post and the responses to it to plan today’s dinner as early as….this morning!
We had chicken in creamy “tarragon” sauce. Yes, the inverted commas are there for a reason. When I opened the shrink wrapped packet of tarragon, I couldn’t smell a thing. Not a thing. And quite frankly, when we ate it, there would probably have been more flavour if I had gone outside and picked some grass and tossed it in instead.
As for the chicken, well, I’ve started buying the new, low in salt chicken. Which just means that instead it being injected with 15% brine, it’s just 15% plain old water. I was using skin-on boneless thighs today. I bought a kilo pack, removed the skin, and pan fried the pieces.
The photo speaks for itself. Maybe it’s time to start buying the more “expensive” chicken. See, I’m doing that trick with the inverted commas again.
One of the great things about living here in Chile is being able to eat locally grown food almost all the time. Our food miles have shrunk substantially in the three and a half years we’ve been living here. So every once in a while I push the boat out and allow myself a foreign treat. Today’s was asparagus, all the way from Peru.
It was all worth it in the end.
9 April, 2012Remember this post? Well, I did eventually finish, and I’m really happy with the result, so it was worth persevering, lack of charts and reams of errata and all.
I added an extra repeat of the flower pattern to make it longer, I had plenty of the yarn, so it would have been silly not to.
Here’s the back, modelled by Mary Queen of Scots. Someday I will take a photo of the front with the absolutely perfect button I found, in the first shop I went into.
Meal Planning
9 April, 2012I’ve been thinking that I need to do something to save money at the supermarket and cut down on waste as well. So I think I’m going to try planning ahead for meals, and going shopping with more of a *plan* than I currently do. And a list that I will stick to has got to help since my habitual shop is done on an empty stomach after the school run.
Food is so expensive in the supermarkets near where we live, and the local markets aren’t much better. Maybe if I get this down to a fine art I will be able to order online from the supermarkets and get my vegetables delivered. We are relatively self-sufficient on fruit of course, most of the year. However, since we haven’t quite mastered storage, we will still need to buy some. I do try to only buy the fruit thatwe don’t grow, like bananas. Or that we grow, but don’t get enough of, like grapes.
And next year I want to grow tomatoes, I know they are very water hungry, but Bill is working on ways of reusing shower and washing machine water, so maybe we will come up with a better irrigation system. I can’t even grow herbs at the moment. Even with them being watered every night in the summer they just shrivel up and die. I want to have mint, and sage and thyme, and all we have is a huge rosemary shrub, and some oregano. I haven’t even bothered with basil, I just know it’d be dead in a day.
*sadface*
So I guess we need more planning in the garden too!
Now, it’s leftovers tonight, but what shall we have for tea tomorrow??
The Slow Growing Tree of Life
6 February, 2012
I finally, FINALLY finished this a week or so ago, then promptly forgot to take any photos, or brag about the fact that it’s finally done! I thought I had fiinished the last time we got together on a Wednesday mornng at Trina’s, but when I got home I realised that I had accidentally tucked a bit of the binding, So I fixed that, and here it is!
I have learned so much, so many new skills from this one project. I know it took over a year from start to finish and it’s only 18 inches square, but even though I put it down for months at a time, I absolutely love it, and I loved each step of making it.
Deborah Kemball’s Jacobean Tree of Life, from the book Beautiful Botanicals. All the fabrics, except the binding, were gifts from Debby, my favourite teacher ever.
The binding fabric was a real stroke of luck. I bought it in Weavers Dry Goods in Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania. I didn’t even have the tree with me, but after spending nearly a year with it, I knew I could trust myself to choose well. I loved that fabric so much that I was soon wishing I had bought more than a yard. I must have bored everyone to tears with how much I loved it. So much so that I ended up making more difficulty for myself… When it came time to cut it for the binding, Debby suggested (insisted?) that I use single fold binding, cut on-grain to save fabric. Add something else new to the skillset then!
