Sunday morning with snow and coffee

Since Gary's tree went down in the last storm, my view opened up. Snowy Sunday with coffee and banana bread 

I finished the bergamot boxes, leaving the inside unpainted to keep the lovely citrus scent, and the tops actually fit quite snugly 

And here they are in a mini gallery 

Today's deed is to finally repair a few rips in the pillows I made several years ago, in a summer frenzy of English paper piecing and patchwork, using batiks, silk, and designer fabric scraps. 

I also converted some dyed beaded and stitched wall hangings into pillows. And the knitted pillows I made for use in the car have come to join them.

They've all had wear and tear from visitor handling, so there's a bit here and there needing a stitch. Invisible repair this time,  they're busy enough without more decoration.

The spicy banana bread is very good on the second day, for breakfast with coffee.

Happy day everyone, enjoy something, what ever you can.  

If Minnesotans can do fun costume runs down the slopes, we can certainly find fun somewhere.

And we can resist AI. AI is theft.

Shoveling light rain, banana bread, clothes wash

The forecast was for light rain. Then

11am 

Noon

Still going. Local police now advising inches of snow, roads are slippery, many collisions reported. Shoveling in progress.

 Meanwhile I had stuff to do 

The makings for banana bread. See the cacao nibs, Wilma? 

And, not to be confused, the makings for laundry soap

The Windex jug is empty,  just a handy gallon container for the mixture. The little wrapped thing next to the funnel is the last of the castile soap, to be grated in.  I don't add scents or color or anything, just a simple mixture. 

And later, after a strengthening cheese and tomato sandwich, here's the rest of the story.

The laundry soap needs 24 hours to cure, the banana bread a few minutes to cool.

In the cooling process I turned the loaf out onto a rack, and made handy discovery.

The rack made handy cutting marks for slicing. How clever.

The knitting is moving along 

The boxes are coming along, one repair almost done. Reveal tomorrow.

Then the plan is a pot of tea, cake and a murderer mystery under a knitted blanket.

Happy day everyone, it's okay to cut straight to the tea and cake, if you're not as driven as some of us.

 

I got weaving

The main event on Friday was the weaving I set up.

I'm pleased about how this worked out. I used that piece of corrugated cardboard for a loom and realized a good way to set up the even warp threads was to insert skewers right through the channels in the cardboard. 

When I ran out of skewers I used small knitting needles. Then I warped up the loom. You'll see the warp threads run right over the back, too.  I wanted a seamless pocket for a potholder, so I set it up that way on the loom.

I used cotton warp thread, and wool handspun for the weft. It came out as 6 epi, ends per inch. That's the weaving equivalent of stitches per inch. 

As you see, I used a crochet hook to draw the weft through. After a while I switched to a size 4 Tunisian crochet hook,  which worked better.

Saturday Handsome Son is visiting to get tea and his share of banana bread. Out of one loaf I get a couple of slices. Mostly it's a shared thing with son and neighbors.

The reviews for it are pretty good so far.

Happy day everyone, get weaving, whatever that means in your life.

Sez Ted and Big Ursy 

 

Whatever bread, pond scenes

Here's the source and recipe for the banana (or otherwise) bread I made. UK blogistas might need to do some translation of amounts and temperature.

As you see, this book has seen some use.

This is a kind of little black dress of recipes. You can sub and add whatever you like, or, more likely, have. 

The trick is to note that you need one cup, 8 oz, of banana pulp. So you can choose to sub some other pulp, same amount. I've used zucchini, pumpkin, squash, grated apple, and here honeynut squash. Honeynut is a little squash with a nice texture and flavor. Sometimes I've even used bananas.

Then you fling in whatever bits you like, about a handful. Chocolate chips, raisins, chopped dates, walnuts, here I used dried cranberries.  

It's pretty fail proof but it's good to remember to get the melted butter out of the microwave, if you can, and add it. Easy to forget it in the heat of the moment and find it next day.

Today is around 70°f, windy and bright and I had a great walk, dodging the landscapers roaring around collecting leaves. I made it to the pond, first time in a few days, and you see how it's changed now that the leaves are mostly down. And how low the water is. 

My house, on my way out.

I'm happy to say that the tipping I reported has been almost totally cleaned up. It looks so much better now it's lost the favela touch.

Carol and I are getting on much better now, and I expect we'll soon learn how to navigate doors, too, then I can test for my Cane Proficiency Certificate, Level One. 

Happy day everyone, bake or get your friends to bake and share with you. Why should you have to do everything, you're supposed to be resting.

More textile arts and the New Misfits

 Yesterday's request about seeing a piece on the saw blade triggered a search in my still open art blog, Art The Beautiful Metaphor, and yielded this.

You can see the wires going around the teeth of the blade. This is the piece you saw finished yesterday, in progress.

And I neglected a couple of notes yesterday

On the left there is a box of cards I made for card weaving. I can't lay hands on a sample, so I probably gave them away. 

Card weaving involves passing four threads through cards, one through a hole in each corner,  in various configurations, then weaving snd turning some or all the cards to create designs, passing a weft thread after each turn. It gives the same range as four harnesses on a floor loom, I'm told. 

I made my own cards, though you can buy them. It's an ancient weaving art, stone cards found in old excavations, many hundreds of years old.

That dark grey piece of cardboard behind there is a bead weaving loom on which I made quite a bit of jewelry , and items like the seed bead decoration on the binding of this artist book I made from red onion paper. 

No, the onion smell doesn't linger long.

The other chunk of cardboard I used to weave these pieces

View of the cliffs at Saltburn, Yorkshire, looking from the beach.

And this more abstract Earth and Sky piece. Mostly I used my homespun yarn, which I'd processed from a raw whole fleece, dyed, combed, carded and spun, wonderful summer long adventure.

I don't use patterns or guidelines for weaving. It's like painting alla prima -- just plunge in, it will tell you how to go. Jump, and the net will appear!

Story of my life, come to think of it!

Last evening I spun more,  and wound off my output into a center pull ball, well more of a sausage, really, on the dibber repurposed as a nostepinne, sent me by Joanne, thank you.. 

That's a tool for winding center pull yarn balls in more skilled hands than mine. But it was the first time of trying.

And I realized ohemgee I have no banana bread. So I remedied that this afternoon, after the first walk since Virus Strike. It was lovely to be out smelling cold air, seeing flocks of mourning doves, currently populous, snd skeins of Canada geese shouting overhead pretending to migrate.

Then home to bake

Banana, cranberry, walnut bread. Minus the melted butter which I forgot and found later in the microwave. More famous cooks than I admit to doing this, too, including Melissa Clark. This makes me feel better.

Made my first order from Misfits since they changed. So excited about no minimum on cold pack items. After I splurged on chicken! Fish! Shrimp! Butter! I probably exceeded the minimum anyway. But I didn't have to over order. They had no eggs.  Let's hope delivery is good next Thursday. 

Happy evening everyone! Don't worry if you forget to add the butter of life, or the eggs are no-shows, all will still be well.

Yes, we do have bananas, and fungi

Yesterday's walk involved interesting fungi, sign of fall. This is one I like a lot, the reddish cap and the lime green gills. Seen from above it looks as if someone dropped a bun

My little books of mushrooms yielding nothing on this pretty common mushroom, I searched online and here it is, all labeled, and a much better picture.

From Russia, huh? Wonder how it traveled here. 

I do like to know what I'm admiring. Near here there's a park, Marquand Park, I expect Inger knows it,  which was originally a private garden , filled with collected specimen trees and shrubs, all with little metal labels, very satisfying.  It's open to the public for study and strolling, an excellent use of great wealth, I'd say.

There's a kind of story that Adam's first job in Eden was to name everything. I doubt it, I doubt Eden except as a metaphor, but I sympathize with the naming urge. 

What are all these things, Eve? We have to name them or how can we manage, can't keep saying look out for that long patterned sliding animal wrapped around that tall brown thing with green things hanging from it and round things to eat.  

So he named snake, tree, apple and it may not, looking back, have been a wise decision. So when it all went wrong and they were evicted,  he promptly blamed it all on Eve.  

Anyway on the way home, I noticed the neighbor's Mexican sunflower, tithonia, doing well. 

I've grown them in the past and they have a hard time with rain and wind, the stems being fragile, but lovely while they last.

Back to the present, after months of Misfit shopping and the local farm, I noticed I hadn't had bananas, nor banana bread, for months, tropical fruit not being a feature of either place.

So I made a small shopping trip, and yes, we now have banana, walnut, cranberry bread. Great for breakfast, afternoon tea, any old time really.  

Gary having gone away yet again to Florida, who knows when he'll be back, he's missing out on this one.  He was making the usual last minute arrangements before traveling. 

Being Gary this involved buying new plants he couldn't resist, they were a bargain (!), celosia, arranging for me to house his elephant plant on my step, to accept s few eggs he couldn't finish before he left, one neighbor to water out back, another to water in the house and out front. I expect he eventually packed some clothes.  

I'll also bet any money he forgot about the watering and turned off the water.. wouldn't be the first time. Anyway he's gone, leaving the neighborhood exhausted. I miss him though, not that I see him much to talk to, but it's nice to know he's around.

Then I embarked on another pair of socks while I decided what to make next. This is the kind of yarn painted to be self patterning, ss you see.

The yarn doesn't look like more than a variegated type, but it's very interesting to knit up and see the pattern emerge. 

It makes you look like a great colorwork knitter without needing the skills of working yarns in both hands, managing floats on the wrong side, all that. 

Floats are the loops of yarn carried across the back of color work, which need skilled management so they don't pucker up the design.

Anyway, here's the wrong side of self patterning yarn

Cool, no? It keeps you knitting just to see what emerges. Really the pattern is knitting the knitter, rather than the other way round.

And I cast on both socks, from one ball of yarn, one from the center, one from the outside. 

This saves carting two skeins around and keeping them untangled.

This morning I finished the outside of the jigsaw puzzle which I was fiddling with last evening, seeing how near i was, why wasn't it working, until I went to bed, thinking it was a mystery.

This morning I noticed a piece under my chair. So I inserted it and aha! done. If I were a preacher I bet I could compose a snappy little sermon on this. 

How we're all searching for that last little piece to make life perfect, then we find it and we see it's only the framework, etc.  

Not that anyone would listen, but isn't that the fate of preachers, after all! Yes, this is a little legpull for the couple of preachers who read in here, couldn't resist. 

And here's a piece of art which looks like maybe 1930s,40s, but look at the date

Happy day everyone, keep on, seeing what patterns emerge from our days, sometimes surprising.

Ukraine racks up more regained territory, very timely to keep Europe's support, now that Russia is cutting off fuel as winter is coming on.