New "Toys"

 These are the delivery guys from DeWaard & Bode, the local, self proclaimed, Appliance Giants bringing my new Electrolux washing machines last month (when the ebil Blogger was holding me hostage for posting pictures - turns out I really didn't have any storage issues at all - we think someone was trying to do a little identity theft - luckily I didn't fall for it ...)

There was a lot of cleaning up that had to be done to get the old Maytag washer & dryer out - the washer quit about two years ago - and I have been schlepping our dirty clothes to the laundromat ever since. Our dryer still worked though, so I'd bring the (heavy) wet clothes and towels, etc home to dry them

I was so done with carting laundry back and forth!

Actually because of some drain field issues, I'd been taking my clothes to the laundromat for more than several years - but we could do one load a week at home, and that was John's dirty work clothes.

So, when our washer died a couple of years ago, I refused to pay to fix a 16 year old top loader that probably used about 45 gallons of water to do one load of laundry - (Even though these are the largest capacity machines that Electrolux makes, they only use 14 gallons of water to wash and rinse. Woo hoo!)  So I started saving my money.  

I love, love, love these machines.  First thing I did though, was buy a package of white "thirsty" bar towels - the house rule is that you dry off the washer door and the inside after you put the wet stuff in the dryer.  And then when you take the stuff out of the dryer, you dry off the inside of the washer door again, and maybe the next morning...

Because they sit in a hallway, it is not feasible to leave the door open to let it dry out, and that would also invite snoopy cats to check out the inside - (that is one thing I have NEVER allowed is for my cats to get in the dryer) - (I actually had a friend start her washer with her cat inside it = cat is still around, but was never quite the same...)  Sorry, I digress - but drying off the door and swiping the rubber gasket a couple of times with these bar towels seems to be working well - no moldy smells what so ever and once every couple of months I'll use some of that Tide washing machine cleaner that they recommend for front loaders. 

And the dirty landscaper/Shepherd clothes come very clean - and my clothes don't get beat to heck with a top loading agitator - did I mention that I love these machines... Big Grin here... AND I have my Sunday afternoons back! 

Someone else was glad that we cleaned up the porch too - and immediately took up residence on top of the deep freeze (which previously had boxes of stuff and detritus piled on top of it)


It provides a nice toasty place to sleep that is out of the way of big boots.

Spinning Silk Caps

What the heck is a silk cap? I asked my friend and spinning teacher, Yvonne, when she offered to teach a seminar on Spinning Silk Caps at our Guild meeting. She said that she had been "gifted" some silk caps and would love to teach people how to use them in spinning. And we had a big group of people who were interested too - several visitors from guilds to the south even.

Quoting from The Silk Worker : "Silk caps are made from cultivated cocoons that have been degummed and stretched over a frame shaped like a bell. They consist of a number of extremely thin layers (maybe 10 or 12 layers) each layer is one cocoon." (There are also "Silk Hankies" where the silk has been stretched over a square frame instead - several people were working with those)

And they really are the size of a cap, in fact the one you are looking at here was a birthday present from our friend Nancy - and it really was big enough for me to put it over my head like a cap, but I digress...

Nancy had taken a silk cap and dyed it all these beautiful colors.

When I was in China in 1981, I remember going to a silk factory and watching the little ladies and probably young girls putting the cocoons on the thread machines - Each cocoon has about a MILE of silk strands on it - and these strands of silk are very strong -







The trick is to separate ONE layer from the cap and then you pull it out flat, sort of like you were shaping out a pizza dough - then, you pop a hole in the middle and take this "donut shape" and keep making it bigger, and bigger - one cap will stretch out so much that you can have a circle of "roving" that will go around your hands if you have your arms stretched out to each side (like wings)

Then you can, as The Silk Worker suggests - put the stretched out silk roving into a bowl and spin from that, or Yvonne suggested wrapping it around a TP roll or around your wrist. I couldn't get it to stay on the TP roll, so I opted for winding it around my wrist. That worked perfectly for me - as you can see, it perplexed Gracie - who was very interested in snoopervision of my efforts.

Have you ever worked with silk? The tiny fibers catch on ANY little rough place on your hands. I forgot to mention that one of the things that we had to do before we started working with the silk was to do a little "spa treatment" on our hands - use an emery board to smooth off any hang nails or chips on our fingernails then we did a scrub with sugar and oil, of all things - it really did get rid of most all the places that the fibers were catching.

Here is my silk roving ready to be spun. It is such strong fiber that you can actually knit directly from the roving.










One thing spinning silk requires though is a LOT of patience. This is the result of TWO HOURS of spinning! I have two caps to spin - One is the one pictured above and the other is just reds and golds. I decided that I will ply the two together for my silk thread and use it to crochet jewelery - necklaces, bracelets, etc - guess what everyone will get for Christmas NEXT year? Ha ha ha...

My Review of WPI Tool Kit

I very rarely review products - sometimes on Amazon if I really like the book or what ever I've purchased, but I'm really excited about this little doo-dad. I found it originally on my friend Vicki's blog The Virginia Purl and immediately knew it was something I'd been looking for. So I ordered it right up, and it came (as promised) within 3-5 days, and then I got an email back from the folks at Village Spinning & Weaving asking me if I'd like to review it.

"No prob", I thought to myself - It's something I'm excited to have and I know I'll be using it a lot. When I got done with the review, their web site asked me if I'd like them to post my review to my blog. Well, that was a cool idea, since I was going to tell you about it anyhow - so here is my review and their dandy picture. One thing I see that this has that the other WPI things don't have is the cool little chart that comes with it. I mean, what good is knowing your Wraps Per Inch, if you don't know what kind of "commercial" yarn measurement it equals. So, I'm a happy camper - I'm going to play with it tomorrow during our "Open Barn" - Oh, that's right, I didn't tell you yet, Luna had her babies yesterday - Just wait til you see them!

Originally submitted at VillageSpinning & Weaving

WPI Tool Kit from Nancy's Knit Knacks This Wraps Per Inch Tool and Knit-Kard is useful for the following: Measures the thickness or ''weight'' of the yarn Identifies yarn with poor or no labeling Makes

WPI Tool Kit

WPI Tool Kit will Deliver

By Tina T-P from Bellingham, WA on 3/26/2010

5out of 5

Pros: Easy To Use

Best Uses: Home, Professional

Describe Yourself: Experienced

As a spinner who crochets with my own yarn, I am often perplexed as to what "weight" my yarn really is - I end up having to make sample after sample to get things the right gauge. This WPI tool kit will help me from the very get-go as I can actually do a WPI on my singles to make sure that I am spinning for the size yarn I want as a finished product. I like that it has more than one inch so you can measure bulky and novelty type yarns too. Very happy with this product!

(legalese)

Road Trip in the Fusion

Are there images that you have so fixed in your mind that you could describe them to anyone at a moment's notice?

This is one of those images for me - "home" - or as I've talked about it before "The Ranch" - where I grew up - the only other place that I have lived besides Bellingham - and that was for the first 18 years of my life.

Out of this writing will come a few more - a few book reports - stories of sisters - and stories of memories - but I have to do my church newsletter first, so I hope you'll stop back in a week or so to see what I have to say.

This picture of The Shepherd and The Blueberry Farmer (my B-I-L) was taken about two years ago on the front porch of the house where my dad was born. There are actually two houses hiding behind all the trees and greenery in the picture above - this is the house on the left hand side of the picture. We have that little house fixed up with beds, full kitchen, etc. We just - after thirty or so years - have purchased an "apartment sized" refrigerator - an upgrade from the little dorm room sized one that we had in the kitchen that would only hold enough food for one or two people for one or two days (now we actually have a REAL freezer!) - Something that was so simple we don't know why we didn't do it years ago.

If you notice in the picture above, there are two REALLY big steps and not a very big area to stand while you are fixing to open the door. Plus the area in front of it was a cement pad that, over the years had broken and heaved up - a very dangerous place to walk -

This past summer my nephews, our farmer (& good friend) Doug and my B-I-L took a jackhammer and a tractor and took out all the old bad cement and we had new cement poured and the boys build these wonderful new steps (not quite finished - face boards on the top two steps and the hand rails still need to be put up - but, again, something that was so simple, we wonder why we didn't do it years ago.


Here is a side view - an area just waiting for some patio furniture, don't you think?












If you scroll back up to the very first picture you will see this tree on the very far right hand sided of the landscape. The tree is planted on a "scab patch" about 200 or so yards in front of the house I grew up in. Farmer Doug planted it in memory of my dad about 30 years ago -

But, when I was growing up, there was no tree there - just the truck sized rock that it hides.














My younger sister and I would spend hours climbing up and around this rock - it would be a sailing ship one day - a classroom the next.

Thinking about it now, it is funny that we spent so much time out on that rock - there were no wildflowers to pick and bring back to our mom - just the sound of the wind and the buzzing of the flies and bees to be heard - and our imaginations gone wild with what adventure that we'd face next up on our big rock.







The Shepherd is checking the map and getting ready for our Saturday trip to Dry Falls State Park - one of my favorite places in the world.












One road trip and you already need a bath! Poor little car.

How we spent our Labor Day...

Yes, we got a new to us car - It isn't a very good picture - I didn't realize that there was so much reflection - it looks like there is a big divot in the side of it, but there isn't - and it's dark now, so I'm not going outside to take a new picture in the dark, that's all there is to it....

Here you have our new(to us) 2006 Ford Fusion - and if I can borrow a theme from the competition's advertising - "Zoom, Zoom..."


I'm afraid I'm going to consciously have to keep my foot off of the gas or there goes my "ticket free" insurance rating!

The Jelly Bean, as we affectionately call my 1991 Ford Festiva, has started to have some major problems in it's "major" systems - and looking at putting a couple of thousand bucks into an 18 year old car, however much one loves it, didn't seem to be very practical. And, I made the final payment on his truck last week.

So, while I'd been doing some internet car reviewing, The Shepherd had been keeping his "eagle eyes" open for different cars that he thought I'd like. About 10:30 this morning he said - "Did you want to go into town and look at cars??" I said - "Sure, why not."

We looked at a couple of Subaru's - specifically the Forester, as it has a lot of head room, but we felt kind of cramped "side to side" - A Legacy sedan, which was really cute and had a lot of cool options but was WAY out of our budget and, again, I felt kind of cramped. The sales guy, who was helpful and not too pushy (for a car sales guy), said pointing at this car - "have you thought of trying out a Fusion" - Not really, but we thought, heck, why not. Wow! - lots of room in this little car - both for The Shepherd's long legs and for my "ample" girth - I didn't feel like my arms were being squished into my torso by the door - it's a little bit hard to get out of, (but maybe that will be a good reason for me to start working on some flexibility exercises, no?) So we took it for a drive. It's got a "pernundle" aka PRNDL aka Automatic transmission - I've driven a stick for, oh, about 30 years now - but, manual Fusions are few and far between. Actually we realized while we were at lunch that Fusions were pretty much few and far between - could that be a good thing? Actually it's one of the top 4 selling cars in America right now. And besides that, my dad would probably turn over in his grave if I bought anything else but a Ford...

I'm not one of those people who change cars with the model year - in fact for my "real" adult life (after college) - I've only owned two cars - and I bought both of them new off the showroom floor - a 1978 Mercury Zephyr (I LOVED that car) and the Jelly Bean, which I bought from this same dealer in 1991. (I think they got rid of the Festiva because it was so trouble free - service departments don't like cars that are trouble free...) So, I'm not into dickering for price - we did feel that this was pretty fairly priced - but wish they had thrown in the set of tires that The Shepherd wanted. (car salesman - whining "You know, we're not making anything on this car" I just hate to listen to people whine - OK, fine - we'll take the car without the new tires.

And they only wanted to give me $100 for the Jelly Bean! How Dare They??? - Nope, we'll keep it.

So, I've got a couple of ideas up my sleeve for the JB - one is a fellow in town who has built an electric Festiva - He was impressed that the body on mine was in such good shape - or, I'll donate it to the local public radio station who says they'll take donated cars, running or not...

First I have to clean it out - AAAaaaRRRrrrGGGgggHHHhhh! I hate cleaning out my car.

I'm going to miss you little Jelly Bean - we had some pretty darn good times together, didn't we?

A Chili kind of day

I know it might seem odd, but in the 40 odd years that I've been cooking, I've never made chili. Truth be told, even after working in a Mexican restaurant for 21 years, I'm still not a fan of spicy foods and when I think of chili, I generally equate it with that horrible canned stuff that is only good if you mix it with Rotel Mexican tomatoes and Velveta cheese and leave it in a slow cooker for a couple of hours - but that's a whole 'nother thing.

But when we had dinner with our friends Curtis & Felicity last month, she made chili for dinner, and it was so good, The Shepherd asked me if I'd get the recipe from her - she gracefully gave me the ingredient list that she uses - it is kind of a "chop and dump" kind of soup - but I was able to find another similar one on the internet so I'd have an idea of how much spice I should use.


I was pleasantly surprised - it turned out pretty good. The Shepherd got to have his chili and watch the end of a disappointing football game - and he got some cornbread too - which he really liked - even tho the game was a disappointment, the dinner was a hit.




I'm not really a big cornbread fan either - it is always too dry or too "something" (fussy, aren't I?) - but this is the cornbread recipe that I put together for the above mentioned dinner with our friends - to me, meals are always more fun if you make them potluck - after all, we all work all day, why should one person have to do all the work for our dinner. I came up with this recipe - it's not too sweet, not to cakey, and not too dry. It uses a can of "Mexi-corn" as well as a can of creamed corn and has a very good texture.



Cheesy/Corny Cornbread

1 15 oz. pkg. Krusteaz Honey Cornbread Mix
1 16 oz pkg. Marie Callender's Cornbread Mix
1 can of creamed corn
1 can of Green Giant Niblets Mexi-Corn, with liquid
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
2/3 cup milk
1 egg
3/4 cup water

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease a deep 9x13 cake pan (or 10 x 15 lasagna pan) Mix all ingredients and pour into pan. Bake 30-35 minutes or until light golden brown. Store what you don't eat in the fridge (because of the corn).