Who Let That Skein Winder in the House Again?

You know how it goes.  The barn cat has a litter of kittens and then you start finding them in the house.  As the weeks go by, despite your best efforts, you find one watching you from atop a kitchen cabinet, another one harassing the spider who lives in the corner of the bathroom, and yet another (perhaps most disturbingly,) looking extremely at home in your favorite chair.

I have what I think is a perfectly reasonable amount of textile equipment for one person, but there is no denying it - it's a lot of stuff.  Much of it lives in my workroom, but the large, bulky, less used things are stored in the Two Loom Garage which is attached to my house.  Except when they aren't.

This skein winder is supposed to roost on top of a filing cabinet in the Two Loom Garage, but now that it has cosied up to my desk, it seems unwilling to return to its proper roost.

What is a person to do?

Peaches and Lobster

I believe that in most sensibly run households you can detect favorite cookbooks by the extent to which they are accessorized with bookmarks.

My copy of Putting Food By falls into this category.  For many years, this business card has marked the page on which the canning syrup proportions are listed, because I cannot remember from one canning season to the next that the formula for light syrup is four cups of water to two cups of sugar.

As I left Maine over 20 years ago, this is a vintage business card.  Now it seems strange to see phone numbers without their area codes, but when I was a small child, phone numbers were still sometimes listed with the first two letters of their exchange, so MI4-

The official list of exchange names for 64 includes:

MIdway
MIlton
MIssion
MItchell
NIagara

But those aren't very interesting.  Why not make up some?  For example:

MIntaur
NItrogen
OGre
MItten (really very appropriate, given Maine winters)
NImble
OGham

Total yield this year: 11 quarts of sliced peaches and 10 quarts of peach nectar.

Merry Christmas Everybody

Despite what the holly tree may tell you, I think it looks fine after the slight pruning I gave it this morning.

The holly bush reminds us to regard those things that are evergreen, including my best wishes for your continued health and happiness.

A Fine Time of Year for Pointless Handwork

What is a person to do once the garden goes dormant for the season?  I don't know about you, but this is the time of year when I return to the more obscure handicrafts.  The really pointless ones.  Like tatting.

I don't remember why, many years ago, I was so intrigued by tatting.  In the dark ages before the internet, I had to haunt many yarn, handicrafts, and book shops in a search for instructional and patterns books.  I'm left-handed.  There is no such thing as a left-handed tatting instructional book, so I had to transpose right-handed instructions in my head.  My mother thought learning to tat was going to drive me right around the  bend.

I did eventually get the hang of it and worked my way through several designs for tatted snowflakes.   For about 350 days a year, this one and its cousins live in an envelope in the box of Christmas ornaments in the attic.   Every year I'm happy to see their lacy little faces, but I don't seem to have any burning desire to make any more.

It's full of stars

Actually, grape juice is full of tartaric acid.  When you make your own grape juice and then put it in the fridge, the tartaric acid forms crystals.  They're white now, but will turn a dark purple.  I just happened to open the fridge before that happened.

Somebody thinks a lot about you!

I keep this postcard on my bulletin board.  There are some excellent books on knitting and war, but that's not what this post is about.

For today, all you need to do is think about filling in the name of your town and who you'd send this to if you had a chance.

Season Finale by the Maple Trees

This was the one sunny day during my recent week in Vermont.   I hadn't been back for the color in a number of years.  It was grand.