Sunday, August 25, 2019

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?

Friday, August 2, 2019

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.