Gosh it's gotten cool here. I harvested the last cucumber on the plants, and with no more flowers, that was the last for the season. I ate it for lunch the next day. There are still tomatoes on the vine, but they are all quite green. We're supposed to have some warmer weather next week, so I'll leave them and hope they get a bit bigger. There are tons of Hungarian yellow peppers, although I've no idea if they are hot or not. There are JalapeƱos left to harvest. There are also a lot of them, however they are quite short. The mystery pepper plant is all still green, but they are very long and slender, so I'm guessing some sort of hot chill pepper. I'll harvest them sometime soon. Other than that, there are only herbs left to harvest; parsley, basil and soup celery. I'm going to plant one bed with garlic this fall. Seed garlic should be in the feed store in a couple of weeks.
I got 100 g of lovely, deep pink roving from A. I spun it into singles and then decided that I was going to spin up more singles to ply it, in a different colour, since this was hand dyed and I couldn't match it. A gave me another 100g of the same fibres which I spun and dyed into a lovely soft grey. I plied them together, deciding to make a matching hat and mittens. I knit the mittens first, and then had to figure out how to make the hat fit the remaining bit of yarn. Finally, after knitting and ripping out hats 5 times, I knit up a sample on a new toy, an old, but lovely working knitting machine. I made a hat with just a few metres of yarn to spare!Odette's Obsessions
Natural Dyeing, Spinning, Weaving, Other Fibre Arts, Gardening, Cooking, Costuming, and...
August 30, 2025
Garden and spinning update!
August 16, 2025
Summer is winding up!
The summer is slipping by far too quickly. The ridiculous heat and humidity we've had so much of this year, is something I'm not sure I'll adapt to easily. However, there are already signs showing how short our summers are. I drove down a nearby road the other day and there was a tree with a lone branch already turning colours. I know this could also be due to lack of moisture, but I'm still not sure I'm ready for the leaves to turn colour. Hubby also brought in a load of kindling yesterday. I asked if it wasn't too early for that, but he pointed out that we'll likely have to have our first fire in 4 to 6 weeks. Plus there are the crickets. They are an end of summer bug; a noisy, loud, end of summer bug.
Speaking of bugs. I noticed 3 big caterpillars on my parsley plant. I looked them up and they were parsley worms, or the caterpillars that turn into Swallowtail Butterflies. The next day there were only 2 of them, and today there aren't any. They were very slow and hardly moving and large enough that a friend who has watched some all summer, said they were ready to spin their cocoons. I looked around a bit but didn't see any cocoons, so I'm hoping they found a safe place and weren't dinner for the chooks, who have been hanging around begging for leftovers and treats! I also hope if they did spin cocoons that they have time to complete their metamorphosis before it turns too cold here.With only 1 tomato plant, which was supposed to be a cherry tomato but has turned out to give large,
yellow albeit delicious fruit, I purchased a couple of baskets of tomatoes. I quickly peeled them, chopped them up and tossed them into the canner. I've done 2 batches this way. It means 2 hours at most at one time for canning, unlike having a bushel and it taking 2 full days to do them up. I remembered how easy it was that year that my tomatoes ripened slowly and I had a canner load every 3 days or so. That was really the best way to do it.
August 06, 2025
Rant and summer colour update
We saved up all our pennies for 5 years because we needed a new car. The old truck was on the road for 2 or 3 years longer than we would have liked. We shared my car last year because winter safety and then general safety, was more important than me getting out of the house, which was a bit difficult sometimes, but it's what was needed. We did without a lot, stopped purchasing unnecessary stuff, used our leftovers, stopped eating out at restaurants, carefully weighed costs vs expectations for classes etc, and I mended a lot of clothes. It's not that we did totally without, as we took small vacations etc but were actively saving for the car first, now a new roof and to get 2 mature trees professionally removed because the previous owner planted them in a stupid spot: both of them in different stupid spots!
So why do some people find this an issue? Like I'm supposed to just go and spend whatever I want whenever, when I have a budgeted amount of mad money for the year and refuse to go over my budgeted amount? I have to pick and choose what I do, and I'm okay with it. Somehow I don't think anyone else should be ticked off that we chose to find a way to make our budget work well for us!
Rant over and it was due to comments and actions of some acquaintances and friends. And nope, just because we have our car now, I still can't afford to get that or do that. By the way the car is nice. It's not horribly special or exotic but all cars are stupidly expensive right now, so what can you do?
This little guy, or his relatives have lived in our woodpile since we moved here. He's not overly tamed or friendly but he's getting better about not racing off as soon as I try to take a picture of him. I'm not a huge fan of small rodent creatures living this close to the house, but he's better than some it could be. I do mean that I'd freak a bit if there was a honking huge rat sitting there, like we used to see sometimes on the farm! We lived on a road with almost all dairy farms, so there were tons of them when someone tried to eradicate them from a barn. ICK!July 22, 2025
Garden update and CSM trouble
We've had 2 lovely summer days which were cool enough at night for good sleeping, and not hot, humid nor windy during the day. It's been such a nice change from those crazy warm days. It's been so hot that some days, it was too warm to fuss with weeding the garden. While I normally water the garden beds mid afternoon, so the plants have time to dry properly to minimise the risk of powdery mildew, blight or other diseases, there was one evening I actually watered the garden beds because it had been so hot I didn't think the plants would survive the night without water. We've had a bit of rain in between, so mostly I haven't had to water a lot this summer.
Due to the blight issues last summer, I only planted a single tomato plant this year. I'll hunt around at the market or see if there are local farmers selling their extras when I want to put them up. Not my favourite way, but it gives the garden a break this year. So the single tomato plant I chose was a sweet 100, a cherry tomato type that I plant for both use in salads and for just eating out of hand when I'm working in the garden. While all the plants in that tray had little plant stakes declaring that they were all indeed Sweet 100, this one obviously was mislabelled. These are not cherry tomatoes! Nor do I have any idea what variety I might have here. It's fruiting already though, so that's nice.I planted more pepper plants than I usually do. There wasn't a lot of variety choice this year, unless I wanted to spend half a day hunting through different garden centres. The large one at the grocery store had minimal choices and they weren't looking all that happy. I usually just go to the feed store up the road and get whatever they have unless it's something special that I really want. So this year I planted Hungarian hot peppers, JalapeƱos and one plant without a tag, in a tray with several different varieties. I planted no sweet peppers because they are easy to find locally during the summer.
I have baby cucumbers too, from some old seed I found in a packet from a year or two ago. It's some fancy variety I think, but since I couldn't find any cucumber seeds at the shop, I thought that it was worth the trial. I had 4 seeds and 3 plants grew. I also did zucchini that way, from seed in a packet that I seemed to have ripped off the variety. I had 2 seeds and lucky me, I have two plants, one already flowering. I planted onion sets but they need weeding desperately but I've held off due to the number of mosquitoes in the cooler evenings.
I took apart my CSM (Circular Sock Machine) to clean it. It took several hours getting the cylinder clean due to yarn fuzz. Then I put it together wrong and had to put a call into my mentor to send her videos of what it was doing, which she diagnosed over the phone, told me how to fix it. It took me 5 minutes to fix, since I just put something in the right place, but the wrong location, if that makes sense. Anyway, everything on this machine, a Legare 400, needs to be set up at 6 o'clock to be in the correct location - crank hand, yarn carrier and making sure the ribber stop is also correctly places. So I'm going to see how it works by making my daughter hiking socks for her birthday. She liked the shorties I make for myself for the summer, but wants them just a little bit higher to fit in her hiking boots.
July 04, 2025
I can't believe I forgot to post!
June 14, 2025
Wild Flower Bounty
On a short hike today, there were lots of wild flowers. This particular trail looks different in every season, and different with whatever trail or paths you follow. The terrain goes from field, to woodland, to wetlands to lake side, with softwoods, cedar, pines and some deciduous areas as well. The fields on both sides of the trail were full of wild poppies. They were so pretty and the little dots of red, with the white clover and purple alfalfa. There were pops of bright green spurge as well.
June 07, 2025
Fleece Prep Steps
I've been working with the Dorset/Friesian fleece that I was given. It's not a super long staple length, or super soft, but it is long enough mostly just over 3 inches and soft enough to make it fun to work with and really nice to spin. The first step to processing a fleece is washing. I've taken to doing a cold water soak to remove and loosen the dirt before washing with soap, degreaser and hot water to remove the remaining dirt and the lanolin. It's worked beautifully in getting the fleece very clean, using fewer hot water washes and rinses. This is the cold water soak I started earlier today. It's amazing how quickly the dirt starts to soak off. The water is really, dirty now. I'll drain it and wash it tomorrow. After an overnight soak, it should be good to go. I don't want to leave it too long or it will start fermenting. This is good, if it's not in your laundry tub, in the back room of your houseI set up my laundry rack on the deck. I have a roll of fibre glass window screening that I spread over the top bars and spread the fleece out to dry on top of it. If it's breezy, I put another piece of screening over top of it and peg it down with some clothes pegs to keep the fleece from blowing away. A bit of breeze will help it dry quickly, as does using a salad spinner, laundry spinner or even just putting the fleece in a mesh bag and whizzing it around quickly in a circle to extract the extra moisture. It was nice enough out that this dried in a few hours. I did check it part way through and pulled the few damp spots left, to expose them to sunshine and air. It was all dried well before supper time. This was good as I needed to have it for the spinning gathering the next day.