Colours as dull as our weather, sadly

I wove off 6 of these tea towels.    They took forever.   I found it amazing that I could weave for 2 hours with minimal breaks at the guild studio, on the slightly smaller Artisat, but on my fanny I have to take regular breaks every 20 or 30 minutes.   It's a larger loom and it feels so different.  It weaves beautifully though.    I used a sett of 18, as a couple of big name weavers suggest that for absorbent towels.  They will be absorbent and are very soft, but I think the next ones will be a sett of 20.

This is the underside of the tea towels we were weaving off in the studio.   I meant to take a photo of the second one I was weaving off but my sweetie called me up and asked if I'd like to run into town for some errands with him, and I totally forgot in the 10 minutes I had left to finish up and head out. Four of us wove off towel, to get 6 done before the show.  It was interesting about the speed differences.  Pat said it was 11/2 hr project.  I said 2 hours, another gal said it took her 5 hours.   It was an intuitive pattern though and I found it easy to get into a rhythm, which does help with speed.


I found a ball of brown worsted weight wool yarn stuffed in a corner of a bin.   I'm turning it into mittens.  I can't find any of my mittens from last year.  Considering I had a coat pocket pair, a truck pair, a car pair and a spare pair, it's kind of a lot to go missing or misplace.   I did treat myself to a nice new set of wooden needles.  These are Knit Picks, which only became available in my town last year.   They are beautifully finished and lovely to knit with.  I like the wooden needles because they are so light that I feel like I can knit forever.

I made this cardigan  a while ago and didn't ever wear it.  It was too big and kept slipping off my shoulders.  It was on the ugly side as well.   I kept telling myself that I'd frog it and re-knit it into something that a)fit better and was more attractive.    I told myself that for the better part of a year.   I think I was putting it off because I'd done a darned good job of sewing it together and didn't want to figure out where all those ends were and the seaming theads.

I finally sat down to rip it apart.  What a pain in the patootie!   It's taking way longer than I'd anticipated.   So far I have the neck/button band, the front and 1/2 sleeve ripped out. Sheesh, the way this is going, it will be next summer before I can start knitting the sweater.  I've already tried that.  Knitting sweaters is definitely not a summer or warm weather activity.

That S word, and mead -

 I woke up the other morning to this.  The only redeeming feature was that there were some patches of blue sky and no wind.   I grabbed the camera and played with camera settings.  It was pretty early and the sun wasn't really up yet.   The view across the road was really postcard pretty but I was in my pyjamas, parka and barn boots and thought that maybe it was better to stay closer to home.

Sadly, by the time I got back inside and started feeding the cats, the blue sky had vanished.  Sadly, we've had more snow since then, including one horrible day dumping although a small amount of snow, only 12 cm, it was a sticky, wet snow which clung to everything including the roads.   I am so not ready for this weather!

A few weeks ago I made some mead.  A hydromel to be exact as I'm not fond of higher alcohol drinks.   A hydromel is a lower alcohol volume mead.  I'd read a lot about it being a watered mead, but then someone called it a session mead, which is much more attractive.   I'd wanted to do two types of fruits, frozen blackberries from my garden and commercially frozen cherries,  in the secondaries, to try different flavours.   Because I hadn't prepared ahead of time, it took me forever to get the blackberries thawed and strained of most of the seeds.   Such bad planning on my part.    I used a bit of pectin enzyme, to help it clear.   The black cherries went straight from the freezer and into the food processor, rather than thawing and mashing, simply because I was running out of time, stupid blackberries.  The last bit of mead in the big carboy filled up a 2 litre carboy, which I left plain for comparison.  Because I didn't chemically kill the yeast, after a couple of days, the fruited carboys showed signs of renewed fermentation, so I popped them into to the sunporch where it is too cold for the yeast.       I'll let it sit there for a few weeks while I figure out what to do next.

I used 2.5 gallons of water, 3 lbs of honey and a packet of Lavlin EC-118 yeast.   Because I tossed in the yeast while the water was probably still too warm, when it cooled, I added a packet of Cooper's Ale yeast, which I had on hand, just to be sure.  I've never used a Cooper's yeast before, so I'm not sure what to expect in terms of flavour.  The packet of yeast was an impulse purchase when I needed an emergency back up last year as it was very inexpensive compared to the other yeasts available.  It's been sitting in my fridge every since.

After the primary fermentation had stopped, I racked the hydromel over the fruits, into smaller carboys, dividing it up into 3 batches, the blackberry, from my own home grown blackberries, the cherry, from commercial frozen cherries and plain.  At some point I'll have to bottle and decide what to do about keeping the sugars from the fruits from fermenting once the mead warms up.

Catching up with chores.

 The other day we finally got hit with frost.    Just a light frost, but enough to finish off the 2 remaining tomato plants and one of the lettuce plants.  There is still Swiss chard, some lettuce and a couple of turnips in in the beds.

My friend Shannon gave me a bunch of garlic, which I planted in to the garden.   Then I found that the feed store had some seed garlic in stock, so I bought 4 heads just to have a bit extra.

The forecast said it would snow today, so I wanted to make sure all the garlic was planted before then, so yesterday was a garden day.  The garlic was all planted and most of the beds have been cleared.   Then I realised there were a few more potatoes to dig up, so I got those done as well.   I haven't purchased potatoes since the beginning of August, except for last week as they were $1 for 10 lbs.   I ended up with almost 5 lbs of potatoes from the last few plants.   They aren't huge but they are big enough.  The weather was such that I'm super happy with the harvest.

Grey ramie is on the wheel.    There is only 50 g of it.  I started spinning it the other day.  It's done now and I have to figure out what to do with the singles.   I should have divided the fibre into equal halves before I started spinning.  I tried to with just a few grams spun but the weighing got weird, and either this packed was grossly underweight or something was wrong with my scale.  Instead I just went on a spinning marathon, and while I don't normally watch TV, due to being spooked last night, because of marauding raccoons, while I was alone, I actually did watch a show or 2.  It was a good way to keep from hearing them rustling and banging outside.

Today, almost all day, it has been snowing.  Enough said about that!