A Sunday hike

 

trail beside the river

We went for a walk yesterday.  It was relatively mild, although breezy and grey out.   The temperature topped out at 9C or 10 C, but the breeze made it feel a bit cooler.  We bundled up and went for a lovely walk in an area where there is a lake, a river, and it feels like you're walking from one type of terrain to another.   The trail meandered along a river, through some fir forest, up through an aspen and poplar grove, up through an open field and then through a large stand of cedars before we ended up near the start of the trail.  We traversed a small piece of preserved railroad track, by the 2nd lookout point for the lake, not the one I usually take pictures from, and saw a lot of browns, with occasional splashes of colour.  

This is the side view from the lake.  Usually I take photos from the right, where the shore line curves around and the lake ends, or begins I guess.   There used to be a lovely picnic table here and we used to pack a lunch and eat looking over this view.  It was lovely.  Then they moved the table.   It's now in the middle of the V where the trail breaks off into 2 different routes.   Nobody eats there lunch there because there is no privacy from all the people and all the dogs.   They did replace it with a very large, long metal girder or beam.   If you don't mind sitting on the metal, hot in the summer and cold the rest of the time, then you can still sit and view the lake.   It's not quite as easy to share a lunch there now though.

There was this single vine of bittersweet, with red, almost fuchsia husks, with the little orange berries.  It was almost the only bright colour outside of some very limey greens from very young pine trees.    

All of this scenery would have still been stunning if we had blue sky, but we really get a lot of pale, grey and almost white skies during the late autumn and the winter.  A few years back, one horribly grey January, it was recorded that we got a whole 14 hours of sunshine in the month.  

Gah, we have another wasp in the house.   There is some type of wasp that is wintering over in our stacked winter wood.   It's larger than a yellow jacket and at least it's fairly calm.  We're getting several a week, maybe every other day or so.  It's both frustrating and irritating.  As a bonus, this weird, unseasonably mild spell, has brought houseflies back inside.   There should definitely be no flies and wasps in November!

A new weaving project.

I warped up the rigid heddle loom.   I purchased some Sugarbush Drizzle, a mohair/silk yarn which is really thin a couple of years ago.  I bought 2 different colourways and since I had no idea how much I'd need, I bought 4 or 5 skeins of each colour.   It was $3 a skein, so it wasn't a huge outlay to be prepared.   I wove up a purple scarf which was lovely.  It wove up quickly and easily.   I ended up giving it away as a gift.   Two nights ago, I had finished the novel I was reading and didn't have a new one chosen yet.   So I dug up the second colour way of the Drizzle and warped up the loom.  This yarn is perfect for the rigid heddle loom.   I'm using the 7.5 ends per inch reed and the yarn, although very fuzzy, works up well at this sett.   It wasn't quite as easy to start weaving with as I remember the purple being, although time does tend to soften some of the memories.   Once I got into a rhythm, it's working up quite quickly.   The colour way is called Sailor's Sunset, and it really is a lovely combination.

The first photo doesn't show the colour variations very well or at all really.   It's also a photo I should have colour corrected because there is virtually no pink in the yarn at all.   

I did make a stupid mistake, totally my doing.  I forgot to attach a tape measure when I started weaving.  I usually pin one into the centre of the item I'm weaving to try for a fairly accurate idea of the length that I've woven.  I didn't notice this until after I'd advanced the weaving more than a couple of times.   I could unroll the weaving from the front beam, but my experience is that it doesn't always re-roll up with the same nice even tension.   I'm going to guesstimate its length and it might end up being a long scarf!

The corn is being harvested.  It's been dry for ages now, partially because we had such a dry end of the summer.   I found a partial cob in the yard, perhaps missed and thrown by the harvester, or dragged out of their field by a persistent raccoon.   It's a good yellow colour and really hard.  I thought the squirrels would have gotten it, or the chooks, but it's was just sitting there.   Then what interested me, is that the neighbour baled up all the corn stalks.  I'd never seen that done before.   I had to look it up to see why it's done.  Apparently it's used as feed.  It's fairly low in protein though and some of the websites considered it a very low quality fodder, that is usually only fed to cattle in desperation.  However, other websites said that if it's slightly damp, it will start fermenting.  This would make it more like silage, so maybe increase the nutrients a bit.   When I was a 4-H leader, we had a great trip to a dairy farm and good silage smell very much like fermenting beer!  I guess at least the cows would be happy.

Fall colours, the loss of the same, and run up to Xmas

 Ahhhh Blogger, you've updated several times recently and things are now harder to use and my original settings have been changed, hidden or apparently are no longer applicable. Something to keep me on my toes I guess.

We went for a walk on a local trail.   It's one with a nice boardwalk beside the river.   I suggested we take this one because soon our weather will change.  The cold, wet and snow will make the boardwalk slippery and difficult to traverse.   We no longer take this trail in the winter because it's just not fun.  Winter walks on the trails can be a little bit harder, but not so much fun when you're also dealing with ice patches or long lengths of snow covered rutted ice, which is what that boardwalk becomes.

However, in the nice weather, this trail is interesting.  All the Ash trees have been cut and left lying around, so that it looks in places like something out of a bad Sci-Fi movie.   The trail runs right beside a train track and an industrial area, so there is sometimes a non-nature like soundtrack to accompany the walk.   Today though, it was the light creating interesting reflections on the river which caught my attention.   They were very clear, as the water was oddly still.

The trail was pretty despite the many downed logs.  I noticed that there were some new ones which weren't Ash trees, and there were some still standing which should be cut down as they were obviously going to be a falling risk soon.   Mostly the woods have young trees.   There isn't a lot of undergrowth in places, so the visuals of looking through the forest is interesting.  The undergrowth usually obscures this.  

It was lovely tromping through the fallen leaves.   This was just before the windstorm which meant the landscape went from lovely fall colours, to stark, empty trees in one afternoon.  Waking up the next morning to virtually no leaves left on the trees was interesting.  It was like we had an autumn colour season which went from green, to full colour, to bare trees in just over a week.   I didn't even get a lot of photos of the fall foliage just because the timing was so quick.

There is always an exception though.   This maple always colours last, and always holds its leaves.  It's just starting to drop its leaves and the colour is still turning.   It's really lovely this year as it's changed from the usually all yellow leaves, to yellow, orange and red.    I have a loom looking out the window at it, and it's always lovely to weave in the autumn with that view in sight.

I've been working on this year's Xmas cards. I've found if I don't start by the beginning of November, they become a bit rushed and stressed.  I'd trialed several ideas.  I watched a bunch of online tutorials for new techniques and ended up just painting something simple.  I like them well enough, although my brain tells me that they still need something.   I'm not sure it does though.   Only had 2 mishaps, one where the tape stuck and ripped a bit of the painting and the other when I was mucking around with the sky ideas and I ended up with one which was too dark for my liking. 

  I tried the remove background feature and it did, relatively well, although it did dump some black spots on the one card, which aren't there in real life.  Also, I haven't figured out how to not have the original save as the edit.  On my old computer, I could just save the edited photo as a different name, but this one applies everything to the original.  This works really well for when I'm writing things up as but I'll still need to figure out the photograph part of things.   

I did figure it out but I like the photo with the messy background better.  I painted 15 landscapes for Xmas cards, all similar but not quite the same, just to keep things interesting for me.

October Colour

 

I had to leave the house at 7:50 am.  The sun was just rising.  I had to stop in the driveway to take this photo as the light and colours were spectacular.   While the mornings are late in coming, I'm really not looking forward to the time change.  I'm on the side of keeping one time zone and not switching back and forth.   Switching seems to cause more issues than not.

This was the view across the road two nights ago.  The light was perfect.  The leaf colour change this year have been odd to say the least.  We've been stuck in a no colour zone for ages.  There have been a few trees changing colour but mainly lots of dull green leaves.  Then a couple of days ago when I was locking up the chooks, the trees were still mainly green in our yard.  The next morning though, it was like every one of them had coloured overnight.  So amazing and beautiful, but definitely odd.

The one zucchini plant left was hit by powdery mildew a while ago.  It survived, albeit damaged with greying leaves.  However I went to pull it out the other day and not only is the plant still flowering, but there were 5 zucchini still growing.  One was starting to get too big, but these 4 are still perfect.   I'd though there were only a few leeks left, but this was a lovely surprise.

I saw this stump full of shelf fungi by a woodpile.   While the trees are finally coloured and the leaves are falling astoundingly quickly, there is still a lot of green in the grass and weeds.     This made a nice contrast.

Soon the world around will be white.  The skies will be grey, or watery, pale blue.  We'll get limited sunlight hours, so I'm enjoying the sun and colours while we still get them.

2 Busy Weeks

Colours have been slow to start in our area, and apparently due to the weather.  The slow and mild decent into autumn, is the reason our colours aren't nearly as bright as usual.    My trips to Westfield have been interesting as the leaves coloured there earlier and have been falling.   I've gotten to tromp through the leaves on the way to my building, which is always fun.   

This is one of our favourite local trails, which overlooks a small lake.    The sky really was that blue that day.   Our winter skies, and sometimes our late autumn skies tend to be pale and watery grey blue.   

One of the invasive weeds in our area is Virginia Creeper.   It takes over fence lines and grows into any nearby trees.    I pulled a couple of vines from a large pine tree near our fence line and the rest pulled off the back part of our deck.   I took a couple of bittersweet vines as well because they were growing up in a space between decking boards.   They were all still fairly green, so I wove them into wreaths.  They need to dry flat before I bring them in to decorate them.  I checked them this morning as was surprised how damp the underside felt, so I flipped them over.   I put them in the gazebo to keep any rain or dew off them.

I wove a scarf on the rigid heddle loom using some lovely yarn I'd picked up.   I did the calculations for the sett before I dressed the loom and using 10 dents per inch worked out perfectly .  However, the yarn was fuzzy, not quite as bad as a mohair yarn, but noticeably fuzzy.    Hindsight, after only weaving a few rows, says I should have gone down to a 7.5 dent to make the fuzzy yarn easier to weave.   I had to open every shed with a pick up stick before weaving.    I have more yarn, so I'll try that next time.

Regardless, the scarf, while taking a bit longer to weave, was quite nice until a quick check of the underside showed that I had some small floats from skipped threads: about 5 of them.  Instead of bothering to fix them, I ironed some lightweight interfacing on the back and cut up some  shapes to make stuffed woven strawberries.   I stitched them by machine, cut little leafy top green bits free hand from felt and sewed them on by hand, adding some hemp twine for hangers.   I'm going to see if the guild wants them for their $5 ornament fundraiser.  If they don't, I have lots more materials and there will be strawberry ornaments for everyone this year!

I had my sock machine, a Legare 400 in at Westfield to demo.  It was a slow day, but the people who did come in were really interested in both the building and the machine.   I had some really great conversations with people which made a somewhat slow day actually good fun and interesting.  Plus the day went by fairly quickly.    I'm going to need to make a nice little acceptable travel table though as finding an antique  table which can support the machine really securely and not wobble, or fit properly has been difficult.   Still it was a great day and I got a pair of socks made in-between conversations.

 

Open German Tart

 I was fiddling around with a cooking challenge and was skimming through an issue of Godey's Lady's book, 1863 and I found this recipe for a very simple pie.   If you've never made a pie before, this would be easy enough from scratch and could look amazing.   Of course you don't have to make it all pretty, but it was easy to do.

I didn't convert to volume from weights because I rather like baking with the accuracy of weights.   Anyway, the pie crust is more of a cookie dough and came together really easily.   I sliced up some apples and laid them on top, and popped it in the oven until the scent of cooking apples was noticeable.   I checked it, left it another 10 minutes and it was done.    I set the tart in at 400F for about 15 minutes and then lowered the temperature to 350F until it was done.

I had used a baking sheet to do this and the edges on the pan meant I had to let it cool before it was strong enough to lift over the pan edges.  Next time I'd turn the pan upside down and bake it on the underside so that I could just slide it off onto the cooling rack.   The crispness of the crust was great the first day, but the next day was just a tad soft, and I think this might be why.  I'd make it again though as it was really fast to throw together.  The taste was not of an apple pie, since there are no spices and no liquid to keep the apples soft.  However the crust is like a shortbread or sugar cookie, with the apples on top and was really nice.   It would be really nice with some ice cream or maybe a drizzle of caramel sauce, for a more modern dessert.

I sliced up 4 medium apples and it was probably too much.  It allowed me to get fancy with the layering of the fruit though and make it look a bit like a flower.  You don't have to be fancy about it though.   The downside is the pie is a little lacking in colour.  I was wondering if maybe running a bit of egg wash over the edges would help.   Whatever it was lacking in colour though, the delicate taste made up for it.   

Open German Tart

3 or 4 apples, peeled, cored and sliced

1/2 lb flour

1/4 lb butter, softened

1/4 lb sugar

 1 egg

 

I just dumped all the ingredients in a bowl and mixed it together to make a dough.  I greased a pan and rolled out the dough into a circle and transferred it to the greased pan.  I trimmed the edges a bit and fixed couple of tears in the dough .  This was easy as the dough was a bit soft and easily manipulated.   I then rolled up the edges to make the rim.   I placed the apples in a circle and when I realised I had too many of them, I went back and reset them, over lapping a bit more like petals.    Once all the apples, well all but 3 slices were in place, I popped the tray into a pre-heated oven.    Really super easy, fairly fast and impressively pretty without a lot of effort.

Godey's Lady's Book - Jan-April, 1863, pg 302

It's two volumes in one book, so this volume is the second one, starting at page 586 or so and is available on the Internet Archive.

End of Summer Activities

 It's getting dark so early now.  The chooks are headed back to the coop by 6:45pm and it's getting dark so quickly afterwards that I rarely have time to get a bit of walking in.  During the summer I tend to walk in the evenings, as it's still plenty light out and the temperatures are starting to cool down.  Now though, it's too dark about 10 or 15 minutes after I lock up the girls.  I've gotten into the habit of downloading a trashy audio book from the library and listening to it while I walk.  I've discovered that most modern regency romances are really silly and worth a few chuckles while I'm out walking.

Other than that, I demonstrated Dorset buttons and spinning for 2 days at the local fair.   The buttons on the Saturday and spinning on the Sunday with a couple of weavers.   The weather was perfect and didn't start to turn until after the fair had closed on Sunday.   I got to eat my lunch, sitting on a straw bale, listening to 2 different bands.  One was quite good, who played modern country music.  The steel guitar player was good and the music was nicely amped so you could actually hear it.   I fell in love with the steel guitar  at that moment.  I messaged hubby that maybe one should be added to our instrument collection, but apparently it's priced in line with the Hurdy Gurdy I'd like to have as well. That means it's well out of our price range.   

The other musician was a John Denver impersonator.   He does a great job and this year he costumed up before he hit the stage, which made it perfect.  Last year he was on stage without his wig, and without a full costume, so the look didn't match the music.   If you closed your eyes though, it was almost right...  I got to eat my lunch, listening to good music, with a really nice antique tractor on display.  What's not to like about that?

The Dorset Button display went really well and lots of people stopped by to ask about them.  Last year not a single person talked to be about spinning as they were all interested in the weavers.  This year it was the opposite.  You just can tell what people will be interested any particular year.

A friend asked me for some heritage recipe help for a friend of hers, who needed a Quince jam recipe from an earlier time period.   I spent about half an hour or so digging up some recipes and sending them on.   Then I found another recipe, slightly different which I passed on too, with all the citations of course.    I got a lovely invitation to come and pick quinces from her quince grove.  That was fun.  These fruits smell amazing.  I walk into the kitchen and there is a sweet, spicy almost cinnamon scent.  They are also huge.  I've only seen one quince before and it was quite small.  These things are as large or larger than my hand!  I'm letting them ripen up a bit while I decide what to make with them.   I'll make a period 1860's quince marmalade for sure, and maybe some quince paste, which seems to be a fruit leather type of recipe. I'm looking forward to trying these and will post the results of my attempts.