Interesting things over the past few weeks

This is the chair I currently have at my loom.   Unfortunately my loom is near picture windows, and gets sun on nice days.   The cats have decided it's more important to nap in the sunspots than let me weave.   I can't say that I blame them.  Once, a number of years ago, when Cat was still with us, he was resting in a huge sunspot.  I was not feeling well, achy and snuffling.  I lay down beside him, in that sun and oh my goodness, it felt so nice!
 So I've let them have their time in the sun.  Soon enough, we'll have snow clouds, or those pale skies with less effective sun spots.   Of course, as soon as we start up the wood stove, Dion will be right in front of it toasting himself.

One of my friends from the Rug Hooking guild also works at her local museum.   She gave me two old cookbooks that the museum acquisitions team decided didn't have any relevance to their local area.  It was a lovely thought and an amazing gift since one of the books is an 1898 copy of The New Galt Cookbook.  It's one of the earlier revised editions since it still have the names of the contributors attached to the recipes.  I was thrilled.

I was out of general occasion cards, so I painted up a few of these for thank you cards.  It was fast and I think quite effective.  I like them a lot.

I was a tad late locking up the chooks the other night and when I came out of the barn, this amazing sunset made it seem like the sky was on fire.  The photo doesn't do it justice.   These moments never last long, and I felt quite lucky to get to see this one.

The fall asters are just starting to fade.  Usually they bloom with the Goldenrod, but this year most of them seem to be blooming as the goldenrod is fading.   They are one of my favourite wild flowers.  I love the colour and I love that they bloom so late in the season when most of the other flowers have faded.

Other than that, the huge storm a couple of weeks ago left a path of downed trees and other damage.   Earlier in the year hubby asked the "tree guy", a local service for a load of wood and said he'd like a couple more.  He dropped off one a few days ago, them dropped one off yesterday  without telling us he was coming and them today I looked up and he's dropping off another load.   Hubby doesn't mind, but there is currently a lot of it out there!   I've been told that most of it's in an easy to process size, so there is that.   

More Crazy Storm Damage

A huge, weird weather system came through the whole area the other day.  The nation wide severe storm and tornado warning system was going off for well over an hour.  We had wild winds, heavy driving rains in heavy cloud cover that had the outside solar lights on in the daytime because it was so dark.  When it was all over and done, there were branches down every where.   We were lucky that we still had hydro, but a lot of areas even nearby had none for hours.   Once again, the storm took out my clothes line.   The clean up of the yard yielded 6 trailer loads of branches, limbs and other tree debris.  The clumps of leaves, just got mowed into mulch.  The worst thing though, was that other half of the tree that fell on my garden in early July, came down, taking a pine tree with it, and it landed - yup, on my garden!   The wire tomato cage and the spiral support are visible, but crushed and one tomato showing on the right side.

It mainly fell on the large Mortgage Lifter tomatoes in the raised beds.  One was just lightly hit, and mainly with smaller limbs separate from the main trunk, so it was fairly easy to clean up.   I ended up picking some of the very low fruit that was still green, because one of them had bite marks in it.   I felt it was better to save the rest of those tomatoes, than feed whatever was making them dinner.   The other plant though was completely covered by the tree.   Hubby trimmed enough away so that I could pick all the still green tomatoes from the plant and bring them inside to ripen.

I was amazed at how quickly the rescued green tomatoes ripened inside.   Mostly ripened, as when I realized that I had to either can them or use them up today, because they were ripening and quite soft, I found a couple of them were not quite ripe inside yet.  I peeled and chopped them up.  Mortgage Lifter tomatoes are a heritage breed which results in huge tomatoes, with lots of flesh bits.  They're great on sandwiches.  I heated them to a boil in a large pot so I could water bath can the batch.  If you heat the jars, and heat the tomatoes, you can put them into a canner filled with near boiling water without risking thermal shock.  I also find that heating the tomatoes allow me to put more fruit into the jars.  

I also used a fair number of the fancy Black Cherry Tomatoes, which are actually greenish brown and green inside. (This is the important information) They are a nice size cherry tomato, albeit ugly.  There are lots still on the vines.  There were too many to eat and I didn't want them to go bad.   A few seconds in a hot water bath and the skins slipped off nicely.  I mixed them into the chopped tomatoes and I thought nothing of it, until I pulled the 7 jars from the canner.   Because the huge tomatoes were chopped, the tomatoes separated, with the meaty part floating over the clear tomato juice.   It's apparently a pectin issue which is released or broken down when chopped too much.   One jar had to wildly green liquid on the bottom and a very green flesh.  I will admit to commenting on the weird effect of the little brown cherry tomatoes.   Then hubby, who remember pulled down the jars for me, reminded me that one of the jars I used was a fancy green glass one.   So I actually think they are all normal and I was just doing the canning by rote and didn't even pay attention to the colour of the jar.  How did I really not notice that?   However, I'm happy that all jars sealed nicely and tomorrow afternoon, I'll be able to remove the rings, clean them up and store them away for winter use.  Thankfully I didn't use one of the purple glass jars.  I wonder what sort of surprise I would have had with that one?

Summer Holiday in Ottawa

 We got tickets to a concert at the Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata, a suburb of Ottawa.  Then we went the weekend before to explore the area.  We had plans to visit as many of the big museums as possible because they are the bigger national ones.  That plan lasted only a couple of days before we decided to rethink our plans.  We hated the city.  We hated the city driving.  We switched out our plans to visit smaller museums, farther out of the area.  These required scenic drives and gave us activities with far fewer people and much less traffic.  We enjoyed it so much more. 

Lancaster - Winnie

We drove because it was only a 5-6 hour drive, and with a fuel efficient car it would be much cheaper than flying and getting a rental.   We left in the pouring rain.  It was miserable driving and I was just the passenger.   Just the other side of Toronto, the skies cleared and it was lovely driving the rest of the way.  We took the Trans Canada, so it was a pretty drive.  We had a picnic in Havelock and got to the hotel as it started to cloud over again and drizzle.  We were early, and our room wasn't ready yet, so we waited in the lounge area, where they gave us hot drinks and freshly baked cookies until our room was available.   When we got to the room, this was our view.  A rainbow suggests a good start to the holiday.

We did go to the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum.  We'd visited the other two plane museums, one in Winnipeg and the other just outside of Hamilton, this one was a no brainer.   This one had great displays and a fair bit of well written information available.  The War Plane Museum had functional planes taking off and landing which was exciting and the Winnipeg Western Aviation museum had fabulous, well informed volunteers.   We did however spend well over 2 hours exploring the Ottawa museum.  I think I've had my fill of historic planes for a while.

We went to the Canadian Agriculture Museum and then decided that was enough city stuff.  We drove out to the Cumberland Heritage Village, which was absolutely lovely.  We went to the Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario in Smith's Falls, which was fun but short.  However' we'd done it in the afternoon, so had a nice drive back to the hotel.  On our last day there we found our way to Pinhey's Point, and the very well preserved Pinhey's House built in in the 1820's.  It was quiet, so very pretty, despite it raining.  We ended up finding a toy store that you could see from the highway, but had to drive through the bush to get to.  So much fun.  The concert that night was great.  Luke Bryan had a fabulous performance with a laser light show and everything.   While we have seen some great opening acts, two of the three were okay, and the third was mediocre.  However the main show was well worth it.  While taking the elevator down from the nose bleed seats, I glanced down and estimated that there were close to $2500 - $3000 worth of boots in the elevator alone.  giggle

Canadian Horse (Breed) at the Ag museum.  There aren't a lot of these left anymore, but I've seen a few and they all seem to be black.  They are sturdy, hardworking  horses: a true all purpose breed.  I've seen them being ridden, pulling carts and pulling ploughs.

Our trip to the beach was scenic, both in the drive there and back.  It wasn't a day for sunbathing for sure and the river was very cold.

A pretty stop along the way.  We'd stopped to pick up lunch as a bakery in Cumberland where we got baguette sandwiches which lasted us for two meals!  We had a picnic at a pretty roadside stop.

There were leaves starting to turn red and orange.  It really looked like early autumn.   The long range weather forecast said coolish weather, so I didn't pack shorts and that was a mistake.  We had crazy warm weather all week.  In all though it was a fun and pleasant holiday.  I'd brought my knitting and found that I could actually knit without getting car sick on the way home, until we hit the outskirts of the city so that was productive.   In all it was a fun and pleasant holiday.

Colours of Late August: Yellow

Well the colours this time of year seem to be mainly yellow.  Overnight the late blooming Queen Anne's Lace disappeared, as did the chicory, and a bit of something purple that I didn't take the time to stop and identify it.   I don't know the official name of this flower.  It grows about 2 m (6 ft) tall.  I got a little clump from a  friend, who got her's from a friend.  Years ago, at one of my kids soccer games, the coaches wife was giving away clumps of this flower that she'd gotten from her grandmother's garden.   So it's an old variety of some kind of rapidly spreading, tall, bright yellow flowers.  Lots of people say it's been found at old homesteads, their grandparent's homes etc.   It's reliable as it blooms in abundance at the end of every summer.  It get's pummelled down by heavy rain, and still blooms, just sideways on the grass.  I've no idea how to control it because digging doesn't always get all the roots and one year in desperation, someone used round up on it and it died back a bit and then the next year, just popped back up, stronger than ever.   It's a good thing it's pretty.

Rudbeckia.  This is a cultivated variety that I planted.  It reminds me so much of being a kid and the fallow fields and roadsides were plentiful with a wild variety of this flower.  Of course we called them Blackeyed Susan's then.  I used to braid daisies in the earlier summer and these later in the summer, into my horse's forelock and mane!

It's still one of my favourite garden flowers, especially for the colour it adds late in the year.

The feed store has a tiny plot of dirt beside the smallish greenhouse.   They used to toss pumpkin seeds there and have a lovely little pumpkin patch in the fall.  Then the whole fashionable thing of getting photos taken in Sunflower patches came up, so they planted sunflower seeds.  They grow tall and look lovely, and then at the end of the season, they toss the remains into their compost, beside the old silo.  There are a quite few volunteer sunflower plants growing this summer, which look quite fun with the volunteer pumpkin plants.  Most of the flowers were still looking a bit down, as it was mainly cloudy that day, but this one was most optimistic, and reaching for the sun that wasn't quite there yet.

Another volunteer, although it's definitely not yellow!  Almost 20 years ago I planted some morning glories in a planter near the front door, where they grow slowly and only had a few blooms.  The next year one plant returned and still was late blooming, with only one or two flowers.   The issue of course was the really bad soil, probably garden soil, hard and compacted and needed to be replaced badly.  I was busy and it wasn't all that important so I just left it and moved on.   Every few years though, I find a morning glory growing someplace around the front entry.  I take that as a win.  These are just the bog-standard variety, nothing special at all, but I do enjoy the little pops of purple.

Another Interesting Holiday Week.

The evenings are starting to cool down a bit and first thing in the morning is starting to feel a little bit autumnal.   With the tree falling on my garden early in the summer, this is the current state of my tomato plants.  They're recovering, just a bit behind.  The one large mortgage lifter tomato was eaten by something in the evening, just as it was starting to ripen.   Since then I've harvested a half dozen cherry tomatoes, just as they're starting to show signs of changing colour in hopes of getting to eat a few ourselves.  These are black cherry tomatoes, which are starting to be quite plentiful in their unripened bunches.  Not so many of the mortgage lifter tomatoes which I was hoping to have for canning as well as eating.  There are only a few of those.   Since tomatoes have  just started showing up in the grocery stores, and they were either not ripe or over ripe, I decided to pop out to the Farmer's Market and pick up a few to start canning.   Several vendors had some tomatoes, mainly beefsteak types, but one vendor had Roma type tomatoes, but only by the half bushel.  Thinking of the timing of the next couple of weeks, I brought home the half bushel, in order to make sure I got at least some tomatoes canned.  We use a bit less than a bushel of canned tomatoes over the winter.

I did two canners full yesterday and one this morning.  I ended up with 19 500 ml (pint) jars. I'm pretty happy about that.  If there are more tomatoes available at the end of the month, or my garden tomatoes ripen, then I can do another canner load full and be done.  Still, I'm pretty satisfied with this weekends results.  The Roma tomatoes were nicely ripe, but not over ripe, nor green.  They peeled quickly after scalding and I simply rough chopped them as I don't care if they are pretty when they're going into soups, stews and sauces.   They are handy to have available and it the right size as commercial tins of tomatoes tend to be larger.  

DH had a week off for holidays.  We did pop out for lunch with our daughter for her birthday.  Otherwise we mainly puttered about home doing things.  I washed fleece, wove off a scarf, re-dressed the loom, made some buttons and socks, and picked, carded and spun some of that washed fleece.  (I also read 3 novels, but I won't mention that)

DH on the other hand spent the week stacking wood.   Our regular wood guy says more people are keeping their wood rather than asking him to get rid of it.  As a result, not only are our wood deliveries smaller, but much less often.  So this year, DH broke down and ordered two larger trailer loads full.  It costs a bit more than getting the logs delivered, but he doesn't have to split it so there is a decent trade off.   Regardless, we have enough wood for this winter, and a good start on next winter's wood, which needs to dry for a year to really burn properly.

Ankle socks made on the Légaré 400 using sock yarn I got from the SOC 2026 crank in this spring.   It's from a fairly local indie dyer, Grand Valley Fibre Company.  The colours are really nice and the yarn is absolutely lovely to work with.  It made very comfortable socks.  It should have since it's super wash merino and nylon.   However, I've purchased other brands labelled merino and it wasn't nearly as nice so I highly recommend the Avid sock yarn from Grand Valley Fibres  .    

These are two new buttons using the Zwirnknopf technique. So apparently one of the button experts says that Dorset button rings are covered with the blanket stitch before you wrap and weave the button while with the Zwirnknöpf buttons you do it last.  Some of the skills overlap and it''s nice to change things up sometimes.   I'm doing a button demo later in September at a local fair, so I'm working diligently to get a few more of the Zwirnknopf style buttons done to increase the display.  They really have quite different end results.    Zwirnknöpf buttons are also sometimes called shirtlace buttons and are another old style of button.  They weren't made in England or the UK, but are from (depending on where you look) from continental Europe, mainly Central, Eastern and Northern areas.  They seem to have been first made in the early 1800's and started being exported after WWI .   They are pretty and are also fun to make.

Zwirnknopf - singular.  Zwirnknöpf - plural.   

Translates to Thread button in English

Early August

Just a record of some happenings over the last week or so.

 Someone crop dusting started up their helicopter at 5:30 am.  They were 2 fields away so the noise was unexpectedly loud.   They were finally done at almost 9 am before they headed off to wherever.  It was a day for a nap!

I was outside gardening when I noticed the sky was this intense blue.  I snapped a photo and a few minutes later it had lightened up to its more usual paler blue.   It was a great colour and reminded me of the skies when I was a kid, living much further north.

The garden was hit by a fallen tree in a freak storm in early July.  The garlic ended up being smaller this year because their roots were severely disrupted but the tomato plants were knocked over and almost all the growth tips broken.  They've been sending out suckers, and leafy new growth to repair themselves which has resulted in my having to prune them once or twice a week since then.  They've also grown tall.  Luckily, it's late enough in the season that I can start pinching off the tips to encourage the fruit to ripen and the flowers to set.   Not a lot of fruit so far this year, I think because of the damage to the plants.   This tomato (a heritage Mortgage Lifter variety) is larger than my hand!   I think that poor tomato plant is pouring all its effort into that one tomato.  

A hollyhock.  I'd planted seeds for black and regular holly hocks.  I think there was one black flowered plant and a few white and light pink one's. Now they've settled into just this colour.  They are pretty though.   I haven't had enough flowers to try dyeing with them, so I'm just enjoying the mid summer colour.  Thankfully they seem to be surviving the wild raspberries that are volunteering that that bed and the chooks who like to hid out there.

It was quite cool the other night so I pulled out the quilt my daughter made me for last Christmas.   Dion adores it and if I don't get it folded up in time, he claims it for the day.  He's a sweet kitty, who is so routine driven it's crazy.  He follows it every single day and you can almost tell the time by his routine.  He does love a good belly scratch though, which is also sort of odd, since most cats won't let you touch their bellies without shredding your hand up.

More buttons and garden update

 I've been fiddling around with making some new buttons.   I wanted to make some shirtwaist buttons and some zwirnknopf buttons, both thread buttons in the same category.  They are a wrapped button, secured with stitches and the button hole stitch border is applied after the threads are wrapped.   They apparently work best on a flat ring like a washer or spacer, rather than a round ring.   I made my first one with a round ring that I use for Dorset buttons.  It was okay, but the roundness of the wire made the wraps more difficult to keep secure and in place.   I ended up starting like a Dorset button and doing the button hole stitch all around the ring first, so that the wrapping threads would have something to grip on to.   This worked well, although not really a zwirnknopf button due to doing that step first.

When I tried to do it properly, with the wrapping threads first, they just keep sliding, even after applying beeswax to the ring and then sanding the ring.   When I tried a smaller ring, it seemed to work with lots of beeswax but every time I went to secure the stitches, they'd just slide off.  It was frustrating.  So other than ordering the appropriate button rings from the U.K., I went on field trip to various local hardware stores looking for washers that were flat rings, with a narrow rim and a large opening in the middle.  I didn't care if they were metal, plastic or fibre board.  Nothing came up at all.  Finally Hubby found a short length of ABS pipe and said he'd slice it up for me to try.   After several attempts and being told it wouldn't work, I was presented with a handful of thin slices of ABS pipe for buttons.  They needed sanding which was no problem and they're  about 1.5 inches in diameter, so too larger for useable buttons, but great for decorative buttons, shawl pins and jewellery,  The plus is that size is also really easy to work with.    The two buttons on the right are shirtwaist buttons and the bunny button is an art Dorset button.  I think it's cute!

This tomato is larger than my hand.   It survived the tree falling on the garden when it was very small and just keeps growing.  My Son in law started the seeds and it's a Mortgage Lifter heritage variety. It's taken a bit for the rest of the tomato plants to catch up after being crushed by the tree in the storm.  

They really only started flowering a week ago.   There are a few chocolate cherry tomatoes and a few more of these mortgage lifters, although they are still small.  I hope that there is time for more of the fruit to set.  We really only have a few more weeks of actual summer, before it will get too cool in the evenings.  I'll snip off all the growth tips  and flowers on the tomatoes then, in hopes of forcing the rest of the fruit that has set to actually ripen.