The sap isn't running!

 We've been having connectivity issues on and off for a while.  Last week it suddenly got worse and then poof, we had no connection whatsoever.   After rebooting modems, unplugging and re-plugging, turning off and turning on, we had to call for assistance.   We got the normal please turn off and then turn on.   Then the next step was unplug and re-plug, but using a lot more words.   By now, my sweetie was getting frustrated, because we'd done all that multiple times.  He went outside to check the dish and it was unplugged.   He plugged it back in, but the connection was obviously loose . Our connection lasted 3 minutes and was so slow.   Once he relayed this info, we had a repair guy here at 8 am the next day.  It turns out that because our dish was installed on a tree and not a post, the tree grows and loosens or pushes out the bolts.  In our case, it snapped 3 of the bolts, which put the dish out of position.  As well, the cable connector hadn't fared well either, and needed a replacement.  In all, the poor repair guy, didn't just do a simple repair, but pretty much had to reinstall the whole kit and caboodle.   It took him  a bit of time because it was a miserably blustery, cold day with snow squalls, but by mid morning, he was on his way and I got to check my email!   Yay!

I wet finished the blue striped tea towels. Everything that could go wrong with these, did so.  I ended up with only 4 towels instead of 5.  Not a huge deal because I'd planned for 4 but had enough loom wasted for a 5th because I'd tied on to a previous warp.   They are the same pattern was the pink and green, but using a series of different shades of blue.   I think  I like this better because the colours are less affected by the warp colour.  Also because they are blue.  :) or at least they don't have green in them.   

I over dyed the red and whitish yarn that I didn't like.  The white went a dirty colour with just a hint of peach.  I thought it was ugly.  I left it lying around the living room so I could get used to it and it still didn't appeal to me.   So I soaked it in some vinegar and water, and put some spots of dye on it.   I was going to do sprinkles of dry dye but realized that I didn't want to waste one of my good masks doing this.  If I'm going to sprinkle dry dye, I want good lung protection.   Instead, I found 3 packets of Kool-aid that I'd picked up on a whim when they were at the check out at the outlet store, ages ago.   I had pink lemonade, mango and blue raspberry.   The pink was pale and insipid, but combined with the other two colours, it made  a lovely combination.   I love the yarn now.   I want to use it as weft for a scarf, using a navy warp.

I spun some 100% merino and plied it.   This is 338 yards, wet finished and ready to go.  If I have enough after doing the numbers for the above mentioned scarf, I will dye it dark blue and use it as the weft for the scarf project.   I'll do it on a table loom though, so there is less loom waste.  I still have more merino roving so I can always spin up more if necessary.      

We checked the long term weather forecasts a number of times.  They kept saying we'd have lovely above temperature days and cooler nights, so we figured it was time to put the spiles in the maple trees.  As soon as we did so, we had a weather forecast change and now we have put our sap buckets out with a week plus of cold weather.  It's below freezing during the day, so no sap will drip.  :(  We should have waited a week.    We did have one day when the sap ran, but it's been so windy, we left the sap to freeze in the buckets to hold them on the trees.   There wasn't enough to do a boil anyway.

quick update

 I've crafty things saved for the next post.  I'm still trying to decide if they were successful or failures.  The ramie I spun was thicker than I wanted, the cake dyed wool is bland, but is growing on me and it seems I may have tied on a warp to the last project and failed miserably in one little section.

  On the weekend though we went for short hikes on both Saturday and Sunday.   Even though our walks are usually less than 3 km, they are a highlight of each week.   It's amazing how being out trudging through the bush on frosty days, can lift one's spirits.   

  I almost wish I had a mask with me though, not because it was cold, but there were way more people out there than we had expected.    It would have been fine on Saturday, but we took the path to the right and everyone else took the one to the left, so we passed everyone on the trail.  On Sunday's hike, it was busy, but we took the correct path, so it wasn't so bad.    Both main parts of the trail were fairly well packed down, which made it easier to trudge through.  The one side spur we took was not so much and we slipped and dragged through that part.

We've had snow regularly over the past few weeks.   I've not had access to my car because it's better in the snow than the truck, so those heading off to work end up using it. It's not that I have any place I need to go, especially since we've just come out of another Covid lockdown.   It's sometimes nice just knowing you can go out if you need to.

 The Ontario Hooking Craft Guild is having their annual convention on-line this year.   Our local guild is doing a virtual rug display.    I was taking a photo of my entry, or trying to.   Phil had been zooming around the house like a crazy cat.    I barely had this rug set down to photograph and he came out of nowhere to plop himself down on the wool rug, as if I'd laid it down specifically for him to check out.    He does look quite at home there.

He had been racing around the house for about 10 minutes or maybe 15 and then popped himself down on the rug.  After I shooed him off, he settled himself on his favourite sofa blanket and slept for hours.   He is a real sweetie though.

Spring is coming.   We have temperatures forecast for above freezing.   This means the sap will be running and hopefully we'll be syrupping for the next couple of weekends.

 

Weaving and wool cutting

The pink tea towels are wet finished.   They washed up nicely, although there was a bit more shrinkage than I anticipated.   I don't imagine it was any different from other towels I've made, but just that I haven't woven tea towels in a long while so had forgotten.

I just piled the towels up, without matching the outside colours.  Still, it's easy to see the difference that the weft colours made on the towels.   I wasn't fond of the changes that the darker green made on the colours.  My favourite was using the pale pink.  I ended up weaving the extra towel in the pale pink as well.  I think it kept with the intended colour scheme better.

The next set of towels is on the loom.  I tied on to the old warp.  Usually this is fairly quick and effortless to do.  However, I managed to find a sleying error and had to resley about 1/4 of the warp.  Luckily it was near the last stripe so it wasn't too fussy or overly time consuming.  When I was winding it on, I came to the end of the roll of cheap watercolour paper I'd been using as packing paper.  It worked really well for weaving, pattern making and anything else, except of course when I tried it for watercolours.   But there was something icky on the inside of the roll and I didn't want it touching the yarn, so I snipped it off.  All was good until I couldn't reach the end properly.  A few threads caught on the paper and yep, I snipped them off when I trimmed the last bit of the paper.  After doing a rough measuring, I simply knotted the cut ends together as it was right in the general area of the end of the second tea towel.  We'll see soon if I was correct.

Here you can see the end of the first towel, with the light grey warp of the first stripe and the start of the second towel with the medium blue of the third stripe.  It sure makes a huge difference!

This is a Fraser cutter, used for cutting wool strips for rug hooking.    I have been looking for one for a while so that I could stop cutting my strips by hand.  That is pretty tedious.   My first choice would have been a Bolivar or a Townsend, but neither was in the budget, so I had to wait.  Over the summer I found a Fraser, but it only had a # 4 wheel that worked.   The wheel number determines the width of the wool strip which is cut.   A #4 is 1/8 in. wide.   It makes for a lot of detail and is a little more difficult to work with than a #6 which is 3/16 in. wide or a #8 which is 1/4 in. wide.   My favourite so far is the #6, which seems to be the hardest cutter wheel to find second hand.  But our local Hooking guild had a silent auction and they put their spare cutter up with a 3, 4,5,6 cutter wheels included.   I bid and won this for about the same price as a single new cutter wheel would cost.   It works well and I had a lovely time playing with it to cut strips for the rug I'm working on.

The cutter came in this box, which is likely the original shipping box.   It was originally destined for a rug hooking class at a secondary school.  I looked up the stamps and they are from 1956.  The stamps were issued to honour the chemical industry and the pulp and paper industry.  I wonder if they'd do the same today.  

  I can't find the original price of the cutter from that year, but I know that a friend purchased one in the 70's for $66.   So these cutters hold and increase their value!  They cost about $600 and up new and still look almost exactly them same.  The cutter works beautifully regardless of it's age.    I'm really happy that I got this as it means I can get some work done on my rug. 

New Tea Towels - Kevin update

 I finally cut off the scarf project that I hated, wound a warp of 2/8 cotton for tea towels and dressed the loom, in quick order.  The pink and green warp had 2 colours I wasn't fond of, the greens, plus the pinks aren't colour I often use, for weaving at least.   I had grabbed a cone of the pale pink and challenged myself to build a tea towel project around it.  This colour combination felt very spring time to me.

Kevin liked the towels!  We've had a few sunny days and he would situate himself on the loom to enjoy the sun streaming inside.   Usually he just sits on the front beam, but this time he kept sitting on the towels as well.  Luckily, it didn't affect the tension of the project, although it did cut into my weaving time.  I realize I could have just shooed him off, but he doesn't get a sunny spot to himself too often.  Usually one of the ginger kitties bumps him away, so I let him enjoy his moments in the sun.

I planned the project for 4 towels.   I used 2/8 unmercerized cotton, sett 18, tabby weave.   I used only a single colour for the weft, but I rotated through the 4 main colours I'd used for the warp.  These towels flew off the loom.  Please note, there are 5 towels shown.  That is because I had so much loom waste left, I wove off another towel.  I had enough left for a napkin as well, however because I'm going to tie on another towel, with the same details and pattern, but in blues, I left the extra warp length to make tying on easier.

I stitched between each towel, on both sides of the dividing marker and at each end of the length of towels.  Interestingly, there was virtually no shrinkage off the loom.   They are 18 inches wide by 32 inches long before hemming and wet finishing. I've tossed them in the washing machine and will then machine dry them before hemming, which I will do by machine.

 I played around a bit with different warp tensions while weaving.  I learned a fair bit.   I did this because we have a jack loom in the Guild studio that people have complained about being really difficult to treadle.   A couple of us have had no issues with this though and I figured out that for that loom, if you ratchet up the warp tension too high, you can't easily lift the shafts and get a really small  shed.    With my counterbalance loom, the same issue happens but to a much lesser extent.  However, if you don't get the warp tight enough, the bottom threads in the open shed are too loose and skipped threads both upper and lower, happen more often.   I found tension more of a personal preference with the counter balance loom.  However, with the jack loom, tension definitely affects usability.

Freezing Garlic

 We were able to get the last of the locally grown, hardneck garlic from my sweeties farmer friend.   Usually he sells it in 2 lb bags, but he had 1 lb left.   My sweetie ordered it and it came home with him a couple of days ago, with the warning that it wouldn't last long.  I figured that because the last of our garlic from the 4 lbs we had in the fall, was either drying up or sprouting.  I had the option of freezing it or dehydrating it.   I don't really like the smell or taste of commercially dehydrated garlic, although we have one of those multi-function pressure cooker/air fryer appliances, do dehydrating would have been easy.   Freezing though is fast, and the frozen garlic will last up to 6 months.

The biggest issue with freezing garlic, is actually peeling it.   I checked out a few websites and videos about mass peeling garlic.   Apparently if you put a bunch of the individual cloves in a bowl or container, cover it and then shake it vigorously, the papery skins just fall off.   I tried it.   I tried it several times, in several different containers and as this photo shows, only 2 cloves were partially peeled.  The rest of the cloves papery skins were solidly attached.     The other issue with this method was that a couple of garlic cloves started to get bruised.  I think that grocery store, soft necked garlic would likely work with this method.  It has smaller cloves and may be dried differently. 

I ended up using a large knife, and tapping the garlic cloves, to crack the skins.  Then they easily peel off.  It took a couple of tries to get the pressure correct.  I usually use this method for cooking, but I use a hefty bit of pressure to crack the garlic so that the peel is almost completely removed and the garlic cloves is flattened for use.

It really didn't take a lot more pressure to flatten the clove completely.   Here you can see that the garlic is starting to sprout.   If it were any larger, it would start affecting the flavour, but the garlic taste on this was still good.

It took about 20 minutes to peel all the garlic.  It was a bit over a pound of garlic.  Look at the big, healthy cloves!   If I trimmed the tough root ends off, the garlic oils and odor could possibly escape more easily, so I left the cloves intact.   I should be able to just pluck out a couple of garlic cloves at a time and after a couple of minutes thawing, start to slice them fairly easily.  They can be trimmed up as necessary then.

A few years ago, my husband decided he wanted to try taking his lunch to work in glass containers.  It didn't last long though, because the glass storage containers are pretty heavy.  But plastic can take on the odor of the garlic quite quickly so the glass storage container was perfect.  It does have a plastic lid, but it's supposed to be air tight.   Plus it was a good size.   There were around 3 cups of garlic cloves.     So far there is no residual odor in the freezer.  Yay!     Considering how much garlic we tend to use in daily cooking, I don't think it will last long enough to see if it does last 6 months in the freezer.  I'm happy that it won't be sprouting on the shelf though

Ash Forests no more

The natural forest cover in this area is deciduous trees.  Plus we're on the edge of the Carolinian Forest area, which runs south, east and west of our area.   For a heavily rural farming area, there are a lot of bush lots, small conservation areas and tree lines, which have a great diversity of flora.  It is unexpectedly beautiful in it's own way.  

But the Emerald Ash Borer has caused huge amounts of devastation.   There are were a lot of Ash trees in our area.  For years now, we've been getting downed Ash trees for firewood.    This year though, our hikes have shown us the reality of the Ash wood lots in our area.   Acre after acre of ash trees, cut down.   You could tell here that some of the dying or dead ash trees were left standing because in places, there would be nothing left.  

Big or small, the Emerald Ash Borer didn't discriminate over which trees it attacked.   It looks like it went from tree, to tree, to tree, eating it's way though whole forests.   

I've been careful about where I've been snapping pictures on our hikes, choosing more uplifting, happier, photos, with little damage and few downed trees.   Pretty much all of the trails have some Ash trees cut down for safety reasons.

I think there have been places we've been with more trees cut down, but here we were walking and walking through this.   It was difficult to see the differences in some places, as it all looked so much the same - trees cut down, left to decompose on the forest floor, a few other trees left standing.

Maybe it's just with the snow and lack of the canopy of leaves, it looks worse.   It seemed just a tad like apocalyptic  scenery from a sci-fi film when we went out on Saturday.  What is sadder yet, is this is the closest trail to home!    We had to cut the ash trees in our yard down two years ago :(

In happier news; flax singles!   I'm spinning flax tow, so it has a few slubby bits and maybe isn't quite as fine as I'd like it to be.  All in all though, I'm happy with it.     I'm wet spinning it, from the commercially prepared tow flax top - say that 10 times quickly, lol!  I'm using a z twist because it doesn't seem to spin any differently if I use s twist.  I figured I might as well just make it easy to spin by rote in that case, so z twist it is.   There are about 328 yards in this skein.

I was looking at lights for better photos and although a decent set up isn't horribly expensive, there are a couple of other major house renos/repairs still in the rotation.  So I got a piece of white bristol board, and two pieces of white foam core board.  I taped them together to make a reflector and put them in front of the window.   It's not perfect, but it's not bad either.   I think with some fiddling it could be better.    

New Mittens

 I decided to make a new pair of mittens.   There was nothing wrong with the ones I made a couple of years ago.  They were still in good shape and were still two of them, which seems to be important :)   I was a bit concerned that I'd be in a bit of a bind if I lost a mitten when on a trail, or getting groceries.  It's happened before, but I usually have a couple of spare pairs lying around.  However this was the spare pair before and I haven't replaced them, so it was time.

I had a bunch of Corriedale roving bits and pieces, so I dragged out the blending board.   The blending board is a fun tool.  I have mine because it was a lovely gift.  My first introduction to the blending board was a demo one of the students did at a class.   She brought out the board and a gazillion bits and pieces of fibre, piled them on the blending board haphazardly while poking them down once in a while.  Then she pulled off a single, gigantic, messy rolag.  I couldn't understand why anyone would want a tool which produced what was likely a difficult to spin, chaotic mass of fibre.    Luckily there are a myriad of videos out there which show how easy it is to make functional rolags on a blending board.    I wish I'd taken photos of these rolags, because they were much prettier than the resulting yarn!

This is a soft, bulky yarn, using  purple, raspberry, navy and pink colours. I used the rolags and a long draw to make the Corriedale soft and airy.  The yarn is thicker, on purpose, than I would normally spin for mittens, but I was looking for something warmer than my current ones.   By spinning the yarn thicker and then planning on knitting it on smaller  needles, I could create a dense mitten fabric which held the heat better, and let less air whistle through on blustery days.  I've done this before and they are great mittens for scraping the snow off the car, walking and general outdoors activities.  Not so good if you need to manipulate a camera button or other things that require a bit more precise finger action.   

The mittens were quick to knit up because of the bulky yarn.   I was using bamboo double points, 3.5 mm and I was worried one would break, but they did just fine.   The mittens fit pretty perfectly, which is nice but of course I did have my hand easily accessible for when I wanted to try it on while knitting.    I didn't use a pattern because I've knitted a lot of mittens over the years and a plain mitten with a thumb gusset is pretty formulaic.   I just had to play around with a couple of gauge samples before I started to knit for real.

It's a good thing I had them finished and ready to go.   On Friday they were calling for a crazy amount of freezing rain.  The forecast I checked showed about 8 hours of freezing rain and another 4 of snow/freeing rain mixtures.   We'd battened down the hatches here, gassing up the generator, bringing in 3 days worth of wood, scrubbing and filling up buckets with water.    We're on a well and if the power goes out, so does our well pump.  I didn't want to run out of water for the chooks.

It ended up that we had a limited amount of freezing rain.  Just enough to make the world sparkle.   On Saturday, when the temperature was warming up, we went for a hike.   I brought both pairs of mittens for some reason, which when we got to the trail, turned out to be that my sweetie had forgotten his thick gloves.    Now he has my old mittens and I have these new ones.  Not horribly pretty but happily, they are really functional.

The world was beautiful with a crystal sparkle.   Because the temperature was just hovering above the freezing mark, we did get dripped on a bit.  The trail however, was snowy and not icy at all.  The sun shone for a bit, which made it a spectacular and fun short hike.