Author Archives: Cabol

Dec 6 2010

Getting my crafty on

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I’m not sure if my upcoming unemployment is increasing the release of crafty hormones, or if I am a pod person, but lately I can’t seem to get enough of the craftiness. Probably I’ve just been spending too much time looking at craft blogs supersaturated with holiday pretties.

Right now I am working on Anya’s Christmas stocking using a pattern from Mason Dixon knitting. It’s a challenge for me not only because of its sockiness but because it has color work in it, and I’ve not done much of that at all. I hope to finish it by Christmas, but who knows.

I am also working on some wire projects the details of which I cannot divulge as they are presenty things. I’ve never really worked with wire, and I find I enjoy its bendy ways. I see more shiny metal in my future.

I made our holiday cards again this year and tried out embossing for the first time. It’s a bit messy, so if you are lucky enough to get one please don’t be too harsh on all the stray glitters. If you don’t get one, it’s probably your fault for not sending me a card last year. I do have some extras…….

I should have pictures to show of these wonderful things. But I don’t. I do have one final project, which I just finished, that I photographed. I tried to make a hip scene like all the crafty blogs do, but I need some practice. I present to you, our Countdown Blocks…..

I got the idea from the Sew Mama, Sew website. Now we can countdown all sorts of things like birthdays, first day of school, or the last Harry Potter movie.

What’s next? Socks? Hand puppets? Sculpting with a chainsaw?

Nov 23 2010

The one about the turkey bird

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Hush little Anya, don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you a turkey bird
And if that turkey bird won’t gobble
Mama’s gonna buy you a road made of cobble
And if that road of cobble won’t roll
Mama’s gonna buy you a mixing bowl
And if that mixing bowl won’t stir
Mama’s gonna buy you a cat that purrs
And if that cat that purrs runs away
Mama’s gonna buy you a bale of hay
And if that bale of hay gets eaten
Mama’s gonna buy you a room to neaten

Nov 17 2010

Another list

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I like lists. Here’s what we’ve been up to this last week.

  • I peeled, sliced, cored about 5% of the apples we had. The last of these went into the dehydrator this morning.
  • The dining room / kitchen is nearing visual completion, but there is still a ton of stuff to put away, so I haven’t taken pictures to post yet. It’s a great space, but it needs a new name. Suggestions?
  • Everyone at work now knows I’m leaving. It’s weird. I feel a kinship with all the congressmen who weren’t re-elected. I am a lame duck! Quack!
  • Time to start working on the 2011 calendar. If you’re family, send pictures!
  • My new obsession is making gift tags. I may even try to sell some. Maybe I’ll open an Etsy shop like all the cool crafty people. I bet June Cleaver would have had an Etsy store.
  • Went scrapbooking Saturday. Our group meets about once a month. I made some cards, and I need to send them out since most are already tardy. Maybe I’ll put cards on my Etsy store, too! I could design a line of belated cards. Tardiness could be my “thing.” Tardy gift tags? Sure, why not! Everyone needs a niche. Of course, I’d probably send all orders late.
  • I’m nervous about my upcoming change in employment. People keep telling me I’ll be expected to cook. I don’t cook. Perhaps I’ll do a Julie/Julia thing and pick a cookbook and cook something from it everyday for a year and write a blog about it and get a movie done about it and become rich and famous and hire a personal chef and never have to cook again.
  • Anya is 37″ tall and talks really fast. I think we need to have a talk with Aunt Rebecca. First she taught Anya to suck her thumb, and now she has apparently passed along the fast-talk skills. What’s next? A love for snails???
  • After reading all the stuff about the TSA scans and pat downs, I don’t know if I’ll ever fly again.
  • Should I be concerned it’s too foggy outside to tell if it’s raining?

I’ve noticed writing in my scrapbooks is a lot easier when I blog about stuff. Especially when I blog in lists.

Nov 8 2010

It is now Soon

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We celebrated Halloween at Anya’s school. They had songs and stories by the kids, a scavenger hunt, a parade, and a potluck. Anya was a magic princess (she had a wand but no wings, so I don’t know if I can say fairy princess). Last minute I crocheted her some jewelry: a necklace with jingle bells, two bracelets with jingle bells, and two hair thingies. I also made hair thingies for me and bracelets for me, Andy, and my parents. Anya had a fantastic time running around with the other princesses/fairies and the dragons and various creatures.

My parents ended up staying a few extra days to help get the kitchen put back together, which was good because my Mom still hadn’t made me tostados by the day they were originally going to leave. Must. Have. Tostados.

It took me, Andy, and my Dad to get the stone (soapstone…soap stone?) out of the back of our truck. I think we managed to escape injury (Dad, you still okay?) by using the tricks of ancient Egypt: pulleys, raised platforms, and bright, orange, rubberized gloves.

Fascinated with all the cardboard and foamy wrap stuff that the cabinets were packed in, my Mom channeled her sewing energy into making costumes. The curtain hemming plans were thwarted by supreme household chaos and lack of places to work and stinkbugs. She did take the living room curtains home with her to work on. (Yahoo!)

I’m torn between posting a photo of the kitchen almost done or waiting until it is done. We have to wait for a local cabinet dude to fix one of the doors that was sorta not done right when sent to us, and we need to put the last few doors on some drawers, and do some painting, and get and install door hardware, and clean all that stuff off the counter I need to figure out what to do with. Come on, Andy, get busy!!!!

Nov 3 2010

Life is Good

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Quick Update

  • I slipped on the steps going down into our living room and landed very soundly on my tailbone. Two hours in the ER got me a lighter wallet and a suggestion to buy a butt pillow.
  • Saturday we discovered that Larry, a cat we’ve had in the family for about 10 years, is a girl and not a boy. This could explain why s/he’s always been so cranky. Should we continue with life as it was or should we change his/her name to Lorry and buy him/her a pink collar?
  • Anya not only knows how to add DVDs to the Netflix queue, she knows how to move them to the top of the list. Instead of a movie I’d picked, Dora will be showing up in our mailbox tomorrow.

  • My mother loves me. She washed all our dishes for us for about a week…in the bathtub.
  • The day my parents went back home, Andy got our new kitchen sink working (water comes out the faucet AND goes out the drain!). Good thing, too, because I’m not washing dishes in the bathtub.

  • We forgot to carve our jack-o-lantern on Halloween, so we’ll probably do it tonight or maybe this weekend.
  • At the end of the year, I will be resigning from my job to be Loafkeeper Farm’s very own June Cleaver. I have the apron, but will someone send me the pearls?
  • Scrapbook tape (the red-backed stuff that comes on a ring) is an essential tool for attaching drawer fronts to drawers.

  • More pictures soon.
Oct 12 2010

Windfall

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After Anya and I came home from school today, I drug her out to the apple tree. Most of the apples have fallen, but there were a lot on the ground that were still fine and a few really nice ones with a cut or small blemish. Anya got bored quickly, and I told her she could go back in the house but no tv or computer. Hrmpf. I guess apples are more fun than the house-tv-computer. Plus Buddy finally joined us, and he’s fun to talk to. Anya seemed upset when he crossed through the barbed wire fence to the neighbor’s yard and I wouldn’t let her follow. I was tempted to toss her over because it looked like lots of nice apples had fallen on that side, but I figured I’d hit my ‘bad parent’ quota for the day when I sent her to school in pants that were apparently so large her teacher pinched and sewed the waist in two spots to keep them from falling down. (Yeah, Andy dressed her, but I didn’t notice and change her.) Even sticking to our side of the fence, I collected a very full paper grocery bag of apples to add to our hamper.

Anya and I gave one of the more damaged apples to the chickens, but it seemed to confuse them. I told Anya we’d check back tomorrow to see if they’d figured out what to do with it. “Yeah!”

Oct 9 2010

Car Knitting

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Sometimes I think about all the hundreds of hours I spent sitting in the car going to work, shopping, wherever…everywhere here is far away…all those hours when I could have been knitting. (It makes me almost as sad as thinking about the lost hours of my youth spent watching Little House on the Prairie reruns.) Why did it take me so long (maybe two years?) to make the connection? Riding in car = Perfect time to knit. Since I realized this, I rarely go anywhere without my knitting bag.

Not only does car knitting make the time go by more quickly, it keeps my eyes and mind off Andy’s sometimes crazy driving. He doesn’t think it’s crazy, but, well, he’s crazy. I do often worry we’ll have an accident and I’ll be impaled with a needle. I try in particular to keep the pointy parts from aiming towards my eyes, and I make sure if I rest a dpn in my lap it’s parallel to my body. Is this weird? Do other car knitters fear having an eye-kebab?

Things I’ve learned about car knitting:

  • The commute to/from work is exactly one hat long.
  • ALWAYS finish a row before exiting the car (trust me).
  • Let the yarn balls run free in the floorboard; sure they’ll get a bit dirty but it makes the yarn flow a lot easier.
  • Be 100% sure you have everything you could possibly need in your bag before you hit the road. It really sucks to finish a color and not have brought the next color and have to waste all that knitting time with your eyes closed trying not to scream as the car careens around a curve.
  • Don’t do anything too complicated. Of course it depends on you as to what that means, but for me it means anything where I have to use a stitch counter.
  • NEVER leave your metal needles in the sunlight. (I just learned this one yesterday. Ow.)

Here are two recent products of my car knitting.

Anya’s backpack…

…and a pair of felted slippers that were supposed to be for Anya and will be…in a few years when her feet are a couple inches longer.

Sep 28 2010

Pommes, pommes de terre, and oak

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We recently moved our web host, so you’ll notice this space had changed a little bit. It will probably change again as we have time to play around with wordpress. While we were moving, Andy wouldn’t let me post anything new. Big ole meanie.

Anya has been in school now for a few weeks, and she loves it. She’d live there if she could, I think. They’ve already had two field trips, and I was lucky to be able to arrange my schedule so I could go with her on both. The first field trip took the school to a local farm to help harvest potatoes. The kids had planted the potatoes earlier in the year as part of a farm-to-school program to help get local food into the schools. There were two bus loads of fifth graders from the local elementary school there, too, and the big kids followed the potato plow like hungry cats after an open can of tuna. The kids swarmed over the freshly-turned ground and vacuumed up all the potatoes before the little kids could get there. It was okay, though, because the little kids still got to play in lots of dirt.

On the second trip, we went to an apple orchard a few miles from our house. Turns out we’ve met the woman who owns the place when we went to pick up our milk share. When she bought the property, it was overgrown, and she’s been working very hard to get things back into shape. Alas, the little kids mostly were stuck with picking apples off the ground what with them being shorter than most of the tree branches, but they all still had a great time. This was the first time I’d seen Anya eat an apple peel!

After we picked apples, we had a little picnic in the grass and then watched some of the bigger kids use the orchard’s cider press to make fresh cider, which was (of course) fabulous. I came home with a big bag of apples and dreams of fresh apple pie. Later that afternoon, the school had a little festival to celebrate autumn’s arrival. We ate fresh applesauce made by the teachers and watched the kids race carrying apples in spoons and jump over an ever-widening river in what made me think of a horizontal version of limbo.

Inspired by the trip to the orchard, I decided to investigate our own apple trees. We have three on our property, but we’ve mostly neglected them. The apples always seemed to be puny and wormy and not worth the effort. A spring or two ago, though, my dad and I pruned the tree closest to the house, and I think it paid off this year. A few days ago we went to check out that tree and it is loaded with large and tasty yellow apples. We picked a few to add to my bag from the orchard and had plans to pick more, but then it started to rain and hasn’t stopped.

Andy has been busy on yet another home reno project. The latest is putting down hardwood floors in our kitchen/dining room area. We picked up some “rustic” red oak flooring, and Andy has been face nailing it with old-timey looking, square-headed nails. (Rustic = stuff that is all sorts of colors/doesn’t match and has worm holes and knot holes and other small flaws in it. Rustic also = a lot cheaper. Luckily, we like rustic.) Yesterday he finished the floor in the dining room area. We decided not to stain the wood and just put poly on top. It’s definitely a nice change from the purple-painted sub floor we’ve had for the last three years. I can’t wait for the peeling, dirt-colored, stick-on vinyl squares in the kitchen area to vanish, too.