Independence Days challenge, week 20

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

1. Plant something: No.
2. Harvest something: Eggs. Good King Henry, swiss chard, kale, chives (sounds like a bunch, but we're talking enough to make one meal of "green eggs" for the kids. But hey, it's something grown in my own very shady yard.) Chocolate mint, sweet cicely, bee balm, thyme, False Solomon Seal berries.
3. Preserve something: Elderberry tincture. The blueberries that were dehydrating last time I wrote turned out to be 1 1/2 qts. dried. Froze 5 1/2 lbs. cauliflower, 3 lbs broccoli. Dried red clover. Canned 8-1/2 qts pears, 4 1/2-pints pear butter.
4. Waste not: Made 3 diaper covers from thrifted, holey wool sweaters. Made a dish scrubber from some mesh bags lemons came in (we eat only local produce...with the exception of lemons. I couldn't give them up in my tea! I'm trying to grow a potted lemon tree, but so far, it's produced nothing.) Made the pear butter from the cores and peels left over from canning pears.
5. Preparation and storage: Last week I forgot to mention that I went to a great tag sale where I got a $1 percolator to replace our broken drip coffee maker, a 16-volume children's encyclopedia, and a manual typewriter (for use with the kids in my program now; for homeschooling later). This week, I went to a wonderful sewing-supplies sale, and got some fabrics which will become clothes for Lucy. I also forgot to mention buying 3 rain barrels a few weeks back. This week, I added 3 boxes salt to storage. The shelves are slowly, slowly starting to fill in (see photo above), although we're still far behind where we should be at this time of year.
6. Build community food systems: As we canned this week, my friends kept asking whether the families in my program realize just how much time I put into food preservation for their kids. They don't, really. But thinking about it made me think about the impact of feeding our family plus 8 other kids a week. I love, for example, that when the kids polished off the bowl of blueberries I gave them for lunch this week and I said there were no more, they asked "Why? Did you save them for the winter?" Yeah, I did. And I love that at 4, they know that and think of it as normal. It is their normal.
7. Eat the food: We ate a lot of eggs this week: green eggs with the kids, a great frittata with veggies from our friend's garden. And we've been gorging on the peaches and pears we picked.

She keeps growing, and growing...

...1 1/2 pounds in the last 2 weeks! Time for more diaper covers.



I made the two pale-pink pairs from one cashmere sweater. It was only a women's large to start with, and once it was felted, it was pretty tiny. So I got creative and combined the two diaper-cover patterns I've used so far. The sleeves were so long, I was able to cut two legs from each one. They look really strange hanging on the line (like upside-down sweaters), but as you can see in the top photo, they're pretty cute on. (You can also see Lucy's face is almost cleared up after Friday's incident.) The darker pair is my standard cut-off-the-sleeves-and-sew-them-together style, except that I'd already used the cuffs of the sleeves for this pair. I'm hoping the ends will be fine as is. If not, I'll add some trim to the bottoms.

We're finding that we much prefer the homemade covers to the store-bought ones. They sometimes look a bit goofy, and they definitely look homemade (not in a good way), but they're easier to put on, harder for her to take off, slimmer under clothing, much more affordable, and cute! Some of the covers we've bought cost $30 a piece. These two sweaters probably cost me $8, and I got four covers from them--that's $2 a piece. I can't imagine that I'll be buying any more. (Except maybe some more of the totally adorable custom-made crocheted ones I bought on Etsy. I love those!)

Home Sewer's Exchange

Ok, let's ignore the fact that we spent 6 hours in the ER last night and didn't get home until 2 in the morning with our poor, pitiful red and blotchy baby. (Allergic reaction? Virus? It's still unclear. But she's in good spirits, and we're in wait-and-observe mode.) We're going to move on to happier things, stopping every few seconds in the writing of it to watch her play and wonder in awe at her amazing disposition (she was still making friends with everyone in the ER at 1 in the morning...)

So, today, when Lucy seemed to have made it through the night ok and she and Andi were all set to spend the morning in bed, I left briefly to go to the annual "Home Sewer's Exchange" at a church around the corner. Why, oh why, have I never gone before? For some reason, I thought it would be cheesy sewing crafts for sale, or maybe for trade; I couldn't quite figure it out. But this time, they'd added a big new banner to the front of the church, shouting out "fabric! notions! patterns!" Oh, my gosh--2 full rooms; tables and tables; and church-rummage-sale prices! Look what I got:



I grabbed a bundle of sewing magazines, not sure what they were, but for 25 cents a bundle, how could I pass them up? (All the other sewing ones got snatched before I could get to the pile.) And I chose some bits of fabric, trying to be careful not to go wild grabbing everything. Do you see those prices? Some were a dime. Some were a quarter. One was a big "splurge" at $2.

I liked how these two looked together. Maybe a top and bloomers for Lucy? Or maybe two layers of a tiered skirt? 60 cents!



A pile of miscellaneous who-knows-what-for:



This one's heavy, and I envisioned it as pants for Lucy. Then later I thought maybe a jumper would be cute. Maybe I could squeeze out both?



And those embroidery patterns! Oh, what joy when I found those! The woman at that table said, apologetically, "I want a dollar for those; does that seem fair?" Fair? It feels like I'm ripping you off! I'm hoping I'll find some time to do some of these this winter.




I can hardly wait for next year's sale! In the meantime, I'm going to go rock my sick baby to sleep.

Dis-cards

While we were away, we missed my sister's birthday. Good...it bought me some time to make a gift, which I'd somehow failed to do earlier. Not much time, though. Think, think...what's quick, but still special? What would she like? She's in massive de-cluttering mode, so most things I think of to give her just seem like more "stuff" she won't want. I perused some of my craft books, and I found a great idea in here:


Shop Indie Bookstores

(Quilts by Denyse Schmidt). Quilted note cards. Perfect! She's great at writing letters and often uses note cards. And I've been wanting to experiment more with quilting, and I love how this technique uses the smallest scraps.



My sister wears a lot of turquoise, so I began with what I had along turquoise/greenish lines. (Including a lovely new bit I got in the mail...more on that later...)



As my little scrap pile by the sewing machine dwindled, I happened to glance down into the trash basket and spotted some scraps discarded as being "too small" after making the birdie scarf the other day. Not too small for this! Back out they came...(don't worry, it's just sewing stuff in there; not too nasty). That led me to my bag of orange scraps for some coordinating fabrics, and soon I ended up with these:



(I hold them vertically, but I can't get the pictures to post that way. Something else to figure out...)

I love them! I can see myself making lots more of these. I was particularly intrigued to notice how the fabric changed as I quilted it. In several cases, I didn't think I liked how the card had come out until I did the quilting stitches. So interesting.

Independence Days challenge, week 19

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge. We just got back home late Friday night, so this is what we did on the long weekend. Yup, it was crazy!

1. Plant something: Nope.
2. Harvest something: Eggs. A few grape tomatoes. 11 lbs blueberries from Running Fox Farm, 3 pecks peaches and 3 pecks pears from Quonquont Farm, elderberries from neighbors and roadsides. Red clover.



3. Preserve something: Dried 1/2 pt. elderberries and ? blueberries (they're still in the dehydrator). Canned 19 qts. peaches. Made 3 pts. elderberry sryup. Froze 1 1/2 lbs blueberries. Canned 9 1/2 pts. "blubarb" jam (blueberry-rhubarb), following this recipe from Chez Beeper Bebe. Canned 5 1/2-pts. peach-blueberry jam. Got ? 1/2 pts. peach honey, 2 1/2-pts. elderberry-peach jam, and 5&1/2 pts. quince pectin from our friend who was canning with us (we share labor and our kitchen and supplies; this was our share of what he made).
4. Waste not: The peach honey was a good example of using all the scraps--it's made from the peels that would otherwise have gone to the chickens (they got them afterwards).
5. Preparation and storage: Working on getting our canning shelves re-organized.
6. Build community food systems: While chicken-sitting for us this past week, our friend decided he wants to get some chickens, too (yes, we recruit!). And we've been canning, as usual, with these friends, which makes it a community experience, and much more fun, too. One of them worked up the nerve to ask some (politically polar-opposite to us) neighbors for their elderberries, something we've been wanting to do for years. They said yes, in exchange for a jar of jam. The husband was very eager to try them, as previously "we just let the birds have them."
7. Eat the food: We ate a lot of take-out to accomplish all this in a weekend. But we did have a great dinner of roasted veggies and fruit cobbler.

Hi! We're back!

Just stopping in quickly to say hi; we're back from visiting family in Virginia. We're frantically trying to catch up on canning, but I'll be back to regular posting as soon as I can!

Independence Days challenge, week 18

I wasn't able to post this while we were on vacation, so here it is, Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

1. Plant something: No.
2. Harvest something: Eggs. A few grape tomatoes, and the usual herb-garden run-by kid snacks.
3. Preserve something: 3 1/2 qts canned peaches, but one quart jar broke as it touched the water (argh!).
4. Waste not: Nothing new.
5. Preparation and storage: Finally, I added some food to our much-depleted storage--just a bit, but a start! I got 25 lbs dried black beans at our co-op on sale; now I just have to get in the habit of actually thinking ahead and soaking them. Also added 3 cans of baking powder.
6. Build community food systems: Well, we're visiting family, demonstrating our "freakish" local-food eating habits when we buy food. I doubt it will change any minds, but it's at least one step toward normalizing what seems weird to others.
7. Eat the food: Nothing new.