Post Thanksgiving Post

Ugh.  We did Thanksgiving on Friday this year, as my sister (ER nurse) had to work on the day itself.  Fortunately her shift was light on anything resembling carving knife accidents!  But I feel that, having cooked a complete Thanksgiving dinner all by myself, I finally get an Adulting Award.

(A 16-lb turkey, giblet gravy, garlic mashed potatoes, stuffing, succotash, jazzed-up cornbread, homemade cranberry sauce, glazed carrots, apple pie, pumpkin pie, homemade whipped cream.  And jello because I knew the three kidlets would not eat pie.  And ALL the leftovers are in my fridge because she wouldn't take any.  Also I steamed 18 eggs because my boys love them as snacks.)

Today, I am determined, I shall sew.  My project started as this:

Nineteen white and cream fabrics, and fifty-two purple/blue/gray/black ones.  No reason for the numbers, that just happens to be what I pulled from the easily accessible tubs in the garage.  Oh, and that stack pictured is what was LEFT after cutting.  Argh!  But I took a 4.5" strip from each, which got cut into these:

And then sewn together:

I've got the small triangles sewn to the large to make squares.  (I ended up overcutting on the small triangles.  Must think of something to do with them... later.)  Next I start assembling the blocks.  I'm working from a pattern in the March 1994 issue of Traditional Quilter, but I'm adding more blocks so it'll be slightly bigger.  I love some of the older quilting magazines.  They have patterns and attitudes that just aren't the same as what comes out in the modern magazines.

Rectangles and Triangles

So I finished up the blocks for this month's Block Lotto and just have to post about them there:

And I also sewed together the remaining scraps from the guild into ninety HSTs and stitched them together:

It measures 13.5"x11.875".  Wonderful Husband isn't keen on that black triangle near the center, but for me it was an exercise in using up all the scraps.  And now that they're all used up and into flimsies, I'm hoping to get to a bigger project.  Three weeks until my project workspace goes away.  Go!

Surfacing

Let's see.  I've made a flannel rag quilt (35"x49") for Squiddle for the car.  He picked out every single pink flannel I had; I ended up telling him that a quilt needs contrast, so it's pinks and blues now.  Ten bajillion snips into the seams!  It took me three days to do them all because I'd worn a spot sore on my thumb after the first day.  Next up is a rag quilt for Jazzy for the car.  I think I'll pull all the bright flannels and see if he likes those.  No picture right now because the quilt is in the car, as intended.

Jazzy will be starting preschool on Monday.  On one hand, I feel bad that I am not the one helping him with his speech delay, but on the other hand, I know a good parent gets their child the help they need, even/especially when it comes to outsourcing things to professionals.  So for now I'll be driving both boys to school four days a week and picking Jazzy up four days a week and Squiddle on Wednesdays.  We'll see how long it lasts, whether the parking lot in the morning will drive me mad or not.  I'm just not feeling sanguine about putting my three-year-old on a bus yet.

At the auction last weekend I got two chairs and a side table and set them up in the living room bump-out.  It's a nice little spot for sitting and reading, drinking tea, or working on handcrafts.  Which is what I've been doing, since I found a 90% complete Bucilla's Celestial cross-stitch kit at the thrift store.  For $2!  That's at the level of insult on top of injury.

I also got two more bookcases set up and hauled a bunch more boxes of books in from the garage and got them sorted on the shelves.  I think we need one more half-bookcase on the right, but Wonderful Husband disagrees.  Me, I'm of the mind that if we're leaving our books in boxes in the garage, what's the point of having them?  We can't read them if they're out there.  We also went through an interesting little experiment where much of our childhood reading is mutually unknown to one another.  There are a few overlaps - Narnia, Tolkein - but largely we were going "huh?" at each other. :)

Also this week I went to Quilters By the Bay, which meets across the toll bridge and is a little bit farther from me than the group that meets in Port Orchard.  But I had such fun!  There was laughter and joking during the meeting, and I've missed that.  The meeting itself was a sort of workshop on string blocks.  Which I know how to do, but there were some variations I hadn't thought about before.  The team I was on made the ten blocks below, for charity quilts:

I liked the bright fabrics we were working with, so I asked if I could keep the scraps to turn into a mini.  One sandwich baggie of scraps plus a black remnant has so far yielded this (10.75"x9.375"):

and I still have ninety half-square triangles to pair up and sew with black to make a second mini.  Part of me is hoping that I can use the eight hours of child-free time I'll get from Jazzy being in school to do some serious writing and sewing again.

Squishing fruit into jars and jugs

A small mystery solved: the partially eaten apples I've been finding under the red apple tree are not (entirely) the work of the local rabbit population.  They're the work of the local bird population!  The red apples have thinner skin and softer flesh than the red-green stripey ones, so I guess it makes sense the local wildlife would prefer them.  (Myself, I prefer the stripey ones.  They're kind of like Fuji apples. Who knows, they may even be Fujis.)

We finally have all the equipment to press our own cider, so this afternoon the boys and I picked a basket and a box full.  Then I washed most of a box, Wonderful Husband cranked the grinder, and manned the press until it got a bit too dark to continue.

When we did this at the cider pressing event, the basket-and-boxful netted us about two and a half gallons.  Today's most-of-a-boxful got us most of a gallon.  So, slightly less, perhaps?  It might be due to different equipment not being able to press the ground fruit as hard.  Or it might be due to me deliberately picking lots of the small/misshapen apples off the striped tree (the red tree doesn't seem as prone to them).  I'm going on the theory that they're the apples not really suited for eating or cutting up for pies etc., so I might as well get use out of them in the form of juice.

I also sorted the quinces, stored the unblemished ones out in the garage, and made another batch of jam from blemished ones (after cutting the bad bits out, natch).  But I forgot the lemon juice, so it didn't deepen to the lovely ruby red the first batch did.  Ah well.  I did check out the quince tree and it's got less than two dozen fruit left on it, so at least that is finally coming to a slow.  And, oddly, one of the fruit that's already fallen as well as one of the ones still on the tree is definitely a pear.  I was told by the previous owner that it was a pear tree, and apparently pears are frequently grafted onto quince rootstock, so... was it a pear tree at one point but for some reason the rootstock took over?  I likely will never know.

Tomorrow: more cider pressing~!  And jam making.

Homestead Happenings

Well, we have a cider press now, but the apple grinder has been delayed and won't be delivered until tomorrow.  We have five emptied and cleaned milk jugs waiting, and figure a good deal of what we squeeze into juice is going to go into the deep freezer.

The windfall apples have slowed down (either that or the local bunnies are eating the whole apples, which is actually possible given how little remaining I've found of some) but there are still tons on the trees.

Meantime, I'm drowning in quince!  I did a morning cleanup under the tree yesterday, and brought in about a dozen.  My afternoon cleanup netted another seventeen!  I mean, I cooked eight or so into poached quince for dinner Sunday (to go with lamb-garlic sausages, and zucchini sauteed with matchsticked elephant garlic, seasoned with salt-pepper-oregano-pepper flakes-cinnamon), but I seriously, seriously need to start turning them into preserves.  My big harvest basket is heaped full.

(ETA: Have now made a batch of quince jam. Need to make much more.)

I also started a quart and a half-gallon of red cabbage apple ginger sauerkraut fermenting out in the garage.  I discovered that Wilco carries actual fermentation crocks, but for all the parts, they range from $65 (2-gallon) to $130 (5-gallon) apiece.  Which... they're tempting, but.  The only things I really ferment are sauerkraut and pickles, and I can do those in canning jars.  I have about six or seven sets of weights and fermentation lock lids.  (I just need to keep my eye open for more half-gallon canning jars.)

And the reason we were at Wilco was to get wellies for Wonderful Husband and myself, so we could try the classic Pacific NorthWest hobby of clamming.  Which we did.  Except... the two closest clamming beaches are inaccessible, and when we got to the slightly farther away one, about half an hour past lowest tide, very little of the area clams would be was above the water.  So I went back and studied the tide charts, and realized that the low low tides for the next couple months are... at night.  Well.  That puts that plan back on the drawing board!

Yesterday, I ran to IKEA to return a drawer organizer which just didn't fit our kitchen drawers, and pick up some more shelves for the bookcases.  Then I met up with my sister and Niecelet and went thrift storing down in Lacey.  One shirt and two pants for Jazzy, who will now only wear knits, not woven stuff, a scarf and a hat for Squiddle, who has been complaining at the bus stop that he is cold even in his coat, and two pairs of jeans (one of mine died the death over the weekend) and three shirts for me.  And today, after an appointment, we hit up Goodwill, where I found a shirt apiece for the boys and a very nice almost complete celestial cross-stitch piece.

The Boys Discover Their Parents' Anime Collection

Wonderful Husband bolted the new media storage cabinet to the wall on Sunday, so I dragged out our boxes of DVDs and Blu-rays and began to fill it.

Problem: we have four boxes.  It will only fit about three.

A lot of this problem, of course, is predicated on the fact that we have several anime series, which take anywhere from four to twelve DVDs each.  So we've agreed that we need to winnow out some which are not our favorites, and for some of the must-keep series, see if they've been re-released in more compact forms.  Spend more money to save space, I guess.

But this afternoon, Squiddle pulls a DVD out of box four and shows it to me.  "Can we watch this now?"

It is Princess Tutu.  Of which he has only ever seen the (AWESOME!) "Håll om mig nu" AMV.

Wonderful Husband and I each independently give consent, and, well... my boys are now watching their first non-Ghibli anime.  And it's a good one.

(And, hmm, the whole series is now available as one single Blu-ray instead of six DVDs.  Step one to a less bulky anime collection!)

Quince and Auction Finds

Well, the quince pie I tried making was... not quite a disaster, but let's just say that better than half of it ended up in the bin.  The membrillo, on the other hand, turned out quite well.  There's just rather a lot of it.  Well, let's call it a year's supply....  Next I'm going to try a couple recipes from Food in Jars and see how they come out.

Yesterday, despite (still) being sick, I went to the monthly Stokes Auction again.  A lot of the stuff I bid on or wanted to bid on went for more than I wanted to pay, but I did get two things:

A bunch of pots, for all those strawberry runners I keep rooting.  Seriously, I bought two plants and now I have upward of twenty!  And for future patio plant needs.  A lady standing next to me asked if I wanted the piece of pottery painted with a dragon in the rightmost carton.  I didn't particularly, so she gave me a couple dollars for it and said she planned to hide it in a park for kids to find.  $39.

I also got another sofa.  Much smaller than the last one I bought, this actually fit inside my Fit!  But it's sturdy and comfy and I've vacuumed it thoroughly, washed the cushion cover, and reassembled it.  Interestingly, it has four rings on the sides of the cushion cover, and four elasticated hooks on the base, so the cushion hooks in and isn't going anywhere.  And the best part?  It cost $17.  So now there's something in the living room that Wonderful Husband and I can sit on to watch TV.  And the folding metal chairs can go out to the garage.