Preparations, Part Two

The Oregon Autumn Cardigan is continuing to grow, but slowly, because I've been busy. When we head out next week, I'll have more time to spend knitting as we drive. Can't do much else. I'll have to pack my good scissors for the other steeks.

We've continued to walk, the dogs and I, putting in 2+ miles a day. About three times a week, Charlie joins us. When he does, Sandy tends to stay right by him.

This is our normal route, starting at our house, walking to the entrance to the trail that's north of us and continuing northwards to Bear Creek Rd., where we turn around, water the dogs (mostly Sandy) and turn around, going back the way we came. Instead of getting off the trail where we came in, we continue south on the trail until we reach the park near the recreation center. Then we turn around again and head back, getting off the trail at the entrance that's south of our home.

I try to leave the house about 7:00, but it's usually about 15 minutes later if Charlie joins us. He's a night owl, so getting up at 7:00 AM is a real sacrifice. We can't go later, though, because we've had very warm weather. It's always much warmer in the sun than in the shade, and there's more shade early in the morning.

We got out the wading pool for the pups. Mostly for Sandy, because he's the water dog.

One of my assignments this week was to get the bed made in the R·Pod. Charlie has found the mattress a little thin for his liking, so he ordered a mattress topper to fit the short queen trailer mattress. We decided to put it under the mattress instead of on top. Some people just replaced the whole mattress, but it would be very difficult to make the bed with a thicker mattress, because you have to pull up the corners while you're kneeling on it. It's hard enough lifting a thick mattress when you can walk around the bed. (The baskets on the shelf are empty right now, but we have plenty of items that will go in them.)

One of the things I did this week was stow away the non-perishable food for our trip. The canned food went under the seat next to the door. The dried food, tea, etc, went over the stove, with the dishes. So I wouldn't forget where I put things, I made a diagram. I numbered each storage location and listed what kinds of things are in each place.

I'm busy now planning menus for the trip. I doubt I'll be able to fit enough meals in the freezer, so I have to have some things that can be cooked on site. We expect not to have electricity (other than our battery or what we can get from our generator), so we won't be able to use our microwave/convection oven. I'm taking the pressure cooker to use like a wet oven on top of the stove. (I did this when we lived on the boat, because our little toaster oven wouldn't have power when we put out to sea.) Some things can be heated up on the stovetop, but if it's something that can't be stirred, I'll just seal it up in foil, to keep the water out, and put it on a rack in the pressure cooker with a cup of water in the bottom (what my pressure cooker requires). Then, when it's up to pressure, I'll cook it for 1/3 of the time I would have had it in the oven for. I should mention that you can't do this with one of those new-fangled hot pots. Those require electricity.

When I was out shopping this week, I "spodded" another R·Pod in the store parking lot. (When you see another R·Pod, that's R·Pod speak for "spodding" it.) I had to take a photo to post in the R·Pod group on FB with the text, "You've been spodded." This looks like one of the bigger models.

We're planning on using the visor we bought. It's sort of an awning that just covers the door and steps, handy if it's raining.

We had a surplus of ripe avocados this week, so I went looking for a recipe that took more than just one. I used three small avocados and added some cucumber that was going to go bad if I didn't use it. This was a good recipe. We'll eat it up long before we go.

We also had this Tuscan Bean and Vegetable Ribollata based on this recipe.

I made quite a few changes for the sake of practicality. Here's my version:

Ingredients
• 1 1/2 T olive oil
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 2 celery stalks, chopped
• 1/2 large leek, chopped
• 1/2 medium red onion, chopped
• 1 sweet potato, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 bouillon cube
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/2 C dried beans
• 1 t dried thyme and/or sage
• 2 1/2 C water
• 4 oz kale, chopped
• Freshly ground black pepper

Directions
In a 6-quart stovetop pressure cooker set over medium-high heat, heat olive oil. Add carrots, celery, leek, onion, sweet potato and garlic. Season with salt and cook, stirring frequently, until softened, about 20 minutes.
Add dried beans, water and thyme and/or sage.
Seal cooker and bring to high pressure over medium-high heat. Cook 30 min.
Rapidly release pressure on the cooker. Open lid and check beans; they should be creamy throughout. If they're still firm, return cooker to high pressure and cook 10 to 15 minutes longer, then check again. (For this recipe, it's far better to overcook your beans than undercook them.)
Stir in kale, then replace lid and return to high pressure for 15 minutes before rapidly releasing and opening the cooker again.
Season with additional salt to taste if needed.

Then I made a big pan of Baked Macaroni with Cabbage, a favorite of ours, because I needed to use up the cabbage; it was getting to that part of the cabbage where you can't pull off individual leaves anymore. I'll package up some of that to take along, as well as a big pot of lentil soup. Eat some, freeze some.

I have a lot of difficulty responding to comments to my blog posts because of technical issues beyond my control (my lack of understanding of how things work). Message me on Facebook, Ravelry or Spoutible if you need information.

If you have a few minutes and are willing, please go to Amazon and B&N and search for "Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook by Peggy Stuart". Every click on the page for the book makes it more likely they will keep a good supply in their warehouse and stores. If you are outside the US, you may have a separate website for these retailers. If you have a copy of any of our books, including Emil, Mariah or Classic Tales Retold, please leave an honest review on the websites, especially if you bought from them.

Where's my blog: If you want to follow my blog, go here and sign up to follow.

What's on my needles: Still working on the Oregon Cardigan.

What's on my loom: Still in its corner under the windows.

What's on my sewing machine: Still its dust cover.

What's in The Doll's Storybook: In A Hole in the Sky, an all-new story in The Doll's Storybook, we relive an old folk tale and learn some science from Mandy.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Still listening to On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci. Also still reading Elfen Königin by Holly Black, translated from English. Didn't get very far with the physical book.

What's in my wine glass: Rossofuoco Barbera D'Asti 2021. Yum!

What's my tip of the week: To freeze small amounts or individual servings when you only have a limited number of containers, turn the container over and use it as a mold for a lining of heavy-duty foil. Then take the foil and put it down inside the container, fill with food and fold the top over. After freezing, dump out the frozen food, label and store in plastic bags for later use. The containers can be reused. The frozen food can be thawed or not, and heated in the oven or in a pressure cooker on top of the stove.

Where are my books: The stories in each book first appeared in the blog and they are reproduced with a few changes. 

Our Favorite Verses: Poems from The Doll's Storybook is available from the BookBabyBookshop and other booksellers worldwide. Poems included are Valentine's Day, Keeping Pets, Back to School, Victor the Vulture, The Week Before Christmas, Insomnia and Veronika's Vocabulary Verses.

The stories in Classic Tales Retold: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are Little Green Greatcoat, The Boy Doll Who Cried Wolf and Lost in the Woods.

Emil: Stories from The Doll's Storybook and Mariah: Stories from The Doll's Storybook are also still available from booksellers. The link for Book Baby is here. The three stories in Emil are Best Buds, Getting What You Want, and The Boys Cook Dinner.

The three stories in Mariah are Being Little, Besties, and Distraction.

If you don't get free shipping from Amazon or B&N, buy from the BookBabyBookshop, because 50% of the price goes to St. Jude. Other booksellers pay much less. 

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

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Weaving In and Out

A lot went on this week. As you may remember, the mattresses arrived and exploded (under control). Well, Wednesday the table arrived. We put it together and pushed it to one side. Friday the bed arrived. Putting it together was more complicated, but we managed to put the bed together that day.

Saturday we put together the trundle. 

(It looks like DH is the only one working, but someone had to take the photo, and I did help.) The trundle was easier to put together, because the construction was identical to the bed.

I still need to make pillow covers for the bed, but in the meantime, I just folded Joanie's quilt over the pillows. I put the new pillow cases on the pillows and used the little bags the bedding came in as covers for some smaller pillows we had. 

This will give you a better idea of how the room looks in use. (The other pillows were from another bedroom. They will be more useful here.) The old folding table was hard to use for storage, because the folding mechanism was in the way. It was also too big.

DH needs to put up the curtain rod for me. When the sun is at the back of the house in the morning, we have nice light in this room, but when the sun shines on the front later in the day, we have to close the room-darkening shades to keep the house from heating up, and then you can't see anything. The curtains will help keep the room from heating up so much if I want to be working in there during the afternoon and need the light to see.

The Kevät is finished! Here it is blocking:

I chose to block the bottom ribbing in points because it was expedient. It wanted to do that anyway, and it only needed to be pinned in 6 places. I used my lace blocking wires for the sides and shoulders.

Here it is blocked and getting acquainted with some of my other pieces of clothing.

Here's how it fits. (Excuse the crepey arms. I'm an old lady.)

I finished the dish mat while we talked with the kids during our regular Sunday Zoom call.

The loom is finally in use, but not before much groaning and gnashing of teeth. If you remember, I wound the warp last week. The different kinds of fiber didn't cooperate with each other the way I hoped they would, and they made a big mess when I tried to warp the loom. It was great practice, though. I had some Peaches 'n' Cream cotton yarn, so I wound the warp again, using only the cotton yarn. I still had some issues, but I managed to get past where I had the mess. I've been using the Craftsy class Floor Loom Weaving as my guide. One thing the teacher mentioned that I hadn't remembered from when I used it to make the project was that all the heddles should be leaning to the right for a right-handed person and to the left for a left-handed person. If they are the wrong way, you need to turn them upside-down, not just turn them over to the other side. I remembered we had taken the heddle frames out of the loom to move it (twice), so I decided to check. I found one set that were all on the same way, but the whole set was up-side down. That was easy to fix by taking the frame out and replacing it the correct way. ALL the others had some the right way and some the wrong way. They must have been this way when I received the loom! Here you can see what I'm talking about. Look at the two heddles in the center of the photo. The heddle on the right is set up for a right-handed person. The other one is for someone who is left-handed.

I took out each heddle frame, took off all the heddles and checked each one before putting it back on the heddle rods. When I got to the third and last frame I had to do this with, I noticed the paint on one end but not on the other. See the one with no paint? It's upside-down compared with its fellows. I discovered that when you have all the painted ends together, all the heddles will be facing the same way.

It should have been easy to realize. It did make it easier to finish the third set. Duh! I don't remember anyone's mentioning this before, but they probably did. Threading the heddles was easier than I remembered from previous projects. This must be why.

Next was to put the beater bar back on with the reed in place to sley the reed. (That black thing in the bottom of the photo is a sleeping Rocky, not a discarded sweater or jacket.)

I managed to get all the threads into the reed in the right order, which I found shocking when I discovered I had done it right. However, when I went to tie up the treadles, I discovered that the job was made more difficult because the treadles weren't quite in the right position. I have figured out that the guys had installed the treadle assembly upside-down. See those holes at the bottom of the photo where the screws go in? That's side is supposed to be facing the floor. The treadles needed to be flipped around to be in the right position. 

It's supposed to fit  down on the floor, as in this photo from our old place:

I explained to DH, and he unscrewed the two bolts holding the base of the assembly, so we could flip it over. 

I managed to tie up and throw a few picks to even out the warp, so I'm finally off to a good start. Now I'm going to weave a narrow border that will hold the fringe at each end of the rug.

I didn't need to undo anything when we fixed the treadle assembly, other than to untie the treadles.

In other news, you may have heard about the terrific heat wave that has descended on the Pacific Northwest. It isn't quite as bad here as locations lower in elevation and closer to the coast, like Portland, but it's still expected to be over 100ºF for the next few days here where we are. However, the difference between sun and shade is much greater than most places. This is what we had yesterday evening, as the sun was getting low and shining right on the front porch.

You may remember that our furnace went out last Fall and we replaced it with a unit that included air conditioning. It's a very efficient and quiet unit, operating with a fraction of the energy older models require. Here's a photo of our thermostat inside the house at the time it was so hot outside.

We have it set on 78ºF, and it pretty much stays there. Upstairs it's a little bit warmer, so we run our little portable air cooler in the bedroom, which keeps it comfortable.

What a week! And DH has an unpleasant medical procedure today, which requires that I drive him. It's supposed to continue to have record-breaking temperatures, but I hope this week goes more smoothly.

Where's my blog: As you may know, the entity that notifies people when a blog they follow posts will discontinue notifications in July. This motivated me to link my blog to Bloglovin', as I did some time ago with The Doll's Storybook. If you are following my blog want to continue following after July, I recommend you go here and sign up to follow.

What's on my needles: Just finished the Dish Mat, but there's still the Brioche Shawl Feathers shawl. I will be working on it again, now that the Kevät is done.

What's on my sewing machine: Its cover. However, I will be making the pillow covers and revising the curtains soon.

What's in my hoop: Still the Whole Cloth Quilt. No progress this week. (Are you kidding?)

What's in The Doll's Storybook: Look-alikes. Pippa wishes she were more like the other dolls.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Still listening to The Rose Code by Kate Quinn.

What's in my wine glass: Crystal Range Barbera 2019. Excellent.

What's my tip of the week: We occasionally eat vegetarian hot dogs with buns, but so seldom, we need to freeze most of the hot dogs. I put the hot dogs, two-by-two, into sandwich bags and tuck each pair into a larger zippered bag with two buns. When we're ready to eat them, I just pull out the pair of dogs and buns, just the amount we need.

Where's my book: Mariah: Stories from the Doll's Storybook is available from Amazon worldwide. Also available from BookBaby, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers. Royalties go to support pediatric cancer research and treatment. The three stories in the book first appeared in the blog and they are reproduced with few changes. The stories (and links to them) are Being Little, Besties, and Distraction.

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals or dolls were harmed during the production of this blog post.

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Crossing Threads

Dolly's bed is finished:

I used a Sterilite Underbed Box 28 Qt., Model #1846 DH found at Walmart for $4.38. To keep the mattress from sinking into the depression when Dolly lies down, I cut a piece of an old political sign the same size as the mattress, which is 16 X 23”, 1” foam (left over from Dolly’s chair), and put it in the mattress cover at the base of the foam. I put the seam of the mattress cover in the middle, so it wouldn’t show. Dolly doesn’t sink in, but the mattress is still nice and soft, so she can sleep well.

The dust ruffle is four 7" WOF strips of quilting fabric sewn together and hemmed 1/4" and an additional 1/4", gathered at the top and sewn with a 1/4” seam to a piece of muslin cut the shape of the lid of the storage box.

The “fitted” bottom sheet was a simple sack, similar to a pillow case, as I showed in last week’s blog post. I used some nice quilting fabric to trim the top sheet and pillow case. The blanket is a piece of fleece, cut to size and trimmed with satin doubled over (like quilt binding) and zig-zagged along the loose edge, to replicate the look of a real blanket.

The quilt was the last item to finish:

It’s a simple 9-patch with sashing. I used some fabrics from my stash collected when a quilting buddy brought out some fabric sample books given her by a relative who was a fabric distributor. I thought Daphne might like the bright colors, which are not really my style. I’m not a machine-quilter, and I don't have a walking foot for my Featherweight, but this project was small enough I decided to have a go. I sewed in the same direction for each vertical line of stitching, starting with the middle, with pins to hold the three layers in place. Then I sewed all the horizontal lines of stitching, also starting with the middle line of stitching and always sewing in the same direction. When I finished, I pulled the top threads through to the back of the quilt, tied it together with the bobbin thread and used a needle to thread them through to the inside of the quilt. 

So Dolly didn't need to sleep in her clothes, I sewed some pajama bottoms and knitted a camisole top.

…and a robe. I used McCall's 2506, now out-of-print, for the pajama bottoms and the robe. Sewing the fleece was a job. I had to use a lot more pins than usual when setting in the sleeves. The fleece kept sliding to the side.



The shopping ensemble is finally finished. You may remember (or not) that I started this outfit right after I bought all the yarn for it and the Valentine’s Day ensemble, beginning with the skirt. January 1st the KAL started, so I made the top that went with that outfit, so Dolly could wear it with the finished skirt. Dolly gradually changed clothes as the other items were finished. The white top goes very well with both outfits.

A bonnet pattern was given for free to each person who completed the KAL. I had yarn left from the shopping ensemble skirt and the same yarn from some socks I made a few years ago, Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino.

Here’s the complete outfit, including Dolly's new shoes, roomy enough to get on over her socks without too much effort:

Common Threads met at Karan’s on Thursday. Margareth brought her new Jakob doll wearing the outfit she made for him.

Margareth is expecting her first grandchild, a boy, so this doll will be for him to play with when he visits her. She has plenty of time to outfit him completely. She also showed us this diaper bag she made. The base is a changing mat that comes out, and the straps can be positioned to fit over one shoulder or used as a backpack.

The pattern is Simplicity 3031os.

Sundance has started. I had my first shift on Friday. Before my first shift, I met up with fellow fiber fan and Aloha Blu Fiber Shoppe owner, along with her husband.

She brought me this lovely swag:

That will probably be the only swag I get from Sundance this year, but you never know. It was undoubtedly the best, though. You can only use so many oversized T-shirts.

Spinners, don’t forget, we’re having a Spin Along on the Knitting Community if anyone wants to join in.

Where? Right here, in the Knitting Community Spin Along.

When? Noon on Friday, February 5 - noon on Monday, February 8, 2016, in whatever time zone you're in.

Equipment: Spindle or wheel. (If you want to use the pencil method to spin, that's OK, too.)

Materials: Any spinable fiber. (Dryer lint, anyone?)

No prizes, no pressure, just spinning together and sharing what we’re doing.

What's on my needles:  A cape for Dolly. The Trickle Socks, waiting.

What's on my Featherweight: Finished Dolly’s quilt. Still a few things for make for the doll.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: Still listening to The Final Empire by Bandon Sanderson. Got a special deal on it, along with the next book in the series. Still reading The Other Harlow Girl by Lynn Messina on the Kindle app.

What's in my wine glass: Crane Lake Malbec, a good wine for the price.

What's my tip of the week: I don't know if anyone has mentioned this, but here's a tip I've shared with my local quilt guild. It always surprises me that more people don't know about this, so I'm sharing it here.

To reduce bulk where four or more seams come together, you can often fan them out in opposite directions. You have to take out a few stitches in the seam allowance. (See photo.) These seams are sewn over, so the seam doesn’t become weaker when you do this. This is especially useful when working on miniature quilts, smaller-scale quilts, or quilts that have very small pieces.

Here is a 9-patch block (five of one fabric and four of another fabric sewn together in alternating order) from the doll quilt. The intersections on the lower part of the block have been "treated." The intersections on the upper part show the stitches that are being removed. I use an awl, but a seam ripper (sharp side away from the thread) may also be used to undo the threads from the seam allowance.

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals were harmed during the production of this blog post.