Shasta Daisy's Spinning Pad!

3 cups flour; 1 tsp salt; 1-1/4 cup butter; 1 egg (slightly beaten); 1/3 cup ice water; 1 tbsp vinegar. Mix the flour and salt. Cut in the butter. In the bowl you beat the egg, add and beat in the water and vinegar (yes, all of it. This is no time to argue!!!). Now stir this into the flour and butter mixture. Let stand for 5 minutes. Roll out on a floured board 1/8 inch thick. This recipe makes either four 8" pie crusts (top & bottom) or three 9" pie crusts (1 top & 2 bottoms) or one 10" top & bottom.

Now, peel, core & slice 8 medium sized apples (sour preferred) into a large, wide bowl. Add 3/4 cups of sugar, 2 tbsp dark brown sugar, 1-1/2 tsp Chinese 5 spice, 1/4 cup flour and a wee pinch of salt. Toss well. Spoon in and mound in pie crust. Top with upper crust. Seal and decorate. I use a very sharp knife to decorate my pies. Now, put foil around crust edges and bake for 45 minutes at 375(F) degrees. Remove foil and bake for 20 minutes at 350(F) degrees. Remove from oven and cool. Enjoy.

In a bowl, mix 3/4 cups of oatmeal, 3/4 cups black strap molasses, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 tbsp olive oil, pinch of salt, 1/4 cups of chopped almonds, 1 cup raisins. Stir until well mixed. Pour into pie shell. Bake at 350(F) degrees for 30 minutes with foil around crust edges. Remove foil and bake for 15 more minutes at 350(F) degrees.

I proceeded with the chicken soup while the pies were baking by chopping up the remains of Sunday night's chicken dinner into a soup pot. I added 2 cups hot water, 1 stick butter, 1 tbsp dried spinach, 1tsp chopped garlic (1 clove), 1 tbsp poultry seasoning, 1 chopped onion, 2 scrubbed and chopped red potatoes, 1 cup chopped carrots and 1/2 bag of frozen peas.

I have an Easter egg on my blog portal page that takes me to the secret worlds of Makezine's daily blog and Craftzine's daily blog. I'll leave to you people out there to find it and see what I'm giving up. Anyway, yesterday, I discovered a wonderful post for this lady's homemade Biscotti. I printed it off and made the recipe this morning. Mmmmmmmmmmm, even without coffee.

After eyeballing the picture and drooling profusely, I decided I had to see about it. Anyway, her recipe is very good, but I did make the standard, obligatory changes to it: Our batch omits the baking powder because we use jumbo size eggs in all of our baking; we used 1 teaspoon of lemon juice in lieu of the lemon extract (better flavor and again a completely natural ingredient); we omitted the vanilla extract and the almond extract because we added 3/4 cup of dried cranberries and there is a whole cup of toasted almonds in the recipe, thus in my humble opinion, no need for the added almond flavoring; lastly, we used lightly oiled aluminum foil in place of the parchment paper (for those of you who will become worried over this, you needn't be, it's a perfectly acceptable substitution, just make sure you use a pastry brush to apply the olive or canola oil to the foil).

We've been doing tons since I last posted. My darling husband bought me an Ashford, 4 harness table loom for my birthday and I built a stand for it (didn't care to pay another $115 for something I can easily build out of scrap lumber) and am weaving my 3rd piece of cloth. Lord willing, it will be a kimono jacket w/ obi. I'm also in the process of spinning about 10 lbs of Suffolk fleece so I can weave my first blanket. I'm going to have to do it in sections because the loom is only 32 inches wide and the actual weaving area varies with what I'm weaving.

I picked up a used spinning wheel, at the local resale shop for $65. It was made in Abrams, Wisconsin back in the 1980's. I had to take it all apart because someone had pinned it together so it was unusable. It's really a fine wheel. The wood is in excellent condition and it's way too usable to just sit in someone's living room looking pretty. I have to bore holes in the posts of the mother-of-all so that I can easily use pegs to take the leathers in/out to change my bobbin (this was pinned together also).

We got 1/4 of the garden put in the ground during the 3rd week of April. Now the peas are almost 3 feet tall. We started almost all the seeds in the house, moved them into the greenhouse and had them in the ground the before last week of April. We only had to cover them twice, as our last genuine freeze occurred just before Mother's Day. We started eating radishes last weekend. So, I decided the onions, squash and rutabagas need to go in the ground over the next few days.

Okay!! I believe you all saw these a couple of weeks ago (maybe a month?). Anyway, they're finally finished. They're knit on size 2 (I still can't believe I knit anything on needles smaller than a 4!!!) circular needles from 1 strand of mohair and 1 strand of wool. The striped band near the tops is where I added a third strand of some very fuzzy eyelash yarn. It's super soft. Of course, then, so are the socks!

My son brought home the movie, Ratatouille for Christmas and I'm assuming, has fallen in love with Remy, the rat! I found a cute pattern for him on the web and whipped him up. He was finished today! At the bottom of her pattern, she says to PM her if you do these and I've not got that part figured out yet. Maybe she'll find my blog??????????????????

Here are some pics of my DLH trying very hard to hide from the camera. He's wearing a very warm, wool knit watch cap I knit for him (2 years ago). The wool is natural brown Shetland wool I purchased from a lady in Oregon. It was a raw fleece that was very wonderful to work with. I spun it sport weight for socks, hat and gloves (he's the socks to go with the hat, but not the gloves.). It actually got cold enough for him to wear it (-16 one night). Bbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I made some wonderful, wonderful Boston Baked Beans with a mess of maple syrup I bought from a friend of mine!!! They cooked all day long this past Saturday and the smell wafted through our entire home!! It was splendiferous waiting to have them for supper (heck, I could eat them for dessert!) with brats boiled in beer during the end of the Green Bay Packers kicking Seattle's butt!!! It was sweet watching them beat the Seahawks and oh, the snow coming down.

These are pics of the sunset the night before our second snowstorm! I'm always amazed at how winter sunsets and sunrises are much more beautiful than in the summer. But, then again, I am a winter person. My seasonal preferences are winter, autumn, spring, and summer. I don't really care much for warm temps as they completely mess my body up. Anyway, the next pictures are of the following morning's sunrise and the snow that came with it:

Sometimes, my darling husband brings home some wonderful, scrap wood for me!! I know that most of it is supposed to end up in the fire pit, but I commandeer a good portion of it for my mad, mad, mad, art projects and inventions. Sometimes, I make stuff to see how the wood runs up on the drill press, before I start making a more permanent project. Here is one of those 'tests': This is a wee variation of the traditional 'marble game'. I used a 5/16" bit for the peg holes. My son cut 32 pegs, each measuring 1-1/2" long. He filed and sanded the edges. The 4 corner holes were bored out using a 1 inch spade bit. This wood is fairly interesting as it's comprised of a hardwood 'sandwich' with approximately 22 layers that are about 3/32 of an inch thick. After experimenting with various hardwood speeds on my drill press, I found it cuts like butter at 1720 rpms. Not a bad piece for being scrap wood!!!

It took me about 2-1/2 weeks, but I actually started and finished a whole project!!! I was getting pretty cold by the time I finished this. It is the Lion Brand Country Car Coat (NOT a free pattern). Theirs was done in a forest green color. I ordinarily love the color green, but wanted something that went with the other half of my wardrobe. It's a very heavy coat and I'm now thinking I want to spin some really chunky wool and knit one similar to it. Maybe.....

I finished a crocheted green and black cotton, 3 inches by 4 inches, striped camera bag for me; a crocheted, acrylic dishtowel topper for the kitchen (am making a total of 4 as they keep disappearing); and a crocheted blues acrylic, MP3 player bag for my son. He doesn't crochet yet, but the more he watches, the more he's convinced he's got to learn how to do that too.

Geoffrey seems to like living in my office very much! It's really quite amazing that something that's only supposed to be 2-1/2 feet tall and 2-1/2 feet wide can take up so much space and gets taller and wider everyday. He's now 5-1/2 feet tall and about 4 feet wide. He managed to flower, so I hand pollinated and the following pics are some of the results of his hard work. I must say that God is truly miraculous in the things he does.

Okay, okay, so I like the Monster Crochet website with a bit of a passion! I can't help it. ladylinoleum (a.k.a. Regina Rioux Gonzalez) has the most fantastic blog on the web. She has a wonderful way of creating the unthinkable and frankly I think she may like those cult cult sci-fi flicks, "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" and "Little Shop of Horrors". Then again maybe she's an old supporter of P.A.S.K.O.V. Unfortunately, P.A.S.K.O.V. met its unfortunate doom during the 'dotcom' failures of 2000. For those of you who are wondering, P.A.S.K.O.V. was an acronym for, People Against the Senseless Killing of Vegetables. The site sold a lot of t-shirts and bumper stickers.

Okay! So fall is here and I've not finished half of what I swore I'd have ready to wear. At least I've got one thing finished that's wearable, but I think they're more suited for winter! :) The weird thing is that it still feels more like summer about half the time. We've been having weekends (Thursday through Sunday) that peak in the near 80's to the middle 80's and Mondays through Wednesdays have been sweater wearing chilly! Bbbrrrrrrrrr!!!

I made these so they were nearly opposite each other. They're also wearable on either hand because of how their knit. I like to be able to just pick up and put on whatever I've picked up without having to worry about if it's going on the wrong hand or is backwards. I also don't like gauntlets with fingers knit into them because it limits my movement when working.

Please don't mind me with the camera. I'm fairly good with my own camera, but I've been taking pics with my son's video camera, using the SD slot and it has it's own little learning curve. All the reading in the world will not help me here. So, I'm taking my time and snapping a lot of pics so I can choose from the best without going insane.

Now, for some of the Halloween things. I'm particularly affectionate toward spiders, so I made a giant spider ring from a giant spider I picked up at Michael's Craft store. I took a tube of 'Household Welder' adhesive and a piece of aluminum I cold forged into a band and let it cure for a week. I like how it looks! It makes the perfect accessory for Halloween.

I tend to allow the 'nice' ones to stay the winter (mostly garden spiders and the like). I don't let any spider that is really big, ugly, scary, or dark in color stay as those tend to leave huge welts when they bite. The tan, yellow, white and other light colored ones (aka, garden spiders) like to visit more than bite. You just clean up they're old cobwebs and keep dusting because spiders hate to live in a dusty house. That's why they abandon their webs when they've become nasty looking. (Coool! I can actually hear some of you grossing yourselves out over this!! I'd rather have spiders in my home than fruit flies or any flying insect for that matter.)

Lately, I've been hanging out at monstercrochet.com and !!! It's been extremely scintillating and exciting to view this woman's crocheted art work and creations. I was especially happy to see that her work is featured in Make magazine's special Halloween edition. If you're not familiar with makezine or Make magazine, I suggest you acquaint yourself. You won't be sorry.

Princess Vanity was very happy to be relieved of her 'Chiengora' and very patiently waited while I cleaned it all up. The really nice thing about grooming/combing her on the front porch, is that it is carpeted with indoor/outdoor carpeting. This means that her guard hairs stick to the rug and I'm able to scoop up her 'fleece' and bag it for spinning. Almost all of her 'fleece' is over 1 inch in length, year 'round, but I use only her spring sheds (February & May) for spinning alone and knitting into hats. I blend her August shed with Suffolk to spin for weaving. Her Chiengora is very, very warm and I've learned that the stuff I get from the spring shed is extremely warm and water resistant.

As you can see from the final pics, the Bissell sweeps very, very well; is affordable; does not waste electricity or batteries (I consider this to be a truly, green appliance); is extremely easy to empty and clean; does not require the maintenance a vacuum cleaner needs after sucking up all that dog hair; and never clogs anywhere!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YAY! (We're doing all we can to remove as much as we can from 'the grid' because our power utility keeps applying for and getting rate increases for natural gas and electricity!)

It was a delight stopping by your blog. Princess Vanity ... I thought a black dog shedding on sand colored carpet was the worst ... I may have to rethink that. I'm spinning Lacy, my "mostly" border collie and hadn't considered the seasonal differences in fiber output texture/quality. I've been just collecting everything as it's harvested and it all gets co-mingled. Will be more observant in future; thanks for the heads up. You're welcome to visit us at http://Seabreezespinners.com/

Tropical Twister (posted 09/01/08)

Seriously.......... this fleece, to me, is the golden fleece after all the scouring and picking I've done. I left the first 2 pictures larger because I want everyone to see how much VM there was. I initially had photographed everything, but did not post because I didn't want anyone to cry as much as I did that I had to throw 1/2 of it in the trash. It was completely unusable for anything.

I was very disconcerted to only be able to salvage about half of it because of all the huge poop tags, severe matting in areas and the VM. I picked, sorted and scoured it in one day (had to get it done before we hit 90° days). After all is said and done, I have one of the nicest, softest, long staple (7+ inches), dark fleeces I've ever been privileged to to work with. In short, all the work was worth it!

The object on the right is a newly finished granny square dishcloth. The one on the left is a granny square dishcloth that is about a month old. They are each made from Senso 50/50 cotton/linen yarn; one ball per cloth. I crocheted these using my standard granny square pattern and a size 3 (2.10mm) crochet hook. I've found that this is the perfect yarn for making dishcloths. The cloths never stink (I change mine daily, but for experimentation purposes, I tested one for a whole week.) and they scrub surfaces and rinse out quite nicely. They start out 8" by 8" and end up about 6" by 6" after several washings. These are the perfect size for me!!

Here's a nearly finished (one round left) pink "Anemone" (Magic Crochet, August 1988 - Number 55, pattern 26, pg. 50). I've made this from the pink cotton I spun. It has crochet quite nicely as it's just a single ply yarn. There has been no twisting while crocheting (yippee!!) and the doily is incredibly, super soft! I'm quite afraid to starch and iron it, so I think when I've got the last round complete, I'll forgo the starch and just mist it lightly and use a warm iron.

The above 4 pics are displaying the lazy kate I threw together for plying my spun camel hair. It works like a charm and is made from a hunk of heavy wood (oak, in this case) and two 7" by 3/8" cut doweling. I drilled 2 holes randomly spaced and used wood glue to insert and set the dowels. And I thought this was going to be difficult (I was originally looking to build a standard, fancy type kate.).

Comments:

Nice tatting! And I like your handmade shuttle - Kathie (http://www.snowleafstudio.com/blog)

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Pies, Soup, and A Finished Rug!!!

Homemade Biscotti & recipe!!!

I've been remiss in posting, sooooo here's what I've been doing!!!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

2008 Lunar Eclipse and some actual finished spinning!!!

Finished Socks, Crochet Baby Things & Bob's Chocolate Pie!!!

Go Remy!!! Do you love Ratatouille????

Crocheted FOs, UFOs and a knit FO/UFO!!!

Boston Baked Beans, Sunsets, Sunrises & Snow!!!

Another FO, my son's WIP and some Christmas pics!!! Still constructing this...

Geoffrey the Holy Moly Pepper!!!

Our Backyard Visitor!!!!

Psychotic Tomato Hat!!!

Creepy Spiders???!!!???

Gearing up for cooler weather, one more Creepy Tomato, & Halloween!!!

Creepy Eyeballs & Tomatos!!!!!

Adventures with Chiengora!!!

The Golden Fleece!!!

More lace and some spinning (actually plying)!