I was feeling like I had nothing to show. Nothing at all for the past 4 days. Well. There are a few things, just not necessarily knitting. I still have precious little knitting time it seems. I did get a smidge done last night. Here is where I am on the sweater:

Pitiful little is done. I also don’t have the cable charts written up. I will have to do that this morning in the hopes that I make it to Knitting night at The Knitting Experience and get more done.

I wish I could say I’ve been spinning up a storm and that’s why I have nothing to show. But really I’ve only plied another hank of Cosmo and worked on some singles. Nothing at all worth showing.

I have been doing a lot with food lately though. I got Kefir Grains on Tuesday when I got this. Jennifer Moore is a fount of knowledge. Especially where foods are concerned. She passed on some Kefir grains which are happily feasting on some Rice milk right now. They are happy little guys and they are doing their job. I also have some videos to pass on. I think it was from a Peter Jennings HD special. It’s now 5 episodes on You tube.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
All of that makes me more solid in my desire to can more foods for my family. I got this done yesterday:

I’ll be working on Marmalade, Salsa, Green Beans, Dilly Beans, Summer Squash and Zucchini in my “spare time” today. Ok, my time is a delicate balance of multi tasking. One of these days I’ll describe the crazy dance of multitasking that is my life.

And then I’ve been working on our curriculum. School starts Tuesday. I feel like we’ve hardly had a summer. Still, getting back into the regular school schedule will be nice.

Last but not least. I got the skeleton of my Mom’s website done. King’s Treasures and the Blog. Not that my Mom or Aunt have time to write much in their blog. But hopefully they’ll have some quilting goodness up soon.

I think that’s about it for me. I need to start my Marmalade so my multitasking all works in unison. I hope you have a good Holiday weekend (if you’re in the US) and I’ll be back on Tuesday with a recipe, I promise.

Everyone loves a girl with hands of garlic!

It’s time for pickling and I’m up to my elbows in garlic and Dill. It’s the key ingredient for all the good pickles. I try to put lots in and sometimes they still ask for MORE GARLIC!. I’m happy to oblige but I smell like garlic and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s permanent.
Proof of all the Canning

If you click it, there are notes all over that picture explaining all the stuff going on.

My goal this year is to fill up my root cellar shelves with pickles and preserves so we won’t be buying the ones from the store that have all the preservatives and ucky stuff in them. I have a small start:

It seems like I’ve done way more work than that small bit that’s done but we are already eating some of the stuff.

This is what’s in the kitchen today:

And Blueberries and tomatoes which were too shy to be photographed. I have green and red tomatoes to use up. I really want to make more salsa. We like our salsa in this house and I know we’ll go through whatever I make.

Because of all the cooking I really haven’t had any free time for knitting. Still I managed to chart out and cast on for a new cabled sweater

Not very impressive with literally only the cast on done. This is a sweater I’ve been dreaming of for a while. It kept popping into my head and finally I decided I needed to get it on paper. Hopefully soon I’ll have some down time to actually work on it.

If I stood behind these boxes, you’d see the tip of my pink hair. That’s it. Well, I’m also that short.

Once all the club is out the door I’ll be back

You may have seen me write before about my loathing of cotton yarn. I need to change that. I strongly dislike knitting with the stuff, but I’ve recently discovered that I LOVE to weave with it.

I dyed a bunch of cotton this past spring. I dyed at least 10 lbs of it and have another 30 or so waiting to go.

I like to test out my yarns before I sell them and well, I needed to test the cottons before I went further. I set aside one that got a splotch of blue in it (Bad blue where it didn’t belong) and figured I’d knit a swatch and run it through it’s tests. That swatch was never knit. Every so often I’d look at the skein of yarn and shudder.

Trying to think of what to put as samples on the shop loom over the weekend, I came up with this skein of cotton. I used the Schacht flip loom and used their direct warping directions (which are amazingly fast and perfect).

Here is the small sample that I wove

And after a vigorous machinewash and dry:

The photos were taken in different lighting situations but I assure you the colors are the same, I matched it up with the left over yarn.
I’m really pleased with this yarn. It washes out soft and beautiful. My colors are fast and there is very little shrinkage. Maybe 10%?? I’ll have to actually measure. I’m a visual kind of gal which is why I drew the corners on a piece of paper instead of simply measuring the sample. Once club is out the door I’ll be dyeing up the rest of the cotton I have and probably ordering more. Hopefully I’ll have a bunch done for the VT sheep and wool.

I also set this up this past weekend.

It’s a Louet Kombo 70 loom. I really like this. It’s got a simple design but very cool. It comes with 4 harnesses and you can add 4 more later to make it an 8 harness loom. I like that it’s upgrade-able and that it’s simple construction is a good way for beginners to get introduced to weaving. Since it’s a kit, you put it together and really get to understand the workings of a standard table loom. Not to mention that it folds up and pops off it’s stand to become a really portable thing. Great for classes or whatnot.

Yesterday I set up this loom so people will be able to try that out. I set up a stripey twill. I didn’t want to do straight tabby because any loom can do that. I wanted to show what having a 4 harness loom can do. Twills look complicated but they’re really simple to do.

I’m using some Paton’s Classic from the stash. I didn’t want to wait to dye something, though I am dyeing something for the next loom (The Schacht Baby Wolf should be here in the next couple of weeks). In December I plan to have a big floor loom on display for people to give it “go”. My thought is, how can you decide if a small Rigid heddle loom is enough to satisfy that need to weave, if you can’t try out some of the bigger ones too?

I’ve started to list the looms on the site HERE. I wasn’t going to because I’m hoping to revamp the site soon (how long have I been saying that?). I figured I’d get them listed just in case I didn’t get my site revamped as soon as I’m hoping.  More and more will go up as I can

I’ve been working on gluten free breads lately. There have been some glorious flops that the compost gladly took. I eat many things, but these were just so extraordinarily bad. One even made it into the trash while still warm. It was really that horrible.

One fantastic winner was the tropical muffins.

.25 cup Coconut Flour
1.75 cups Brown Rice flour
4 tsp Baking Powder
1 flax “egg”
Crushed pineapple
Coconut flakes
1 mashed banana
1 cup of Rice milk

Mix everything together except the coconut flakes. You may need more rice milk, it all depends. You want the muffins to pour not be too thick. Put them in a greased muffin pan. Sprinkle the tops with coconut flakes (I like the crunch of the flakes over the shavings, but the shavings will do).

Bake at 375F for 30minutes or until the toothpick test says its done.

KNITTING:
The sleeves are almost done for the Jack sweater.

Yes there is pooling on one sleeve. I could have combated that by working from 2 balls of yarn at once. When it comes down to it, i like the pooling. I like the unpredictable coloring and the mismatched sleeves that came out of it. I know that makes me odd with so many knitters hating pooling.

I also did some weaving and set up some looms for the shop. I’m going to put simple warps ona few of them so people can come in and give them a try out. These need a whole post to themselves so I’ll post about it tomorrow.