bellevett

yarn along.

linking for this yarn along.

while i am still reading through to the lighthouse by virginia woolf, i have been flipping through this canning for the next generations book.  i scored this copy from the library, and had intended on copy a few stellar-have-to-make recipes out of it for my personal recipe book.  i do have about 100 canning books, after all. 

after perusing this book for a little while, i simply have to own a copy.  there are so so so many delectable treats of recipes in this book that i cannot pass up.  eeeekkkss.

i also have this book, this book, and this book added to my wish list.  apparently, i have an epic canning year in my future. 

in knitting news, i am finishing up the last sleeve on my levenwick.  the above yarn will soon be turned into a sweater of perfection for cody.  i am swatching this yarn today.  i purchased this yarn at my lys, and it really is dreamy.  and milled in the us.  score and score.  this is a project that i am vowing to dot every i and cross every T.  complete with making, and BLOCKING the swatch and all that type of stuff that good knitters do.  because in the end, 1200 yards of yarn for a big man size sweater is a lot of time to spend on a sweater that you wonked up here and there to get it to fit.  for a change, i will follow someone else's directions.

in preservation news, i have a few pounds of peppers to chop and freeze and a 5 pounds of cucumber to turn in to freezer pickles.  (of the dill variety...)

oh, and before i go, here are a few pictures of another being in our house who finds much fascination in yarn and a metal bin that is easily banged on for maximum sound pleasure. (and sometimes chewed on, if you are into that sort of thing.)

oh the blurry quality of the photos? yeah, that is possibly a result of a certain small being who enjoys licking and touching the camera lens.  yeah, maybe clean the camera is going to be added to the todo list for today.

weekending- over already?

there is something about a lazy luxurious weekend on the couch that somehow stretches time and simultaneously makes the weekend feel longer.  

 

this weekend was not one of those lazy luxurious weekends spent wandering from the couch to the chairs outside to the kitchen table to the couch to the bed.  this weekend was a luxurious weekend spend in the mountains exploring and soaking up the last bits of summer. 'cause did you know this week it will be september?

this weekend was on warp speed. so enjoyable and so quick and fast that i was already pining away for the next time we could visit this spot.

busy weekends make a monday morning that looks like this: cody gets up and showers and makes coffee and kisses me goodbye while i am still laying in the bed next to a sleeping boy- my mind is typically reeling to figure out- what day is it why is cody leaving i didnt even hear him get up who am i what is my name again i smell coffee.....

 

 

 

 

 happy week beginning to you.

linking with the habit of being.

on a blanket.

sometimes we just have to get outside.  as fast as possible and for as long as possible. 

it really has been one of those weeks so far.

 

edited to add: i encourage this sort of yarn unravelling.  is there anything cuter than those fat fingers trying to figure out a ball of yarn?  i think not.  however, i do give him his own ball of yarn.

yarn along.

 

just got back from my weekly library trip, which is a trip in and of itself.  i have two library locations i frequent. and i reserve my books online, as i think of books i want to read. 

one library downtown, one library down the road. same library system. each has it's place. but this often results in confusion for me and the librarians when they go on a  wildgoose chase for a book that they think they should have on hold but it is actually on hold at a different location.  always an adventure i tell you.

regardless, i only went to pick up a copy of virginia woolf's to the lighthouse.

this was an epic library trip, i know you know the kind. 

you go in, stop by the new book section.  browse in the locations you know best. and bam one book right after another is calling your name.

 
soo, i know you are asking yourself the deep dark question of what book i will link with for this weeks yarn along.....

but of course:

and yes, it is still levenwick.  this will most positively be the last week levenwick will be appearing on the yarn along.  i simple will must absolutely have to have it finished before next week, as i am completely sick of dreaming of purling for two straight arms with double pointed needles.  yes, i am apparently purling in my sleep these days. 

and also, i just might be a tad preoccupied with my ravelry queue these days.  nothing like nearing the end of a sweater that sends you to the ravelry queue sweating with the completely unrealistic fear that you will not be prepared to start a new project INSTANTANEOUSLY.

 

freezer pickles.

around these parts, we try to use our money as a chance to vote everyday. 

we enjoy our environment.

 we enjoy our national parks, state parks, rivers, streams, and our backyard.

 

quality food is important to us.

scratch that- good for the earth food is important to us.  (see reason above concerning environment)

scratch that- fresh, unprocessed, un-pesticide produced food is important to us.

scratch that- food that is grown in a manner that is good for the earth and good for our bodies is important to us.  and the farmers and companies who agree with our standards are who we choose to give our money and support.

that sometimes most often means giving up on any and all prepared snack foods.  lucky for me cody i love to make food of any variety- so snacks we will have.

so, as we all know, most snacks arent really that great for you and your growing and toxin free body but we all have to indulge a little right?  see poptarts. since we spend the bulk of our food money on wholesome quality foods and ingredients for meals, it leaves little excess for buying, lets say, prepackaged pickles!

here to save the day is my garden.  and my $2.75 investment in a pack of seeds.

who loves a good pickle?  i sure do.

i had a recent pickle catastrophe. 

i made several pints of bread and butter pickles as well as 12 pints of kosher dill pickles, and canned them.

cut to, last thursday.  i decided to open the bread and butter pickles.  weird looking.  has weird grey spots, possibly from the onions, but possibly the deadly botulism bacteria.  i am an extremely clean and precise canner, and also a slight hypochondriac, so i dare not take my chances. 

enter friday- after i called my mom mourning the loss of all of the jars of my bread and butter pickles, to possibly nothing or possibly a deadly bacteria (it wasnt botulism for inquiring minds.  i researched and found that it is actually a product of the onion) she showed up armed with my favorite childhood pickle.

the freezer pickle.

you are going to say, gross that sounds terrible. or dont they just become soggy.  well no, actually quite the opposite.  they are crisp and clean and perfect in every way. 

so after polishing off a whole container of her sweet freezer pickles, i found a new freezer dill pickle spears recipe to try and decided to use some of my recent cucumber harvest as trial.   

here is her recipe for her freezer pickles or as she calls it:

freezer cucumber salad

7 cups cucumber

1 cup onion

1 cup green pepper

1 teaspoon of salt

2 cups of sugar (i sometimes use agave nectar)

1 cup white vinegar

wash cucumbers and slice. dice onions and peppers. mix together in a bowl with white vinegar, salt, and sugar.    let sit in fridge for a couple of hours or up to 2 days.  when time is up, spoon into freezer containers* and cover with liquid and freeze.  take out of freezer a few hours before you are ready to eat them. 

*you can use a bpa free plastic freezer container or a glass freezer container, but make sure it is made for the freezer.

 

do me a favor.  throw a few carrot seeds in the ground this week in some loose soil.  you will thank me in november.  or april if you forget about them.  dont worry the snow will only make them sweeter.

 

weekending.

 

weekending:

this weekend we picked our daily doses of raspberries from our little patch at the end of our driveway

next year i would like to plant bushes all along the road at the end of our driveway. these are eaten long before they are brought into the house.

i wore my new school house tunic, which i modified to a schools out sleeveless tunic.

i meant for this to be a dress, but it ended up a tunic, i must make a longer version.

i added darts, i dont see anyway around them.........

please buy this pattern for yourself if you are a sewer.  you owe it to yourself to make yourself feel good about your sewing skills.  this pattern will do it.

while the boy was napping on saturday, we did some real work in our garden beds, adding compost, tearing out dying plants, and planing a fall crop of deliciousness. there is nothing that gets me out of the poor me my garden hates me mood like planting fresh seeds in fresh compost equaling a fresh outlook.

after the small boy in our house spent friday and saturday recovering from a fever, i spent saturday night in bed with the sleeping boy knitting and watching mansfield park, on my laptop.  that was pretty much the best decision i had made all week. 

 

oh, and after watching mansfield park, i have decided i need this shawl... now. and it cant wait one minute longer.

 

growing growing gone.

above: future carrot seeds.

 
a lost butternut squash that made its way into a flat leaf parsley patch.

overall, the over riding theme of this years garden was big fat failure. 

i blame this on my loss of my garden journal from 2010.

sidenote: i have always used artemis factory's gear notebooks for my garden records. with just 40 pages, they worked beautifully for keeping my records.  now the store that i buy them from here in knoxville closed.  and to top it off, i cant find a single supplier online.  to give you an idea of what these notebooks are and look like, there is a post about them here.  

those people are serious about their fountain pens.

back to my story of loss.  i have several of these notebooks. and each one has certain info in it.  one is knitting info, one is sewing info, one is garden info.  i vaguely remember the last time i saw it, and upon further tearing apart of my house in march, i can not find it.  i had drawn a little pea on the top right corner.  and now? gone forever. 

therefore, when we were planning planting and procuring seeds for the coming year, i had no reference of the years past aside from my pictures from my camera. 

i have started a new garden journal, but in the event that this one gets misplaced by the evil journal snatchers, i guess i can go by this post?  if only i blogged more.

so here is the report from this year.

 

we started 20 heirloom tomato plants very early this year in april.  cody built a makeshift greenhouse over one of our raised beds.  they did beautifully!  The polish linguisa was my favorite this year on account of its awesome tomato sauce making qualities.

our early garden was as follows:  tons of radishes, carrots, and spinach.

green beans were but a faint glimpse of what could have been.  which made me equally sad.

our early potatoes did fairly well, but we need to order fresh seed potatoes this year.  the 4th generation seed potatoes are not seemingly as effective.

cucumbers: get more plants. 6 is not enough. and trellis from the beginning.

last year i cursed the amount of kale that we grew. i vowed to no longer grow kale.  who does that??  i missed the kale something fierce. next year? 20 pounds of kale! at the minimum.

every year we have peppers upon peppers that i freeze.  somehow, we have no peppers this year.  all of our plants died, and we only planted 4 as opposed to our normal 10-15.  next year: i call for more peppers.

the beets tastes straight up delish.  more beets more beets!

sweet potato takeover.

one word for my future self regarding squash. thin those seedlings and trellis.  goodness. i thought squash was easy!? i had dreams of being overrun with a big beautiful bounty of delish butternut!  how many do we have? 3!! blah.

our little raspberry patch seems to be doing just fine.  however, none seem to make it inside the house..... 

i have been reading the new organic gardener by the famous elliot coleman.  he has assured me that the answer to most of my problems is to plant a cover crops this winter and till it in come spring.  i would stand on my head and do say squash 40 times if someone told me that i would be able to produce more food, so cover crop, here we come. we are ordering our cover crop from here.

we are going to plant a small winter garden with a makeshift greenhouse covering.  spinach, carrots, kale, lettuce,beets.

our one win for this year was my committment to supporting as many u pick farms as i humanly possibly could.  around east tennessee we have several good quality U-pick farms.  strawberries, peaches, corn, blackberries, broccoli, yes please! 

stickers from here.

and all is not lost considering i am holding my standards for my garden at the illusive hoarder status.  which is what i have turned out to be.  a food hoarder. 

 

on a blanket.

this is where you will find us. 

 

sometimes, there is a certain kind of phenomenon that happens inside our house.  it is very peculiar. suddenly every animal, woman, and child, (and sometimes man) feel absolutely certain that the only place in the world we should be is outside.  sometimes we get in the car and drive to the mountains.  sometimes we drive to the nearest river.  and sometimes, we just want to not drive at all, so we take a certain kind of refuge on a blanket in the yard. 

 

 

 

this will be a weekly post sharing our moments on our blanket. are you familiar with this phenomenon?  link with me in the comments.

yarn along.

i am participating in this yarn along.

novels tend to absorb me in the summer time. 

melissa coleman's this life is in your hands was pretty much one of the best books i read all summer.  

however, with the cold weather moving in slowly, i have moved toward working on readying my winter goals....

a quilt for our bed is numero uno.  that is aside from all of our new sweaters (and 2 for me).  the modern log cabin quilting guide is just the answer for my new quilt project.  fyi- i have only ever made crib sized quilts, and i am not sure that i would call them all tremendous successes.  this might be attributed to my pesky, i can figure this out on my own, and their must be an easier way to do this, attitude toward sewing.  you would think, after sewing for this many years, i would have moved past that. but here i sit, in the land of stubbornness. ironically, this only happens with sewing, and not knitting.  hmmm, deep thoughts.

the above sweater is still the levenwick.

*************************************

it turns out that lately i have so much to say and so much in my head that when i sit down to get it out of my head and on to paper, or blog, it gets all jammed up and nothing comes out.  i think this might mean big things.

in response to said overload, Crosby and i have been taking our bodies outside as much as humanly possible.  with the cool winds moving in, it proves to be the perfect place for us to both sit and just be.  Him with a few discovery blocks and me with my knitting, a book, or my journal.  tomorrow i will be here with a new weekly series called on the blanket.  which is where i will be until the snow moves me inside. 

ps. have you been following my weekly ice cream cone recommendation?

 

weekending.

feeling quite indulgent.

white wheat flour. 

butter.

my last jar of 2010 strawberry jam.

feeling good about using that.  i've got 20 pints of fresh 2011 strawberry jam.

i dont ever leave my shelves unjammed.  (figuratively and literally. jam is important.  and i am messy.)

so... since i have so much jam from this year, i figure it is time to let go of 2010.

along with all the jam that was made in 2010.

made the pop tarts from the april 2010 bon appetit. one of my favorites.

(obviously not quite ready to let go of 2010, or any of my bon appetit's...)

ate them and realized how much more often i should make this recipe. i have 20 jars of fresh jam afterall.

here is what i call real weekending:

this morning i woke up before crosby and cody. at 8am i made coffee and took my knitting outside.  after knitting 6 rows of my newest sweater, with a very unseasonable nice breeze blowing outside, i went in to check on them to make sure they were, in fact, breathing.  after confirming their existence and shaking my head at my good luck, i refilled my coffee and went back outside to work on my sweater for a while longer.  realizing that they were both obviously taking the opportunity to sleep in, i started seeing possibilities of different projects i could start in my acquired free time.  then i realized that i can start projects anytime i want, but i rarely can sit in silence outside and knit and drink coffee with the animals. (sidenote, the silence isnt because people talk to me, its mainly because when others enter my presence i feel hard pressed to not talk.  just cause i like to talk.)

So then i laughed outloud, watched my cat jump over my neighbors fence to try and gather any and all stray mice and chipmunks and got back to my knitting, and my late summer breeze.

 linking with the habit of being.....