a few me hours!

Today I took a half day from work - well, I left at 1pm, because that's how things go!  I just wanted to have a few hours of me time!  I went to my new favorite thrift store - a giant new St. Francis - and got to look through all the clothes!  I usually only look through the clothes when I'm alone because otherwise I get the "uuuuh, now you're going to try them all ON?"  I found some great stuff - there was a cool red/orange peacoat, but it was too big - booo!  I did get this super snappy vintage dress that fits me like crazy!  how often does that happen? Also, why can't I write a sentence that doesn't end in an exclamation point?  geez.

I don't know why, but I was having the hardest time getting pictures of this dress- I think the color might be more right in the full length shot, but it doesn't show my favorite detail - the little asian neckline - that shows up in the smaller, more green shot.  Anyway, super cute, eh?

I think this is vintage anyway - it's definitely vintage double knit fabric, and there's a lot of hand sewing inside, but the seams are serged.  I know my grandma had a serger, but I think it was pretty newfangled at the time.  So not impossible, but I just don't feel like I see it a lot.  Eileen, I feel like you'll know about this!

I also had to buy these mittens because they'd obviously been lovingly handknit and they didn't deserve to be in a thrift shop for $1.99.  I rescued them.  and I'll wear them because I love them!

I also got a fantastic red velvet blazer, which is a little tight in the upper sleeves, but it was too great to pass up, so bought it with the hope that maybe I can melt off a little arm flab!  surely all this walnut work will do it!!  

My chestnut empire

New things are always a novelty and fun, but I don't think I'll ever get tired of my chestnut tree!  As I mentioned before, it's one of my favorite trees because it's so cool looking.  Now it's chestnut harvesting time and it has been crazy!  (i nearly said "nutty"!)  I had no idea the quantity of chestnuts I'd get - I mean there were clearly tons of them on the tree.  Recently they've started falling, which is when they're ready to harvest.

When they fall, the yard looks like it's covered with sea urchins - and chestnuts.  Inside each VERY prickly hull, or burr, there are 2-3 chestnuts.  Usually the hulls open and the chestnuts fall into the grass.       Unfortunately, the nut wizard I own is the large size (made for apples and walnuts) and trying to pick up small chestnuts was damn near impossible.  It would take a lifetime to pick them up by hand.  Thankfully my neighbors (who are big nut people - in the Ohio Nut Association and all that!) came to the rescue after I'd gone in the house and ordered a small nut wizard online.  He happened to have a stockpile of nut wizards in his barn to sell to nut association folks.  He gave it to me for free!  Amazing!  So I was off to the races, picking up chestnuts.   Now here's how I built my empire - I put out one email at work letting everyone at the facility know that I had chestnuts if anyone was interested.  $1.50/lb.  So far I've sold out my entire harvest plus the next 20 pounds I get (oh yeah, there's more in the tree!) - I've weighed up and sold something like 92 pounds of chestnuts!  My fiance scoffed at first - thinking my chestnut business was a folly - now he's changed his tune!  The buyers are a combination of people who haven't had chestnuts since they were kids, and people who've never had them but want to give it a try.  And the Chinese.  I heard that some of my neighbors sell directly to Chinese restaurants.  I only knew of water chestnuts in Chinese food, but no, they love chestnuts.  One guy bought two pounds to try them (because he's picky about the quality) then said they were awesome and wanted 50 lbs!!  holy smokes!  That's where I oversold my current stock!  I weighed and bagged 40 pounds for him tonight and I told him I'd get the next 10 pounds to him probably within the week!  Then another Chinese co-worker ordered 10 pounds - so hers are next!  It's amazing!   I mean it's not going to pay the mortgage, but it sure is fun!  yes, I've roasted a few myself and I'll make sure to save some back for some dressing, but they're going like hotcakes!  My neighbor recently told us we should be asking $2/lb (he sells at a local farmer's market) so next year my hot commodity may be bring in even more!  

full and finished!

This morning I had to crack a walnut, despite it being uncured.  I just wanted to make sure it had a nut in it and that I wasn't doing all this work for nothing!  It was FULL!  how beautiful is that?

I have some undyed Frogtree Pima Silk yarn that has tried to be 3 different projects so far that have all be ripped (maybe the name "frog"tree should have warned me that it would be nothing but frogged projects!).  I'm wondering if I could dye it with my walnut hulls.  I'm not a huge fan of brown, but I do think it'd be cool to have a walnut dyed cardigan!  I'll have to read up on whether mordants are needed with cotton and all that!  

Speaking of yarn, tomorrow is the Woolgathering and despite the fact that I need more yarn like I need a hole in my head, I'm super excited about it!  And because it seems like I have about 25 projects on the needles that I can't seem to finish, I finished this scarf last night.  Seriously, I was 5 rows away from finishing it - why did I let this sit on the needles for more than a year?  geez.  I blocked it last night and I love it!!  This is some of the Wolle color changing Cotton that we were all going gaga over at last year's woolgathering.  I still have 3 balls of it that I intended to make a Daybreak shawl out of - but haven't yet!  

Wal-nutty!

I took a couple days off work for a stay-cation, and I sure have been getting some stuff DONE!  In anticipation of the walnuts dropping from my 25 black walnut trees, I made these 4 curing racks.

But before we get to the curing part, we have to get the things off the ground!  I used my fantastic Nut Wizard and got 3 buckets full.  There are tons more in the trees!  2 of the 3 buckets are still sitting out under the trees because i ran out of juice before I could carry them in!

The green hull on walnuts will stain anything it touches (which is why it's used as a natural dye!) so I was trying to be careful and wore leather gloves.  I didn't want to mess up my shoes by stomping on them to get the hull off, so I just did the ones that I could rip off with my hands.  THEN, you have to wash them to get all the fiberous hull parts off - that's the part that isn't so fun.  Oh, this is the point when I realize that leather gloves were a stupid choice because they'd soaked through.  My fingers got a little brown, but not too bad.  I switched to rubber gloves.  Then I rinsed and rinsed in a bucket and I was afraid to dump the water because it's toxic to a lot of plant, so the first two bucket fulls I took out and dumped around a walnut tree.  then i got sick of that and just dumped it!  Some people use a concrete mixer with some gravel in it to get off all the hull.  I do not have a concrete mixer.  I do have a wire brush, so that's what I used.  whew.  This is what I got from half of a 5 gallon bucket.  some were tossed because they were "floaters" - those are ones with undeveloped walnuts.  Not a lot of walnuts.
But about 3 hours of work!

My hands are only a little stained, but I'm not too worried - i'm not a hand model!  I've noticed that it's gotten a bit darker as the night goes on - so maybe it'll be horrible by tomorrow!

Perhaps tomorrow I'll find some shoes that I can sacrifice as stomping shoes and get more done!  After they dry, you have to let them cure on the racks for a month or so.  After that, the fun of cracking them - black walnuts are like the diamonds of the nut world in terms of harness!  I saw a you tube video of a guy using his bench vice, and that's what I'm going to try too!  I know my neighbors all have walnut trees too, so maybe eventually I will get tips on being more efficient!  

oy!

Well, i peeled and quartered and boiled and stirred apples today and ended up with 12 pints of applesauce.  It doesn't seem like a lot. 

And of course there's the cleanup afterwards and the mopping of the floor because inevitably apple stuff is everywhere!  Originally i peeled and cored the apples because  that seemed easier, but my hand was killing me after paring enough for the first batch so i said forget and and I did the next 2 batches with the skins on and sent them through my Victorio food strainer.  They're a little more chunky and have bits of peel in them still, but it's good.  Not entirely sure which was the better method - the Victorio is kind of a messy process and then you have to clean all the parts. Anyway - i still have this staring me in the face!  :

Just for the record, the apples left in the carrying basket were originally from the bushel basket - i grabbed a few to finish up the last batch but didn't need them all.  Regardless, it's still a bushel of apples left!  oy!  what to do?  what to do?  Maybe I should take them down to the neighbor with horses! 

when life gives you...

When life gives you a broken apple tree in August, you make a lot of apple sauce I guess.  and you pout about losing a tree.  Today, one of our two apple trees, just fell right over - it broke off a the trunk.  We knew it was old, but I didn't think we'd lose it the first year!  So I went out and picked a ton of apples - well, about a bushel and a half, i guess, and I'm going to be making apple sauce this weekend.  I'll probably freeze some, but I feel like I should can some because I brought a bunch of canning jars when we moved.  I should make sure all my carrying and hauling wasn't for naught!

These apples are a little bit gnarly - I didn't spray them because we were still dealing with the old house this past spring and there was just never time or money to do it.  I'm pretty sure I can cut off any little spots and it'll be just fine!

it'll catch up with you!

geez, i haven't posted in forever!  well, it's been a heck of a month.  i don't usually post about personal stuff, but last month my fella had a heart attack!  he's only 42!  it was quite a life changer!  to make it worse, i had just left that morning for a meeting in Seattle - and something was telling me that i shouldn't go before i even left Dayton.  I'm not usually all superstitious like that but he dropped me off at 10:30 for a noon flight and I didn't get out of Dayton until 8:30 that night!  flights were pushed back then cancelled, then I rebooked, etc. - i was thinking to myself while i was waiting in line at 8pm that it seemed like this was a sign that something bad was going to happen if I left!  But i finally got on a plane and got to Seattle at midnight (that's 3am Ohio time) only to have a voicemail on my phone from a friend of his telling me that he had started having chest pains and was at the hospital getting tests run.  that's not a call you want to get when you are as far away from Ohio as you can get but still be in the US.  it's not a good call to get anytime!  needless to say, i flew back to Ohio just a few hours later.  He's ok - they caught it early, but he had an angioplasty and a stent put in.  Apparently a life of smoking cigarettes and eating too much macaroni and cheese will catch up with you!  even though i really thought we didn't eat terribly, i've realized that we ate too much of the stuff we shouldn't, and not enough of the stuff we should.  now it's low sodium, low fat, low cholesterol.  i weigh out portions and look at grams of saturated fat and whether or not stuff is whole grain.  Here's my advice - find a happy medium for yourself before this happens!  Most days he's super positive about it all and he's doing great with eating well and walking on the treadmill every day (even weekends!) but other days it's all I can do to bite my tongue because he find a way to see the negative in everything and acts like life isn't worth living anymore.  I know it's normal for people to feel that way so I try to just let him vent when i want to tell him he ought to be thankful.  You really can't talk someone into being thankful.  i also know that life changes are hard when you didn't make the choice to change.  He had all but quit smoking entirely - so cutting out the few cigarettes when he was with his friends was easy, but taking a 180 with eating (and salting!) is hard when you didn't really want to do it.  it's also frustrating because between the healing time and the medication side effects, he doesn't always feel great - and when he does, he knows he isn't supposed to exert himself too much until he's healed, so that's frustrating.  I'm hoping that losing weight will make him feel better and motivate him to continue (he's lost about 20 lbs - of course, i've only lost 10!  you'd think with our new super healthy diet, we'd both have lost 50lbs by now!  i guess losing it slowly is the healthy way to do it.)  So anyway, heart healthy recipes are my obsession now.  I'm trying to keep food interesting to divert attention from the smaller serving sizes and less salt.

I have been knitting occasionally - I started this for my meeting trip, and continued it in the hospital:

It's all seed stitch and quite wide - i'm hoping I can make it pretty long.

And for my mother's birthday, I started this set of placemats for her.  I used a bluebird patten on my embroidery machine and changed it to the blah neutrals that she likes!