And yet another snow day!

On Monday the news was saying we were only about 6" away from the snowiest month in CT since they started keeping records in the early 1900's.  I'm pretty sure we've passed that mark now.

 This was the view of my backyard two weeks ago.  This is an 8' trampoline, and I'd estimate it's about 2' off the ground.

This is the view of my backyard today.  It's gonna be awhile before anyone gets on that trampoline!

We've had at least one snowday and two delays/early dismissals every week for the last three weeks.  People are definitely going stir-crazy!

There are a couple of chairs in here if you can find them.

You would never know that there's a 3' tall composter under there somewhere!  Those fence posts are about 5' tall.  At least my tender perennials are well-insulated!

If nothing else my son has been having fun turning the snow drift in the front yard into an igloo!

Fractal Spinning and Warm Toes

This past Christmas I used some of my gift money to do something I haven't allowed myself to do in many years.  I bought some wool for spinning that had been dyed by someone else!  I bought this Bluefaced Leicester top from Woolgatherings.

I haven't bought spinning fiber (or yarn) in a very long time because I still have a ton of wool that I bought when I was working full time.  I had stopped spinning and knitting for a while (see this post), but in recent months I have been able to get back to it, as I have with my knitting.  On the plus side, I'm not likely to run out of wool any time soon, and have enough for many pairs of toasty wool socks.  The down side is that almost all of it was purchased as raw fleece, and while it was washed ages ago when I bought it, it still needs to be carded before I can spin it.

Unfortunately I have found that while I love the look and smell of a (fresh and well-skirted!) raw fleece, I am bored to tears by the carding/combing process.  This makes it difficult to spontaneously decide "I feel like spinning tonight!"  I need to spend several days carding the wool before I have enough to spin, and if I'm tired and don't feel like breaking out the carding equipment, it doesn't get done.  I've debated selling off the drum carder, but then I remember that there are some breeds of sheep that can only be acquired as unprocessed fleece.  My compromise is that in the future I'll only buy a raw fleece if it's something special I can't get commercially prepared. 

As with the rest of the world, fashions come and go within various crafts.  When I had been more actively involved, the "in" thing to do with multicolored tops like the one pictured was to Navajo-ply it to preserve the appearance of the color repeats.  This was also about the time when self-patterning "fair isle" yarns were being introduced, and people thought the idea of yarns that made stripes without having to weave in extra ends was kind of cool.

Current spinning fashion is shifting towards more subtle color changes.  In the Summer 2007 issue, Spin-Off magazine  published an article on a technique the author called "fractal spinning."  With this technique you split the spinning fiber lengthwise into strips of varied thickness, with the thicker sections providing longer color repeats than the thinner ones.  When the resultant singles are plied together you end up with the longer color repeats acting as a sort of unifying background to the shorter  color repeats, with the net effect being that the transitions between color changes in the finished piece are much softer. This was my first opportunity to try this technique.

 I decided that I wanted a 3-ply fingering-weight yarn for socks.  I split the tops into thirds, with one third left whole, and the other two split into two and three parts.  You can see the difference the splitting makes in the singles!

Here's the yarn I ended up with - a lovely, drapey light-fingering-weight 3-ply.

I chose to knit a pair of Kai-Mei socks from Cookie A.'s book  Sock Innovation: Knitting Techniques & Patterns for One-of-a-Kind Socks.  These were a breeze compared to most of her other sock patterns!  They only took me about a week and a half (not counting days I couldn't get any knitting done), and they are very warm and comfy!

As you can see, while there are definitely stripes, they have much softer edges than they would if the color transitions had been more abrupt.  I may still have projects that want defined stripes, but it's nice to be able to choose a middle ground.

Back at the Bench

The garden has been (mostly) put to bed.  I admit I have been lazy about getting it ready for next year, and I know I'll pay for it in the spring :(  I had plans to try and rearrange the fencing so I could fit in a couple more beds before the weather got too cold, but it never happened.  Those three weeks my daughter was home in between the end of ESY and the beginning of her new school year just sucked all the motivation right out of me.  I know it's kind of backwards - one would think after three weeks of being prevented from doing what I wanted in the garden that I'd want to make up for it as soon as she was gone during the day, but no - I didn't have the motivation to do much besides sit around and read.

 
I'm feeling much better now, though, and have been back to making new jewelry.  I've listed some new work at the DaisyCat Jewelry shop on Etsy, and I hope to take more photos on Monday and have the rest of my new work up before Black Friday.  This is the one time of year I go out of my way to remind everyone I know "Hey, you know someone who makes jewelry for a living - and this is the one time of year you can justify spending money on jewelry, even if it's for someone else!  Buy presents!"

So this is what I've been up to:

Work-in-Progress - Sterling Pendant with Rutilated Quartz and Rhodolite Garnet

This pendant is almost done.  I love rutilated quartz, and work with it as often as I can.  The stones are now set, and it's been polished.  I'm going to add some dangle to the link at the bottom, but I'm not sure exactly what yet.  I'll post another pic when it's finished.


Here are some new earring designs that I made earlier this year that I finally got around to taking photos of and listing:

Almandine garnet and Sterling post earrings

Handmade chain and Amethyst earrings

And another new pendant:

Sterling pendant with Carnelian and Citrine

 Hope everyone has a wonderful and relaxed (?) holiday next week!

Happiness is....

Lots and lots....

of really, really looong stickers!

At least I'm getting *something* out of the garden!

 I may not have had enough good cucumbers to make pickles, but I had enough to make relish!

It's the basic Ball Blue Book sweet relish recipe.  I haven't tasted it yet, but it sure smelled good!  It calls for covering the veg with salted water for two hours, then rinsing and draining thoroughly.  I think I drained pretty thoroughly, but I still ended up with more liquid than I was happy with in the final results.  Next time I think I'll try and get more of that water out.  I'll either let it soak longer, or salt-and-sit without water first, before I rinse.  Or maybe I'll line the salad spinner with cheesecloth and try and spin the rinse water out that way!

What have you done to get more liquid out of chopped veg before pickling?

Look Ma! No BER!

 
I may actually get tomato sauce this year!  I don't have enough plants to have big, all-at-once harvests, so these guys are being cored, seeded, and frozen as they come ripe a few at a time.  The other plus side to this method is that by the time I have enough tomatoes for a big batch of sauce, it'll probably be September, and (one would hope) much cooler!

Sadly, I may have to give up on the pickles.  It's taken three years, but I can no longer avoid the fact that trying to plant cucumbers as a succession crop in New England is doomed to failure.  Powdery mildew will hit at roughly the same time every year, no matter what I do to prevent or stop it.  If I want pickles, I really need to get my cucumbers into the ground as early as possible.  It's the only way I'll get a good crop before the cucumbers start to look like this:

I'll try again next year!

Surviving on next to nothing, part 2

As I mentioned in my last post, part of my current strategy for survival on an extremely limited budget involves finding ways to shift some expenses from the cash budget to the food stamps budget, mostly by using homemade cleaning products that rely on ingredients like vinegar, and handmade soap, which uses cooking oils.  In order to do this I need to make sure that I spend my food stamps wisely, so that I have enough both to keep my family fed for the month, and be able to buy those few extra things I use for cleaning.  Fortunately this is not difficult.

 

A lot of these ideas are things I'm sure you've heard before, as the grocery budget is the one we all have the most control over, no matter our financial situation.  There are a few things I do differently, but these are based on my own personality quirks - Your Miles May Vary :)   A lot of what I do is tied in to my whole Philosophy of Food, not all of which is about saving money. 

First, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Michael Pollan.  In The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food I found someone making a case against processed food and industrial agriculture who was able to back his assertions up with facts, naming specific studies and their results.  He cites his references, and includes a bibliography so that you can find the original studies and see the results in context, should you so choose.  Here, for once, was a true journalist who came to his conclusions as a result of his research, rather than looking for research to support a conclusion.  This was no zealot nutjob, this was someone whose conclusions I was able to take seriously, and it's made a tremendous difference in how I view food and where it comes from.  That being said...

I cook almost everything from scratch.  My personal beliefs about highly processed food aside, I do find that I spend less.  I can buy cumin, oregano and chili powder, combine them with other pantry staples, and have a year's worth of tacos PLUS I have those seasonings on hand for anything else that calls for them!  No need to spend .99 on an envelope of "taco seasoning" that has almost as much sugar as spice, and I can decide we're going to have tacos on the spur of the moment without having to worry about whether I have taco seasoning on-hand!  I've managed to find recipes for most of the convenience foods I used to buy (e.g. macaroni and cheese, and ranch and Catalina dressing).  Some of them (though by no means all!) take a little longer, but taken as a whole, they do work out cheaper in the long run. 

I only buy what's on sale.  I hear a lot of "keep a sale price diary" so that you know how low sale prices go on certain items, and how often.  I'm not quite that organized, but I do know what the lowest sale price on certain things is, and when it hits that price I try and stock up.  I only buy ground beef or boneless chicken breast when it drops below a certain price.  I buy chicken leg quarters and separate them into thigh and drumstick myself.  I buy bone-in thighs and bone them myself.  The bones go into the freezer (along with various vegetable trimmings), and when I have enough I make chicken stock.  The chicken stock gets frozen in ice-cube trays, and the resultant cubes go into a freezer bag.  Did I mention I have a freezer chest? 

I have a freezer chest!  It is absolutely worth its weight in gold.  It allows me to buy things in bulk that I would never have room for otherwise.  It allows me to make my own "convenience foods" in large batches because I have room to store it all.  It takes the same amount of time to make four gallons of chicken stock as it does to make one, and I'm more likely to actually do it if I don't have to do it very frequently.  It allows me to freeze leftovers of big meals that otherwise would go bad, because no one wants to eat chili four nights in a row.  It also means that DH doesn't complain that he can't fit his beer mug in the freezer because I've gone and stuffed it full of food of all things!

I'm a very "seat-of-your-pants" cook, so I ignore the advice to plan a weekly menu.  The idea behind that advice is that you look at all the supermarket flyers and plan your meals for the week around the sale items.  It's a good idea, but it doesn't work for me.  My version of this idea is to be a Really Good Cook!  I buy lots of basic ingredients (see first point), so when it's time for dinner I can look at what I have and decide what I want to make.   I'm not dependent on recipes, although I sometimes use them, and I know when it's safe to leave out or substitute an ingredient I'm missing.  It achieves the same basic goal - to have the majority of your meals based on what's on sale or what's on hand - but it has a great deal more flexibility.

I no longer bother with warehouse club stores.  Sure, it's cheaper than the supermarket, but only on the brand name items they offer.  Most of the time the supermarket brand was still cheaper than the warehouse brand name price. Yes, when there was a warehouse store brand version of something it was cheaper than the supermarket store brand. Unfortunately most of the items I found these savings on were for things I no longer buy - namely packaged, processed food.  The few remaining items (milk, cheese, butter, etc) do not offer enough savings to make up for the annual fee and the gas to get there.

I do not bother with coupons, except maybe store coupons (as opposed to manufacturer's coupons).  With rare exceptions, manufacturers coupons are all for processed food that I no longer buy.  Even when I run across a coupon for something I want, I find that the store brand is frequently still cheaper than the name brand, even with the coupon. Occasionally there will be a sale on a brand name item I want while the coupon is still valid - then it will be cheaper than the store brand.  If I already subscribed to the Sunday paper and was getting the coupons anyway I'd be willing to keep an eye out for these deals.  As it is, I'd have to spring for the paper once a week in hopes of finding coupons for food I was willing to buy combined with those items being on sale sometime soon.  Way too many "ifs" for the amount of effort involved.

I have a vegetable garden.  Many people don't realize that food stamps can be used to buy vegetable seeds and plants, as well as food!  My garden is fairly small, and it's only in its third year, so I'm still on the uphill side of the learning curve.  Some things work and some don't - and I try to distinguish between things I did wrong and those problems that are the Gifts of Mother Nature so that I can learn from my mistakes (Mother Nature's mistakes I can do little about).   I have not given up just because last year was awful for tomatoes and this year my cucumbers may not last long enough to provide me with pickles :(  I will try again next year!  In the meantime, I no longer have to buy  fresh herbs from the supermarket!

I found that my local farmer's market has a grant from Wholesome Wave that allows them to give 2-for-1 food stamps.  For every real food stamps dollar, I get two farmer's market "credits."  This puts the farmer's market produce on par with (or cheaper than!) the supermarket prices, which allows me to indulge my philosophical penchant for local food while staying within my food "means."  I like the idea of keeping my money (more or less) in my community.  A lot of farmers are on food stamps, too!

I can. It is not my primary form of food storage, nor is it necessarily even cheaper, as far as just plain condiments go - not until the garden improves.  It costs me more per pint to make my own blueberry preserves than it does to buy a pint of store brand grape jelly.  It is, however, much cheaper than the comparable "gourmet" blueberry preserves you might find at the supermarket, and I know exactly what has gone into it.  For me the biggest cost savings in canning is the ability to give the results as gifts!   Food as Gift is another way to transfer cash burden from Real Money to Food Stamps, and my family always appreciates the fruits of my labor.

Sadly, the one thing I don't do as much as I'd like is bake my own bread.  My daughter won't eat my homemade bread (it's an autism thing - I think she dislikes the texture) so I need to keep store-bought on hand.  While the rest of my family is quite happy to eat my bread, and expresses a desire for me to make it more often, I find that when it comes time for them to make their own sandwiches they automatically reach for the pre-sliced bread, and mine goes either stale or moldy.  Since the most expensive food in the world is the food you waste, I no longer bother.

It does, however, make wonderful bird food!

*Disclosure:  If you buy something from Amazon through the links to the Michael Pollan books I get a few pennies.