Still Stretching

It's been six months since I last posted here. I miss this space.

Random songs are warming the mood as the fire crackles in the hearth and Decadent Dad is whistling, just like his Pops, and enthusiastically chopping and grilling our Friday Night Special Night dinner. This institution started in 2000. Tonight we are looking forward to hot baked rolls filled with our own Chinese spiced beef sausage and a cabbage pickle à la Jamie, followed by chocolate Tumble cake, as in chocolate coated raisin and shortcake balls baked into a cake. We will watch a movie and I will knit. Of course there will also be coffee.

I am making a tea cosy for my art deco Susie Cooper teapot that I inherited from my grandmother. I am using a squishy cream-coloured yarn with streaks of yellow, red, green and blue, a mohair/wool/acrylic blend: Toledo by Elle in the Smarties colourway. It will be topped with cream coloured roses and green leaves. I am making it on a whim after joining the Miss Marple Knit-along that A Knitter's Life is hosting. I am binge watching the Joan Hickson series of Miss Marple, Agatha Christie murders while I work on the tea cosy.

Since learning to spin, my taste in yarn has become a bit more discerning but, being Elastic Mom, I can't bear waste and will  try to make the most of my pretty acrylic yarns. Earlier in the month I went stash-diving and put together a Leftovers Diagonal Scarf using a collection of scraps of purple wool that my sister gave me a few years ago. It feels good to turn these bitty pretties into something that is fun to wear. I really like how it turned out. I am sure that some of the wool was hand dyed mohair blend from Nurturing Fibres, there was also eyelash yarn, some recycled sari silk yarn, and the leftovers from the Granny Stripe Blanket that I made for my daughter when we first moved up to the farm. Now she lives faraway and it is her-Hug-From Mum blanket. It is so bright that my son told me it hurt his eyes. My goal is too try to use up my yarn stash before I buy more yarn.

I gave away quite a bit of my stash yarn when I started the Hope Knitters group with the three ladies who live in the staff village up the road. I wanted to give them a way of earning some money to supplement their husbands' meagre incomes. The ladies live in rudimentary houses with outside pit toilets and no running water in their homes, just cold water taps outside. Their lives are hard. They collect wood to warm their homes. They do have electricity, but their diet mostly consists of mieliemeel (maize porridge). Even though we are a little group and the knitting project is a simple concept, I believe that it will bring them hope.

The idea is to start with an incentive pack of yarn, knit or crochet an item, sell it and use the proceeds to buy another skein of yarn. Once they have done all that then they receive another donated incentive pack from me. Then they are free to spend the profits or save them and use any leftovers for personal projects. We have received some generous yarn donations from kind people from Cape Town to America. We happily take leftover yarn and scraps and I put them into 100g packs. Blantina, who works for me has enthusiastically joined the group, and we have occasional visits from a middle aged Basotho man, Ntate Tshupa, who used to crochet using a match as his crochet hook.

Mentoring these beautiful ladies has been exciting and heartbreaking. It is wonderful to see their progress and their delight in selling the items they make. Choosing their well earned packs of donated yarn brings them such joy as they anticipate their new projects. They are quick and keen to learn new stitches and patterns. We try to meet weekly. One lady brings along her two little girls who play with educational toys while their mama knits. When I first started I didn't realise how much my life would change. These ladies have captured a piece of my heart. It has been heartbreaking to see the effects of poverty on their homes along with enduring the brunt of alcoholism and domestic abuse. One of the ladies has left the group because she can't see beyond her personal pain. Then came tragedy of a car accident that killed the young husband of one of our ladies. We have taken a knock. 

Yesterday three of us sat under some gum trees with a view towards the mountains of Lesotho. We stitched and chatted. It was one of those infinite moments where nothing else mattered except that moment.

Slow Living in October

"Dit is die maand Oktober,

                       die mooiste, mooiste maand:

Dan is die dag so helder,

                       so groen is elke aand,

So blou en sonder wolke

                       die hemel heerlik bo,

So blomtuin-vol van kleure...."

C. Louis Leipoldt

The beautiful Afrikaans poem that has lingered in my mind since school days accurately describes our October: This is the month October, the most beautiful month. Then the days are so clear, each evening so green, the lovely sky above so blue and cloudless, the garden full of colours..."

Good rain has brought relief to our land, and in between the thundershowers we have been blessed with crystal clear, still, warm days and evenings. The fields are greener, the garden is beautiful. Join me as I remember the days gone by last month along with Slow Living Essentials.

NOURISH

Seasonal eating, teaches patience and true appreciation of the delights from our garden. A longed for fruit or vegetable tastes much sweeter and is enjoyed wholeheartedly in its abundant, yet short season. My philosophy of USE IT-DON'T LOSE IT, keeps me on my toes as spring produce ripens and brings new flavours to our table. October has brought us plenty of strawberries, onions, baby cabbages, mangetout peas, broad beans, rhubarb and asparagus. More variety encourages exciting explorations into gorgeous recipe books and tantalising food blogs. This in turn results in some delicious new mealtime experiments... for example: coriander and pea slaw from What's Cooking Good Looking (pic above) and my variation on garden pea and rocket pesto soup from Bernadette Le Roux's tribute to heirloom veggies, Roots, shoots & leaves (pic below).

PREPARE

My delightful new gift, the recipe book, Sugar Salt Smoke, has inspired me to rinse off those jars that gathered dust in winter and put them to some use.

I made a jar and a half of  very strong 'wholegrain honey mustard' using our own honey stores and my super potent apple cider instead of vinegar. Then I bubbled up enough heart-melting 'nearly strawberry jam' to serve on breakfast muffins. Finally I eked a few tots worth of wickedly wonderful 'rhubarb schnapps' from our rather too young rhubarb plants.

Oh yes, how could I forget, I also made my best ever camembert cheese this month as well as some farmhouse cheddar to add to our stores.

GREEN

Slugs with a rather presumptuous sense of self-entitlement have appeared in the veggie tunnel and would love to feast on my lettuces and strawberries, but I have other plans for these long awaited treats. So I dry eggshells on the windowsill before crushing them into spiky slug barriers around my precious plants. We also feed a few crushed shells back to the hens and so maintain the calcium cycle.

REDUCE / RE-USE / RECYCLE

Don't you think ruminant lawn mowers are far more appealing than the noisy mechanical alternative?

Actually, this was our solution to a broken lawn mower. The cheeky animals had to be supervised or they would have mowed down the roses too.

GROW

It's been out with the leeks and brassicas and in with the beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and pumpkins. The potatoes are growing faster than we can earth up their beds and there are strawberry popcorn shoots springing up, and young carrots and beets promising hope for Summer. I still need to plant the last few tomato plants into their beds, but the rest of the Spring planting is mostly done.

I am loving the herb and strawberry wheel we built last year, and it is loving the soaking rain. Decadent Dad's fun strawberry spiral is showing potential for next spring.

My biggest delights at the moment are the flowers. My study window looks out over a bed of irises, cornflowers, herbs, virginian stocks, poppies and daisies. It's becoming a real cottage garden. When the sunlight wakes me at 5 in the morning I love to slip on something warm and wander around the dew drenched garden while my family is still sleeping. Often the lambs and calves are snoozing too. Only the chickens crowd at their gate, hustling to get out.
 

CREATE

Our daughter has recently rediscovered the peaceful joy of crochet and has embarked on a blanket project in anticipation of a new room in a faraway town next year when she leaves home for college. It delights my heart to see her beginning to enjoy the gentle arts of cooking and crafting as she is preparing to leave home. 

DISCOVER

Ooh, October's down-time has found me immersed in some delightful books: On Kindle - A Daughter's Walk by Jane Kirkpatrick, a novel which tells the true story of Clara and Helga Estby who walked across North America in 1896. In paperback - the classic, Eleni, by Nicholas Gage, another true story of courage, love and revenge in Greece during the 1940's. 

Top of the list of delicious books at the moment is Jamie Oliver's famous, Jamie at Home, published in 2007. A friend lent it to me along with the dvd series of the same name. I love Jamie Oliver's easy, practical, yet gorgeous recipes, and his veggie garden, the main source of his ingredients, is magnificent and something to aspire to. Best of all is that we are growing each one of the veggies he focuses on in his chapter on Spring. 

ENHANCE

Our children attend art classes in our little town. This month they participated in a fabulous exhibition of the student's work. 

ENJOY

The highlight of our month was a special birthday treat of a night away for Decadent Dad's birthday. We stayed in a tiny secluded stone cottage at an old mill dating back to the 1820's. I pampered him with an Elastic Mom spa treatment and delectable food. 

  

We also had a lovely weekend with family from KZN. The big boys played as boys will do, shooting targets, sneaking camouflaged through the fields with their bows, and returning home happy and empty handed. 

photo by Karin

'Die mooiste maand", October, has brought respite in the form of rain, variety from our veggies and some soul-strengthening rest. 

Slow Living in August

Come and meander though the highlights of the past month with me, guided by Slow Living Essentials

August started off as the month of fire and ice. Snow fell on the farm twice, but to my children's disappointment, it was not heavy enough to last long. August is also the windy month. Veld fires have raged through some  of the surrounding farms, keeping my son and husband fighting flames late into many a night. Until the Summer rains come and the dry gales subside, we are all on high fire alert.

Fires of a more comforting, crackling, contained kind continue to warm our home at night. 

Towards the end of the month as the temperatures soared into hints of the coming summer, new fires were made for al fresco meals and a little cheese smoking. There was ice then too, but the glass-tinkling cocktail-cooling type.

NOURISH
I have been making cheese incessantly as Rosie's milk flow relentlessly gushes into the buckets twice a day and more townsfolk discover the delights of jersey milk cheese. The constant stirring of pots of warm milk and monitoring temperatures has left me rather uninspired in the kitchen, that and the meager pickings from the garden and farm. Not much is left in my stores from last summer, some frozen tomatoes, plenty of apricot jam, bags of frozen apricots, a few jars of chutney, walnuts and some sun dried tomatoes. Cooking from scratch under these circumstances is depressing. Even so, the garden is beginning to show signs of spring but, as Barbara Kingsolver says, " this is the hungry season". Thankfully we have an overabundant supply of dairy products to keep us going. Even my chickens have not yet discovered the coming joys of spring.

This meal was made from the collection of beans that I dried at the end of summer, baked with our frozen tomatoes. The salad consisted of leftover brussels sprouts tossed with walnuts, sun dried tomatoes and some of my chabrie cheese in a yoghurt dressing. I make a pleasant mock mayonnaise by whisking oil, lemon juice or vinegar, mustard powder, sugar and salt into my natural yoghurt.

PREPARE
The only stockpiling happening here is in the form of golden cylinders of cheese. This month I tried making pecorino and parmesan. Waxing the cheeses once they are dry will hopefully let them mature without a thick, hard rind. Oh yes, all the butter making left us with buttermilk which we baked into bread and there are a few loaves of bread in the freezer now too. I did also store up a few tubs of gourmet ice-cream for our family who are visiting soon.

REDUCE / RE-USE / RECYCLE
When I was a little girl, my doctor-daddy would bring us used glass injection vials which we filled with tiny shells or beads for ornaments. Well, a few months ago I quiveringly mastered giving injections to our animals. When Rosie was ill then I managed to save a cow-sized vial.

and this month, when I got around to cleaning it up, it made a pretty little vase for some dried tansy flowers.

Why toss a favourite pinkT-shirt just because it's stained. Buy some inexpensive black dye and have some tie-dying fun. 

Throw in a white pair of jeans that fit but aren't practical for the farm, botch up their dying to create a mottled grey pair of jeans and then you can buy more dye and have more fun next month too. 

GREEN
I am pleased to say that the soap nuts my friend gave me are wonderful in the dishwasher. Our citrus cleaner also does a great job shining up the sink. I have run out of moisturizer and eye make-up remover. Natural plant oils work wonders for both.

GROW
Snowdrops, daffodils and rocket have been popping up in our garden, much to our delight. The flowers are almost too pretty to pick.

The rocket, on the other hand, once packaged, was gratefully received by a nearby restaurant, and put a few coins in my pocket in the process.

Other welcome spring plants that have made an appearance in the last few weeks are coriander, bok choi, asparagus and mustard lettuce. I have planted loads of seeds in trays. Here's hoping they will germinate. If I could only remember to water them. 

CREATE
Another kitchen helper created by my husband - a recipe book stand that is off the work surface and swivels out of the way.

My clever husband also designed and built this impressive castle-bed, even hand stitching the pennants.

Two years of dedicated crocheting whenever I had a chance finally produced my daughter's granny stripe blanket.

What a wonderful relief to get back to a bit of sewing now. This apron was a delight to make.

DISCOVER
Oooh, I have discovered a deliciously addictive, wonderfully educational website, called Craftsy. It is full of online craft courses, and some of them are free. I signed up for their free quilting Block of the Month course. I have never quilted before, but have wanted to learn ever since my talented aunt gave us a beautiful quilt as a wedding present twenty years ago. As you can see, my first two blocks are made. Not too shabby either, and I am using a South African traditional fabric, shwe-shwe. I am so excited about this project, jumping up and down inside, and there are so many more exciting courses. I just wish I had more time for quilting in my days.

I have also treated myself to a mail-order quilting course, thanks to my cheese income. Great big happy smiles.

ENHANCE
I have started teaching some of the farm teen girls some knitting techniques, like cabling, and making those cute booties, and even a bit of what I am learning from the quilting course. Sitting chatting, listening to "Call me Maybe", cups of tea, young ladies each working on their own project, random displays of exuberance from my daughter... smile.

ENJOY
My talented daughter, in exploring her photographic creativity, and being relatively isolated here and having limited access to models for her photography, has decided to commit herself to 365 self portraits. I am so enjoying her passion for creative expression.

As the tempestuous days of fire and ice give way to balmy spring weather, pink peach blossoms line the road to our farm house, and white orchards adorn the hill, promising luscious summer fruit. I take a deep breath of joy as I surface for air after the breath-holding submergence under winter's frozen grip.

Recipe for Elastic Scatter Cushions

-

Start with one Elastic Mom
Add in one free Saturday afternoon and one recently dusted sewing machine.

Take one old, out of shape pink pyjama top that was in the scrap pile (mine)
Add some crocheted granny stripes that have been gathering dust for a year (my daughter's)
Cut the pink top and sew it to cover an old, ugly scatter cushion.
Cover the now-pink cushion with the cheerful stripes.

Then take some orange fabric that was intended for a school project and never used.
Add a serviette decoupage made in an art class four years ago. (my son's)
Sew the leafy print onto the orange  fabric and decorate it with yellow stitching.
Then sew it into another cushion cover.

Take a large square of moss stitch knitted five years ago...

using unraveled wool from an unfinished baby jersey (my son's) that was started 12 years ago ...

using leftover aran wool from a  jersey (my husband's) knitted 17 years ago, 

and sew it onto a piece of unbleached cotton bought 18 months ago.

Sew up a creamy cover for another scatter cushion.

Make button holes and use three cream-coloured buttons cut off an old tatty cushion to decorate the back.

Continue in this fashion until your weekend runs out.

Send the stripy cushion to your daughter's pink bedroom. Keep the blue and red cushions on the couch.
Arrange some of your Autumnal cushions on your bed along with the fluffy blanket knitted by your daughter for her daddy and the beaded cushion from your sister.

Smile.

On My Mind Today... Blankets and Booties

A big little boy is soon to be born to my brother and his wife. He is due to arrive in around 5 weeks. I have, rather ambitiously, started knitting him a blanket. His mommy chose the wool - a delicious denim coloured bamboo/cotton blend. The blanket is knitted on circular needles. It contains 35 squares of different texture in the pattern of my design: cables, stripes, diamonds, lacy bits, but not to lacy for a boy. The squares are not knitted separately. I distinguish between them with bands of garter stitch. It is complicated, yet I enjoy the challenge. My only concern is that the blanket won't be complete in time for the arrival of this long awaited baby boy. You see, I am only just completing the first set of 5 squares. Thirty squares to go.

A hand made gift has love woven into it, and means far more than something that I just bought off the shelf. Every time his mamma wraps him in his blanket, they will know the love that went into making it is wrapping around him too.

The doctor says that he is a really big baby, about two weeks bigger than his gestational age. I have a feeling that the booties I knitted him might just be too tiny.

I am also desperately crocheting two granny stripe blankets. One each for my children. This one will be for my 15 year old daughter who adores all things colourful. My son says that the bright colours hurt his eyes, so his blanket is rather more conservative. I want them to feel my love wrapping around them too as they snuggle under them in the freezing winter here near the Lesotho Highlands. My children see the time and love that goes into each stitch of their blankets. I know that they will value these handmade labours of love.... when I eventually finish them.

Thank you Rhonda for this idea of sharing what it On My Mind today.