Shiitake Mushroom Harvest

Remember when Bill and I prepared those logs about 2 years ago with the mushroom plugs? They take about 2 years to "mature" or whatever it is they do, then you can harvest for about 10 years after that. I'd kind of forgotten all about them until Bill looked at them a few weeks ago. Well....

The mushrooms are coming! The mushrooms are coming! Actually this is harvest #2.

Here they are washed and drying... guess what's for dinner? This is just one of two cleaned batches... yeah, a big harvest. I'm going to be pretty sick of shiitakes after a few nights of these. We'll have to give away a ton of them.

The first harvest had a ton of little bugs in the gills and it took alot of rinsing to get them all out. The weather was still warm so that's probably why there were so many. But we've had temps dropping into the 40s at night in the past week. No bugs this time. We also took the logs up to the lake and dunked them into the water overnight (brrr). Left 3 logs up there and brought these 4 home.  2 weeks later, they exploded with mushrooms! I expect at least as many in the next 2 weeks. Anybody know any way to preserve them other than drying?

Weaving adventures

Maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew by choosing something hard like this undulating twill. The warp is tencel and the weft is a fingering weight merino wool, I think. I messed up the threading, skipping a whole segment, and it became really noticeable once I got going, so I had to unweave a few inches to fix that... there are 2 other places where I think I switched two threads but I have to really look for those places so I just left those in... perfection is so overrated anyway. Besides, unweaving is no fun.

I've learned how to use two shuttles/colors and to treadle two patterns (tabby with the left foot and the twill with the right). It's fun to watch the curves appear. Notice my perfect tension... and I forgot to use warping sticks or paper or anything. Hope the weaving police don't show up.

Weaving...

Getting set up for weaving... here is the swift on the left and the ball winder to the right. Mom and Janie, I fixed the swift's missing top by using one of those wide rubber bands from broccoli along with cotton string. Seems to be working so far! The swift takes a skein of yarn and unwinds it as the ball winder re-winds the yarn into a ball (also called a cake).

Here is my new (old) loom. It's a 32" weaving width 8 shaft-10 treadles Loomcraft. It feels so much sturdier than the Norwood or even the Artisat, mostly because this isn't portable! It is firmly ensconced in the dining room but out of sight of the great room so Bill doesn't have to actually SEE it. His only comment so far was just that it was big. Heh. Locking pins are holding the beater stationary for now. It came with the tilt seat bench.

Here's the back of it. The back beam flips up for when I need to thread the heddles. I also have a home-made replacement warp beam that's more like the cloth beam... maybe I'll switch it out if I can't get used to this large one that's already on here.

For Mom and Dad (and Janie), this is the wedge trick I read about that helps to elevate the shafts to different levels to make threading the million heddles a little bit easier. I don't think a doorstop would be big enough after putting in this nearly empty cone. I just raised the shafts and inserted this in the space in the middle (bigger end toward the front of the loom).

Hopefully you can see how the heddles on each of these 4 shafts are at staggered levels - I think this will be better than trying to paint the heddles different colors.

When I get this all threaded and get some weaving done, I'll post a picture of what this scarf is going to look like. I am doing a draft from this article online http://www.weavezine.com/content/flowing-curves-part-1-overshot-and-weaving-overshot

Growing mushrooms

Several weeks ago, a tree fell in the woods just as we were getting out of the car. What a racket. Bill decided to order this mushroom-growing kit... heh, whatever, yall know I tend to just go with the flow with Bill. Apparently you need to use freshly fallen/cut trees for this. He cut some large sections of the tree to use as the base for the mushrooms. The rest he cut up for firewood. You can never have too much firewood.

Then, as per instructions, he drilled holes all over the tree sections.

And pounded in the mushroom plugs. They were about an inch long and less than a half inch thick.

I helped. The kit came with hard wax that I melted a little at a time and then "painted" on over the plug to create a seal. I guess this is to keep the moisture in and the bugs out.

Here are the sections we did. They sit out in the woods in the shade like this for about a year and then supposedly we will have a bumper crop of shiitake mushrooms. I still think I'd rather get mine from the grocery store.

Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas from Bill and me!

We tried yet again, to get a decent picture of the 3 kids. It started off okay...

Then the high jinks took over... and Mae got a huge fit of the gigglies...


which Steven and Will love to keep going...

Hope you all have plenty of merry happening in your house!

One of my favorite pictures

We're missing Will, but I love this picture of Steven and Mae taken after her graduation from 8th grade. Click on it to get the full impact of two happy faces. Sigh. It does a mother's heart good.

Washington, DC trip, part 2

So, continuing on with the 8th grade trip to DC, we spent some time in the Air and Space Museum. Recognize the Apollo? Amazing to think that was all the room they had in there. Click on the picture to check out the little cots they strapped themselves into.

These innnneresting water sculptures were outside. Lovely for the little kiddies to get their beginner's anatomy lessons.

We went to the Botanical Gardens. This was the only thing I wanted to take a picture of there. What a great idea for an arbor or walkway. I loved checking out all the varieties of plants in there. Otherwise, it was a bit ho-hum in comparison to Duke Gardens in Somerset, NJ, or the NY Botanical Gardens.

This was one of many, many benches Mae anointed with her bottom and her heavy sighs in DC. Actually this was the only pretty one. It would have been even better without the dividers in the bench. Mae discovered that if you don't place your bum correctly, you get a butt crack divider, ouch!

We did the Tour of Monuments from around 7 - 9 pm. Mae was definitely running out of steam and we visited every other bench along the walkways. She's standing in front of the WWII Monument (which is huge) and the Washington Monument is visible behind it. Mae is facing the Lincoln Memorial on the other side of the long Reflecting Pool (remember in Forrest Gump when he finished speaking just as the sound comes back on and Jenny wades into the water shouting, "Forrest!")

We walked through the Korean War Monument. The statues were all spaced out in kind of an elongated V to show, I guess, how they walked through an area. They all had capes over their uniforms, but you could see guns and radios and other things sticking out. The expressions were pretty grim. It was kind of depressing overall.

On our last day, we went to Arlington National Cemetary with a small detour into the Women's War Memorial. Here is Mae standing in front of the "Women Go To War" part of the women in WWII display. The class brought flowers to recognize her great, great aunt Allie B. Williams who was a WAC in WWII. We ditched the rest of the class and stayed here while they walked through Arlington. Mae couldn't see all the crosses to get the impact of how many there were, so we watched a movie about women in the armed forces through the years. Okay, I admit it, I sat with Mae on a bench... in an air-conditioned room while they had to walk through the cemetery in 85 degree humid heat. Heh, heh, heh.

On our way back to NJ, we stopped at the Naval Academy in Annapolis for lunch and a tour. Whoa! This is definitely something I'd recommend to others. Our tour guide was fantastic and as the former Director of Admissions for the Academy, he gave our group quite a bit of advice. One of the many things he said that stuck in my mind was that, on average, after college we live about 72 years. The amount of hard work we put into 4 years of high school and then 4 years of college - those 8 years - have a direct effect on how we get to spend those remaining 72 years.

This picture is of the residential dorms. I can't remember the name, but it has 8 connecting wings and is absolutely gorgeous inside and out. Big dorm rooms too.

The last thing we saw in Annapolis was the crypt of John Paul Jones. It's in its own circular room under the chapel. I wish we'd had more time to walk through here because he's quite the interesting historical figure in our history - "I have not yet begun to fight."

and a tiling masterpiece... ta da!

After the new stove and microwave got put in, we decided to FINALLY do something about putting up a backsplash of some sort. After measuring the space, I went shopping and found these 2" tiles that came in 12" sheets. We cut some of the sheets apart, but didn't need to do any tile cutting, they fit perfectly. Voila! It really was much easier than I expected. And yeah, the blue tape isn't there anymore :)

Before and after

Second to go, but first to be replaced was the oven. The cooktop just cracked out of the blue one day while Steven was cooking bacon. It would cost at least an arm to replace the part, so we decided to get a new one. Which meant a matching microwave, of course.

Before:

And after:

The first thing to go and just installed today were the lights. One of the globes of the island light just slipped out and shattered all over the kitchen. Steven and friends were making lunch at the time... notice the common denominator? Haha, really though, none of it was Steven's fault, but I got to rag on him anyway. The island light never matched the table light for some reason. It was one of those things that we said we'd take care of when we bought the house, but here it is 16 years later...

Before:

And after:

8th grade DC trip, Part 1

I went with Mae on the 8th grade field trip to Washington DC last week. It was a mostly fun trip except for the parts where Mae complained about walking. We arrived around noon on Tuesday and had a picnic lunch at Lafayette Park, which is just across from the White House. It was still drizzling so we ate standing up and walking around. The squirrels were very cute. At first. Look at this darling black one - he stood just a few feet from Mae. I threw him a piece of bread. Can we just say MISTAKE!

Every other squirrel in the park came out of the woodwork, or at least the trees. This guy was literally 2 feet from my face! I started getting nervous. I put the camera down and realized that we were surrounded by at least 30 of them, and they were stepping on my own feet. How I refrained from shrieking and running away, I don't know.

I pulled Mae along, listening to her complain that they were just friendly and they'd probably let her pet them. Sigh. She couldn't see the beady eyes that were gauging how far they'd have to climb up our legs to rip our food away. We walked to the other side of the park. I had no idea whose house this was, but there were demonstrators marching up and down protesting nuclear bombs or something. It took me a second to realize it's the White House. Yeah, THE White House. It's alot smaller in real life. There are houses in my town that are bigger, but then who needs all that room anyway. Ignore the chocolate on Mae's teeth. Pretend we are country bumpkins.

My most favorite place in DC will have to be the Library of Congress. Never mind all the historical and artistic treasures in its many collections, or the fact that every book ever published is here, the building itself was gorgeous. The tour guides were all welcoming and gracious. Mae was allowed to touch EVERYTHING. That was so cool, because it meant I could too! This was part of the ceiling in one of the rooms. All marble and each little square was less than a half inch. The designs were inspiring...

Even the floors were marble - doesn't this look like a quilt to be?

My next original quilt is going to be a medallion - here's my inspiration.

Even the ceilings were amazing. I took a bunch of pictures here but after looking at them on the computer I realized I concentrated on design elements that are probably boring to other people.

We went to the Capitol Building as well. I won't bother going there ever again. Snotty, unfriendly guides. I didn't see a single one there who smiled - at all - EXCEPT for the lady whose job was sitting inside the elevator. She was very nice; probably because she was lonely. It was really weird how they made a big deal about having to have a few people use their elevators. Hello! Never mind the girl with the cane, what about the kid in the wheelchair? How DO you expect him to manage the stairs?! Sigh. Mae wasn't allowed to touch anything in here. I felt like the pic I took outside was indicative of the inside. An armed guard to shoot you if you screw up and an ambulance to take you away immediately.

This was the only thing I took a picture of inside the Capitol Building. It was on the ceiling of course. If you click the picture to see it bigger, you may notice the lady in the center is George Washington in drag. I kid you not. My mind has forgotten the guide's explanation of the artist's intention, I was too mind boggled at my own thought that dang, those revolutionists were quite the swingers!

Procrastination

I had about 3 months to work on this art quilt panel, but I couldn't decide what to do. I was supposed to represent the element of Earth in a setting that was determined by the first panel in this series (the other 3 elements are Air, Fire, and Water). I finally decided to show everything overgrown - in hindsight I wish I'd taken a pic of Air to show the difference. The setting is very similar, but here, less water is visible,  the tree is bigger, the greenery is lush and overgrown, there are rocks, and the fence is slightly askew.

I like the girl. She was initially going to be Mother Nature in a rocking chair (like an old lady with a grey bun), but the first two panels of this have a young girl with long hair so I kept her the same. The rocking chair and the long dress sort of age her a little.

I added a little bit of vines to the fence. And the ferns were a last minute addition.

Steven's prom

Bill didn't do a very good job taking pictures. Hardly any were in focus. I will have a word with him later. Here is Steven with his date, Chalisse.

Orchid show, Part 2

Mae had had enough after about 2 seconds. This fountain area was about 3/4 of the way through the gardens. I asked her to sit for a minute while I took a picture of her. This is the 4th attempt to get her to smile. You know it's a losing battle when she mutters, "I'm not frowning. Can't we just get out of here already?" I deleted the others. You don't need to see what I deal with every day.

Steven took this picture. Finally. Bill and I had just about exhausted our fake smiles and were going to jump forward to show Steven which button to push to take the darn picture already. 

Bill wouldn't let us leave without having me take this picture. He insisted. Can you guess what he found so amusing? Hint: look where his hands are... sigh. So immature.