Viney happiness

I just loved the spiritual wonderful decoration in my ol best friend Lena's house. As the winters are cold, and you are often in your home - and it can be stimulus depriving - it totally makes sense that she has pinned every last branch of this LIVING vine onto her ceiling.  Beautiful.

Also cool use of debarked real tree branches from the forest which surrounds them. I want to use branches as well in my house! Like for the drapes? 

Why not?

Blue Alpaca Webbed Pattern Toque

I didn't post a photo of this toque (said toook rhymes with fluke) as I finished it shortly before we left to visit Canada.

 It was a cabling-fail - but I just went with the pattern it made. When I knitted two stitches out of order, instead of cabling - the stretch created a sort of run in the knitting. After about an inch I just moved the run, and so went on.

 You can see what the stretched webbing pattern looks like the most in the leafy photo below.

Unipegasus for Phoebe

 

Unipegasus - inspired by a girl who really wanted me to make her a unicorn. 

I used a pattern from a craft book - which I looked at and scaled up by eye as I drew it on a larger piece of paper.  Then of course, I had to make a few adjustments when I was sewing it together on the sewing machine.  I added the hair in advance - laying it along the seams before sewing up those seams, as I knew that would turn out well.  I used hand dyed and spun wool that I had bought at a craft market.

I stuffed the unicorn with soft unspun soft real wool that I had around to use for felting.  Then I added a mouth and red felt tongue. 

The horn was made by sewing a case around a shell shaped like a unicorn horn - then sewing that to the forehead.  I used fancy metallic fabric for that ( mine was stretchy, but then sometimes a bit sags above the horn - non-stretchy would actually be better.)

I had sewed the top of the nose on the wrong way up (part 1), but after tailoring to fix it, and adding the mouth and tongue to suit the 'corn, the end product was a bit goofy and cute - but so is the recipient. So all good.

 This is the pattern I used - from a New Zealand women's weekly pattern from 1971 (but republished recently in a craft book), contributed by Helen Crompton, Waiheke Island, New Zealand (Waiheke is close to Auckland. a ferry ride away).

 

Elizabeth Fox

Over the holidays in Canada I was busy making all sorts of things for my nieces and nephews.  Not the greatest photo, but this was a fuzzy "fox" hat for my niece, Elizabeth.  The insides of the ears are also knitted in brown yarn.

There is a kind of wool which is like fake fur. When you knit it, it's like a plush toy after - all stretchy and soft. It's called "eyelash yarn" as the string has little tassels of yarn all along it. I also used some plain brown yarn beside the fur string as I knitted, which you can't see at all - but made the final product warmer and stronger.

The ears look more like bear ears, but still - I think it really suits her style!

JR's stripey toque (using Fair Isle to make the stripes)

JR requested a red and blue toque (beanie), stripes which were balanced like ying and yang. I wanted to knit so that the blue and red came into a ying yang swirl at the top - but this is difficult with knitting. My sister Wendy stopped me from using all these lengths of cut strings so I could have diagonal stripes (like how you change colours to knit a picture) and showed my this amazing simple knitting method called Fair Isle.

Basically you use two colours of wool at once, knitting 3 stitches of one then the other colour, just looping the unused colour round the back (in this case I did this on 3 double pointed needles so it went round and round). (You can also do 4 stitches of each.) Basically you have one extra stitch total in the round, so additional to the multiples of 3 (or 4 if you are doing 4), so the pattern is staggered by one each row.  I charted how multiples of 3 or 4 would look, and chose a multiple of 3 as the stripes were thicker.

I still wanted to try to swirl the stripes into ying-yangs at the end, but it just wasn't the easy way the medium wanted to go. I did decrease only at the start and end of each needle so the hat kept swirling in a cool way at the top - decreasing did not wreck the pattern.

How to make hot chilli pepper jelly (and preserving info)

This is the best thing I ever made from my garden produce.

So simple to make, but the finest.  You simply blender hot chillis, capsicums (peppers in North American) and vinegar.  I found the recipe here at this great publication about chilli peppers and capsicums, "Peppers: Safe Methods to Store, Preserve, and Enjoy"    (Content reviewed and revised by LINDA J. HARRIS, Food Safety and Applied Microbiology, Specialist, Department of Food Science and Technology, University of California, Davis.)  Their recipes were adapted from “So Easy to Preserve,” 2nd Edition, Cooperative Extension Service, University of Georgia.

This is because I couldn't just try a recipe blindly.  I was learning to live off the land, and preserve my garden produce - possibly for a long time, so I had to learn how to do it safely (and yummily!).

My favourite recipes in this publication was the "Pepper Jelly" (p.11), followed by "Hot Chilli Salsa" (p.8).  But one of the reasons it tasted so amazing was the produce - fresh from my own garden, and using a variety of amazing heirloom and interesting tomatoes ranging from jam tomatoes, various coloured tomatoes, to different shapes of varieties.

Here is the recipe for Hot Chilli Pepper Jelly (sometimes called Red Pepper Jelly) but omitting a few drops of food colouring as I like completely natural foods.  For the info I needed on preserving in general, go to the full scientific paper on preserving peppers, here.  It is so easy!  Just blender, and bottle.  An amazing food with cheese, or on meats.

Hot Chilli Pepper Jelly

Makes 5 half-pint (250-ml) jars.

4 or 5 jalapeño or other hot peppers cored and chopped

4 medium green or red bell peppers cored and chopped

1 cup white vinegar (5%) or 250 ml

5 cups sugar or 1.25 L

1 pouch liquid pectin

1. Put half the peppers and half the vinegar into a blender; cover and process until

peppers are liquefied. Repeat with remaining peppers and vinegar. 

2. Combine the pepper and vinegar mixture with the sugar in a large saucepan and

boil slowly for 10 minutes. Remove from heat.

3. Add liquid pectin and boil hard for 1 minute. 

4. Skim foam off the top of the jelly and pour jelly immediately into canning jars, leaving 1⁄4 inch (0.5 cm) of headspace.

5. Wipe jar rims with a clean, damp cloth and secure lids and ring bands.

6. Process the jars of jelly in a boiling water bath as prescribed in Table 7.

Table 7. Recommended Processing Time for Pepper Jelly in a Water Bath Canner

Processing Time at Various Altitudes

For jar size of half-pint or pint: 

Altitude 0–1,000 ft  is 5 min processing time

Altitude 1,001–6,000 ft is 10 min processing time

Altitude above 6,000 ft is 15 min processing time

Knitted jumper for unipegasus (sweater)

Jumper (sweater) for Uni-pegasus as it's colder here in Canada (Troy's request). Troy has also requested jeans and shoes for Uni but these things take time.

I just sewed pieces together - a back piece with large buttonhole for wings (I put half the stitches on hold, and knitted one side at a time, then rejoined to finish top). Then I did a bottom piece shaped like an hourglass to go make room for the legs. After sewing back and front together I knitted and sewed on the ribbed sleeves. All while visiting, so wasn't tedious.