Year End Review 2017

Experimental doll. 

It is the day of New Year's Eve.  I usually try to take a look back and see what I have accomplished this year in my crafting endeavors.  I generally approach this with a bit of dread because I always feel as if I have not gotten anything done.  Generally I am surprised when I go back through this year's posts.  I have completed quite a lot, even though it does not feel that way.

Please note:  the photos may be all over the place on this post.  Whenever I make a long post, the blog platform gives me a lot of grief over positioning the photos.  I finally gave up on adding captions.  In order the pictures are: experimental doll, pin cushions, spiral bowl, needle keepers, wall hanging, lap quilt, star and leaf quilt, painting, sandworm, Jupiter sphere, and challenge quilt.  Sorry if the post looks messy. 

At the beginning of the year I set a rather loose set of goals for the year.  I find that setting too rigid a schedule causes me to become stressed and frustrated rather than enjoying the process.  Some years I am able to meet all the goals.   Other years, like this year, I only partially met those goals.  Life sometimes gets in the way of the things I want to do.  Other times, I was out there having so much of a good time that I could not even get into the studio.  At any rate, there were things I accomplished this year and things I did not. 


The goals I set for 2017 were fairly modest.  I wanted to make a doll of a Flamenco dancer, refurbish my painted Jupiter sphere, and make a quilt in a Star and Leaf pattern.  The doll and the quilt were large projects.  Refurbishing the Jupiter sphere was a moderate project.  Other than that, I planned to do some work with my quilting guild. It seems like a small enough agenda, but I also did a few other projects along the way. 

The Star and Leaf quilt, a large quilt 72" x 72" (182.88 x 182.88 cm.) is put together and half way through the process of being hand quilted.  I confess, this quilt would have been completed if I had followed the quilting suggestion that came with the pattern.  However, I chose to go off on a quilting tangent, and this quilt is only half way finished.  The way I began quilting it, each block takes about six to seven hours to quilt.  I work on it steadily, but sometimes I just have to put it down for a while and come back to it when I am in the mood. 

The Jupiter sphere has been repainted.  I recently showed a picture of it on the blog after I painted the base coat.  Since then I have done more work on it, but have not had time to get on the blog.  The holiday season had me tied up every day one way or another.  I was exhausted, even though I had a nice time.  I will be showing pictures of the completed sphere after the first of the year.

The Flamenco doll never made it beyond the initial planning stage.  I made a basic sketch of my idea for the doll, but that is as far as things went.  I was doing so much quilting and hand work this year that something had to fall by the wayside.  However, this project has been slated for the new year.  I haven't given up on it.  This doll is an ambitious project.  I could have started it earlier this year, but I hope to enter this project in the state fair in 2018.  The rules state that the project must be made in the year that it is exhibited.  I have held off starting until after the 2018 begins.  I did not think I would have time to finish the project in time for the 2017 state fair.

So now that I have reviewed my goals for last year, it is time to get on to what I actually did in 2017.  I began the year working on an experimental doll.  It was an attempt to use an existing doll as a mold for a papier mache doll.  I wanted to see if I could modify the position of the doll's arms and legs and make a doll with a different stance from the original doll.  The result was a doll named Barbara. 

Another experimental project was a spiral paper bowl.  I had seen some objects on Pintrest made from spirals made of paper and thought I would give it a try.  I did make a bowl, but it was not very sturdy.  However, it was a great fidget project for sitting and watching television.  Making the spirals kept my hands busy whiles viewing shows.  That left my daytime crafting for other projects.

The rest of the projects for this year were almost all textile projects.  I completed 18 pin cushions for my quilting guild and 20 needle keepers in folk art shapes for gifts.  The pin cushions were sewn on the machine and stuffed with fiber fill.  The wool felt needle keepers were all hand work.  It seems like these would be fairly quick projects, but they were not.  I spent days and days stuffing the pin cushions.  The blanket stitch on the needle keepers took much longer than I thought it would.

Although I have not finished the Star and Leaf quilt, I did complete two other quilts this year.    One was a small scrap quilt made from some leftover fabric.  Fabric has become so expensive that I try to use up what I have before going out to buy more fabric.  I was making this quilt for display at my guild.  The other was a small quilt for the paint chip challenge.  You had to go to the store and pick out paint chips with paint names that started with the initials of your name.  From all the combinations of paint chips with your initials, you had to find colors that coordinated enough to make a quilt.  There were many paint chips to choose from, but the problem was the fabric hunt for colors of fabric that matched the paint chips.   Then you had to put the quilt together.  Those two quilts kept me busy for the better part of the year.

I am also working on a quilted wall hanging of an elephant.  I take that with me to the sit-and-sew.  I got bogged down on that one because I decided it needed to have beading on it.  I wanted to make it look like an elephant that might have been outfitted with fine fabrics and gems as if it was in some sort of royal procession; perhaps one that might have been ridden by some raja in a bygone era.  I don't exactly know where this quilt is going.  I have one more section to bead then I will begin quilting it.  Sooner or later I will finish it.

I always want to make something to add to my Halloween collection.  This year I was pressed for time, so I did a painting.   I don't usually do paintings.  I think this one came out pretty well considering.  My other Halloween project was an edible project.  I made a Sandworm from the Dune series.  It is actually a cinnamon roll recipe set to look like a creature from a science fiction series.  I did not come up with the idea, I saw it on the internet.  It was fun,and my friends really enjoyed seeing (and eating) it.

So all this was accomplished while traveling out of town for seven trips this year.   As I said earlier, I really did not feel as if I had made much progress on anything this year, but I actually did get a fair amount done.  I hope this year will be better.  At least, I hope that I will be able to work on projects that will further my crafting goals for 2018.

Jupiter Ball Redoux - Part 1

The original painting.

Long time readers may remember that in 2015 I made a hypertufa gazing ball and painted it to look like Jupiter.  The ball sat outside for a long time.  By 2017, sun and weather took its toll on the ball and it became faded and the paint was flaking off in the polar region.  I decided the ball needed a makeover.  I started the project this spring, but had so many trips and projects going on that the project languished all year.

Paint faded and flaked off over the years.

The ball had originally been painted with acrylic paints.  I knew that at some point they would fade, but at that time I thought when the time came I would cover it with stained glass and make it into a mosaic gazing ball.  In the end, I decided that I was really quite fond of my Jupiter ball and would like to repaint it.  However, I did not want to end up painting the ball every few years so I decided to use enamel paints rather than acrylics.  This is where the trouble started.  I was unsure how well the enamel paints would work over top of the acrylic paint and sealer and whether the acrylic paint would continue to flake off, taking new paint with it.

Paint removed with a power tool.

I felt I had to get the old paint off the ball before I could put new paint on the ball.  Although the paint was flaking off in some places, the rest of it was thoroughly adhered to the ball.  I made a trip out to my local discount hardware place for a wire brush.  As is many times the case with this discount hardware store, the wire brush was really not the best quality.  After a couple of hours with this thing I started using a much sturdier wire brush from my husbands tool kit.  After a few more hours of diligent brushing the paint was still barely scratched off in a few places. 

The new enamel base coat.

I decided I needed to go to Plan B: a power tool.  I began using a grinding angle with a masonry attachment.  Compared to the wire brush, this tool took off the paint quickly but it was still a couple of hours of work.  The tool was fairly heavy and before I was able to figure out the best way to hold it against the curved surface of a sphere I made a few gouges in the ball.  To smooth out the worst of the dings, I kept grinding away at the ball.  It is a little bit smaller than when I started; and probably not quite as round.  Furthermore, when the ball was cast, the surface was relatively smooth.  The grinder left all sorts of score marks and I was very disappointed with the look at the time.  Later, I began to think of these marks as a feature.  I am sure that I could have eventually found a way to smooth the surface, but it would have taken a lot of time.  At that point, I set the project aside, partly through frustration and partly because I was so busy that I was not getting into the studio for weeks at a time. 

I did make one attempt at restarting this project near mid-summer.  I made it out to the craft store and purchased the enamel paints.  That was another discouragement point.   I needed to use air dry enamel paints rather than bake in the oven paints because the ball was too large to fit into the toaster oven that I have dedicated for craft projects.  The craft store had a very poor selection of enamel paints. Mainly what they carried in air dry enamels were paints for painting on glass.  Most of the colors appeared to be either transparent or muddy.  I decided to do what I could with what colors I could mix together.  I started painting the base color on the ball. Each color had to sit for at least an hour before another coat could be added.

At this point, the ball is not finished.  I have painted on the base coat and done a little work on Jupiter's red spot.  It has taken a while to get this far but the results have been encouraging.  The striations caused by the angle grinder have become an asset.  It gives the ball the rough look of Jupiter's roiling atmosphere.  The transparency of the paints will cause me to use more layers of paint than before, but that may add to the look of the planet's storm clouds.  I still have a long way to go on the painting of this project, but I think that with more layers of paint that the sphere will be restored to something of its previous condition.  At least it will be restored enough to put it back outside. 

Check back next Sunday to see the progress on the sphere.

First Snowfall 2017

We had our first snow of the season this weekend.  It was a bit of a surprise for many people.  Although it is not unusual for us to have some flurries by now, we don't generally have heavy snow this early. 

At first the weather forecast was only calling for two inches (5.08 cm.).  That was not getting a lot of attention from people.  Then, by late afternoon, the forecast changed and started calling for 8 to 12 inches (20.32 to 30.48 cm.)  That probably caused a stampede at the grocery store.  When the word snow is uttered, people rush to the grocery store and wipe out the milk and bread.  I did not go to the store as I had been shopping earlier in the week and was well stocked with food. 

There was a good deal of concern about power outages.  Many trees still had leaves on them.  The heavy wet snow could bring down branches on the power line.  There were thousands of people without power, but this time our neighborhood was spared.  Our neighborhood was once referred to by some power company employees as a "frequent flier" when it came to having power outages.  This is due to our neighborhood being ringed by lots of Poplar trees.  These trees grow tall, but are very rigid.  When there is a high wind they tend to snap in half.  However, there was almost no wind with this storm, just snow.  Other than an occasional downed branch here and there our neighborhood was pretty much intact. 

Yesterday, my husband and I went for a walk around the neighborhood.  We enjoy looking at the beauty of the trees all covered with snow.  We encountered only two people while we were out.  A teenage girl was busy rolling snow to make a snowman.  The second was the UPS delivery man.  Incongruously, he was wearing a medium weight jacket, and shorts.  He gave us a beep and a wave as he drove down the street.  I guess he was recognizing us because we seemed to be enjoying the shared sentiment of being outdoors in the snow.

Later in the day, my husband went outside and cleared the snow off the automobile windows and roods.  By afternoon it was snowing again.  I guess we might have received another inch or so.  Overall, we received eight or nine inches here.  Due to the temperature remaining slightly above freezing, the streets and sidewalks remained clear.  It was nice not to have to shovel the walkways or dig out the driveway.  I guess we will have to go out again this morning to clear the car windows and roof.  We will be waiting until a little later until it warms up a bit.  It won't get too much warmer, the forecast high today is only for 39 degrees Fahrenheit (3.89 C). 

My husband snapped a few pictures of our backyard.  The trees look so beautiful covered with snow.

Cabin Food and Cooking Strategies

Earlier this year I had blogged about some of my strategies for serving up tasty meals at the cabin without having to spend so much time in the kitchen.  I love being at the cabin in cold weather and it can be fun to cook on the wood stove up to a point, but I don't really want to spend my entire time up there cooking.  Also, the weather can at times be warmer than expected, and if it is too warm, you don't necessarily want to be firing up the cook stove.  Once the stove heats up the cabin it takes a long time for the place to cool down.  So I have to have strategies for multiple ways to put a meal on the table.   I also do some cooking ahead to speed things up while I am there. While "quick" is a relative term, I think you will find these recipes worth the effort.

Of course a soup or stew is great on the wood stove.  You can have the stove banked low and let the food cook in a long slow simmer.  To make the cooking up there a little easier, I sometimes brown the meat and onions until the meat is cooked through and then freeze them.  It saves a little time on the cooking and cleanup while at the cabin.  The potatoes and carrots go with us whole and I cut them up when I'm ready to start the stew.  I throw in a can of tomato sauce and some frozen peas and the stew is on the stove to simmer until ready.  I once tried to cook the stew in an electric frying pan when the weather was too warm to start up the cook stove.  It cooked, but it just did not taste like stew.  It was hard to get the potatoes and carrots to cook through.  The vegetables needed a longer, slower cooking time.

Three bean soup is one of my favorite soups for cooking in the mountains.  It is delicious and ready in a matter of minutes.  Saute some onions, garlic, and green pepper.  Throw in a can each of kidney beans, black beans, and re-fried beans (mashed pinto beans), add about a salsa (I use our homemade, canned salsa), a can of chicken broth, and chili powder about 2 teaspoons, pepper and cumin.  Easy on the cumin, I use only about a heaping quarter teaspoonful.  Start there and add more spices to taste.  Depending on the type of salsa you use, you may not need any more chili powder.  If you use a mild salsa, adjust the chili to your level of heat.  Or, throw in some chopped fresh jalapeno pepper.  After that, the mixture only has to simmer about ten to fifteen minutes.  We usually make fresh bread baked outside on the grill to serve with the soup. 

This recipe makes a big pot of soup.  The good news is that it freezes well.   After eating soup for a couple of meals we put the rest of the soup in the freezer and bring it home for later use.  Even better, it also tastes great over macaroni.  You can use it to stretch the portions out for extra servings.  It makes a great Tex-Mex style chili mac.

As I mentioned earlier, it is sometimes too warm to be worth heating up the cook stove.  This is a huge stove.  Once this cast iron stove heats up it stays heated up for hours.  I needed other ways of cooking the meal to make sure I can get a meal cooked other than depending on cooking on a wood stove.  I have done some experimenting with alternate means of cooking.

These recipes can be cooked in an electric skillet, but the results are mixed in an electric skillet.  And depending of the size of the skillet, it could be a problem with handling the volume of stew or soup.  We have a hot plate, but I get concerned about knocking a large pot of stew or soup off the burner.  Although our hot plate was rated at 1500 watts, it was that wattage split between two burners. All in all, it is only good for heating small portions.  We also bring a Coleman camp stove up with us and can cook on the porch if necessary.  You are not supposed to cook with those inside because of carbon monoxide build up.  We use the Coleman stove for cooking items that need high heat for relatively short periods of time, such as boiling potatoes or making hard boiled eggs.  Generally, this stove is used only for emergency cooking.  Up in the mountains we sometimes have electricity outages.  There are a few million trees growing near the power line.  When something falls on a line we can be without electricity for a while.

I am becoming enamored of our small roasting oven.  You generally see these small ovens on sale around Thanksgiving.  The oven cooks very slowly, and I am not sure how well the temperature is calibrated, but it does work.  A stew or soup can be put into the roaster oven in a Dutch oven and cooked using the oven like a slow cooker.   It makes for a long slow cook, which is great for a stew.  Our main problem with using the roaster oven was that it is heavy and hard to get down from the attic.  We started storing it wrapped up in plastic bags under the bed.  (There was absolutely no other place where it fit.  Space is at a premium in a small cabin.) Storing it downstairs made it much more usable.  Before finding a place for it downstairs we avoided using it if at all possible.  We have to use a heavy duty extension cord with this.  The makers saw fit to add only an eighteen inch electrical cord to the appliance.  If you decide to use one of these ovens, make sure you have an outlet nearby for it or make sure your extension cord is rated for the wattage of the oven.  Using a cord that cannot take the wattage could be a fire hazard. 

Anyway, those are a couple of my recipes for up at the cabin.  I have a couple more, but I will put them in a separate post next Sunday.  This post is getting a bit long.  Check back then for more cabin cooking recipes.

Cabin Trip November 2017

Fair weather for the trip.

I actually wrote the blog post last Sunday, but the internet was overloaded with people shopping online for the holidays.  I was not able to upload my photos, so I thought I'd put it off for a day and try again.  Unfortunately, the next day was cyber-Monday.  I still wasn't able to upload the photos.  Today is the first day I have had tine to get back to the blog, so here it is, better late than never.  I plan to post on Sunday again as usual.

We made one last trip to the cabin this year.  The weather favored us although the forecast leading up to the trip was all over the place.  At one point it said there could be rain, snow, and ice pellets (firmer than sleet but too small to be hail?)  We changed our plans a couple of times, but as the date for the trip became closer, the weather cleared.  For once, we were not leaving in rain.  However, as the day progressed, the sky turned gray.  A cold front came through, but it was a dry front with heavy winds.  After we arrived at the cabin the weather service put out a travel advisory saying that high profile vehicles should stay off the road until after the wind abated.

Kudzu loses its leaves in cold weather.

Generally the weather was nice for this time of year.  Some days it made it up close to 50 degrees Fahrenheit ( 10 C.)  At night it was close to freezing, give or take a degree in either direction.  We did not have any precipitation while we were there.

Trees are bare at higher elevations.

The nights were chilly.  We have some radiator heaters, but much of our heat comes from a wood cook stove.  Once the fire dies down it can get pretty cold.  Some mornings we woke up to a nippy inside temperature of 46 degrees F. (7.78 C.)  We were an amusing sight in our thermal wear with an extra shirt over top, two pairs of socks, and our sleep hats.  We stayed under the covers for as long as we could, but sooner or later we had to get up and start the day.

This will be our last trip up for the year.  Our primary mission was to get as many leaves as possible out of the yard.  All the leaves are down now.  The last time we went up there many of the trees were still a leafy green.  Also, there were plenty of apples down that needed to be picked up.  I think we moved three tarps of apples.  I made an apple pie with some of them.

Shadows falling on the cabin.

My husband worked on the upstairs floor while we were there.  He finished the underlayment on the last trip.  This trip he was working on leveling the floor prior to installing laminate flooring up there.  The floor has to be very level to install laminate.  If there is more than an eighth inch of difference in the floor it could cause the laminate to crack.  To get the floor level, he has been using layers of tar paper to build up the floor in spots where it was low.  Wouldn't you know it, with twenty feet (6.09 meters) of floor left to finish he ran out of tar paper.  It is a long ways to a hardware store, so the rest of the floor will have to wait until our next trip up in the spring.   Tar paper is sold in 100 foot rolls (30.48 meters) so I guess we will forever have roughly 80 feet (24.38 meters) of tar paper left in the shed.

Locking up for the winter

Our first night there, we rescued a lost hunter.  He was a young guy, no more than eighteen or twenty.  It had been fully dark for over an hour before he found us.  He said he had been walking for hours.  He had an app for his phone that was supposed to show him the way back to his vehicle.  Unfortunately, either the app would not work when there was no signal or the app was not a very good one.  I guess he was inexperienced enough to rely on technology and did not do anything to mark his way through the woods.  When his app did not work, he could not find his way back.  My husband had to drive him to look for his truck, but it was not where he thought it was.  There is one place on the mountain where you can get a cell signal.  The hunter was able to call his father and have him come pick him up to go searching for his truck.  He was reunited with his family if not his vehicle.

The guy was very lucky that we were at the cabin.  There was no one at the other cabins until the next day.  There are no more cabins higher up on the mountain. You have to go over the mountain and well down the other side before there is another one.  And most of those cabins are not occupied year round until you get a good way down the mountain.  He could have been walking for hours more.  Also, the day had started out warm, so he was in a short sleeve shirt with insulated overalls.  By the time he found us, a cold front had come through and there was a high wind.  I am sure he was chilled through and through.  Fortunately, he had a flashlight.  It was just at New Moon, so it was very dark.  If we had not been there, I am not sure his batteries would have held out all the way over the mountain.

I guess there are lessons to be learned from this.  Technology is great, but you cannot always rely on it.  If he had marked his way through the woods as he went, he could still have found his way back.  Weather can change very quickly in the mountains.  If he had carried a jacket or some windproof layer, he would not have been so cold.  So yes, this guy was very lucky to have seen the lights of our cabin.  But no one should depend on luck when they go into the woods.  Be prepared.