Happy Things Friday, Mostly in Pictures

 

A jug of freshly pressed apple cider from our first family Labor Day gathering and cider making.

(Thought up and press provided by DS2.)

A camouflaged little friend I found in DD1's apple tree  while DH was mowing their yard.

Just one of many large lady praying mantis I have seen lately around this little place here

(my hand for scale)

Evening sun through an interesting cloud.

Rides through the woods on the LBM

A family joke from long ago: Tag to you, 

'Dead Pony' deodorant to my kids and I.

(An example of humor in sadness that can survive decades.)

Chicken of the woods?  I don't have an experienced mushroom person to verify id, 

so I didn't harvest and eat it.

A monarch caterpillar munching away on a milkweed leaf.

Not pictured:

--DH found and acquired a used, running, ride-on lawnmower on Thursday evening for DD1 and Honorary Son, so he won't need to mow both their lawn and ours on a weekly basis for the rest of the mowing season.  Loading our zero-turn on our trailer and hauling it to their house every week to week and half, plus mowing for them while he was there, was getting hard to squeeze into the schedule, especially with our weather tending toward fall rainy-ness.

--Yummy smoked spare ribs and carne asada DH made for our dinner on Labor Day when (almost) all our kids and grandkids were here for cider making.

--a whole bunch of Roma tomatoes from DS1's garden that I will make into sauce.

Sewing Stuff Sept 1-7

 

This is my total mess of a sewing area.  Or, at least, most of it is.  In the far back of the picture is more storage (mostly DD2's stuff she hasn't moved to her current residence or gotten rid of) than sewing area, but it's still kinda in my line of sight when I'm trying to sew.  I'm posting this picture from the very start of September, as I'm hoping to use National Sewing Month to get 15 (or more!) minutes in my sewing area every day of this month and will (hopefully) be able to take a picture of a much less cluttered, much more usable space on September 30th.

Let's see how I did the first seven days:

September 1, I repaired the Poetess's fly mask that is laying over the back of the chair at my sewing machine.  It had several tears in the ears that needed to be hand stitched closed.

Holes do not keep flies out of the Poetess's ears 

(which is the main reason I have her wear a mask.)

Fly-proof once more!

September 2, I sewed up the holes in the toes of a couple of DH's black dress socks.  That only took about five minutes, so I used the rest of my 15 to start putting some things away.  Like scrap flannel from the nightgowns I made K3 and Faline last December.  And knitting and sewing patterns that were also laying out from the same time frame.  I also put a bag of free yarn of several weights, but mostly worsted, that my Mom had given me last fall, into the bin I have for worsted weight yarn.

September 3, I cleaned off a corner of my cutting table and filed away more quilting/sewing patterns as well as threw away the little tags that had been on each square of a quilt block swap I'd participated in back in the early two-thousand-teens.  A couple of years ago I had sewn those blocks into a twin-sized quilt top, which still awaits sandwiching, pin basting, and quilting (all the components for this take up yet another spot on the cutting table 😒).  

Also included in this 15 minutes was sorting out the contents of a cardboard box of DH's grandma's quilting related things that Mother-in-Law had sent to me sometime during the overwhelming years of the mid-to-late twenty-teens.  Inside the box I found lots of fabric marking pencils and spools of thread, a leather thimble, some labels that proclaimed "Specially Made by Ethel" (huh?  Who was Ethel?  Grandma's name was not Ethel.  Nor was her middle name Ethel.), and best of all, a bunch of hexies in what looks to be 60's or early 70's fabrics!!

I've wanted to try sewing hexies into something for a long time.  Now that I know I have pre-cut ones ready for me, maybe I'll actually give it a whirl sometime in the not-too-many-years-distant future.

September 4, I used the sewing machine for the first time since early January!! I mended a seam on a (new, but washed) cloth diaper I had from a pack I bought several years ago to make baby burp cloths out of  (Faline, Buck, Sixlet, Lucky, Octavia) and hadn't used this one yet because one of the center seams on one side had come unstitched during the washing process.  Now it's fixed and ready to be used for a future baby's burp cloth when the time comes to make more!  

I also fixed an inch-long section of a waistline seam on a dress I'd made a long, long time ago that both DD1 and DD2 wore as little girls.  I recently pulled it out of a tote of special things I'd been saving, ran it through the washing machine to freshen it up, and am planning on passing it along to Faline now that she's about the same size.   With my remaining handful of minutes I did a little more cleaning up of the tables that hold my sewing machine, rotary cutting mat, rulers, templates, etc.  I'm getting the itch to work on a real project, not just mending (although there's more mending waiting. . . )

September 5, I didn't get to the sewing area until late in the day, after dark.  I did some more tidying, especially of small fabric scraps that went into a bin of really tiny saved stuff for paper piecing or string quilting.  In the process, I found the shoebox sized plastic container where I keep my leftover binding strips (mainly in case I need to repair binding on a grandkid quilt in the future).  Hooray!  I had binding strips from three baby quilts to add to it, and had been keeping my eye out for it all week when tidying up.

September 6, A little mending with the sewing machine, and more tidying.  Put away larger leftover fabric pieces that were stacked up, each color going into the appropriate bin (bins stashed under the tables).  Put away yet more sewing patterns that were also still out from Christmas sewing last year.

September 7, The sewing area is looking less like a mess compared to at the beginning of the month.  So much so that I can actually use a large portion of my 'cutting table', so I did.  I had found, in my tidying over the week, a fleece 'blanket' that DD2 had brought to me several years ago.  She had intended to make a tied fleece blanket, but when she started to tie it, several of the fringe pieces broke off.  Frustrated, she had given it to me, basically saying she couldn't make it work, and to do with it what I wished.  Well, at the time, I had a ton of stuff going on and so I folded up the two pieces of fleece, partially tied on one side, and set it aside.  Over time, it got moved here and there, and buried under stuff.  

Now that I had found it, I looked at it again, decided that for whatever reason the particular fleece fabric used just wasn't going to work for making a tied blanket where you cut fringes in the sides and then tie top and bottom together with the fringes.  Rather than getting hung up on the why it wasn't working for that/how to make it work, I decided I could make a tied blanket of a different type with it.  Both layers were still lined up with each other, so I laid them out on my now sorta usable cutting table, smoothed the layers, and pin basted them together.  My intention is to use embroidery floss at regular intervals sewn through both layers and then tied into knots as you would if you were tying a quilt rather than quilting it.  Once that's done I'll sew around all four edges and call it a finished and usable blanket.

The fleece blanket in question.

A Long Time Coming

 Lookee what I got!

I finally, after 23 years, have a bench in my mudroom that seats two adults (or four small grandchildren) for putting on and taking off footwear!  This is something I've been wanting, and from time to time keeping an eye out to purchase, for literally decades.

Initially, DH didn't want me to buy one because he was going to make one.  I honestly believe, in 2003, when we were finishing up the house at this little place here enough to get our occupancy permit, that he did have the best intentions on building a bench.  Temporarily, we had two plastic lawn chairs (you know, the white kind that was so popular in the early 2000s) there in the fall and winter.  

Maybe they were actually there longer, as I don't remember what came between them and the small, narrow, not very heavy duty, more decorative than useful, bench that I found at Goodwill around about 2006 or so and stuck in my mudroom.  Yeah, 2006 and DH hadn't had time yet to make me that bench he intended to make.

That little bench stayed in the mudroom until about 2016 when it started to pop apart in places because it really wasn't intended for large adult men to sit on.  I banged those joints back together and moved it to near my front door, where it stayed until around 2019 when I gave it to DD1 for her house.

Next in the mudroom were two 'extra' wooden dining chairs as we had bought six new ones for our dining room table because three of the original six had broken by that point.  It made sense to stick two in the mudroom for everyday use putting on and taking off your shoes, plus they'd be handy when we needed to seat extra people at the table.

At some point, one of the chairs started to deteriorate in strength, and we strapped a booster seat for a grandchild on it to ensure that someone lightweight used it for family meal gatherings.  Which left just one chair in the mudroom.

Yeah, post-2016, DH still had not gotten around to making that bench.  In his defense, from 2014 through Covid 2020 his work schedule was horrendous and I think in many ways both of us were just trying to keep up on the basics (him working 60 or more hours each week, plus work travel, and me trying to work plus do my chores plus take up the slack on the most important chores of his).  Nevertheless, time went by and no custom made by DH bench ever happened.

Fast forward to now.  I happened to be heading out in my trusty rusty Suburban to go run some errands (because one of the errands possibly entailed needing more trunk space than Sweet Madame Blue has) and saw, two miles down the road, a sign for a garage sale.  It happened to be at the house of someone I used to know pretty well; the mom of a friend and softball teammate of DD1 throughout high school. So I pulled in her driveway, partly to see what she was selling and partly just to say hi.

Long story short, after talking to her a bit and finding out how all three of her (now adult) kids were doing (as well as how many grandkids she has), I looked through her sale offerings and I saw this bench!

It's sturdy!  It's big enough for two adults!  It's solid wood!  And the price was very right.  So I told her I couldn't live without it, handed her some cash, put it into the back of the Suburban (yay, cargo space!) and brought it home.

It's going to live in my mudroom forever because this is what I've been wanting and waiting for.  (Unless, of course, in retirement, DH becomes a furniture maker, in which case I will gladly swap it out for a DH-made bench of similar size and styling.  Because now that I've acquired what I've waited 23 years for, an oak--or pine--plank on plank-width legs with no back [his original homemade mudroom bench idea] is not going to do.)

Books Read in 2026: August

Call It Horses by Jessie van Eerden . This one was listed in July, but I'd barely started it so didn't really have anything to say about it.  Now that I finished it, I wanted to give a quick review.  It was not at all what I expected from the blurb on the cover. And, (disappointingly to me) it doesn't have much to do with horses at all, they only come in at the very end of the book. It is not a light read, nor does it have a cute happy ending.  That doesn't mean it was a bad book, it just means its not one you want to pick up if you are currently weighed down by some heavy life circumstances. (Which I wasn't, so I read it, but if I were I don't think I would have had the mental bandwidth to finish the book.)

On to August's list!

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry by Harry Kemelman.  This is the second in the series, and I loved it just as much as I did the first.  I got ahold of it from the library via the state library interloan system, and was surprised by how old this particular copy was: 1966!  It actually had the old original due date slip taped on the page inside the back cover with due dates from the 60s and early 70s, then on the inside of the cover itself was a pocket with the due date card which had more stamps from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. So I not only enjoyed the story itself, but also got great joy seeing a book older than myself still in circulating condition!  Really stood out as to the durability of books printed back then versus books made in this century.  On the other hand, it also made me realize that these stories have fallen out of fashion and tend to languish in library storage rooms these days rather than out on the shelves where browsing readers can see them.  Let's bring them back into popularity because this is a great series and I fully intend to read all of them.

The old blue cloth bound covers of the 60s.

Stitching that held the pages together (stitched, not glued!)

A Dark Path by Linda Castillo.  This is a now-in-print version of several short Kate Burkholder stories that were previously released on Kindle only.  Since I don't Kindle (or any other form of reading books on a screen instead of on paper) I was really happy to see that stories I knew about but wouldn't ever read if they were electronic-only were going to be compiled into an honest to goodness book.  And I wasn't disappointed, either!  Each story is stand alone and roughly 60 pages long.  Perfect for a time when you don't have hours available daily to devote to reading.  They are all well written, with no rushed or sloppy feeling to them.  Really makes me hungry for a whole novel; I hope the author has got a new full-length Kate Burkholder story in the works.

Nantucket Second Chances by Pamela Kelley.  This one was suggested to me by the library's automatic book picking system when I requested a different (not in print yet) novel recently.  Looking on Amazon for the blurb, it sounded like it could possibly be something I'd enjoy reading, so I put a hold on it. It was okay; although if I were to be brutally honest, I didn't like it.  I had a hard time getting into the characters, not just because they were so obviously from a different economic class than me, but also because many of them seemed to be shallow stereotypes.  Similarly, I felt that every drama point resolved too easily and quickly to be realistic.

Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie.  This is her third novel, and in my on-going personal project to read/re-read all of her mysteries (since I read the majority of what I could get my hands on of hers as a teenager, it's been a long time), it was next on my list.  It did not disappoint.  She most definitely was and still is, in my opinion, the queen of murder mysteries.

Oh No, Not Bots!

(I'll start with apologizing for potentially blurry pictures.  Not the best angle, lighting, etc for a cell phone camera when you are crouched next to a horse, leaning slightly into the underbelly danger zone and trying to be quick about it all the while hoping the horse doesn't move.)

Recently, there was an evening when I brought horses in from the pastures to put them in stalls for the night and feed them dinner, and I saw this on the inside of one of Poetess's front legs:

 

BOT EGGS!

Oh no, not bots!  I quickly checked her other legs, and yep, the other front leg had eggs attached to the hairs too.  Which meant, without a doubt, that the time of year the bot flies are out laying eggs had come.

What are bots and why does it matter if they put eggs on the horses' legs?  Bots are a fly that, as an adult, do not eat.  They only mate, lay eggs, and die.  It is the eggs that are the problem.

Eggs are laid on certain parts of the horses bodies, parts that the horse can reach with it's mouth--say, to rub an itch, or to smack at a different fly that is biting them.  When those eggs are rubbed by the horse's mouth, they come off and are ingested. Once ingested, they hatch, and the larvae dwell in the horse's digestive system as parasites.

As we all know, parasite = bad.

Which means that it is imperative to removed those eggs as soon as I discover them.  The less chance of the horse ingesting them the better.

So, I dug around in the tack room and pulled out my trusty pumice-like bot block.  A bot block is used, with some pressure, in the direction of the hair growth to scrape off those bot eggs.

Bot block employed.

If the horse stands still, and standing still no matter what I'm doing to them is an important skill I teach my horses, it really only takes a couple of minutes to remove those pesky bot eggs.

Leg free of bots once more.

PHEW! Potential crisis averted.  (Crisis being intestinal worms to get rid of, which are much harder to reach than eggs on legs.)

I checked each horse, and did need to do some scraping with the bot block on the other horses too, some as much as Poetess, some less.  A quick daily check has, so far, found no more eggs deposited.  Thankfully this 'season' (botflies) is typically only a few weeks, which means I only have to be diligent in checking for eggs for a little longer.

Did You Know?

 Did you know that September is National Sewing Month (in the US), and has been so since 1982?  I sure didn't!  I only learned of this (or maybe paid attention to the mention of it) today while reading the comment section of a quilting related blog.

I'm not typically a person who hears of an activity and says "Yep, that's for me, I'm doing it!" Usually I need to think on things a good long while and examine them from all sides, determine their worth and feasibility to my life, and then, maybe, I will take part months or years later.

But you know what?  I haven't sewn anything since the very beginning of this year, and for the past two months I've really been having an increasing urge to get back to the sewing machine.

The bowl cozy I sewed in early January.

An urge that I have mostly ignored because my sewing area is buried in lots of not-sewing-related crap.  Plus, it's summer, and there's so much to do outside that I haven't even been able to sort of keep up on.  So how could I possibly rationalize taking time from outdoor tasks and doing some sewing?

Last month I thought I might possibly be able to excuse taking time to sew by saying I was getting a jump on Christmas presents, as both Lucky and Octavia are slated to receive reading pillows this year. I all ready have the pillow forms and I all ready have the fabric.

But still, I couldn't quite bring myself to take the time to clear all the stuff off my sewing area in order to be able to even pull out and cut fabric for those pillows.  So I didn't.

But now!  Now it's National Sewing Month!  And, as that comment I read on that other blog said, devoting just 15 minutes a day to being in the sewing room, whether that was in the form of cleaning, organizing, planning a project, pulling fabric, cutting fabric or actually sewing was not a selfish or unreasonable goal.  It's even something I could do in the evening, when I'm done with outdoor stuff.  I mean, the sun does go down before 8:30 p.m. these days.

OK.  Sign me up.  Yep, that's for me, I'm doing it!

I Canned Them 'Maters

 Last week, I canned the half-bushel of tomatoes that DH had brought home from his run up north with the borrowed truck.  Did I have room in my schedule to can tomatoes?  No, not really.  But here they were, and they only stay good for so long.

So, after getting two horses worked one morning, I spent the next roughly six hours canning tomatoes all by my lonesome (DH was working in-office that day).  Would it have gone faster if I had had a helper?  Not that much.  Most of the time factor was because each canner load takes 40 (pints) to 45 (quarts) minutes to process after the canner comes to a rolling boil.  With 6 quarts and 14 pints to put up, that meant three canner loads.*

Why did I not do all the tomatoes in quart jars and cut down to two loads instead of three?  Because, with just DH and I here, there's only a few recipes I make that require an entire quart of tomatoes anymore. I would rather take an extra hour-ish to do a second canner load of pints than, throughout the coming year, have multiple times where I have a half-jar of tomatoes that is opened and needs to be incorporated into a meal in the next few days before it goes bad.  

Invested time now saves me from potentially wasting time and food later if I have opened jars of tomatoes that don't get eaten soon enough and have to be thrown out. That would waste the time I spent now canning them, plus half a jar of tomatoes.  Hence many more pints than quarts got canned.

*The rack in my canner can easily fit seven pint jars at a time.  Quart jars, sort of, if they are the narrower kind and not the fat-round type.