Little Dude is taking shape

I started making my little dude. He is still missing his ears. As promised I´ll show you updates on how he develops. Next step is to glue him together and then I will weave around him. He will be nice and warm in his new little outfit. If you want to find out more about this great project or to find out how you can be involved, go to this site: littledudes.de. 

On the weaving front, I have finished my black and gold houndstooth patterned scarf. Here you can see the beginning of it, but I´ll show you the finished project some other time. Today I´ll finish setting up the loom with another scarf of the same weave pattern but using green and blue wool. Seems to be a good colour combination.

On the farm front, we have more apples than I know what to do with. I have made so much jam, apple and ginger, apple and wild blackberry, apple and cinnamon, apple and apple... And there are still enough apples to make more than double that again. Not to worry... all the apples and apple bits that are left over are being donated to at least 4 not so little but very happy pigs in town that suspect nothing of the sad fate that awaits them. I´ll give you a little clue... chouriço.

The sunflowers have given us plenty of seeds. They look pretty. I am not sure what to do with them except to save them for sowing next year. And Autumn is here which means soon I will be helping with the grape harvest and as soon as it starts to rain there will be plenty of mushrooms to pick again. Is it just me or does it feel like this year has evaporated?

Corn & Loom Socks

As I am sure you will agree, corn has such a wonderful golden colour. The dark variety you see however is blue hopi and it is a deep blue almost black. This year we were just interested in seeing which plants were best suited to our environment so that next year we can sew just those varieties. I was also looking for the corn with the smaller grains so that we could feed them to the chickens, but they are just going to have to leave fuss aside and eat all grains, big and small. Needless to say we will not hear any complaints.

The varieties that came out winning were the blue hopi, 2 local varieties and one that came labelled "Nuno Tejo". You can also see from the beautiful varied weirdness of our corn that some major cross pollination took place, as was expected seeing as they were all growing so close together and the very fine corn pollen can drift considerable distances in favorable conditions. Another drifting agent we had to contend with were the birds that enjoyed half our crop right before our eyes, dodging the hanging super reflective CDs and even a tiny wind mill with propellers shaped like little baby animal cartoon faces. Very scary... but not for the birds who are busy storing their grains for winter... many sadly forgetting where they so carefully hid them.

I am not starting to prepare for the winter, but I started again working on making socks. I say starting again because it can take me a long time to make a pair and if my warmth depended on it I would have frozen two winters ago. The sock loom is really easy to use and the heel and toe are just as easy to make as the rest. I have a Kb sock loom. It is adjustable so you can make different size socks, the foot that is, because the length of the leg can be as long as you desire. The wool I have been using is from Germany and is proper for making socks, it is Crazy Zauberball by Schoppel Wolle and it is 75% pure wool. The wool you use to make socks needs to have a very high content of pure wool otherwise the sock has very little elasticity, you will even feel how much harder it is to work with acrylic on the sock loom, it just does not give.

Last year I also started making a sock with 5 needles, but this has not gone as well or as quickly as expected and it is normally the first project to be put to the side. Just today I considered giving up on it and using the wool on the loom instead. I envy the ladies in town that make a pair of socks in a day and say that they used to make them much faster but that now they cannot see so well. I wish.

Ps. I won a prize in the sweets competition in the town´s festival. I came third almost by default, with a beetroot and chocolate cake. I won something because there were only 4 cakes in the competition, one of the entries was an apple tart and one of the jury did not like apple and so did not even try it. I won a toaster and would have seriously still preferred a truck load of manure. 

Little Dudes 2013

Dear little dudes and dudettes,
I am happy to inform you that I have been invited to collaborate on this wonderful Berlin based project. Yes! I am going to make a dude. And you can make one too! All the information you need you can find on the little dudes site. There will be an exhibition with all the little dudes and also a book that will be launched on the opening night with the little creations. You just need to download the template and be creative. I will show you the progress of my little dude over the next month, little sneak peaks here and there. It will be super fun.

Should I weave him a poncho or make him a patchwork eye patch? Or both? Only time will tell.

So what are you waiting for? Get creative! Create a little dude. :-)

Hexagon patches and wind chimes.

I have embarked on a long journey. I started making patches for a quilt using hexagon blocks. It will be a hand pieced project and I have estimated that I may need a little over a thousand pieces. At this moment in time I have managed to make about 30 patches, so I clearly have a very long way to go. I decided to use my african fabrics. I had a lot of small left over pieces and figured this project was the perfect way to put them to good use. Of course I will need quite a bit of fabric for this quilt and so I have my pile of fabrics out and ready to go. I estimate that at this rate, if I worked on nothing else but making the hexagon patches I would have all the pieces I need in one month. But then I would still have to piece them all together, which I supposed would easily take up another month of solid work. and even then that would just be the front of the quilt finished. Perhaps this time next year I might have a hexagon patch quilt..

I have also started to get the wool ready to make a jacket. I am still very keen on the idea of making a ´bog´ jacket or a variation of it. You can read more about this kind of jacket here. A friend of ours Kent and his lovely parents came to visit us this week. I was very happy to learn that Kent knits. I gave him some burgundy, white and blue wool and he is going to make me a pair of mittens and a pair of knee high socks. I can´t wait to see what he comes up with. We have not figured out an exchange yet but surely it will be something woven, a bog jacket, who knows.

The rest of the week was spent making wind chimes to cheer up the garden and hopefully distract sneaky hungry birds from eating our corn and sunflower seeds. I hope that of course it does not have the opposite effect. I also took this opportunity to make the garden a little brighter and added some coloured strips of fabric. The town of Meimão is throwing its annual party next week so I may as well start getting into party mode. There will also be a cake contest and I am keen to enter it. I have not decided what cake to make yet. Perhaps the watercress cake would go down well, or maybe a zucchini or a beetroot cake just to use something seasonal. I hope I can make a winning cake. The prizes, if last year is anything to go by, are rather appealing as I am sure you will agree. The first prize may well be a whole leg of prosciutto or some cured meats like chouriço. If I am lucky I will get the second prize which could very well be some kind of blender, although a food processor would come in quite handy since I broke the one I borrowed trying to make nettle pesto. Even a small truck load of manure would be an excellent prize, perhaps I could suggest it to the organizing committee. 

Blue and Green

Maria and Thorbjorn came to visit. Maria fell in love with a blue and green scarf. She loves this color combination. And so this little scarf went off to Denmark with Maria to keep her warm come winter time.

I also like the blue and green combination and realized my long awaited trip to Lagos was on the cards. Perfect blue sky and crystal clear green water. By pure and magic coincidence my friend Filipe was sailing through with his dad on their boat, called "Mil Milhas", on their way from Peniche to Alvor. They invited me for a sail. I could not refuse. It was brilliant and served as much needed refreshing inspiration.

Curiously when I get back to the studio I plan on weaving a red "bog jacket". Go figure.

Bag, berries, beets.

The last couple of weeks were spent making the most of what I had most of. I had cherries of the sweet and sour varieties, red currants and gooseberries. The sweet cherries were preserved in jars with sugar water. The sour cherries I used to make a liquor we call Ginjinha. To make Ginjinha you need sour cherries, sugar, cinnamon stick and the magic ingredient is Aguardente, which is "Firewater" distilled in this case from the seeds and skins left over from the wine making process. It is strong. As it turns out the best Aguardente in town is made by a lady, Laura, who gave me 2 bottles of the fiery liquid for the purpose and in exchange as a thank you I gave her a draw string bag. I think I was better served with this swap. The Ginjinha will be ready for drinking one year from now. 

I also made jam with the few gooseberries I had and got just one jar. The less is more maxim I am sure can also be applied to this situation. At least this way I will not get sick of eating the stuff. The red currants I made into jelly, but I think that it turned out a little runny. It is delicious, nonetheless, and good to eat with yoghurt or spread on roast meat or with peanut butter and cheese... yum!

The seedlings I pleaded to grow back in March have soared to towering heights. I present you the first sunflower in bloom. To make us all a little happier.

And beetroots that were grown from seed are also rewarding me now with delicious and beautifully vibrant treats. My friend Ben who came to visit cooked up a storm and made the tastiest lemony and limy beets I have ever tasted.

Warm and fuzzy.

This saturday we gave away our first gift hamper. It was composed entirely of products from our veggie garden. The hamper contained: 3 onions, 4 beetroots, mint sprigs, bay leaves, a bunch of pigweed, red currants, oregano, 3 jars of dried flowers to make tea, a dozen eggs, and a CD. The red currants are as tasty as they are pretty. And as you can see things are going well in our garden. I am super happy that we have enough for us and to give.

The CD in the hamper, did not grow in our garden but it was recorded here in Meimão so in a roundabout way it also grew here in our backyard. It is Charanga´s new Album. Going by the name of "Borda Tu", which means "Embroider", it is a break beat influenced Portuguese electronic folk mash that is sure to liven up any party. You should check out their site. And if you happen to be in Lisbon this Saturday, the 13th of July, you can go to their album launch.

Meanwhile, we are struggling here with extremely high temperatures, averaging 40 degrees celsius over the last week. I can´t complain really, otherwise these stories will turn into a list of weather complaints, "too cold", "too hot", "this rain is too wet" kind of blog. But the interesting thing is how fast we forget how cold it was when all of sudden it is always so hot. Last winter due to this very same temperature dementia we forgot to collect pine cones during the summer. Pine cones come in really handy when you need to light a fire in your fire place. Just a little hint. So today we climbed the hill, sweating profusely, to collect pine cones to keep us hot during the cold season. Couldn´t think of anything worse, like trying on a wool jumper in the middle of Summer.

Some pretty fresh fabrics I bought at the market, samples of 70´s curtain fabrics. just to cool us down a bit.

And back to wool again. A couple of weekends ago I went to a festival in Sortelha and there was a girl selling hand spun and died wool. The project is called Lhana, and has its roots in Duas Igrejas, a small town in Miranda do Douro, in the region of Trás-os-Montes. The wool is wonderful and is died using either natural or synthetic dies. If you want to buy wool you can get in touch through this email, lhana.info@gmail.com. I bought two skeins, both hand died, the grayish one was died using black berries and the yellow one using Reseda Luteola, commonly known as Dyer´s Rocket or woold. Now I have to think up some cool project to use this wool. Best done with a cold beer in hand.