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.