Post Cards from the Selv-edge

Over the summer there was some sort of communication break down as far as Post Cards From the Selv-edge went. There are several people in the loop that live in various other parts of the country and for some reason (maybe moving, maybe vacation, maybe too much dancing in the streets... who knows?) but the long and the short of it was that I went the entire summer without a postcard to work on. I just received the postcard that I should have gotten back in June.

And then forgot to take the before picture.

So here is the after picture.
Here is some detail of what went on before me.

The woman jumping is actually part of a postcard that I made and sent to my friend Amber a number of months ago. I added the heart beat and star tape. The edge of the "window" in which the lady was jumping had a rough, unfinished edge that bothered me and so I "taped" it up.

There is one participant who had been putting a fortune cookie fortune under ribbon under each one. Another participant has made it her mission to "free the fortune". I added the heart beat.

The back has also some interest this month.


Apparently the next months postcard is all finished and only needs an "after" picture taken.

I hope that I will get it soon.

Every Mother Should Have One of These

The rare and patented Uncle Sandy!

Lake washable

Won't come apart at high speeds

Reachable through the latest banana phone technology

It is the New ....

Improved ....

Uncle Sandy!

(Some restrictions and conditions apply)

Privitive Art Found!

The other day, Mira went for a walk with the camera and came back with an amazing discovery! She found an undiscovered cave and, lo and behold, there were never seen before cave drawings!

The cave entrance was not very far from the the cottage and really not very well hidden, so it was quite a surprise that the cave had not been found before this.

The drawings were very primitive and showed a lack of understanding of animal anatomy. The mastodon doesn't even have any ears.

There was also a drawing of some sort of an antelope or elk critter that inhabited this area a millennial ago.


Primitive drawing tools were also found near the entrance of the cave.


Who knows who these primitive people were or how long ago they walked these shores.

The cave entrance is rather obvious so I really don't know how it could have been missed all of these years.

Life In The Fast Lane

When life hands you lemons.... you make lemon aide, right? So when life hands you an inner tube (and cold, rainy, damp days) while at the lake? You make a WHAT? The SS Mira, as it was first known,


and soon the SS Liam.

Mira spent quite a bit of time paddling around on the tube and doing all sorts of interesting things. She explored the creek. She had been up and down it many times before, but apparently it was a bit different when viewed from the tube.
She also went paddling solo in the canoe for the first time.

She decided that she wanted to harvest some of the lake grass that grows in our cove and was pestering the adults to come with her. I finally convinced her that she was more than able to paddle alone in our cove and she harvested to her hearts content.


Keep watch for what she did with the grass. I was (and still are) amazed!

Fungus Amongus

Or Humongous as the case may be.

According to a recent CBC article, there are an amazing amount of fungus that are around the wilds of New Brunswick. It is thanks to all of the rain that we have had in the past month. Copious amounts of rain that has made the ground boggy. Rain that has made the septic system at the lake... suspect. Rain that has encouraged blight among the tomatoes. Rain that has encouraged the deer to come out of the (usually) boggy ground and snack at our garden. Sigh.

The neighbour that has been very vigilant at keeping the deer out of our garden ( and there by his own) has just sold his house to my brother and his fiance. For some reason, I doubt that my brother will be able to keep the deer out as well a our retired neighbour. Too many cows and other critters to keep an eye on where Eli had only his back 40 (less than an acre) to look over and if the deer stayed away from our garden, they were less likely to snack at his.

I've heard of many different things that discourage deer. Like marigolds, or scarecrows, or (can you imagine something called...) deer nets. Actually the deer net lends a rather wonderful picture of reeling your net in after a hard day defending the garden from the deer and finding a deer or two suspended in the net just struggling to get free. The mind boggles at the type of net that could catch a full grown deer. What a mental image!

In any case the wet summer has been a boon to the mushroom pickers in the area. And as we found out, it is also a boon to the mushroom naturalist in the area.

There were many new and interesting species to be seen in the wet, wet woods of New Brunswick this summer. What are their real names? No clue. But we shall call them the "brown circle",

yellow puff ball.


ugly thingie, to name a few.



There were also some rare sightings of the "white rose"



and handsome humongous.


Quite a few of the humongous sightings actually. Several with sneaker "to show scale".

And a few that were not necessarily nice. At least that is how we perceived them. Or at least how Mira ( living in a house with one bathroom, three boys, and an open door policy) named them.
"Look! This one looks like a penis!"

yet more pickles

Do I have a new picture of pickles? No. If you want to see what they now look like, see my previous post. Coincidentally, I made another 26 jars of dills in various sizes.

I have been taking a bit of an enforced break from the computer for the past week or so. And I have another week or so to go before we get back to our regularly scheduled life. In the mean time, here is a small glimpse of why I have been absent.

See you next week.

It has begun.

We went out to the garden on Sunday to see the amount of damage that two weeks of rain had done. All I have to say is that weed is a four letter word.

So is deer.

But the cucumbers, like the weeds, loved all the rain. When we got home, the cukes were washed and sorted according to size. Large to be sliced or spears, medium to be packed whole, and small to be packed into the interstitial spaces. The dill wasn't quite ready yet and so I had to resort to dry dill seed.
All together it worked out to 26 jars. Some are 1.5 liters, some are quarts. All I know is that is a lot of pickles. And that is just the beginning.

You are suppose to leave them to cool undisturbed for 24 hours. And imagine my surprise when I looked at the jars and some of them had this funny layer of suspended dill seeds!

We biked to the garden to do the picking and then had to go pick up some vinegar and salt to do the pickling and about 15 minutes after we were all back home, the skies opened up the rain came down. The rain is bouncing about 6 inches off the ground. Am I ever glad that we were not biking in that!

The other thing that we picked was basil. We make a premix for pesto that then gets tossed in the freezer. Four cups of packed basil leaves, one cup of olive oil, buzzed in the food processor then put in plastic containers. When we want pesto in the winter, we thaw a tub, toss it and the rest of the ingredients into the food processor and voila! Supper!
The kids helped with the plucking of the leaves.

Bill did the washing of the leaves,


And I did the buzzing and packing of the finished premix. So far, we have four tubs in the freezer. And the basil doesn't look like the it has had anything picked at all.

Box?

You may wonder why a box is front and center today. Mira certainly wondered why I was taking a picture of it.
This, my friends, is what I have been using to make skeins. Necessity is the mother of invention and I needed something to skein off my handspun so I would wrap it around a box.
This proved to be a little tiresome so I decided to make myself a kniddy knoddy.

I went to the local hardware store to find some PVC pipe but they didn't have any stiff pipe that was smaller than 1.25 inches. Which, to my mind would be a little to fat. So I wandered around for a while and found dowels and copper t-joints.

Add a measuring tape, some krazy glue, and a miter saw and you have the recipe for a home made kniddy knoddy.

I cut the end bits to 6 inches and the center one 16 inches. The cut ends got a quick sanding to get rid of the rough edges.

Then I made a skein and was happy that it worked! But the skein looked a little large to me and I thought that a trial on my swift was in order. It turned out to be just as I thought. The skein was about 6 inches to large to fit on the swift.

I shortened the center pole to about 15 inches and now the skein fits the swift perfectly.

It is not the most beautiful kniddy knoddy I have ever seen, but it functions as it should. If I get bored at some point (cue the laughter) I'll give it a paint job.