Slow Progress

Progress on this is slow ... and not in a good way ... not in a slow cloth way.  I have spent too much time ripping out stitches. Still, I am enjoying the process.

 

I don't know about these stitches on top of stitches.  What do you think? Is it interesting or just confusing? Is it too busy? Does it look messy?

This dill was in my New Pond Farm harvest share, which I picked up last Thursday ... so it is in its seventh day since harvest. I am delighted, to say the least. All I've done is keep it in this tiny pitcher with water. No refrigeration. It still looks as good as new. Imagine doing that with supermarket dill ... even a high end grocer.  Seriously ... I usually come home with one of those big bundles and it smells delicious but it doesn't even stay fresh for one day.

Shared Harvest - The Beginning

This is the first week of picking up my veggies from the Shared Harvest CSA at New Pond Farm.  I am very happy that there are ton of arugula leaves ... one of my favorite salad items (along with avocado, but I'll get that from the store). 

What I took home today: broccoli, Pac Choi (Chinese cabbage), buttercrunch lettuce, White Russian kale, curly kale, lacinato kale, multi-colored "bright lights" chard, radishes, spinach, dill, and kohlrabi. The radishes are huge ... in fact, I thought they were very small beets! I also didn't recognize the spinach at first ... I knew it looked familiar, but it took me a while to recognize that it was spinach. Funny. 

This is my other new thing for this week. Not at all sure where it's going. But it's nice to have something to sew. I like the different blues and the thread which I dipped into the indigo vat, all crumpled up so it came out variegated.

The indigo vat, last year ... learning from Glennis Dolce - Shibori Girl. I did so little, maybe this summer I will pay more atention.

Light

I walked into my kitchen this evening and the light hitting the flowers on the table was breathtaking. I grabbed my phone and took a shot.  I didn't really capture it in all its glory, but this is the best my phone could do.

I was amazed to see how this shot turned out ... the camera actually captured a rainbow of colors streaming through the air.  

Happy first day of June!

Beginning

The pieces in the top photo all want to be together and so do the pieces in the bottom photo. Whether these are two separate projects or all part of one, I'm not yet sure. It's too soon to know how it will end, but it's definitely started and so I will pursue it - whatever "it" is - to its perfect conclusion.

It feels so good to be excited about doing something. I've been fretting for quite some time about when-oh-when will I ever get back into the studio and start making things again. Luckily, I stumbled upon  THIS  and it was exactly what I needed to remind about what is the most important part of the creative process.  

Hint: You have to show up.

The thread, by the way, is some vintage tan crochet thread which I dipped into the indigo vat when I took an online class offered by Glennis Dolce (Shibori Girl).  If you are not familiar with her work (and even if you are) do yourself a favor and go exploring because she makes some really drop dead gorgeous stuff and it is always a treat to spend time browsing her latest creations.

As I ponder what I will make with these elements (and this may only make sense to you if you are old enough to carry West Side Story in your memory), this is what keeps going through my mind:

Could it be? Yes, it could.
Something's coming, something good,
If I can wait!
Something's coming, I don't know what it is,
But it is
Gonna be great!

Daily Bread

I recently learned how to make focaccia ... not that there is a whole lot to learn ... I had just never done it before. I've watched my daughter make it many times, but never did it myself. The thing is, it is very easy to make ... the kneading seems so much easier than when I make "real" bread ... and the finished product is hugely delicious and very versatile ... like tofu, it can take on whatever flavor you want, depending on the toppings you use. I'm thinking I could just make this every day.

Flower Power

Bud's daffodils

Another reason to love living in Redding: Bud McQuade's field of 40,000-plus daffodils. Every spring, we Reddingites know to take a drive on Cross Highway where nearly 97 year old Bud McQuade lives in a house he built on property next to the house where he grew up.  It is a breathtaking sight and one which lets us all know winter is truly behind us and summer will be staying for a while.

My daffodils

I have a few daffodils in my yard too. They will not impress a passerby as does Bud McQuade's glorious display, but I find joy in them just the same.

It occurs to me that flowers are like a magic show in the fact that they are stunning to observe while difficult to understand just exactly how their magic happens. Even so, it is so easy to take them for granted. Sure, we all sincerely appreciate their beauty ... but do we truly embrace how profoundly phenomenal it is that these gorgeous bits of tint and fluff exist at all? That they push their way through the ground with amazing fidelity to the rules of nature and serve us in so many ways? They please our senses with their beauty and aroma They provide food for the bees who then provide honey. Many plants and flowers have medicinal properties. Others can be used to dye textiles.

Of course artists are in debt to the world of flowers. Can we fully imagine van Gogh without  his sunflowers? How much the poorer would we all be if Monet had not painted his waterlilies, or Georgia O'Keeffe her poppies? And I am certainly grateful that Imogen Cunningham  used her camera to immortalize a magnolia blossom.

If you really want to appreciate the magic in flowers, consider this: flowers help the poets to write and lovers to unite. That's pretty good magic, is it not?

The earth laughs in flowers. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daffodil photos: Doug Crites-Moore

Feast or Famine

Why do all these wonderful magazines arrive on the same day?

It would be nicer spread out across the month. 

Little treats, with lulls in between. 

Adding Culture To My Life

New Pond Farm, Redding, Connecticut

Among the many beautiful features of the town where I live is New Pond Farm, a 100-acre working farm (very small scale) and education center. The programs offered are always high quality and wonderfully diverse. And affordable! I mean, how often have you seen an interesting offering somewhere, only to discover that it would cost you $300 to attend a workshop? And maybe it's a perfectly reasonable fee, in terms of what's offered, but it's not perfectly reasonable in terms of what's in my wallet.

Alex Keilty, our Guru of Gastronomy

Recently I attended a class to learn about fermenting. What a wonderful, energy-filled two
hours that was! Our Guru of Gastronomy (the moniker Minister of Culture having already been taken) was Alex Keilty, a dedicated promoter of the benefits of fermented foods.

If you are thinking sauerkraut, think again. There is much more to fermented foods that that. Fermented foods include miso, tempeh, fish sauce, kombucha, pickles, wine, beer, yogurt and plenty more. Click HERE for an interesting list. Caveat emptor: If you want real fermented pickles and sauerkraut, you probably should learn how to do it yourself; the stuff on the supermarket shelves is possibly more about fast flavor than full fermentation.

Stripping the herbs ...

So, why are fermented foods important and why were we all there to learn about them? Fermented foods improve digestion and help to restore the correct balance of bacteria in the gut. Several of my classmates mentioned the importance of fermented foods in relation to leaky gut syndrome, which is an interesting subject on its own. This in turn is related to the immune system; one participant caught my attention when she claimed that much of our immune system is regulated by the health of our guts. Do you spend $50 per month on a really good probiotic? You can spend so much less, with better results, by eating fermented foods. Not to be ignored: good quality fermented foods - sauerkraut, yogurt, blue cheese, sourdough bread - are delicious!

We covered a lot of territory, but I think I'll have to go back for another class because I am so bad at retaining information. We had kefir (a fermented milk product, similar to yogurt in taste but not texture), which is pretty good. I can definitely imagine incorporating it in a smoothie. There was also an opportunity to sip on some buttermilk but I did not partake. It's weird, really ... I have tasted tons of foods that many consider to be exotic yet I have never tried buttermilk. It just sounds creepy to me, although I do like buttermilk pancakes and buttermilk biscuits. Go figure, right?

Ingredients ...

Alex set us to work, creating a ferment - possibly not grammatically correct, but that's how we in the know refer to our finished product. It seems there is no need for a modern style recipe, with measurements and a specific list of ingredients. Rather, we followed a truly traditional style of recipe, the kind that might have been written by my great-grandmother. You know what I mean ... use some of this and a bit of that and let it sit awhile.

As we worked at the big kitchen table, Alex treated us to a concoction of smashed up avocado mixed with his latest batch of ferment and a bag of blue corn chips to scoop it up. It was OMG-worthy. It was delicious and everyone went nuts for it. I know "comparisons are odious" but this stuff is way better than guacamole.

Sourdough bread

We also had some of Alex's sourdough bread which was heavenly. When Doug and I lived in California, we kept sourdough starter and made our own bread. Lately, I've been baking bread again, after a fairly lengthy hiatus. I definitely want to get some sourdough going again.

I think the only rule, regarding types of ingredients is: don't use mushy stuff. No tomatoes, no squash, no artichoke hearts. The crucial rule regarding handling ingredients: don't wash them! The microbes which cling to your vegetables are essential to the process.

We chopped, we diced, we grated ...

If I remember correctly, here are the vegetables we chopped, sliced, shredded and so forth: green cabbage, carrots, red onions, red bell peppers, beets, ginger, and a bit of garlic. If you are so inclined, you can add herbs and spices ... oregano and red pepper flakes, for example.

Ready to start fermenting

Here comes the really hard part: throw it all together in a bowl, add some salt and you're pretty much done.

There are a few details beyond that, but you can read all about it in many places online. Here are links to an interesting website and a few books, recommended by Alex:

Nourishing Days (website)

The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World (Sandor Ellix Katz)

Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (Sally Fallon)

Real Food Fermentation Food for Health: Preserving Whole Fresh Food with Live Cultures in Your Home Kitchen (Alex Lewin)

The Acid - Alkaline Food Guide: A Quick Reference to Foods & Their Effect on ph Levels (Susan E. Brown)

Letting Go

I am thinking about letting go of a lot of my raw materials. First on the mental list: felted sweaters as well as sweaters which I have not yet processed, plus lots of sweater pieces.

I'm doing this because I am feeling overwhelmed by too much stuff. I can't comfortably maneuver in my studio. There is no such thing as a good sized clear surface to work on, and, most importantly, I find it difficult to be creative when there are so many possibilities piled around. I work better when I have to make something from nothing.

So, I'm just going to start unloading until I feel like I'm back at the "right" amount of wool. All the wool I will list for sale will be from my own precious stash, gorgeous wool which I had planned to use for my own projects before I realized how overwhelmed I was becoming.

Sometime in the next day or so, I hope to start uploading listings to my wickedwaifFIBER shop on Etsy.  Maybe you will see something you like.

Contentment

"We need much less than we think we need."  - Maya Angelou

“That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.”  - Khaled Hosseini

Some days I am so perfectly content, and others I would cry into a magical cup.