Cider pressing and fiber messing (aka spinning and knitting)

When we bought our land 16 years ago, we knew we wanted an orchard. So after clearing land, we planted a bunch of little trees: apples, cherries, pears, plums...

You have to be patient with an orchard - it takes a while to establish. But we have been reaping the benefits of our fruit tree labor for a while now. 

Case in point: this year alone, we pressed cider on three different occasions, with hundreds of pounds of apples from our place.

Some of this is getting made into hard cider, lots of it is frozen for juice.

This is a job for a few people at a time: some are picking apples, some are washing them, and some feed the apples into the chute.

Then the cut-up pieces are being transferred into the pressing chamber, and the handle gets cranked.

And then comes the tasting, where people elbow each other out of the way to stick a cup under the steady stream of fragrant cider flowing forth, exclaiming how good it tastes.

Also, enough containers need to be rounded up for fitting all this golden liquid. After filling them all to the brim, there's cleanup.

As it often happens in our wilderness neighborhood on a weekend, people tend to stop by to visit, and of course, they get pulled into the cider making operation, much to the delight of all the little ones.

Come along and see what happens on a day like this!

Picking apples, and getting the ones on the ground before the bear and deer eat them

Washing station

Feeding the apples into the cutting chute

It helps to have willing and enthusiastic helpers

Putting the cut-up apples into the pressing container

Ha! Suckers! You thought you would stop by for a chill visit? Well, so much for leisure and relaxing!

The kids love to eat this foam. Better than ice cream.

Filling the containers

Besides harvesting all the fruit from our orchard, we also got all the food out of the garden. Pumpkins, squashes, gone-to-seed lettuce for the chickens, the rest of the cucumbers... 

Now all that's left is Swiss Chard, Kale, and Collards greens, plus lots of carrots and beets in the ground.

Last week, I put the garden to bed. I really like covering the soil to protect all the lovely soil organisms and micro critters in there, so I either sow green manure or spread straw.  (Not hay, since it has weeds.)

Now that the weather has shifted to almost-frost, rain and storms, the time for hibernation has begun.

Hibernating for me means plenty of knitting and spinning.

I've been on a sock-knitting kick, since it's moderately mindless and relaxing, and oh-so-necessary in a house full of active people who need socks. All. The. Time.

Last week I went to the Northwest Fiber Fusion event and bought a gorgeous batt of wool that made my heart rate speed up when I saw it. I'm spinning it into yarn for a hat and fingerless mittens. I think they will be gorgeous.

Now it's your turn. Leave me a comment in the comment section below and tell me what hibernating looks like for you.

You should read this if you are a knitter or a friend of a knitter

If you have read my blog for a while, or if you follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you have most certainly come across pictures of my knitting.  

I joke that knitting is my psychotherapy and keeps me sane, and that's what I tell my husband when I fondle yarn at the yarn store, while he patiently waits, credit card in his hand.

He wouldn't want me to be emotionally unbalanced, now, would he?  Ahem.

I've been knitting since I was a little girl.  I'm full-blooded German. Born and raised there, I grew up in a culture where mothers and grandmothers have passed on this very important skill to their young for generations. 

I have knit and purled many millions of stitches, hundreds of hats, mittens and socks, and dozens of sweaters and started designing my own patterns years ago.

This is one of my favorites:

I spent the past two weeks knitting and filming a video tutorial on how to knit these beauties.

They look complicated, don't they?  With that scallop edge and picot top, some knitters might look at this and think they could never knit them.

But wait!  That's why I created my video tutorial workshop: so people can knit alongside me, where I show them step-by-step how to knit these fingerless mittens, from start to finish.

So if you are a knitter and want to make yourself fingerless mittens (or make them for Christmas presents, nudge, nudge, wink, wink), I invite you to sign up for my knitting tutorial workshop.

You will get the pattern, seven video tutorials, and access to a private Facebook group where you can post pictures of your work-in-progress or finished work and ask me questions.

This course is self-paced, and you can start anytime, download ALL the materials and keep them for life.

The course would also make a great Christmas present for a knitter in your life!

It's easy: all you do is go to the workshop page, sign in with your email, put in a password, and off you go.

I can send a beautiful electronic gift certificate to the recipient with all the information.  

My mother-in-law wants me to tell you that even if you are just a beginner, you can knit these if you follow along with my video tutorials. I taught her how to knit a few years ago, and she loves making these mittens. She's right. You can do this.

Spoiler alert: the course is only $15.

PS: I also offer an affiliate program for this, so if you want to promote this workshop on your blog, to your friends, or on social media, you will get 10% of the proceeds.  So if you refer one person, you get $1.50 for every person who joins the course.  Message me if you are interested!  There is no cost to you!

Sparks are flying!

These days, you need to be careful of crossing our path.  Sparks have been flying in every direction.  Steve and I are finding ourselves sucked into a powerful vortex of creation, which finds us armed with knitting needles and axes, and which catapults pieces of yarn and fiber (in my case) and wood chips and saw dust (in Steve's case) into our space.  
We are in a creation frenzy.  My knitting needles are moving so fast, I swear they heat up.  I finished my gorgeous, gorgeous sweater and am now working on custom orders.  A couple of weeks ago, several people posted pictures of a knitted fox hat on my Facebook wall, asking me if I could make these.  Ha!  Could I make these?  Yes, I could.

I am taking custom orders to knit these up on my smoking knitting needles as fast as I can.  If you want one (baby, toddler, child, or adult), let me know.  You can go here to order it.

And can I show off my sweater?  I feel a tiny little bit self conscious about boasting so much, but I love it, I love it, I love it!

In the meantime, Steve taught a bow making class to eight people.  It was a full house shop for sure!  I love that there are so many women wanting to learn the art of bow making.  (It helps that their instructor is so damn handsome).  They were all so excited and jazzed about making their own bow, they told their friends about it, and now Steve has to schedule another class for December.  If you want to participate, let us know ASAP so we can reserve you a space.

The other creative thing my hubby and I have been cooking up is a video about bow making.  He wants to show and share that you can make a bow with a green, fresh cut stave in a week, instead of having to wait for a year to cure it.
We are having fun with this, and I am learning more about video making.
Interestingly, our boys are watching what we're doing, and now they are making their own movies about spy stuff, involving blood (ketchup) and suspenseful sound effects.  I kind of wish they were making educational movies about nature instead, but if they are learning tech-stuff with blood and guts, so be it.

Here are some pictures of Steve doing his thing with the bow making.

What creative things have you been doing lately? 

What's going on here?

I am allowed to brag about my kid, right?  Bear with me here.  Because the thing is: My ten-year old has been bringing home the bacon... uhmm I mean... the salmon. He and his Dad sneak out of bed in the wee hours so they can fish at the river just at day break. That's when the salmon bite, I hear. Not that I know anything about fishing. All I know is that the guys come back from some of these excursions with big, bright smiles, and a salmon in their arms. Literally.

Typically, it goes something like this: I sit bleary eyed at the breakfast table with little Eva and our eleven-year old son who doesn't care much about fishing. A car pulls up, the door opens, I jump up to see if they caught anything. If there is a fish, I yell and scream. Lukas always gives his Dad a knowing look and says, “I know she'd freak out.”

Then I run to get the camera, snap a picture, and drill the guys about every detail of their adventure. I'm so proud of those two providers. We've had some good meals lately.

Talking of meals: We smoked our the bacon from our last year's pigs the other day. We've never done it ourselves, and I will write a separate blog entry about how we did it and what recipe we used. The end result was good, albeit a little salty.

We smoke it with alder chips and don't use nitrate, so it's healthier.  Since we don't want to die from the ever so slight chance of botulism, we freeze it after it's smoked.  On the other hand, we might not even freeze it but eat all of it immediately, since our four pigs will get slaughtered on Friday, and we need to make space in the freezer.

Aside from bacon makin', we are free to pursue other interests, since it has been raining non-stop, and we can't play outside much.  That means that this here Mama spends a lot of time in front of her spinning wheel and behind the knitting needles, even when other people in the family do fun things like carve pumpkins.  I'm glad my knitting portable, so I can move where the action is, if I so desire to spend time with my noisy children.

The fiber in the picture below comes from an angora rabbit, and it is softer than a baby's bottom.  I got the fiber from my friend when we visited her last week.  If you want some of her awesome fiber, visit her website here.

While I knit and spin and avoid cleaning the house, my kids spend hours making noise music.  They are getting pretty good and are involving little Eva, letting her take over the microphone every now and then.  Our friends gave us a drum set.  I don't know what I was thinking, agreeing to this.

And Steve?  Well, Steve does manly things, like hoisting a 300 pound cast iron claw foot bath tub up into the second floor window of the new addition.  Or scouting out new fishing spots.  Or cleaning out gutters 25 feet off the ground.  Smoking meat.  Rounding up escaped pigs in the dark.  You know.  Stuff like that.

And you?  What are you up to these days?

I'm leaving you with some autumn-y images.  Stay warm, hear?

My passion - show and tell

We've been lighting the wood stove every day.  It's getting cold, and the rains have started.  In the past few days, many gallons of rain have fallen onto our soggy soil and into our raging rivers.  In other words: we are housebound.

It's perfect, though, really, it is.  I am spending lots of time spinning yarn and knitting.  I am also spending way too much time in front of the computer, playing with a new photo editing program.  I've been revamping some of my pictures of sweaters I knitted and yarn I spun.  Oh, I'm having so much fun with this!  

Let me show them off to you, okay?  You don't have to be a knitter to appreciate them, so bear with me.

Here is a sweater I wore a lot, and then threw it into the washing machine, where it got wrapped around the center and stretched like crazy.  Usually, people shrink clothes in the washer, but I manage to stretch them.

Here is a sweater that gets me stopped on the street, literally.  People are forever asking me if I made it, and what pattern it is.  I think I should just wear a sign around my neck with all the info whenever I wear this thing.  Here's the front, and below is the back.

Next up is a figure-hugging cardigan-type sweater that I loved a lot when I still had boobs, meaning when I nursed a baby.  Now, it fits very differently on my boy-ish, no-more-boobs body.  Ohhh, how I loved my cleavage when I had babies!

Here is my handsome, model-worthy hunk of a husband.  Honestly, couldn't he be on the cover of a magazine?  I knitted him this sweater ten years ago, and he still wears it, although it now sports a bunch of holes.

Ahhh, and here's the shrug combined with one of my felted hats.  Did I mention that my photo editing program has a feature that erases your wrinkles?  I kid you not!  It's terrible that I used that feature on my face, because I'm always so proud of being all natural and stuff, but for these fashion-shots?  I want no wrinkles, and they shall be removed.

This picture is awfully grainy, but it can't be helped, not even with my new editing program.  It whitened my teeth though, and what more do you need, I ask?

This one was fun to knit, with wooden beads and all.  I don't wear it much, but I should.

Another one with lace.  You can tell I really love knitting lace.  My red hair, the purple sweater, and the pink one underneath it are clashing terribly, but please forgive me.  I was too lazy to retake the shot...

Ohhhh, and I love this one, the Kelmscott sweater.  As soon as I saw the pattern in a magazine, my heart rate accelerated.  I HAD to knit it for myself.  And I did.

This one I knitted when I was 14 years old.  Yep, back in Germany.  It fit me then, it fits me still.  In some ways, it helps to not have any boobs after all.

This one has a soft spot in my heart because it is made from all my own handspun yarn.  And not only that, but the white yarn is the first yarn I EVER spun, so I was extra proud of it.

Here is my most recent sweater for Steve.  I knit it when we were in Mexico.  He didn't want to wear it there.  Then we came back to this, and he happily wore it.

Here is another sweater I made when I was a teenager in Germany.  It looks kind of 80's, doesn't it?

And last, but totally not least, if you are still with me, here's a sweater I made that I live in.  A lot.

You can probably tell by now that I really love knitting.  People have asked me for years if I teach on-line knitting classes.  Although I have taught many people one-on-one how to knit (the European, fast way - not the American, slow way), I have never taught an on-line class.  I think it's time.  I welcome any suggestions on how to do this, in case anyone reads this who has experience with such a thing.  I just am not very tech-savy.  I'd rather knit.