The past couple of weeks......

Today we are celebrating our anniversary.  We had both been married and divorced before we met and this is our 13th wedding anniversary.  It has been a wonderful 13 years even with the ups and downs of health issues and am looking forward to many more years.

Where our journey together will lead us we have no idea but we plan on it being together.

Eventually we will have to leave our existing home and land because there is more upkeep involved than we are able to do but we will hang on here for as long as we can because we can't envisage living anywhere else.

Enough philosophizing,  back to the subject of this blog.....making things.

I haven't actually done a fat lot to be honest, just been making the pin loom weaved squares for the baby blanket ready for when the next baby in our extended family arrives.  Nothing on the horizon that we know of yet.

I have 70 of then done and need 81 so only 11 more to go.  That should make a 3' x 3' blanket.  I will determine after that how much bigger I will make it.

I also bought a pattern for an apron that I had seen Henny Penny made.  (see link below)

The apron Henny Penny made

I really like the style of this one and the fact that it doesn't need to be tied.  My arms do not work so well these days so tying things behind my back is not so easy.

I ordered some bias binding and am awaiting it coming and I have some fabric already to make it.

It's been a long cold winter here as it has most places so as I am sure that you are looking forward to some better weather as much as I am.

Bloggers and blogging

I have been a little disappointed to hear that a few of the bloggers whose blogs I read have had negative comments about their blogs and I fully understand how they must have been hurt and upset.  Why do people make nasty comments?  Can't they just move on and read a different blog.

To me it's like complaining about a certain TV program.  You don't have to watch it if you don't like it, just switch to another channel.

I am not a prolific poster but I do enjoy reading other folk's.  If there has been any I didn't like I just stopped looking at them. I am not much of a commenter either but once in a while I do.

We all have our own reasons for blogging, mine is to keep a sort of diary I can look back on.  I don't have many people read my blog and that is fine, I started it for me.  I do appreciate any one who comments though.

I hope those bloggers who were subject to the nasty comments keep on posting as I do so enjoy reading about their adventures and daily activities.

Apologies

I am such a Dumbo sometimes.  I never realised I had a lot of comments awaiting moderation.  Today I found them and told Blogger to publish them.

If yours was one, I am very sorry and have resolved the issue.

Will Mung beansprouts be the answer?

On a visit to see my husband's neurologist last month we commented to him on how well he was looking.  He is not a well man and suffers himself from neurological problems as well as other things especially allergies.  He told us he had been eating Mung beansprouts for about a month and wasn't sure if his improvement in health was related but it was a big coincidence, he said.

So, we researched them and found that they are supposed to be beneficial healthwise and though why not give it a go.  Nothing to lose except a bit of time and the cost of the beans.

This was the best video I found online on how to grow them.

How to grow Mung beansprouts

I am now on my third batch of growing, here are a couple of pictures of my second batch before I harvested them.  They didn't grow as tall as the one's in the video but they taste great and they were plentiful.  Enough to keep us going until the next batch is ready.

Have we noticed any changes?  Well my husband thinks they are helping with his problems of constipation and I have noticed that I do not get indigestion at all if I have eaten some.

We eat about three small bowlfuls a day usually with or just after meals.

On a not so good note, when my husband was in the hospital the week before last some blood tests showed some liver function tests highly elevated so he has to have an ultra sound on his abdomen on Tuesday.  I might add that he hadn't started on the beansprouts at the time the blood test was done.  The first batch was growing while he was in the hospital.  Hoping it is just a temporary reaction to the plasmatheresis treatments he had.

Will keep you updated.

That was the month....that was!

February has been one of the busiest months I have had in forever.  My husband has not been well so there have been many trips to the VA hospital 150 miles away.  In between the usual housework, cooking, washing et al, you know how it goes.  He spent a week in the hospital at end end of the month and came home yesterday.  He had to have three plasmatheresis treatments which take many hours each time plus time to recover so they just kept him in for the week.  The last two treatments left him with critically low fibrinogen levels so then he had to be infused with cryoprecipitate afterwards which was another lengthy process.

Another thing that has kept me busy is cleaning up Asian beetles which have invaded us really badly this year.  The only thing you can do is vacuum them up and they just keep coming and coming so not a fun time.

Not much making of things other than a curtain for the door into the sunroom so I don't have to see them pesky bugs, they are particularly bad in there and some woven squares for the baby blanket work in progress.

Hoping for a bit of an easier month in March before the grass starts growing again in April and the never ending mowing starts.

That all said, life is good and I am grateful for every day.

Good old fashioned bread pudding

I am beginning to feel a little better.  I have had a loaf of bread in the fridge ready to make a bread pudding from before we got the flu and it is freezing cold out today so it seemed like a good time to make it.

I have fond memories of my Mum making it when we were little kids and I suspect her Mum used to make it too.

I haven't made one in many many years and I had a loaf of bread that needed using up. Documented the process in pictures. No particular recipe as all measurements are based on taste. First break up the bread into small pieces into a large bowl. Soak the bread in boiling water straight from the kettle. Beat it with a fork until it is all mixed into a pulp. 

Add sugar until it tastes sweet enough for your taste. Add mixed spice the same way. I use English mixed spice as it is a little different to the North American "Allspice' and I prefer it. The more observant will notice that this went out of date in 2008 but it was a sealed sachet. 

Add whatever dried fruit you want to use. I used raisins and about 12oz as I like dried fruit. 

Grease an oven dish and spoon mixture into it and rough the top a little with a fork as this will help make the top nice and crispy. Put in oven at 300F and let it cook for a couple of hours. Don't overcook as the dried fruit will get burnt on the top.

It is in the oven right now and smells delicious!

Posted this on FB too so cut and pasted the words, don't know why they are coming out with white round them!  Arrgghh!!!!

I succumbed to the flu!

I started feeling yukky early last week but come Saturday I was most definitely ill.  Aches, pains, chills, snotty nose, hacking cough and to top it all off a UTI!

No sign of it abating yet so just feeling sorry for myself.  My husband, bless him is trying to help as much as he is able.  Weird thing is he is the one with the compromised immune system and he hasn't really caught it.  He is a little under the weather but much better than me.

He did have the flu shot and the pneumonia shot so maybe that is what is helping him.

I might have to rethink my options on that this coming year.  I have only ever had one flu shot  back in 1997 and I was ill for months afterwards  and vowed never to have another.

Maybe they have improved a lot since then after all it was 21 years ago lol.

For sure I do not want to feel like this again.

Not much to blog about!

The first few weeks after Christmas are always a bit blah to me.  I don't know why.

Christmas Day was a bit of a non event with my husband sleeping a good part of it away.  It was a hard one for him after the death of his eldest son and this coming February will be hard too as it will be a year since the car accident that took him.  Andrew has been on our minds a lot.

Not much done in the crafting area, just a few of the woven squares.

The weather is bitterly cold right now with snow forecast tomorrow and Monday which is not good as we have to drive 150 miles each way for hospital appointments on Tuesday.

A pretty gloomy post I am afraid, hopefully the next one will be more cheery.

Merry Christmas one and all

We woke up to snow this morning, not a lot but enough to make it really feel really Christmasy.

The gnomes weren't too impressed though!

Just a few Christmas makes for my wonderful neighbours.  There were a couple of other things hand made too but I forgot to take pictures.

Hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year

The cards are all done.....

I finished off the cards not long after my last post, now they are all written and now I just have to get them all mailed off. No two are exactly the same and they all say Merry Christmas either on the front or inside.

Wasted three days when Windows did an update and changed the drivers on my the video card to something that was incompatible and the resolution changed.  I thought it had changed my settings and tried correcting them but couldn't get it to work. Had to watch a lot of you tube videos to find what was wrong. I had to revert to a previous driver and then go back and change all the setting s back. It was a very trying few days.

Hospital appointments for us both.  My husband had to have another chemo infusion as the auto immune disease had kicked back in and weakened him.  Not much improvement yet but hopefully soon.  I had more xrays on my neck and the surgeon signed me off as everything has almost fused completely and he is happy.

Made pineapple upside down cake yesterday. We don't eat dessert often so this will be it until Christmas.

Concentrating efforts on Christmas. ⛄❄Put up outside lights. Tree will be next weekend.🎅🎄

Enough of the emoji silliness lady!

Oh! and one last thing, Sizzix had a great sale again with free shipping with over $25 of purchases so I have over $100 worth of new dies and stuff coming for only $26.  So excited for next years cards already.

Yay! Production is underway

All the cards have been embossed, all the fabric trees and Santa's are cut out, all the Merry Christmases are pressed out and all the recycled pictures and words are done.

And nary a Happy Holidays in sight!!!!! 

And the first batch of completed cards

I am still here!

It has been a couple of weeks since I posted.  I have been busy making things as well as the usual day to day busying.

I made a couple of hats on the looms I got from the Thrift shop.  The first one, which I used the dusty blue yarn that was with it and was just experimenting with, turned out big enough to make a hat and that is for me and the red one is a Christmas gift for my neighbour's grand daughter who helps me out with dog sitting and housework from time to time. It was actually made on a bigger loom but the yarn was different and although it looks narrower it actually stretches better than the blue one.

I also made some more appliance covers, one for the food mixer, one for the breadmaker and one for the coffee machine which just gets used when we have visitors as my husband has an espresso machine and I use instant coffee (old English habit).

Only putting up one photo because they are all made of same fabric and only differ in size and shape.  Yep! custom made appliance covers. Another reason is I made a mistake on the bread machine one and the fabric is upside down!  I didn't notice until I had cut the fabric to shape the corners and then it was too late to change.  You can just see q corner of it on the right of the photo.  Deer standing on their heads!

The rest of my making things time has been taken up with making Christmas cards.  I think I am sorry I ventured into this because it is really time consuming as I am making 50 cards.

I have recycled old cards and cut out images and words to glue onto the blank ones.  I am also embossing one side of every card and cutting out fabric shapes with Santa and Christmas trees on to glue on. Every card has to be embossed individually and every tree and Santa has to be cut out with pinking shears so it doesn't fray.  The hardest thing though has been the 'Merry Christmas' that I press out on my Sizzix machine.  It is very fiddly to take out the  logo and each one takes a fair bit of time to do.

Pictures in the next post when I have taken it all upstairs to my sewing room to work on them as I have been trying to do it downstairs on the dining table and what a mess I am making!

Just some ramblings.....

I know we live in the middle of nowhere and are pretty much hermits but we have TV with a million channels and high speed Internet so why hadn't I heard of air fryers until a couple of weeks ago?

Anyway, I did come across them and did my due diligence as to their usefulness and decided we would benefit from one.  We virtually gave up eating home made chips (french fries) because of the high usage of cooking oil and wastage of said oil. 

In my research I downloaded an air fryer cook book and in it was directions to make Scotch eggs.  That was the decider!  I love them and had never been successful in making them before.  Plus my husband loves chips so the thought of being able to serve them not dripping in oil or fat was another decider.

Next thing was to find one at a reasonable cost so I spent a lot of time looking on the Internet and checking reviews etc.  I found one for $69.99 from Avalon Bay on Amazon which had great reviews and was on sale.  So I ordered it and it arrived just over a week ago.

Yep, the first thing I made was Scotch eggs.  Totally delicious and perfect, no splitting of the sausage meat and cooked to perfection and again not dripping in oil.

I wanted to make a cover for it so I went through my fabric stash and found some fabric suitable for our home and surroundings and made one.  Now I plan to make more for some of my other appliances, first being the food mixer which is not used on a day to day basis and gets dusty.

Next ramble is about the weaved squares mentioned in my previous post , I have made 20 or so now.  I purchased some of the same yarn but with different colours.  I am enjoying making them a lot.

Next on the agenda is the mowers and the mowing.  I couldn't mow after my surgery for a couple of months as the discs they put in my neck need to fuse.  Finally the surgeon gave me the all clear to mow but my mower was playing up.  We both have riding mowers as we mow about 6 acres or so and my husband's mower fritzed also.  Fortunately, it was at the time the grass started slowing down because of the heat.  They went to the mower guy but he was going on vacation for two weeks, after one thing and another we eventually got them back.  My husband got his first but he ran over a wasps nest and was attacked by the swarm and suffered multiple wasp stings and ended up in the hospital.  It made him a bit leery to mow again while it was warm.  I got mine back just over a week ago. Then there was a week of hospital appointments and things to be done so we didn't get mowing again till Friday and today and I have to say it was a pleasure to mow after so long and the weather was perfect for it. He wouldn't let me mow the very long grass though so he did that I did the shorter stuff.

Finally, on one of our trips out this past week we went looking for a wheelchair for my husband for in his hunting blind as the nice new leather office chair he got for it squeaks.  Oh darn!, I will have to use it for my computer desk. Ha ha!  Anyway, I digress, when in the Thrift Store, which didn't have any wheelchairs, I found these knitting rings and yarn in a bag for $2.  What can I say? I am still a kid at heart and love toys to play with.

So I am making a tube lol, have no idea what I will do with it but it is fun to do.

That was a lot of rambling wasn't it, bet you are glad I don't blog every day eh?

It took a lot of failures but finally I can use the loom successfully

Who would have thought that the pin loom would prove to be so difficult to use?  I know I struggled with it many years ago but back then I didn't have the time to persevere.  This time I was bound and determined to succeed.

Armed with yarn and instructions last week I sat down to give it a go.  I failed........

Next day I tried again, and the next and the next. This pattern of failure was repeated for two more days.

The edges were all out of wack and this was after I had tried to fix them

Three edges were OK but the 4th went awry

Oh no, incorrect weaving and ratty edges, total failure!

A bit better but some mis weaving

Then yesterday it all fell into place and I made a good square.

Finally, a success!

Then I made some more

Phew! Thank goodness.

I am working on a baby blanket for the next baby that that comes along.  My youngest son is in a serious relationship with his girlfriend, also one of my grand daughters is too with her boyfriend so with the Universe's blessing and not so long into the future, there might be a new baby. Hopefully a marriage or two first though!

I will get some blue variegated yarn too to make squares and some white to crochet them all together and put an edge all around.  Maybe even back it too with some nice soft baby fleece.  Got plenty of time!

Well wouldn't you blooming well know it

The loom has been on my mind.  When I did my last blog post, at the end I mentioned I thought that maybe I had taken the loom to her as I had found it too fiddly.  When thinking about finding the completed squares in her stuff from the nursing home it became apparent that is what I must have done. Vague memories of it were floating around in my head.

Prior to all this thinking and having spent days and days looking for it in our house I had assumed that it was lost never to be found again and ordered one off ebay, (see previous post).

It has been our first cool day for a few weeks today so I ventured into the workshop to look through some of my MIL's totes. As I said, it somehow feels invasive but the darn loom wouldn't get out of my head.

Wouldn't you know it, there it was sitting proud in the top of the first tote I opened.  I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Laugh because my thinking had been correct or cry because I had spent $14 to buy another one.

Oh well, such is life.  Now I have two, so no excuses for not trying again.

I did find the instructions online and printed them up, that way I can keep the original instructions which are in the one I purchased which is also in the original box and from the pictures on ebay looks to be in pristine condition.

Now here is a thought! I can put one of the needles I have purchased with the one from ebay and it will be a complete set in excellent condition.  Maybe I will put it on ebay myself and make a little money.

I do so enjoy my blogging, it gets the old brain cells working! Better leave it for a couple of weeks though, don't want the seller thinking I was trying to make money off him by knocking the price down because that wasn't the case at the time.

I hate it when I can't find something I think I know I have somewhere!

Recently, we were out in the workshop where we still have some of my MIL's stuff stored.  She died in 2010 and it still seems invasive to go through it.  I know that at some point it will have to be done. Somehow one of the totes got knocked over and the contents scattered on the floor.  So we set about picking them up and I came across some squares that she had weaved on a mini loom and started to sew together.

They were not big enough to be anything useful but clearly she had something Autumnal (Fall) in mind.  I remember having the mini loom that she used, I tried it, it must have been ten years or so ago (it was before she died even) and it was fiddly so I didn't do any more.

Well, I have searched the house high and low for it, to no avail.  I have literally spent hours and hours searching for it.  I went through all my craft stuff and all our cupboards but couldn't find it.

So next progression was to go searching for one to buy.  I discovered they were called 'Weave It'.

I found many on ebay and they were not cheap considering they were all old and used.  They ranged from $20 to $40+.  There were a couple on auction but they had bids on them with days to go. The above pictured one is a buy it now for $30

Finally I found one for a buy it now price of $20 but even though it seemed in excellent condition it was missing the 6" needle. I put in an offer of $14 for it and it was accepted so I bought it and found some needles on Amazon for $5.75, so still a complete set for less than $20 with extra needles also.

I eagerly await their arrival.

In hindsight I may have taken the original one to her in the nursing home after I had tried it and wasn't too successful with it, so it may yet turn up in her stuff when I eventually get around to going through it but meanwhile I will be able to continue on with the replacement one and add to her original squares to make something useful.  It is something I can sit and do at night now the nights are drawing in.

On a separate note, in my searching I did find some 'cool towels' I had purchased the year before last and put away for safe keeping.  They are those towels you dampen and put around your neck to keep cool.  A bit late for this year though!!!