There's No Place Like Home

That was a very pleasant vacation seeing some new towns like Bloomington,

and Indianapolis;

knitting--and finishing-- my Knit-1-Below leg warmers in the rental car on the way through Ohio;

being taken care of by my folks for two weeks back at the cottage on Lake Erie;  

eating the original Buffalo wings at the Anchor Bar;

and hanging out in good old Wash, PA.

 I say "good old," but, dang it has really grown with all this natural gas drilling and fracking going on.  I almost fell out of the car driving around -- there are OUTLET STORES for goodness sakes.  There were people from OTHER COUNTRIES in the AT&T store. Seriously astounding.

Anyhow, we made it back only an hour late on United. The trip out on American was perfect. And the staff was friendly (and existent). I'm so glad American is flying into Eugene now.  We are definitely going to continue to try to avoid United. 

Anyhow, anyhow, we got back and the next day I went to Eugene Textile Center to get a cone of black 10/2 Pearl cotton to go with my other Lunatic Fringe yarns which I had left from my Fiber In the Forest doubleweave class with Madelyn VanDerHooght last spring. Now, that was a totally awesome class, and I learned a ton and a half, but it was seriously a bit over my head. I was so excited about weaving after that though that I was acting like a crazy chicken. I knew I needed to do something a little more basic, but what? Did I want to try to do handspun? Did I want to try some more basic dish towels? Wool or cotton? Did I want to do different threadings? So many options! Of course the result was, I didn't do anything until now.

While I was toiling back along the rails to trails bike path from Ridgeway to my folks' cottage on Silver Bay on a cranky old bike one chilly day on vacation I kept my mind off the sore parts by planning out my next project.  Doing multiplication while riding is recommended only on easy trails!  I finally decided to use the beautiful Lunatic Fringe Cotton for some multicolored dish towels where I could try different treadlings on one tie up. I used our delay "due to weather" in bright and sunny SanFrancisco, to type up my plan on my iPad.  My mental math was right, I was pleased to find. 

I grabbed my tiny warping board, which I have taken apart, and screwed it to the fence with the sides a yard apart to make it bigger.  Now this worked great the first time I did it, last spring for FITF,  

but this time the screws (which I had not too intelligently put back in the same holes in the fence) started stripping out on the right side so that edge started leaning in and the threads kept sliding off the pegs which are a little shorter than I would like anyhow since it is only a small warping board. I just kept powering through because I didn't know what else to do.  Of course the last half of the warp ended up being about 8" shorter than the first half.  If I hadn't been in a panic (did I mention I was outside and it was getting dark and I had to go to my piano class?)

 I might have realized I could just stop that warp and start a second one for the rest.  I know that's what "people" do for big warps, but "I" have never done that in my vast warping experience (I think this is warp #5).  It turns out I could even have done the colors separately.  So much to learn.  I had "heard" all of this, but it's not until you really experience something that it thoroughly sinks in.  Next time I will think in smaller warp chunks (392 ends was probably a bit much for my short pegs even if they hadn't started to come out of the wall) and be sure my warping board is really secure. Oh, yeah, and don't start later than 12:30 pm.  

It was hard to chain t off the board because of the sliding issue, but I managed it.  Whew. 

I suppose 8" of loom waste is a very small price to pay for the education.  

The saga continues in the next installment!

Another Go at Blogging On the Go

After that first mobile blogging attempt I went out of WiFi land for awhile, but now I am back in civilization! It's hard to believe but my mom and dad actually have WiFi at their 200 year old farmhouse now. It's not that the house is old that makes that hard to believe of course, it's that it's my parents!

Right now, I'm showing my mom how to use a touchscreen.  She loves it.  Look out internet, here comes Susan!

**********

So using the full blogger website didn't work very well at all, so I have paid big money ($5) for an app: here goes.

Well that was easy.

Darling Claire's Pea/Coco-nut Power Pods

     On yet another tangent--neither fiber nor travel related--here is a great (not to mention vegan and gluten free) no-bake cookie recipe I have been making.  I got the basic recipe from my good friend Claire Darling.  You can fudge the amounts one way and another and it will (probably) work just fine, but this is what I used on my second batch and they worked great. More coconut oil makes them sturdier, but I like them a little squooshier.  I imagine you could obviously use any kind of nut butter/ nut combination that sounds good or that you have handy.

Quite a few people have requested the recipe, so I thought I would just post it so it will "always" be handy if anyone wants it!


DARLING CLAIRE'S PEA/COCO-NUT-BUTTER POWER PODS:

Toast  3/4 c.  EACH raw filberts (a.k.a. Hazelnuts to folks outside of the PNW) and almonds for a few minutes in your toaster oven (a.k.a. easy oven for my Canadian cousins) or under your broiler.  Let  them cool before trying to chop them up.

Chop 1 c. of them very fine into a flour consistency. Chop the other 1/2 c. coarse like the chunks in chunky peanut butter.  I used my coffee grinder, but you can use a food processor.  Or you can buy nut flour in a natural food store and use that.

Warm to melting on medium low heat in a medium saucepan:
3/4 c. Coconut Oil
3/4 c. honey
1 c. unsweetened nut butter (I'm sure you can use regular old Peter Pan,  but I imagine they will be quite sweet)
1/2 tsp salt (if your nut butter is unsalted)(or if you just love salt)

Add:
2 C. quick oats (if you use regular or steel cut you may want to whirl them through your food processor or coffee grinder real quick like)

Stir the oats in well and let them warm up and cook a bit for about 3-4 minutes.

Then Add:
Your pre-made 1 c. nut flour and 1/2. c. chopped nuts
1 1/2 cups UNsweetened dried  coconut flakes 

As Claire said, "Basically you just want to glomb all that goo together."

I put mine into mini muffin tins lined with mini muffin tin papers, which made them very handy for sharing, not to mention super cute, but you can also just drop spoonfuls of the stuff onto parchment paper.

Let 'em cool. Eat 'em.

If you live in a hot climate and you don't over air-condition your house, you will probably need to keep them in the fridge or the coconut oil (which is what makes them solid) will be too soft and melty to hold  them together.

These are kid approved, and a really great for between meal snacks for picky or A.D.D eaters who might not get quite enough at regular meals.

P.S. I have dreams of rolling them into little balls and dipping them in melted chocolate. Let me know if you try that!  I would also love to hear about any other adaptations.

P.P.S. That's Grandma Hisrich's cake plate I have them on there.

For The Love of Fiber

I have about a million more pictures of the Rose Cottage project, but since this blog is supposedly about fiber arts and travel, I though maybe a little shot of a few things I have been working on lately might be fun.  Not to mention easier than the next 75 steps of the cottage project!

For the love of Bumbles

  I "unvented" a new way to make catnip toys: a needle-felted, scarily realistic, cat-nip rat.

Take a little fiber (washed, but still a little sheep-y seems to intrigue Bumbles better than scoured within an inch of its life fleece) and needle it to make a little mat.

 I forgot to take a picture of the next step where you put some catnip on it and fold the fiber around it.

Then needle it into a basic mousey shape.

Make some whiskers and a tail by braiding yarn scraps together.

Attach the whiskers and tail by needle felting a little more fiber over them.  Detail pointy nose shape.

Add some eyes with little bits of a darker color, and Viola! A pet rat for your beloved cat.

I keep getting a little scare every time I see it on the floor!

For the love of Byron

I love my cat, but I love my brother-in-law, at least as much.  A few years ago I made him a cotton throw, but it was always just a little small for him (though he loves it dearly!). I knew he would appreciate this:

It's based on the Modern Miters Afghan free pattern from LionBrand, and is made with super easy care Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick and Quick yarn.  I started it at the end of December managed to finish it in time for it to arrive right on his birthday the day after Valentine's Day. He called me to thank me even before he called his own mother!

For the love of Myself

I dumped all of my knitting notions out, sorted them by type into a gazillion saucers and then reorganized them into various pouches, and even managed to clean up after myself!

Love is all you need!

Ultimate Chile

After using a post title with a word like "penultimate" in it, you're kind of stuck with doing an "ultimate" installment even if it's a year and a half  three and a half years after the fact and you've done a million things in between and can't find the picture file where you had sorted out the last of the photos you thought you might use.  I guess I'll try to meet the challenge, but it's going to be pretty seat of the pants! Here goes:

Seth's birthday dinner in a revolving restaurant, consisting of more fish soup that had some specific name (to which there is a related poem) that I cannot recall, than you could shake a stick at.

2 buck duck bought in market in Chiloe and brought back in a basket on the plane.

Valparaiso market on New Year's Eve day

"Jumbo" on New Year's Eve day

Carts had gripper things that held them onto incline-alator!

Cool Chilean shellfish (Machas?) for New Year's Eve dinner.

Kate's lab's zebra-fish stock room.

New Year's Eve is a big deal there, too.  Remember it's the beginning of their summer vaction!

Kate and John's cool house and her gorgeous collage art.

 Best fireworks ever all along the bay that night, but couldn't get good pictures.

Night time harbour tour

Crazy long tunnel to the strangest straight up an elevator tower ascensor.

Valp'o market again

Last shot of cool graffitti art.

Penultimate Installment

Summer break is over here in Eugene, and I am still writing about summer break starting in Chile in January! The drive back to Valparaíso was uneventful. The high point of the drive was when we took some photos of a giant copper smelting plant which took about 5 minutes to drive through. Copper is used for all kinds of stuff from medicine to space shuttles according to the billboards along the road, and is one of the most lucrative industries in Chile.


Getting close to Valp'o, the traffic became pretty thick. When we had left there was almost none, but summer vacation was gearing up into full swing for the New Year! Charles and Reida showed up at Kate and John's, and we started a new segment of the trip together. First we explored the Casablanca Valley wine region for a day since we still had the car. Kate and John had to work so we were on our own for navigation, but there is only one big road out of Valp'o east towards Santiago, and that's the Casablanca Valley, so we did OK. We ate lunch at a vineyard calledIndomita . The architecture of the building was too much in my opinion, but the food, wine, service and setting were fabulous.



After lunch we had a bit of trouble getting across the highway to our other vineyard, Emiliana, and missed our tour reservation, but they still did a wonderful tasting for us. It was very civilized--sitting at a table with a bi-lingual hostess who poured us hearty tastes of their delicious bio-dynamic wines and told us about the discovery of the Carmenere varietal which had been thought extinct (and was in Europe), but which some visiting European vintner found among the Merlot vines in Chile. It's a delicious varietal; try it if you ever find it. It has more oomph than Merlot, but is easier to take than a big Cabernet or Pinot Noir. This was a lovely vineyard with guinea hens and chickens running about and flowers everywhere; I quite liked their building as well!



Another day while Kate and John were busy dealing with their real lives, Charles, Reida, Seth and I went traipsing about Valparaíso. The city is made of steep watersheds running down to the sea, which create a succession of hills. Each hill is a neighborhood with it's own particular flavor. The famous Chileno poet Pablo Neruda had one of his several houses/wives/mistresses in Valp'o, at the very top of the road system on one of these hills and it is now a museum. It is called La Sebastiana, and you can only take pictures through the windows to the outside (the views are quite lovely), but you really should patiently check out this website: http://www.fundacionneruda.org/imagenes_sebastiana.htm as he was one goofy quirky collector of a man. His houses and belongings were all partially destroyed/stolen by the Pinochet regime (they didn't like people speaking for the common man, and that was what he did) but this foundation retrieved/restored several of his houses around the country.

One day, as Reida and Kate are both very horse-y types (and Charles holds his own) we went on a little trail ride through the hills East of Valp'o at a place called Caballo Puro. They had some awesomely expensive horses there (not the ones people like us got to ride) and one of the hands told us (Kate) about them and all the security they have to have as horse theft is crazy-common. It was a pretty nice place with a nice restaurant and all, but they were a little disorganized, and maybe trying to rip us off the tiniest bit (that's just how things work some places), so Kate had to pull out her "Crazy (yet entirely fluent in Castellano) Gringa personality" to get things straightened out. It was awesome to sit back and watch her "negotiate." I had the nicest horse in the world (Mariposa --means butterfly, and also a kind of Lily), but I could barely move afterwards--oh my achin' knees! I did it though, and we did get a nice view of the landscape. Somehow John managed to slip out of this one. Hmmm.










Each day brought a new mini adventure it seems. On yet another day we headed down for a day trip to the quaint little fishing village of Quintay (notice it has all the letter of quaint right in its name!) which used to have a whaling station but since that is not so legal anymore, one of the universities in Santiago has turned it into a marine science research facility. That is where Kate was about to have her special summer course, which Charles was down there to teach part of, which led to this whole trip we all took to Chile in the first place. Being guests of Kate we got a nice long tour. Their main focus it seems is to help create methods of raising nursery stock of commercially important fish which can be released into their real habitats, thus helping maintain fisheries without the problems that come with many fish farming operations. They had pretty much figured out the conger eel (which is delicious and hearty and a favorite there, and which is not really an eel) and are now working on sea urchins! We saw tiny baby ones which I could barely even photograph they were so small (but they looked just the same!).

We just spent the afternoon in Quintay, but Charles and Reida went back after we left for the course of course and reported that the little restaurant on the beach was most excellent!

Then we headed back to Valp'o for New Year's weekend, when things really get going down there!