Valuing the work of others

I have loved nice needlework for as far back as I can remember. My fondness for it probably started when I was old enough to realize my mother, exhausted from running a house, keeping a garden, tending the hens (and yes, slaughtering them herself), making lye soap, raising six children (and making darned sure we walked the straight and narrow!), and helping in the dairy barn, somehow found time to make dresses and coats for my sisters and me, as well as knitted mittens and sweaters. When she had a new project underway for me, I could hardly wait to see it finished. I remember trying on partially-completed dresses and wool coats and hoping, just hoping, they would soon be finished so I could wear them to school in a day or so; I also remember her fitting a pair of argyle-patterned yellow mittens to my small hands, only to discover once they were finished that she was actually knitting them for my oldest brother's girlfriend!

My Aunt Jean, probably my favorite aunt if one were allowed to have a favorite aunt, always had needlework of some kind under way when we would visit her in New Brunswick. I marveled at Aunt Jean's needlepoint, which I never learned myself, as well as her knitting, her quilt-making, her sewing, and her crocheting. When Aunt Jean sat down to rest for a minute, she always had needlework of some kind in her hands. When I would take my mother to Fredericton to visit her brother and sister-in-law, I always enjoyed talking quilting or crocheting with Aunt Jean. We would sit on their front porch in the warm July evenings and work on our current needlework together. We would tease Uncle Harry that he really needed to learn to crochet, too. Aunt Jean shared several of her favorite crochet patterns with me, and I treasure them.

I guess it stands to reason that I would develop a real appreciation for well-made and creative needlework. My mother taught me to sew and heaven knows she certainly tried to teach me to knit. The knitting lessons were for naught, because I just could not grasp the complexity of knitting directions.

It wasn't until 50 years later, when my mother was 100 or 101 and couldn't really comprehend that I was finally learning to knit, that I taught myself how. I've always regretted that she never understood that I was finally, officially, a knitter. I wasn't a failure after all!

When Ken and I go to flea markets, when I'm not eyeing the bone china, I am drawn to needlework items. Often the prices are too high, if the seller happens to understand the value of handmade works of art, but sometimes I snag wonderful bargains.

Such is the case with this crocheted tablecloth above, with white daisies enhanced by multicolored centers.

My heavens, that tablecloth is beautiful! When I think of the hours that must have gone into it, no doubt by a woman whose daily tasks were as overwhelming as my mother's, I'm humbled. I spotted it at the Montsweag Flea Market last Wednesday. I asked the price and was told $20. I knew I wasn't prepared to pay $20 for it, so I started to replace it on the display rack. It was then that I noticed the tablecloth has several  signs of wear in it, better known as frayed holes.

I mentioned this to the seller, and he promptly said, "Then I'll take a dollar for it, but don't tell my wife!" I promised him his secret was safe, and the exquisite tablecloth came home with me.

I feel it has found a good home where it will be appreciated. I hope I can find a way to mend the frayed areas, but if I can't, I can still treasure it.

The table runner to the left, with the blue flowers, is another flea market find. Someone worked carefully and diligently to embroider the designs and add a crocheted edge.

This cathedral window quilt is one of my most prized flea market finds. I paid $20 for it. The fabrics, perhaps from grain sacks, look to be from the 40's or 50's. I've done cathedral window quilting myself, and I know the hours that must have gone into something like this.

This is yet another flea market treasure, a bureau scarf embroidered with beautiful yellow flowers with green stems and leaves. It's very meticulously stitched, and it's in excellent condition.

And finally, I love this white-on-white linen tablecloth with hand-embroidered flowers in only one corner. It's lovely, and I'm now the proud owner. I paid $2 for this at Montsweag a couple of years ago.

I sometimes wonder what will become of my needlework items in the future. I don't pretend they're of the calibre of many of my flea-market finds, but I've given so many of them away as gifts. Are they treated with the kindness they deserve? And will they be passed on to someone new to appreciate? I hope so.

Done, I tell you. DONE! And African violets, at no extra charge

Well, there. The Aran cardigan that seemed like an endless knitting project, consuming my life for a month and a half, is finished. Completely finished. With buttons, even. And my label inside.

So there. I'm now knitting quick projects, winter hats for Hearts for Warmth. According to their page on Ravelry, they are collecting handknitted hats, mittens, and sweaters for The Home for Little Wanderers in central Maine, so this is a project especially close to my heart.

I'll attempt to knit some mittens for the project as well, despite my feeling that the mittens I knit are a disappointment. Maybe I'll discover a new, fool-proof pattern for mittens.

Second topic du jour, completely unrelated to the first: How to grow African violets.

I'm not an expert on the topic, but I play one here in my own home.

For years I had sickly African violets which would sometimes bloom but, more often, just sit and look morose most of the time.

Things got so bad that their leaves even started to grow extremely pale. (The pale pink one at the left is supposed to have white/green mottled leaves. It's not sick!)

I was baffled. I was about to throw the violets into the compost bucket and pretend I'd never known them.

Then I thought: How about giving them some fertilizer? I hadn't done this for months, if not years. The poor plants were starving for nutrition. I have no idea why I'd come to assume they could exist on water alone. Their soil was depleted of nutrients.

I started giving them some liquid African violet food, and immediately I saw renewed hope in my violets. Their leaves slowly returned to a healthy, shiny deep green.

But the battle was not completely won.

How to get them to bloom regularly, almost non-stop, year 'round? Was this too much to ask?

Somewhere I read the suggestion that violets be watered ONLY from the bottom up. I had been taking mine to the kitchen sink every week or two, spraying them mercilessly with water, and putting them back at the window. I switched to putting a little African violet fertilizer in each of four small "tubs," such as an empty margarine tub, adding water, and setting the plant pots into the tubs.
It takes a few hours for each plant to absorb water up to the top of the soil. Sometimes I have to refill the tubs if the plants were especially thirsty. When the top of the soil feels moist to the touch, I know they're no longer thirsty.

Si

My final trick is this: I never put them in a window with direct sun. In fact, mine sit at north-facing windows year-round. They seem to like that amount of light, judging from their willingness to bloom almost non-stop.

I try to remember to spray mist them each day during the winter, but that's it.

My violets are much happier now, don't you think?

My NEW kitchen

I was hoping our kitchen remodeling project  would be 100% completed before I posted any photos, but we're still waiting for the finishing touch, the crown moulding at the top of the cabinets, to be installed, and I don't want to postpone sharing these photos any longer.

So here's my new kitchen! I love it.

It all started when we realized we needed to replace the sink. It was a cast-iron sink with a ceramic glaze, and some of the glaze had cracked and chipped away, revealing rusty iron beneath it.

Ken said if we were going to replace the sink, then we might as well replace the vinyl flooring and put in hardwood, which I'd often said I'd like some day.

Then he said if we're going to replace the flooring, we might as well replace the cabinets while we're at it. I balked at this, because the former cabinets were only 12 years old, but I'd often wished I'd chosen white cabinets instead of stained hickory....

Then I said if we're replacing the cabinets, why not install granite counter tops, which we've both dreamed about....

And the old hutch? It had no windows in the doors, and I wanted an area to display my collection of Watt Ware....

We got an estimate on having the kitchen design center also build us a hutch, but once we heard the cost of doing so, we decided we might as well go to a furniture store and purchase a hutch. This one was made not only in the USA, but practically next door in Massachusetts, for crying out loud. (How Ken and I managed to get the top half of the hutch positioned over the bottom half, without creating a disaster, is a story for another time. Those hutch sections are extremely heavy.)

Oh, and we also replaced the plain kitchen window with a bay window. I've been wanting a bay there since before we built this house. I now have a place to display flowering plants, start seedlings in the spring, and put up a small Christmas tree in December.

So that's how my new kitchen came to be. Preparing meals and baking are now a treat with so much
s-p-a-c-e to work in.

Knitting, post cards

This is getting to be the knitting project that refuses to end.

It's an adult Aran cardigan, a Yankee Knitter pattern, which I started on May 16. I should have been done with it in June, but here I am, still plugging away.

I don't know why it's taking me so long to knit this sweater. I've used this particular Yankee Knitter pattern many times to knit both adult and children's Aran sweaters, so I should know the directions well by now.

Yankee Knitter designs are well-written and easy to follow. The gazillion pairs of socks that I've knitted have been strictly Yankee Knitter designs. I've knit two or three of the designer's other sweater patterns.

So the sluggishness in this current project is clearly not the fault of the designer but, alas, the fault of me.

Maybe it's the gardening and the days out and about on excursions and the housework that are keeping me away from my usual knitting time.

The good news is that I'm about half done with the second sleeve. After that, it's the sewing together of all the sections, then the neckband, then the buttons, then...then I can move on to a new knitting project, something quick and easy, I suspect.

Meanwhile, the Postcrossings post cards continue to find their way to my mailbox. I've received the following three in the past two days:

This, as you've already guessed, is from Russia.

And this, obviously, is from The Netherlands.

This one is less obvious, at least, to me. It's from Hamburg, Germany.

It's time for me to request a new Postcrosser address so I can send a post card to someone somewhere in the world.

It's also time for me to knit a few more rows on that Aran cardigan!

I didn't believe it 'til I saw it with my own eyes

Someone, I don't recall who, mentioned to me a few weeks ago that it's possible to cook a whole chicken in a crock pot without adding any liquid.

That sounded a bit bizarre to me, but then I came upon a recipe last week that called for a whole chicken, a few vegetables, and essentially no liquid.

The recipe did say to add a tablespoon of olive oil and a splash of lemon juice to the chicken, but that was it.

The recipe contributor also mentioned she'd removed almost all of the skin from the chicken, although this was not necessary.

I bought a 4.5 lb. chicken, removed as much skin as possible, stuffed the bird into the crock pot, added the olive oil and lemon juice, added some cut-up carrots, a white potato, and a sweet potato (both cubed), tossed in a cut-up onion, dusted everything with salt and pepper, put the lid on the top, set the heat at "Low," and...went about my day.

The recipe I used called for four hours of cooking on "low," but that seemed a bit skimpy to me, so I extended the cooking time to six hours.

At the end of the six hours I removed the cooked vegetables, then the tenderest chicken I've ever had the pleasure of eating, from the pot. What amazed me beyond the tenderness of the chicken was the fact that the crock pot was almost full of liquid when I opened the lid. And oh! the aroma in my kitchen all day!

The chicken was of the falling-off-the-bone tenderness type.

Um-um, good.

Since trying the above recipe, I've discovered there are many cook-whole-chicken-in-crock-pot recipes on the web, such as this one, or this one, or this one or this one. None of these recipes calls for adding any liquid to the pot, just whatever herbs/spices you want.

The next time I cook a chicken this way, I think I'll not bother to add vegetables.  I want to see what the chicken is like with various seasonings added and nothing else.

Give it a try! It's quick, easy, and delicious.

Have you heard of Postcrossing?

I hadn't heard of Postcrossing until a month ago, when my niece Rachel said she and her six-year-old daughter, Violet, are Postcrossers, and she wondered if I might like to be, too. (Rachel and Violet have a world map to which they add pins when they receive new post cards.)

I did, and I am. I registered immediately.

Postcrossing is a free project, except for the cost of postcards and stamps.

Once registered, you simply request the name and address of a participant, to whom you will send a card.

I've sent seven "official" and one "unofficial" postcards so far. The unofficial one went out this morning to a young man, Milad, in Baghdad. He'd come across my name on the site and wrote to ask if I'd send a postcard to him from Maine, preferably a card with a map of Maine or of our capital building, or something of that sort. It's OK to make direct swaps like this, and I was happy to fill Milad's request, but I plan to do most of my swaps through official requests to the site.

My cards have been sent to Belarus, Germany, China, Russia, the Netherlands, Lithuania and Finland. I sent the Portland Head Light card below to Tatiana in Belarus this morning.

I've received three post cards to date, from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Belarus. Maartje in the Netherlands read on my profile that I like to knit, so she thoughtfully chose the card at left for me.

The ostriche card is the one I received today, from  Rebecca in Belgium. She's a second-year teacher there, mentioning on her card that she hopes the job gets easier. I e-mailed her a thank-you and assured her the first two years of teaching are, by far, the most difficult.

Jurgita in Lithuania mentioned on her profile that she likes vintage cards, pictures of mothers and children, etc. When Ken and I went to Montsweag Flea Market a few weeks ago, I found just the card for her: an early 1900's card depicting a mother giving a baby a bath in a basin. Luckily, the card had not been written on, so I purchased it and sent it to Jurgita.

To visit the Postcrossing site, go here.

To view my profile at the site, go here.

To learn more about Postcrossings and its over 330,000 participants, go here.

I think this project is a wonderful way to meet new people worldwide, and to reaffirm what fine folks the vast majority of us are!

Our Molly (and Murphy and Hershey)

In my header is Molly, our chocolate Labrador, at eight weeks old, back in 2002. Quite frankly and not at all modestly, I think that is one of the most adorable photos I've ever taken, but not due to my photographic skills. There's simply nothing cuter than a Labrador puppy.  Ken and I tried to put Molly back into the crock a few days later, for another photo shoot, and she'd already grown too large to fit into it! To the left is Molly today, looking older and wiser.

We got little Molly after losing our beloved Murphy, another chocolate Lab. Although our hearts were broken, we quickly found room in our hearts for this new, rambunctious puppy.

We've had three chocolate Labs in all: Hershey, who lived to be only 14 months old and passed away, much to our grief, when we'd put her in a boarding kennel before we left on a three-week trip to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. What a shock to come home and learn our Hershey had died only a few days after we'd left on the trip. Her death has made leaving our dogs behind when we travel all the more painful.

I've always felt as if we never really got to know Hershey. She traveled to Newfoundland with us the first summer we had her, when she was just a small puppy, and she was a hit with the natives. Many had never seen a chocolate Lab before, which surprised me since Labradors are native to, well, Labrador, and Labrador is next-door to Newfoundland.

Hershey traveled on that trip in the back of our pick-up truck, safely stowed in her kennel. At night in various campgrounds, she'd snuggle into bed with us in our tent camper, because the mosquitoes were relentless to her if she stayed in her kennel at night. It took what seemed like hours for her to finally settle down in bed, preferring to walk on us, bat us with her paws, lick our faces, but she'd eventually tire herself out and sleep all night between Ken and me. We loved little Hershey and thought we'd have her with us for years. The next summer, she died.

Murphy, full name Murphy Brown, was ours for eleven years. What a kind, gentle dog she was. When I'd get home from school in the afternoon and sit down on the cedar chest to put on my walking shoes before we'd go out for our walk, Murph would lay her head in my lap. She was a dear, dear friend. Cancer took her from us in 2002. She's buried in a grave dug by Ken behind our house. (Hershey, however, is buried at our former house.)

And now there's Molly Brown. What a piece of work she is! She doesn't let us do much without first getting her permission, preferrably in writing. We are not allowed to use our front or kitchen doors unless we're taking her outside with us. She takes personal offense when the UPS truck drives by the house, and she declares all-out war if it pulls into our driveway. When she and I are out for our daily walk, she's as sweet as pie to some of the neighbors but barks and growls at others. For the life of me, I can't figure out what criteria she uses to determine if she likes someone or not. She spends most of each day pretty much glued to me: If I go into the kitchen, she follows; if I go into the living room, she follows,...In the evening, when Ken's in his recliner and I'm on the end of the sofa near Ken, Molly tucks herself in at our feet. She likes to be with her people. At the moment, in fact, she's holed-up with me here in my study, sleeping at my feet and snoring a tad loudly. I'm sure if I should type something about her she didn't like, she'd leap to her feet, grab me around the neck, pull me to her so we're nose-to-nose, and demand I delete what I'd just written. That's our Molly.

Now Molly is showing signs of aging. She's almost ten. She hasn't yet had the health battles that Murph had, but her muzzle is quite white and she has slowed down.

I hadn't intended to reminisce about our dogs when I uploaded the photo of Molly-in-the-crock. I'd simply planned to share that photo so you could see what a little doll she was in her pink collar and with her amazing teal-blue eyes. Somehow the memories flooded back. There you have it. And I have a big lump in my throat.

P.S. Since my header photo of 8-week-old Molly has been deleted, I'll add it here: