Chatbooks

The gifts I most enjoyed giving this Christmas were Chatbooks. Whether they were as exciting to get as to give, I'm not quite sure, but I truly enjoyed preparing them.

Chatbooks.com is a website where one can upload photos and prepare neat little photo books for around $15-25.

I heard about this site from a blogger and immediately checked it out. Then I decided to create some books as gifts.

The book I'm most pleased with is the one containing old family photos starting around 1880-1890.  I made identical copies of this book for my sister Roberta and for myself.

This particular book starts with my maternal great grandparents, Samuel and Abigail Haines, a photo taken around 1890, and goes up to my mother's 100th birthday party in 2004. The photo book contains 89 photos in all, the majority from the early- to mid-1900's.

On the left here are my middle brother, Eldon, holding me, looking to be about six months old, and my sister Roberta, about two years old. On the right are Roberta and me stuffed into an old wicker baby carriage.

My kindergarten class is shown on the left here; on the right Roberta and I pose with our dog, Skippy. We're wearing our beloved silk pajamas, sent to us for Christmas that year by our brother, Eldon, who was serving in Korea during the Korean War. The year was around 1952.

Here, on the left are Grampy and Grammy Haines on their farm in Burtts Corner, New Brunswick. Peeking out the window between my grandparents is my mother.

The photo on the right is of my Grampy Haines, Grammy Haines, my mother, and my Aunt Betty with her daughter Gail. This was taken when my mother traveled to Manitoba to visit Aunt Betty, Uncle Fred, and Gail. Mum took this trip in the 1960's.

The Haines/McLean Chatbook contains 89 photos, most of which I had already scanned a few years ago to upload to my family's Facebook page.

When I first started creating a Chatbook, I overlooked the fact that the books are only 6" by 6." That concerned me when I realized it, but then I decided this is the perfect size, especially for old photos which are unlikely to have the high resolution of photos today.

The books can be ordered in a hardbound cover or a soft cover. I ordered two of each and have decided I prefer the hard cover.

One aspect of Chatbooks that I especially like is that if another family member wants to use the book I've created as a basis, then delete some photos and add photos of themselves and their children, they can easily do so.

All they need to do is contact me, I'll send them a code to use to access my book, and they can add, delete or whatever to their copy of the book without changing the contents of my book.

The other Chatbooks I created and gave as gifts are of the drive Ken and I took from Maine to Oregon and Washington last summer (for Ken) and the drive we took this past September with our friends Jim and Lynn through Washington, British Columbia, and Alberta (one for Ken, one for Jim and Lynn).

Chapbooks are a nice, neat way to preserve memories. Oh, and they're, as I said, fun to create.

A concert and an app

Tuesday evening we went with friends to Merrill Auditorium at Portland City Hall to attend a Ray Cornils Christmas concert. It was excellent. The real treat of a Ray Cornils concert at Merrill Auditorium is listening to Mr. Cornils play the Kotzschmar organ.

Look at the pipes of that organ on the back wall! The organ has five keyboards, and Mr. Cornils used them all, and he also used foot pedals like I'd never seen them used before.

Our friends apologized at having to get our seats in the far, far upper balcony. This did require a lot of stair-climbing, but it was definitely worth it. Look at the view we had!

On Wednesday morning, coincidentally, one of my former students shared information about the Pip Camera app, which allows one to do all kinds of clever things with photos.

Before I knew it, I'd taken my photo of the Cornils concert and placed it in a Christmas ornament.

Then I found myself playing with Pip and some of my photos of the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens light display.

I've also used friends' photos of their babies to place in various ornaments.

I'm having fun. All my Christmas gifts are wrapped, the baking is done, so I'm passing the time until Santa arrives. This is better than twiddling my thumbs.

Merry Christmas!

My brief career in papier mache´

Several years ago (and by "several" I mean twenty-five or so), a coworker brought back with her from a craft fair in Virginia an intriguing ornament.

It was a Santa head, but what it was made of we couldn't, for the life of us, figure out.

It appeared to be a Santa face somehow formed over a 4-watt bulb, maybe.

Or maybe not.

Not long after Vicki showed me the strange ornament, my newest volume of The Spirit of Christmas arrived in the mail. I loved that annual craft book. It was full of all kinds of clever things a person could make.

Lo and behold, on one page were Santa ornaments that looked a lot like the one Vicki had bought.


...with directions for making them....

Before I knew it I had purchased a block of dry papier maché. I mixed it up according to the directions on the package and got to work.

First I crumpled a wad of aluminum foil around a bobby pin, then I carefully formed faces over the aluminum foil.

I hung the wet papier maché Santa ornaments near the wood stove and allowed them to dry thoroughly, which required several days.

Then I applied a coat of white gesso. After that I could begin adding the flesh color, the beard, the hat. I finished each one with a coat of Mod Podge and a spray coat of acrylic sealer.

I cranked out Santa head ornaments every weekend. I gave them as gifts; I sold fifty of them to a nearby gift shop; I taught a group of teachers how to make them (although I suspect none of them followed through with a batch of their own).

And I kept many of them for myself. I still enjoy getting my Santa head ornaments out of storage each December and decorating a couple of our small trees with them. They've stood the test of time.

Gardens Aglow

Ken and I drove up the coast to Boothbay on Friday.

We visited with my sister for awhile, then we stopped at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. I'd heard rave reviews of the Gardens' "Gardens Aglow" program this month, so I knew we needed to see it.

We weren't disappointed. What a beautiful display of colored lights.

Snow on the ground wouldn't have hurt the atmosphere, but I guess Maine, the southern part, at least, is in for a brown Christmas.

 Nonetheless, the Gardens Aglow are breathtaking.

Handy man

I realized soon after our marriage, if not before, that Ken comes in mighty handy around the home.

Whether it's painting the bathroom or kitchen or living room,  or building a chest of drawers, or designing and building kitchen cabinets, or adding dormers to the upstairs,  or building a family room addition, or just about anything else that most people have to pay others to do, Ken does for free.

Recently I've spotted white birch candle holders on Pinterest, Etsy, and various blogs. I like their Country Christmas look and their practicality.

I mentioned to Ken a few days ago that I'd like to have a set of them.

...Voila! Just like that.

Aunt Judith's Spritz

One of my Christmas baking traditions is Aunt Judith's spritz.

Aunt Judith was my friend Lynn's aunt, not mine, but I called her Aunt Judith regardless.

She was a lovely Swedish lady and oh, could she ever bake!



She wasn't stingy with her recipes, either, most of which she'd memorized years ago.

Aunt Judith dictated her spritz recipe to me several years ago.

I've kept it carefully stored in my cookie press ever since.

I get out the cookie press each November-December and mix up a batch of Aunt Judith's spritz.

Making spritz isn't for the feint of heart, if being feint of heart includes not wanting to get your hands into the batter to give them a good mixing.

I'm sure Aunt Judith was more meticulous than I in making sure each and every cookie was the exact same size as the one before it.

I take a more casual approach, press out a long line of dough, then haphazardly cut it into approximately 2" lengths and form each length into a circle.

The baked cookies are always packed into my Beatrix Potter tin once they've cooled.

I don't remember where I got this tin, but it's prefect for storing spritz so that I'll stay out of them, more or less, until Christmas.

I enjoy making Aunt Judith's spritz each Christmas. Aunt Judith was a lovely Swedish lady, as I said earlier, and these cookies are a small way of honoring her memory.

My Terrible, Horrible, No-good, Very Bad Day

The day started innocently enough. After I'd had my coffee and read the newspaper, checked Facebook and played a game or two of Words with Friends, I decided to wind a hank of yarn into a cake. I'd had "nothing on my needles," as we knitters say, for a full 24 hours, and I was eager to launch a new project.

Side note: At left, above is a hank of yarn, but not the one featured in this story.

One cannot knit from a hank of yarn. If one tries, one finds oneself in a pickle. The yarn tangles mercilessly.

So I got out my yarn swift and my ball winder, and undid the ties on the hank of beautiful, hand-dyed  aqua "Caper Lace" yarn by String Theory, which happens to be made right here in Maine. I bought this yarn at the Maine Fiber Festival in 2014 and have been waiting to find JUST the right  project worthy of it.

I'd found the project: the September Circle cowl, by Melissa LaBarre. The pattern is beautiful and it has received rave reviews, so what could go wrong? Well, the following could go wrong:

1. I managed to screw up the yarn while carefully, I thought, placing it on the swift. I cranked the handle of the yarn winder a few times before the yarn started pulling, refusing to be wound, and tangling. I stopped the winding, untangled the yarn, and resumed winding. This went on for quite a few seconds: wind, stop, untangle, wind. Finally I realized things were getting worse, not better, so I removed the hank of precious String Theory Caper Lace yarn, $29 a hank, by the way, from the winder and decided to wind it into a ball by hand.

Five hours later (yes, five hours. The hank contains 575 YARDS of lace-weight yarn, and the hank was now a mess of tangled spaghetti on my sofa. If this had been a skein of, say Red Heart yarn, I would have tossed it into the trash and bought a new skein the next time I went to AC Moore. But this was no skein of ordinary yarn; it was a skein, as I might have mentioned already, of precious String Theory yarn, purchased not simply at the Maine Fiber Festival, but at the festival I attended with my dear friend Margaret, a fellow knitter who was visiting me from England. This skein cost $29, which I might have mentioned already,  and it had much sentimental value.

So I meticulously untangled the yarn for five solid hours. As 1:30 p.m. loomed and I'd done nothing but untangle a mess of lace-weight yarn most of the day, I told myself I'd work just until 2:00, and if I hadn't finished untangling the mess, I'd call it quits for the day and try again another day. At 2:00, however, the end was in sight, so I forged onward and finally, FINALLY finished untangling the yarn at 2:30. It was now wound into a neat ball.

That evening, while watching the news, I felt my blood pressure had returned to relative normal and my nerves were relatively calm, so I would cast on for the September Circle cowl. I would cast on all 216 stitches, I told myself, and knit a row or two to get this project under way.

I selected a 24" size 7 circular needle, rejoiced when I discovered it was a Knitters' Pride cubics circular, and began casting on, using the long-tail cast-on method. With the long-tail cast-on, one works with only one end of the circular needle set. So I held the needle in my right hand and blissfully cast on. (This bit of information is crucial to your understanding what happened next):

2.  After I'd cast on oh, maybe 199 of the 216 stitches, I looked at the other end of the circular needle set and discovered, to my utter horror, the needle was missing. That's right, the needle had broken off. You can't knit with a set of circular needles if you have, sadly, a needle on one end and a missing needle on the other. (See photo at left.)


For some reason, however, I managed to remain optimistic. I hadn't shed a single tear.) Admittedly, I might have uttered a curse word or two or fifty, but I'd done it softly and, I'm sure, the neighbors were none the wiser.) I calmly slid my 199 stitches to a new set of 24" circulars, size 7, finished casting on the remaining stitches, and prepared to knit the first row.

All seemed to be well. I knit not only the first row, but the second, the third, the fourth. All was good.

Then I began to get suspicious. As I tried to straighten out the needles and cable to admire the pattern that was developing, I noticed the needles/cable were, uh, very reluctant, shall I say, to straighten out and form a nice, neat circle.

3. Then my worst fear was realized: I'd been happily knitting not a circular cowl, but a mobius strip.

I was tempted to leave it as is. After all, it's going to become (I continue to believe) a cowl, and cowls are wrapped and even twisted to lie attractively at the neck.

My better sense prevailed, though, and I raveled the entire 216 stitches X four rows = 864 stitches, put this yarn back onto the ball by hand, and once again cast on 216 stitches.

This time, though, I used a set of circular needles with a needle on each end and I checked not once, but at least four times, to make sure I didn't have another mobius strip in the making.

So that was my terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day. The cowl seems to be progressing nicely at this point, but I'm keeping my optimism in check.

Bring it!

The handmade swag is on the front door.

The "Let It Snow" sign hangs by the kitchen door.

The heathers are covered against the cold.

The deck furniture is stored in the basement.

And the firewood is in.



Ready for you, winter. Bring it!

It's about those socks

There's a chance I've been overdoing it in the hand knit socks department.

Exhibit A: The new, never-been-worn socks stored in a dresser in the guest room. I see eight pairs of socks there.

I'm currently wearing one pair of hand knit socks.

There are six pairs of hand knit socks in my dresser drawer.

There might be a pair or two hand knit socks in the clothes hamper.

Hmmmm. That makes fifteen pairs of hand knit socks, minimum, all in my size, 7 1/2.

What do I have on my needles at the moment? Why, socks, of course! (Exhibit B, to the left)

This is a sock yarn I purchased in Victoria, BC, in September, and I've been eager to try it out. It's Opal, a German yarn, and it does knit up beautifully.

But I digress. What am I doing with all of these socks???

I like to have a sock project underway between other knitting projects, and also socks are the best project for travel knitting as far as I'm concerned.

But still, fifteen pairs of socks? And I wear them only fall-to-spring, not in the summer.

I'd guess I have enough unused pairs of new socks on hand to last me the rest of my life. After all, I turned 70 earlier this week.

On a more upbeat note, two of my orchid plants have sent up flower spikes! See them in the photo below? The spikes are held in place with pink butterfly clips.

I'm quite excited about this. If the orchids bloom in a few weeks, I should have orchid blossoms that last until spring. Stay tuned for photos of orchids in bloom1

Friday drive

Last Friday Ken and I took a drive to my hometown in central/western Maine: North Anson.

Along the way we stopped at the Wire Bridge in New Portland.

We hadn't visited the Wire Bridge in years, not since my stepfather's death in 1981. My mother had lived in North New Portland while married to my stepfather. He loved the wire bridge and made sure his stepchildren admired it during visits with him and my mother.

After my stepfather died, my mother moved back to North Anson. That pretty much ended our visits to the Wire Bridge.

 The bridge is a unique bridge, in that it is a suspension bridge, one of four built in Maine in the 1860's. It's now the only one still standing,...and still usable.

 It's probably the only bridge of its type in the entire U.S.

 On Friday Ken and I walked across it, viewing it from all angles.

Ken pointed out, just as we started the walk, that the bridge sways. That's the nature of a suspension bridge.

We also drove across it in order to continue our journey to North Anson.

We both enjoyed seeing the old bridge again. It's still a beauty, despite its 150+ years.