Chalk paint and Mason jars

Warm sunshine and melting snow sure do lift my spirits. Add to that the sound of snow sliding off the roof, and I'm practically hysterical.

But I must calm down and write this post, which isn't at all about snow or cold.

My friend Lynn is giving her daughter-in-law a baby shower on the 21st of March. I offered to help.

One thing I've been wanting to try is chalk painting Mason jars. I've seen many on Pinterest, and I think they make wonderful shabby chic decorations.

Lynn liked my suggestion, so I was off and running.

Except...I'd never done any chalk painting. The one thing in my favor was the shelves of Mason jars stored in the basement with my home canning supplies.

I priced chalk paint on Amazon and found it at $24 or so per small can. That seemed a bit ridiculous considering I'd need a minimum of four colors for eight measly jars. $96? No way.

So I googled "homemade chalk paint" and found several recipes.

The one I chose involved small tubes of Apple Barrel acrylic paints from Walmart, at 50¢ a pop, some cornstarch, which I have in my pantry, and a little H2O.

I bought lavender, yellow, aqua, and pink paints and also some white paint to lighten each color a bit. (I wish I'd lightened the yellow a tad more than I did, but oh, well.)

I mixed the cornstarch and water, added the paints, and voila!

Chalk paint at approximately, oh, maybe 10¢ maximum per painted jar.

I gave each jar three coats of paint. For some reason the aqua went on much less cooperatively than the other colors. I even had to totally remove the aqua paint from the jars at one point and start over.

Persistence paid off, though, as it usually does, and I now have eight pastel chalk-painted Mason jars to use as flower vases at the shower.

I've also made a gazillion salt dough hearts to tie to the mason jars. (As you might have guessed, the baby is a girl.)

Now I'm thinking I'd like to take several miscellaneous jars with interesting shapes and chalk-paint them. I think they'd make a pretty Easter display on my mantel.

But as I said earlier, the sun is shining, the snow is melting, and I'm about to go open several windows to bring some fresh air into this too-long-closed-up house.

March!

Mid-January to the end of February were rather tough, for sure. We averaged a sizeable snowfall every 2-3 days, and the temperatures refused to go above 8° most days.

Our furnace has been working over time, and our wood stove has been eating lots of wood.

Many day we felt housebound because driving conditions were poor.

And although we've been home much of the time, that doesn't mean we've had to freedom to wander around our property, because the snow is too deep for wandering.

Our great-niece Violet visited us for three days during her school's vacation,  and that visit from a nine-year-old was a godsend.

She loves sliding on our hills. While she did her sliding, I put on my snowshoes and did some serious hiking on the side and back lawns.

In fact, one day I logged over 20,000 steps on my Fitbit! My daily goal is 10,000 steps. Most days I meet that goal, sometimes getting 12,000-13,000 steps, but never before had I achieved 20,000 steps.

Ken's been getting his exercise by snowplowing and shoveling. He has also been chopping away at the ice on the back side of the roof.

Yesterday, finally, the temperature went a bit above 32° and we heard the joyful sound of water dripping off the eaves!

Here are Violet and I enjoying the snow. It truly has been a beautiful snow, but I've had enough of it for this year.

I keep thinking of my crocuses and daffodils still buried under three feet of snow. They must be wondering what's going on. I've had snowdrops in bloom by now in past years.

Of course I've been knitting. That's the best way to spend one's housebound days.

The hat is called "Emma" by Handknitsbyelena. She offered the pattern for $1.99 for a few days, so I grabbed it then and downloaded it. It's a great pattern, but learning the 1/1RSC stitch was a challenge at first because Elena's directions weren't clearly written. I think she has rewritten that step since a couple of us knitters contacted her.

Anyway, the hat is fun to knit and I've now finished three of that same pattern. They'll make good donations to a local charity.

The little pink and white hat is by Cascade yarns and is free at their website.

So that's the news from here: snow, more snow, cold temperatures, some snowshoeing, and much knitting.

I don't think he's having fun

Ken has just left for Home Depot to buy a new ladder. He needs a lighter-weight one to prop against a section of the roof where the heavy ladder won't cooperate.

I don't think Ken's enjoying this winter. If he's not snowplowing the latest snowfall, he's shoveling it or raking the roof or chopping ice off the roof.

These photos were taken at least a week ago, probably two weeks ago for the top one. We've had more heavy snow since then. One snowfall piles on top of the previous one because the temperatures insist on staying below freezing.

We've had some days when the thermometer couldn't make it above 8°. That's cold, especially if there's also a strong wind. It was a few degrees below zero when I got up this morning.

The forecast for this weekend? Another blizzard, with 1-2 feet of new snow in this area and gale-force winds.

I said I'd never let this happen

I've always been amazed by knitters who have more than two projects "on the needles," as we say, at one time. Amazed by them, but not envious of them.

I'm a finish-one-project-at-a-time kind of gal. I do make an exception with sock knitting: I often have a sock on the needles while I'm also knitting something else.

But I can justify this: The sock makes a good carry-along-with me project, because it's small. I can knit on it in the car while Ken's driving, I can take it to the Red Cross blood donation center and knock off a few rows while I'm awaiting my turn on the table. I can take it to a doctor's appointment.

Three or four or five projects underway at one time, though? Not for me. No, sir.

Until this past weekend, that is.

I was between projects, so of course I cast on for a pair of socks.

Then I remembered the Dream Baby DK, in soft aqua, waiting for me.( I need to get a baby sweater done by mid-March.) So I set aside the sock and cast on for the baby cardigan.

Then (and this isn't my fault, honest), someone on Knitting Paradise asked if anyone could direct her to a certain knitted animal pattern. Someone did, immediately, and before I knew it, I was checking out the pattern, too.

And before I knew it again, I was purchasing and downloading the pattern...and casting on for a white bear with pink pullover sweater. A bear with his hands in his pockets, a bear looking to be just the right toy to add to a baby shower gift.

So there you have it. I finished the bear this morning, and I'm down to two projects now, but I have a little bit of leftover pink and white yarn, and I'm thinking a cute little hat, size 6 months, might be just the ticket....

My mother's cabbage rolls

As you can see from the condition of the recipe card, I've been making my mother's cabbage rolls for many, many years.

I love them. Ken loves them. They're easy. They're delicious.

A helpful hint before you try wrapping cabbage leaves around the hamburg-rice mixture:

Use a sharp knife to cut a cone-shaped hollowed-out area in the core of the cabbage, then place the
cabbage in the freezer, uncovered, overnight.

The next day take the frozen cabbage from the freezer and immediately place it into a pot of boiling water.

Let the cabbage sit in the hot water for ten minutes or so.

When you remove it from the water, the softened leaves will come off the head of cabbage easily and will be soft and pliable to work with. I learned this trick years after I'd been fighting with uncooperative cabbage leaves that wanted to tear and become a mess.

Here is a "glob" of the hamburg/onion/egg mixture ready to be rolled into the cabbage leaf.

Here it is rolled up, with another cabbage leaf ready to receive the hamburg/rice mixture. (These are actually half-leaves. The outer leaves are large enough to accommodate two hamburg fillings, so I cut the leaves in half. Once I get closer to the center of the cabbage, I use one full leaf per filling.

The cabbage rolls are now topped with tomato soup. I actually put some tomato soup in the bottom of the Dutch oven before adding the cabbage rolls. I also add a final sprinkling of fresh-ground pepper before putting the pot on the stove. I love pepper. I also add one bay leaf.

Um-ummm. Just like my mother used to make!

My Gulanfang

My WHAT?, you ask.

My Gulanfang collection.

When Ken was doing contract work in Chengdu, China, in 2005 and 2006, I would join him there for a few weeks at a time during several of his trips.

We had a housekeeper, of course, because every Westerner in China has a housekeeper. (This, incidentally, is the only time in my life that I had a housekeeper, but sadly it was the only time in my life when I didn't need one.)

So, to help pass the time while Ken was at work each day, I'd leave on a walking sightseeing tour. I felt perfectly safe in this city of 11,000,000 and I knew how to keep my bearings in order to return to our apartment at some point later in the morning.

I must have walked several miles each day, and I came upon a multitude of interesting sites.

One day I stumbled upon a small shop selling Gulanfangs.

I recognized them immediately, because I'd seen a story about Gulanfang on CCTV (Central China TV) just days earlier.

Gulanfang are small, elaborately embroidered animals made in a specific region of China. The embroidery is hand done, so of course that's what attracted me to these colorful creatures.

I browsed the shop quite some time before selecting the animals I wanted. Then I went back to the shop the next day and selected more.

I left the price tags on the underside of the animals. This morning as I dusted my collection and looked at their prices, I was reminded I'd paid roughly 25 yuan per animal. That was roughly $3.00 each in 2005-2006.

Some of the animals are easy to identify; others are a bit of a mystery to me. Then there's the two-headed donkey. I'm not sure what the story might be regarding him!

So these are my gulanfangs. It's another snowy day here in Maine, and these creatures are adding much color to an otherwise white world.

REAL Maine winters aren't for wimps

After a rather so-so start to this winter, things have suddenly ramped up and it's definitely a good, old-fashioned Maine winter around here.

It's not just the heavy snow, which we've been getting in big doses for the past week, but also the cold. Last night it was around 8 degrees when I went to bed. That's not extremely cold, I realize, but this cold is hanging on and hanging on and hanging on. I don't remember when the temperature last went above freezing during the day.

Yesterday the local meteorologist said, "February begins tomorrow, and with it the snow and the cold will continue."

I've been looking out my kitchen window for the past week and thinking I really need to refill the bird feeders. A few minutes ago I finally did it. It wasn't easy, because the cold has produced light, fluffy snow with each storm, and that means the snow hasn't packed down much.

With each step I took into the snow, I sank down at least a foot, often more. At one point I'd sunk down so deeply that I had a hard time lifting my foot out of the snow to attempt the next step.

But I got the job done, and now my pants are drying by the wood stove. My efforts were worth it because I saw a downy woodpecker at the fresh suet cake not more than three minutes after I came back inside.

I do wish I'd remembered to remove my birds' little red Christmas stocking from their feeder, though.

Oh, by the way, another heavy snowstorm is headed this way for tomorrow. The forecasters are saying 12" in this area of the state.