I stayed up til 2:30 last night finishing the dress. I made shoulder rolls and tried to attach them via snaps. But that wasn’t going to work – snaps small enough to be unobtrusive weren’t strong enough to hold on the puffy rolls. So in the end I just basted them on. They can be […]
Just in time for Halloween, another repulsive garden pest is plaguing my little farm. I’ve complained about the curse of crazy insect pests here before. The caterpillars in legion like I’ve never seen. The squash vine borers that thrive here to the point that they ignore their normal biological limitations and wreak damage worse than […]
I dug up about 4sf of the sweet potato bed on Wednesday, to see if there was anything at all going on down there. Turns out, there was. Hooray for the homesteaders, just because you’re nearly out of potatoes doesn’t mean you have nothing to eat all winter! Those black dots are eyes, not worm […]
Canning season is nearly over here in Maryland. I’ve got a few cans’ worth of green tomatoes left to do, and I could go buy more apples for applesauce if I felt like it, but it is a relief to be nearly finished with late nights and boiling water. (Though the sheer satisfaction of putting […]
Part 5 here. Today and tomorrow are sew-all-day Dress Days, as I struggle to get the bridal dress done for Halloween. It’s an arbitrary deadline, but – in spite of how much fun I’m having – I’d sure like to get this all off my plate. Today I got a good 6 hours in, and […]
We’ve barely made any headway splitting the logs from having our land cleared in February. The enormous log pile mocks us. I cart wheelbarrowload upon wheelbarrowload of splits to stack near the house, and yet the main pile grows no smaller. Doesn’t look like all that much, but it’s taken dozens of overloaded wheelbarrow trips […]
See part 4 here. The bridal dress redo is chugging along, and I have high hopes and crossed fingers that it will all be finished by Halloween Sunday! I spent the last two days draping and pinning the overskirt to its waistband. See how many pins? And that’s just half the waistband you see there. […]
These past few days Sofía has been more interested in the refrigerator letter magnets – the 10 or so that are left from our original set of 52 or so. She’s been arranging them into linear globs and then asking me “What does that spell, mommy?” This morning’s word is P7GAAU. (The L was upside […]
Holy cow, I made soap. This story starts more than a year ago. See, when we moved in here I found a bottle of lye under the kitchen sink (along with a truckload of other random scary chemicals) and it was one of the very few things that evaded the HazMat roundup. My thought was […]
I’ve had a lot of long-term projects come to non-fruition this past week, one after another. It made for a depressing few days. First I discovered that most of the cheeses I’d made back in January were no good; I opened all the remaining five in a frantic quest for cheese to use on a […]