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Scrap quilting makes a lot of sense. Old pieces of fabric were reused to make a blanket. The method I use is quite different. I buy large quantities of beautiful fabric, cut it up into little pieces and then sew it into a large beautiful quilt. It seems like a crazy process when you think about it. Here’s what I’m talking about.
These little scraps
Get pieced together into bigger squares
And will one day soon become a large quilt with some optical illusions, my favorite type of quilt project
My horse neighbor is wearing a very sporty coat. I’m not sure why he was wearing it when the temperature was in the high 40’s but he knew he looked handsome!
My little amaryllis, I was so happy with, has quadrupled! Four times the pleasure, four times the fun.
Our farm share continues all year. During the winter months, we eat food I imagine Russian peasants have always eaten – beets, cabbage, onions, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, turnips and rutabaga with some kohlrabi and celeriac tossed in.
I make borscht, stuffed cabbage, roasted vegetables, soups and stews.
This week hominy, or dried corn, was added to the share with suggestions to make tortillas. I gathered my corn and culinary lime and headed south of the border.
Lime is calcium hydroxide and is called “cal” in Mexican recipes. It softens the corn, boosting its nutritional value and helps remove the husks. Water, hominy and cal are heated and then left to soak overnight. Next the corn is ground into masa, traditionally between two stones. Since I live on an old sand quarry, I opted for my food processor.
I may have been better off with two stones. I ground the masa as fine as I could then made a dough with some salt and water. Next I flattened the dough with a spatula and peeled them off the board and tossed them in the hot griddle. The flavor was perfect but they were too thick and a little soft. I tried to pass some dough through my new pasta maker but that was too cross cultural and didn’t work.
Next time…
My knitting is well under way for the year. I already knit three mittens, a hat and wove a scarf. Next is to start a quilt and weave some new placemats.
These are the thrummed mittens waiting to get felted by the wearer.
This is one of my new mittens. I made a pair last year for one of my daughter’s friends a coveted a pair for myself.
Next up is a scarf I wove with alpaca, my handspun merino and silk and a little novelty boucle alpaca and silk. Sweet.
Snow abounds and its 0 degrees F outside. It’s crisp and crackly and I almost got stuck to the hot tub again last night.
The chickadees in this video adapt well to winter. We found safflower seed is a great food for them. Great for them because the squirrels don’t seem to like it and thus don’t empty the feeders as soon as we fill them.
The birds are the epitome of cheeky buggers. They chirp and flit within a foot of me and thank me for their winter feast.
I love the color of a winter amaryllis. This was a Christmas gift and brings warmth to the room.
I made a batch of delicious pasta last night with my new, industrial strength pasta maker. The gift giver also benefits from it.
It was a perfect meal after work with a meat sauce I made on Sunday.
A walk in the woods behind my house tells it all. The quiet and beauty is revealed in winter.
Soon the January thaw will be upon us and it could become a mess.
Yes it is. We’re still playing and working in the snow. I earned my chaps (kind of like a Girl Scout badge but cuter) and got to run the chainsaw. Our woodpile has a lot of wood too long for our stove so first I chainsawed, vroom, it to the right length and then spilt the logs with the axe, wedge and mawl. Very gratifying to see the burnable wood pile grow. Tim wasn’t impressed.
Today we skied Kingdom Dam Road and ran into a prime example of birth order personality differences. I’m the oldest and follow rules to the tee. Tim is youngest and thinks they don’t really apply to him. So when we came upon this sign, I hesitated.
The “This Means You” cinched it for me. This was in addition to the standard “No Trespassing” sign. I was cajoled into blatantly ignoring it by the youngest child but turned around after the downhill portions became a little steep and bumpy for me. A likely story.
I rationalized that i was in neutral colors and wouldn’t be seen while Tim wore bright red and would be picked off first. 
The river scene was beautiful before and after the boundary.
There were snowmobile tracks, actually they broke a nice trail, and coyote tracks and yellow snow but no other people.
On the home front, I am test knitting a pair of thrummed mittens. A piece of merino- alpaca roving is knit in every few stitches and creates a thick warm lining, which should felt to the wearer’s hand. It’s a free pattern from wooltrends.ca called Newfoundland thrummed mittens.
The pattern link is here
.
A cold snap has arrived and brought beautiful, crisp, clear weather. I’ve been snowshoeing or skiing every day and remember how fabulous it is to be here in the winter. Except, of course, when you wake up to a temperature of minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit outside and find your oil burner isn’t working, as we did this morning.
We called the plumber at 0800 and by 0830 we were cranking out heat again. Nice!
I’m prepared though. I finished a double layer hat – naughty and nice. While in town, I wear the Nordic side out.
But when I am among friends I can reveal the dark side.
I am getting my cross country skiing mojo back – sort of controlling downhill speeds and confident I can get up again when I’m down. OK I haven’t actually practiced but I think I can. Yesterday I went through the river valley and came upon my favorite junk in the woods – an upended, rusted old car, balanced on the side of a steep cliff.
I warmed up in the hot tub to crystal clear sky. The Milky Way was like a ribbon, there were shooting stars, it was beautiful. I almost got to enjoy it for longer than I wanted though, because after I got out of the tub and was shivering in the wind, my fingers stuck to the metal latch when I tried to secure it. Yikes!
And we got it. A whole bunch.
Earlier this week, we only had a few inches of snow. This photo is from Lake Placid. The moon was bright and Whiteface Mountain emerged from the clouds.
It was magical. The moon was so bright, the snow twinkled.
Yesterday’s storm brought about 16 inches of snow.
It’s been 3 years since I skied due to travel and surgery. I went out and broke trail. I felt like a real explorer until I fell and couldn’t get up. Basically in
my backyard. My skis kept getting bogged down in powder and I couldn’t release the binding. I ultimately slid to a nearby tree and hauled myself to a standing position. Pretty pathetic.
Meanwhile, Tim had no idea of the troubles I had.
I warmed myself by the fire and watched several you tube videos, which demonstrated how easy it is to get up while cross country skiing. Now I’ve got it. Piece of cake. How’d I forget?
So I finished a quilt and nursed my pride. This was lingering, I had to sew the strips together and I flipped and tied it for a special request this weekend.
It’s official. It begins December 21 here, unlike Australia, where the season begins on the first day of the month and six months later (or earlier). Happy holidays and winter solstice.
There’s a nor’easter headed our way and we may get about a foot of snow. I’m excited because I’m going to ski the old logging roads on our property. Last year I was in a cast and the year before I spent the Australian summer on Deal Island.
I was surprised to find this little guy on our basement stairs yesterday.
He rivals Punxsutawney Phil in weather folklore. It’s a Banded Woolly Bear, an arctic caterpillar, and the thickness of its middle stripe is rumored to predict winter’s severity. Thick is mild. What’s remarkable is it freezes solid during the winter. It may spend up to 14 years, freezing and defrosting, before it becomes a moth.
It may be frozen now because the temperature is finally seasonally cold and this morning I found it curled into a ball.
It produces a “cryoprotectant” to preserve its tissues after its heart stops beating and its blood freezes solid! Impressive. It has a sad life cycle though. Years as a caterpillar, freezing over the winter, and when it’s finally eaten its fill, it emerges as a moth and then only lives a few days to find its mate before it dies.
Groundhogs have it easy.
A trip to our closest big city entails a border crossing. We went to Montreal for the evening to see and hear the Montreal Symphony Orchestra perform L’enfance du Christ. If not for a classic Canadian Catch 22, Tim would have been singing with them. But it was wonderful anyway. The night began with magical street lights.
There were dripping icicles over the streets and these angels welcomed us to the Notre-Dame Basilica where the concert was performed.
More wonders to follow. When we crossed the border home
and had cell phone reception again, we received an invitation to spend time at this lighthouse this summer in Alaska!
Tell me this isn’t the cutest diner you have ever seen.
It is housed in an old railroad car and lunch was delish. We chowed down before heading off to check out one of the newest trails in our region, The Champlain Area Trails’ Cheney Mountain in Port Henry.
It promised beautiful vistas and delivered.
We had a gentle snowfall from the beginning, which was picturesque but made the fallen leaves a little slippery. I’m not happy on a hike unless I spend some time sliding on my butt-and I did.
There were long views in each direction. Looking north to Split Rock Mountain on Lake Champlain:
Southeast to the new Champlain Bridge, which connects Crown Point, NY to Chimney Point, VT:
and west to the High Peaks of the Adirondacks:
In the foreground is a man made mountain, leftover from when the area was dominated by an iron mine and towns sprung up around it. We saw this better when we took a short walk to a nearby fire tower.
I’m pretty sure this is Cheney Mt. From the fire tower.
Island and North Country Life 
