crafting

Warming up a bit, and a cancellation

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today was a good day to not go anywhere.

Yes, it was warmer than yesterday. As I write this, we’re still at -9C/16F. Wind chill is -22C/-8, though.

It was a good day to break out the crochet. I haven’t been doing that a lot, as yard tends to catch on the rough spots on my skin and get yanked right off the hook. My daughter, however, got me a skein of blanket yarn, yesterday.

Turned out, blanket yarn doesn’t catch on my fingers!

So I whipped up a hat, here modelled by Ferdinand, my beat up display head.

The ear flaps can be folded up for extra thickness. Which is something I need, because wind in my ears causes ear aches very quickly.

I even got to test it out while doing my evening rounds.

It was snowing again, by then – it’s been snowing lightly, off and on, all day, even though the weather apps were saying we had no snow, but to expect some tonight. Uh huh.

Adam came out for food today, on her favorite perch to eat, on the cat house roof. It took several attempts, but she did allow me to finally skritch her neck and ears. She’s more friendly when she has kittens around. Once they were weaned, she got standoffish again. *sigh*

On of the things I had on my to-do list today was to call Visa. My first credit card that I got to re-establish my credit rating, so we could finance the truck, is expiring at the end of this month. Weeks ago, when using my phone’s bank app, I started seeing a notice saying that, if I have my new card, I could activate it right there.

Except, I didn’t have my new card.

What we did have was a postal strike.

I still don’t have my new card, so I called up Visa. He looked it up and the new card had been sent out in the middle of September. Three months ago.

The post office isn’t on strike anymore, but I have no reason to believe my replacement card will come in before the current one expires.

I had two options. One was to simply wait until the end of the month and, if it hadn’t come in by then, call them back. The other was to list my card as lost, and he could send me a new card, with a new number, immediately, and expedite it. It would arrive within 3 or 4 business days.

In the end, that was the option I chose. He got me a new card set up and it’ll be sent out tomorrow. He even waived the fee for expediting it. It was all done so quickly, I probably spent more time going through the automated options and waiting before I got to talk to a human.

It does mean my current card is cancelled and no longer useable, since it’s now considered “lost”, but that’s okay. The new one should arrive before I need to use it for anything. Oh, I just remembered… that’s what the pharmacy charges our prescriptions to, when we have refills delivered. I don’t know if my husband has anything coming in that isn’t fully covered by insurance right now. I have to call them anyhow. I’m hoping to be able to get more than 30 days of our prescriptions before Christmas, so that we won’t need to get refills, pick ups or deliveries through the harshest winter months. They may need to contact our doctors to get updated prescriptions to fill 3 months worth. There might be some issues with one of my husband’s meds, and one of my daughter’s, as these are “controlled substances” and we’re not allowed to refill them until within 3 days of running out completely.

If all goes well, I won’t have to drive anywhere until Friday, when I’m potentially heading to my mother’s to do her laundry and Christmas housekeeping.

On a completely different now, looking ahead to the spring, I’ve already asked my brother if we could work out a day that I could borrow him, one of his tractors and some chain. We have so many fallen dead spruce trees in the spruce grove, with many of them stuck on other trees. They are a fire hazard, of course, but I would also like to clear them out so that we can eventually transplant more spruces into the spruce grove. We’re also talking about cutting down the big spruce closer to the house that finally died a couple of years after we moved out here. The risk with that one is that it’ll fall on the house. I did make sure to debark it at the base, so no ants will get at it. A lot of the fallen spruces fell because their bases were weakened by carpenter ants. Then there’s the tree in front of the kitchen, with that one branch stretching over the roof that we can’t get down on our own that we talked about.

So that’s something that will hopefully get done next year. My brother needs to work on one of his tractors to get it going first, though; they are all rather vintage and need some TLC to be useable.

Life is going to be so different with my brother and SIL being able to come out here more often, and with all his equipment here. They’re looking to set up an office in the trailer home they moved out here, so he could work “from home”, then work on stuff around the property in the evenings during the week, rather than trying to rush to get things done on a weekend. I look forward to helping him out and learning from him! No living person knows and understands this place more than he does.

That will all come in time.

For now, it’s hibernation and planning time.

The Re-Farmer

Rain day and cuteness

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Well, there was definitely no chance the door would get replaced today! It started raining last night and is expected to continue to rain until about 6am tomorrow morning.

The door isn’t going to be done tomorrow, either. The installers aren’t available until Wednesday.

Which is the day I’m going to my mother’s for her grocery shopping and appointment with the home care assessor. I’ll be coming home to a new door.

Rain or no rain, the outside cats needed to be fed. When I went out to do the evening feeding, though, this one was not hungry and stayed in bed.

This fluffy kitten is getting so big – and so gorgeous!

Must. Socialize. The wild kitty.

Feeding the cats was about it for going outside today. Even they were avoiding it as much as possible!

Which means I more relaxed day indoors. I even got to do some crafting! I haven’t doing any in a very long time. Partly because I usually do crochet, and with my hands to rough and dry from working in the garden, the yarn gets hung up on my skin and will even pull the loops of my hook!

Today, however, I tried doing a small weaving project. I’ve got a loom knitting and weaving kit, and used the pieces to put together the smallest square peg loom possible. Big enough to make coaster sized squares.

I’d gotten the idea from some Pinterest images that showed up in my feed, but it was this video that gave me the full instructions.

I tried using single strand yarn, but found it too open and floppy. I ended up making four squares, experimenting with different thicknesses, doubling up the yarn, and different ways of finishing the edges. Eventually, I’ll make up larger peg looms and see how that goes. If nothing else, practicing on the small loom for coaster sized squares is a good way to use up leftover balls of yarn that are too small for anything else!

So it’s a been a quiet day, overall. Which is good. Normally I try to keep Sunday as my day of rest, but took advantage of the good weather to get much needed work done, so today is my day of rest, instead. I’m going to need it, as I’m going to be doing a lot of running around over the next couple of days!

The Re-Farmer

Good kitties, bad kitties!

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

When I was done with my morning rounds, I paused to say hello to the kitties (I counted 29 this morning – never saw Rosencrantz).

The four in the foreground, plus Princess (who had climbed me while I was trying to take pictures), were absolutely all over me, fighting for attention! Those five – Plushy, Pointy Baby, Judgement, Gooby and Princess – are the friendliest of them all.

Caramel, in the background, isn’t. 😄 I’ve managed to touch her while she was eating kibble on the roof, but only by sneaking up behind her to do it, and she was hungry enough to not run away immediately.

The outside cats are such good cats.

Then, there’s the inside cats.

With being sick for the last while, I haven’t been working on this year’s Christmas ornaments, so everything has been tucked away on my work station.

Not well enough.

This morning, not only did I have to pick up the knocked over bin of Christmas decorations, but also gather up some of my mini yarn.

*sigh*

Clearly, the little bucket they were under was not enough to keep them safe!

Ugh. All that cat hair.

I didn’t even realize the tassel was in there until after I’d started untangling the colours. Only the metallic purple mini skein was still okay.

Bad kitties! I don’t even know which ones did the damage. Could have been several. They wait until we’re in be

I’ve got to finish those ornaments, so the stuff can be put away, out of harm’s reach!

The Re-Farmer

Morning head count!

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to my friends in the US! I hope you have a wonderful day today. 😊

My goodness, this group really loves it when I put kibble on the cat house roof!

It’s mostly the older kittens and adult cats. I even got to pet Broccoli! But only because she didn’t want to leave the food. The kibble I leave up there gets inhaled pretty quickly!

The younger kittens mostly prefer more ground level food. The kittens under the cat house take “ground level” to the extreme. 😄

Altogether, I counted 29 heads this morning – and I never had a chance to peek into the entry of the cats’ house. Usually, there’s at least one more in there, eating at the tray just inside, but not always.

Meanwhile, the self-sequestered cats in my office are very obviously happier, now that Bitty is gone. Amazing how such a little fuzz ball could stress the other cats out so much. Butterscotch, I can sort of understand. By the time we got her fixed and discovered her uterus was “tattery and falling apart”, kittens must have meant nothing but pain to her. But Nosencrantz? Why was Nosencrantz so freaked out? But then, everything seems to freak Nosencrantz out, hence her alternative name, Anxiety Bear.

We need to find her a home with no other cats. She likes people. Oddly, most of the other cats don’t like her, either. When even David will suddenly up and attack her – David!!!! – while she’s just up on her favourite perch by the ceiling, minding her own business, there is something odd.

We’ve got some very nice weather happening for the next while. Today, we’re supposed to reach a high of 1C/34F. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to reach 4C/39F! Then 3C/37F the day after.

My brother heard back from the roofing company. Because the weather is so good, there’s still a chance they’ll be able to get a crew up here. Fingers crossed!

In other things, I’m feeling somewhat better today. Some pain killers and lying down for a couple of hours yesterday helped. I even went to bed “early” and got almost 7 hours of sleep. Which is about 3 hours more than I usually get. 😄

Still, I’m going to be taking it easy today. When visiting my mother to do errands, we talked so much, my throat was sore by the time I left. I’m not used to talking much, so that didn’t take long. 😄 Now, that sore throat is worse, and I’m starting to feel like I’m coming down with a cold. A good day to stay inside, and drink lots of hot drinks with lemon and honey, while getting crafty! I found most of what I needed at the dollar store to make our annual Christmas decorations, but I’m not willing to drive to the city for the stuff I couldn’t find, so I’ll make do with what I’ve got on hand.

These are my first experiments. They’re called “berlingots”, which is the name of a hard candy of a similar shape, or sometimes Dragon Boats. These were made on a cardboard form that started off as a rectangle of 2″ x 6″, but I’ll be making ones for the tree probably from a 3″ x 9″ strip. I don’t think I want to get any larger than that. Or I’ll make both sizes, with the smaller ones for the top of the tree, and larger for the bottom. We have a pretty small tree. It is currently hanging flat against the dining room door, several feet above ground, to get the cats used to it being there. I was able to bring the tree up from storage in the basement, but I had to get the girls to haul the bins of decorations up. I can’t carry those up the stairs; my knees aren’t stable enough anymore. I think I’ll be leaving most of the decorating to the girls, since pretty much all of it will involve climbing up and down the little step ladder to hang things out of cat reach! 😂

Anyhow; for the decorations, I’ll be using more seasonal yard to wrap on them, and I want to find things I can pin to the points, such as beads, or maybe I’ll make some tassels. Each one will be different.

So that will be my project for today, if all goes to plan.

For now, though, I think it’s time to get the kettle on again, and make some more hot lemonade!

The Re-Farmer

I made a thing

/ Re-Farmer / 11 Comments

With the colder temperatures and chill winds, I haven’t been able to wear my usual ball cap outside. No ear protection. Getting wind in my ears causes me headaches. But I like my ball cap, and having a visor to shade my eyes.

So I made a thing.

Nosencrantz seems perplexed.

After looking at different styles online, I combined the features I liked, and this is what I came up with.

I have just come back from feeding the outside cats for the night, and testing it out.

It works rather well!

The Re-Farmer

A sweet gift

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

My younger daughter has been slowly working on cleaning up the spring moisture mess in the basement for the last while, but also just being down there to stay in the cool.

Today, I found out she has been having fun with my wood carving tools, which I have not been able to use myself for quite some time. Her first experimentation was to finish off a fork I’d started some time ago, but stopped because the wood really sucked to work with. This is her second project, and her first made from scratch.

She make a shawl pin for me! Something to use to keep my reading jacket closed, instead of the hair pins I’ve been using.

I absolutely adore the teeny little frog she carved into the top!

What a fantastic job she did, and I absolutely love it!!

The Re-Farmer

Wood carving: completing the set

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Having made an olive server, using my new gouge, I thought it would be good to use some of the remaining wood to make a spreader and olive fork.

After cutting a length off, the first thing I did was split the wood down the middle.

Here, you can clearly see the rotted out core that I had to work around with the olive server.

The utensils I wanted to make would be well away from that core, though, so this was okay. I split off some excess wood from the opposite sides, then debarked the remains.

In sketching out the spreader and fork, I decided not to include the knot at one end. It may have added visual interest, but I just didn’t want to fight with it.

Once rough sketches were made, I rough cut away excess wood. A band saw would make the job easier, but I don’t have one that works, so I made do with a little Japanese pull saw that I got last summer, and a coping saw. The coping saw has been a problem, as it won’t lock at the handle end anymore, so it tries to rotate while I’m using it!

For the spreader, I added another rough sketch on what would become the top. I wanted a slightly wider bit at the start of the spreader blade as a sort of stopper, more for visual interest than anything else. I wasn’t too worried about matching the sketch closely, since it would depend more on how much I had to cut away from the core of the wood.

Next up was using carving blades to do more shaping and trim away excess wood at the core, to take out that rotten strip.

Then I broke out the Dremel.

After trying out different tips, I ended up just using the sanding tips. They are a course grit and did a good job of taking off the excess wood, grinding away the remaining saw cuts, and shaping it more.

Then it was back to the carving knives for more delicate clean up and shaping, then sanding.

Ready for oiling!

That knot in the blade was why I switched to the Dremel. I like how it looks in there, but my goodness, it was brutal to work around!

Next, the olive fork.

For this, I just went straight to the Dremel and used the sanding tips to rough shape it.

I then used carving knives to clean it up and work on the tines end to narrow it down even more. Once it reached the point where I would otherwise have started sanding, I made the tines.

My Dremel set includes tips for carving and engraving, and I used one of them to drill a hole where I wanted the tines to join. Then I used a cutting wheel down the length of it.

There was a knot right in the middle. The Dremel cutter did NOT like going through that knot!! :-D

After that, it was back to doing more detailed shaping until it was ready to sand.

Doing those tines was a real pain in the butt!

It actually worked out much better than I thought it would, though.

For both the spreader and the olive fork, I worked my way through increasingly fine grits of sandpaper, finishing with 220 grit. Because that’s the finest grit sandpaper I have.

There they are, ready for oiling!

You can see the edges of the knot that was cut through to make the tines much more clearly, after oiling!

The slightly wider bit on the spreader turned out to be a perfect thumb rest!

When sanding the blade of the spreader, I actually had to be a careful not to make it too sharp. It’s meant for spreading, not cutting! It’s remarkable how sharp a wooden blade can get.

A closer look at the tines of the olive fork.

Then I wiped off all the sanding dust that got onto the oiled surface! :-D

They fit! I had not actually planned this, but it makes sense, since they’re from the same piece of wood, but I’m really happy to discover they fit so perfectly inside the olive server.

I am quite pleased with these. Not only with how they turned out, but how quickly they worked up, too.

Now to think about what to make next! :-)

The Re-Farmer

This year’s decorations; what’s working, and what isn’t!

/ Re-Farmer / 16 Comments

I’ve already posted photos of dehydrating orange slices and using them to make decorations for Christmas this year. I will post more on those in a moment.

The other experiment I tried was to make a baking soda and cornstarch dough (which I wrote about here), which was supposed to be good to roll out and use cookie cutters on. These are supposed to result in a bright white final product, that was also quite hard and durable, which would take paint or other embellishments well. The dough ended up way too soft and sticky, so my daughters used it to make more sculptural stuff, though one did try and do some cookie cutter ones when the dough seemed to have dried up enough for it.

After leaving them to dry for a while, we ended up having to put them in a cool oven (they were supposed to dry slowly, to avoid cracking), because… cats.

Cats who leave paw prints behind, as they do dastardly things!

All of the cookie cutter ones have had to be thrown out. They just crumbled.

Plus, the cats seem to be desperate to get at them! I had to take them out of the oven to put the decorated orange slices in, and had to get really creative in covering them, while still giving them air flow to dry. There is still some hope for the more sculptural pieces, but they will need at least a few more days to fully dry.

If we can keep the cats out.

As for the orange slices, the cats have been after them, too! They ended up knocking over the tray on the table they were laid out on.

I’m happy to say that the glue worked very well.

Several of the decorations were scattered on the floor and, while the glue was not yet completely dry, it held! This was a bottle of WeldBond that came with a case of crafting materials given to us. I have no idea how many years it was there, but it was long enough that the plastic and cardboard pieces of the original packaging came apart.

Clearly, the cats are not put off by the orange slices and cinnamon sticks.

Today, I decided to add ground spices to 7 of the 13 slices.

First, I rigged up a cardboard box that I could use to spray them with adhesive.

I also decided to use a combination of ground cloves, allspice and nutmeg, with a tiny sieve to apply them evenly.

After crowding the decorations close together, I tried to spray just the orange slices, not the strings, then dusted them with the ground spice mix.

They are now set aside for the spray adhesive to set. The box set up allowed me to put something over them in case a cat decided to jump into it.

Since I started writing this, I’ve had to go put the cover back and add weight to it, because the cats had already knocked it off.

The main thing about doing this craft was that citrus and all these spices that smell so good to humans are supposed to deter cats.

Our cats apparently did not get that memo.

*sigh*

I’m still holding out hope to having a tree, somehow, but these spicy, fragrant decorations are definitely not going to keep them away. If anything, it seems to be attracting them, instead!

Ah, well.

At least they look pretty!

The Re-Farmer

This year’s decorations, in the works

/ Re-Farmer / 7 Comments

Today, I finally started working on the Christmas decorations I was planning to make with the dehydrated orange slices I’d prepared earlier.

Of course, things didn’t work out to plan! :-D

Do they ever? ;-)

I was going to use cinnamon sticks, plus some little decorations I’d saved from Christmas crackers over the years – they would have been the perfect size – to decorate the orange slices.

I couldn’t find them.

Many of these were collected before we moved, and now I’m second guessing myself. Did I bring them along with my other craft stuff, or did I give them away before the move? I had to pare things down quite a lot for the move.

And yet… I’m sure I saw them since the move, as I’ve had to reorganize my crafting materials a couple of times, since unpacking them.

No worries, though, I decided to use some pine cones I’d gathered from our spruces a while back.

I didn’t have enough to put two on each slice, though. We kept finding them with our feet, around the house, before I discovered one of our cats digging in the container they were in, stealing a pine cone, and running off!

I had enough left for this project, though. I just made sure the biggest cones went on the smaller slices, and paired up the smallest cones on the bigger slices.

Now, I just need to see if the adhesive will work. If not, I’ll break out the hot glue gun, but it’s not like anything is going to stick to dried orange slices very well! :-D

I haven’t decided if I will do more to these or now. I might use a spray adhesive on them, and dust them with ground cloves. It’s more about making them smell unappetizing to cats than anything else! :-D

The Re-Farmer

This year’s decorations start: dehydrated orange slices

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

For many years, I would craft new decorations for our Christmas tree. It was a good opportunity to use small projects to try out new techniques and ideas. Our tree is basically a mad chaos of different styles and materials, and I love it!

Life got in the way, and I stopped doing this for many years. I was able to do a few last year, and I’m hoping to be able to continue this yearly tradition.

With so many cats in the house, though, we’re going to have a much smaller tree, set high off the ground! We’re still trying to figure out how to manage that, but the cats have inspired ideas for this year’s decorations.

Cats are supposed to not like citrus, so I will be using dried orange slices as the foundation of the decorations.

Last night, I sliced two naval oranges and laid them out on a rack in a baking pan. I set our oven to “warm” (170F) and left them overnight. I did have the opportunity to turn them a couple of times, since I was up anyway, investigating the crashing and banging that woke me up (I found Layendecker on the fridge, and a decorative jar with seashells on it was on the floor in the dining room; I’ll have to figure out how to remove the broken seashells to replace them. :-( ).

This morning, one of my daughters took a dried slice and showed it to some cats.

I don’t think they’re going to work as cat repellent! :-D

I plan to include cinnamon sticks in the decorations, too – something else that cats are supposed to not like. I don’t think it’ll help, since in the past, we’ve had cats try and steal our cinnamon apple dough decorations, right off the tree!

Well, even if it doesn’t work, we’ll have new decorations for the tree this year! :-D

The Re-Farmer