Now Them's Popovers!

Day 282: A couple of days ago, I received a surprise box from one of my sisters-of-the-heart, shipped directly from Stonewall Kitchen in York, Maine. Of course, no gift from Stonewall Kitchen is complete unless it includes a package of their famous popover mix, but since I'm trying to lose a little weight, I put it in the cupboard for later. Well, my will power failed, and yesterday, I made popovers. And man, did they pop over! I suspect my popover pan is meant to make medium-sized ones, but I managed to get all the batter into its twelve compartments anyway. I've used the combination of the Stonewall mix and this pan before, but I don't recall them ever leaping quite so high! Them's some tall popovers! Thank you, Patty!

Why I Keep A Blog

Day 242: Even as I am working on another hexagon quilt, I am also cutting the little wedge-shaped pieces which comprise the arcs of Double Wedding Ring. They are smaller, giving me the opportunity to use up some of the fabrics from the bag labelled "Fragments." It seemed like as good a time as any to better organize my fabric stash, so I started pulling things out of one box to put in others. In the bottom, I found several plastic bags with labels saying, "Potato Chip." Now I've made a lot of quilts in my career, and I can generally remember where they've gone if I have some sort of prompt to put me on the right track, but this one was a puzzle. "Potato Chip? Who got Potato Chip?" I asked Merry. "Kevin got Scrappy Stars. The boys got Patience Corner and the Twenty-Year Quilt. Joe and Sharon got hexagons. Anne got the first Cathedral Window. Who got Potato Chip?" (There were others, but those sprang immediately to mind.) "Ah!" I said, "I bet it's in my blog!" And it was. Potato Chip had gone to one of my sisters-of-the-heart. And the funny thing is, I had just been thinking that I had never made a quilt for her. This is one of the reasons why I keep a blog: quilt phenology.

Haycorns

Day 352: Western Washington is famous for its Doug-fir forests and the other evergreens interspersed throughout. One does not associate deciduous trees with the state, although we have cottonwoods, alders, maples and a few others. However, oaks (primarily Garry) are fairly well confined to the prairies of the southwestern counties, so when I needed haycorns for a project, I turned to my east-coast sisters with a plea. Patty was in a position to gather quite a few in various sizes. Some have worm holes in them, so the lot will be given a bake in the oven to eliminate any unwelcome visitors. Tiggers may not like haycorns, but I do, and this windfall should keep me in crafting material for a long time to come!

Patty's Potato Chip

Day 296: Yesterday, the Potato Chip Quilt arrived at its final destination, taking my sister-of-the-heart Patty quite by surprise. Oh, I'd baited her with a tracking number so that she could follow a Mystery Box as it travelled across the country, but had given her no clues as to what it contained. The third member of our triumvirate was in on the secret, keeping her lips zipped as tightly as mine. I wanted her to share in the suspense and the moment of revelation. Now both of my "sisters" have quilts I hand-stitched, although Mousie's was pieced by her grandmother about seventy years years ago.

Quilting is one of the ways I've kept sane through the pandemic. When I finish the one currently on the frame about two weeks from now, it will be the seventh one I've made since covid protocols became a new way of life. Of those seven, one was quilted with the sewing machine and one was tied, using buttons at the anchor points, but the other five were all hand-quilted to make the puff pattern visible on the back side (photo, right). This stitching helps stabilize the batting, although modern batts don't tend to lump like the cotton ones of yesteryear. I find hand-quilting very relaxing, even meditative, and I am grateful to the friend who gave me her old quilting frame which has made the job even more enjoyable. As much as I love piecing the bright colours and arranging them, I am truly in my métier when doing hand-stitchery. One hand remains above the quilt, the other beneath it, driving the needle straight down or straight up, striving to keep my stitches uniform and aligned. As my mother often said, "A thing worth doing is worth doing well," and I try to live by her philosophy. Even so, my hand-work is far less meticulous than that of my great-grandmother who, although I barely knew her, has served to inspire me in the art of quilting.

One Tough Puzzle

Day 87: Being snowed in affords an excellent opportunity to work on jigsaw puzzles, and I do love tough ones! One of my sisters-of-the heart is a professional photographer, and created this 1000-piece puzzler's daydream/nightmare from one of her own images as a gift to me after I remarked on it. There is very little colour in the scene: a marcescent oak (more on that in a minute) and some vaguely green lichen, very little visual variation beyond sky, snow and the brighter trunks. Even so, when laid out on four cookie sheets for analysis, you'd have said that every piece was identical. What I did not notice at the time is that there is a Snowy Owl perched in one of the darker sections between the trunks. It did not provide a starting point, to say the least. The edge went together quickly, and the brown foliage of the oak was relatively easy to sort. However, from that point on, the challenge began. Even when I was down to the last twenty pieces, I was still having trouble fitting them in. For a 1000-piece puzzle to take me more than three days to complete is rare. This one took eight!

Now about that marcescent oak...in Patty's description of the scene, she explained the phenomenon whereby some deciduous trees (particularly oaks) hang onto their leaves instead of dropping them as most others do. She used the word "marcescence" which was new to me, and being able to add a new word to my vocabulary was a gift in and of itself. I thought I'd try it out on Arnie, since he and I swap obscure words from time to time. Neither Arnie nor his wife knew the word, nor did the third botanist visiting them. Obviously, we'll all be doing more reading on the subject.

Little Baby Lettuces

Day 188: Look carefully in the foreground. Those are the cotyledon leaves of little baby lettuces, courtesy of the sister-of-my-heart who lives clear across the country in New Hampshire.

Y'see, I zigged when I should have zagged. A few days before the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in a Kirkland WA nursing home, I was in town shopping. I wandered past the vegetable seed displays and said to myself, "Nah, it's too early yet. I'll get seeds in a couple of weeks." I wasn't expecting to be staying at home, trying to insulate myself against a dangerous disease. I thought life was going to continue normally, as did we all.

Because I am in two high-risk groups (my age, and the fact that I had pneumonia two years ago), I am not venturing out of my own neighbourhood, not for any reason. Some friends think I'm over-reacting, but I'd rather be safe than sorry, as the saying goes. However, my self-enforced isolation has put a substantial dent in my plans for the garden this year, and after bemoaning that fact to Patty, I found four packets of lettuce seed in my mailbox a few days later, shipped from far-away New Hampshire where a stay-at-home order was not in place at the time. There may not be any tomatoes to add to my salad, but at least I'll have greens and, if I'm lucky and tend them assiduously, the blueberries, raspberries and kiwi fruit should bear as well. With time on my hands, I'll have no excuse for letting the weeds grow.

Star Light, Star Bright

Day 84: A few years back, a hot, dry summer and neglectful watering combined to kill the Hoya bella which was the pride of my small houseplant collection. My hairdresser no longer had the one which had been its clonal parent, but I had sent slips to several friends over the course of time, one of whom had also started slips to give away. She offered to send me the original plant I'd mailed to her, i.e., a piece of the one I'd just lost. I accepted the offer happily, and a few days later it arrived. When I opened the box, my enthusiasm took a nose-dive. She'd meant well, watering it heavily to survive postal handling, but she'd almost drowned the poor thing. I didn't say anything to her at the time, hoping that by transplanting it immediately into drier soil, it would bounce back. Even so, almost all its leaves yellowed and dropped, although the few which hung on gave me a dash of hope. I nursed the potful of stems for at least 18 months before the first small cluster of flowers appeared. It's still not fully recovered, but I am happy to say that with every blooming period, the clusters are getting bigger and more numerous. Once again, the bright stars shine!

Pieces Of Sanderlings

Day 94: The Christmas tree was down, freeing up space in the living room. I got both looms emptied. I got the knitting off the needles. All my time-value projects were done, so I was ready to start putting together a custom jigsaw puzzle given to me by a friend. When Patty posted her photo of "Sanderlings on the Rocks" some time last fall, I'd commented that I'd love it as a 1500-piece puzzle, not expecting her to take me seriously. I didn't even know that custom puzzles of that size could be made, but it put me in mind of a series I'd done forty years ago called "Super Challenge," scenes with very little colour distinction. I love difficult jigsaws, and thought her Sanderlings image would have been a perfect candidate for the brand. When I work a puzzle, I go at it with the same fervor I devote to any other project, and a standard 1000-piece model usually takes me about three days to complete. The Super Challenges required a bit more time, but never more than a week. I have now been at the Sanderlings for roughly 10 days now (possibly as many as 12), and don't yet have even a third of it done. Now that's a challenging puzzle!

Patty's Birthday Bathmats

Day 99: Ever hear the phrase "hoist with his own petard?" Few people can quote the line from Hamlet accurately, and even fewer understand what it means, i.e., to be destroyed by a weapon you intended to use against someone else. In the popular (and erroneous) sense, it is frequently used to imply that a plan has backfired, as mine did when in early December, I posted a photo of three rugs I had just taken off the loom. My intention was to distract a friend from thinking my chattering about weaving might indicate that she might receive a birthday gift of handwovens. I mean, would I post a picture of somebody's present before delivering it? That's when the plan went south.

Patty (whose birthday was coming up in January, intended recipient for two of the three maroon/green bathmats) commented on the photo: "Wow! I bet those would look great in sea blues and greens, too...just sayin'." Some further discussion ensued about how maroon/green would work in a different room, but I realized that if I really wanted to give her something she'd fully enjoy, I needed to get hopping and weave another set.

The first ones had taken over a year to complete because I got bored with the repetitive nature of tabby-weave. Now I had to settle in and do some serious weaving if I was to have blue/green ones done in time. Fortunately, I had nothing on the loom, so made a quick trip to town for the weft (Bernat's "Blanket") and started warping as soon as I got home. Three days later, I had two bathmats and a toilet-tank topper done and ready to mail!

Best Present Ever!

Day 6: I knew I had a surprise coming in the mail from my sister-of-the-heart Patty, and saw by its tracking progress that it was due for Wednesday delivery. Patty had warned me that it was perishable and fragile, so I was in a hurry to get home from work to liberate it, whatever it might be. I slit the tape and opened the box to find another box made of clear plastic, and in it a mass of...LICHENS!

Y'know, I'm a cheap date. It doesn't take much effort or expense to entertain me. I was going to leave the project for morning and better light, but I was just too curious about the foliose species which had caused me to blurt "Rag-bag!" before I'd even felt the specimen. Okay, it resembled our local limp-washrag Platismatia, but there were some distinct differences which told me it wasn't the same thing. I spent the next 45 minutes with Skunk squashed under the 40-pound field guide on my lap and a lighted magnifier pressed tightly to my eye as I analyzed the black pycnidia along the lobe margins and searched for pseudocyphellae. At last I was content with an identification: Platismatia tuckermanii, named for lichenologist Edward Tuckerman who likewise lent his surname to Mount Washington's famous Tuckerman Ravine. He also has a whole genus of lichens named for him: Tuckermanopsis. There are still a couple of other species to sort out in this best-prezzie-ever, but I think they need to hydrate a little longer.

Easter Blooms

Day 185: The colour in my garden is patchy, but there's no denying that Spring has arrived. My earliest memories of Easter involved searching for eggs in my parents' garden, and I think it's fair to say that I was more entranced by the flowers than by the treats the famous Bunny had left beneath them. Invariably during my hunt, a few stems of Grape Hyacinth would be broken, and of course these were gathered up to be accompanied by a few deliberately-picked daffodils and the obligatory do-you-like-butter dandelions. Lilacs came later, in time for May Day, followed by the blood-red peonies which my father so dearly loved. Sometimes there were sweet peas, a plant I have never successfully grown here at the foot of the Mountain. Today, my complement includes daffodils and narcissi (we won't quibble over semantics), Fritillaria meleagris, grape hyacinth, pigsqueak (Bergenia), heather, a Patty Plant, wild currant, abundant hellebore and snowflakes. If the Bunny were to bring me eggs today, he'd have no trouble matching them to a hiding place, whatever colour they might be.

Something's Fishy Here

Day 68: "Sisters of the heart." That is how a Mouse, a Finch and a Crow describe the relationship which developed out of our common interest in geocaching, starting...oh, my! Has it been over a decade ago? We "met" in a chat forum, saw each other through various emotional crises and joys, and finally got together in several personal meet-ups despite the fact that two of us live on opposite coasts and the third is in New York.

I'm not sure when or how the tradition began, but each year, each of us sends the other two twelve numbered gifts, to be opened sequentially leading up to the finale on Christmas morning. We call it "the Twelve Days of Christmas," although it's on the wrong side of the holiday in the strict interpretation. There are no rules; gifts can be as goofy, lovely, inexpensive, lavish as the giver deems appropriate, but there always seem to be a few which bring a chuckle. Case in point: goldfish in a bag glycerine soap bar. The bag is going to have to deteriorate with age before I actually put it to use because it makes me laugh out loud every time I see it in the soap dish. I can't wait to see the reaction I get from the first guest to use my bathroom.

Twelve Days, Two Friends

Day 65: Although I generally don't have much good to say about the internet, if it hadn't been for computer technology, I might never have met the two women who are my "sisters of the heart." We became acquainted through a forum about ten years ago, a friendship which evolved into in-person visits and fun adventures on both sides of the country. With them, I share a "Twelve Days of Christmas" tradition of gift-giving, gathering or making twelve presents throughout the year which are then opened in numerical order on the eleven days preceding Christmas, winding up on Christmas Day with a final gift. We "wrap" gifts in cloth bags whenever possible, tie them shut with real ribbons and sometimes add tags which can also be recycled the following year. It makes so much more sense than throwing away piles of paper which has only seen one use.

The Hole Story

Day 39: Another puzzle submitted to me by my sister-of-the heart Patty resolved itself after some reconstitution of the subject matter in a sealed container with a piece of wet paper towel. You have to love lichens for their resiliency! While Patty was in Maine recently, she sent photos which led me to a tentative identification in this case of Cladina mitis, Green Reindeer Lichen. What I was not expecting was that she would also submit a physical specimen so I could take a closer look. When it arrived in the mail a few days ago, it had withered substantially, as had a small sprig of an Usnea. Examining it under the 'scope, it was hard to tell how many podetial tips were present, curled in on themselves as they were, but I did observe what I thought was the "gaping hole" between the tips, making me wonder if it might be Cladina stellaris instead (pointer shows the hole). However after further moisturizing, the tips have opened out into threes, ruling C. stellaris out. Given the other physical characteristics, I'm reverting to my initial identification of Cladina mitis. As for the Usnea, the jury is still undecided, but I believe it is U. filipendula, Fishbone Beard Lichen, one of the generic category of "Old-Man's Beard" lichens.

See? Urchin Spines!

Day 38: Seriously, it doesn't take much to keep me amused. Just give me a jar of sand from an "exotic" east-coast location and my microscope, and I'll be occupied for hours.

See those little green bits at the end of the built-in pointer? Those are sea-urchin spines, almost invisible to the unaided eye and barely visible under a hand lens. Under the microscope, they're revealed as textural beauties, ridged longitudinally. Occasionally, you can catch one in cross-section, and in those moments, you might think you'd found a faerie's zucchini dinner. Proportionally, this "sand" seems to be an almost equal mix of rock and shell fragment. A riot of colour, unlike the Pacific Northwest's drab grey grit, bits of opalescent mother-of-pearl and purple mussel-shell catch the eye amid the softer tones of cream and tan.

Sand was not the only thing in my mailbox yesterday. The friend who sent it included two lichen samples as well. See? Presents don't have to be pricey to be fun!

"About A Million Marbles"

Day 93: My cousin Toni surprised me this year with a Christmas gift of a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle entitled "About a Million Marbles." I cringed inwardly at the age of it, fearing missing pieces. "Eh, I'll put it together once anyway," I said to myself, and dragged out the card table and the cookie sheets and proceeded to lay out every piece rightside-up. The edge went together in about an hour, and by bedtime, I had a few pieces added to the next row in. That was my plan of attack: start from the edge and work in, because there was no hope of trying the old "put the blue bits together first" method.

New Year's Day saw me out on the trail, leaving only an hour or so in the evening to resume puzzling, but yesterday, I settled in shortly after breakfast and worked all day...no exaggeration, all frigging day!...and an hour past the time when I usually retire. I was positive I'd found several places where a piece was missing. I cannot abide a missing puzzle piece, but I'd vowed to complete it, and complete it I would. This morning, with about 100 pieces still on the cookie sheets, I began again. The longer I worked, the more convinced I became that some pieces were gone, but because it was marbles...and we all know how much I like marbles...I was thinking that if it was only missing one, perhaps two pieces, I'd keep it anyway and label the box accordingly.

I wasn't counting empty holes (impossible anyway due to the irregularly shaped pieces), and as I got down to the last dozen, I was still convinced some were missing. Ten...nine...eight...seven...six...five...what the hell? I had four pieces left and only three open spots! I ran my hands over the surface and discovered one more open space I hadn't seen. Four...three...two...one...DONE!

I love jigsaw puzzles. I love HARD jigsaw puzzles (complex patterns and "monochrome" color schemes), but not gimmicky ones (same picture printed on both sides, and so on). My usual preference is for 1000-piece or greater, but in this case, I'm quite content with a mere 500 pieces. This one goes on my shelf of favorites, for sure!

Thanks to the addition of the cat's-eyes accenting the puzzle (a gift from my sister-of-the-heart, Patty), my personal collection now holds 3817 marbles and weighs about 50 pounds. While that's not even close to a million marbles, I'm hoping to bring the total to 5000 some day.

Making A Paper Ball

Day 86: You'll find instructions for this origami figure in almost any book or website offering a basic introduction to the art of paper folding, however, what I'm showing you here is just one component of a kit given to me as a Christmas present from my good friend Patty. When I have all the balls folded and inflated, they will be installed along a string of lights, and hopefully, I'll have them done in time for New Year's Eve. Patty was curious how you got from a flat sheet of paper to a cute little ball, so I promised to take pictures of the steps.

First, fold your piece of origami paper on the diagonal (white to the inside). Unfold it, and fold it again along the other diagonal. Lay it out flat. You will see that you have fold lines which intersect in the middle of the paper. Now turn the paper over, and fold it in half across the width of the paper (color to the inside). Only make one fold. Now we'll collapse the figure. Lay the form on the table, colored side up, and push the edges in so that the intersection of fold lines rises as a peak. Flatten it out, and you'll see that you've created the triangular form shown in the second image.

Next take the outer points of the triangle to the center of the peak and crease the folds on one side of the form. Do the same for the opposite side. You now have a square. Fold the side points in to meet at the center (bottom of the third image) and crease them well. For simplicity's sake, the images from here on only show the fold on one side of the figure. Repeat the identical folds on the opposite side of the form.

In the first of the middle row of images, you can see the points folded in during the last step. Above them, you will fold down the top points to make a crease. The top points should be returned to their previous position after creasing. Now following the second image, fold the tips of the points down to meet the center junction. The third move in this series is a little tricky. Those points must be inserted into the little "pockets" in the side folds. It helps if you curl them slightly with a thumbnail. Once you have them seated in the pockets, be sure they are well creased. Your form will look like the first figure in the bottom row.

To inflate the ball, open it out as shown in the center bottom photo. At one end, there will be a small hole where the paper edges meet. Put it up to your lips and give a quick, firm blow. The ball should puff out into its inflated shape! Have a ball making your own origami light string!