caracolina

I found out yesterday that the baby celebration (it isn’t really like an American baby shower) is on Saturday! This Saturday! Luckily I’m almost done. I finished the embroidery and took care of the hanging threads last night. And at 8.30 PM we drove over to the nearest Joann store so that I could pick out some cute buttons. At that time we were enjoying our first big rain this Summer with great lightning action. It cooled off very nicely too.

The spinning is going slowly, obviously, since I’m only doing it on the way to and from work in the car. I’m surprised how well this works actually, considering our car is so tiny. Since I’ll be done with the tank top sooner than I thought, I’m throwing in the navajo rugs and spinning/plying the rug wool into the challenge. They have to be done by end of the month, anyway. Let’s see if I can do that AND complete my drop spindle spinning.

Before I forget, I got the Om pattern online from a cool knitting blog called Kody May Knits. Thanks, Kody!

Our house guest since Sunday, the portable A/C unit that our apartment complex lent us, left us this morning because our A/C is working again. Yesterday late afternoon, A/C repair man arrived and heroically climbed up our crawlspace (not an easy feat when it is 140 F in there).

He found out that the coils of our A/C were all gunked up and frozen. While he cleaned those up, John took a look up there and discovered that our roof isn’t fully insulated! Could that have something to do with our ridiculous electricity bills in Summer?

Nahhhhhh…..

I came across a new challenge, La Tour de Fleece. Participators set themselves a spinning goal and try to attain it while the Tour de France is going on. I’m a bit late because the tour started last weekend but I’m going to try to reach my goal anyway. I decided to challenge myself to spin my kool-aid roving with one of my drop spindles, the one my mom won for me at Fibers Through Time 2008. It is a KCL spindle. I own three drop spindles but I’m not really proficient in their use so I don’t know how this will turn out. But that’s why they call it a challenge, right?

Earlier today we realized the apartment was hotter than usual. John inspected the A/C and found out it was frozen. He borrowed a water hose from a guy who was cleaning blood from the walkways in the apartment complex (apparently some drunk guy went on a rampage last night and broke through some people’s windows – there goes the neighborhood) to thaw the thing on the outside, but we needed to let it stay off for a while because it needed to thaw further in (whatever that means, I have no idea). At some point we took off to get more mason jars and a bite to eat but when we returned the A/C still wasn’t able to cool. The apartment complex people let us have a portable unit so we installed that in one of our windows and crossed our fingers. It got up to 96 degrees in here and it is humid! At some point we decided to just grin and bear it and proceeded to get going with more canning. John made about 1/2 a gallon of fig preserves and right now a huge pot with 15 pounds of tomatoes and other veggies is simmering on its way to more canned V8.

As canning season continues, John brought home another huge load of tomatoes, bell peppers, and chile peppers from Rob’s farm today. Last year he made pickled peppers and they turned out really nice, so tonight, to ensure the peppers would be as fresh as they could be, we sliced about 20 pounds of bell peppers and ended up with two and a half gallons of pickled peppers in jars. In between, John drove over to Mi Pueblo where Nelson roasted 2 pounds of chiles for us. These, along with 5 pounds of tomatoes, and 1 pound onions resulted in 1 gallon of canned salsa (in assorted pint jars). Spicy!

John left really early this morning to join Rob and Jerry at the farm stand, but I took the day off and just did what I wanted to do. Mostly, I experimented with dyeing. I chose some photos from the inspirational picture book John had given me for my birthday and tried to hit those colors, with mixed results. The main take away for me is that I’m still not diluting the colors enough. But, it seems that when I dabbed some colors on a paper towel for testing, they just looked a lot weaker than they actually came out on the fiber, so I can’t really use that as a gauge. I ordered some more dye powders so that I can continue experimenting when my dye stocks run out. It is a lot of fun!

I also took a bunch of photos of my experiments as well as finished projects and other stash items and started some sets within John’s Flickr account. Since he’s not really using his pro account to the fullest I figured I could share his account for a while. Once I’ve taken a few more photos of my stash and WIPs I’m only going to take photos every once in a while for blogging or Ravelry, so I don’t think I really need my own pro account. Let’s see how I’m handling having my own camera. 

Celia gave me about 2/3 of a quart of goat milk yesterday so what do I do? Make yogurt! I followed instructions and used 2 frozen yogurt cubes from the first batch as starter. I started around 9 AM and curiosity got the better of me around 4 PM. It is pretty liquidy but tastes wonderful. I think goat yogurt must be naturally liquidy though because all the store bought stuff contains tapioca, guar gum or other additives.

Today, John and I headed out to Tonopah, but he dropped me of with Celia and Jimmie before joining Rob and Jerry at the farm. I helped out with watering and feeding and a few other chores (including bottle feeding Jaanu, one of John’s goat kids) before we made curds from goat milk and tried out John’s new cheese press.

At some point we stepped outside and both heard a whistling noise. Walking towards the noise we realized that the tiny fish pond was almost empty! I ran over to the hose and got the water flowing. In this weather it takes a few minutes for the water to run cool and throwing the hose into the pond too soon would have resulted in fish stew. Luckily there was about a foot of water left in the bottom where the goldfish were huddled, holding their collective breaths, as it were. Apparently the cats had been playing around the fish pond’s “water fall” which is a hose that pumps water out of the pond and allows it to run down a few steps back into the pond. One of the cats tripped the rock that holds this hose in place and the water ended up outside the pond. The whistling noise was the pump sucking in air.

Once we got that squared away, Celia got to test drive my spinning wheel, not surprisingly quite the challenge. Unfortunately she didn’t have a whole lot of time on it because all of a sudden it was getting to be late afternoon and John called because he wanted to call it a day. Not surprisingly, since working outdoors in this heat and humidity is exhausting! Since Celia and Jimmie were planning to go to a party for 4th of July later that day, I helped her with the second round of watering and then John arrived and whisked me home.

Thanks to our homemade goat yogurt bounty I’ve had mango lassi for breakfast every day this week, using mangos that I froze last year during mango season at Lee Lee’s as well as some fresh ones that John picked up (apparently mango season is on again now). To make mango lassi I pretty much just throw about 1 cup of yogurt and a few mangos into the blender and top that off with some rose water. Then, while blending, I add a little bit of water to make it “drinkable”.

I used to make mango lassi with soy yogurt and enjoyed that a lot, too. When I looked for recipes I realized that most of them use sugar! For me that would be too sweet, though.

I also froze two trays of yogurt cubes to use as starter for the next goat milk that comes my way. Come on, Mary!

Celia was able to make it out our way today, for lunch and an afternoon of fiber dyeing. Last year I got some acid dye samples in “primary colors” (red, yellow, blue, and black) and they were finally put to use. Before Celia arrived I mixed up the dye stock solution according to instructions. John and I figured that 2 Liter soda bottles would be good containers for the dye stock. The only problem was that the water that I poured into the first bottle was so hot that it shrank and puckered the bottle! I was more careful with the other bottles and managed to keep the puckering to a minimum, but the volume of the bottles was still shrunk because I had marked 1, 1.5, and 2 Liter levels with sharpie and they were no longer accurate. Oh well! If I ever come across glass bottles in the right size I’ll use those instead. Until then, I think these will do nicely.

John had made kaddhai paneer for lunch and the three of us tucked in before he headed out to Indo Euro to help out Sonal, and Celia and I began to plan out what we were going to do. We weighed out Celia’s fiber (churro roving) and calculated the amount of dye stock and overall liquid needed. Celia handpainted two sets of roving which we microwaved. As she had intended, the colors were very saturated in both pieces, but in the first piece the colors ran together, although the result was still very pretty. We could have used a lot less dye stock and still gotten the same effect. This stuff is potent!

I used some of the leftover dyes in plastic cups and whipped up a blue, purple, and green which I poured over a wool/alpaca roving coiled into my crock pot and the blue which I wanted to be a paler shade was still pretty saturated when it was all said and done. When we rinsed our roving hardly any dye came out, so it seems our overall liquid/stock calculation wasn’t too far off, only the dye to liquid ratio was off. We had lotsof fun this afternoon in spite of the heat in my dye lab (i.e. out on the balcony). When John came home and we were ready for a break we sampled his new blackberry cobbler variation – using coconut milk instead of cow milk. It was really good and not coconutty tasting or overly sweet as I had feared. In case you are wondering, the recipe still contains dairy – there’s a good amount of butter involved. Yum!

Before Celia hit the long road home to Tonopah, she showed us how to make yogurt with two quarts of raw goat milk she had brought from the farm. It is easy! Place the quart jar(s) into a big pot with water, heat until the milk is at 110F. Stir in the yogurt starter cultures, close the jars. Place jars into small cooler, pour hot water in, close cooler and let stand overnight. Ready for breakfast!