Crocheting Reminds Me of Morning Sickness

This week in Jenny elefantz book-study the topic is about colour. I am such a coward when it comes to selecting colours for any project. I do not trust myself here and probably end up  missing out on so much fun. And yet, I love colour. The predominant colour theme in my 175 year old farm house is earth tones. Often lots of earth. The living room is the only room with carpeting. It is an earthy butternut colour. The colour of sand.  The pine floor boards in the original 9 rooms and 2 hallways are 2 inches thick and 7-7 1/2 inches wide. The back kitchen and 2 guest rooms above the kitchen have 1 inch thick boards. These 3 rooms were added to the original house in the 1880's. The kitchen and back kitchen floors are hardwood maple milled in the 1930's from the maple bush by the swamp. This is where our farm name, Maplehurst came from - as well as lots of maple syrup over the years. We used to boil down the sap collected from the massive majestic maples lining our long laneway. We set a couple of large pots on the stove in the kitchen and let them simmer for days. The kitchen door open so the steam had somewhere to go besides on the ceiling and walls. The last time we made it was at least 25 years ago and I determined never to repaper the kitchen again. I had stripped the layers of paint from the 6 doors and 2 windows - coffee cream over dark brown over lime green over a bubble gummy base that took a lot of patience to remove. The new wall paper was a naturalistic Glen Oates green and gold maple leaves and stems. I love it. It will stay on the walls as long as I live in this house.

As I started to say, I have a hard time deciding on colors. That is one of the reasons I have purchased sosososososososo much fabric to make quilts. Jane Brocket, in her book The Art of Gentle Domesticity, talks about her journey of processing colour. She crocheted a rippled blanket from many bright colours.

Now I learned to crochet in the first trimester of my second pregnancy. It was going to be a red sleeveless sweater but nausea and red just took the joy away from finishing it. Dang! That is another thing I started and did not complete. Sigh.

Instead, I just gave my mother some yarn and she made me several afghans. I found these in the time out closet under the stairs the other day when I was looking for something. They do not match any of the earth tone rooms.  I also gave her yarn to knit things for my children. Now I do know how to knit, but why bother when she so enjoyed doing it for me and she finished things.  I miss my mother who died nearly 20 years ago. I am thinking I might put revisit knitting on my 2020 goals list.

Jane likes the bold brilliant colour styles of Kaffe Fassett. All those bright colours squished together gives me a head ache. Seriously. I started my second Dear Jane Quilt in brights on a crisp white and recently decided to stop making any more blocks and complete the thing with an original layout designed by my creative grand children. Stay tunes to see what we finally come up with.

Blessings,
Chris

btw - I did not complete my one-monthly-goal for February. 

Domesticity in Books

We had had no less than 5 snow days in the past 2 weeks and a PA day where all the school children stay home and the teachers go to school. Today we have the little boys here for the week along with the snowbound little girls. My first wake up came at 3 am when 5 year old Devan could not find her hippo stuffy. It was lost among the mere 6 blankets she brought to my bed to sleep with me until we can finish removing the wallpaper from her bedroom. I found the stuffy and settled her in again until the next wake up call at 6 telling me all schools were closed today because of the snow storm and Dad was going in to work since he is the foreman. Elly came next at 6:20 saying she could not find Daddy and the radio was on in the kitchen. That was to listen to the storm reports. Elly has a birthday next week but we celebrated last night with the traditional pizza and cake. We went downstairs to turn on a show and I thought I might sleep a bit longer on the couch, but little 3 year old David and 4 year old Jonathan showed up around 7 and joined us under the quilt. Eleven year old Ava came down at some point and we were only missing the sleepy Devan who came in at 7:30. I got up and made milkshkes for breakfast. My blender had given up the ghost last week so my son brought in his Ninja cement mixer. That thing is serious about blending frozen anything. And it has a 2 liter capacity. We had strawberry banana with French vanilla ice cream and the last of the whipped cream from both cans. Yum. Official breakfast was cereal at 10:30. The snow has let up but the wind is still howling out there. 

Two weeks ago, Jenny of elefantz  asked the question, "What book have you read in the past which still holds an emotional connection for you? In what way? This is part of the reflection on Jane Brocket's book The Art of Gentle Domesticity.

I read Anne of Avonlea last month just because it was laying here near my desk, but I really should have been doing coursework. (By the way, I dropped a course that I hated working on and picked up another about healing of memories for my doctorate in Christian counseling.) 

As I was saying, I re-read Anne of Avonlea. I have a fragile hardcover copy printed in 1944. I think it has been at least 30 years since I last read any of the 8 books in the series. I had the complete collection in my cart on Amazon for many months and finally purchased a hard cover set last week. I have loved this Canadian author since I was in a one room elementary school in rural Canada in the late 1950's early '60's. Our teacher, a 20 year old single fella who boarded at a local  home in our village, read out loud to all the grades every week. I recall him reading Anne of  Green Gables. Later in high school I read Anne's House of Dreams so knew that Anne and Gilbert got married even though there were still 3 books to be read before that one. I finally visited Green Gables in Prince Edward Island a couple of  years ago. It turns out that the hard cover "set" is really one very large hard cover book with all 8 novels in it. I arrived yesterday damaged so I will be returning it.

I actually was intending to write about the Little House on the Prairie series. I read my first one, Farmer Boy, in grade 5. And just tonight as I was starting to put the little girl grandchildren to bed, the 2 little ones were playing school and fighting over 2 boxed sets of books. One was the Little House set. Interesting that Laura Ingals Wilder, the author, opens the first story with butchering day on the farm in the 1860's. My father was a butcher and he raised a few pigs along with cows and chickens. The girls were never allowed out in the barn on butchering day. But his smoked Kalbasa was the best I ever had. He told the story of meeting my mother for the first time in post war Germany. He was a young Polish soldier serving as a cook in a British battalion delivering some of his amazing Polish kalbasa to a refugee camp when he first saw the beautiful young Polish girl who was his wife for 54 years. 

It appears that I copied a line from another blog post but cannot figure out how to return to the regular printing here. Oh well. Live and learn.

Blessings,
Chris

OMG February 2019

My one-monthly-goal for Feb will be to quilt Dear Daughter,

 bind her and gift her. 

I think I will do a simple scribble of hearts of something where I do not have to do straight lines (not good at that) or start and stop a hundred times ( too much work too little time). The backing and binding will be the same blue and white Sturbridge Village reproduction print (since I still have about 5-6 yards).

Blessings,

Chris