Knitting Today: Pumpkins!

 Many years ago a granddaughter said to me that I should decorate for holidays. Finally I am doing a little decorating.

There is a pattern called Velvet Pumpkins, so named because of the Bernat Velvet yarn which is a bulky weight yarn. This yarn was not available in a store near me so I chose other yarn.

Here is what I made.  So far...

This a mini pumpkin, a small pumpkin, and a medium pumpkin.  There is also a large pumpkin but I have not yet made that.

The yarn for mini and small is:

This orange yarn was held with just one strand.

These two yarns were held together for the medium pumpkin.  I used US #8 knitting needles for the knitting.  The stem on the medium pumpkin had an add-in of some chocolate brown I Love This Cotton that I got for another project that I have not yet started.

When you look at the original knitting pattern you will see that those pumpkins in that Bernat Velvet yarn have definite lobes in them.  I felt that the delineation in these plain pumpkins was good enough.  They are now sitting on our dining room table for us to admire and think about autumn every time we  walk by.

The pattern states that it will take about two hours to knit a pumpkin.  That may be true. I did not manage to time the knitting.

Knitting Today: Square Five of the Midwinter Blanket

 Life has gotten ahead of me.  Again.  Finally I finished knitting Square Five just as the Knit A Long is about to end.  Here is the square on the blocking board. Now that I look at it spread out, it may be that there are more errors than one. Oh well.  It is a blanket.

You can see that I am using up the yarn that I have in the bin!  These colors do not match any of the other colors but it is a blanket.  Mostly the people using it will be asleep so color coordination does not probably matter.

This morning I cast on for Square Six, which is the final pattern.  Tomorrow is the day the wind-up of the Knit A Long happens with instructions on how to sew all the squares together and how to knit a border.  I will watch the instructions even though I am not making an entire Midwinter Blanket. I believe I have mentioned I am just adding these squares to the already-in-progress Barbara Walker Learn To Knit Afghan which I had started months ago to use up all the Hilda Yates yarn.  Making progress!!

Renovating A Bag To Have A Zipper And Boxed Bottom

 A couple of weeks ago I attended a Stake Relief Society Leadership meeting.  It was so very good!  I learned many things from other Relief Society presidency members.  We had a very nice lunch from Olive Garden.

AND...we were given a wonderful bag!  I absolutely love bags.  All kinds of bags. Purses, zippered pouches, reusable handle bags, simple bags, complicated bags.

The bag we were given as a remembrance of the meeting was a simple handle bag with an image of the motto of Relief Society on front.  I love it.  I decided I would try to make it have a boxed bottom and even install a zipper at the opening.

Here is the front of the bag as we received it.

The zipper was pretty easy to install after the fact.  Most times you would install a zipper before sewing up the sides of the bag.  Originally I thought of making an inset zipper then thought to try it just by itself.  It worked.  I did have to do a little horizontal sewing to attach the zipper to the sides of the bag at the top.  That worked, too. After attaching the long end of the zipper I cut off the leftover zipper...maybe 7 inches.  When I find some YKK zipper pulls I will be able to make a small zippered pouch.  Bonus!

Boxing in the bottom of the bag was such an easy affair...after first stitching up the edges instead of stitching across the bottom!  AND of course I stitched a much wider box than I could have.  Oh well, it works perfectly.

Since writing the above and well after boxing this bag, I watched a video which was so useful...or would have been if I had watched it first!  I used method number two and did NOT cut off the extra "ear" of fabric.  I feel like it stays sturdier.

Canning In Instant Pot Max

 The weeks just fly by like moments.  My plan (always!) is to put out a blog post every week day with occasional "special" posts on a weekend day.  This is not happening.  I get busy with life then spend the evening sitting like a lump in my swivel rocker with Dear One watching a variety of shows from the sublime to the ridiculous while I knit.  My newest plan is to work work work during the day then in the evening sit down and watch one sublime program then move into the workroom for writing. After writing then I can knit on whatever project is in the pipeline.  That is the current plan.  Let us see if it can happen....

Today I want to talk about something important to my mental health:  the Instant Pot Max!  You laugh.  Not really a laughing matter.  All our lives together we have had a garden.  With a garden there is produce to harvest and "put away" for when there is no harvest. In Vermont there are many months when no production is possible due to ice and snow.  Garden season is very short, but it is oh, so sweet, to harvest yellow string beans, tomatoes, apples, etc and eat them.  There is always more to harvest than can be eaten at once.  I have tried, and you can see where that got me!  Well, you could see if I put up a picture, but I won't do that.

(You will notice that along the right side of the readout there is the word CANNING.  This is the ONLY Instant Pot that safely cans food.)

So during the many years of our marriage we have done water bath canning and pressure canning depending on the rules of the USDA for safe canning.  When we came to South Carolina I left the pressure canners in Vermont and just brought the smaller water bath canner with us.  When we arrived almost immediately I purchased a new pressure canner because it seemed like we would be able to have lots of produce to can since there is such a long growing season, in fact, there seem to be two growing seasons,  Well, I used that canner once.  ONE TIME!  So once we purchased the Instant Pot Max last November we gave away that big old almost brand new canner to a wonderful young family who are successful gardeners and who have lots of children.  Win for everyone!  And it made me happy.

Here in the hot humid south it turns out that you cannot use your garage for food storage if you want the food to be good  when you open the jars. AND we do not have as much room as you might think for attractive storage shelves.  That is somewhat because I "store" a lot of stuff, some of which is unsightly.  Much to the chagrin of Dear One...

Anyway...it turned out that we did not need a big pressure canner that would can hundreds of quarts of things as we did in Vermont.  There are just the two of us after all.  Then last fall just before Thanksgiving I read online that Instant Pot makes a pressure cooker that actually CAN get the contents high enough in temperature and pressure long enough that it is safe to can foods.  This is a six-quart machine so you can only can 4 pints of food at a time.  THIS IS PERFECT FOR TWO OLD PEOPLE!

So what do we can as our gardens are such a failure so far and since Dear One is totally on board to plow under the gardens (if we had a plow or equipment like plows!) and turn them back into lawn. He says it would make lawn mowing so much easier.  I guess it would. 

 It happens that often I prepare food in quantities more in keeping with feeding a family of five teenagers than a family of two old people who only need about one-third the daily calories than we previously ate so, surprisingly enough, there are leftovers.  I have mentioned before that Dear One is not a big leftovers fan.  He is agreeable to eating the same food a second time but a third time, well, that is anathema.  And he is (kindly) clear on that.  

Now that we have an Instant Pot Max on our shelf, I am able to can up left over soups so we can eat them next month when I don't feel like making a fresh meal.  AND IT IS OKAY WITH HIM!  

So last week we had a Grub and Gab Potluck Luncheon for ladies at church.  I made some bean soup from the Blue Zones American Kitchen cookbook which we just acquired with the idea that we would eat more healthy so we could live to one hundred.  Of course the quantity was too much and as we had a small group of sisters at the luncheon there was leftovers.  The moment I got home I put four pints of soups into new widemouth pint jars and started the Instant Pot canning.  So great!

(Here is a picture of the second batch of bean soup after being pressure canned.  You can clearly see that two of the lids have not "pinged".  The upper left one never did so it was refrigerated, and now has been consumed.)

When the first batch was done and the canner was cool, I brought out the jars and processed a second batch.  The only glitch in the system was that I had stopped at the hardware store for more widemouth canning lids.  They only had an off brand, as in, NOT Ball brand which I have always used.  One of the jars did not "ping" so I put it in the refrigerator and served it to Dear One on Sunday.  Apparently he had been waiting for bean soup...!

So this is the story of the bean soup and canning in the Instant Pot Max.  Please know that it is ONLY in the Instant Pot Max that you can safely pressure can food.  I am so thrilled with this new way to put up food which works with my cooking methods so less food is wasted.  Now if I can study up on how to do the same thing with even denser food like leftover sweet potatoes...I bet RoseRed Homestead has instructions!

New-ish Knitting Project: Pressed Flowers (Shawl) Cloth

 Some time ago I saw a beautiful shawl that used mosaic/slipped stitch knitting.  Since I had embarked on a program of learning as much as possible about mosaic knitting, I thought seeing this was providential.  It also seemed that every podcast I saw was about Pressed Flowers Shawls.  Now, I hate to spend money on knitting patterns (because there are so many glorious free knitting patterns on Ravelry and other places) but I really wanted to knit this sort of thing...so I bit the bullet and purchased the pattern.  I probably won't knit the actual shawl, at least not for a long time...too many other projects in the queue ahead of this one!

Reading the pattern was not as simple as I had thought it would be.  I read and re-read then started watching YouTube videos on Pressed Flowers.  My first efforts were dreadful but I kept going.  Finally I had a friend having a birthday and decided to try my hand again.  This is what I made:

This made me happy!  By the time I finished it, I felt comfortable with "Pressed Flowers" and was confident with pressed flowers knit flat.  Now to see if I can knit pressed flowers in the round!

The yarn here is I Love This Cotton from Hobby Lobby.  I think I used US 6 needles.

And if you are wondering what the strange "thing" is under the pressed flowers cloth, it is a copy of The Blue Zones American Kitchen.  We watched a Blue Zones series on Netflix I think it was, and became inspired to work on refining our eating and increase the odds that we can live to 100.  We shall see.  There are 100 recipes in this cookbook and Dear One has found one that he is interested in trying...the 16-bean soup recipe.  Back in the old days when we had all our children at home "on the farm", we made Magic Bean Soup which Dear One really liked.  

We will probably try this soup.  I will let you know.

Knitting Today!

 Another week has passed and the Midwinter Blanket squares are coming along.  This is number four:

It was relatively easy though I still don't get the floats right at one edge.  Maybe the next one...!

Red Bird!

 How I love birds and their dear little faces and their sweet songs.  This fellow flew up as I went to the front window.  It does not have a crest so I imagine it is not a cardinal.

Please help me identify it. Many thanks!

Friday Finish: Midwinter Square Number 3

 Here is Square 3 on the blocking board.  I gave it everything and finished early-ish, now on to the next project until square 4 is released next week!

As you can see, I really am using up everything I have of the Barrlettyarns.  One day all the yarn will be consumed in various projects and I will feel good about starting over with yarn.  It won’t be any day soon…!