There's another EXARC textile chat on Saturday, July 24 - topic this time is "Unusual Materials". So if you're interested in uncommon or weird materials for all kinds of textile techniques, join in and bring your stories and pictures!
I managed to get into the woods again yesterday, before the mosquitoes came out, and pick some more bilberries. These are just wonderful in a Finnish mustikkaapiirakka (bilberry pie), and I also love them with semolina, or Quarknockerln, or, well, practically anywhere. I was a little late for harvesting last year, but this time around, I caught them.
There's lots and lots of bilberry patches in the wood here, and at some of them they are, actually, rather large. The berries, that is. Still, picking them is a good amount of work and takes its sweet time, so I make it less mind-numbingly boring by listening to stuff on my (always very long) podcast list.
Among yesterday's crop was a story that made me giggle and sigh at the same time. It was one of the best stories I've heard in a while, and you might enjoy it too - so here it is:
It's very short notice, but maybe you catch it in time (and if not, you should be able to watch the recorded stream later): Marion and Rachel are doing another livestream on the CuriousFrau Youtube channel, showing stitches and seams used in the Lengberg garments:
If you want to stitch along, you should come prepared with:
- two 8x4 inch (20 cm x 10 cm) pieces of medium or heavy linen
- one piece of 6x6 inch (15x15 cm) medium to heavy weight wool and a matching size piece of medium to heavy weight linen
- thick linen thread
- a good handsewing needle
- beeswax for waxing thread
A sad thing from Scotland - the Scottish Crannog Centre, a reconstructed Iron Age roundhouse, has burned down on last Friday night. Here is a short article about this from the Guardian.
Fire is, and has always been, both a life-saver providing warmth and light, and a danger to people, animals and dwellings. Even with our modern fire-fighting technologies, fire can still do a lot of damage before being extinguished; Notre Dame springs to mind, of course.
At least in modern times, with so little actual open fire being used in daily life, the chances of flames getting out of hand are much reduced compared to a few centuries ago...
Today was insanely busy - and I still did not manage to get everything done that I had planned to do. (Is that new? No. Do I manage, again and again, to plan too much to fit into one day? Yes.)
There was making of some distaffs, and then dressing said distaffs, and packing said dressed distaffs for the online workshop (the German one is full already, I will fix a second date soon). Then getting the parcels ready for a post office run tomorrow morning.
I also managed to sneak in a little time outside in the garden, which counted for my obligatory daily "time outside", and it did feel so good. (We agreed, early on in the pandemic, that getting outside at least once a day for at least half an hour was a non-discussible thing that we'd do. In some cases and on some days, it wasn't easy to get outside in the rain after a long day, but we both had the feeling that those were the days it was most necessary, and did us a world of good.) Flowers are starting to bloom everywhere in our garden, the raspberries are getting ready to bloom, and I planted a lot of the now-quite-grown seedlings outside. Hopefully they will all grow into nice plants that make lots of fruit and vegetables. One of the tomato plants already has a first fruit!
So - another really busy day tomorrow, and then there's the Pentecost weekend, which means time off, and I'm very much looking forward to that. There's a bank holiday on Monday in Germany, but since the Most Patient Husband had some more vacation days to spend, he's getting two extra days - and it would be unfair to let him spend these on his own, right?
Which means I'll be back on the blog on Thursday next week. And since tomorrow is going to be really busy as well, I'll take the day off, too...
There's been progress on the writing stuff (yay!), and there's been a good bit of sending off parcels to lots of different places (thank you, online shoppers!), and if this were a normal year, I'd be off for a week of book-binding fun with friends this week.
Unfortunately, this is not happening this time due to, you've guessed it, the pandemic. Tomorrow is still a bank holiday here in Germany, though, which means I'll be taking the day off, and because it would be a shame to waste such an opportunity for an extra-long weekend, and the Most Patient Husband of Them All also has the day off, Friday will be added to this.
It's May the Fourth, so may the fourth be with you!
Yes, it's a bad one, and it's not getting better from year to year. But since I'm a sucker for bad puns, and good ones, and especially ones that are so bad they are coming around again to emerge on the good side... I still enjoy it.
In that vibe, here's the good old Grocery Store Wars video, because it's Star Wars-related, and it's punny, and I really enjoy it. Also, sadly, even though this video is quite old by now... it's still current.
We're still having trouble with pesticide use (killing off our insects); there's a lot of unsustainable farming practise, including fish farming. Mind you, I don't think that just buying organic food is the golden solution - I'd guess it is more sustainable to buy a locally grown cucumber that has been commercially produced by a farmer using fertiliser and other agricultural chemicals responsibly, than to buy an organic avocado from Peru. Lots of organically grown things also come in plastic packaging, including fruit and vegetables - also not the best thing for our environment.
So personally, I try to buy food that is locally grown and unpackaged, bringing my own containers to the shop or market. Bonus if it's organic, but local and unpackaged actually has higher priority on my list; we basically only buy things from outside the region if it's something that cannot be grown here, such as bananas and oranges.
Next best is re-useable packaging - deposit glass jars, for instance. Next best: paper or paper-based, plastic-free packaging material. Following this are one-way glass jars, which we re-use in our own household for storage of stuff we buy unpackaged, or for canning our own things. Home-made convenience food does have its own charm.
We're thus down to buying or consuming very little plastic packaging these days. A lot of things only come in plastic packaging, and there is an easy solution for most of these, for us: We just don't buy them. On closer inspection, most of these, for us, can be replaced by something equally delicious that has no plastic wrapper, or we can make it ourselves. (Mascarpone is one of these. Tortilla chips have been successfully produced here. It has the side effect of actually appreciating treats a lot more.)
Meat and fish are the really difficult bits here, especially with the additional hygiene rules implemented by a lot of shops due to the Corona thing. To our great delight, we've recently discovered a small farm shop that makes it possible to bring our own containers, so the meat problem is more or less solved. It means we'll eat what kind of meat they had - but since most of my meal planning goes "Let's see what we get at the market, and then we'll make it work somehow", that has not brought much of a change. Fish, though... there's one local fish farmer on the Saturday market, and he has lovely fish, but it's all plastic packaged. So we've reduced the amount of fish consumed, and are keeping our eyes open to find some alternative where we can get unpackaged fresh fish.
It's a journey. It makes some things harder, and it means not eating a lot of things because they are out of season, or only available in plastic - but on the other hand, the same thing makes life easier in a way, as well. If it's clear that something will not be bought due to reason X, Y, or Z, that makes shopping decisions quite a bit faster... and seasonal things a lot more awaited, and appreciated.
So. Use the fork, Luke. Use it wisely. And if you suddenly find yourself in a quite different movie: Choose wisely.
