Green Knitting, Green Monkey

This monkey is GREEN because he has been made from two mismatched, handknit wool socks. A dear lady gave us a dozen or so pairs of wool socks she'd knitted for her now-departed husband, to pass on to the clothing bank we work for and at. However, there were four stray socks, and even very destitute people like to have their socks match just like everyone else's do.

What could I do with those four socks? I could always use them for dusting and polishing, but I wanted to give them a more dignified task than that. Knowing and honoring the work that had gone into them, I wanted them to be seen, not stuffed into my ragbag.

I had made many sock monkeys, but none from handknit wool socks, and so this little guy was an experiment, as is much of what I do. I wished that there was more contrast in color between the two socks I used for him, but there wasn't, so I tried edging the "shirt" he is wearing with turquoise, and I was happy enough with the result.

This picture is a bag of yarn of various fibers, all gleaned from unknitting/frogging (rip it!) items from rummage sales/ thrift stores. It takes a little time, but can't be beat for the price, which is usually a dollar, sometimes much less than that, for each garment. I highly recommend doing this and will continue doing it myself.

Several Evenings Project

A very kind lady, when her husband passed on, gave us several pairs of handmade socks she'd made for him. She wanted them to go to the clothing bank and they did and were snapped up very quickly. However, there were a few socks w/o mates and I wondered what to do with those. I decided to use them to make sock monkeys, which are a favorite thing of mine to make. The first one is close to being done--I'll post a picture when he's done. He needs earsl. I may have to knit those. I knit some to make his arms long enough, too, from yarn I unraveled. I love a challenge, and I love to recycle and reuse,; I like the phrase "reprised materials," too.

The Sewing Machine I Won by Accident

Oh, boy! I did it again!! I mean, I WANTED it, but I thought when I offered the seller half of what he asked, I'd get a note that he OK'd it BEFORE I actually bought it. Nope! That's not the way it works; if you offer them less and they accept the offer, it's YOURS.

I'm not SORRY! It's a lovely little Spartan, not much bigger than a Featherweight, but weighs about twice as much!! I have a "thing" with old sewing machines, can you tell?!

Screamer's Cute Baby Has Shoes

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Screamer's Cute Baby (sounds like the name of a dog with a fancy pedigree, or a race horse!!!) now has feet and a pair of shoes. Not just ANY shoes, mind you, but VINTAGE baby shoes--the kind I wore when I was in three cornered pants. I watch garage, rummage, and estate sales for these shoes, mainly for my vintage dolls, but also for the dolls I make. My friends make pretty art dolls but I make funky weird dolls that make people laugh. And I laugh right along with them!

The reason he is called Screamer's Cute Baby is that his face is made in a manner similar to Screamer's, but Screamer's head is a bottle gourd and Baby's face is a hollow plastic ball. But you can see a slight similarity between the two. Soon he will have hands, and then I will call him done.

Well, back to cleaning off the kitchen table; I'd take a picture of it BEFORE but I'd be too embarrassed. I DO have some pride, ya know!?!

Planting Sweet Potatoes

You can buy the slips, but why buy what you can make yourself? You take a sweet potato and put four toothpicks, equally spaced, around its "waist." Then put it in a jar of water, so that only half of it is in the water--the toothpicks will keep the top part of it OUT of the water. I painted my jar black, but you could just wrap it in aluminum foil--roots don't like light.
Soon, the potato will start to have little green sprouts. When they are about two inches long, take the potato out of the water, and carefully cut the potato to separate the spouts, but don't separate the sprouts from the little hunk of potato that it's growing from. Plant each "slip" in a pot of soil and let it grow until it's time to plant it outside--after all danger of frost is over.
I'll post a pic of mine when it spouts--stay tuned.

Planted yesterday, Mar 27, 2010

It may be too early to plant in SW WA state, but we shall see. A couple years ago I waited and waited to put my geraniums out on the porch; finally put them out near Mothers' Day, and guess what!? It froze and they died. Kaput! End of the geraniums I'd kept inside, tripping over them, all winter. S*%t! I may have just as well let them freeze in November!! Of course, I COULD have listened to the weather report and brought them in for that night. It pays to pay attention!

Anyway, yesterday I added spinach to my crops that might freeze. I planted them on top of my second year hay bale. I tried hay bale gardening last year and wasn't really very impressed. Some things did OK on them--peas and kale seemed to do OK. Other stuff, not so much. One hay bale is flat, out of the four that would fit in our little pickup. It's about four inches high now. When I plant on it, I will have to construct one of my ingenius (!?) little fences to keep the dogs off it. Now they just run wherever. In fact, Poki was on TOP of the bale I planted yesterday WHILE I was trying to plant it. You wouldn't know she had two badly broken back legs in November!!

I also planted a lot of lavender seeds yesterday in those little peat pellets that swell up in the water. I am hoping to get enough (and permission from the gallery's landlord) to plant a row of them on each side of the sidewalk leading into the gallery. It's already grass-free along the side walk, and I think a row of lavender on each side would look really nice--and lavender's perennial, (here) so it would be a one-time planting. I had lavender in a couple pots that did fine all winter in my backyard. They are both in the ground now. I'm lucky they did OK. Things in pots freeze quicker than things in the ground. I am a lazy gardener.

DH trimmed an evergreen tree and a deciduous bush Friday, and so I am having him cut the evergreen boughs to put on my blueberries, and the bush branches into little chunks to put on the walkways in my garden. It keeps the weeds down and they eventually biodegrade. Hopefully that won't add too much acid to the soil--I never test it (too lazy) so I won't know til something refuses to grow. I have compost to add, too, though, so hopefully everything will work out. I like everything that comes out of my garden to go back in, as much as possible, and am trying to get to the point where I don't have to buy bags of potting soil, manure, etc.

A friend gave me horse manure last year and another is going to give me some this year, so I get that free. I want to build a three part compost bin this year. The Master Gardeners had one at the fair last year; it was made of 98 cement blocks. Let me tell you, if you are a gardener in a wet climate like ours, cement blocks are your best friends! The wood raised beds we built not all that many years ago are completely falling apart; now I use cement blocks to make my raised beds. You can move them to enlarge your bed if you want, and ten years later, they look as good as the day you purchased them. I put them with the holes in the blocks vertical and then I can fill the holes with soil and plant flowers in them. Looks very nice and some flowers thwart the ever present slugs. Marigolds, I think. I've started some of them, too.

I moved a dark green container into the greenhouse; will fill it with water and hope it will radiate enough heat at night to keep the greenhouse from freezing. It's not heated and is made from that wavy fiberglass, which doesn't have insulating properties. I hope to eventually replace that with some of the more modern material that has air spaces for insulation. I am grateful for my greenhouse, though; one of my son's friends that owed us some money, built it for me. This is just my second spring to use it. I tried growing tomatoes in it, to see if they'd winter over, but it wasn't very successful. My tomatoes just don't seem very happy in containers. I think perhaps they needed more fertilizer. I tried the upside down ones, and wasn't very impressed with my results from those either. This year, my tomatoes will just grow in the ground. I COULD just dig a hole for one or two in my greenhouse's floor--it's dirt with crushed gravel on top. Wild blackberries sometimes show up there. I might try that this year and see what happens. Gardening for me is just one big experiment. Stay tuned. I hope I have successes to report, as well as failures!!

Food Inc.

The documentary film Food Inc is being shown on the program POV (Point of View) on PBS on April 21 at 9:00 pm. I've seen this film twice and will watch it again. It is well-worth watching, IMHO. Did you know it is AGAINST THE LAW to criticize a food?! (Remember Oprah and her comment about hamburger? She only was able to win the lawsuit because she has enough money to fight the beef industry. You or I would not be able to win.)

Even the mother whose child died of ecoli could not tell the makers of the film how she had changed her eating habits since her baby died!!!! And she is still working to get Kevin's Law passed. This law will allow the USDA to shut down plants that are producing contaminated food products, which you'd think they should already be able to do, but, unbelievabley, can't.