SUMMER, finally

After a very cold rainy June, the first week of July was wonderfully sunny and warm.

The garden is good. The peas have stopped flowering but are still pretty loaded, we probably have another week of fresh peas.

The tomatoes are possibly loving the sun more than I am. As are the weeds, here are some pictures before and after weeding and pruning, the pile of vegetation removed, and the first baby tomatoes.

Not much summer yet

Tomatoes and peas in the north bed.  The gutter on the garage isn't attached correctly which means that during this very rainy June a lot of water pours down on this bed.  Since we're just renting the place, I've gone for the cheap fix to protect the plants from getting splashed with mud.  It seems to be mostly working, the lettuce (at the base of the peas) is growing finally.

The peas haven't climbed up the strings very well.  I'm not sure if it's a light issue making them bend away from the wall or if it's because there's a bit of a wind tunnel back there.  They're producing peas now.  The boy and I ate one today that was good but the peas were tiny, next week they should be good.

The lettuce in the raised bed is still threatening to shade the tomatoes in that bed.  I've been eating a big salad several times a week which is barely keeping ahead of it.

June 9

Reviving this as our garden blog

Catching up after a year long break. I started 17 varieties of tomatoes, mostly from saved seeds from tomatoes from a farm in the interior. But I dropped the tray one morning in early May when I was taking seedlings out for their day in the sun and all the labels fell out. So it's somewhat a mystery what tomatoes I planted.
May 13

Seedlings right after transplanting to the paper cups-which worked really well as a final transplant container, will do that again.

May 26 Tomato transplant day

Seedlings ready for their new home

Lettuce in the raised bed and a garden nymph

Lettuce after I trimmed out the middle to make space for tomatoes

Guess what's for dinner

First 10 tomatoes in the ground

end of the playing with sweaters

Final tally: I've made 8 longies, 5 soakers, and 3 hats. Two of the longies aren't usable-the first pair i made are just too stiff and scratchy and i shrunk one pair in the wash :( But not bad for $35 worth of thrift shop sweaters.

We're packing up the house so no more machine based creations for a while. We're heading back to my homeland for Christmas then will hit the road, going wherever Thairo has projects for a few months. I'm excited about being a temporary gypsy, hopefully will turn my creative juices towards photography or who knows maybe even paper writing.

More fun with old sweaters

so I've made more longies and a couple of soakers which are good under clothes or next summer when it's too hot for long pants.




And realized yesterday when we were out culture crawling that kidlet really needs some hats that actually stay on his head. So I made these two

woolies!

I don't think my great-grandma ever heard the term "upcycle" but I think she would have liked it. While I may not look much like that particular grandma, I definitely inherited her frugalness (it's frugal people not cheap). And as an ecological bonus, upcycling means I can get new stuff cheap and with very little environmental impact which are the 2 reasons that we're cloth diapering the kidlet.

To date we've been pretty simple with our diapers- prefolds (those square diapers with more fabric in the middle) and wrap covers. But I've been reading breathless, fawning reviews about wool and fleece covers. Basically the cotton diaper absorbs the liquid and the natural water repelling tendencies of wool or fleece keeps that moisture from getting onto the bed or my pants. I was skeptical but tried putting him in fleece pjs in just a diaper, no cover and was really impressed. Kidlet hasn't had any diaper rash and using the most breathable cover possible should keep that streak alive. So, I took the plunge and got some wool sweaters from the salvation army to turn into diaper covers. I'll make some diaper soakers in the future but I decided to start off making wool longies (pants) out of the sleeves of my recycled sweaters.

Close up of sweater before I felted it nearly out of existence


I should have taken a picture to show how big this sweater was before felting but I was just too excited to get the felting started. and the sweater kind of stunk so I wanted to get it washed. Anyway here's the sweater after felting-it went from a very large mens XXL to a weird shaped womens small.


Look how thick this material is now. I was afraid it would kill my sewing machine.


I cut off the sleeves and used a pair of kidlet's pants as a pattern guide. It's just an optical illusion that one sleeve/leg is much wider and shorter.


Standard pants crotch sewing-put right sides together one leg inside the other and sew. I used a zigzag stitch just to make sure that it wouldn't unravel but seriously this sweater has been turned to felt, it's no longer a knit.




Use the hem of the sweater as the waist band of the longies


And they're done


Yesterday I made 2 more pairs of longies out of 2 more upcycled sweaters. The orange pair is from a 100% merino sweater that I also felted a bit more than I wanted. I added a diamond shaped crotch gusset because the legs are pretty skinny and not streatchy. The blue longies are from an 80% wool 20% acrylic sweater that I abused along with the orange and purple sweaters but it didn't felt nearly as much. That pair is nice and stretchy and not too thick. It was the easiest to make-I think it took me less than half an hour to make that one. I made these pretty big so they are longies now but the waist size should be big enough that kidlet can wear these for quite a while.


We've tried both the purple and blue longies overnight with no leaks. And the beauty of wool is it doesn't need to be washed after every use, as long as it's not poopy or stinky it just needs to be air dried between uses.