Finding time

I think one of the hardest things, no matter who you are or what time period you live in is finding time. There are some days I feel like my mind is in a thousand locations. Thinking, what do I still have to do, how much time does it take, why does my to-do list never get any smaller. I look back at my life and I have been busy and I remain busy. I have learned to compartmentalize, prioritize, and be somewhat organized. Between baking, cooking, gardening, sewing, tatting, spinning, knitting, learning new things, reading, studying, and remembering what I need to do at work sometimes I will admit I do feel a little stretched thin. It is finding balance though that keeps me from going crazy and shutting down.

So how do I find time for it all? Well first is by knowing how long things take and setting time limits. Like tonight, I came home from work, I typed up my blog, giving myself only until 6:45 to type up them. This doesn’t mean I am posting, I am just typing up the rough draft, and thinking what I will need for pictures, and then by Tuesday when I post it will be already to go and I can just click publish. After that I am making supper, now when I cook I make big things, tonight is leftover chili. This means I spent one day cooking it, making a lot which means I have lots of meals for the future, and all I need to do is heat it up. After dinner, I can knit, or sew until bed. Now tomorrow when I come home, I will do some cleaning, maybe work in my garden, then eat dinner and sew, knit or spin.

To keep track of my projects, I write. All over my house I have note pads. I have a note pad by my computer with my blog ideas. I have note pad on my kitchen counter where I note items I need to buy and what I need to do before a certain date. On my calendar I note where I need to be on different days so I can keep track. In my purse I keep a green note book. Inside it are tools for my purse knitting project, (the one I keep in there in case I have spare moments), and a list of every project I have yet to do or need to do. There is no order to the list but it helps me keep track of what yarn or fabric is for what project and what I need to do.

Some project take forever for me to do. A cousin is getting married and I have no clue what they are getting yet and I still haven’t finished the last cousin’s gift. (I promise I will finish it soon-ish,  maybe, someday). Keeping track isn't easy but neither is finding time but if you spare a moment here, and a moment there, it doesn't pile up so bad. (Hopefully)

So how do you find the time? Do you set times for set things, or do you follow your heart, or are you like me and halfway between the two? Do you keep lists everywhere, or think, I’ll remember? Do you struggle to find the balance or is balance in the disorder? I am kind of the later. I’d rather be disorderly balanced then have nothing to do. Life is more interesting that way. 

Lay my sewing down...

No matter what century or world we talk about there are always things that get left behind. Sometimes it is because something better comes along, sometimes because we forget about it and sometimes just because. I am always on the hunt for these little treasures of things that we have long since stopped using. One of them I discovered three years ago was the sewing pillow. Yea you read that right. It is one of those items that aren't talked about in sources. I know a lot of what I talk about isn't well documented but this is one of those items we can source but not in the written word. It is however documented in a number of paintings from the 1500s and 1600s hundreds.

Nicolaes Maes 1634-1693. Not only is she sewing with a sewinp pillow she has a bobbin lace on a pillow sitting on the chair 

When I was first shown this helpful tool I shrugged it off. Why would I need such a thing? Yet as time went one I grew to love it so much that I made myself one for my home use. They are pretty easy to make, just stuffed a square pretty good with wool, cotton or if you’re adventurous scrap cloth. This little pillow sits on your lap and holds your project in place bringing it to a more comfortable position for your body and your eyes. I have even pinned my project to the pillow so that it wouldn't blow around in the wind when I was working outside or was setting a seam.

The Needle woman (1635-1643) by Diego Velazquez hanging in the national Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.. sewing on a pillow

Now the word pillow according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is a bag filled with soft material that is used as a cushion, usually for the head of a person who is lying down. They are filled with feathers, down, sponge rubber or plastic fiber, (it forgets to mention wool). It also refers it to “a cushion or pad tightly stuffed and used as a support for the design and tools in making laces with a bobbin.” (It should read making bobbin lace, since that is really the only lace that requires a pillow but then again I am being nit-picky.) The noun comes from the Middle English word,  pilwe or Old English, pyle and the Latin word pulvinus and predates the 12^th Century. As a verb it isn't seen until 1629 but you can guess that it was probably in use about 20 years before that.

Gerard Terborch (1617-1681) Woman sewing. Not only is she sewing on a pillow, but she hasa baby next to her, she has an awsome coif and well look at the color of the pillow, it is blue.

What has all that to do with sewing pillows? Well evidence of them being used in sewing is seen in engravings and paintings by Johannes Stradanus, Jacob Cats, Phillipe Gale and more. Some of them have tassels hanging off the corners making them a bit fancier, while others are appear plain. They seem to be in the shapes of squares and rectangles and about a lap’s width. They appear to bring the women’s project up more to the waist line as they work. They are very well stuffed, almost appearing firm, and are most likely stuffed with cotton or wool. My first attempt at one, I stuffed with bits of cloth that were in my scrap pile. It worked well but is too heavy for my lap and so I re-stuffed it with stuffing from Jo-Ann’s. I have a few different sizes, so depending on my project I can pick one over another. Plus I can leave them in all my different sewing locations and kits.

So why have sewing pillows become a forgotten tool among sewers? That I don’t know. What I do know is I love my forgotten useful tool. 

Yarn bowling... Strike!

We have all got that fear in our heads, You’re knitting in church, at a town hall meeting, at the office meeting or on the train and our ball of yarn falls out of our laps rolls down the aisle and stops right at whomever is talking’s feet. You turn beat red as you make your way up to the evil ball of yarn pick it up and slowly wishing the earth will open up and take you, make your way back to your seat. For a brief moment you consider maybe this isn’t the place to knit, and unless you are at Church (where you take it as a sign from God that this really isn’t the time despite your deadline), you say nah, and keep knitting. Now at home it is a whole different story. You are knitting in your home, because you don’t want to do your chores, and there goes the ball off the couch where you are sitting and rolls to the dirtiest corner in your living room, or through the dirt if you are outside. In that case you might think I might need to clean but I’d rather be knitting so after you pick up your ball and brush it off you keep knitting. If you have a cat or dog you might have to chase them down first to get the ball.

Have you experienced any of that? Yea it has happened to me a few times, though never at church. One of the other things that must have gone through your mind is there has got to be an easier way. 

Now Modern methods for winding balls of yarn have made this problem a bit less but some companies still sell their yarn in skeins that you must wind yourself, so those are usually the biggest culprits of this problem. Well believe it or not there are some solutions.

A hook version I found on Pintrest. Find in on my knitting gadgets board.

On the market there easy to find are yarn bowls, and sacks. One of the ladies in my NH knitting group has a plastic one that she can set on the table or hang around her neck that also holds her tools. I have a yarn sack I can loop through my hand and knit with when I am in public. I found it among my Grandma’s stuff. It has proven very handy with some of my smaller projects, such as socks and mittens. Then recently a friend of mine, who does pottery, traded with me a pair of mittens for a gorgeous and may I say ever so useful yarn bowl. I feel a little bad because every time I see her I thank her, because oh my god do I love it. Now it doesn't work if you are doing multiple colors but I am not panicking every second that my yarn is going to do it’s traveling act on to my dirty rug and under my coffee table or to the worst possible spot where I have to preform yoga to reach it. I think the only reason I am flexible is because I am forever getting things out of the most inconvenient places.

My new Yarn Bowl

Now to find time to knit.

Yarn bag

Got any .useful tools you think I should try out or find out about, let me know in the comments.

Spring, Spring, Spring

So my dear readers have you sensed it yet, the leaves are coming back, My work garden if you look close you can seethings making an appearance.and the birds are reappearing, those are sure signs of one thing, SPRING!!!!!! Alright so I am excited but hey I have right to be I live in New England, we had record snow fall. Even my truck was covered. (If you live south of the Equator, I am sorry.) What is the best part of spring… well other then everything, I think it is planting. Yea that is right I get to plant my garden again. I haven’t quiet decided how my home garden will work out but my work garden that is another story. On the first day I got to plant, I planted spinach, red tongue deer lettuce, radish, onions, leeks, cabbages, peas, and parsley.

My work garden if you look close you can seethings making an appearance

Now it will be a few weeks until I see anything growing, and then maybe a few more weeks after that until I can pick anything but hey it feels good to work in the soil again. When I was a kid loved to help my mom in the garden. I am not sure how much of a help I actually was but it is the thought that counts. We would plant peas, and beans, pumpkins, now and then carrots, and once we even did sweet corn. Of course there were also tomatoes and my mom still continues to make the best spaghetti sauce in the world. We would go to my Grandpa K’s house and he and my Grandma would have planted tomatoes, beans, butternut squash and summer squash. I was always impressed at the size of their garden. At my Grandpa G’s there was the largest blueberry bush and there garden always had lettuce and beans. They grew so many beans that we even call them GG Beans. It helped to keep straight him from his father who was also Grandpa G.

So why do we garden, well one is because freshness. I think the secret to my mom’s spaghetti sauce is that she grows the tomatoes. The moment she harvest them they go straight in to the pot. Even her Oregano is from her garden. The second thing is they are sweeter. I am not sure if it is the fact that you grew the goods yourself but there is something about the difference in produce between store bought, farmers market bought and home grown. It is your sweat, your caring, sometimes your tears, and on occasion your blood that goes into your garden. I have even found strength in it. Now sometimes because I am gardening so much at work my home garden misses out on some of my love and attention but I still enjoy seeing what comes out.

Gardening is nothing new. It like everything in history goes back in forth to how often it is seen. They are very common in the country side where you have a lot of room but in the city they are still not all that common. You might find homes with potted plants and some cities today are finding way to put them on roofs and other locations like that. Yet in cities throughout time it hasn’t changed, food is still trucked in from the country. There were places in some cities though were market gardens were kept, usually in abandoned lots were the building had fallen down but the idea of seeing them would depend on what city you were in, what part of the city you were in and what era you are in.

Dutch Painter Beuckelear's Earth dipicts the fresh vegetation you might find at the local market.

So here is to the things we grow now that spring is making an appearance. Here is to spring’s arrival, and summer’s coming. Here’s to the aces in our backs and legs, the sweat on our brows and the love in our hearts. What will you be growing this year? 

Wraping thread

When we sew we need thread. Today thread comes on a bobbin, or a spool. Even non-sewers know what these look like. Yet spools of thread haven’t been around all that long in the grand scheme of sewing. Spools as we think of them today have only been around for 100 years coinciding with the beginning of the industrial age and the invention of the sewing machine. Spools of thread were common long before that but the shape of them now is a modern concept. Before that they were bigger and balkier and more for selling the thread then for being purchased themselves. Thread could of course be purchased in small spools or you could purchase just the amount of thread you needed. It could be wrapped around a scrap of cloth to be kept or a thread winder.

My Victorian thread wrapper you can hang from your belt

Thread winders are also used for prettiness factor. They can be extremely interesting and pretty. Most samples I have seen date from the late 18^th centuries and seem to fall out of use by the turn of the 20^th century. They can be animal shaped wrapping your thread around the body of your animal. Some are crosses with eye catching patterns and details. They were as much something to look at pretty in your basket as they were about being a useful part of your basket. What’s more  perfect interesting and useful. 

Swiftly winding....

A few years ago I went home to visit my mother. She gave me a whole bunch of my grandmother's knitting, sewing, and tatting supplies. Among the magic that were in the piles of stuff was a ball winder. Now at the time I was living with my aunt. That same weekend she went to a yarn and wool festival and bought herself a yarn winder but also a swift. Now more and more yarn companies are selling their yarn the old fashion way, in hanks. A hank is when you take the yarn off the bobbin and wrap it around a kniddy knoddy (this will bring up a whole different blog post.) The result when you take it off a kniddy knoddy  is a hank that you then curl in on itself before you wind it into a ball to use it. With the creation of massive yarn companies this has fallen by the way side but dyers and artisan spinners still sell it in this form.

the swifter I asked for at Christmas

What happens is you take your yarn hank and place it on your swift, and it holds it for you while you go through the pain of winding it. If you have a ball winder you may get it done even faster. Now I have wound yarn with out a swift, to put it simply, it was like trying to eat ice cream on a very hot day. You think when you start it is a good idea, but by the end you are still sweaty, but now sticky and wishing you had asked for a cup and not a cone. First you start in the spread knee position, holding the yarn on your knees as you wind but then you are stuck in the position. As your ball becomes bigger the yarn around your knees has slid off with you noticing. Now instead of a some what organized hank you have the biggest knot you have ever seen in your life. You put down the ball to fix the hank and the ball not only rolls off your lap but under the table and across the room where the dog discovers it. You get up to retrieve the ball after putting the even more knotted hank down. What should have been a 10 minute winding process turns into a three hour epic project. If the yarn was under $15 dollars you might go get scissors to get yourself out of the mess. If the yarn is over $25 you will continue to muffle curses under your breath as you try to straighten out the mess. If you are single you might start thinking it is time to date again, so you have someone who can hold the hank for you. If you are married, you decide you might sit though his grumbling of he has better things to do for 30 minutes then to ever debate doing this by yourself again. If your really smart you ask for a swift for Christmas (after debating the maybe I should find a human one).... which is what I did.

Mid 19th century swift at Lowell Mills National Historical Park

So I received my swift, I have already in 3 months wound 6 balls of yarn, I love my new toy. Now here is the thing the idea of swifts goes back centuries. They are often seen in varying shapes and styles in the back of paintings, and prints through time. Spinners use them to stretch the yarn to make sure the spin holds. Also they have been used to measure yarn. They will count how many times the yarn goes around the swift to know if they have enough for what ever they will be using it for. Weavers use swifts to measure their warping threads, if they don't have a warping board, to make sure they are all even.

Some come on stands, often called Yarn weasels. These ones would often make a popping sound as you spun them so you would know how many yards you had completed. Others were umbrella style and could be easily folded up. Mine is two bars that come apart and you put pegs in it to hold your yarn at various sizes. It can also be screwed to the wall.

19th century metal yarn swift.

So here is to the tool that makes my spinning, knitting and (if I ever learn how to weave) weaving life easier, the swiftly swift. (I know bad pun.)

Grind his bones to make my bread...

So everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. One of the most famous lines from Jack’s story is “Fe Fi Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an English Man.” Then everyone gets fuzzy on the next line until he says “Grind his bones, to make my bread.” Alright now that is just gross but it brings up the point, anything if you really want it to can be ground down to make flour. In fact some friends and I recently read the ingredients on a Gluten free and apparently flour free cake. It was not in fact flour free, just wheat flour. Gluten is a protein found in the seed that when mixed with yeast, baking soda or baking powder that lets the dough rise. What the cake was made out of was rice flour.

van Gogh 1885, wheat field

In the 16^th and 17^th century English documents the word grain is used but not as often as the word corn. Corn during this time period referred to any good that could be ground down to a powder. In a number of sources the word corn is found following anything that might be ground down to make flour, wheat corn, rye corn (though this is falling out of favor by the late 17^th century being referred to as just rye), barley corn, Native Corn (Flint corn, or the very colorful corn we use to decorate our table at Thanksgiving time), Pea Corn (also falling out of favor like rye, becoming just peas), Gun Corn (referring to the ingredients that get ground down to make gun powder) and so on. Now based on archaeological evidence the first bread seems to be made in the Fertile Crescent, what is today Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Syria, Israel, and Palestine.  Bead was the staple food of the people in this area and they were harvesting vast fields of wild barley and wheat 22,500 years ago.

Now with the creation of fire, people have been cooking with fire for almost as far backs as Homo sapiens which is around 4,800 years old. (That is us by the way,) The earliest evidence of human cooking heaths dates to 250,000 B.C. That dates to Homo heidelberenis (350,00 years old,) but a few years ago, charred bones and primitive stone tools were found in a cave in South Africa, moving cooking on a fire to 1 Million years ago (That dates to Homo erectus).

Small Morter and Pestle

Ignoring when fire was created it, using it to cook caused not only our bodies to get used to cooked food but also our bodies to adapt to cooked food, hence body parts like the appendix that we don’t need anymore. This means that when 22,500 years ago when we start eating wheat and barley our bodies couldn't digest it in its raw state nor could our teeth handle it. So we “grind grains to make our bread” to paraphrase the giant.

Grinding Stone

Now a statue out of Old Kingdom Fifth Dynasty Egypt (2,465-2,323 B.C.) shows a woman grinding flour on with a flat rock and almost round pin. Evidence of this method for grinding are found the world over. Examples are found all over Mesas in the Western Americas. Mesa Verde in Colorado has some beautiful examples that date to over 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. Mortar’s and Pestles are found all over showing the pounding method everywhere. Eventually these gave way to mills. The first mill was run by slaves or mules around 300 BC and by 89 BC the first water wheel was created. Archaeologists are still determining if it is in Greece, Norway or one of the other few locations that gets to claim who had it first. The grinding mill allowed flour to be readily produced for the masses, strengthening breads grasp on cultures around the world.

5th Dynasty Egypt

So grind on, enjoy bread, and I prefer stone ground over steal ground (today's method) when I can get it.   

Ryan's Interpretations : First Person Perspectives [Guest Post!]

Ryan's Interpretations : First Person Perspectives ,[Guest Post!]: This month I did something different. I decided to reach out to my community of friends who also blog about things historical and try to tap...