Making efficient use of meat

This past week, I had the chance to buy a turkey from a local farmer, and I jumped at the offer. I will not eat industrial meat, so I don’t have poultry very often.

The bird was HUGE. I didn’t weigh him, but probably more than 15 lbs all told. He rested in the unplugged but still cold freezer for a couple of nights, and today was ‘deal with the turkey’ day.

There’s no way we would eat a bird that large at one sitting, and having all that cooked meat leftover would just be asking for trouble. I’m also not quite sure that I have a roaster large enough … Anyway, I decided that the best thing to do was to break it down into manageable parts.

I got out my trusty knives and sat at the table to begin processing. I removed all the skin and then took off meat as best I could – I’m not particularly skilled at this, but it’s much like carving a cooked bird, only it’s not cooked. I removed the silverskin and cartilage whenever I could and put big pieces in one bowl and small pieces in another. In the end, the two huge turkey breast pieces were frozen in separate bags, as one will be enough to feed all five of us no problem, and the other nice large pieces I got were put in a separate bag to be ‘turkey stir fry’ or meat for a casserole. The rest went through the trusty meat grinder (a big metal one, just like my grandma used, purchased at Princess Auto for under twenty bucks if I remember rightly). Three packages that are probably about a pound each were wrapped in waxed paper and put in the freezer to be the basis for some kind of ground meat meal, and the rest was mixed with a pound of bacon (also ground) and some seasonings to make sausage patties. Those are in the freezer now stacked on a cookie sheet between pieces of waxed paper, when they are frozen through I’ll package them up in meal sized batches.

The whole job took me about three hours, and although I could have made stock from the bones and the leftover meat, I chose to just let the dogs have what was left. I generally prefer vegetable stocks, as my old vegetarian meat aversions do come back and catch me unawares sometimes, and poultry broth can really trigger my “eww, no, can’t eat meat” reflex. The dogs and cats will clean off the bones, and since they weren’t cooked, it’s safe to let them have the carcass. (The dogs drag home bits and pieces of quite a lot of things so they are quite accustomed to raw meat … at least this stuff is clean, which is more than can be said for much of what I find them chewing on.)

All in all, I think this was a good use of three hours. The meat is now ready to use and it’ll hold us for quite awhile, as we still eat vegetarian a lot of the time. It’ll be nice to have roasted turkey this coming week, though, I’m looking forward to it!

The home for wayward wheels

A local spinner found a wheel for sale on Kijiji recently – it was a great price (the people were clearing out Grandma-the-hoarder’s house and wanted it gone ASAP), though it was missing a bobbin and in somewhat questionable condition.
Of course, she couldn’t resist and she bought it. It did, indeed, need a little help. Not a lot, but a little. I offered to do the work for her, and she was happy to take me up on that. It’s a “pay me what you think the job is worth when you see the finished project” kind of deal, and since I enjoy doing the tweaking and I think people who want to spin should be enabled as much as possible within their budgets, this works for both of us.
Here’s the before picture:

Dry, unfinished wood, no bobbin, and a really strange blue tape arrangement for the brake band. Hmm.
Here it is now:

Stained with Watco dark walnut all over, but since there are different woods involved (I think this was a kit wheel of some kind) it came out really varied. It’s quite pretty, actually.

There is a proper brake band (leather, not blue fabric tape), the footman is tied on with a leather shoelace, and there’s a drive band (blue cotton warp thread). The loose axle has been fixed firmly in place, and the whole thing has been stained and waxed, though it should probably get a bit more wax to bring out the shine.
It’ll go back home later in the week.
Getting that all finished up was a good day’s work for me, now I’m going back to knitting.

Mixed up seasons

The seasons seem all mixed up, though I know they aren’t.

Winter has been really mild this year, with comparatively little snow. What snow we did have came in small bits, I think we were only snowed in once (usually we are waiting on the plow three or four times in a given winter due to heavy snowfall).

A couple of weeks ago, melting started in earnest. Nice and warm and drippy and soggy, but slow, so the ground can soak up the moisture. The perfect weather for pastures and replenishing the ground.

Then we got a blizzard a few days ago. That was well on the way to melting when we got another, smaller one, last night. No lambs this time – and it’s mostly melted now already.

In my knitting work, I’ve got mixed up seasons happening too: I’m working on an afghan in autumn colours.

This is a beautiful new yarn from Mary Maxim – it is acrylic, but it is nice acrylic (and I don’t say that often). It’s soft and the colours are bright and gorgeous.

Mary Maxim is having a design competition, and I’ll be entering two projects: this afghan, and a shawl that is also underway (in brighter, more spring-like colours, thankfully). The shawl is still too small to take much of a picture, it’s curling up and hiding the stitches, so once it is a little larger I’ll let you see how it is coming along.

All the yarn for these projects (plus more!) is a gift from my parents, who went to the Mary Maxim store in Paris, Ontario and chose it specifically with the design competition in mind. My mom is a quilter and certainly has a good eye for colour, and when my dad was small, he stocked Mary Maxim yarns in the shop his family owned, so these projects are extra special to me.

It’s been a weary sort of day for me, so it’s a good day to just sit and do some easy knitting with pretty coloured yarn.

Learn to knit lace … online

When I first thought about knitting lace, I was terrified – it’s hard, isn’t it? All those holes, all that careful pattern reading … probably way harder than anything I could manage. A fellow knitter encouraged me to just try it, and so I did.

And it worked. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

However, I am a self-directed learner. I like to just try things and see what happens, and for people like me, the internet is full of useful information to help get you started: videos on YouTube, articles on various websites, helpful people on the forums on Ravelry and Homesteading Today. Everything you need to know is out there … if you can find it and are willing to do some experimentation.

Thea again, not everyone learns the way I do, and not everyone is comfortable surfing the haystack that is the web to find the specific needle of information they need. Some people are really quite unprepared to just try something out without having a coach there to guide them through the various steps. And you know what? That’s okay.

Because you see, I can do that coaching thing. Even without having to travel to your house to do it, or meeting you at some central location, or being on a webcast at the same time of day. I’d love to help you get started with lace knitting, because lace knitting is awesome. And thanks to the miracle of the internet, I can be in your living room in the middle of the night, if you like, helping you with your knitting.

Online learning is cool. The Boy does all of his schooling online, and the Reluctant Farmer has been taking a lot of courses that way as well. I used to write courseware for teaching computer classes, and I like knitting way better than I like software, so I figured … why not make a course to help people who want to learn, but who aren’t going to travel to a class somewhere and aren’t ready to just figure it all out on their own?

So I did. Today, the first online classroom for Demystifying Lace Knitting: the basics by Fibre with Frazzlehead went live.

Care to find out more? Check it out here.

A story in a scarf

My friend Wheelwright suggested that I create a design that spoke of forgiveness “in a language that knitters would understand”.
I spent a few weeks pondering design elements, shapes, construction ideas … and eventually it came to me.
There is a seed stitch border – because we all carry the seeds of violence and the seeds of peace within us. One of the Quaker Queries on the Peace Testimony relates to this:

We are called to live 'in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars'. Do you faithfully maintain our testimony that war and the preparation for war are inconsistent with the spirit of Christ? Search out whatever in your own way of life may contain the seeds of war. Stand firm in our testimony, even when others commit or prepare to commit acts of violence, yet always remember that they too are children of God.

The seeds of war are held in our anger and our grudges and our refusal to let go of injury. We need to seek out those seeds, and put them aside in favour of the seeds of peace.
There is also a knot – anger and hurt feel like a knot inside your chest. The knitted pattern gradually untangles itself, though, as our own inner knots can be unwound when we listen to our hurts and give ourselves time to heal.
The untwisted knot becomes a vine – because when we let go of our anger and choose forgiveness for ourselves and others, we can start to grow again.
Mathanas is the Gaelic word for forgiveness.

Available now on Ravelry

Weird spring blizzard: the perfect day for lambing

Very early yesterday morning I woke up in need of a glass of water, and I heard rain on the windows.

“Great,” I thought, “that’ll help wash away some more of the snow, and since we’re down to bare ground in a lot of places, it will go quickly.”

I went back to sleep, and when I woke up the rain had stopped. Oh well, sunshine melts snow too.

Then I looked out the window.

All that arrived in just a few hours. Whoa. I was very glad not to have to go anywhere in the car, not with that heavy wet stuff all over the roads.

I flipped the switch to make sure the batteries were charging from the grid power and got the dishwasher going: with all that snow a power outage was probably coming and although there is enough solar power to keep us quite comfortable for a good long while, it’s best to be topped up before a storm if you can. We did have power outages off and on all day, though they were all short lived.

The next thing I thought was “some sheep is going to decide that today is the perfect day to have a lamb”. Storms and bad weather don’t bother the Icelandics much, so it could happen. Sure enough, The Boy came to the door and said “can you come deal with this lamb please?” I was just getting into my coveralls when he appeared at the door again, this time holding a tiny little lamb. “Here,” he said, “deal with this one first. It got out of the  pen and couldn’t figure out how to get back in, so it’s kind of cold.” Sure enough, the little lamb was shivering, and when I stuck my finger in his mouth it was cool, but not as chilled as some we’ve had to work with in the past. He was trying hard to suck my finger so I knew he’d be okay once he warmed up, so I put him on a wool rug (which is actually the felted coat of one of the Icelandics, who didn’t get shorn in time) in front of the fireplace and headed outside to check on his twin. The other lamb was up and nursing and doing fine, so we put him in the barn with his mama and I was able to get a bit of milk in a jar for the chilly lamb. The lamb greedily drank the colostrum from the oral syringe, though he was still shivering. I put a heated barley bag over his chest and belly and he went to sleep, peaceful as anything, with the cat sniffing at the milk droplets on his chin.

Once the lamb was good and warm, I helped him to his feet. He immediately started butting at my leg, a sure sign that he was ready to see his mama again, so I got into my outside gear once more and took him out to the barn. The ewe wanted nothing to do with him: she sniffed him and seemed unimpressed, and when he tried to nurse she butted him away. Then I realized that there was a second ewe in the barnyard bellowing that “where is my baby?” sound – aha! We didn’t have twins, we had two ewes who had delivered at the same time! Sure enough, once that mama caught sight of her baby she was ecstatic, talking to him and licking him and quite happy to let him nurse. She needed a bit of a trim around the lower half so that the poor lamb could find his way to what he was after, but that mama was really calm, and just stood there chewing her cud while I did a quick haircut.

Today, all is well outside, we have two happy lambs with two happy mamas.

This mama is a Southdown/Columbia cross, and her lamb is clearly an Icelandic cross – the curly fleece and short tail are the giveaway there:

And the other mama is a similar sheep – a Columbia/Southdown cross, and her lamb is very clearly a Southdown baby … one of Jack’s last offspring.

Look at those big feet and that adorable face.

I do love my sheep. :)

Shearing to Shawl

I spent the last three days at the local Farm and Ranch show, participating in a Shearing to Shawl event hosted by the alpaca spring show.

We were a bit surprised to find out that we were the headline event!

Thursday around noon, two alpacas were shorn and their fibre put out on a sorting table for us … and then we were off to do our thing. With the assistance of several spinners and knitters who showed up to help, we got that fibre combed (some of it – it was so clean that spinning directly from the locks was not a problem), spun, and woven and knitted into two finished objects: a rectangular stole and a woven scarf.

I didn’t get much in the way of pictures, but I should have a few emailed to me in the next few days and I’ll post them when they arrive.

The stole was made by using Judy’s Magic Cast On to cast on … umm … a lot of stitches. I didn’t count. Lots. Then we worked in the round, increasing every corner for the first six rounds or so, then every other round. It’s a great strategy when you aren’t sure how much yarn (or time) you will have but need to create a rectangular object of some width or other. One of our number is accomplished at crochet, and worked an interesting crochet cast off / loopy lacy border that gave extra definition and size to the stole at the last minute. Here it is, being modeled at the judging table:

It was fun, if exhausting. We explained the magic of spinning and weaving and knitting to groups of bystanders, talked to alpaca owners about what spinners want in the fibre, and got to pet and hug a lot of adorable creatures.

In fact, the second alpaca they sheared for us, a female named Eos, is the same one who came up to me while I was spinning at the show in the fall and kissed me on the cheek! Her people (the nice folks at Northern Mystery Alpacas) brought her specifically to be one of the animals donating fibre to us, because they know that the beautiful and friendly Eos loves spinners. Athena, also from Northern Mystery, provided us with a lovely brown coat and the two colours blended beautifully together. Not incidentally, this was the cleanest, most dirt and VM-free alpaca fibre I’ve ever handled straight off the animal. Combine that with the absolutely amazing shearing job (the lady who did the shearing will have done 10,000 animals by the end of this shearing season, so she is good)  meant that we had almost no second cuts to deal with (I think I ran into about three little tufts the entire time and they came out easily). It was about as good a spinning experience as you can have, particularly when you don’t have time to wash or fully prep the fibre before you get going on your project.

Later, I’m going to write a big post about how much I love wool combs for fibre prep, but for now, I am going to relax with my cup of coffee and my knitting beside the fire … because when I woke up this morning, all the grass that I was so happy to see yesterday was covered in a foot of fresh, sticky snow.

I’m staying inside today.