The past few weeks have been filled with crafting and cleaning. I am working on getting back to a more regular post schedule, which will likely get messed up again by the holidays but we will see.

Crafting

I crocheted a pair of 100% wool socks. I made some small skeins of yarn using my drop spindle. I dyed one of those small skeins using some Barberry berries from the yard. I finished a blanket that I had promised to Ben before we got married. It was a very productive crafting week.

Socks!

There was a make-along for October called Socktober that I decided to participate in because I saw a pattern for crochet socks that I really really wanted to try. And wool socks for a New England winter seemed appropriate. I found the colors on knitpicks and fell in love and I couldn;t be happier with how it all came together. I wish I had done a few things differently. One of those things was done towards the beginning and I refuse to frog that far back.

Yarn Fun!

My new spindle came in and so I ended up making three small skeins while initially practicing. I have since made one more. The visual difference between all of them is so encouraging. I am so excited to play more with the drop spindle and to get the wheel in working order. So I can play with that as well.

I also played a bit with naturally dying yarn. I have some invasive Japanese Barberry growing in the yard that also happens to make a yellow dye when you use the bark and roots. But it also has berries that are currently in season and so I wanted to play with that as well. It took so long to harvest and chop these tiny berries. The Barberry berries are also apparently edible and they smelled pretty good while I was making the dye. I haven’t tried the yellow dye yet but hope to soon. The berry dye turned out pretty well.

Crochet and a Tiny Bit of Knitting

So before my husband, Ben, and I got married I gave my husband an eventual blanket for Christmas. As in I gave him an unfinished blanket that I was still working on finishing. We have now been married for almost six years (I can’t believe it has already been that long) and I only just finished it. Oops. But it is so warm and currently resides on our bed with our down comforter making it perfect for the oncoming New England winter.

I also started practicing knitting recently. Emily, Florence, and Adeline all knit and all collected knitting patterns that I now have on several shelves. I started a sampler stitch scarf for my practice piece. It is far from perfect but I will take it as a decent piece and great practice! I am learning so much about knitting.

Cleaning!

Ben and I got tired of the maze that has become the living room and finally got around to making a plan to fix it. Here is how the living room started.

It is still pretty much the same for now, unfortunately. But we did make some progress on other parts of that plan. The first thought of ours was where to move all the stuff that has plans of being sold/donated/not kept because we don’t have room or a use for them. We settled on clearing what we could from the detached garage and using that to store some of the sell items. So on Saturday of this past week Grammy came to help us go through things. And we pulled pretty much everything out of the detached garage and sorted through it. Which was both fun and incredibly gross. In the past twelve years of just sitting the detached garage became home to a great number of mice… One chest of Clarence “Doc” Ropp’s (Emily’s husband) college papers and photos was completely eaten/ turned into a house. Pretty much everything inside was irredeemable due to the stench emanating from this chest.

We found an antique television, a bunch of tools from when the property had an apple orchard. There were quite a few mystery items that no one was quite cure what they belonged to or were. We basically organized everything into tools, trash, keep, and mystery. Most of the tools were kept along with the majority of the furniture that was in usable state. I am pretty sure we found an antique gas or water pump. The one we found was 100% used for gas, you could still smell the gas. There was an odd mechanical something with knobs and dials that was inside one of the chests. I have no clue what it could possibly be or for what the chest could possibly being used. I then did a bit of cleaning and reorganizing the guest room to make some space for stuff as well.

The next steps are going through the last few boxes in the guest room (they are hiding inside the closet), moving unwanted furniture from the living room to the detached garage, and getting a rug to cover the icky green mat until we can get the floors refinished. Hopefully some headway will be made on this front this week. I also have to hem Ellie’s Halloween costume so she doesn’t trip and fall on her face.

Thanks for joining our adventure!

Lots of Love,

The McMullin Family