Harvest Time

OK, so I haven't dyed the coffee yarn, yet. The kitchen, and the dye pot (only food-safe dyes so far), has been kept busy with corn and tomatoes from my grandmother's garden. Mom and I flash cooked tons of ears of corn, shocked them in cold water, then cut the kernels off the cob. We then bagged the loose corn for freezing, filling every possible space in two top freezers (two refrigerators in the house) and a full stand-up freezer with quart-size bags of corn. Mom loves to cream the corn and it's easier to do so from plain frozen corn than actually making the cream corn before and freezing it that way. Besides, I'd walk off the production line in protest if we cooked all the corn in any one day. Crazy talk.

Then we had all these beautiful tomatoes that needed to be eaten, and I, with my great love of all things tomato, could not eat them quickly enough. So Mom boiled them, peeled the skins, sliced them up, cooked them in their own juices for a bit, and then canned them. Yum. They smelled so good.

I did make a tomato pie. Sauteed onion and garlic on the bottom of a pie crust, slices of fresh, seasoned tomato piled on top, and a mixture of mayonnaise (wait, it really worked), real parmesan, and mozzarella cheese, mixed with fresh basil. No one else really thought the combo sounded appealing, but the joke was on them, and I ate it all. It was particularly good with some mushroom rice (unfortunately, that was from a season packet, but very tasty).

Then, on the way home this afternoon, we stopped by to see my grandmother again (Mamaw). She and her husband, my step grandfather, live in a house just down our road, closer to the base of the mountain. Guess what? More tomatoes! Tomorrow we can some more. But we also picked up grape jelly that she'd made from the concord grapes we grow (OK, they survive on their own despite our neglect) on our own property. It is super tasty.

You can see the grapevines at the bottom edge of the front lawn.

With all these foody goings-on, you would think I'm embracing summer's inevitable slumber and the slide into fall...but I'm not quite sure. This is Lucy's face (she really doesn't enjoy all the rain):

This is kind of how I feel about rolling into fall and the year ending. Is it really over already?

We still have lots and lots of green:

So it's easy to be in denial.

Knitting? I've begun work on the Wayside Lace Cardigan using very old Brunswick Fairhaven wool in a burnt orange-brown that I found in some bags of yarn that one of Mom's friends gave to us.

I was concerned about it being old and not knowing its previous exposure to vermin, even though the yarn ball band said it was "moth-proof" (yeah, right), but also 100% virgin wool. So, I froze it for three days, let it thaw back out, and then threw it back into deep freeze for another three days. It's a little rough, but softens with a good bath after knitting.

I also have a cone of Earth Guild's Dragon Tale 4/2 cotton in their Winter Wood colorway:

It's a sport weight, but light and I plan on using it in a lace wrap, but I haven't settled on a pattern yet.

I am slowly amassing research and tools on acid dyeing wool. More on that at a future date.