Nurtured by Love

Category: Family life

  • Fireweed Hub

    Fireweed Hub

    Four years ago I joined the board of the Silverton Co-work Society. They were a group working towards the creation of a co-work space in the area, and had just married that idea to another long-term community goal: of a food hub. It was a long, twisty road we trod, but the result is that we are now the Fireweed Hub Society and successfully managed a million dollars in grant money to renovate a heritage building on Main Street, transforming it into and absolutely amazing community resource.

    We opened in May 2024 and two months later the area was hit with a massive wildfire event. Our still-wet-behind-the-ears facility became the de facto community hub. Amidst all the evacuations and business closures, we were able to accept donated food, purchase what we could from businesses with excess produce to help feed people in need, rally dozens and dozens of volunteers to do useful things, employ laid-off food workers, feed firefighter and structure protection crews, welcome evacuees and those on alert to hang out, to connect, to eat, to destress, and act as the information hub and meeting space.

    It was the ultimate proof of concept: we manage a multi-purpose community space that can quickly adapt to serve almost any need. The emergency situation demonstrated to community members the breadth needs that we can serve: we are not just a pop-up restaurant venue! And we enjoyed a lot of positive press coverage and a huge boost to our reputation throughout the region.

    Thank goodness things settled down by mid-August, giving us the chance to better find our feet. The remainder of our inaugural year has included pop-up restaurant and café offerings provided by chefs who rent our space, weekly social / recreational / educational gatherings for community elders, a lot of use by non-profit and other groups for in-person, remote and hybrid meetings, meal preparation for the local food bank, occasional use by value-added food producers, and a steady rota of food-related workshops and cooking bees.

    Our Society is comprised a great “working board” of directors and some great staffers; we have fun and enjoy and trust each other. My role is as the lead on the co-working operations, I sit on the fund-raising committee, I manage the website and the technology solutions within the space, and am the communications and publicity person. I also do a lot of volunteer dishwashing and food prep for the programming our society offers.

    I probably do 5-10 hours of Fireweed work in a typical week, but some weeks are just an hour or two while others more like half-time or even full-time. It’s gratifying, because we have created a community-informed tangible facility that is unique, and is already serving a range of important roles.

  • Front Room

    Front Room

    Old plaster-and-lath and gaping fir flooring in the front room.
    Old plaster-and-lath, upside-down receptacle and gaping fir flooring in the front room.

    Oh look. I did some things. The front bedroom was uninhabitable when we took possession of the Nelson house. Over the summer Noah, Sophie and friends stripped and then repainted the two gyproc walls, but the ceiling was flaky acoustic tile and two of the walls were this stuff: plaster and lath with a bit of vermiculite behind it, being held together by many layers of paint, wallpaper and press-board panelling. At the suggestion of our building inspector we chose not to investigate asbestos status but simply to leave everything intact and seal it off. The safest way, really. So I cleaned loose plaster away, shimmed the places where it was gone completely and got the walls passably flat.

    New drywall, and electrical receptacle now right-side-up
    New drywall, and electrical receptacle now right-side-up

    Then I drywalled over it. The ceiling required ten-foot sheets. Chuck and I did those together with a single step-ladder and, among other things, a baseball bat. Not too many corners (or arms or toes) got damaged.

    I actually kind of like taping and mudding drywall. Not that I’d want to do that for a living, but a single room is a gratifying project. I’ve done it before, but it had been years. I got better at it as I went. In the end I didn’t get obsessive and do a full skim coat, since the two walls that had been done by a previous owner weren’t perfect either. But I got a pretty decent finish in the end.

    Walls painted, hickory flooring and moldings done.
    Walls painted, hickory flooring and moldings done.

    From there it was on to painting. I went with what was marketed as a sort of chic tan-grey but turned out to be not that far off the colour of raw drywall, but whatever. Neutral, so that redecorating won’t require repainting, since we’re not really sure what this room will be for over the medium-term, and may not own the house for all that long anyway.

    Then the flooring went in. That was really fun. I had picked up enough surplus engineered hickory via the regional buy & sell website for a nice price. I floated it over an underlayment, gluing the tongue-and-groove together, staggering the joints. It took me about 5 hours, and this was where the room really began to pop for me. Adding the mouldings was a time-consuming final step but brought everything up to the next level.

    Looking the other way, mountain dusk in the distance.
    Looking the other way, mountain dusk in the distance.

    Sophie liked the room enough to move into it, vacating the larger, slightly more private room on the other side of the house. Which prompted Fiona to move across into the now-empty “blue room” that had been Sophie’s.  All of which is good because it means that the room she was in, which Noah repainted during the summer, is now empty and can get a bunch of finishing details done. Then I can move into that, meaning the entire upstairs will be empty and we can start looking towards a major renovation up there in the spring. The plan for upstairs is to add a dormer with a bathroom in it, and turn the rest into a master bedroom. The extra bathroom is definitely needed in a house with four bedrooms. Last weekend during the choral festival we had Sophie’s friend plus four billets staying with us. The eight of us had enough space, but sharing one bathroom eight ways was nuts. The girls were great about it but … yeah, it was crazy.

  • House progress

    I really love our Nelson house. When we bought it I was sold on it as an investment, a fixer-upper, but I think I’m falling in love now. It has a really nice feel to the living space. It’s open and light and airy during the day, and yet at night it feels cosy and welcoming: the best of both worlds! I love the absence of clutter and the simplicity of the space. I know it’s probably just a matter of time, but I’m determined to do whatever I can to keep the junk from accumulating. (Maybe it will help that Chuck doesn’t actually live there!)

    Now that we’re establishing a fall routine of back and forth-ing, I’m love having repair and renovation projects I can pick away at when I’m there, rather than just feeling like I’m killing time during the girls’ activities. This week I did a fair bit of outdoor work, dealt with a couple of filthy floors and completed the stripping of a white bookcase in preparation for repainting it black. I’ve also been researching historical colour schemes for the exterior. The big project for next week will hopefully be drywalling the front bedroom. I’ve been making extensive use of Kijiji (our version of Craigslist) and have scored some lovely hand-scraped hickory to re-do the flooring in there too. Sophie is hosting three choir festival billets the first weekend of November, so I hope to have that room finished by then!

    • Finished converting my 1989 black Stumpjumper into a mountain city cruiser

  • Summer, here and gone

    It was an early summer. The trees were greening up a good 3-4 weeks earlier than usual, and the season continued to unfurl early. The lake got “warm” (as warm as it ever does) in June. The wildfires were burning by the end of June. The huckleberries peaked in mid July. The wildflowers up Idaho peak were over before August began. And here it is September 2nd and the ‘late’ apples, pears and prune plums are ripening, the rains have socked in and the leaves are turning.

    IMG_2233
    Symphony on the Mountain

    And there has been a lot of water under the bridge. My mom came to visit. She’s really struggling with her rheumatoid arthritis, but a bit of prednisone helped take the edge off while she was here. She was able to be here when Erin performed a repeat of her grad recital locally. It was wonderful for us all to hear the maturity her playing has these days. She played the Debussy Sonata, Beethoven Sonata No. 7 and the Bach C Major solo sonata. She and I did the Symphony on the Mountain gig together in Kimberley. Kind of fun, and nice for me to get back to doing some symphony playing.

    Fiona changed violin teachers. Although she really liked her previous teacher as a person, maybe the relationship was too casual: she just wasn’t feeling the drive to impress her, and maybe there was some trust lacking as well. She has had three lessons with the new teacher, and has said “She’s a little bit intimidating at first, but really nice, and she’s seasoned. You can tell she really knows what she wants, and how to explain it to me.” The new teacher is the one Erin went to for part of a year, who had to suddenly stop teaching when her husband got cancer. He’s well now, and she has returned to teaching in a very limited under-the-radar fashion. Fiona is one of three or four regular students she has. So far so good. We’ll get properly underway in a couple of weeks.

    Ballet-specific physio
    Ballet-specific physio

    There has been physiotherapy. It has gone well. The tendons healed. The strength and flexibility have been very much compromised, though. There were several therapy sessions and lots of daily exercises prescribed. We had to drive to Spokane to get new pointe shoes and she’s now beginning some re-training exercises en pointe at home. She’s signed up for three two-hour days a week of ballet this year. Hopefully she’ll know enough to avoid pushing too hard as she comes back from this. She’s young and they start the year gradually: she’ll probably be fine. Gymnastics may be harder to approach as carefully.

    The Uphill Cruiser, in progress
    The Uphill Cruiser, in progress: waiting on rubber and wicker

    I started building a city bike, rehabilitating the Stumpjumper I bought in 1989 to try to get a couple of years of life out of it toodling around Nelson. I figure the mountain-climbing gears will be essential climbing 10% grades with payload. Eventually I hope to get an e-bike, but that’s hard to justify now when most of my travel is to transport kids.

    Helping out at Dance Camp
    Helping out at Dance Camp

    Fiona wasn’t able to do dance camp, but she ended up being the teacher’s assistant at both the Music Explorers and age 6-11 dance camp. She was amazingly hard-working, helpful, pro-active and mature. Put in long days … up to 6 hours straight without any real break, herding children, helping with activities, doing prep and clean-up, redirecting problematic behaviour, supervising for safety.

    Sophie and Noah have spent most of the summer in Nelson at the Mill St. house. Sophie has been working full-time at a café. She’s taken up longboarding. She’s got herself a twice-weekly paper delivery route. She shops, she cooks, she cleans, she’s been taking a Spanish course. She’s a maniac hard worker. Noah has spent much of the summer getting cold after cold, and when not sick playing D&D with his Nelson friends until the middle of the night. He’s also done some renovation and cleaning work on the Mill St. house. Spackling, washing everything with TSP, painting, carpet-underlay scraping, all that fun stuff.

    SVI Play-in
    SVI Play-in

    SVI happened. It was over-the-top busy for me. Delegation is not my strong point. But Erin and Fiona were very helpful, and overall things ran smoothly. We had 95 students this year, the most ever, and with my grip on a local team of volunteer-parents slipping away now that I don’t teach locally, I struggled even more with asking for help. I managed to delegate one area, with rather less success than might have been due to my inability to relinquish control, but there is plenty of “room to grow” as they say.

    IMG_2312We went to Ontario to visit my family and Chuck’s family. All six of us went, a miracle of planning and lucky timing. Erin was completing a Suzuki teacher training course in Waterloo, so we intercepted her there and managed visits here and there.

    I biked as much as I could. The new bike has been fabulous. I got much stronger over time and decided there was no need for a bigger sprocket or smaller chainring. I just bought a used trainer, a Cycle Ops Fluid 2, and plan to keep riding in the garage even through worst of the fall rains and winter conditions. I have my iPhone rigged up on the aero bars for reading books. Also in the plans is a two-day Silvery Slocan bike ride, from one home to the other and back again.

    IMG_2371And there’s been a bit of trail-running and mountain biking and alpine hiking. Not as much as any of us wished, but Fiona’s limited ambulatory capacity has put a bit of a crick in our style.

    But there: that’s some of it anyway. And so we move onwards into fall.

  • Pergola completed

    Pergola completed

    With lights and wattle railing panels installed.

  • Pergola

    • A little help from Limpet
    Our “new” deck is almost five years old now. I always had bigger dreams for the square apron that extends towards the trees, but at the time we opted to put up a minimalist railing for safety reasons. Of course that had the effect of eliminating all the urgency of doing something else with the space.

    A couple of weeks ago at Fiona’s behest I ordered some nice globe lights to string over the apron. We spend a lot of time walking around Nelson and, being new to the whole business of neighbourhood rambles, we enjoy noticing the neat things people have done with their homes and businesses. We were admiring a lovely lighted patio and suddenly the push was on to enact some similar ambiance at home.

    Over the Easter long weekend, with all four of us home and available, we decided it would be an opportune time to push to get the project both started and [hopefully] completed. I had spent a few hours the previous week digging the screws and bolts out of the under-inner-side of the old uprights. Chuck had got busy reclaiming lumber from the remains of our old carport, cutting it down to the right dimensions.

    When we got home from Nelson mid-day on Friday the girls immediately got busy with the measuring tape, some cardboard templates and the jigsaw. Spring is still toying with us: while the sun shows up from time to time, temperatures tend to otherwise hover just above the freezing point, and today was definitely on the cool side. The fire pit helped warm our hands up when we needed. Between them Sophie and Fiona did almost all the 40-odd decorative ends for the beams.

    The first afternoon we got all the beams prepped and ready for assembly.

    Then we hit a couple of snags. First … it snowed overnight. It took a few hours for the snow to melt. And then we realized that the 8″ lag bolts weren’t quite long enough to anchor the two corner posts that had to be mounted into diagonal braces. Eyeballs and guesses had been substituted for trigonometry. That’ll teach us! The building supply store was closed for the holidays, so we were stuck.

    We did still manage to do a fair bit of assembly, using clamps and braces and gravity and what hardware we had. We got to the point of having the main structure standing, with the cross-beams laid overtop but not secured. The next time we have a chance to do some work, we’ll substitute in the proper bolts, attach the cross-beams, work on wattle railings and attach the light strings.

  • Orange is the new black

    Orange is the new black

    So we got a new vehicle. Compared to the old one it’s less boxy, less black, cuter and smaller. It’s also less backwards, having the steering wheel on the left, a fact that makes my three (yes three!) kids with Learner’s Permits much happier. I think that we now have some hope of actually getting one or two of them to the next stage of licensure.

    IMG_0008The new car is a five-seater Subaru CrossTrek. Now that we’re rarely a family of six, or even five, we no longer needed the passenger space the Delica offered. Since the Deli was reaching its 21st birthday and beginning to show its age, we decided to opt for something newer, smaller and more fuel-efficient. I love the CrossTrek so far. It gets an extra 160 km from a tank of fuel compared to the Delica (and it was actually pretty good) and has the high ground clearance and AWD that are necessities where we live. Furthermore it has all sorts of nice safety features like airbags, ABS and traction control, things that are pretty standard these days but which the Deli was missing.

    IMG_0011So we’re a three-L family, and I think we’ll be hard-pressed to share the driving experience out over the holidays. By rights Erin and Noah should already by onto the next stage in the graduating licensing, but it hasn’t happened. I really don’t know what it is about this generation that they don’t relish getting their driver’s licenses the way my generation did. It may be that this is regional, and that in other parts of the country it’s different. But here, there doesn’t seem to be a headlong dash towards learning to drive the instant kids turn 16. A few kids, sure, they’re in a hurry but a lot seem to have no interest. For my kids and the majority of their friends it’s just not a priority.

    I wonder about a few factors. First, the graduated license program, which I completely understand the reasoning behind, has had the effect of pushing full licensure out of the high school years. In BC if you move quickly, you can have a partial license as early as your 17th birthday, but full licensure (meaning being able to carry more than one passenger without restrictions on time of day, etc.) has to wait until well into legal adulthood. So driving just isn’t part of the high school culture. Kids don’t see their slightly older friends enjoying the perks of being fully licensed, encouraging them to look forward to becoming so themselves.

    Then there are the economic constraints. When I was 17, gas cost 23 cents a litre. Around here we’ve been paying more than five times that much. Inflation only accounts for about half that change. So cars are more expensive to buy, insure, fill and maintain, even taking inflation into account, and higher education costs more than ever. How likely is it that a university-bound young adult these days will own a car? Not very!

    And then there’s other fallout of the graduated licensing system: it makes it expensive and inconvenient for teens to get enough practice to prior to doing their road tests, since (at least in our case) they’ve moved away from home by the time they’re age-eligible. Living in big cities, with ample public transit, thankfully, on shoestring budgets and with no access to a family vehicle, they are mostly limited to few weeks of rural driving in the summer to get the driving experience and confidence they need to do their first road test.

    (I should say that I have a similar beef with the practice in some jurisdictions of pushing the legal drinking age well into adulthood — particular as old as 21. It means that it’s difficult for parents to provide support and guidance as their offspring venture forth into these new areas of responsibility. Hey kids, there’s something we think carries a bit of risk, so we’re not gonna let you try it until you’re a bit older and completely on your own.)

    Finally, for my kids at least, there’s the fact that they’ve had a lot of autonomy and independence already. Erin travelled to SE Asia, and took herself to Alberta once a month when she was 14 and 15. Noah went to Cuba as well as various other Canadian locations with his choir and has couch-surfed a bit in Nelson. Sophie’s already living on her own a few days a week. All three kids made their own educational choices, whether as unschoolers or by choosing to attend school. Maybe a driver’s license doesn’t have the same symbolic value for them as a marker of the passage into independence and autonomy.

    At any rate, it’s not part of high school culture because you now have to be older, and that makes getting enough learn-to-drive experience is awkward and expensive, and my kids have already got a fair bit of independence, so what’s the big deal with driving? Why bother to learn? In our case if you then add the disincentive of learning in a boxy high van with the steering wheel and controls all on the wrong sides and you’ll understand why we’re all stuck at the L stage here.

    It turns out it may be Sophie pushing the older siblings forward here. She turned 16 recently, got her L and has actually seen the wisdom in knocking off as much of the learn-to-drive process as she can while she’s still living at home, even if the payoff may end up being many years down the line. Perhaps several years after graduating from university she’ll finally having enough income to buy her own car, and won’t have to pay to take a several-months-long Driving School course at that point.

    She’s pushed herself past the “freakin’ stressed out” stage of being behind the wheel and is now to the point of enjoying our lonely rural drive back and forth from Nelson. She’s getting experience with all kinds of weather and is learning to keep her eyes peeled for black ice and deer eyes glinting in the dark. What she’s not getting enough of yet is dealing with traffic patterns in city environments, but Nelson is big enough that she’ll accrue that over time.

  • Getting around

    DSC04780Here’s our minivan. We bought it about 18 months ago and it transformed my driving experience. It made access to alpine hikes a breeze. Road trips and drive-in movies were awesome. I loved not having to hike in from the highway end of our driveway even once last winter, and knowing that winding mountain roads covered in snow were safer with our 4-wheel-drive and high ground clearance. The right-hand drive was easy to get used to, and while there are more and more of these beasts in the area, I also loved the mildly eccentric aura that it created around us. Fuel mileage has been pretty decent, and it’s a spacious and comfortable vehicle for five or more.

    But the Delica is showing its age (it’s a 1994), especially since we’re such mileage-hogs. Our at-home family is smaller now, and I’m not driving five teenagers to choir practice anymore. In another month all three of my older kids will be in possession of driver’s Learners Permits (Erin and Noah having delayed attaining their full licensure due to a combination of temperament and lack of proximity to home). And really, what is the wisdom in having beginning drivers learn their basic skills in a right-hand-drive vehicle? So we’re planning to sell it and buy something new or new-ish. Something with all-wheel drive, but smaller and cheaper to maintain, considerably more fuel-efficient and with the driver’s seat on the left. I also like the idea of having airbags again. I’d like a few airbags. Hoping to make this a reality before winter hits full-force, since this is a pretty good time of year to be selling a snow-trampling monster minivan.

    IMG_0042We’re now spending part of each week in a city. When we get to Nelson, we’ve been trying to leave the van parked at the house, and walk as much as we can. It’s been so much fun to poke our way around amongst the secret stairways and paths in a city where the terrain makes drivable roads a bit of an engineering challenge. Our house in Nelson is a mere 750 metres from downtown, but 100 metres above it with most of the elevation gain taking place over just 400 metres. Just getting home is a workout, and it’s a workout we tend to do at least a couple of times a day. The sidewalks run places roads can’t, and we love the feeling of winding our way amongst lovely homes and beneath hardwood trees with changing leaves, up “sidewalks” like the one pictured above.

    So we’re spending three days a week in a walkable city, and when we’re home we hardly need to drive at all. We’re still doing two trips a week to Nelson, but soon that will be in a much smaller vehicle that gets double the mileage. Our carbon footprint should diminish dramatically in size this year.

  • Shibori

    Inspired by the introduction to shibori that Fiona got at her homeschoolers’ art class, I began sewing and tying a couple of dozen squares of cotton fabric to do my own experiment with the technique. I started this in July of 2012 and then set it aside, about two-thirds completed. I recently dug it out, finishing sewing and tying the last few squares, and then did the dyeing. It was so exciting to pull out the threads I had tied almost two years ago, not remembering what I’d had in mind at the time, not knowing what designs and patterns I’d used.

    Shibori is an old Japanese resist technique for fabric dyeing. It was originally developed by peasants who hadn’t the means to purchase woven patterned fabric. Traditionally indigo dye is used. In my case I have an idea for a quilt sashed with various washes of indigo-dyed recycled denim, punctuated by bright eye-catching squares of various shibori patterns, so I chose a deep red for the dyeing. I will probably regret my choice of denim, because of its heavy weight and the technical problems that will create when piecing a quilt top, but I suppose if it ends up feeling impossible I can buy some chambray and use that instead.

    There are numerous shibori stitching, folding and tying patterns. I gleaned some of my ideas from the internet, and invented or adapted others. Perhaps the quilt top will take another couple of years to come together, but I’ve had a lot of fun already and feel really satisfied with the results.

  • Owl encounter

    We heard that an injured owl had been found semi-conscious being mobbed by crows in the parking lot of our local grocery store. It had been whisked away and left with Rob, who, along with his wife Linda, is a bit of a birder. So we dropped by the café Rob runs to see if we could have a look. The owl was being kept quiet and warm elsewhere while Rob tried to figure out what to do with it. It turned out that the Orphan WildLife (OWL) rehab centre on the coast was willing to take the owl, and that transport had been arranged through the Trail airport, but that someone was needed to take the owl there for a 4 pm flight.

    Having already planned to swing through Castlegar at about 5 pm to find Fiona some dance wear on our way to gymnastics, we volunteered to go a couple of hours early and drive the 25 minutes out of our way to drop the owl off.

    He was a great horned fellow, alive and thumping around a little bit in his closed box, but mostly seeming quiet. We were warned that these guys have nasty talons and a grip strength of up to 300 psi, and so not to open the box under any circumstances. We loaded him into the back of the van and headed out. We didn’t get to really look at him, since he was all enclosed, but I did push my iPhone through the breathing hole and take this picture. All puffed up from stress, shying away from the light of my phone. I left him alone after seeing that. Poor guy. But beautiful!

    When we arrived in Trail we were surprised to find a local friend waiting for her own medical transport on the same flight. They departed together.

    After they left we spent a few minutes updating Rob and Linda, and the veterinary clinic that had offered to overnight the bird if there hadn’t been room for him on the flight, and the OWL Rehab centre, whose volunteers were amazingly helpful and efficient and were already en route to meet him at the other end.

    Then we bought dance shoes, tights and leotard (very exciting!) and went to gymnastics.

    Although our friend did well with her surgery, we found out a few days later that the owl did not fare so well. He was vastly underweight due to a broken leg that had presumably been preventing him from hunting for some time. He did begin eating well, but an xray revealed that his leg was shattered beyond repair, so he had to be euthanized. A lot of people did their best to help, but it just wasn’t to be.

    If you’re in the Lower Mainland, I’m told that the OWL Rehab Centre has excellent educational tours. That will be one of our stops the next time we’re in the neighbourhood.

  • Garage: before

    Garage: before

    We’re building a garage. Well… no, more to the point: we’re having a garage built. An important procedural distinction, one which will likely ensure the timely and effective completion of the project.

    The aging carport will come down. A year ago, expecting it to collapse under the weight of a fairly ordinary snow load, I enthusiastically parked the old minivan under it whenever I could, hoping for a catastrophic collapse that would crush the van. Alas, when spring rolled around, the carport was still standing, and the minivan still belonged to us.

    Now we have a minivan I treasure. I have no desire to crush it. I do, however, have a desire to park close to the house, avoid hours of windshield-scraping, and have a place to store bicycles and skis and camping equipment. You’d think with all the sheds and shops we’d have ample storage space, but somehow that isn’t the case. Almost all that space is filled with Chuck’s tools and machines and workspace and materials and might-come-in-useful-someday stuff. So yeah, I’m actually looking forward to having a garage.

    After we built the addition to our house back in 1997, the one that took us from four rooms to a dozen and gave us actual bedrooms for ourselves and our children, we realized we had almost no photos to remind us of what the house looked like before we so drastically altered it. We took pictures of the building process, but not of the “before.”

    Will I miss the way the reverse grade inside the carport allows for the formation of unexpected downhill sheets of ice? The kind that encourages vehicles to continue to exercise the Newton’s First Law of Motion as one attempts to gently apply the brakes in order to cease movement before striking the end wall? Will I miss the impossibility of reversing up a sheet of said ice? Or the door-obstructing upright posts? The leaky roof that supposedly performs the duty of keeping our firewood seasoned and ready to burn? The endearing 2-foot cedar tree trunk that is integrated into the whole contraption in some sort of organic and semi-structural way? Will I miss the overstatement of the term “carport,” when it is in fact merely a “front-end port,” meaning that rear windshields still need to be shovelled off and scraped free of snow and ice? Probably not. But just in case, here are two photos.

  • Thermos hack: yogurt-maker

    I have a large plastic thermos, and inexpensive item that is world-weary and not particularly water-tight. It has a capacity of about 3 Litres, and is perfect for making a large batch of yogurt for our family. Since we’ve been freezing the local summer fruit bounty, the kids are making a lot of smoothies and subsequently we go through a lot of yogurt. This is so cheap and easy.

    A Thicker Yogurt

    4 cups boiled water
    4 cups tap water
    4 2/3 cups instant skim milk powder
    1/2 cup fresh yogourt with active bacterial culture, or two packets of yogourt starter

    Combine boiled and tap water in a large thermos. In my house the resulting temperature is about 115ºF, which is ideal for starting a yogourt fermentation. I can trust this temperature, but if you’re trying this for the first time, definitely check the temperature of the mixture and adjust as necessary. Whisk in skim milk powder, then whisk in the fresh yogurt. Using skim milk powder allows you to get a thicker yogurt by getting more milk solids in less liquid volume, and it means you don’t have to go the fussy process of heating the milk to kill any lingering thermophils.

    Place lid on thermos. Place in unheated oven with the light turned on to provide a bit of warmth. Leave undisturbed for 8 hours. (Put a sticky-note on the oven to remind yourself and others not to turn it on! Ask me why my thermos is world-weary with bubbly plastic on the bottom…) With luck you should have a nice thick yogurt. It will firm up a bit more in the fridge.

    Yield: 8.5 cups of yogurt

  • Shibori

    I’ve decided that the time has come to make a quilt. I made quilts for each of my children, around the time they graduated to big beds of their own. Erin got my first quilt ever: appliquéd jungle animals in the main squares. Noah was given a community quilt by a host of my friends, a colourful alphabet quilt. I later made him a more “grown-up” quilt, a repeating stars motif with black and turquoise whale printed fabric. For Sophie I made a quilt of drawings the older two children had made, embroidering a replica of each picture (Noah was very into dinosaurs at the time!) onto a square of muslin. Fiona got a tie-dye quilt: the older three kids and I tie-dyed individual squares in a rainbow of colours and designs, and added black-and-bold sashing.
    Who will get the next quilt? Perhaps it will belong to the grown-ups. Perhaps it will be a “spare bed” quilt. Not that we have a spare bed, but it never hurts to have an extra quilt around. 
    I have a vision of a quilt-top made of denim. I know this is a really challenging vision: denim is nasty to work with once you get more than two thicknesses of it. As you inevitably do piecing a quilt. But I have a good sewing machine, and a fair bit of ingenuity and experience. We’ll see. 
    I’ve been harvesting used-up jeans for years, and the local donation store is a ready repository of plus-sized jeans in a beautiful array of indigos. Denim will be easy to find.
    The striking element in my quilt will be the shibori sampler blocks. Shibori is a Japanese textile art. It’s a form of resist dyeing traditionally done with folding and stitching, using indigo. I first saw it years ago in a quilting book I bought. Then my kids were able to experiment with it during their art workshops with a local textile artist:
    The central motif here is done with cherry pits. The pits are pinched in the fabric and the “neck” of the pinch is wound with thread. The upper and lower patterns are what is called “mokume,” or wood-grain. they’re made by pleating the fabric with multiple parallel running stitches which are then tightened. The muslin above has been dyed with a fibre-reactive dye, exactly the same stuff we use for tie-dyeing. Lots of it lives in our basement. 
    My quilt will not use indigo either, except in the denim, nor will it use a traditional blue colour for the shibori. Instead the shibori blocks will be done in fire-engine red. I intend to make each of the two dozen blocks using a different shibori pattern or technique. Here are a few of my first dozen samples. The sewing is shown on the left, and the right panel shows the same sample with the thread drawn and tied as tightly as I could manage.
    Top: a fine-grained mokume. 
    Middle: Komu, a geometrically pleated technique using stitched squares and twist-tied cherry pits
    Bottom: Maki-agi, a stitched shape resist. 

    I have a dozen or so ready for the dye bath now. I’ve done a traditional arashi (diagonal pole-pleated resist), a heart in maki-agi, some itajime (folded shape-resist), some meandering ori-nui, and various other experiments. I have some extra fabric, so if a few of the squares don’t work out that will be fine.

    But I’m so excited to be accumulating all these surprises-in-waiting! It will take me another week or so to finish a couple of dozen samples. Then it will be dye time … and the big reveal!

  • Dandelion syrup

    About 6-8 cups of dandelion flowers yielded about 1 cup of packed yellow petals. We mixed this with 2 cups of sugar and 2 cups of water, brought to a simmer and allowed to cook for an hour or so, gradually reducing in volume to a syrupy consistency. Then we added the juice of one small lemon, strained out the petals, and cooled.

    It tastes wonderful! Like spring sunshine mixed with honey and lemon. Delicious on ice cream.

  • Hello, trees

    Fiona and I have been visiting the trees in the forest that surrounds our home recently, appreciating them anew as they emerge from the snow and prepare for a new season of growth.

    Yesterday we checked out the red cedar bark, which we will use for basket weaving. Years ago the kids did a workshop with this lovely local lady, and while they’re a lot of work, the tiny baskets we have since made have been very striking and rewarding. It’s still too early in the season for it to come away easily in long strips, but we’re looking forward to harvesting some in May. We then dug up some red cedar roots, to decide how useful they’d be for embellishing our baskets. I had read that they make great sewing material, but had never taken the suggestion seriously. They really are amazing. The slenderest ones are strong, pliable and lovely to look at, and they dry and increase in strength very quickly once harvested.

    We collected armloads of white pine cones to use a fire-starter next winter.

    And then we made our acquaintance again with the birch trees. We tapped a couple of birch trees years ago, but our sap collection set-up wasn’t ideal and we didn’t get enough sap to make a proper syrup. Because birch sap is about five times less sugary than maple sap, you need a heck of a lot of it!

    Sometime in the intervening years I managed to purchase four spiles and today we picked up some clear 1/2″ tubing at the local hardware store. All it took was a quick bit of work with the portable drill and a couple of taps with the mallet the trees began spilling their sap out for us with eagerness. We plugged a couple of tubes into each of two glass carboys and within an hour or two had a couple of gallons of sap.

    I imagine it will be incredibly time- and energy-consuming to boil the stuff down, but I’m happy to do it just once, to experience the process and the taste of the syrup.

    Birch sap is sterile and contains trace amounts of minerals, xylitol and various other good things. It’s actually a great source of safe drinking water. Not that we don’t already have safe drinking water, but hey, when civilization crumbles, this might be a useful piece of knowledge.