WOYWW 490

No change on my main work desk this week, but over the other side, all my felt stuff has been pulled out again…

On Monday afternoon, I finally got round to wet-felting the embellishments I made for the striped scarf. You may remember a while back I needle-felted quite a few felt balls and flowers and these needed a bit of rough treatment to firm them up a bit. At the top of the photo on the left you can see my olive oil soap that you use with hot water for wet felting. That stuff smells lovely and I always associate it with felt.

All the pieces are laid out on the table with the vinyl cloth which is beside the sink in my studio. I shall leave them out until they are fully dry, and then I can start sewing the embellishments onto that scarf.

I’ve done quite a few more inches on the peacock scarf and I should finish the knitting in a few days’ time. I need to make a few more peacock feathers and then I can finish that one too.

I’ve also resumed unravelling a rather unsatisfactory knitted tunic top I made years ago – I like the colours and the design (purple circles on a yellow background – there’s a snippet of it in the photo montage that makes up my blog header) but it never fitted very well and I didn’t like the neck. I am going to knit it up again to a different design. It is made up of different 4-ply thickness yarns so there’s variety in the texture as well as the colour. I started working on this particular UFO (UnFinished Object) unravel months ago and it was another one that bit the dust along the way and definitely needs finishing. It will be good to have a new knitting project to keep me going through the winter.

The only other thing I did in the studio this week was also on Monday afternoon. I mended one of my necklaces that had got broken, and soldered a stretchy metal arm band that had also snapped, which I’ve been putting off doing for months! I like these old-fashioned men’s arm bands as I’ve got rather short arms and my sleeves are always too long, and they keep them up out of the way when I’m busy in the kitchen etc. Really pleased to have got that little job done. I had to do the other arm band too, last year. The joins obviously weren’t that secure, but I’ve had them for years so I suppose they haven’t done too badly.

I am getting absolutely inundated with dried teabags and I really need to start working on those, carefully cutting them open and tipping out the tea, ready to go on the garden. Then I’ve got to decide what to do with them all! This job is definitely on my UFOs to-do list.

Bread

I’ve decided to start making bread rolls. They are useful for sandwiches etc. and looking at the list of ingredients on the supermarket ones, I was horrified! So many added chemicals to such a simple food. They are very little trouble to make really, and much more delicious, and with no artificial additives. I found a simple half-and-half wholemeal and white recipe online and added lots of nice seeds to the mix (my usual sunflower and pumpkin, and also some chia and brown flax seeds for good measure), and topped with sesame seeds. A huge success!

My sourdough this week was NOT a success. As usual the flavour is good but I tried altering the technique a bit because I thought the reason why my sourdough never rises very much may be due to over-proving, but leaving it for a shorter time clearly wasn’t the right decision.

Oh well, it tastes OK, even if it’s rather dense this week! It would make good ballast.

Our Michelin-Starred Meal Out

Last night we went for our special meal out. A friend from church gave us the ticket that he’d won, saying we would enjoy it more than them. What a lovely treat! Scroll down to previous post. View it if you dare. Prepared to be green with envy, and don’t view if you are hungry or you’ll hate me!!

Kitties

On Sunday afternoon my hubby was busy in the garden, cutting back, and clearing all the weeds from the waterfall outside the kitchen window. Ruby was fascinated by all the activity and I snapped this sweet piccy of her balancing on the trellis – taken with the zoom through the kitchen window.

Lily has decided to be antisocial in the evenings and her latest sleeping place is on the armchair in the flat, much to my hubby’s disgust. Ruby just loves to settle down on my legs once I’ve got my feet up on the recliner and we both enjoy the mutual warmth!

My little buttercup was in real trouble yesterday – not just once, but twice, I caught Ruby in the act of licking my butter when my back was turned – while I was actually still in the room! The second time I caught her, she ran away and hid. She knew she’d been a naughty girl. Lots of cuddles and forgiveness later.

Health Update

The first pair of support pants duly arrived last Thursday and to my extreme annoyance, they don’t fit. I thought, “Oh no, not again…” I went through all this last year. I immediately phoned the lovely rep and she was absolutely horrified that this has happened to me again, and immediately swung into action, consulting her manager and attempting to sort out the problem. The next morning she phoned me for some additional accurate measurements and I emailed her photographs too. They are going to remake them and hopefully they will arrive in the next day or two as she was marking it urgent. I also sent her a photo of my now very obvious hernia and she agreed this really needs proper support.

They have cut the pants much too short. The band at the top cuts right across the middle of my stoma bag – completely useless! Also, I asked for lace, and they haven’t put this on. Someone isn’t reading the directions the rep gave them.

My hubby wondered if I could go with another firm but I really don’t want to – when they get it right, the pants are excellent. This company uses a unique fabric which is specifically designed by a doctor to give adequate hernia support while not interfering with the operation of the stoma, and is the only company that does a bespoke service and home visits. Our hospital also deals with them and they run a regular clinic in the colorectal outpatients, and they know the rep that covers our area. The rep didn’t think that what had happened to me was a common problem and was mortified that it had happened to me at all, let alone twice! I had such a time with it last year when they got it wrong twice, and it took months to get it sorted.

In the meantime I am continuing to wear the old ones which the rep said were no longer giving me adequate support because they need replacing every year (they are now about 18 months old) as they gradually lose their stretch with wearing and washing, and also since they were made, I have lost some weight. I didn’t order any more early this year because I knew I was due to have surgery and you can’t wear them for several weeks after that as they exert too much pressure, and then I was waiting to see my surgeon and the stoma nurse for several months after I eventually got out of hospital. When I saw them in August they agreed I should continue with the support garments and the nurse arranged an appointment for the rep to call on me. Everything takes so long to get organised these days and with them making a mistake with the fitting just adds insult to injury and all the time my hernia is getting bigger, it seems.

I had my CT scan last Thursday and of course I haven’t had any result back yet. I shall probably phone the stoma nurse early next week to see if there’s any news.

Rollator

My hubby’s brother has used a rollator for some years now and swears by it, and several months ago, our sister-in-law suggested that I might find one useful. I did some online research and found the one I wanted on Ebay, but it was collect only, and too far away. I looked up the model but unfortunately it is no longer made, which was disappointing because this particular one ticked all the boxes for me. I set up an email alert on Ebay and decided to wait a while to see if any more came up, rather than getting a different one, and this week I got notification of one, and immediately bought it. It’s second hand but looks virtually unused, and I got it for a very good price, and they were prepared to send it, too. It arrived on Monday and it’s really good! We went for a 90th birthday drinks party later on that morning and I was able to try it out. It uses a lot less energy than walking with crutches.

Ruby is terrified of it.

The next thing is for my hubby to try and rig up some sort of bracket so I can hook it on the back of my buggy.

So again, another pretty eventful week chez Shosh! At least I haven’t been so exhausted this week.

WOYWW 481 Felt, Crochet and Sourdough

I can’t believe another week has flown by… We are nearly at the end of August, for goodness sake.

Still no movement on the studio front apart from tidying away my disaster of a felt box which I had discovered was all wet because I hadn’t emptied a bottle of soapy water and it had leaked all over everything. It’s all now cleaned up and dried and put away so there’s a slight improvement in floor space on that side of the room.

I have been continuing to work on felt embellishments for my striped scarf.

I have made several little calla lily lookalikes, and I’ve also started covering the white cores with coloured fleece, as you can see on the left in the photo.

To add a bit of variety, I thought I’d do a few crochet embellishments as well, so after a quick search on Youtube I found some very nice flower patterns, which I haven’t started yet, and this delightful Dutch video on crochet butterflies – even though I don’t understand Dutch, the filming was so clear that I was able to follow everything, and I’ve written out a pattern that I can follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh1uEIyN0rc&list=PL-OKjxuL-AQjnRsxxRNohlLOr1oAF1Y7s&index=7&t=0s

I have completed one, and am working on the second.

They are a bit lumpy but once they’ve been steam pressed, they will be fine, I am sure. They are such fun to do, and don’t take long.

Sourdough

I decided this week to have another go with the sourdough, following the very good video I mentioned last week. Because my first attempt seemed very dry compared with the baker’s dough on the video, I thought I’d try increasing the hydration of the dough by 10 percent, which was a total disaster – when I turned the dough out onto the table towards the end of the process, and left it to rest, when I came back, it resembled a pancake and was practically flowing out of the door!! There was nothing I could do about this and I was really fed up by this time, as it was the end of the day and I was tired, so I binned the lot.

The day before yesterday I had another go, this time reducing the hydration by 5 percent and the same thing happened. I thought it was a shame to waste good ingredients, although bread flour isn’t that expensive, so I scooped it all up, and decided to make it into sourdough crackers which are made of excess sourdough starter with some added flour, coconut oil, an egg and some additional salt. I can’t remember but I don’t think I added the egg, but I did add some coconut oil and another teaspoon of salt. The cracker recipe says you have to leave it to rest for several hours, and when I came back, the dough was rising all over the place so I thought, what the heck, I’ll bake it as bread and see what happens! I didn’t take that much care over the folding and shaping, so I didn’t expect stellar results, but it did produce a loaf, and as anticipated, the crumb was much more dense than that of true sourdough.

It tastes pretty good, though.

Yesterday I thought I’d have another go, and this time use the Youtube baker’s recommended 65 percent hydration again, which I’d done the first time I’d tried his method. I thought that on that occasion the crumb was a bit dense because I hadn’t exactly mastered his method of folding and shaping, so this time I took extra care over this.

Initially the dough did resemble his much more – on my first attempt it was so dry, which I put down to the fact that the rye flour I mix in has a higher absorbency – I thought I could compensate for this by increasing the hydration but after two failed attempts, this obviously wasn’t going to work. This time it seemed a lot less stiff to start with, and I thought all was going to be well. However, with each folding session, it seemed to get more and more wet, until at the turning out onto the table stage, I knew it was going to spread again, and so it did. I was getting so desperate with it at this stage that I thought I couldn’t possibly waste any more dough, and I’d bake it anyway.

As happens every single time I bake sourdough, the final moulded dough sticks to the cloth and will not turn out cleanly onto the baking sheet or into the casserole I use as a Dutch oven. Pulling the cloth away destroys the integrity of the boule and spoils the top surface and because the skin of gluten that you work so assiduously to create is broken, there isn’t enough oven spring and the bread does not rise sufficiently in the oven. I have tried normal bread flour to dust the cloth (not recommended because it’s too high in gluten and sticks like glue), rice flour and semolina (both low in gluten) but everything sticks.

Yesterday’s effort was a total disaster. It stuck big time to the cloth despite copious amounts of semolina – there was only one small central area which didn’t stick. The trouble is, when you flour the cloth inside the bowl or banneton you use for the final proving, the flour won’t stick to the sloping sides but slides down to the bottom.

Worse was to come. I took the lid off the casserole half way through the baking as instructed, and when I came to take it out of the oven I noticed it was rather overdone. Then I couldn’t get it out of the casserole because it was stuck fast! The whole thing is terrifyingly hot so there wasn’t much I could do except leave it in there to cool off a bit. It is still completely stuck. I shall have to wreck the loaf to get it out. Grrrr and double grrrr! I don’t know what’s going on…

The baker on Youtube is a lovely man who has answered everyone’s comments on the video, so I think I’m going to ask him for some help! I’m obviously doing something wrong and am wondering if it’s something to do with the rye flour. If I have to abandon this, I shall be rather sad because we do love the intense flavour of this.

So I think the latest effort may end up being sourdough croutons!!! At least there are lots of variations in the sourdough universe, and whatever I do, and however unsightly it may be (crumb too dense, top looking like a lunar landscape, whole loaf looking like a squashed flying saucer, etc. etc.) at least one thing is consistent – the delicious flavour! I am so determined to get this right, though, and will NOT admit defeat!!

Other fermentation

On Monday the three days required for the second fermentation of my first batch of kombucha (fermented tea) were up, so I put the bottles in the fridge. Cooling a carbonated liquid helps retain the gas in the liquid, so opening the bottles tends to be a somewhat less explosive experience than at room temperature. Yesterday I opened the first bottle, and released the wire clip very, very, veeerrrrry slowly, with the bottle in a bowl in the sink and my eyes tightly closed like a kid watching Doctor Who from behind the settee, and it was pretty lively even so! I strained the liquid into a bowl and saw that as the Youtube video had said could happen, it had grown a little baby Scoby (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeasts – the culture used to ferment tea into kombucha). (in the photo, you can see it on the surface of the mango one on the right, and in the raspberry one, it has got stuck in the neck of the bottle. Goodness… it will probably shoot out and get me in the eye when I open that one!!) Unfortunately I couldn’t keep this because it had flavouring in it (in this case, mango puree) but I had no conscience about putting it in the compost bin because Scobies make excellent compost to feed the garden. The man on the video said if you don’t strain it, swallowing a Scoby by mistake can be a bit of an unnerving experience (like drinking a jellyfish) but it won’t do you any harm – it’s full of gorgeous probiotic bacteria and goodness for your system. (You can feed them to animals who love them! Or you can cut them up and dry them to make dog treats. They need probiotics too.) Anyway, my first batch is delicious – I can’t taste too much mango, but it tastes rather like cider. I haven’t tasted the raspberry one yet. In addition to drinking it as is, I am also using it as an ingredient in a rehydration drink I am making as a change from St. Mark’s Solution (a rehydration drink designed by St. Mark’s Colorectal Hospital in London for ostomates) – I drink a litre of this every day. I’ve been making up the new recipe with the brine from my fermented apples until the kombucha was ready – all adds variety to the spice of life! I think it’s delicious, but when I offered my hubby a taste, he pulled a face!!

Kitties

From being ultra teenagerish and stand-offish, suddenly Ruby wants cuddles all the time in the evening once they are in from the garden and have had supper. When not on my lap she likes sleeping on the back of the settee behind me. Last night Lily purloined her favourite spot and for a couple of hours they were happy up there together. Is this the new latest place? Lily seems to have abandoned the hammock!

Here they are on the outside of the kitchen window, in the vain hope I’ll open up and let them in.

And here’s Ruby cuddled up with the teddies after my hubby brought them (the teddies, not the kitties) in from the sitting room window.

Lily is loafing around the TV. She is fascinated by the screen saver that comes on if the DVD player goes into standby. Lily is a bit of a TV addict anyway, and particularly enjoys wildlife programmes.

Hospital appointment

I have done a blog about this in detail, but suffice it to say here that I saw my surgeon last Thursday, and the stoma nurse. It is possible that I have herniated again… I suspected this and told him, and after examining me, he couldn’t be sure so he’s booked me in for a CT scan (awaiting appointment for that). If I have got a hernia again this will be the biggest bore ever – it will mean I went through ALL THAT at the beginning of the year for nothing – further major surgery, followed by infected haematomas and the beginning of sepsis and coming close to death. It will be much more difficult to deal with now, because of the presence of the mesh, and also I have already had the hernia repaired twice. Oh grrrr… Anyway, I’m not going to worry, but wait and see what shows up, and if I have got a hernia, I think my surgeon will agree with me to leave well alone, get adequate support asap (stoma nurse arranging appointment with support garments lady – my existing ones now 18 months old and probably too stretched to work properly any more, in addition to my having lost weight), and hope against hope that it doesn’t cause another obstruction. They reckon that between 50 and 75 percent of ostomates will get a hernia and it’s a very difficult problem to deal with.

Another Needle Felted Angel

I have made another angel body from needle felting over an armature, this time made from my mammoth new pipe cleaners.

These pipe cleaners are enormous – very long and extra thick and fluffy! Almost large enough to sweep the chimney with. The colours are somewhat lurid but as they will mostly be needle felted or wrapped, I’m not too bothered about that.

Here is the armature for the angel that I made – this one is quite a bit larger than the previous one.

This armature was made from two giant pipe cleaners, one for the head and arms, and the other for the body and legs. I looped the ends of the legs a couple of times to form the feet, and the arms are double thickness with a loop at the ends to form the hands.

I began the needle felting by loosely felting a ball to form the inner part of the head.

Here it is, stuffed into the head loop of the armature.

It was then a simple matter to begin wrapping the whole head with wool roving, needle felting as I went.

Here is the head, almost complete.

As it was quite a bit larger than the first one, I decided to attempt to sculpt a face on this head. I began by adding more roving to the front of the face to build it up.

This is the head in profile so far.

I sculpted the face by building up the nose, forehead and chin, and pushing in the eye sockets and mouth, and the area under the nose, with more aggressive needle felting. Not too bad for a first attempt!

Here is the finished head in profile, showing the ear – I made the ears from two small fragments of wool roving, shaping them as I needle felted them to the sides of the head. The face is a little flat – a bit like an Easter Island statue!

The next step was to needle felt the body. I made it a little bit too long so the proportions aren’t quite right, but once the angel is clothed, this won’t matter. I built up the chest and stomach/bottom areas with extra wool roving.

The final step was to cover the limbs with needle felting. I covered the hands and feet well with roving before beginning to wrap the arms and legs.

Not too bad, I think! With his rather long body and short, slightly bandy legs, he looks a bit like a drunken sailor. At least there was no angel abuse this time, unless you count being stabbed all over repeatedly with a barbed needle!

I’ve been pooped all week. At least the worst of the side effects of the chemo have worn off now, but my energy levels remain extremely low and I’ve done little else but flop about on the recliner since my last treatment. The next one is a week today and I really need to start feeling better so I can actually achieve something before the next one is upon me and I’m back to square one again!

WOYWW 316–Brainless Knitting and Angel Abuse

Not a lot going on chez-Shosh this week because my second round of chemo has completely flattened me – I started to feel poorly while the stuff was still going in, and although a lot of the side effects are now better than they were, I am still feeling profoundly exhausted and have hardly stirred off the recliner for the past week and a half. I was warned by my oncologist that round 2 would be worse, but I am hoping that my body will have acclimatised to the chemo by round 3 and that that treatment won’t affect me so badly.

While undergoing the second treatment, I started knitting a scarf, but unravelled it because my circular needle was too long, and to fill it, the scarf would have been far too wide, with too many stitches, and using too much yarn, so I ordered a nice little short one off Ebay and restarted the project. This is what I call brainless knitting – it can be done without a pattern and with very little concentration. I had a rummage in my wools scrap boxes and selected some nice bright-ish colours and have been working in random stripes, each separated by two rows of black, which give some coherence to the design. This is how much I’ve done so far:

Depending on how many of these scarves I can make in the next five or six months, they will also be added to my box of goodies to hand out to my fellow chemo-ites. I am planning on making some nice brownish ones for the men, and each one will have different types of fringing and tassels on the ends. Working in the round means there’s no making up to do except sewing across the open ends.

After my gifts of small lavender sachets in boxes, I have been thinking a lot about making a collection of mixed media angel art dolls to give away next time. I certainly wasn’t planning on putting pressure on myself to complete them in 3 weeks and as it happened, I have barely started because of feeling so poorly.

While resting on the recliner, I’ve been spending a lot of time trawling Pinterest and making a nice collection of art doll pictures. I decided to use the few rather short pipe cleaners I had, and made an armature (sorry, I didn’t photograph this) and used it as a base for needle felting in white, producing what looks like a little white stick figure, about 5 1/2 inches tall, who although devoid of all features, seems to have a character all his own! He was all a bit fluffy looking when I’d finished, so I wet-felted him as well, and the final step was to throw him violently into the sink to accelerate the felting process, which reduced the poor little figure into a screwed up heap that looked as if he had been mugged!

Angel Abuse.

Here he is, hanging on for dear life, onto my bathroom heated towel rail, being dried. I defined his neck by wrapping a narrow elastic band tightly around it. More Angel Abuse. Not only mugged, but strangled as well.

He lends himself to being bent into many different positions. He doesn’t look too much the worse for his traumatic experiences.

He has no face, no hair, no clothes, and no wings. Yet. Hopefully these deficiencies will soon be remedied and he will take on his full persona as an angel.

I have got on order a nice big pack of thicker, longer pipe cleaners which should enable me to make larger figures. The needle felting was pretty time-consuming, and the friction of the wet-felting has drawn the felt back a bit from his extremities. Not a huge success but practice makes perfect! I’ve also got a few more bits and pieces on order, and I’ve been doing a lot of research into different polymer clays and how to use them – not something with which I have had any experience to speak of, and I hope to make a nice collection of eclectic angels, most of whom should hopefully not end up suffering the indignity of Angel Abuse.