Maple Sugaring in March

I always think of pure maple syrup as liquid gold--nothing else in the world tastes like it, and it's expensive!

This is how I like to think of gathering maple sap.  See the bucket hanging on the maple tree?  That's how maple sugaring used to be done.  The farmer would have to empty the buckets full of sap into containers on a giant sled pulled by horses.  Then the sap would be brought to the sugar house and boiled over a wood fire until most of the water had evaporated to make maple syrup. Nowadays plastic tubing is connected to the tree taps and runs from several trees into large plastic 55-gallon drums--more efficient but definitely not as picturesque!  In late winter as you drive along country roads in New England, you'll often see this transparent green tubing hanging from the trees.

In March we visited Lamothe's Sugar House in nearby Burlington to watch maple syrup being made. Mr. Lamothe runs a pretty sophisticated operation--he uses a reverse osmosis system to extract about 90% of the water from the sap and then boils the remaining liquid in an oil-fired evaporator to make his maple syrup.

I have photos to share from the sugar house but for the past couple of days, Blogger has been having difficulty accessing my photo files--when these problems with Blogger have happened in the past, they seem to get fixed in a week or so.  I'll try again in a few days.

Celebrating Mother's Day

Looking back over the past 3 months, it's hard to decide what to post first--should I go all the way back to February where I left off when I started my temp job?  Or should I work my way back from the present?  I think I'll start with the weekend of May 11th and 12th...

With Saturday's showers, Malima and I spent the afternoon at the New Britain Museum of American Art which had a special Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit on loan. I like this museum because it is small enough to view everything in just a few hours. The men opted to stay home so we toured the museum at our own leisurely pace. We all went to dinner to celebrate Ross's recent birthday and Mother's Day at the Pond House Café.  We'll have to go back to Elizabeth Park in June when the roses are in bloom--it's spectacular!

It wouldn't be Mother's Day without our traditional minigolf game at Farmington Miniature Golf!

Sunday's weather was sunny and cool, but it was a beautiful day to be outside. Notice the fantastic necklace I'm wearing--Ross and Malima made it for me along with a matching bracelet! (The bracelet  is a little harder to see on my wrist below my watch.)  I get lots of compliments whenever I wear them, and of course I tell everyone the story behind them.

We followed golfing with ice cream in the minigolf's snack bar--another tradition!  Actually, we had lunch before golf at the snack bar too.  It was a fun weekend for me!

I'm Baaack!

This is where I've been for the past three months:

Yes, subbing for another school counselor on maternity leave at yet another high school...

 

The people I worked with in the Guidance Department were just wonderful to me--so warm and welcoming that I truly was sorry to leave when my 12 weeks were over.  I had a nice office with a big window, and as usual I brought some things from home to make the space feel a little like my own place.  It's always tricky since I have to keep everything that belongs to the counselor who's on leave, and she had lots of personal stuff on display.

 

There was a lovely built-in bookcase along the left wall as you walked in the door, and I rearranged some things so that I could add two photos and my grad school diploma on the top shelf.

I have lots to blog about to catch up on the last 3 months.  Between working long hours and a long commute, something had to give!  Please check back soon--I plan to post more regularly now that I'm back at home.



Bargains Galore

Last week I stopped into my favorite consignment shop, The Pink House in Canton, to see if there was anything interesting. I especially like looking for the items that have been in the shop for more than 2 months because they are 50% off the ticket price.  I found a couple of treasures...

 

I have always been fascinated by Scandinavian style knitwear with its classic designs, so this Dale of Norway cardigan came home with me for only $25! It has all of its original pewter buttons but the buttonholes are a little tight so I left them unbuttoned for the photo. These 100% wool sweaters run $300-$600 new, so I was thrilled to get a good bargain on such a timeless piece.

 

This was a bit of a wild card: an Yves St. Laurent silk blouse made in France for $17. With the gold metal buttons it has somewhat of a 90s vibe (but no shoulder pads!), but it fits well and with black in the print, it will look great with black pants. The paper care tag looks new so I suspect this blouse was hardly worn by its original owner--and I aim to change that!

I'm so happy with the bargains that I've added to my wardrobe!



More Quilt Details

It's fun to compare the old quilt with the new--at least I think it is! The selvedge of the new panel had the title "Off to Dreamland" and I wonder if that was the name of the original fabric design.

 

 

The puppy and kitty design is one of my favorite motifs.

 

 

It's nice that the center medallion has a boy and a girl so that the quilt is appropriate for a baby of either sex.

The colors in "Little Boy Blue" have held up pretty well in the original.

Mark's name was hand-embroidered by his mom many years ago.

Today it's considered good quilting practice to add a quilt label to back of a quilt.  I used MS Word for the words and then traced them onto muslin with a Micron permanent pen.

And that's the end of this quilt odyssey!



Baby quilt finished at last!

Wow, this project took a lot longer than I ever expected!  How much time could it possibly take to hand-quilt a fabric panel?  I'm glad I didn't keep track because I know I'd be really shocked by the answer.

I think it turned out very nicely!  It's still hard to believe that a fabric company recently reprinted the panel that Mark's mother had quilted during the summer of 1946 when she was pregnant with his older brother.  I was so surprised to see the familiar design again that I just had to buy it.

Here's the original quilt!  It was quite worn on the edges when my sister-in-law was expecting her first child so she added fabric to the sides and turned the quilt into a cover for the playpen pad.  Her two boys used it and then our two children used it.  A couple of years after I had returned the playpen, she gave me back the quilt thinking I might like to cut it up and make stuffed animals from it--very popular at the time. I didn't think the printed designs were quite the look I might want for a stuffed animal so I left the quilt alone.  Of course I kept it, especially since Mark's mother said he used to carry it around with him when he was little--in fact she embroidered his name on the back in case he misplaced it.  His name is still there today.



I found the backing fabric at Sew Inspired Quilt Shop in Simsbury, and the helpful ladies who work there helped me pick out the binding fabric.  I was looking for a stripe and this one works perfectly. Tomorrow we'll go shopping for a narrow curtain rod with brackets so that our nephew and his wife can use this new quilt as a wall hanging if they want. (I added a "hanging sleeve" to the back just in case.)

When their little girl arrives, she'll have a quilt just like the one her great-grandmother made for her grandfather!

Books, Books, Books!

I haven't figured out how to crop photos using Windows 8 so I'll use Amazon photos for my recent reads instead.

 

 

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin was book group's January selection and none of us finished it. At first I thought the writing was lyrical--the author uses 50 words to describe something where 5 would suffice--but I soon tired of his style. Nearly halfway through the book I realized I didn't care about his characters and gave up. Checking the Amazon reviews, this seems to be an "either-or" book--some people think it's the greatest ever and others don't care for it at all. I'm in the latter group!

 

 

 

Mrs. Kennedy and Me by her Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, was so interesting to me. I was ten years old when JFK was assassinated in November 1963.  Growing up Roman Catholic in Massachusetts, it was quite special when our native son and fellow Catholic was inaugurated in 1960--the Kennedys were like gods to us.

 

At first disappointed when he was reassigned from President Eisenhower's security detail to cover the new President-elect's wife, Clint Hill soon fell under Jackie's spell. It's actually a very sweet memoir and I learned some things about her that I never realized--she smoked, lived away from the White House most of the time that JFK was president, and she traveled extensively without JFK during his short presidency--charming world leaders and their citizens alike wherever she went.  It's safe to say Jackie saw a lot more of Clint Hill than of her husband! The children had nannies and Jackie didn't seem to spend much time with them, but she was one of the first jet-setters. These are my observations and not the author's, and this book is a fascinating look back at the Camelot era. Incidentally, in video footage of the assassination, Mr. Hill is the SS agent seen climbing over the trunk of the presidential limousine immediately after gunshots were fired.

 

 

 

 

The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation by Elizabeth Letts is a horse-lover's dream. Saved from a truck headed for the slaughterhouse by a young Dutch immigrant named Harry deLeyer who was looking for a gentle school horse, Snowman goes on to become a champion show-jumper at the national level in the late 1950s-early 1960s.  Nicknamed "Teddy Bear" due to his genial nature, the photo of Harry's young children piled on the horse and swimming in Long Island Sound is priceless. There's a saying along the lines of "when the student is ready, the teacher appears" and Harry is the perfect teacher for Snowman. It's a sweet, heart-warming story for anyone who loves horses.

 

 

 

Book group's selection for this month, Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple is a quick and creative read. The author's descriptions of people in the Seattle/Redmond/Microsoft area are laugh-out-loud funny. Could the events in this story actually happen? Probably not, but it's original and fun.