Still hooked on rug hooking: a yarn mat and 'Just Marbelous'

I have many hooked rug projects, at various stages of completion, and the #30DaysOfMaking Challenge seemed like the perfect time to pull them out and really rekindle my passion for rug hooking.

(No, not latch hooking, you children of the 80s. I'm talking about the much older technique that uses a crochet-like hook to make a running loop stitch using fabric scraps cut into strips. It began as a thrift craft, and is carried on now as a textile art with multiple styles, from folk-art 'primitive' designs using wide cuts and reclaimed fabrics to meticulously-shaded 'traditional' designs using narrow cuts and specially-dyed new material.)

I. Hooking with wool yarn

Feb 14th, reverse side of a Cheticamp-style rug hooking kit using two-ply wool yarn on burlap. I bought this a couple of years back at Jennifers Of Nova Scotia as a gift for my daughter, to help her learn to hook, but it became mine when she became too frustrated with the slow pace of hooking in nearly every hole and the yarn loops pulling back out on her. We'll try again when she's a bit older. This piece was meant by the original (unnamed) designers to be a round mat to protect a table.

Feb 19th, showing all the kit pieces (except the hook, which was made by my father for me,
the hoop, and the stork scissors). As you can see, I modified the design quite a bit, in order to commemorate a whale watching trip to Brier Island, Nova Scotia - I took out the enormous seagulls and added a whale watching boat, a whale tail-lobbing, and a couple of brier rose bushes. It's a bit folkier and busier than I would like, and I'm not happy with the lighthouse (which was hooked exactly as drawn on the burlap). Hooking with such fine yarn can be tedious, because it takes longer to fill a motif than if you're using fabric strips, and the loops have a mind of their own, so the direction of your hooking is lost. The trick is to lose yourself in the moving meditation instead of overthinking it.

Finished and framed, on March 11th. Destined for a bathroom wall, I think.

II. "Just Marbelous"

Detail of "Just Marbelous", primarily wool fabric on cotton monkscloth, March 7th. This rug is my own design, inspired by my collection of antique handmade marbles, many of which we believe were childhood gifts from my dad's maternal grandfather to him, but the bulk of which were won during dad's childhood marbles bouts in New Glasgow. They're like miniature works of art glass, and made the perfect subject to challenge my skills in hooking circles, working with many widths of woolen fabric strips (mostly #3, #4, and #5 cuts), and working with multiple materials (the marbles also include spot-dyed and dip-dyed fabrics, a couple of types of yarn, and a metallic-laminated wool). The biggest challenge in it was the temptation to overpack, but the result of that was that a few of the marbles took on a domed appearance - a tripping hazard on the floor, but a pleasing effect in a wallhanging. It would also make a brilliant stash-busting project, although in my case the materials were leftovers given to me by friends from the Dartmouth branch of the Rug Hooking Guild of Nova Scotia, back when I began hooking.

The date on the rug is 1997, when I began it, and the reason it has taken me so long to finish is that the matte black wool that I chose for the background, to show off the bright colours of the marbles, is an absolute bitch to hook. Never again! It requires bright daylight for me to be able to see what I am doing properly, and a drum-tight stretch on the hooking frame (because I chose monkscloth as the backing). I have, however, found that the little purse-size OttLites can be clipped to the neckline of your shirt, at the point of a V-neck, if you need to shed a little light on the situation.

Here's a work-in-progress photo and a detail photo from July 30th. You can see by this time I'd added this year's date, which commits me to finishing this by the end of December. I'm determined to get this background finished before the short days of winter hit. So I brought it on vacation with me.

My work-in-progress cellphone shot from August 17th, while on vacation in Nova Scotia. In this photo you can really see the domes where I overpacked the loops early on in the process. Every bit of black background that I add makes the marbles pop more, which is so satisfying. Before I can complete the rug, I need to cut more #3 and #4 cut of my flat black to fill the remaining spaces. I also need to hook in a few more rows of the teal border. 

Hopefully the next time you see a photo of it here, I'll be celebrating its completion!

Note: This post is part of my #30DaysOfMaking Challenge. 30 nonconsecutive days, as it turns out.

My zone 3 perennial garden

This month, I planted a perennial garden in front of the house. The curved bed had once had some annuals planted in it, and was covered in pea gravel. It had maybe an inch of topsoil on top of sticky clay, so I'll need to top-dress it with a thin layer of organic compost annually to gradually build up the soil. We added cedar edging that may or may not hold up to our harsh winters - that might be replaced with stone or faux-stone concrete edging eventually.

My Canadian Food Voice, and Wild Saskatoon Grunt

This post is my final entry of the Canadian Food Experience project (2013-2014) (also on Facebook) proposed by my friend Valerie Lugonja, who is a board member of Slow Food Edmonton, with the goal of sharing regional food experiences to clarify our Canadian culinary identity. THANK YOU, VAL! Please check out the blogs of the other participants, and watch Val's blog for ongoing quarterly roundups of Canadian Food Experience posts for phase two of the project. 

via

I'm not a food blogger. I'm not even a proper capital-b-Blogger with a single focus and a daily or even weekly writing practice; I write intermittently, as the mood and topic tickles my fancy, and my photography skills are indifferent at best. I write to please myself. That anyone else reads my posts is a source of constant astonishment.

So, writing monthly posts for the Canadian Food Experience challenge over the past year stretched me, in the best ways, and helped me to clarify my voice as a writer and explore my interest in the slow food movement. 

Slow Textiles: Experiments in Natural Dyeing

My fascination with natural dyes continues unabated! Here are more of my experiments with immersion dyeing, bundle dyeing, and rust dyeing from the past couple of months.

I. Bundle dyeing

Quick-and-dirty bundle dyeing (aka eco-dyeing/printing, originated by the inspirational India Flint) instructions: Wet prewashed & premordanted cloth, lay out the dyeing agent (leaves or flowers), then roll the cloth around a stick or a copper pipe. Steam or boil for 60 min. Allow to dry for as long as you can stand (ideally weeks, overnight at minimum), then open the bundle.

What I actually did:

Slow Textiles: Experiments in Dyeing using Black Beans

Inspired by these blog posts found via Pinterest, I soaked black beans (no-name brand from the grocery store, 1 cup, in 8 cups of tap water) for about 24 hours at room temperature (then cooked the beans, to be added to a chili today, mmmmm). The extracted colour was much more red than blue. I added more water and some alum, to act as a co-mordant, then I dumped in my fabric. In retrospect perhaps co-mordanting was a mistake; premordanting fabric that has been properly stripped would typically give a much stronger colour.

Before dyeing: off-white bamboo-rayon socks, and 8 m/m silk habotai scarves that were previously dyed with logwood and alum mordant.

I also, inspired by this Spirit Cloth post, tied some black beans into a rayon-spandex (95%-5%) tshirt and threw it into the pot, too. Then I let everything sit at room temperature, with a plate on top to keep the fabric all underwater, overnight.

The Canadian Kitchen Garden: USDA Zone 3

This weekend is the Victoria Day long weekend, which Edmontonians usually consider the beginning of the frost-free season and safe to plant seedlings, and things are finally starting to green up - so my thoughts have turned to establishing my kitchen garden. 

(September 7th update: skip to the bottom of the post for photos from the end of the season!)

happy bee on an Evans Cherry sapling in bloom at the garden centre

I grew up in Nova Scotia (USDA Zone 5ish), but all my gardening as an adult has been in Edmonton (USDA zone 3, which you can push to zone 4 in protected microclimates). The cottage-style garden I made at my last home was purely decorative, with an emphasis on peonies, iris, hostas, and daylilies. I am sorely missing the now-mature Evans Cherry tree we planted in that garden, and the gorgeous sour cherry gelato I made from its fruit. Sigh.

my little raised bed from last summer needs rebuilding already

However, two summers ago we moved house to a larger lot, and so this summer's labour of love is turning the bare bones planted by the previous owners into a proper kitchen garden.

Another Regional Canadian Food: Donald Merriam's fish chowder and Solomon Gundy

In my last regional Canadian food post, I noted that my Maritime ex-pat friends missed all manner of seafood. This one is for them: my grandfather's chowder recipe, a classic fish-and-potato chowder that is easily adapted to whatever seafood you can get fresh or frozen locally. In my case, I'm using grocery-store seafood that has been flash-frozen while fresh, because I live on the Prairies. It's not possible here to ask your fishmonger how old their stock is, and have them look at their watch.

Port Greville harbour circa 1910, via Dan LeBlanc's flikr stream. That's my grandparents' home, where my Dad grew up, with the upstairs bedroom windows open in the lower right corner.

Workers at Wagstaff & Hatfield Shipbuilding, Port Greville, Nova Scotia, probably sometime in the 1960s. My grandfather Donald Merriam is the fellow third from right in the front row, squinting at the camera. The big red house on the hill at left was built by his father. Via Dan LeBlanc's flikr stream.

My father's dad was a sailor, from a long line of merchant seamen of Planter ancestry (the New Englanders who were shipped in to settle the land after the Acadians were deported). He sailed two- and three-masted schooners along the trade routes of the Atlantic before World War Two. He served in the engine room of motor gun boats after training as a motor mechanic during the war, then applied that skill to work in a shipyard on the Parrsboro shore of the Bay of Fundy. He had very impressive blackwork tattoos from his sailing days on his forearms, gone blue and a bit blurry with age; at least one was the anchor that he would have gotten after his first Transatlantic voyage on a schooner. At the tender age of four he made me solemnly promise to never get a tattoo, because he'd always regretted having them as an adult. I also remember him taking me out on the Bay in a dory to jig for flounder once when I was a kid - he never repeated the adventure, because apparently I couldn't sit still and he was terrified that I would fall in and drown.

My grandfather in his Canadian Navy dress uniform (I think) during World War 2. I believe this was taken in London when he and my grandmother got engaged or married - there is one of her to match.

Cream-soup chowders are a landlubber's luxury. This chowder was served aboard ship on cargo schooners, where fresh milk was not available, and even adding canned milk would have been unlikely and is optional (but my mom always did, so to me, it doesn't taste right without it). The fish used would have been cured with salt and smoke and packed for the voyage, or caught fresh.

For those of you who like to compare recipes before you make your own version, my grandfather's chowder recipe is similar to this milk-based recipe from Cubits, and Chef Michael Smith's version grates the potatoes and adds white wine.

Tonight's version, made with bacon, scallops, and halibut. It tastes almost like I remember.
I'm out of summer savoury so I substituted a bit of dill.

Donald St.Clair Merriam's fish chowder 
(as told to my mother shortly after she and my father got married)

bacon (or, originally, salt pork)
white fish, filleted: cod / haddock / halibut / flounder / sole
potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced (optional)
1 stalk celery, diced (optional)
water
spices: summer savoury, salt and pepper to taste
1 can evaporated milk (optional)

Cook bacon, chopped up. Sautee the chopped onions in the bacon fat with bacon. Add potatoes (and carrot and celery) to the soup pot and add water immediately to cover. Bring water to boil, then turn down to medium-low. Cook covered 10 minutes, then add fish. Cook covered until fish is cooked (10 minutes per inch of fish). Add 1 can evaporated milk and spices at end. Best served with tea biscuits or scones.

My modifications:
(1) I add scallops, too, because I love them. They get sauteed in the bacon grease until cooked, then reserved, and added back into the pot just before serving.
(2) Instead of leaving the bacon in the soup pot, I prefer to cook it until crisp, reserve it, then crumble it and some dulse over the bowl when serving.
(3) My mom prefers to leave the bacon out, and sautee the chopped onions in butter instead of bacon fat, which is likely how it would have been done when brined pork was used.
(4) Sometimes, like today, I don't peel my potatoes. I thought the red skins would look pretty.

Bonus recipe! This one is exactly as written in my paternal grandmother's handwriting. I haven't tried it, and my parents don't remember him making it, but when I was a teenager, Grampie had converted a small shed into a smokehouse, so he probably made it to use up his salt-cured smoked herring. It's served as an appetizer with crackers, sometimes with cheese and another pickle. My maternal grandmother's father also made Solomon Gundy - which is emphatically not said "Solomon GRundy" like in the nursery rhyme.

Don's Solomon Gundy (pickled herring)

Cut herring into bits.
Soak overnight if salt.
Next day mix equal amounts of vinegar & sugar, enough to cover fish, in saucepan.
Add small bag of pickling spice & boil. Let cool; pour over fish after packing in bottles with layer of fish, layer of onions.

If this recipe is unclear, try this version. The history of Solomon Gundy is discussed here. You might be more familiar with Solomon Gundy as the spicy fish paste from Jamaica - same stuff, but with no sugar and more heat in the spice mix, and pureed.

This post belatedly fulfills Challenge 10 (from March) of the Canadian Food Experience project (also on Facebook) proposed by my friend Valerie Lugonja, who is a board member of Slow Food Edmonton. The project began June 7th, 2013. As we (participants) share our collective stories across the vastness of our Canadian landscape through our regional food experiences, we hope to bring global clarity to our Canadian culinary identity through the cadence of our concerted Canadian voice. Please join us.