Monday Message

"We encourage members worldwide to prepare for adversity in life by having a basic supply of food and water and some money in savings. We ask that you be wise, and do not go to extremes. With careful planning, you can, over time, establish a home storage supply and a financial reserve." (All is Safely Gathered In)

Adversities in life - we seem to be all having those now on top of what adversities we had before. We need to be working harder than we were on everything. So roll up those sleeves, we are in for a bumpy ride.

Here is the bag my sister made after weaving the fabric. It holds the test knit sweater I am working on. I am working on the button band then the sleeves.

Doing this between all the gardening is making it go much slower but I am building on my knitting skills.

Did you put any seeds in the ground? It is hard at this end to see the fruits but they will come.

The raspberries look to be a bumper crop. What I do is pick, wash, and freeze them. Then when things cool off in the fall, I make raspberry jam.

I picked enough rhubarb to make a rhubarb cake - yum! Here's the recipe...

This is from a really old cookbook. It was one of those church type cookbooks that everyone put their favorites in. They always have the best recipes in them. So if you run across them, grab them up.

We need to find uses for everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVDDN93qGj0 - this is making a rug from plastic bags without crocheting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRJ1W3VFOzE a rug from plastic bags using crocheting.

This rug my sister wove on her loom from plastic bags.

I thought you would like to see these three ways you could make rugs from plastic grocery bags.

Our ancestors used everything. So we need to think outside the box. When we think we will be tossing something out, we need to ask ourselves can we use it in some other way?

If we don't know how to do something, we can learn. With YouTube we can search how to do a lot of things...remember we did that to fix our dryer.

There are classes on just about anything you can think of for free. The sweater I am making has a video to watch for an area that is tricky to do that helps explain it to you. She did not have PUK in the abbreviations section of the pattern but a quick Google search showed me what it meant pick up and knit.

I taught myself to tat by watching YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08JpLOStvFA - this gal is so cute, if you shouldn't do something she wags her finger at you :p

I am planning to learn more on bobbin lace and these pictures I was gifted from my sister is the inspiration to encourage me to learn.

When the Olympics were in Oslo they had a segment of knitters making sweaters and talking about them. I taped it as they said it was coming up - this was way back then with VCR tapes, remember those? I played it over and over until I could learn that way (continental) of knitting. That was before YouTube. Now you can type in how to knit continental style knitting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLSaApeG-vY - just like that you have an instant teacher.

Remember I told you I would pick up buttons that I would see on the ground and built a collection of them. They have been useful to me over the years. When we have an article of clothing no longer useful to wear, I first cut off the buttons and add them to my button collection, the rest of it is cut up to be cleaning rags since my husband paints pictures. You can see his artwork here - www.dickshook.com 

So think on how you can use it up, wear it out, make do or do without as the saying goes.

When you are feeling way too busy, know it won't always be the case.

Gus says learning new skills is interesting and fun, especially if he gets to help.

Missy says the more we learn the more we save.