Yarn Along and announcing Wool 365

It's been quite a while since I've been on this space and I've missed it.  I think I'm back, but I need to figure out how this is now going to work into our family's rhythm.  It seems like joining in the Yarn Along each week might be a good place to start.  Speaking of rhythm, we need to figure that out again now that the holidays are winding down.

I'm also announcing the start of a new project of mine, Wool 365.  DH and I got a new DSLR camera for Christmas and I figured taking pictures each day would be a good way to learn to use the camera.  I decided to use Wool as my subject.  While working on decluttering this week I realized that I have surrounded our family with wool.  My creativity is largely wool based, with the needle felting, knitting and crocheting that I do.  For me, it seems like a natural subject matter.

This fall was super busy for us. It has also been a really lovely blessed time for our family. We had lots of company over the last few months, which was wonderful.  We've celebrated festivals and holidays and birthdays and maybe if I get around to it I'll share more about that later.  W and I have been attending a weekly Waldorf Play group and we also have our parent-child class at the school once a week.  DH and I are attending bi-weekly parent discussions that are being offered by one of the teachers at the school as well.  The school and the school community have been so wonderful for our family this fall and I am eagerly awaiting the spring term, hoping to get involved in the handwork group etc.

Okay, now to the yarn along.  I'm joining with Ginny of Small Things for this week's yarn along. I've got lots of WIP, but the two I've been working on primarily are the Alice shawl in  Green/Plum Malabrigo sock yarn, and what I am calling the Ranger Cowl for DH to be able to wear to work now that the weather seems to be getting colder finally.  I'm using this Easy Unisex Cowl pattern for it and since DH claims a wool allergy (can you believe I'm married to a man with a wool allergy?) I'm using Lion Brand Wool-Ease that is mostly acrylic.  I don't think that will make him too itchy.  This allergy is probably the reason I don't knit many things for him though.

In terms of reading, I received a Kindle for Christmas and I am loving it.  I just finished reading Philippa Gregory's Lady Rivers on it. Philippa Gregory novels (and others about dead British royals too) are one of my big guilty pleasures! I also have put all the pdf's of patterns I'm knitting onto it which is just wonderful!  DH and I are also working through Simplicity Parenting together for the parent discussions that we have been attending at W's school.

Yarn Along and updates

It's been a couple weeks again since I've managed to participate in the Yarn Along with Ginny of Small Things. Come to think of it, it's been a few weeks since I've managed to even update the blog.  What can I say, things have suddenly gotten very busy around here.

I have finally made some like-minded mama friends around here which is just wonderful!  Together with them I have been very busy starting a local Waldorf Homeschool Coop we are calling Rosebud Circle.  We aren't planning on homeschooling unless we were to move somewhere without a school, but we also don't live particularly close to the nearest Waldorf school here so it's nice to have a local community closer to home.

W and I are also hoping that we will be starting the parent-child class at the nearest Waldorf School next month.  The teacher welcomed us into the class in May and I just realized last week that we hadn't heard anything since then and school starts very soon.  I'm in the process of playing phone/email tag with the school now and hope we get it all resolved soon so we can start week after next.  Our homeschool community is wonderful, but I also really feel a need to be connected to a Waldorf School as well.

I am going to be starting Waldorf Foundation Year Studies through the Sophia Institute late next month as well which is hopefully the start of an exciting new chapter in my life as well.   For some time now I have been wanting to start Waldorf teacher training but I guess it's something I haven't mentioned here previously. My intention had been to start earlier this year, but then our move came up and I had to postpone my intentions for a while.  I'm glad that we are finally settled enough for me to start down this path. I'm really looking forward to this and I think it is going to offer me great opportunities for my own personal growth and really make me stretch  in new ways.  I'm still undecided as to whether I want to pursue early childhood education or elementary education.  I had always thought I would go into elementary education, but there continues to be this little voice in my mind telling me that early childhood might be where I need to be.  I really enjoy both age groups and the curriculum is so beautiful from early childhood up through the grades.  Sometimes I think both are calling to me with equal intensity at this point.  My hope is that as I go through the foundation studies I will be better able to decide in which direction I am being called.  I am sure that by the time I need to make the decision, I will have a clearer picture of what that calling is going to be.

Okay, now to the yarn along!  I finished the first sweater I've ever completed.  It's a blue wool hoodie for W (Rav notes here).  He loves it but I have to apologize for the bad picture.  He didn't feel like being a very cooperative model.  I enjoyed knitting this one so much that when I went back to the store to get a skein of yarn to finish it, I decided I also wanted to make him a striped one which is my knitting project for this week.  I decided to knit this one in the round and work the arms from the top down (Rav notes here).  As I write this, though I'm realizing I'm going to have to go back and take a quite a few rows and start the decreases on the first sleeve.  Still, I don't think it will take me too much longer to complete it.  I'm amazed my how much more quickly it has gone knitting this sweater in the round than it did knitting it flat.

For books this week, I just completed Farmer Boy (not pictured) and The Long Winter from the Little House series.  Oh how I love these books!  I read little bits of Farmer Boy outloud to W and he loved hearing new stories about " 'Manzo" besides the ones in his My First Little House books.  It's certainly not a book I would read to him in its entirety, but I was surprised by how much he enjoyed me reading a chapter book to him.  My other book that I am currently reading in School as a journey by Torin M Finser.  I ordered a used copy of this one from Amazon and imagine my surprise when I opened it up and found that it was a signed copy!  Kind of cool!  In any case, I've read the chapters on first and second grades and I'm working my way through the 3rd grade chapter now.  It's a fantastic book and is really inspiring me right now.  

Okay, hopefully I can be back here a little more regularly in the coming weeks.  I'm also hoping to get a few minutes in the next day or so to see what all of you are working on!

Nourishing Traditions (or an explanation for my absence)

I'm still here though things have been pretty quiet here on the blog over the past couple weeks.  I mentioned in my last post that I have been reading Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon recently.   This book has inspired such a huge change in our house.  I skeptically got this book from the library after listening to friends rave about it and traditional foods in general for the past couple of years.  They had some influence on our family for sure.  I've been cooking with coconut oil for a couple years now, I occasionally soaked my grains, was known to make bone broth a couple times a year and I had developed a healthy (if expensive) kombucha habit.  We ate whole grains almost exclusively at home and ate some produce from local farmers' markets, but we weren't really eating a real/traditional foods diet on a daily basis. W and I would grab fast-food lunches often if we were out and about (way more often than I ever care to admit) and I drank diet soda like it was going out of style. It only took me a few days reading and cooking from the book to realize how much this is revolutionizing the way our family eats.

At first my plan was to implement a couple things here and there, but the more I started preparing and eating these real foods, the more I craved them and the better I started to feel. It was like a fog was lifted.  Then, one day W and I were out and hungry and decided to stop to get some fast food.  BIG mistake.  I felt sick and sluggish for three days afterwards.  It's not an experience I care to repeat anytime soon.

I also started reading Real Food by Nina Planck and found it to be a wonderful companion to NT.  Honestly it has had a bigger impact on the types and sources of the foods we are now eating than NT has I think.  I've been getting more of our food from the local farmers markets and much less from the grocery store.  I found a local milk source at one of the markets.  It's not raw, but it is grass-fed, local, whole and unhomogenized (and since we always make the majority of our milk into yogurt or kefir, I'm okay with it for the moment).  I feel like it's the best I can do while I seek out a source of raw milk.  I've also found a wonderful meat and egg vendor that we are also frequenting along with all of our favorite produce vendors.

Okay, so on to the fun stuff going on in my kitchen now!  Just look at what I have going on above my kitchen cabinets!

One of my first projects was starting my own kombucha scoby.  It seemed to take forever, growing that first scoby from a bottle of GT Dave's, but,  I now have three jars of kombucha going and multiple bottles in a second ferment stage. (In the picture above the jars covered with clothes are my first fermentation stage jars and the bottles next to  them are the second fermentation stage). This makes me very happy and I can honestly say I don't even want to think about diet soda anymore.  For me, I think the kombucha made this such an easy and much needed transition.

I also have jars of cortido, pickles, ginger carrots, beet kvass, bean paste, and peach/tomato salsa fermenting up there.  The two jars on the right contain my sourdough starter.

I realized this past week that we are buying far fewer processed items and that I am now really making almost everything from scratch including most of our breads, tortillas and pastas.  What all of this has meant is that I spend way more time in the kitchen than I did previously and that I have to be way more organized about our meal planning and food preparation than ever before.  This is especially true for any foods containing grains or beans that need to be soaked or sprouted or meats that have to be thawed.  It has also meant that much of the computer time I do have gets devoted to researching information, recipes and tips than ever before (so less time for blogging).

The challenge now, seems to be getting the rhythm of all of this worked out so that I can do small amounts of food prep a few times a day to maintain it all and do the other things that I want or need to do done.  I hope within a week or two I will have that part sorted out a bit better.  In the mean time, I am enjoying the creativity and health of this new way of cooking and eating.

Yarn Along

I'm joining with Ginny of Small Things again today for the Yarn Along.

I haven't had a huge amount of time for knitting lately, but when I have, I've been working on this large worsted weight shawl.  I really want to get it done and blocked soon so that a) I have it to wear once the weather gets colder and b) so that I can focus on really getting started on gifts for autumn birthdays and Christmas.

I have been reading a good bit recently though (and perhaps thus neglecting my knitting).  I started reading Nourishing Traditions recently and of course I have thus been spending most of my time in the kitchen cooking, and soaking and fermenting up a storm.  I was a bit skeptical going in to it, but I have really enjoyed the book and implementing as much of it as possible so far, I feel fantastic.  I think this will have to be covered in a later blog post at a later time.  If you are interested however, my friend Tiffany  at The Real Food Mom has been blogging about it from her own unique perspective.  It's been fun sharing thoughts about more traditional foods with her.  I've also been reading Nina Planck's Real Food and have found it to be a good companion to NT.

Otherwise in reading, I have set aside Wuthering Heights for now.  I'm thinking I'll go back to it this fall, but for now I am doing some reading to prepare for our upcoming trip out West to visit my parents.  While my husband, the Park Ranger is looking into all of the National Park sites between here and there, I'm excited about getting to visit the Little House on The Prairie Museum.  We've been reading the My First Little House books to W on a daily basis and he absolutely loves them and is also really excited to go see "Laura's House".  So, in preparation for the trip, I just completed Little House in the Big Woods and I will start Little House on the Prairie this evening.  We read all of the Little House books when I was a child and our family vacations often included visiting Little House sites.  I think Pepin Wisconsin is the only one we did not visit when I was a kid.  Once W is a bit older, I think we will have to do all of the Little House sites with him as well.  I so love sharing this with him already.

As I read, I'm looking for ways to make this come alive for W as we travel across the country to the plains.  I think this may have to be it's own post as well at some later point, but if anyone has any suggestions for resources or activities that would work for a three year old boy, please leave me a comment!

Yarn Along

I am  joining with Ginny of Small Things again this week for the Yarn Along.  I'm really looking forward to seeing what everyone is knitting and reading this week.


For my reading, I'm still working on Wuthering Heights and still enjoying it.  I'm going to reserve further commentary on this book though till I finish it.

On the needles this week, I still have all of my projects from last week as well as another shawl using cotton yarn.  My intention is for this to be a Christmas present.  I've been working on most of these projects a little each day.  I am putting my foot down with myself however and not allowing myself to cast on any more projects till I complete at least one of these.  I realized this morning when I was putting all of the projects out together that they are all in shades of blue or green.  I have some delicious reddish-brown yarn waiting for my next project to break out of that rut.


You might notice one further addition to my table of knitting this week.  A new pair of reading/knitting glasses. I've never worn glasses before and I am amazed at how much more clearly I can see my work and my reading now.

W's book pick for this week is The Rose In My Garden.  We love the beautiful illustrations of flowers and critters.  If you are familiar with the book you might find it somewhat ironic that our cat was pretty insistent on staying on the sofa while I photographed it. 

Yarn Along

I am joining Ginny from Small Things in her Yarn Along again this week.   Thanks for all the comments on Wuthering Heights last week.  It's slow going, but I've stuck with it and I am enjoying it.  It was definitely worth getting through those first pages. I've also been rereading parts of Simplicity Parenting this week looking to get us back into some semblance of rhythm for the summer.  I've especially been focusing on what he has to say about sleep since that is sometimes a bit of an issue for us.

In terms of knitting, I'm still plugging away at that shawl.  It's growing and getting closer to the lace part, but has a little ways to go.  I'm finding this to be my go to project to knit on while I'm reading since it is mostly easy stockinette with a yarn over thrown in here and there.  I also decided to start on a Pembroke Sweater Vest for W.  I'm really enjoying working on the cables and it's coming along more quickly than I would have imagined.

I found a local yarn shop in our town this week and of course W and I had to stop in to check it out.  I'm so glad we did!  It was an amazing experience. The owner brought out coloring books and crayons for W and totally engaged him while I was trying to decide what yarn to buy.  The shop is under new ownership and the owner is working hard to get classes going.  We even had a fantastic discussion about how important she thinks it is for boys to learn to knit.  I could not agree more and think it is wonderful that one of her goals is to have monthly knitting nights for men and boys at the shop! I'm really looking forward to spending more time there. W  helped several customers (including myself) choose yarn for their projects.  He choose green yarn each time!  I love the superwash merino he helped me choose and couldn't wait to knit it up so I started a pair of socks for him.  He is really excited about them and keeps saying "Mama's making socks for me!" each time he sees me knitting them.

W's book pick this week is Puff the Magic Dragon.  We received the book as a gift when he was born and he had not shown much interest in it till recently, but oh how he loves this book (pictured with W's cup of Strawberry tea by his request).  It didn't take him long to learn every single word of the song as we read this book over and over.  He sings about Puff and Jackie Paper constantly now!  He decidedly however, does not enjoy the CD that came with the book, though I enjoy it having grown up listening to Peter Yarrow sing with Peter Paul and Mary.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone is reading and knitting this week!

Yarn Along

This week for the Yarn Along from Small Things I am happy to show you the completed scarf I had started last week.  I can't wait till the weather is cool enough to actually wear this.  It's in my favorite eggplant/plum color and remains one of my favorite easy quick knit projects.  I don't even have to look at a pattern to knit one of these at this point.  I'm also continuing work on my shawl, but  haven't made too much progress.  I'm looking forward to getting to the lace portions since I get a bit bored with all that stockinette, but I keep plugging away at it.  


For books this week, I finished  The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte within an hour of finishing my scarf.  I really enjoyed it and feel inspired to read more works by all three Bronte sisters.  To that end, I started reading Wuthering Heights yesterday.  Honestly, I am remembering why I put it down in the first few pages when I attempted it as a teenager and never picked it back up until now.  I find Emily Bronte's prose to be quite dense and much less accessible than I found Charlotte Bronte to be (at least in Jane Eyer).  This time I am determined to persevere and read it however, and as it goes on, I'm finding that I am adjusting to her style and enjoying it. I would say however, at this point both the boring stockinette in my shawl and reading Wuthering Heights are exercising my will and in the end will contribute to strengthening it (I've obviously been ingesting a bit of Steiner recently too).  I do expect great rewards in terms of learning and  feelings of accomplishment with both endeavors!


I'm also perusing Earthways: Simple Environmental Activities for Young Children which is apparently the only Waldorf book contained in our local library system.  I think it has some ideas in it that we might try and I'm looking forward to delving into it a bit more.

W also has some favorite book selections to share this week.  He has been loving his first two selections from the My First Little House Books series, Summertime In The Big Woods and County Fair.  He is especially enthralled by the County Fair book and the part about the mules.  W's daddy used to work with mules so they've been having lots of conversations about mules not being scary and daddy's even making plans to take W to visit the mules now.  All of this warms my heart.  I grew up heavily influenced by the original Laura Ingalls Wilder books and many of our family vacations when I was a kid revolved around visiting places where the Ingalls family lived.  I have such vivid memories of those trips to this day.  I hope one day to share a similar experience with W.  


W's other selection is Ruth Brown's Ladybug Ladybug.  We received our own copy of it in the mail this week. I've written about it before and it is a favorite in our house. This was a book W was heartbroken to return to the library so he's very excited to have his own copy which he wants to read multiple times a day.

Yarn Along

I am continue to participate in Small Things' Yarn Along this week.  

I've done some more work on my shawl, but the stockinette portion is taking a while, and I needed some knitting variety, so I have cast on this scarf.  You may remember I made about five of these last Christmas as gifts for the women in my family.  They are a great quick knit and I had intended to make one  for me and never got around to it, so here we go.  I've made a few small changes to the pattern for interest.  I'm using some purple Patons Wool yarn that I found left over in my stash.

This week I have finished up Children at Play.  I found that I really enjoyed it and that it is having quite an impact already on how I view W's play and toys and reinforces what we are choosing for him in terms of education.

I also have been looking at the verses, songs and stories in Wynstones Press's

Summer: A Collection of Poems, Songs and Stories for Young Children, as we look forward to summer and our Midsummer/ St. John's Day celebration.

This week I found myself revisiting Raising a Son which I have not looked at since W was an infant.  As part of my quest to be a more mindful parent, I felt that I wanted to delve into this again.

For fun I picked up The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte  from the library. I read Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre a few weeks ago in preparation for listening to the Diane Rehm Show's program on that book.  One of her guests was the other of this novel, Syrie James.  I loved Jane Eyre and decided to read a novel about the author as well. 

W also made a selection for this week's Yarn Along.  A friend recently recommended Farmer Brown Shear His Sheep: A Yarn About Wool so we picked it up from the library.  The illustrations are very cartoonish for my taste, but the story is told through a wonderful, humorous rhyme and W and I love that it covers all the steps in making a sweater from shearing the sheep to knitting.  It is definitely a fun read, especially for two sheep and wool lovers like W and myself.

Ladybugs Under The Old Oak Tree

"Ladybug ladybug fly away home..."

I have a confession to make.  I have a serious aversion to real ladybugs.  It goes back to my college days when thousands of them invaded my dorm room each year.  Every year our dorm was overrun by ladybugs sunning themselves on the outside walls.  That was fine.  It was when they all moved into the dorm that I started having issues with them.  I had always really liked ladybugs until I had to live with huge numbers of them falling from the ceiling and light fixtures on my while I slept or into my drink.  Just thinking about it makes me shiver and feel itchy.

So, fast-forward ten + years, and I am ever so slowly embracing the ladybug again.  I know they are a very beneficial insect to have in your garden, and are harmless in the great outdoors (probably indoors too, but I have baggage around that.)  When I took W strawberry picking, I even caught one for him to see.  It didn't even make me squirm.  I was very proud of myself for being able to handle and enjoy seeing the ladybug.  

I'm not sure this could have happened if W and I had not been doing some serious ladybug reading.  Our first trip to the library in our new town, we found Ladybug, Ladybug by Ruth Brown.  It quickly became one of our favorite books.

The illustrations in this version of this nursery rhyme is just so beautiful!  The depictions of the English countryside where the ladybug meets animals are so gentle and lovely.  W and I also love the poetry of the rhyme and it is yet another example of our love of nursery rhymes that I wrote about previously.

So, to celebrate my new found respect (and possibly even love) of all things ladybug, the newest addition to my Under The Old Oak Tree Etsy shop is this needle felted ladybug.

Yarn Along

This week I have decided to start participating in the Yarn Along from Small Things.  Hopefully it will keep me a little more on track with both my knitting and reading.

Right now I am working my way through Children At Play:Using Waldorf Principles to Foster Childhood Development by Heidi Britz-Crecelius.  So far, I am really enjoying reading her insights on play and the importance of creating opportunities for children to play with the elements.


For my knitting this week I am working on my first shawl.  I can't believe I've never knitted a shawl before.  I'm finding it really enjoyable and I'm looking forward to trying my hand at a bit of lace.  I'm using this Skipping Stones pattern but plan on adding some to the size of it by increasing my stitch count when I start the lace my multiples of twenty-four.    I am absolutely in love with the yarn which is lace weight merino wool that I purchased at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival from Mistralee Farm Studio of Oxford PA.  The colorway is called Mallard and I don't think you can really get a true sense of it from the picture.  It has the most beautiful deep blues and blue greens that are perfectly blended.  This yarn has given me such pleasure working with it.  I can't wait to finish this shawl which is going to be for me.  I've not actually knitted much for myself recently, so I think it's time I make something for me.  I'm also thinking that shawls would make wonderful Christmas gifts for a couple of special grandmothers and I have a beautiful wool/silk blend that I also purchased from Mistralee Farm Studio which would be perfect for those!