Pumpkin carving, walnut crushing, booze, and treadling at the Delightist = fun times

Happy Halloween and for whatever reason we're getting all old-timey up in here

Triclops kitty et al.

  Hi all, and I do hope you are enjoying the fall season.  I certainly am! I don't know if it's all this harvest-y energy or what, but a d.i.y., earthy, old time-y theme has emerged  big time in my sphere of earthly existence.
  Exhibit A) I have started making a hawthorne berry "tonic".

  I got the idea for this around a decade ago when I gave birth to Ruby in my living room.  (Huh, maybe I've been kind of old-timey all along)  Anyway, immediately after she came out I was woozy, to say the least.  One of my midwives ran out to the yard and picked some hawthorne berries off our tree for me to eat. (Don't eat the seeds though.)  She explained that they are a fantastic heart tonic.  And she also mentioned that people have made delicious and healthful cordials with them.  Somehow I remembered this little factoid in my haze and kept it tucked away this entire time.  Until now. Pictured above is phase one, infusing the berries (otherwise known as haws) in booze.  The big jar is brandy and the little one is vodka.  I'll keep you posted on how this all goes.  Okay, on to Exhibit B)cracking our own walnuts.

 So we went to our favorite pumpkin patch(http://www.krugersfarmmarket.com if you want to know) to get the pumpkins pictured above.  We got unreasonably excited when we saw that they had unshelled walnuts for sale.  Why you ask?  Well, last Spring, Ruby and I went to Geercrest Farm, an organic, biodynamic farm about a 45 minute drive south of Portland. Here's a link: http://www.geercrest.org/GeerCrest_Farm/Welcome.html
  For a small fee you can spend the day, help out with the chores, and have a delicious lunch made with stuff from the farm. We mostly loved it until a driving rain storm moved in and it was time to collect the eggs and feed the animals.  It was then that our citified ways came to the fore.

We are not farmers

 
   Clearly we are not farmers.  Oh well. But we did discover in the course of this day that we love cracking walnuts and meticulously picking out the meat if need be.  My neighbor Hans, came through yet again by lending us his adorbs squirrel nutcracker.  It works fine but truth be told, I prefer the hammer method. Nut cracking must be a dying art because we could not find a nut picker at any of the local kitchen stores we checked out, but a lobster or fondue fork will do in a pinch. So get yerself some unshelled nuts and be amazed at how satisfying this is.  Or not.
  Alright, on to Exhibit C) Great Grandma Rideout's Singer treadle sewing machine.  Well, kind of.  Here's what happened: two years ago, when my mom died, I had a few pieces of furniture shipped from Oklahoma to here.  My parents were divorced when I was 6 but somehow she ended up with this relic from my dad's side of the family.  I figured it had enough history to make it worth holding on to, plus it looked cool.  So I paid the big bucks to have it professionally packed and shipped and it has been residing in my basement since then.  Flash forward to now when I got a wild hair to sew on a machine and why not on this cool old machine?  My dad was coming out for a visit and I thought it would be a great project for us to try to get this baby up and running again.  So we dug the custom made box out of the depths for the unveiling.  Much cardboard, styrofoam, and some sort of industrial cling wrap later, she emerged.  Well, except for one little detail.  When we opened up the cabinet, the machine was gone!  WTF!?  Somewhere along the line the sewing machine part went away.  Well that was a wee bit of a disappointment.  I calmly started to peruse Craigslist and Ebay.  I also started feeling like I was going to have to learn A LOT more before I would buy a machine this way in order to avoid ending up with a big beautiful sewing machine shaped paper weight.  I didn't have much time at that moment so I decided this would be a project for another time.  Sad.

Note: an I-phone and a beer are critical to antique sewing machine repair

  However, the next night we were having a small party in honor of my dad being in town. At some point in the evening our friend Mike noticed the treadle cabinet in the living room.  As it turns out, he had made a few up-cycled pieces of furniture from antique treadle cabinets and still had two of the old machines he had removed from them in his attic.  So the next night we stopped by his house to see if there was a chance that one of his machines was the right make and model.  Oh my god people, he had the exact Singer we needed!  Can you believe it?  Talk about instant manifestation.  He also had a box of related pieces and parts and an old but unused treadle belt.  Thanks Mike!!!
  Granted, this machine had been sitting in a damp garage attic for a few years and who knows where else before that, but we had faith in this sturdy old technology.  That faith combined with copious amounts of 3 in 1 oil, my dad's ace tinkering skills, and Youtube tutorials, finally rebooted the old dame.  Also, thank you to those angels who post treadle repair instruction on Youtube.  By later the next day we had her humming along.  Then mysteriously jamming up.  Then running again.  Then jamming up.  Finally, she seemed to work out her kinks and now she purrs like a kitten.  Unbelievable.
  So if I can sum all this up, from pumpkin carving to booze to human powered machinery: old time-y = fun for the whole family.