February: A Month in Review

We've just entered March and I'm somewhat in awe of how February simultaneously felt like it lasted for years and was gone in the blink of an eye. I didn't accomplish everything I set out to do in February (looking at you, pallets that didn't get made into a compost bin), but it was overall a productive and enjoyable month. I knocked several things off of my to-do list, spent time with friends, read a lot, and whiled away afternoons crafting and gardening.

The month started off on a high with the celebration of Imbolc, a one-day SCA event where we welcomed the coming of spring surrounded by friends. We ate a feast of preserved foods, dipped beeswax candles, and made Brigid's crosses out of rushes. The event broke us out of our winter hibernation and marked the beginning of our medieval event season.

Late in the evening, we returned home from the event to find that Tom, the chaos kitten, had escaped his confinement in the kitchen to get into a fight with Figaro and use our bed as a litter box. This quickly soured our celebratory mood from the day, but it wasn't all doom and gloom. We spent the next day, a bank holiday Monday, searching the local area for a laundrette we could use to clean all of our bedding in one go. I don't usually miss having a dryer, but when we were faced with no clean linens and a weather forecast of cold and rain for the next week, I wasn't sure how we would ever get our sheets and duvets dry again!

We ended up spending the day in Newport, a town we hadn't been to before (and that has a giant washer and dryer in a petrol station car park). While we were waiting for our laundry, we had coffees and walked along the river. We retreated to our car to read and knit when the rain started and from there we witnessed the most rural Irish experience imaginable. As we sat, two farmers drove up and parked their trucks and trailers behind us and proceeded to unload dozens of sheep into the car park into makeshift pens. They paraded the sheep around, haggled over prices, swapped sheep between trailers, and then were off again. The entire exchange only lasted a few minutes. We are definitely not in Dublin any more folks.

We continued our activity with the SCA for another couple of weekends in February. As mentioned above, the event season has officially begun! We spent a Saturday in Galway at an Arts & Sciences gathering with our local SCA branch. It was a great opportunity to see people we don't often see at events around Dublin. I worked on my 16th century knit coif cap and admired the scribal activities and leather-working being done by others in the group. The Arts and Sciences minister for Eplaheimr taught a class on patterning hose, and I spent some time with a partner wrapping kitchen roll around our legs, securing it with a solid layer of masking tape, cutting it away from our legs, and then refining the pattern onto paper. I left with a personalised pattern to make my own pair of medieval knee-high hose, something I've been wanting to try making for some time now (watch this space!).

A couple of weekends later, I attended Eplaheimr's Court of Love event. Usually, this event is themed around courtly love; being an occasion to practice your courtly manners and courtesy, and share your appreciation of each other with respectful affection. This year though, the event steward twisted the theme and we spent a delightful day being bawdy and rude. There was a competition to write naughty limericks, clay to sculpt your own sheela-na-gig, and a class on medieval love potions and aphrodisiacs. I taught a class about medieval underwear called 'Mentioning Unmentionables', and we had a lively discussion about the impracticalities of going commando under your gowns! Court was full of mistaken identity shenanigans and I ended up laughing the entire time. After the event, I spent the night at a friend's house and we drank wine and gossiped into the early morning hours. Perfection.

I did a lot of crafting through February too. I finished knitting my Step-by-Step sweater, a HUGE accomplishment for me. As soon as it finished drying, I put it on and have been wearing it ever since. I love it so much. In case you somehow missed it, here's the blog post about the process of making my first knit sweater:

I also spent a silly amount of time photographing every skein of yarn I have in my stash and uploading it onto my Ravelry account. I love being able to see exactly what I have, with lengths, weights, and fibre content all recorded together. I especially love that Ravelry recommends which yarn in my stash might work for patterns I'm interested in knitting. Using that feature, I used some of my stash to make the 16th century knitted coif cap. Here's a link to that blog post too:

Because I liked the process and the finished cap so much, I've started working on a second coif cap using the same pattern and more of my stash yarn. It's nearly done, so you'll probably see pictures of it in next month's wrap-up post!

I also selected the next sweater knitting project I'm going to work on and bought yarn for it. It's the 'Baba Sweater Chunky' by ANKESTRiCK. It's a beautiful striped sweater in a DK weight yarn. I love the designer's version so much that I picked very similar yarns to make my own; the only difference is that I warmed up the colour scheme slightly by choosing a light brown instead of a cream coloured yarn and I bought a tweedy yarn to give some specks of colour variation throughout. I can't wait to get started on this project soon.

I finished a big sewing commission for a friend in the SCA. She asked me to make her several pieces, and I've been working on them bit by bit, delivering each piece as I finish them. Over the last season, I've made her a 14th century wool gown with hand-sewn eyelet lacing holes and hand-made fabric buttons to secure the sleeves; a velvet jacket with peplums and hand-stitched finishings; and a linen, Roman-style chiton dress. And, finally, this month I finished and delivered the last piece, a silk Gates of Hell style overdress. The silk was flat-lined with linen and most of the finishings were done by hand. She wore it at the Court of Love event and looked absolutely regal and beautiful. It makes me so proud when I look around at an event and see all of the garb that I've made on so many people. I must get better at taking photographs of the recipients wearing their new garb, because my mannequin really doesn't show them off at their best!

Daniel and I planned a couple of outings together this month. We watched an online talk through the V&A Museum with the director and costume designer of the new 'Wuthering Heights' movie, and then went to the cinema to see the movie and munch on a giant bag of popcorn. I loved the book as a teenager, and the movie took me right back to the tumultuous, all-encompassing love you feel as a 14 year old. It was artsy, weird, and uncomfortable, and I loved it so much.

We also spent a morning at the sauna. It was snowing and icing outside, but we were toasty warm in the sauna, overlooking the beach and watching the snow melt on the window. We were very brave and ran from the heat to the freezing cold ocean to dip our bodies into the water and cool off. But, I could only muster that level of braveness once, so between the rest of the sessions in the sauna I just stood outside in the falling snow to cool off. If that's not the definition of luxury, I'm not sure what is.

Most of my month was spent working in the garden. The transformation over the last few weeks has been so exciting to see! We started the month with frost most mornings, snow, and hail. Now, we're starting to see our daffodils bloom and many of our other plants are starting to emerge from their winter hibernation too.

At the beginning of the month, our willow cuttings arrived and Daniel and I spent a couple of days out in the field laying weed suppressant and then planting all 112 baby willow plants. I wrote a dedicated blog post about the process, you can find it here:

The rest of our baby apple trees arrived and we planted them out too. We now have all five planted! I'll be writing a post about the start of our orchard soon, but it fills me with so much joy and optimism for the future when I look out over the field and see them planted.

And then, because past-me was enthusiastic and ordered everything for the garden at once, we ended up having a gigantic freight truck show up and drop off three pallets in the middle of our driveway, blocking our car from being able to park fully out of the way of the gate. There's nothing like worrying about our new car being in the way of our neighbour's cows to motivate us to get to work in the garden!

I built our two garden beds one day and then lined the bottoms of them with the cardboard they were shipped in. Then, I layered sticks and some leaves on top of that to help with drainage and to cut down on the amount of soil and compost we needed to fill each bed. The next day, we moved two entire pallets of soil from the driveway up to the field and into the garden beds. We counted, and it took 32 wheelbarrow loads to move all the soil (and the field is not very close to the driveway, you have to go up a few steps and a big hill to get there, it was so much work 🙃) The last pallet is a load of wood chips that I plan to put down around the garden beds so that we have a nice path that won't get too muddy throughout the year. That will hopefully happen in March. We can squeeze the car around the final pallet of wood chips, so our sense of urgency dropped away and we realised how tired we were after moving all that soil!

I ordered vegetable and flower seeds from the Irish Seed Savers and am eagerly awaiting their arrival. I also have a few dye plant seeds that I bought but never planted last year. I've chosen spots in the field, raised beds, and in pots for everything. I'll need to make a couple of simple wooden frame raised beds for some of the flowers, but with all the pallet wood we have that shouldn't be a problem. I know it's too early to actually plant anything outside in the raised beds or directly into the ground, but I'm going to start some of the seeds inside as soon as they arrive. I ordered a grow light and some seedling trays and plan to transform the window sill in the guest room into a tiny greenhouse.
Here's a list of the seeds I have for this year:
-Brecon Black Runner Beans
-Purple Pod Capucijner Peas
-Blue Curled Scotch Kale
-Wautoma Cucumber
-Superschmelz Kohlrabi
-Round Red Forcing Radish
-Egyptian Beetroot
-Giant Noble Spinach
-Syrian White Courgette
-Sunnybrook Peppers
-Alexander's Herb
-Angelica Herb
-Sweet Mona's Dill Herb
-Sunflower Mix
-Feverfew Flowers
-Hopi Red Dye Amaranth Flowers
-Hollyhock Flowers
-Irish Woad
-Coreopsis Flowers
-Dyer's Chamomile
-Marigold Flowers
-And my friend Cheryl has picked pumpkin seeds for us to grow together too!

Yea, it's a lot. I may have been overly excited when I saw all the beautiful seed packets and pictures of plants online.

I also spent several hours in the garden throughout February doing general tidying and trimming. This feels like one of those jobs that will be perpetually on my to-do list, but I don't mind at all. I love picking a small area of the garden and focusing all of my attention on it for an hour or so and then looking at how much change I can make in such a small amount of time. Especially now, as I'm clearing out the dried up flowers and dead leaves that I left over winter as shelter for the bugs, I'm seeing the bright green shoots of bluebells and geraniums peek through the soil. The daffodils are blooming enthusiastically, and as I cut back brambles and trim bushes, the garden is starting to look alive and vibrant again.

I've started the beekeeping course I talked about previously. I absolutely love it and find it completely fascinating. Over the last couple of weeks, we've discussed the history of beekeeping in Ireland, and different cultural beekeeping traditions around the world. We're learning about the different types of bees that will be in my hives, and how to care for them. I've selected where I think I will put my hives when I get them later in the year, and I'm planning several in-person meetings with the instructor to practice tending to the hives.

We ended our February with friends spending the weekend with us at the house. They walked around the garden with me and gave me tips for what to trim more aggressively and which plants I could dig up and separate to help them thrive. We brainstormed about planting future hedges and made lists of flower bulbs I'll try to buy and plant in the fall. In the evening we sat by the fire and talked about books, food, vacations, and planned future weekends when we will gather together again. It was such a gorgeous and fulfilling way to end the month and ease into March.

I don't think I'll write a post about my March intentions this month because it feels odd to publish two posts right after each other at the start of each month, but know that my next few weeks will be filled with sewing, knitting, reading, and gardening and, of course, I'll keep you updated as I finish projects.

Friends, try to find joy and peace. Talk again soon.