Pot Holders, Coasters and More

 My mom was cleaning up and she found this. This was from when I was in Kindergarten. I smelled pretty bad so I just took a picture of it and tossed it. Did you make one of these in Kindergarten? They got a large piece of butcher paper and made you lie down on it. You got traced, then you had to color yourself in. haha. I don't know if they still do this in Kindergarten.

 These are string pot holders and coasters. I made for my mom's birthday. I actually went overboard on the coasters and made double the amount. It was a good thing too, because I used them in a Christmas grab bag at the 2012 Bernina Club Christmas party. The woman who got it really liked it. She told me that she has to keep track of them so that they don't walk away.

 As in a earlier post here, I wrote about my worms. Well, I have a large black rubbermaid container with my worms in it. It is raised off the floor of the garage and the lid has air holes. One day, there was a small frog in it, like the one we found in the house. As I was moving the paper to feed the worms the frog jumped out at me! After that I decided to get the worms a new home. We went to Koolau Farmers and found this green worm bin. We tried to clean out the black bin, but it so large that we couldn't get all the worms out. Hopefully we can get to it this summer, otherwise I will have two worm bins! I don't know if I can maintain two of them.

Japanese Quilting Book and Vermicomposting

Well, it's been a while since I posted and I apologize for that. I hit a dry spell for a while, but now I'm back on track and busy sewing. I purchased this Japanese quilting book for inspiration. It has some really cute stuff in it, but now I have to translate the instructions. Okay, now that's going to take a while. They have pictures to follow, but I'd like to try and translate what I can. Maybe my no. 1 daughter will help me when she comes home for the summer. She may double major in Japanese ( keeping my fingers crossed).

Anyway, I'd like to tell you about my worms. We're going green at school. I have a bin of garbage eating worms at school. We're trying to make a school bin. I have had a small bin since the beginning of the school year (August 2008). Pictured here are others harvesting their worms. This is called vermicomposting. The worms are vegetarians. They eat fruits and veggies, newspaper and cardboard. The worms reproduce rather quickly and one of their waste products is a very fertile soil called vermicast which is great for growing plants. The liquid in the tofu container is called vermicast tea which helps ward off white flies! I put some of the tea on my potato plants and the white flies are gone! Hooray!

Anyway, back to the worms...I bought a black containter from Hardware Hawaii for $5.00 (it was on sale). I learned how to drill holes in the bottom for aeration. Then I put burlap on the bottom first. On the burlap I put torn pieces of cardboard. On the cardboard I put shredded newspaper. Then I dumped in all of the contents of my old worm bin. The bin rests on the tofu containers for aeration. The tofu containers collect the vermicast tea.

I didn't harvest, I just went to a bigger bin. Maybe next time I'll be able to harvest my worms. I don't know if you can see the worms (they're red). I'm hoping I can get enough to have some for home.