What a week! Between the mounds of paperwork at work, the kids on vacation and life in general during the Summer, it has been so blessed busy!! The good news is……I am getting a new kitchen!! I have been waiting 9 years for this kitchen to be redone, so I am beyond excited!! I would post a before picture…..but since I am still living in the “before picture”, I think that I will wait….. I wouldn’t want you all to feel to badly for me…hehe. I never realized the work though, that it takes trying to redesign a kitchen and on a budget makes it even more challenging, but it is going to be fun 🙂

BABIES!!
We have some new little fuzzy arrivals!! Well, not quite fuzzy yet, in fact they look like little piglets…LOL. My German girl, Nordic Bonnie Lass, had 2 of the biggest babies that I have ever seen! They are HUGE!!!!! This was a breeding I was not sure would take, as the doe is a bit older and the buck, Woolybuns Buffalo Bun Cody, is on the youngish side. The doe had not been bred for almost 2 years, so it was anyone’s guess if the breeding would take. Being that I had a large litter a few months ago from another girl and just finished placing the last of the ones that were going to leave here, I was relieved to have a small litter. I am hoping that one is a buck and one is a doe………if that is the way it turns out, they will both stay here :-), as Cody is from the new German Import lines and has a lovely, dense coat and Bonnie has given me fabulous babies before. WELCOME BABIES!

Knitting, Knitting, Knitting
Well, I have decided that I will bite the bullet and finish my cloverleaf socks, as the singleton sock fits one of my daughters perfectly and she loves it…..however, I needed to take a break, so I decided that I would get started on the new sock. It is a neat cabled sock and will be our Aug/September sock for the six sock knit along. I took a breather from the kids, dogs and the paperwork, Friday and took a trip down to Patternworks. I am fortunate that it is only a 40 minute trip for me. What fun to have it so close! After working with the dastardly Fixation yarn, I decided to treat myself to some nice Lorna Laces Shepard Sock Yarn, in Gold Hill Colorway. During Saturday Night Live, I started working on the sock……..it is a fun pattern. I wil have to put these down for a little spell though, so that I can finish the baby sweater that I need to have done soon, before the baby comes. Perhaps at tomorrow’nights stich and bitch at Joan’s house, I will get it finished.

The Loom
Yup………the LOOM…….. I spent the better part of yesterday and this morning fighting with my loom. Moving heddles and harnesses around and trying to figure out how to center my towel pattern on each harness. Normally I would figure out how many heddles would go on each harness for the pattern that I was working on and then divide that in half so that the harnesses would be balanced. On this loom, however, the harnesses are diveded in thirds because of the way the hooks that hold the heddle bars on. Thankfully one very kind man, William Koepp, from the Weaving List, helped me figure out all those 8##%%!@& mathematical calculations. Thank you Bill!!!!! The towels are all “beamed” on and I started threading heddles today. Hopefully tomorrow I will have time to get the rest of the heddles and the reed threaded. One can hope!!

It’s back!! My Robin wheel made it’s way back home to me today. This wheel is definitly one of my favorites. It is a gorgeous wheel made from burled maple and is a stunning wheel. It comes to me from my good friend, Gil Gonsalves of Robin Spinning Wheels. I stopped in and visited with Gil today at his workshop in Parsonsfield, Maine, to fetch my lovely wheel. I can’t say enough about the workmanship that goes into each wheel that Gil makes. One of the great things about purchasing a Robin wheel is that Gil stands by all of his wheels in the event that you ever have any problems. Customer service is A+!! My lovely wheel went in a few weeks ago for a tweaking and it was sorely missed here. I am fortunate that Gil and Robin live so close by that I could go and pick it up. They are both such lovely people. I am happy to have my wheel home where she belongs!! Shhhhhh………….I think Gil is working on a few new designs :-)).

Well, I have finished one of my socks for the Six Sock Knit Around,
and I have to say that I am dreading doing the other one. I love the pattern……it is fun and easy, but I HATE the yarn that I chose to work with on this project. It is an ecru shade of fixation and is very pretty, however, working on size 0 needles with the elastic cotton yarn has turned into a chore. A good friend suggested breaking out of the mold of knitting 2 socks and just framing the one cloverleaf sock. Hmmm………I am thinking how lovely the ecru would look against a nice warm wooden frame…LOL.

Weaving
I made my self a mental list of things that needed to get finished this weekend. Working on the cloverleaf sock, my stash of merino angora and working on the loom were all on the list. While a knitting or spinning project is one that you usually just purchase the materials and/or pattern and you are ready to get started, it is very different when it comes to weaving.

The weaving part is the easy part. The planning, winding, beaming and counting part of weaving is the biggest and most important part of weaving. My mother used to swear that someday I would use all that math that I complained about having to learn and boy…….was she right! Just look at all of these mathamatical hieroglyphics!!

I have decided to do some waffleweave dishtowels on 4 shafts. I took a pattern out of a handwoven magazine that I had done previously, but because I am using a different weight of yarn this time, I had to figure out the difference in the EPI (ends per inch). I have also chosen to design my own warp pattern, which meant some additional figuring as well. This is the first time that I have varied a bit different than a precise printed pattern, so we will see how it comes out…:-). I have chosen some lovely naturally colored orgainic yarn in natural and sage and am combining it with a soft unmercanized 10/2 lavender yarn.

Being somewhat of a beginner, I still find the beaming on process a challenge, as I have mentioned previously. Because of that, I have been using Peggy Osterkamp’s method of making 2 crosses. A traditional counting cross
as well as a raddle cross. I have found that doing the raddlecross helps to keep the yarn behaving better in the raddle. Big on my birthday wish this year is a sectional beam. My good friend, Nancy, from The Spinning Bunny, swears by her sectional beams, so we will see :-). I also use Peggy Osterkamp’s method of chaining in which she wraps the warp in a lark knot fashion around a slat of wood. This really does help keep the warp from getting tangled…….usually..grin.

Tomorrow it is my goal to finish winding the warp for the towels, getting the dogs (all 7) bathed and possibly tackling getting the warp onto the beam.

It has been a busy day here today. My husband and I have spent most of the day working around the house. He has been busy scraping the back side of the house, getting it ready to be painted and I spent the day in the barn, working on various projects. Being that my studio in the barn is air-conditioned……it was definitly the place to be today with the warm temperatures.

I started the morning finishing up the bunny shearing. What a difference there can be in bunny personalities. One of the girls that was lined up for shearing, really hates being sheared and hates even more getting her spring dose of Ivermectin, which helps to keep mites at bay. She hates that Ivermectin so much so, that the little bugger, bit me!! “OUCH!!” Not hard, mind you……but all the same, this was a first and it really surprised me. I have never had a rabbit bite me before. Unfortunately, mites are an unpleasant fact of life in rabbitries, so it really is necessary for them to get their spring and fall dosage of Ivermectin. My friend Claudia has written a wonderful write up regarding mites on her blog.

The other girl that I worked on today is a sweetheart named Belinda. Even though I did not breed her, she comes from my breeding. Her mother was a special girl that I bred here, named Glinda. She lived with Claudia of Countrywool. Claudia sadly lost Glinda due to a back injury this past winter. Belinda is a chocolate torte, with what I believe is some rufus (red factor) hiding in her genes. This is a picture of her in full coat

She is such an easy girl to work with, and even though she did not give me a lot of fiber in this shearing, it is exceptionally pretty.

I love the rich color. One of the things that I have been concentrating on in my breedings,is the color red. Perhaps it is because I am a red head (strawberry blonde), that attracts me to this color……whatever the reason, I just love it! A rich red is very hard to achieve in German Angora Hybrids. In order to get the percentage of German up to a hybrid level, one has to keep breeding back to the pure REW German. With each breeding to a German, keeping the intensity of the color is hard to maintain. I have a red (fawn) french crossbred buck, who has given me a red baby in both of the litters that I have used him. The first red baby was Glinda, and his newest red baby is Nordic Peter Hoppit. He will be Belinda’s date down the road, with hopes for more red babies.

YIKES…………………a naked hare!

I am finished shearing now until the beginning of September. I try to keep on this schedule, so that the bunnies are clipped down during the hottest part of the summer, as I worry about the bunnies in the heat. After cleaning up and boxing all of the angora, I moved on to the next project that has been waiting for me…..

This is a lovely coopworth fleece that I purchased at the Denmark Sheep Festival in Maine. Although I swore that I would not buy anything this year (I set up as a vendor every year)….this fleece just called out to me and the price was a steal, at just 4.50 per pound. So, today, I loaded up the fricke electric carder, and processed 4 oz to see how the handle on the fiber would be.
I will spin up a few ounces to get a feeling for whether or not I should add something soft, such as alpaca. I am thinking though, that this feels realllllly soft all on it’s own, but sometimes what it feels like in the roving, is not always how it feels once it is spun…..so we will see.

Tomorrow, I am hoping to tackle the loom again. I have decided, that I will do some dish or bath towels instead of working with chenille again. I bought some lovely organic naturally colored cottons, that are begging to be woven………more about that this week :-).

Have a safe and Happy 4th of July Celebration!!!

What else can I say……….the title says it all….haha! I should have known, just from the way my day started, that I shouldn’t have tackled getting the chenille warp onto my loom. 😦

Bright and early, the kids were fighting and the visiting dog was here hours before I expected. The knitting machine I sold on ebay last week, needed to be packaged and of course, the UPS man was early too. Everyone being early, ended up making us late for swim lessons….and me grumpy.

As I was complaining to one of my friends via the internet, she sent me this little ditty,that summed up just how I was feeling today.

P Past
M My
S Sanity Quota

So, I took a little sanity break and did some blog surfing and getting inspired again. After lunch and breathing a little better, I sat down to get the chenille warp chain, that had been sitting around for months, into the raddle to go onto the loom. Well……………there is something to be said about not leaving a warp chain unattended for too long. You guessed it, it was one tangled mess. Uuuugghhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have only been weaving for a little more than a year and getting the warp onto the back beam, with the right amount of tension, has always been my biggest challenge. I would probably get a lot more weaving done, if it were not for that one aspect of getting started. I will wind another chenille scarf warp today and try again, later in the week. I think, however, that I may just start researching putting a sectional warp beam on my loom. Somehow, it looks like the warp would go on so much easier on a sectional beam. I love to weave……but……..that warp beam is definitly slowing me down.

Needless to say, with my paitence level being what it is, that warp is now in the trash. I am thinking I will just work on simpler things for the rest of the afternoon, such as working on the perennials that are starting to bloom and getting the basil and rosemary into the garden.

My Cloverleaf sock for the “six sock knit around” is coming along. A little slower than I had hoped, but working on size 0 needles definitly slows me down a bit. I don’t like to feel the stitches on the bottoms of my feet when I am standing, so I usually knit with really small needles when making socks.

I started a new project last night. A close friend of my DD’s is having a baby in August. My daughter lost a child last year and these friends have been such a wonderful support for her and her husband, that I really wanted to make something special for their new little one that is coming soon. I chose a delicate looking garter-stitch sweater from the book, “Simple Knits for Cherished Babies”‘ and booties that will be done in a wool/cotton yarn from Debbie Bliss. Working on the sweater will give my fingers a respite from those small sock needles…LOL.

Being an “ADD” adult, there are always enough projects that have been started, so if one project isn’t behaving, there is always something else to do…..haha. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

Whew…………..what a lot of work it has been learning my way around this blog software! It is fun though, watching it all come together. I have spent the better part of the day (when I should have been working), reading other blogs and getting ideas for this one. Crusing thru all of the many blogs can be addicting…LOL!

Now, that I feel that I have a handle on how to use this software, I am moving on to tackle my next project. Last week, I bought a “new to me loom” and I am so excited!! It is a 48″ Macomber, 6 harness loom. I had been working on a 36″ Schact loom, with 4 harnesses, but felt that the larger size would work better for some of the projects that I am planning. The last thing that I wove on the Schacht was a 35 inch Overshot baby blanket and because in the reed, it was right to the end of my harnesses, I kept snapping selvage threads, which was making me wild. It was time to start researching larger looms……………….it didn’t take me too long to find the loom that I have always dreamed of having, much to my husband’s chagrin. My husband feels as though our home is being taken over by looms, spinning wheels and fiber stashes..haha!!! I will be looking to find a good home for my little schacht. It is too nice of a loom to sit idle for too long.

My first project for the big loom will be a small one, so that I can get familiar with the feeling of the extra harnesses. My Dad has been hinting that he would like a solid black chenille scarf for his Cashmere overcoat…..so perhaps this will be his Christmas present.

So many projects to dream about………so little time!

Recently, I discovered the world of blogs and I have to say that I have been completely fascinated with it. I decided to stick my toe in the waters and give it a try. With the help of my friend, Anna Podlesak, I have had such a good time learning how to use my blog program.

I am a fellow fiber artist, living in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with my family of 5 children and 2 grandchildren. Of course, the oldest child and her family do not live here at our home, but near by in the Valley. We are fortunate to have our grandchildren so close by.

We live on a small farm with 15 Angora Rabbits and 6 Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. I raise the bunnies for the lucious fiber that they so willingly give to me. Here is a picture of one of my all time favorite bunnies, “Buster”.

The breed of Angora that I raise is the German Angora and German/French Crossbreds. They are the largest of all the Angora’s and are very sweet and gentle. I keep the rabbits in my fiber studio,enjoying the time I spend working on fiber and listening to the quiet, gentle noises that the bunnies make. They truly are dear little animals, each with a unique personality all their own.

I breed and show the dogs that we own. They are such dear, little dogs, which were originally bred many years ago to be the companions of the Queen of England. Today, they are still bred to be companion dogs. Although, they are a small breed, they are sturdy little dogs, always ready for either a nap on your lap, or a hike in the woods. They love “their” people and are true companions. In my real world job, I am the Registration Supervisor for the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club, USA.

I am looking forward to my venture in the “world of blogs”!