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It's hot!

We have hot summers here. And they tend to last for years, or at least it feels like it. This summer we had an unusually cool and wet spring so the heat of the “real” summer has felt all the worse. Last summer we had a horrible drought and went several months without rain so I spent a lot of time watering the small trees in the front yard. We have been much more fortunate this year and have had more rain, but we have also had higher temperatures. There’s just not much nice you can say about 98 degrees except, perhaps, that it isn’t 104.

The goats don’t seem too bothered by the heat even with their long curly coats. They lounge in the shade during the heat of the day and make the rounds of the pastures during the early morning and in the evening. I worry about the llamas and alpacas, however. Historically they come from the Andes Mountains in South America where it’s generally dry and cool and gets really cold in the winter. With their fluffy thick coats, they are well protected from the cold. All of my animals were born here in central Texas or in the Midwest and have been at least partially acclimated to our heat and humidity. The llamas and alpacas also lounge in the shade during the day and are much more active at dawn and dusk. However, they are much more susceptible to heat stroke than the other animals so keeping them as cool as possible is a good thing. Here are the new guys, Smoky, Shiraz and Stash lounging under the trees...

Last summer I put sprinklers out under the trees so there would be a cool wet place for them to cush during the heat of the day. The problem with regular sprinklers is they need to be turned on and off appropriately and then tend to put out a lot of water. We don’t have a lot of trees in the pastures and I didn’t want to kill any of them with too much water. And I do tend to turn the water on and forget about it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve flooded the pastures by leaving the hoses on to fill the water troughs or created small lakes when I was watering the big trees. It’s a waste of water. We have our own well so we pay only for the electricity it takes to run the well but water is a precious commodity and none of us need to be wasting it.

When I went to see my new potential llamas at Figment Ranch, I was fascinated by what they do to keep all their animals cool in the summer. They have lots of trees and each one has a mister under it. The misters are made of long plastic pipe with mister nozzles and hang horizontally or vertically under the trees. They are attached to hoses and put out a fine watery mist constantly. It’s a great way to cool under the trees and doesn’t put out enough water to damage the trees. Unfortunately, the constant breeze at my place would just blow the mist away. My solution was to put in four automatic sprinkler heads controled by a timer. Each sprinkler head is set at the drip line of a large tree so when it sprays it wets down the entire area under the tree. They are set to spray for 30 minutes four times per day. It’s worked out great and because they are installed in the ground, there are no mowing hazards – don’t ask how many hoses I’ve destroyed by mowing over them. These spray heads create a wet cool place under the trees for the animals to lie in but don’t endanger the trees with too much water.

The llamas always get up and move out of the way when the sprinklers come on, then move back into the wet spots as soon as the sprinklers stop. The alpacas always come running to stand in the spray. They love the water hitting their legs and underbellies. Here are Rascal...

and Scamp playing in the sprinklers.

They are so funny to watch!

New Fences

Five years ago when we moved out here, the only fence on the property was a barbed wire fence around the perimeter. The house sits on the right of the driveway near the road with a huge lovely live oak in the back yard. Beyond the house is the shed and behind that is the barn. Our horses moved here with us so the first order of business was to build some cross fences to make pastures. We left the barbed wire on the perimeter and added fences to make four connected pastures. Our horses had never lived with barbed wire so I was initially concerned about their safety. We made the pastures wide enough and had few enough horses in each pasture that I didn’t think it would be a problem. It hasn’t been.

We built goat pens behind the barn in an area that used to have raised garden plots. I left all the overgrowth so the goats would have some browse and they loved it. We used no-climb horse fencing with a top board for stability, just like the pasture fences. The goats couldn’t use the horse pastures since they would be able to get through the barbed wire but they had a nice shelter and a safely fenced off area of their own.

Over the years we have added fences here and there. We fenced off the back yard, added an arena and connected the goat pens to the other pastures. This spring we finally added the safe no-climb horse fencing to the entire perimeter. Now the fiber animals can safely be put in any of the pastures with no danger of getting caught in or cut by the barbed wire or worse, getting loose.

Our last bit of fencing has connected the pastures on the outer perimeter of the property to the barn. I’m not sure why we didn’t do that in the first place. Well, actually I do know why. I wanted to be able to drive around the barn. It’s useful to be able to do that but it means there is no moving animals into the barn without herding them or haltering and leading them. The horses are easy to halter and lead. The goats are easy to herd, particularly since they will follow you anywhere if you have treats in your hand. The llamas and alpacas are a whole different story. They are difficult to catch and don’t lead well. They are terrified of being trapped so they ought to be easy to herd but they are very fast and once they figure out where you want them to go, they go anywhere but there.

I had built a connection from the goat’s pens to the barn with moveable panels and it works great to move animals into and out of the barn. Unfortunately, the panels are pretty much stationary. It’s difficult to move them enough to get the tractor in there to mow and driving through there is impossible. I’m excited that we have finally replaced my panels with real fences that have large gates. Now with the gates closed, the pastures are connected to the barn and with the gates open I can drive around the barn. Cool.

Cotton

Early this spring I opened a zip-lock bag full of cotton seeds, planted them and thus becoming a cotton farmer. The bag came from my friend Anita and included seeds from some of the many bolls of cotton that she had grown and spun. There were several different types of white cotton seeds as well as seeds from green and brown cotton. I tossed all the seeds into one of my round garden bins, spread them out evenly spaced and poked them into the ground. They sprouted! I have little enough experience planting anything that any time a seed sprouts I consider it a success. And they grew. As the plants got larger I thinned out the weakest looking ones so they didn’t get too crowded. And they kept growing. This is so cool.

The big operations always treat cotton as an annual. When the cotton bolls are ready to be picked, the fields are sprayed with a defoliant so the leaves don’t get mixed in with the cotton. Once the cotton has been harvested, the plants are plowed under. I think the reason is to reduce the chance of perpetuating boll weevils, nematodes and other pests. Cotton is actually a perennial and if you don’t strip all the leaves off can live for several years. Our occasional very cold winters can kill them but they can take a mild winter in stride. I saw my first mature cotton plant at the Museum for Contemporary Craft in Houston last year. It is a gorgeous plant with wide glossy leaves and flowers of pink and white. The plant produces flowers throughout the growing season so you can pick ripe bolls throughout the late summer and fall. How cool it that?

The big cotton producers are not happy with little growers like me who plant cotton, particularly the colored varieties, near their fields where the wind can cause cross-pollination of different varieties. It’s one of the many reasons to check with your agricultural extension agent before you plant cotton. If I lived further south, closer to the big cotton farms along the coast, I would have done that before I planted. Since I’m at least 50 miles from the closest cotton production, I figured I was fine. I was a little tardy in calling my extension agent, but I did call. She says I’m fine. There are only three large cotton producers left in this county and they are all pretty far south of me. And she gave me some great references to check. One of them was this great article about all the insects that live on cotton plants that are actually good to have - lady bugs and spiders and wasps and all manner of creepy crawlies that will kill and eat boll weevils and other cotton pests. I itched for three days after looking at the pictures.

So I’m legal and armed with lots of great information. And now I have cotton. I started picking cotton a week ago. I check the plants every couple of days for more ripe cotton. I should have paid more attention to where I planted the different varieties. I ended up with only a couple of colored cotton plants. I probably thinned out a lot of them over the summer without realizing it.

I guess it’s time to learn how to spin cotton…..

The llamas arrive!

The big day arrived. Sean (my wonderful llama shearer and part owner of Figment Ranch) loaded up my three new llamas and arrived at my house with no problems other than having to change trailers in the process. The three new boys were wearing halters and we lead them out of the trailer and into my barn. They all lead beautifully and stood calmly. It was a treat.

Guard llamas are most usually males and almost always neutered but their fighting teeth are not removed. The fighting teeth are used by males to establish dominance over competing males and thereby successfully breed with the ladies. Fighting teeth are a good thing if you are on guard. Guard llamas are not like guard dogs that will attach predators. Instead, they are watchful and if they see something they don’t like, they walk towards it with head held low in an effort to shoo the intruder out of the pasture. They are pretty good at it too because they are tall with long legs and necks so they can look pretty threatening.

This is exactly what I want my guard llamas to do – shoo off anything that comes into the pasture that might bother my herd. Here is an interesting fact of geography. I live in “rabies central” for this county. This is not something that was listed as pertinent information when we bought this place but it has been confirmed by our vet. Most of the cases of rabies in this county happen within a stone’s throw of my place. This puts a slightly different slant on the whole guard llama thing. I can’t very well put them out there to guard my herd without rabies shots. And while we’re at it, the entire herd should get rabies shots. The horses, cats and dog have always gotten rabies shots but I hadn’t thought about it for the goats, etc.

So, Sean and I walked the new llamas into a stall where I had already put out a small bit of feed. I wanted them to know where they would get fed and where the water and minerals were located. After they had eaten the feed and investigated the stall, I opened the door so they could have the run of the barn and the pens outside. From the beginning it was obvious that Smoky was in charge. He was the first to venture out of the stall, the first to look out at the pens, the first to move out and try eating the grass. All the rest of my animals were fascinated by the new arrivals so were standing at the fence watching. Smoky had an excellent view of the entire herd and watched them all like he was trying to memorize them.

Smoky watched the fence line, the tree line, the other animals, me, my dog, everything. Shiraz was interested in everything but with the air of someone not on guard duty right now. Stash spent more time watching me than anything else, like he was trying to figure out what would impact him personally.

The vet arrived the next morning. All the rabies shots were given efficiently and quickly. We ran fecals on all the animals and determined only the new guys needed to be wormed so the vet came back to handle that. I’m pretty good at giving shots to all the animals but giving oral worming medication to adult llamas does not fall into the category of “Penny can do this.” They have long necks and long legs and are very agile. And of course there is the whole spitting thing. Fortunately, my vet is young, strong and has lots of experience. He got them all wormed pretty quickly with no spitting. And then the new llamas got to go out in the pasture with Tucker, the alpacas and the goats……

Phat Fiber

Phat Fiber is the brainchild of Jessie Booth. As Jessie says on her webpage “Phat Fiber seeks to bridge the gap between talented online artisans and consumers hungry to support the independent small business.” .She manages this by selling a new Phat Fiber mystery box every month containing a wonderful mountain of samples donated by many talented independent fiber artists. The boxes contain samples of fiber batts, roving, yarn, small tools and occasionally tea or soap or jewelry items. What a treat! These boxes are so sought after that knowing the exact date they go on sale is a necessity. They are sold on a first come first served basis. You can sign up for this critical information on the Phat Fiber website. There has been a surge of new independent spinners, dyers and weavers who market their products on the web and what a great way to see these colorful and carefully produced items close up before investing in larger quantities.

Jessie was here in Texas earlier this month teaching a seminar on marketing on the internet for independent artists. Peggy and I were fortunate to attend. The seminar was held at WC Mercantile in Navasota and was well worth the drive up there and back. We talked about developing your mission statement, vision and business plan and discussed separating yourself from your peers, identifying your niche and creating your customer base. Heady stuff. Then we talked about the nuts and bolts issues….. inventory tracking, shipping supplies and location and how to make your shipments special with handwritten notes, little additional gifts like sachets. And then there were the internet issues… creating banners and avatars, writing your profile and shop policies, taking excellent photographs and how to provide the kind of customer service your customers will remember. It was a very full day.

Many of the things Jessie discussed we have already done since we already have our website up and running. But there were many more things we could be doing. For example, we have our etsy.com shop set up but haven’t ever added any products.

We have just joined the Phat Fiber group so we will be contributing samples of our hand dyed fiber and hand spun yarn to the Phat Fiber Sampler Boxes in the near future. And we expect to learn a lot by joining this active, productive and successful group of independent entrepreneurs.

We have baskets!

If you go to fiber festivals you have probably seen these wonderful baskets. They are hand woven by local craftsmen in the African country to Ghana using sustainably harvested grasses and locally raised goats. They are a fair trade item so our prices should be the same as you would find anywhere else.

The baskets have beautifully reinforced handles and grips of smooth leather so they should last and last. We have bought quite a few of them over the years for our own use and finally figured out where to get them so we can offer them for sale.

Many of them come in the natural color of the grasses but the colorful ones are stunning. And they appeal to weavers because the patterns range from very simple to very complex. What an inspiration to have sitting next the loom!

My smallest basket hold thrums from my weaving projects, the medium and large ones are perfect for a knitting project and the extra large ones are wonderful for display of all your hand spun yarn. We just found the fancy baskets recently. They are bell shaped or have “wings” on the top edge… fun and different and definitely fancy.

All the baskets in the photo above are now on our website!

New llamas

Ever since I bought my first goats, I’ve been concerned about getting some sort of a guard animal to protect them. We haven’t had any predator problems so thankfully I have no tale of woe to report but you only have to read one account of someone going outside to feed their animals and finding death and destruction to be concerned. I’ve talked to people about their guard dogs and guard donkeys and guard llamas but had never really decided what I wanted. We’ve had our fiber herd for nearly 5 years now with no problems. And getting my first three llamas a couple of years ago seemed like enough to provide some security. My three llamas became one over the last year through losses that had nothing to do with predators and that left me with one llama along with the alpacas and goats. Tucker is a wonderful llama and he is watchful of the alpacas but he’s young and not really a guard. He’s really more of a companion. He has seemed satisfied with his companion duties and not unhappy about being the only llama.

My husband was the one who suggested we get a guard llama. It would provide us with an animal that could really guard the herd as well as a companion for Tucker. This is the same man who put me on animal probation a while back because the animals just seemed to be arriving here on a regular basis. Now it’s true that most of them were cats… but I digress…. I emailed the great people at Figment Ranch to see if they had a guard llama for sale. Figment Ranch is the home of the wonderful Sean Price, my llama/alpaca shearer. They had three guard llamas available and sent me pictures to look at. All three llamas had been laid off of their previous guarding jobs although not for dereliction of duty or poor work product. The animals they were guarding were going away so they were returned to Figment Ranch. Two of the three really attracted me. Shiraz looked alert and watchful and has the nicest fiber. He had been guarding a herd of alpacas. Smoky had been guarding a herd of fallow deer. I was mostly sold on these guys when I saw the pictures but made the drive over to look at them in person.

Ruby Herron and Robin Turell along with Sean are Figment Ranch in Cypress, TX. I had talked to both Ruby and Robin on the phone but had never met them in person so I was excited to visit them. I had a great time walking around, seeing all their llamas, hearing stories and laughing and chatting. We stood in their back pasture talking about various llama health issues and I watched Smoky guard. His eyes were constantly moving - watching the tree line or the fence line or the dogs or us. It was amazing.

Shiraz was in a paddock with another llama named Stash. Stash is the most wonderful appaloosa llama. I love appaloosa llamas. So the one llama my husband suggested became two and then three new llamas. I had to wait a week, during which time Stash was neutered, for my new guys to be delivered. More about how they are settling in next time.

Buzzards

I live out in the country. I have neighbors and there is traffic on our road so we are not isolated but there are more cows in this county than there are people. For the most part, the cattle live in large open pastures with scrub brush and some trees. We have several varieties of oak along with pecan and pine trees, Osage orange, yaupon and trash trees like hackberry and tallow. The topography is slightly rolling with creeks down in the low areas. There are lots of deer out here and flying down the back roads at great speed close to either dusk or dawn is dangerous. We have skunks and opossums and rabbits and gophers and moles and various other small animals. And we have lots of birds. We see an occasional eagle, lots of hawks and starlings and swifts and cardinals and since our neighbors are raising quail, we see lots of those too.

Given all the wildlife out here, it’s not surprising that we have lots of carrion birds. Turkey vultures are very common along with black vultures and Caracara birds. We call them all buzzards and you can see them flying on the air currents searching for food or crowded around road kill on the back roads. Turkey vultures are large dark brown to black birds with a red head. Black vultures look very similar to Turkey vultures but have a black head. Caracara birds are also in the vulture family so they look similar to the vultures but have large white or light colored patches on their wings. All three birds eat carrion although the Caracara birds will also kill and eat small animals. They definitely have their place in the eco-system, cleaning up the remains of dead animals and thinning the populations of small varmints.

But, and it’s a really big but…. I grew up with lots of cowboy movies where the circling vultures always signal the hero that something is amiss. There are dead cattle or dead friends or the remnants of an Indian shoot-out just over the brow of the hill. So when I moved out here, I was always concerned when I saw the buzzards circling over a spot on my property. The first few times I actually ran out to the pasture to count noses and make sure everyone was fine. So far, everyone has always been fine. I’ve never found an animal in distress or dying so I’m sure the vultures are scouting for something to eat that doesn’t belong to me. I’ve gotten used to seeing them flying around and don’t think much of it anymore.

However, I draw the line at having them perch on my house. True, my chimney is the tallest thing around and I’m sure it gives them a great view of the road and the open pastures. But it’s just creepy having them sitting on my house. During one of the storms we had earlier this spring, they were perched on my chimney and tapping on the metal chimney cap at the very top. The sound reverberated down my chimney and it sounded like they were coming through my fireplace. It would have been funny on a sunny day but in the middle of the night with the wind howling and the rain pounding, it was disturbing. And creepy. I just wish they would sit on a telephone pole instead.

Reconnecting

I guess the first thing I’m reconnecting to is this blog. I was horrified to discover it’s been nearly two months since my last post. Yes, things have been crazy here. I’ll try to do better.

What I really want to talk about is reconnecting with the people from our past. It’s amazing how time passes, life continues and we can loose people we used to be close to. Our lives go in different directions and that loss of connection can go unrecognized. Recently I’ve reconnected with quite a few people.

Patsy and Nancy Engelhard were my best friends growing up. Nancy was a year younger than me and Patsy a year older. Our mothers were best friends from the time we were in second or third grade until my mother died about 40 years later. Growing up, our families had Thanksgiving dinners together, spent Christmas and/or Passover together, had parties, saw each other all the time. We always lived close enough to each other to walk between our houses. Patsy, Nancy and I had sleep-overs, went to the swimming pool together, played softball in the field until the street lights came on, crated our own religion, talked on the phone for hours.

Once we got to high school, we began to drift apart. Patsy and Nancy were both very bright, excellent students, very verbal and had strong personalities. They were the “movers and shakers” in high school. I was shy, quiet and a passable student. I was sort of a late bloomer and didn’t hit my stride until college. Life continued. We all went off to college, fell in love, got married, had babies. Patsy went to law school, Nancy was an elementary school teacher and I bounced along from biology major to geology major. And we lost touch with other.

Bless Facebook. After some 40 years, Nancy found me. We shared pictures of our kids, now grown, pictures of ourselves and tried to sum up the intervening years. Nancy is a knitter and found our website. She passed the information on to Patsy. Patsy had learned to knit last year and was in the process of opening a yarn shop. I got an email from Patsy this past spring. Turns out she now lives in Oxford, MS. Her yarn shop is called Knit1 and opens today! How cool is that? She has bought quite a bit of our hand dyed and hand spun yarn and has invited us down to Oxford sometime next winter to teach a fiber weekend… spinning and weaving. I can’t wait to go. All of it will be fun but the most important part will be seeing Patsy again.

Bless Facebook, again. Several people from my high school graduating class have been re-connecting with others in our class. They have set up a Yahoo group for the Rich East High School Class of 1966. It’s been so interesting to find out what my classmates have been doing all these years. High school was not a good time for me. I spent most of the four years terrified someone might notice me but equally terrified no one would notice me. Being a teenager is tough and I wouldn’t go through that angst and uncertainty again for all the tea in China. It is so sad that we were all so scared at the time that we missed knowing some great people. All the relationships that we didn’t make then, we are trying to make now. I missed the last pizza party but will try to manage a trip to Chicago for the next Class of ’66 get together.

Spring Shearing

Spring shearing is bigger than fall shearing. The goats, all four of them, get sheared twice a year - spring and fall. I've done this myself for as long as I've owned goats, although I started off poorly. The first time It took me several hours per goat and I only had the stamina to do one a day. Even with as few goats as I have, it took me a week or more to get them all sheared. And they all looked like a four year old had gotten a hold of the scissors. I'm sure they went back to their shelter and laughed at each other's hair cut. And probably laughed at me. But I've gotten better over the years. I still only do one a day but even the worst of them only takes me an hour now and they actually look pretty good. And Bernadette, who has wavy hair instead of curly dreadlocks, only takes me about 20 minutes.

The llamas and alpacas are a whole different story. They are sheared only in the spring so we only have to fight the battle once a year. Last spring, when they needed to be sheared for the first time in my care, I had never seen it done. I decided I should hire a really good shearer. My intention was to learn from an expert and then shear them myself after that. Enter Sean Price. He is part owner of Figment Ranch in Cypress, TX and has been shearing llamas for over 17 years. Sean is wonderful. He's young and strong and has a great hand with the animals. His version of "tough love" is delightful to watch. He expects the animals to stand up and stand still and put up with this once a year procedure without complaining. He's not rough or abrupt but his expectations are high and amazingly, the animals always seem to rise to the occasion. He's efficient and calm. Two things I'm not when it comes to shearing. And he knows the animals well enough to know when to back off and let them rest and when to push through and get them done.

Notice that Tucker, in the first picture, has very little hair on his head. It's a llama thing. Llamas also don't have much hair on their lower legs. Scamp, on the other hand has a very fluffy head and the fluff on his legs goes all the way to the ground. This lead to three very funny looking alpacas last year. It was my first camelid shearing so when Sean said they don't shear the heads or lower legs of llamas, I said that was fine for the alpacas too. I ended up with fuzzy headed, fuzzy legged bobble head dolls when he was finished with the alpacas. They were cool and comfortable for the summer heat but they looked pretty funny.

This year I requested that we shear the alpacas heads and lower legs so I would get more fiber and so they would look like the pictures of sheared alpacas I'd seen. No problem.

Llamas and alpacas really do look odd after their sheared. Their bodies, neck and legs are long and thin.... really long and really thin. They have a concentration camp look to them. You really get used to seeing them fluffy for almost the entire year and it's startling to see them nearly hairless. Regardless of how they look, you can hear the big sigh of relief when they finally get a chance to take off that fur coat! As much as I want the wonderful fiber they produce, shearing is more important for their comfort and health, particularly in our hot and humid climate.

So the llama and all the alpacas got sheared. I have wonderful fleeces to pick through and send off to be processed. They all got their annual shots and had their toenails trimmed. Sean charged me a very reasonable price. And the whole thing took about 2 hours! I've watched Sean shear my animals twice now and have decided not to try and learn how to do it myself. He's good and he's fast and he's charming and he's reasonably priced. What's not to love?

Natural Dye Workshop

We have been talking about having a natural dye workshop for quite a while. I love the natural dyes although Peggy is happier with the acid and fiber reactive dyes. It's great that we cover all the bases between us. The Tall Pines Spinning & Weaving Guild, located in North Houston, asked us to put on the natural dye workshop for their members this spring. I had told Gloria Chuckman, president of Tall Pines, that I thought 10 would be our maximum number of attendees. We ended up having five, plus Peggy and I, and that turned out to be the perfect number. Any more people and we might have been falling over each other.

We had quite a bit of our yarn already mordanted and ready for the dye pots, and for sale, when people arrived although everyone brought yarn of their own to dye. We set up pots to mordant all the new yarn in - Alum, Tin, Copper and Chrome. Somehow we never got around to using Iron.

We spent most of the morning mordanting and collecting dye stuffs. We chopped down Yarrow from one of my garden bins,

gathered Bronze Fennel from my front garden...

and picked up oak galls from under my various oak trees. My dear husband, Ron, made us a wonderful lunch of salad and sandwiches so after we'd eaten we were ready to dye.

We started the indigo vat and cooked up the Yarrow, Bronze Fennel and oak galls along with black walnut husks, cochineal, onion skins and Osage Orange, a total of 8 natural dyes. Among us we dyed wool, silk, mohair, cotton and various blends. It was great! We have a great spin dryer to spin out the water and then hung the yarn up to dry...

We ended up with a nice palette of colors...

A special thanks to Gloria Chuckman for letting me use her photos! Note to self..... next time let's skip the Yarrow and Fennel. Both gave us very unremarkable beiges not worth repeating. I'll try them again sometime during the heat of the summer to see if we get any better colors. If not, I'll pull up all the Yarrow and plant something else for color. The Bronze Fennel in our front garden is there to please the caterpillars so that will continue to have a home regardless of it's worth as a dye. There are lots of other natural dyes to use. I'm growing marigolds which give nice yellows/golds and the madder is doing well. I just planted the madder this spring so it will be several years till we can dig up the roots for dye.

We are already planning our next natural dye workshop. Temperatures are consistently in the 90's now so we will wait till the fall.

Our Dye Studio

We have been dyeing yarn and fiber for quite a while now and use half of an old shed at my place as our dye studio. The tractor, gas cans and yard tools live in the other side of the shed. I think the shed started out as a potting shed for the previous owner. The counters were high and slatted and the floor was paved with large cement slabs, some entirely cement and others just a skim of cement over a core of Styrofoam. I wish I had taken a picture of the way it looked at the beginning. We did manage to get quite a bit of stuff dyed but were constantly tripping on the uneven floor and we ended up with sore backs from working at counters that were too low or too high. Our various small tools kept falling through the slats on the counters and bouncing on the floor. Not the best of conditions but we did some great work in there.

The shed has great bones.... the doorways are wide, the walls and ceiling are made of corrugated metal and the space is generous. Our propane burners are inside the shed to protect the flames from the ever present wind but there is still plenty of air movement so we have good ventilation. Inside we are protected from the wind and rain and sun. We hung several clotheslines from the trees right outside the dye studio so there is plenty of space to hang newly dyed yarn to dry. It has all the comforts of home, minus heat or air conditioning, but the uneven floor and awkward counters were maddening.

We decided last winter to cement the floor and have the counters re-built. I mentioned the upgrades to Richard, my wonderful contractor, but it took months to get Delbert and the rest of the cement crew out to do the job. I got the news that they would arrive one Monday in April so Ron and I spent the Sunday before cleaning out all the dye supplies, burners, pots and racks. Delbert and the guys showed up bright and early Monday morning to take out the counters, move all the odd cement pavers and get all the prep work done for the new floor.

Here the re-bar has been set, the edge forms installed and it's all ready for the cement truck to arrive. We even added a real porch outside the doorway so we have a place to set hot pots and rinse buckets!

First thing Tuesday morning I woke up to the sound of a very large truck coming up the driveway. Cement trucks are much larger when you see them up close than they are when you see them on the highway... and they look pretty darn big on the highway!

It took these guys almost no time at all to back the truck into position and start pouring cement. It was fun to watch! Here they are spreading the cement. Once the cement was all in the forms, the guys...

started smoothing it out and making the perfect surface for us - smooth enough to hose off but rough enough that no one would slip on it when it's wet. They had it all finished in just a couple of hours but stayed most of the day to work the surface every couple of hours.

We let the cement rest and harden for a couple of days and then started moving all our stuff back in. This is what it looks like all finished.....

The floor is nice and smooth, although about 4 inches taller so the head room through the doorway is less. Peggy and I can walk through without problems but taller people have to duck. We had some hooks on the rafters but have added many more along with hooks on the wooden cross pieces so there are lots of places to hang spoons, strainers, hot pad and thermometers. The counters are the perfect height to work on with smooth solid tops and the shelf underneath is metal hardware cloth so the pots will drain. It's fabulous! And it was ready just in time for our Natural Dye Workshop, but more of that next time....

WC Mercantile

WC Mercantile is a fiber and yarn store on the main drag in downtown Navasota, TX. What a wonderful place! Stephanie and her mother have created a lovely oasis for spinners and knitters in the middle of the hubbub of small town Texas. The storefront is large and open and with it's high ceilings and ceiling fans, it's a cool, calm and inviting place to shop for wonderful fiber or just sit and spin. There are lots of chairs and benches so you can do just that. Stephanie carries lots of different spinning fibers, some straight from the supplier and much that she dyes herself. She has a great eye for color so her hand dyed fiber is wonderful. She also carries some supplies for both spinning and knitting and has the expertise to help you decide what you need. Stephanie found me a free standing distaff so I could start my flax spinning journey. Thank you Stephanie!

WC Mercantile is about an hour and half from my house so I don't get there nearly as often as I would like. I made the trek up there on April 24th for their Spring Spin-In. On that Saturday it wasn't calm or quiet or contemplative. It was a mad house of spinners. I'm not sure how many people came that afternoon but at one point I counted 30 spinners. It was a riot of spinning wheels and drop spindles and chatting and laughing. As with any good spin-in, there were goodies to eat and drink, drawings for prizes and a wonderful sale on the fiber Stephanie carries. She even sent buyers home with a goodie bag of free samples.

Peggy met me at WC Mercantile on the 24th and she brought along her husband, Mike. Mike hasn't been spinning for as long as Peggy and I have but he's good. We all sat and spun and chatted and laughed and admired the work of the other spinners. It's always fun to get a bunch of spinners together. Everyone has their own style and it's great to see what other spinners love to spin, the colors they choose and the wheels they own.

My excuse for buying my way across WC Mercantile is that I want to support others in the fiber industry, especially those local to me. It's a pretty good excuse but I love the fiber and the potential of every bit of fiber that's yet to be discovered. This time I bought several bumps of 80% Mohair/20% Wool. It's not a blend you find a lot and it should be wonderful to spin. And it will give me some ideas about blending the mohair and wool fleeces I have sitting here. I also bought some flax strick for my ongoing journey in spinning linen. And a lovely drop spindle hand made by a local man who has a great touch with wood.

It was a wonderful afternoon in a wonderful place with really wonderful people. If you are ever in Navasota, you need to stop and visit Stephanie and the WC Mercantile! Actually, if you somewhere on the far north west side of Houston, make a detour to Navasota. You won't be disappointed.

The scale of things

A number of years ago we were lucky enough to travel to Australia and New Zealand. I could go on and on about how lovely and different the two countries were. New Zealand really is Middle Earth and Australia is as vast and changing as our own country. I would go back to Australia and New Zealand in a heartbeat if given the chance.

One of the places we visited was a sheep station north of Adelaide. Portee Station was first built in the 1800's and is now owned by Ian Clark. It's 55,000 acres of open, mostly rough country where the sheep thrive. It had been terribly over grazed when Ian bought it so he cut the number of Merino sheep in half and has rebuilt the station house to welcome guests. We were there slightly off season so Ron and I were the only guests. We helped sort sheep along with the sheep dogs and inoculate the lambs. It was wonderful.

Ian had about 5,000 Merino sheep. I told him about my animals, only Angora goats at the time. He asked if they were livestock or pets. I told him they live outside in pastures with shelters so they were livestock. He asked if they had names. Well, of course, they have names. Then they are pets, he assured me. I think he was right.

I went out to feed yesterday morning and found Prank dead in the pasture. I'm heartbroken. Prank was my only Suri alpaca and a beautiful dark fawn color. He was the hysteric in the group. For the entire two and a half years he has lived here, he always assumed the worst about me. Every day I drive up to the pasture in my mule and feed. Every day he ran around trying to convince the others that I was there to kill and eat them all. Fortunately, the other alpacas and the llama all had figured out I was there to feed them and came running. But not Prank. He just knew I was up to no good. That doesn't mean I didn't love him. He was funny and skittish and beautiful. Just not very trusting.

He may have decided early on that I was evil because he arrived at my place with an irritated eye. It's not uncommon when these lovely animals are transported. I took him to the vet's and was given some eye cream to put in his eye every day for at least 10 days. So, every day for 12 days I corralled him in a small pen and grabbed him and put cream in his eye. He recovered nicely from the physical problems but never really trusted me after that.

The scale of things really does make a difference. When Ian looses a sheep, one out of his 5,000, he is sad for the loss of property. He only makes a living by giving his sheep the best that he can, keeping them safe from predators and healthy. For him, the numbers change and he moves on. He may address why that sheep died, in order to keep the rest of them safe but it's not the heartbreak of loosing a friend. When I loose an alpaca, one of my three, it's different. There will be one less feed buckets clipped to the fence, one less lovely animals to watch gamble about in the pasture. I have lost 1/3 of my alpacas, not one out of 5,000.

For now, I'm waiting on the vet's tests to see if we can figure out why Prank died. He was fine one day and dead the next. It wasn't a predator. Could he have found a poisonous plant? Don't know yet but we will continue to investigate.

Weaving in the French Quarter

Ron and I were in New Orleans last weekend. Ron had lots of meetings to attend and I had a couple of days to eat and shop. Whenever I travel, I try to google fiber, spinning and weaving shops in the area to find fun things to do. For this trip we had no car and were staying at a hotel just west of the French Quarter so I looked for places within walking distance. I guess there aren't a lot of spinners in New Orleans because I couldn't find anyplace that sold spinning fiber. I did find a great weaving shop!

Louisiana Loom Works is owned by Ronda and Walt Rose and is located on Chartres Street a block north of Jackson Square. It's not a large space but is warm and welcoming. It's full from floor to ceiling with rag rugs and large looms. I thought my 5' Cranbrook was a huge loom until I saw Ronda's 6' and 10' Cranbrooks. Yes! Ronda can weave a rug 10' wide and as long as she wants! All in one piece! It's amazing.

Here is Ron standing in front of Ronda's huge loom. She weaves rag rugs and has a great eye for color and design. She also carries rugs made by several part time weavers. They are all wonderful! I don't have room in my house or my budget for one of her 10' rugs but if I ever do, I'll go back and visit Ronda again. I did buy two lovely smaller rugs.

Ronda has an interesting smaller loom that I was fascinated with. It's over 100 years old and was made in Iowa. She says there are many still in use in Utah. Many of the Mormons bought them on their trek from Nauvoo, IL to Utah in the 1800's.

The loom has two harnesses and no treadles. When you beat to the fell line, the loom automatically switches sheds. And when it's adjusted properly, the cloth is incrementally moved onto the breast beam so no rolling the warp towards you when you weave. Talk about a production loom! You could just sit and throw the shuttle and beat the beater and make cloth. It would be a great loom to have.

Ronda and her wonderful studio have inspired me to get going on my rug weaving. My Cranbrook loom has been set up since December but I haven't done the tie-ups or gotten it warped yet. Right now its acting the part of a yarn and fiber rack - a place to hang newly dyed roving and yarn. It's time to get out my countermarche instructions and get going!

Fiber Dyeing

We dye a lot of yarn and really enjoy it. It's easy and fun. Indigo and other natural dyes, acid dyes, fiber reactive dyes, hand painting, vat dyeing - it's all fun and easy. It's also exhausting since I'm not as young as I used to be and we usually do marathon days when we set up a dye day. We mostly do a dump method. We start with a color, say blue, and then add whatever strikes our fancy..... purple, green, pink, whatever.... until we have a color we like. It means we always get wonderful colors we love but can never reproduce them. We do have a couple of "recipes" for hand painted color combinations we really like, but only a couple.

Now we have a client who wants us to help create a store brand of hand dyed yarns. This is a whole different kind of dyeing for us. It means we have to have reproducible colors. It's different but also exciting and interesting. We need to find dyes we can combine easily to get the colors our client is looking for. And we are working toward the final decision on which yarns they want. The process is turning our normal dyeing experience upside down but in a really fun way.

This past Saturday, Peggy and I spent the day working on some new dyes, aiming at the colors we are trying to obtain. It was a great day. We decided to begin with fiber and save the yarn till we knew we were close to the colors we wanted. Since our clients want both protein and cellulose based yarn, we used wool, silk and bast bamboo fiber for the dye day. Whew! We dyed 14 pounds of Polworth, Wensleydale, BFL/Tussah and Superwash BFL into 14 colors.

All the fiber looks wonderful. It started out drying on my skirting table in the dye shed and this morning I moved it to the studio to finish drying.

Dyeing fiber is different than dyeing yarn. Yarn has all that wonderful twist that holds it together through the entire dyeing process while the unspun fiber tends to drift apart if it's not treated gently. Of the fibers we've dyed, wool seems to hold together the best. Add silk to the wool and it's more likely to come apart. But Superwash is the worst. Without the scales on the individual fibers that would cause it to felt, Superwash wool tends to drift apart as soon as it goes into the water. Even with a beautiful new color, the Superwash wool looks ghastly when it comes out the dye bath. It looks better as it dries and looks wonderful by the time it's totally dry and has been pulled back into shape and fluffed.

Spring is really here!

After all our cold and dreary winter, I think sping is finally here. I'm feeding the animals in the morning with only a sweatshirt rather than a warm jacket to keep me warm and am down to my jeans and t-shirt by the evening feeding. Even the plants seem to agree. The Buckeye is blooming as well as the Pansies and the roses.

The Lamb's Ear is coming back and will be ready to dye with later this spring. It makes a wonderful warm, pale beige. The Azalia buds are just starting to open. There will be a riot of color soon all along the front of my house.

I know that the coming of spring means that the long hot summer can't be for behind, but it's OK with me. I will complain about the heat but spring is magical and summer brings it's own rewards. Like more dye plants ready to harvest.

Bast Fibers

Ever since I discovered now much I love linen, I have wanted to learn now to spin it. Flax is the plant that produces the fiber and it becomes linen when it's spun into yarn and woven into cloth. Other bast fibers include hemp, ramie and some bamboo. A bast fiber comes from a plant and is usually inside the inner bark of the stems. It's a cellulose fiber, similar to cotton, so it doesn't have any elasticity or memory like most animal (protein) fibers.

A note about bamboo. Most of the bamboo we find available in spinning shops is made by a process like rayon. The bamboo is the source of the fiber but it's chopped up and chemically treated and extruded to form the slick, slippery fiber that's available. Ashland Bay is now offering bamboo that's prepared in a process similar to flax and hemp. It's not the uniform super slippery preparation we have seen up to now. It feels more like flax or hemp. We have just order several pounds of this new bast bamboo and will be dyeing it and spinning it and will offer it for sale in the future. I can't wait to try it!

I took a fabulous bast spinning workshop a couple of weeks ago. In my experience, workshops in spinning and weaving can be a crap shoot. Some are fabulous, some are worthwhile but not great and some are not worth the time and expense. And you can't always tell from reading the write-up or the biography of the teacher how good it will be. Even some well known people can give a mediocre course. Well, take it from me. If Susan Fricks of Yarnorama in Paige, TX is teaching anything you are interested in.... take the course. Susan is a fabulous teacher and Yarnorama is a great place to be. It's a wonderful shop full of knitting yarn, weaving yarn, spinning fiber, spinning wheels, looms, books, tools, space to teach and to learn and even a couple of fluffy bunnies.

My workshop was offered by the Austin weaving guild and since I'm not a member, I had to jump in at the end of registration when all the Austin people had had their chance to sign up. I'm so glad I managed to get in. Over the one day we spun a blend of wool and flax, dry spun flax roving, wet spun flax roving, ramie and flax strick. Wow! It was a full day. The wool/flax blend was a great way to start for all of us used to spinning wool. Flax has a very long fiber length and with no elasticity, it's totally different than wool so the blend was a great beginning. Then we moved on to flax. It's different and there is a learning curve but I loved it. I liked the wet spun technique better than the dry spun. It means you need a little bowl of water and you have to keep dipping your fingers in the water and smoothing out the fiber as you spin. But I loved the flax strick most of all. The stick is what you see suspended on a distaff in all the old paintings of women spinning. We weren't able to actually dress our distaffs during the class but Susan gave us a description of how to do it.

I find it really appealing to be spinning like the women did hundreds of years ago when most people grew their own flax and spun it into the clothes they wore and the sheets they used. Back in the days when cotton and wool were not very common and were very expensive. I left Yarnorama with bags and bags of bast fiber to spin. It will take a while before I'm up to spinning flax into very fine linen and weaving my own clothing.... but I'm on the path!

Weaving Linen

Linen is a fabric I have come very lately to love. All my life I stayed away from linen clothing because it wrinkles so quickly and so badly. Why would anyone buy a shirt that as quickly as you put it on, looks like you slept in it? The fact that people explained how good it felt to wear and how much cooler it was in the summer did not impress me. I thought of linen as a flash from the past, an odd holdover from the time when people didn't have air conditioning. Oh, how wrong I was.

My husband and I were in Rome a few years ago and at one of the hotels where we stayed, we slept on linen sheets. It was amazing. The sheets were cool but not cold, not smooth like high thread count cotton sheets, but much more comfortable. I started looking for linen sheets for our bed at home. Then last year, Peggy and I were demonstrators at the Texas Renaissance Festival. Of course, we needed costumes. While the linen chemise was a bit more expensive than the cotton version, I opted for slightly more realism and ordered the linen. Again, I was amazed. Linen is heavier than cotton but so much better. It was warmer on the cold days and cooler on the warm days. It's texture is somehow comforting to the skin. Linen is an anomaly among fabric types because it is stronger wet than dry. It means you can wash it in the washing machine without harming it but must hang it up to dry. Putting it in the dryer will break down the fibers.

The logical extension of my new found love of linen was to weave with it. I do a lot of kitchen towels made out of Cottolin, a blend of 60% cotton and 40% linen. It is strong and absorbent and just keeps getting softer and softer as you use it. And it can be washed in the washing machine and dried in the dryer. The perfect kitchen towel! But it is not the same as 100% cotton any more than it's the same as 100% linen so I approached my first linen weaving project with the knowledge that there would be a learning curve. And there was.

The project was a dresser scarf for my daughter. Katy has an old china cabinet base that she uses as a dresser. It came from her grandparents and has seen a lot of wear and tear over the years. It has some stains on the top and Katy wanted a nice sturdy something to conceal them. She picked a woven lace pattern in natural unbleached linen. OK. It may be that I picked the linen, but I know Katy picked the pattern and color.

Linen yarn is very stiff. It doesn't feel like it will make something you would want to handle. I had faith it would soften up when I washed the finished product and I was right. Here are the weaving details - natural 16/2 wet spun line linen, sett 20 epi, five thread spot huck lace pattern, assumed 15% shrinkage. Here is the fabric right off the loom:

And here it is after being washed and ironed:

I'm really pleased with the project. And, of course, there were lessons to learn. Linen isn't very forgiving when it comes to the selvages so they don't look as good as I hope the next linen project will. It likes a high tension on the warp and a heavy beat. It doesn't full very much but does soften. The next step is spinning flax into linen thread....

Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can be all around you in the colors and patterns and textures of life, in the juxtaposition of items you would never put together, in the buds of spring, the drifts of snow, the heat coming off a hot engine. Or it can just be gone and you fear you'll never find it again. I've spent the last part of winter and this early spring with not much inspiration. As I've gotten older, I find I'm much more influenced by the weather than I ever used to be. When it's been dark and gloomy for more than two or three days, I start to droop. The sun brightens everything including my mood and my inspiration. But we've had a lot of gloomy, raining, windy, stormy days this year.

On President's Day we had glorious sun. I was just getting over a horrible cold and finally felt like I was up to venturing out in the world again. Peggy and I met our friends Nancy and Janet for a fun day of shopping. One of the places we visited was Yarntopia in Katy. Yarntopia is our most favorite local yarn store. Sheryl and Amy, the owners, are wonderful, funny and first class enablers when in comes to knitting yarn. After months, or is it years?, of inspiration-less plodding through life, I found wonderful yarn that will be my next shawl.

After Janet had to head home and Nancy went back to her wonderful goats, Peggy and I stopped at the Lone Star Loom Room, our favorite local weaving store. Once the inspiration is really all around you, you just keep seeing things that look wonderful. I found Cottolin (60% Cotton and 40% Linen) that made me smile and some wonderful hand painted linen that was stunning. So here are my next kitchen towels:

I feel like a shadow has been lifted. I have three great projects ready to go. When? Not real sure. Life keeps interfering, but they are now officially on the list and I'll get to them soon. Inspiration is pretty cool.

We have woad!!

Woad is a wonderful plant. It is the historic Northern European source for indigo, grown there for hundreds of years until other sources of indigo made their way westward from the far east. Woad doesn't have an much indigo in it as the Japanese and far eastern indigo plants but is a hardier grower in northern climes.

I have to tell you why I'm so thrilled to have woad growing here. Last spring I bought a ton of plant seeds, mostly mixed wildflower seeds that will grow happily here in Texas, but also dye plant seeds. Coreopsis, woad, madder, marigolds, purple basil, fennel - basically every seed I could get for a plant that gives color. I also had sunflower seeds I had bought intending to plant them for my goats. Goats love sunflowers. All parts of the plant - leaves, stems, seeds, flowers - are good for goats. You get the idea. I had lots of seed. The wildflower seed packets said that planting in fall is the best way to go. Well, I have never been known for my patience. It's all I can do to leave a dye bath overnight. I know the color is better that way but mostly I can't stand waiting that long. So here I had all these seeds and was supposed to wait for months? Not likely. Most of the seeds I scattered over my newly installed septic drain field. I thought this would go a long way in encouraging people not to drive on the drain field. No one is likely to drive through a beautiful field of flowers. The woad seeds I planted in one of our 7' diameter raised garden bins. The bins have always been intended for dye plants. They are behind the studio and I can stand inside and look at them. And watch my dye plants grow.

So the wildflowers seeds are out front on the drain field and the woad seeds are in a garden bin. This is May. Well, last summer was the hottest and driest one on record for decades. I started off watering daily as the temperature climes. As the drought got worse, I switched from watering the wildflowers and dye plants to watering the trees. Fortunately, all the trees made it but I had completely given up on my newly planted seeds. The drought ended with the winter rains. Lots of winter rain. And cold. Much colder than normal. Then more rain. This is a good cycle for most wildflowers but what about my woad?

I checked the drain field area and sure enough, I have wildflowers coming up. Texas Bluebonnets and lots of other things I can't recognize yet. I'm hopeful we will have lots of wildflowers later this spring. Then I checked the garden bins. Eureka! I have woad plants!

Woad is an enthusiastic re-seeder. It's considered a noxious weed in the western US where it can take over vast acreages in only a couple of seasons. Interestingly, if you let it go to seed, you don't get any indigo. The normal plan is to plant it early in the spring and harvest the leaves throughout the summer. Once the first frost comes, no more indigo. If you leave the plant to overwinter, in the spring it will bloom and produce prodigious seeds. For dyers it makes sense to let one plant go to seed for the next years crop but to pull out the rest so the woad won't take over your garden, or yard, or the county.

So the question is.... is my woad in its first year or in it's second? We will see. If it goes to seed, I've missed the indigo. If it doesn't, I'll be harvesting leaves this summer. I think I'll order more seeds and plant them next month. That way I'll have my own home grown indigo this summer. Cool!

Teaching spinning...

I love to teach spinning. Peggy does too. It's a wonderfully gratifying task. Of course, we are enablers when it comes to almost anything associated with fiber arts. We really do want to take over the world. It's just magical to watch someone who is all thumbs to start with, begin to understand drafting our the fiber so you get the size yarn you want and learning to add the twist and make real yarn. For most people, there is an initial frustration with the process. It's hard to get your hands to do all the things they need to learn to make yarn. Like any skill, it requires practice and initially patience to build the muscle memory that ultimately lets you spin without really thinking about it. Just like riding a bike or skating or skiing. I've been watching the Olympics and I am amazed at what those talented athletes can do. I was a mediocre skater as a child and still am amazed that anyone can actually skate back-wards. I've skied only twice in my life, both times as a full grown adult, and am in awe of the downhill racers who fly down the mountains. These are, of course, the best of the best in their chosen sports. But spinning is just the same. You start out frustrated and with practice you get better and better. I've been spinning for about 5 years and have learned enough to make pretty good yarn. I'm no where near the best of the best but I love the process and I keep practicing to improve my technique.

We tell our students that you always start out with three days of swearing before the light comes on and you begin to understand and be able to actually do what you are trying to do. There are exceptions to this, of course. Our friend Willie is a spinning savant. He was spinning better yarn in about ten minutes than I was after six months. If he wasn't such a great guy, funny and creative, we would hate him. This points out that everyone learns at a different rate. Willie is a massage therapist, working on both people and horses, so he has honed his sense of touch to where he can feel the subtle differences in the fiber he's spinning more easily than most of us. Anyone can learn it but it takes most of us more time to get there.

We were supposed to teach spinning at our local yarn shop, Yarntopia, tonight. We've postponed it a week because of the winter weather advisory issued for tonight. We are expecting cold rain changing to sleet and snow. The weather changes quickly down here. It was 70 degrees on Sun, 60 degrees yesterday, 40 degrees today until the cold mass of air gets here later this afternoon, then below freezing expected for tomorrow morning. It's not horrible weather in the grand scheme of things but it could get ugly. We have had more than our alloted three days of winter this year and I, for one, will be happy to have the temperatures in the 50's and 60's.

I'm off to the studio to try and finish the linen dresser scarf I'm weaving for my daughter. I'll post a picture at some point so you can see what I've been working on.

Stay warm and safe.

The Clover Kids came by today.

We had a great group of kids and their parents out to the studio today. These are mostly kids who live in Houston and don't have a lot of access to livestock. They were interested in seeing the animals we get our fiber from and then how that fiber is processed and spun and woven. It was a lot of fun. The kids ranged in age from about 3 to about 8. They enjoyed hearing about the goats and feeding them treats and watching the llama and alpacas skitter around. The kids got a tour of the studio and saw the spinning wheels and drop spindles and the looms. They all took away a bit of prepared fiber for their felting project later this spring. The kids were all well behaved, interested, charming and a delight to have here. Their parents were equally interested and funny and also a delight to have visit. They are all welcome back any time they want to come.

This past week I've been concerned about how I would feel today. I've been sick with a horrible cold for the last week and wasn't sure I would still be standing by the time they left. Peggy was here to do the lion's share of the presentation but I didn't want to collapse in the goat pen either. As it turned out, I felt better when I got up this morning than I have for a long time and while I was popping decongestants, I felt pretty good the whole day. I hate being sick. I don't do it very often, fortunately. And a cold, even a really bad cold, just doesn't seem enough to make all the symptoms worthwhile. If I'm going to be sick and feel really miserable for a week, I should have a disease with a real name. Not that I want to get the H1N1 flu or any of the many other diseases with a real name. I'm just really glad to be feeling better. I'm hoping to feel even better tomorrow and hopefully spend the day back in the studio getting some weaving done.

The sun is finally shining! .....or maybe not....

I woke up this morning to bright shining sun. It feels like I haven't seen the sun in years although I think it's only been about 10 days. We had sun for the drive from Houston to Destin, FL last week but haven't seen it since. Destin was really fun. We went to be vendors at the January Spin-In. It was a great group of spinners from all over the southeast and other places too. It was a long show for us... arrive Tues, set-up Wed morning, be open Wed afternoon and all day Thurs, Fri and Sat, then drive home on Sun. And it's a very different type of fiber festival - no classes or workshops, just 120 spinners in the ballroom, spinning, chatting, seeing old friends and getting to know new ones. It's a really creative group, all spinning the kind of yarn they love. We saw more "art-yarn" spinners in one room than we've ever seen before, lots of people spinning lace and everything in between. It was great to actually see the yarn made from our fiber.

We did a lot of fiber dyeing leading up to Destin. We dye lots of yarn and our own fiber but dyeing prepared combed top is a bit more challenging. I think we did good since most of the fiber flew out of our booth. We talked to other fiber dyers in Destin and got some great ideas for different dye techniques to play with. Our next dye day should be really fun!

At every show we get asked about our wonderful baskets. We have picked these up in a variety of places and use them to display our fiber and yarn. They are made in Ghana, mostly by women, and made available in this country by people who want the weavers to get paid a fair wage for their work. In Destin we sold one of our baskets to a lovely woman who was really insistent about having one. We have found someone in our local area who will sell them to us wholesale. Because they are a "Fair-Trade" item, the mark-up is really low but they are wonderful and every fiber person should have one. I'm sure you've seen them. They are round baskets in either natural color or with bright woven patterns and have a leather handle across the top.

As I have written this, the sun has vanished. We are back to dreary overcast skies and cool temperatures. I think they are predicting sun for later today. I hope is comes.

Roc Day was a blast!

Our Roc Day Celebration was such fun. We had spinners and weavers and knitters and dyers and I think we all had a great time. We sent 3 or 4 non-spinners home with new spindles and fiber to spin. We spinners really are trying to take over the world. We had a great time talking and spinning and eating and laughing. Here is a peak inside the studio before and during the fun...

We have several male spinners in the group and for Sunday, we added a husband or two also. It was great!

It was chilly for this part of Texas, about 50 degrees but we had steaming dye pots to keep us warm. We used onion skins and black walnut hulls for great gold and brown colors. The indigo pot was rejuvenated from a previous use and took a while to get right, but we came up with some great blues. We also did an acid dye pot of screaming red, always a fun color. Several people brought yarn they didn't like the color of to overdye. The yellow yarn came out a great green from the indigo pot.

The whole day was fun. Well, possibly excluding our broken pipes from the freeze earlier in the weekend. I'm already looking forward to next year. One of my neighbors said she would love to see how the process starts - with raw fleece. I'll be sure to invite her over to help pick some of the mountain of fleeces sitting in my barn!

Brrr!!! It's cold!

I have long argued that 34 degrees and rain is the coldest I've ever been. Now understand, I grew up in the Chicago area so I'm familiar with a hard freeze and snow and ice on the roads and snowballs and plane de-icing and snow plows and single digit wind chills and the like. But I've lived in the greater Houston area for 24 years and in Tulsa for 11 years before that. There is a bone chilling, miserable, wet and ugly, go right to the core of you, kind of cold that you only get at 34 degrees and rain. I worry about the horses and now our fiber animals getting wet and cold and sick. 34 degrees and rain is really horrible. My family always laughs at my contention. They live in Chicago and Detroit and western Colorado where they have real winters with real cold and real snow. But I have been convinced of my feeling about cold. Until now.

I may have been wrong. I got up this morning to 13 degrees and sunshine. Very unusual for central Texas. And REALLY COLD. It is supposed to get above the freezing mark later this afternoon and the sun is bright and everything always looks better and happier with the sun shining. But it's cold. Really cold. We have water in the house and the studio but not in the barn or the dye studio or my husband's office and certainly not from the spigots out in the pastures. Yesterday I broke up the ice that had formed on the water troughs but this morning we will be hauling water out to the pastures. The animals, of course, are happier with this cold than I am. The goats and alpacas were happy in the barn last night but ready to get out and frolic in the sunshine this morning. The horses had lots of good hay to munch on in their shelters and are just really pleased it's not 100 degrees.

I think it's possible that 13 degrees really is colder than 34 degrees and rain.

Pictures....finally!

So we have finally tweaked the blog so that I can upload pictures. Of course, what that really means is I tweaked the way I was trying to upload so the image editor and I could actually communicate. Software programs are so picky!

Here is the new studio. The photo was taken this past spring when the building was just finished and before the horrible drought turned all the grass brown and I was frantically watering our trees. We have been moving in, moving out and re-arranging ever since. It's still not perfect... but I keep adding more equipment. It's a little bit late to add 5' (or maybe 10') to the overall dimensions, I guess.

I've been busily cleaning up for the Roc Day celebration on Sunday afternoon. I moved all the fleeces out to the barn to get them off the studio porch. Egads! It's quite a pile of fiber when it's all lumped together. After asking for a skirting table for Christmas and not getting one, I ordered one online. It should be here later this week so picking all the fleeces and deciding what will be blended with what should go quicker.

Please come to our Roc Day Celebration!

We are having a Roc Day celebration at the new Sky Loom Weavers studio in Cat Spring on Sunday Jan 10th from noon till 4 pm. Bring your spindle or wheel and come spin with us. Or just come and watch. That's fine too. We have a selection of fiber if you want to try something new to you and all my wheels will be available if I have one you haven't tried. We'll fire up the dye pots and the first people interested in dyeing can pick the colors. We may have an indigo pot going too. It will be such fun!

If you aren't familiar with Roc Day it's also called St. Distaff's Day. Historically its the first day back to work for spinners and weavers after the Christmas holidays. Traditionally its the day after Epiphany but since Jan 7th falls during the week we are celebrating the following weekend.

In anticipation of Roc Day, I'm trying to get all my looms warped. Tradition says you can't leave a loom unwarped for more than a few days. The actual number of days indicated is different in different parts of the world. My workhorse Gilmore loom has been empty since I took the last batch of kitchen towels off a couple of months ago. I guess I've broken that rule! Sometimes I'm better at planning the next project than at others. I'm almost done putting a linen warp on the Gilmore for a dresser scarf for my daughter Katy. A belated wedding present. The next one on the list is my new huge Cranbrook. I finally got it put together and now need to tackle the tie-ups. It's a countermarche loom so the set up is twice as complicated as my other jack looms. I think I'll be able to get it done by Roc Day.