Oh Yeah

Went out and got some more fleeces today! Beautiful wonderful dark brownish ones! There is a wonderful woman not too far from me breeding her own sheep, they are columbia x rambouilet x corridale crosses. The fleeces are nice and I can't wait to play with them a bit! It totally made my day!

My sinuses are acting up because of the weather and I am getting behind on everything again. I have rabbits waiting to be plucked and wool to be dyed and other various things to do, but I feel so horrible that I am not making much progress.

ugh, I am sick of being sick!

Increasing my stash

Found a wonderful little yarn shop yesterday, Heavenly Ewe Yarns. They are right in Arnold, tucked away inside of Parable Christian Store. An unlikely location maybe but here's hoping that they grow and grow! While there I bought somenice kaleidescope yarn and then decided to hit joanne fabrics on the way home. OMG! They were clearancing out thier Red Heart Symphony Yarn, all the colors. This stuff is awesome, an acrylic mohair imitation. It was on sale for $1.00 a skien so I bought 15 of them. Oops, kinda had to sneak them in the house to get past the husband! I got one of my french does sheared today and will hopefully get her wool posted on etsy today. Getting ready to handpaint some yarn for a friends crocheting project. Got the house cleaned and all (or at least most) fiber related stuff moved into it's very own bedroom.

Still behind

Well, I am still behind but trying to catch up. Maggie turned 5 this month, thankfully her party is not for another two weeks so I still have time to finish up the various projects that will be her presents. I am doing my version of fall cleaning, which means getting rid of the stuff that we have accumulated over the summer. I started yesterday and have two giant trashbags of clothes to take to the resale shop already. I have fallen behind on my shearing schedule, started my bun cass last week and she is still sitting in the cage half done. Reorganized my wool stash and have a bunch that I need to get posted to the shop. On a good note the kittens we took in are doing well, growing bigger every day and getting into everything. Litterbox training is going well. I haven't felt very interesting lately. I guess that explains the lack of posts. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that nothing gets done. Life just goes on and I can't seem to get back in the swing of things. Today is better, I have a mild sense of accomplishment and a giant cup of coffee.

Better Today

Maybe I am finally breaking out of the rut! Yesterday I canned some wonderful orange marmalade, Plucked my beloved Tigerlily (5 1/4 oz . and she's a tiny little English!), cleaned the house, finished my book, did some laundry, transplanted my 2nd crop of peas, weeded the garden, and various other things. Today is wide open, though it is still raining! I really need to sit down and get some knitting done, and my kids could use a bath. Maybe I'll find time to groom another rabbit. Or post some of the lbs. of angora covering my kitchen table onto etsy so that we can eat there again.
We decided to start "doing school" after maggies birthday, in fact, it is one of her birthday gifts. I think it's awesome to start out very year thinking of it as a gift. But, I realized that I had this silly idea that we should all start getting up earlier in preparation (keep in mind that my children do NOT get up before 9 am) so for the last week I have been trying to drag myself out of bed earlier and earlier telling myself that it was so that when we started "school" we could start early. Then this morning it hit me. We as a family are night owls. We are not morning people. I tried to wake maggie up at 8:30 this morning and it was most unpleasant. So my epiphany was hey, didn't we decide to homeschool to break free of all those things?!? I realized what a gift that kind of freedom is! Instead of forcing all of us into an unatural schedule with hours of groggy, unfriendly waking up time I can just do things on our normal schedule. I don't have any set hours which means that if we want to start school at 4 in the afternoon we can. If we want to do it at 11 in the morning, we can. Then that makes me realize what an adventure we are about to embark upon! The world is wide open, we can learn what we want, when we want, how we want!
Life is good. The kids are wonderful, the garden is bountiful, the husband is agreeable, and the bunnies are wool producing machines! Now, if I could only get the house to come to some sort of agreement about it's level of cleanliness.

lazy end of summer

Still being lazy. I have on fingerless glove for maggies birthday on the 20th halfway finished. I have an assortment of other projects in similar stages of completion. I've gotten my 2nd crop halfway planted, but I am still waiting on a few packets of seeds to come in the mail. My 2nd crop of tomatoes has it's first green ones. The neighbor kids brought me a litter of kittens that they had found under the dumpster and after walking around the neighborhood with a mewing kitten I found momma and lured her back to my house. So now we are dealing with little kitty terrorists....pooping on the floor, attacking anything that moves, just being babies. They are so cute but I can't wait to get them fixed and find them homes. Today I will be canning some orange marmalade and hopefully plucking tigerlily and maybe spending some time catching up on all the things that I have been letting slide. It's damp and rainy and this kind of weather doesn't make me want to jump up and do things. The other day I turned one whole side of the overflowing compost bins. the very bottom was finished so I shoveled it into a barrel and turned the rest back into the bin. I had planned on shoveling out the other side but it has rained for the last two days so I don't see that happening until it dries up again. Phinny is 7 months old and into everything, he has started pulling himself up to standing and he crawls everywhere.
We are once again without a vehicle, the van was totaled a few weeks ago and we don't all fit into the truck so I have not left the house for quite a while. The jefferson county freecycle program is getting started, as is handspun with love, we have picked up some volunteers but we still need more. I'm not especially inspired lately, just tired and lazy.

Where did the time go?!?

I don't know how, but I have been so busy the time has just been slipping away! I have been knitting alot on the nifty knitter looms because volunteers for handspun with love have been less than I thought there would be. I picked up some decent cheviot wool today. Quite a bit of it actually..... I see a queen sized bedspread in it's future! Oh, that lovely sheepy smell that comes with bringing home a bunch of fleeces! No, I am not being sarcastic, I really do LOVE that smell. My husband thinks that it's a sign of mental illness. I sold all the buns that I am willing to part with and brought home three more. They are the sweetest boys, I love to bring a bun home and be pleasantly surprised with a sweetheart. I've gotten alot of things listed on Etsy and have alot more to take pictures of BUT one of my children decided to take my camera out of my purse and then step on it so my beautiful new camera is destroyed. The screen is not visibly cracked but when you turn it on you can see where it is ruined. Will go shopping for a new one this week but I am not happy about it.

LAZY

Oh, Have I been lazy lately! Took the kids to grandma's and have done nothing since! I've still got the two littlest ones but they are quiet and happy to read books and color with me all day. We haven't gone anywhere or talked to anyone.... or gotten any shop updates done, but it's so nice just to take a break. I did get some more wool and angora dyed up and tommorrow I am planning on getting some more roving dyed. My computer is not liking me lately so I am having problems uploading pictures here and on Etsy. I have kind of started a new project, I am in the process of sanding down an old desk, it will be painted and then decoupaged and it's just going to be awesome, so good that I don't know if I will sell it. Either way I am going to have to find a chair to match it and figure out how exactly I want to do it. I am thinking on a few different ideas. It's nice to get back to my first crafty love (furniture) It's something that I haven't had the time or ambition for in a long time, I still have that amazing vintage chair in my bathroom just waiting to be reupholstered but I can't decide what color and there are sooo many buttons on it, I think It will be in it's ugly but beautiful pinkness for a while longer.