A Few Sheep Shy of a Farm

All this spring Craziness!

Its been almost a week since my last post and there has just been so much going on. DH’s brother is visiting from out of state so we have a houseful of company . . . my niece had her 2nd birthday on Saturday and gosh is she cute!

Actually, M and I went to NH Sheep and Wool bright and early Saturday morning (after staying up way too late visiting the night before) and had a blast! I only came home with 2 fleeces! Not too bad, right? There was so much to see and do it was wonderful! I even got to try my hand at bobbin lace! I’ve been wanting to give it a try for a while now and it seems like fun so at some point I’ll be ordering a starter kit from Lacis. . .

I got about 10 new books, on weaving, card weaving (another thing I’m going to try soon), and dyeing with plants, the new Lavold book etc. The two new fleeces are a very interesting varigated grey Cotswold (#2) and a very soft, very lovely white Romney which I’m going to process by hand and probably use the new viking combs for! That one was a big one, #8!

Oh and M and I each bought an Angora bunny! Yup! Two new bunnies at the old “farm” these days! Neither DH was very happy with this news, but they seem to be adjusting to the idea. We are planning on Sunday to get together and work on building a nice hutch system that will hold all 4 rabbits eventually. Plan is to build a sturdy, protected shelter that can function as there outdoor home about 11 months of the year. The absolute coldest weather we will likely move the whole hutch into the barn for a couple of weeks (it will be heated to just above freezing all year). My new bun is a “tri-color” English/Satin/French cross, her’s is a black of the same kind of cross though they aren’t related. Both were sold as does but as they are still very young we are keeping everyone seperate until we can be sure.

I did decide that since I now have a lot (yes, really, a lot) of wool in the house, I’m going to spin up the Finn/Ram cross stash into roughly dk weight yarn (that seems to be about as thick as I can get myself to spin these days without adding plies) and once I have a pile of it done I’ll go ahead and play with some immersion dyeing and eventually it will become hats and mittens for the kids and any adults around that need them over the winter. I manged to get about 6 oz done over the weekend, which only leaves about another 86 to go The good news is that will clear an entire 70 qt tub for some of this other stash!

I have one fleece so far that I am planning to send out for processing but it needs a better skirting first so that will be something for A to get some practice at that stage of the process. I may also grade out one of the other fleeces and send part of that with it to be blended if they seem similar enough. I know I’m going to have to send out a couple more as there are just too many for me to do on my own this year. Now there is a surprise

ah, well, off to get some work done so I can go home and spin!

And now its Wednesday!

Not much to say this week. Still feeling very tired from the weekend and haven’t caught back up on things yet. I did work a little the past 2 nights on the Bocksten Tunic I’m making to wear to SCA events this summer. This layer will be the under-tunic, made from natural colored linen. I sewed the last of the seams last night and now it just needs hems and finishing. It didn’t turn out quite right in a couple of spots, but they are minor flaws which won’t show during wear since it is the under layer. I’ll be making a green Linen outer layer next as summer layer and later on I’ll do a wool outer layer as a winter tunic.

I may even do a bit of embroidery on the underlayer as practice, since it won’t be seen much. Later I plan to spin my own threads to do the finish work on the other layers but for now, this one is getting commercial threads.

A is interested in getting into the SCA also so I’ll likely be doing a similar tunic for her out of what I have left of the fabric. I plan to make hers a bit big and then add generous seam allowances so we can let out the seems later on as she grows. I’ll also make it extra long and put in a deep hem so there will be some room for addtional height. It would be nice if she can get a few years out of it before we have to make another!

Guess that’s about all for now . . . I need to do some none fiber projects around the house tonight along with some bunny brushing and hopefully I can get to bed on the early side tonight . . . . yeah, right!

Stay tuned for a report on the NH Sheep and Wool Festival after this weekend!

Yikes! Is it really Monday already?

This weekend was a sucess! The party went well, lots of food, lots of friends and lots of fun! However, I am totally, utterly and absolutely exhausted.

Nothing fiber related to report, I did about 5 min. of spinning on the alpaca Saturday night before bed and that was it for the whole 3 days. A quick check of the blogs I visit regularly yielded no updates on Maryland yet. Though I did hear from M by email and it sounds like the Festival was quite a trip.

I’ll post again in a day or two when I’ve recovered and maybe even have something to post.