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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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....

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.

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!

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.

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.

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. 

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!

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.

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.

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.