The grand total is 1 7' triangle loom with stand, one basket of cotton yarn wound in balls for the tri, 10 tubs of fiber all in plastic bags, 6 cotton punis carefully carded and ready to spin, 1 trash can, one upholstered chair on wheels and several wooden chairs - all somewhere between very moist and dripping wet.  Yuck. 

I went to bed last night happy and exhausted.  Roc Day was wonderful.  We had several people I had never met before, several more that I knew only slightly, good friends who had never been out here before and lots of friends we see regularly out here.  It was a great group and I had fun.  I hope everyone else did too. I woke up this morning about 6 am to pounding thunder, flashes of lightening and pouring rain.  I didn't once think of the studio or the porch or anything else except  how nice it was to have the rain and how glad I was that all the gates were open so all the animals had shelter to go to.  Then I rolled over and went back to sleep. 

It wasn't until nearly 10 am when I was dressed and had had my first couple of cups of coffee and I was on the way out the door to feed when I saw the tri sitting on the porch.  Wonderful. 

<Penny kicks herself mightily and rushes out to check on the damage.>

Not much damage, actually.  The tri has come into the studio, been dried with a hand spun towel and will sit to finish completely drying before we start on the next shawl.  I'll need to take the balls of yarn and put them back into skeins that can be washed and dried or they will end up smelling musty.  It's only four balls of cotton yarn so it won't be too difficult.  I fear the cotton punis are a total loss but I'll lay them out on some towels and see if they dry well.  If not, into the trash they will go.  The fiber in plastic bags should be fine.  I've dumped them all out on the floor inside the studio to dry and I'll inspect them as they go into large trash bags for the trip to our next fiber festival in Oxford, MS.  I'm hopeful the upholstered chair will dry out without smelling horribly musty.  We'll have to wait and see on that one.  The wooden chairs have all been moved back against the wall of the porch where they are protected from the worst of the rain.

There are also several bedraggled skeins of newly dyed yarn hanging on the line by the dye studio.  Peggy worked very hard yesterday during Roc Day to get  lots of yarn dyed and took all but the wettest of them home with her.  The last  7 skeins are still out there hanging on the line.  I'll give them a quick wash and hang them inside the dye shed to dry.

Here we are drying out fiber bags in the studio....

I took these pictures on my morning walk a couple of days ago.  They look undisturbed because I didn't disturb them.  The interesting thing is when you happen to step on either the dirt mound or more spectacularly the tunnels, they cave in.  It's not like prairie dog burrows that are large and deep and you could break your ankle but it's somewhat startling to have the ground disappear beneath your feet.

I haven't had this happen to me before so I think it may have something to do with the long drought followed by the rain we've had recently.  Now that it's happened quite a few times, I'm not startled by it.  It does leave unsightly holes but the next rain should smooth them out.

When I got ready to write this blog I decided to do some fact checking on gophers and moles.  The term gopher can refer to several burrowing animals including ground squirrels and prairie dogs so the more correct term for what I have is Pocket Gopher.  The pictures look sort of like the odd body parts the cats leave for me.  Of course, that makes for a difficult comparison in any case.   I know I've never seen an animal that looks like the pictures of moles, in pieces or not but since they do make the kinds of tunnels we have here I can only assume my cats haven't brought me any.

In the interested of having a beautiful and flawless yard, it would be nice if all the gophers and moles would move next door.  But this is a working ranch so flawless is never a goal.  As long as the holes and tunnels aren't large enough or deep enough to hurt any of the livestock, I'm more than happy to live and let live.

Ron will make us some warm soup and we'll have sodas, coffee, tea and some munchies.  Please feel free to bring a snack to share.  Bring your wheel or spindle or just come and watch.  You can take a fling on any wheel we have here and on any of the looms.  We'll have lots of fun and funky fibers for you to try.  And hourly door prizes.  Please come.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Roc Day, also called St. Distaff's Day, let me explain.  In the history of northern European cultures the women were the ones who did the spinning and weaving.  They did not work during the 12 days of Christmas or the following day of the Feast of Epiphany.  The first day after Epiphany, Jan 7th, marked the day they went back to work.  The men, however, did not have to return to their work until the 8th of Jan and felt it important to harass the women.  They would try to set the flax in the distaffs on fire.  Expecting this, the women were prepared with buckets of cold water to put out the fires and to douse the men.  Frivolity ensued.  It's a story described in a poem by Robert Herrick (1591 - 1674) called "Saint Distaffs day, or the Morrow After Twelfth Day".

We won't have any setting the flax on fire and no buckets of water but we will have fun and laughter and food and comradeship and a wonderful beginning to this new year.  We would love to have you!  Call if you need directions - 979-733-8120.

This year I resolve to weave more and maybe finally get the curtains woven for my house and studio.  The pattern comes from Favorite Scandinavian Projects to Weave by Tina Ignell.  They are simple M's and O's woven with cottolin warp and linen weft.  They will be light and airy, letting some light into the room but blocking the worst afternoon heat.  I have all the yarn, I just have to get the kitchen towels off the loom and warp up for the curtains.

I resolve to let go of the things that don't really matter and focus on the things that do.  Max, grandchild number one is one year old and healthy after being born 3 months early.  That's important.  Keeping the floor spotlessly clean is not.  Grandchild number two, Miss Artichoke, will make her appearance the middle of January.  That's important.  Mom and Dad have let us know that they have decided on her name and it begins with the letter "A".   Somehow, Artichoke sounds better to me than Baby A, although I'm pretty confident that her name is something other than Artichoke.  What her name is isn't important as long as she is born healthy.  Actually, compared to babies being born healthy and growing up, not much is very important.

Here's what's on the looms.  The Gilmore loom has kitchen towels.  It's a 15 yard warp, slightly longer than my usual 12 yards, of cottolin.  I'm doing my favorite pinwheel pattern and alternating a cottolin weft with hand painted linen.

The Cranbrook loom has a heavy linen warp for rugs.  I'm just starting to play with rugs.  I'm using jute cored wool and alpaca yarn for the weft.  I've only gotten to the sample so far but I hope to have rugs truly under construction soon.

I'm working on two Cricket looms right now.  The first one is a scarf with wool/alpaca warp and my hand spun art yarn for the weft.  It's narrow and quick to weave and has a lovely soft hand.  I'm not sure yet if it will be for sale when I'm finished.  I may just want to keep it for myself.

The second Cricket is warped with hand painted line linen in a white/beige color.  The weft is tow linen which is much more hairy.  These will be linen face cloths when they're finished. 

The 7' triangle loom has just the beginning of a new and totally wonderful shawl made out of Malabrigo Merino wool yarn from Uruguay.  It is so soft and will be warm and cuddly.

I have a new loom that isn't warped yet.  I bought it from my friend Betty Vanderberg.  It's a small workshop loom with handles and wheels.  You would think taking it a workshop would be easy but it's actually quite heavy.  I don't intend to take it out much so the weight is not an issue.  It has a weaving width of a bit more than 20" and 8 harnesses.  It's interesting that I fell in love with this little Macomber loom when I've decided to sell my larger Macomber.  You just never know.

ice on the last of the fall flowers,

and ice on my truck.

I love frost and waking up to crisp mornings, but we have also had the air conditioning on so it hasn't been consistently cold.  This week has been glorious with bright sunny days, cool breezes and being sure the animals have hay in the evening to keep them warm overnight.

Hay is very precious this year with our horrible drought so I give it out regularly but sparingly.  The ponies will eat every single morsel they can get into their mouths.  It looks like the area around the hay feeder has been vacuumed.  At the other end of the spectrum are the goats.  They tend to spread the hay around but once its been on the ground and they have walked through it, they won't eat it so they waste a lot. 

The llamas and alpacas are somewhere in between.  They spread it around more than the ponies do and lay in it while they're munching but they do a much better job of clean-up than the goats.

I am hopeful for continuing cool temperatures and we really need more rain.  The last statistic I heard said we are behind by somewhere between 25 and 35 inches of rain.  That's a lot of rain to not have.

Ron decided he wanted to burn today so we set up the hose running from my studio out to the burn pile.  This is important since the first summer we were here I set the pasture on fire.  Not a fun experience.  Back then our burn pile was on the west side of the property just a hundred feet or so from our neighbor's hay field.  We hadn't run water lines up to the pastures yet so Robert and I were carrying water in buckets to tend the fire.  Note to self - don't ever do that again!  Robert is Peggy's son - tall and thin and really strong and I'm so glad he was here that day!  The fire took off and was heading straight for the neighbor's field.  They had just bailed 30 acres so had round hay bales scattered as far as the eye could see.  I had this horrible vision of all 30 acres, all that hay and their house going up is smoke because I hadn't been appropriately prepared to burn a small amount of tree trimmings.  We called the fire department which fortunately is just 1/2 a mile down the road from me.  They arrived in just a minute or two and put out the fire in about 5 minutes.  The firemen were all very kind.  I had been running back and forth carrying buckets of water and when they arrived I was hanging onto a fence post to keep from falling over.  They found me a chair, put it in the shade, brought me water and made sure I wasn't going to collapse before they went back to the station.  I'm much more careful now when it comes to burning anything!

This morning the burn pile did not go up like a rocket.  It burned very happily and I only had to spray it with water a few times to keep in from making me nervous.  We have tended it all day - being out there part of the time and checking on it from the studio the rest of the time.  It's a lot of work to get all the debris cleaned up and burned.  As it was getting dark I spent about 20 minutes watering it down so we wouldn't have any surprises over night.  We will still check on it through the night but expect it to just smolder.

As many of us do every year at this time, I've been thinking about what I'm thankful for.  Here's a short list...

• I'm thankful for the rain we've had recently.  It hasn't taken us out of the drought but it has greened up our lives.
  
  


• I'm thankful for the cooler temperatures.  I love wearing sweatshirts!
  
  


• I'm thankful my family and friends are all healthy and safe.
  
  


• I'm thankful Max is so healthy and is almost walking.
  
  


• I'm thankful all the animals are well so I won't have to call the vet during his turkey dinner.
  
  


• I'm thankful the new roof on the house is finally finished.  I was getting really tired of all the pounding.
  
  


• I'm thankful I still love the spinning and weaving that so enriches my life.

Because the studio is where I weave and spin, and because I'm pretty far out in the country, we don't have regular store hours.  We can be open pretty much whenever you can get out here as long as you've called first.  We will be open on Saturday for Shop Small Saturday from 10 am til 4 pm. 

Here are our normal hours.  These are based on something that was flying around the internet so I can't attribute it to anyone, but whoever wrote it must have visited Sky Loom Weavers....

                                                                           Business Hours

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This morning Larry gave me a small bag of cotton bolls that he called Okra Leaf Cotton.  I had to google it since I'd never heard of Okra Leaf Cotton.  Turns out it is similar to other white upland cotton but has a leaf that looks like an okra leaf.  With all due respect to the people of the south, I don't think okra is edible, wouldn't grow it and have no idea what the leaf looks like so I googled it.  Yes, Google got a bunch of my business today... 

Here is a photo I grabbed off the internet that shows a regular cotton leaf on the left and the okra leaf cotton on the right.  Son of a gun!  It really does look like an okra leaf.  It's supposed to be great for letting all the pesticides get to the lower part of the cotton plant, particularly in areas where they spray 8 to 10 times during the growing season.  I don't spray pesticides on my very small cotton crop so that distinction doesn't really help me much but I love the idea of different shaped leaves.

When the ground warms up in the spring I'll be planting my Okra Leaf Cotton in one garden bin and some other cottons in other bins.  In the mean time I'll spin some of this up and see how I like it.  It's going to be great to compare them - both the leaves and the cotton.

This year we went to SAFF.   That's the Southeastern Animal Fiber Festival in Asheville, NC.  Several people we met at the Spin-In in Destin, FL raved about SAFF and since we hadn't been back to the east coast in a while it seemed like a good idea.  It was great! 

The festival was held at the Ag Center literally across the street from the Asheville Airport.  Asheville has the cutest little airport I've flown into in decades.  They have 7 gates and it feels like about 10 feet from the gate to the front door.  It was such a delight after flying in and out of Houston all the time.  The Ag Center is a collection of buildings and barns with ample parking.  It's a nice venue with plenty of room for animals and classes and vendors.  We each took several classes and they were beautifully organized. 

There are several great things about going to a fiber festival across the country - getting out of town, seeing different topography and a different climate, a complete change of schedule and all the different vendors.  Some vendors travel to all the big fiber festivals so you see them where ever you go - Brooks Farm Yarn comes to mind.  Many vendors are like us - they decide how far they are willing to drive to a vendor event so can only be found if you go to their part of the country.  It's so interesting to see different local vendors. 

Walter Turpening was there.  I have one of Walter's weaving benches and I love it!  He makes them to order after taking specific measurements - like the length of your lower leg, the height of your treadles and the height of the breast beam of your loom.  Yes, I ordered another weaving bench - this one on rollers for my 6' wide loom.

Carol Leigh and Denny from Hillcreek Fiber Studio were there with their wonderful triangle looms and copies of Carol Leigh's new book about weaving on frame looms.  It's a fabulous book with great ideas!

Also there were Gale's Art,Gwenyth Glynn Wensleydales, Stony Hill Fiberarts, Good Fibrations and Plays in Mud Pottery along with so many more that I can't remember.

So here is the summary - SAFF is great!  Nice people, good travel arrangements, beautiful weather, lovely hills and valleys, wonderful vendors, great venue, lots of fun!

Both these get-togethers are fun with great people and pretty good food.  Just very different.  We like both of them.

Having done a wide variety of shows in the past few years, I think a three or four day show is the best length.  It spaces out the setting up and the tearing down but isn't so long we start to get really tired.  The Yellow Rose show was only two days - a very good beginning to what we hope will be an annual event - but that meant setting up on Fri and tearing down on Sat after being open for business all day.  We decided ahead of time that we would stay over and come home early Sun morning.  It turned out to be the correct decision.  We were exhausted by the time we got the trailer loaded Sat night.  We got home at a civilized time on Sun and unloaded the trailer.

I've spend the last several days unpacking and getting all our stuff put away - but cleaning the studio along the way so it's taken me longer.  And I'm not quite finished yet.  I still have large black trash bags full of fiber to put up but most of the yarn and finished goods are where they should be.  There is a stack of empty bins to be taken up to the loft but I've made good progress.

The Yellow Rose Fiber Festival was great!  The facility is lovely with comfortable air conditioning, nice bathrooms, easy parking, a perfectly acceptable concession stand and ramps for loading and unloading.  Every person we dealt with was accommodating, efficient and pleasant.  You couldn't ask for anything more.  This festival is the brain child of Karla and Joe Herre of Windmill Crest Alpacas in Seguin.  We have already signed up for next year, which has been expanded to three days.  Yea!  Check out the Yellow Rose website for the list of vendors.  Great vendors!

So I feel like I've been lifting, moving, packing, unpacking, shifting, loading, unloading and adjusting daily for a week.  I think that's because I have been.  I had a twinge in my lower back yesterday but was careful and didn't do anything stupid to make it an issue.  This morning I went out to shear my goats and realized I had four large plants that needed to get into their new pots.  I got them all plotted but with more significant twinges in my back.  I guess the goats will have to wait one more day.

Here are the latest kitchen towels in the weaving process.  Not my fastest set of towels but surely one of my favorite patterns.  I love color & weave.  The color repeat pattern in the warp is the same as the color repeat pattern in the weft so when one color of the warp crosses the same color of the weft, there is a bold dot of that color.  In all the other areas different colors cross each other for more muted color.  Changing colors every eight picks does take more time but the final result is well worth it.

This is a portion of the 12 yards of kitchen towel right off the loom.  I zigzag both ends and wash and dry the entire long fabric.  Then the fabric is cut into sections of about 36 inches in length and all those ends zigzagged....

Once the towels are secure from fraying, they are washed a second time.  In this case they are washed in warm water and dried in the dryer.  Then the hems are pressed and hand sewed...

Twelve new towels, already pressed, waiting to be hemmed.  I was told early on by a fabulous weaver that hand woven items always needed to be hemmed by hand.   I resisted the idea initially.  I didn't actually machine hem my first towels but I certainly thought about it.  Now that I've gotten used to hand hemming, I have got to agree.  Thank you Connie Elliott.  You were correct.  Lovingly hand woven kitchen towels should be lovingly hand hemmed.  So that's were I sit right now.  I've finished hemming the first towel and the others are sitting next to my chair ready to go.

Voodoo Donuts landed on our "must see" list for Portland, OR when Anthony Bourdain talked about it on his No Reservations show on the Travel Channel.  Anthony Bourdain is a food critic who travels all over the world to eat.  Not a bad gig.  While I don't think the bacon donut will ever be on his most favorite flavor list, it was intriguing.

My husband and I were in Portland last September and made it a point to stop by Voodoo Donuts.  I opted for the zombie donut....

while my husband went all the way with the bacon donut...

The zombie was pretty good but I liked the butter crunch better (to the upper left of the zombie above).  I decided not to try the bacon - the bacon itself didn't bother me but the maple icing turned me off completely.  So if you are ever in Portland and are interested in having a donut.... try Voodoo Donuts.  Yum!

And the roses are blooming!

And the peach tree is full of very small peaches...

And one of the best things for today..... it's raining!  Not a happy female rain that calmly puts lots of water on the ground and not an angry noisy male rain either.  It's more of a mist but it's putting rain on the ground!  A very good thing.

Good care of the livestock and the land encourages rotation.  In the abstract that makes perfect sense to me but it's not happened here on any planned and organized basis.  The ponies have always been moved from pasture to pasture as they eat down the grass but the goats have always remained where they started.  Until a couple of days ago.

My plan was to completely scramble where all the animals are so everyone had a new pasture.  We have never had a serious parasite problem but moving everyone around is only a good thing.  It will discourage developing a parasite problem, give everyone a new view of the world, change the order in which I feed them... Change is a good thing.  Did I really just say that?

The logistical problems of scrambling the pastures became immediately apparent.  It's not really hot yet but soon the llamas and alpacas will need their sprinklers to keep cool.  The sprinklers are only in the goat's pen and the "new" pasture.  The ponies can go pretty much anywhere but Eclipse still needs to be by himself since he has a severed tendon in one hind knee and is fed the highest quantity of food and put with either of the other ponies would have to defend his food.  The goats can go anywhere.  So in the end my big plans of scrambling the locations of all the animals involved moving only the goats.

My goats love me.  With a bucket of food they will follow me anywhere.  I'm sure it's more my magnetic personality than the bucket of food.  Really.  I opened the gate and walked boldly across the property to their new pasture.  They followed along perfectly.  The move was clean and quick and without incident.  The ponies were outraged that I had moved these small, fuzzy, smelly creatures in next door to them but calmed down pretty quickly.

I was surprised that the llamas seemed concerned about the goats.  Smoky, the guard llama in charge, usually ignores the goats, or at least seemed to, but was very upset when he couldn't see the goats.  Even Tucker was concerned.

Behind the barn, the goats didn't see much of me.  From the other pastures they could see more of my movements but now that they're in the front pasture, they can see my every move.  They can see the door to the house and the barn and the studio.  Every time I venture out I have 4 pairs of eyes trained on me.  It's slightly unnerving.  The goats obviously assumed they were on a day trip to their new pasture.  They want to go home.  I've tried to explain that this is their new home but they are unconvinced.

First core spinning... it's spinning a fiber around a central core.  The core can be a hand spun single or commercial thread, thin yarn or crochet cotton.  The core is generally completely covered so it's not seen in the final yarn... unless you want it to be part of the design.

In this case I'm using ecru crochet cotton as the core and wrapping the mixed fibers of the art batt around it.  You can see I've wrapped the core around my fingers so it doesn't slip too easily onto the bobbin.  A silk core sounds much sexier but you want the core to be slightly rough so it grabs onto the fibers and doesn't let them slip and slide around.

Art batts are a funky mix of fibers including the standard wool, mohair and silk along with ribbon and charms and flashy metallics - just about anything you can spin.  This batt is actually much blacker than it looks in the photo and is called Black Opal.

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Some batts are well carded and uniform and will allow you to spin a perfectly consistent yarn.  Others are a jumble of fibers and colors just barely carded enough to hold together and usually produce a lumpy bumpy unique yarn.  No surprise that I like the lumpy bumpy final result the best.

The class was so wonderful that I rushed home and bought 6 or 8 art batts on etsy.com.  Check out etsy if you're looking for anything hand made and all the supplies you need to make anything hand made.  I spun them with glee.  I suggested to Peggy that we should make art batts to sell.  We have a drum carder and, after all, how hard could it be?  She wasn't bitten by the core spinning bug like I was so looked at my suggestion with a bit more objectivity.  We were vendors at Kid 'n Ewe in Nov.  It's always on the weekend of my birthday and Peggy usually finds something wonderful there as a gift for me.  This year she bought me 10 ounces of art batt - that I had to make myself.

There were bags of all sorts of fibers - soft buttery Merino, course Karakul and everything in between, Cotton and Flax and ribbon and Mohair and Silk and Sari Silk and Cashmere and Buffalo.  You get the idea.  I could pick anything I wanted and load it onto the drum carder.  Then I could card it once or twice or three times - as much as I wanted.  I finished the first batt, only carding it once, and had to go back to our booth and sit down for a rest.  It was really hard work!  No individual step in the process is difficult but by the time I had finished three batts, I really needed a nap.  OK.  So maybe my idea of making art batts and selling them was less easy than I thought.  I've also looked closely at the batts I buy and the artistry that goes into making them is amazing.  Colors I wouldn't put together along with fibers I wouldn't put together that all turn out perfect.

So making art batts is a job better done by someone else.  But I will continue to buy them and spin them!  What fun!

We also dyed 24 skeins of Splendor.  It's one of my favorite yarns.  65% superwash wool and 35% bamboo.  It takes the color beautifully and makes wonderful socks.  We were careful to dye 6 to 8 skeins in each colorway so there will ample yardage for projects larger than socks.  And we tried a new dye technique.  Well, it's new to us - dip dying.

We dyed several pounds of Merino spinning fiber, along with Merino/Silk, Mohair and Flax.  Sorry, no pictures of the fiber.  I'll take some soon and get them posted.

We had a great time and got lots of stuff dyed.  With shows coming up, we need to keep working!

This will be a great shawl for me to use at any of the demonstrations we do, in any time period.  It's all hand spun wool and nothing is dyed so any re-enactment - Civil War or Renaissance or Colonial, etc. - is suitable.

I couldn't remember if the yarn had been washed after I spun it.  It probably was but I wasn't sure.  I washed the shawl after it was finished and the water wasn't too dirty.  I think most people think however they learned to spin is the best way.  And, of course, that's true for me.  I learned to spin on Romney wool.  It will always be a favorite of mine.  It's soft enough to feel pretty good and grabby enough to spin easily.  It's not the buttery softness of Merino or the slipperiness of silk.  It's just great spinning.

This is a hearty shawl - thick and stiff and very warm.  It should protect me from rain and wind and cold.  No soft drape here just sturdy warmth.  I'm very pleased.

So here is my wonderful 7" triangle loom hanging on the wall of the stairwell in the studio with it's friends.  It got quite a workout this last couple of months and can rest now while I work on other things.

Kitchen towels are now in motion!  I'm already half way finished with this warp so it shouldn't take too long to finish them up.  As usual, they are cottolin which is a blend of 60% cotton and 40% linen.  I love this yarn.  It's clean and easy to care for so it makes great kitchen towels.  Just throw them in the washer and the dryer and they just get softer and more absorbent.  And this is one of my favorite patterns.

Funny how things turn out.  I love spinning on a drop spindle and carry one with me most times.  I drop spindled all the way across the Pacific Ocean and on every other plane I've ever been on since I learned how to spin.  I still love the tri loom.  You can change your pattern, yarn, sett, structrure on the fly which is really fun.  But then I moved to the floor loom.  I still have the one my grandmother bought for me when I was 13 but I've added a couple more.  The Cranbrook for rugs and the 8 shaft Gilmore that has become my kitchen towel loom.

I love weaving kitchen towels and have done set after set for the last couple of years.  I love the linen and the cottolin and they make such wonderful kitchen towels.  So no one was more surprised than I when my big tri loom started calling to me.  I'm just finishing up my 6th tri shawl in the last 6 weeks.  For some reason, after not weaving on a tri, except as a demonstration, I can't seem to put it away.  I have the next shawl all planned before the current one is finished.

Here are the most recent creations:

Peggy did the lovely red shawl but the rest are mine.  We have Merino and other wools, silk, mohair, cotton, llama and alpaca in thick yarns and thin yarns and boucles, commercial and hand spun.  Cool.

The last shawl I'm weaving is made from my very first handspun.  It happens to be all natural colored wool and I've been saving it for years until I could figure out what to do with it.

Your first hand spun is special.  It's usually lumpy and bumpy and overtwisted and understwisted and something you will never be able to make again once you have more experience.  And it's worthy of something wonderful. 

Mittens or a scarf are pretty common but we don't have long enough winters here for me to use them much.  A shawl is actually more useful for me.  Plus the fact that this one is all hand spun and has no dyes, it will be perfect for any time period re-enactment.  I will look stunning in Nov at the Civil War Re-enactment at Liendo Plantation!

So the shawl from my first hand spun yarn won't be for sale but the others are slowly making their way to the website.  Come and take a look at them!  Peggy has now put me on shawl-probation.  We have three shows coming up in April and June and have no kitchen towels for sale.... None.  As soon as I finish up this last shawl it's back to the Gilmore and more towels.  Not a bad thing at all.  I love kitchen towels...

I love winter.  I'm not sure that Peggy would agree but I was raised in the north and really appreciate cold days and sweaters and long-johns and wool and down jackets and hot cider.  What I don't like much anymore is winter percipitation.  Nice dry snow is pretty wonderful but sleet and freezing rain and rain at any temperature below about 50 degrees gets me anxious.  Anxious for the animals and especially anxious about driving.  It's just been too many years since I did much driving in winter conditions.  After the broken pipes of last winter's freezing temperatures we were a bit better prepared this year but it never got cold enough to be a problem.  No broken or frozen pipes and all the animals froliced in the cool weather.

I hate summer.  At least I hate the central Texas version of summer.  Hot, dry and humid are not my favorite things.  I'm not very enthusiastic about hurricanes either.  I do love my roses and all the fun dye plants we grow here and we do need summer for those.

Spring and fall are my favorite.  Spring because everything turns green and flowers pop out everywhere and the bluebonnets are glorious.  And fall because the heat of summer is finally gone and we can gets lots of work done in the dye studio and winter is coming.

Today is great.  Some clouds in the sky but plenty of sunshine, a cool breeze and 70 degrees.  Eclipse, our oldest pony, got his allergy shots this week and I wormed all the ponies this morning.  We ran fecals on the llamas, alpacas and goats a couple of weeks ago and they are all clear.  Yea!  Guys from our electric co-op have been by this morning to check all our electric poles.  I'm running into town to buy a bag of cement to plant our new Purple Martin house.

Yup.  I think it's spring.

Max really changed my focus.  A new baby always does that, I guess, especially the first grandchild, but Max's situation made everything else so unimportant.  I wasn't the one who went to the hospital every day and held him and fed him and talked to him.  I did all those things but my daughter and her husband were the ones who made the daily trip up the freeway to see Max.  Bless the doctors and nurses at the NICU for the wonderful care Max received.  Bless the insurance company for making the cost of Max's care something we didn't have to worry about.  And bless Peggy and all the other friends and relatives who pitched in to help so my daughter and son-in-law could occasionally sleep.

Only in the last couple of weeks have I been thinking about this blog again and beginning to compose posts in my head.  So it's time to catch up on all the fiber fun that's happened since September.  We have some wonderful new shawls and shawl pins to talk about.  We sold out of all our kitchen towels but I'm weaving some more.  We had a great time as vendors at the Kid 'n Ewe Fiber Festival in Boerne, TX and were privileged to be invited the first annual Knit 1 Oxford Fiber Festival in Oxford, MS.  I have some great pictures of the large looms at the Pendleton Woolen Mills in Oregon.  I've discovered core spinning and have created some really interesting, fun and funky yarns.  And then there's the upcoming events.... the Yellow Rose Fiber Festival in Seguin, TX in April, the Spinning Retreat in Moss Bluff, LA in June.

Like I said, we have lots of fun stuff to talk about.  I'll be adding posts soon.

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.