Sorted, Skirted, Picked, Weighed and Sampled ... Oh My!

What a GREAT week this has been! Last Saturday (AM - After Market) we sheared a dozen of the (mostly) Wensleys, and I spent that week getting fleeces sorted out and ready to sell. I have a spread sheet with pictures, prices and fiber information, but it was too big to upload here. If that link doesn't work for you, cut and paste this:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B743nbzGR7t_MDA2ZjYzZGUtNWExNC00YjZiLWFhOWEtNjhlMWNkMTczZWYw&hl=en&authkey=CPvHudcJ

UPDATE: Opal and Lila's fleeces have been sold. Thank you!

It is over 6MB, so takes a while to load.
Next weekend we do more and some goats, yay!

This week, we skipped the Saturday market and instead drove to LA where I was able to sit in on the SCHG (Southern California Handweavers' Guild) monthly meeting. Patsy Zawistoski gave a great talk and slide show on Using Your Yarns; A Look at the Creative Process. That afternoon and all day Sunday she taught a superb workshop called Quick Novelty & Boucle Yarns. I don't know how quick I was, but it was a treat and a challenge to keep up. We worked on spinning a worsted slub spiral, a core spun bouclé, a knotted yarn, a cable yarn and a lopi style singles yarn, among others. The worksheets she designed served to keep us on track as well as provide a reference for future projects. Never have I been so organized! All in all I found them to be a wonderful, lively guild, and the workshop was stupendous.

Today (Valentine's Day) I gave a short presentation on carding and spinning on a Navajo-style spindle to my own guild, Palomar Handweavers' Guild, PHG . Now I sit with my brain quite literally spinning, thinking "Fiber, fiber EVERYWHERE but never time to think!"

What a Strange Way to Start the New Year

I know that most people begin a new year by making a list of resolutions or taking stock of the year past, but I decided to start by taking the Death Test. The questions are reasonable, thoughtful, kind of interesting, and some are downright funny. You should try it - it doesn't take too long.

After several pages, the verdict was revealed:

Dead At 72

From Cancer

View my profile:

Find out when and why you'll die, take The Death Test!

Why they showed a picture of this odd man from the 50's with a bump on his head, I do not know. But the truly spooky part is that I actually toook the same test twelve years ago ... and got the exact same answer, down to the actual day: November 18, 2016.

Then came the sobering statement:
You have 1944.3 days left on this earth.
You’ve already lived 93% of your life.

Now THAT calls for some taking stock, doesn't it?

If this test is too morbid for you right now, check out the web site: there are 43,442 more tests, dealing with a dizzying array of subjects. There are tests in other languages and on all maturity levels, rated on the star system, complete with statistics of how many people have taken it - ever - and how many have taken it in the last hour.

The top three?

The Which Karamazov Brother Are You Test
Which of the Karamazov brothers from Fyodor Dostoevsky's famous novel are you? 4.43

3085 (#3206) people have taken it. 10 (#282) people took it in the last 24 hours (↑400%).

The Commonly Confused Words Test
Complete Answer Key available. URL at end of test. Good communication is not necessarily about using an expansive vocabulary. 4.4
1238180 (#2) people have taken it. 363 (#6) people took it in the last 24 hours (↓9%).

How good of a Calvinball player are you?
Do you have what it takes to win? It's a tiger-eat-boy world, so you'll need to be quick on your feet to win this game. 4.42

22776 (#408) people have taken it. 8 (#348) people took it in the last 24 hours.

So hey, if you are bored this weekend, or don't want to examine your life and learn your fate right now, just jump right in! Maybe I'll try the PERSONALITY DEFICET Test next.

WeFF

One week later we were locked and loaded for another big event: the Western Fiber Festival, held annually in Torrance by what was formerly SCHG. What fun! And this time it was just a one-day event, so we could leave the mighty Mouse at home with our farm feeder. It was dark when we left - 4 something, by the "new" time - but the skies lightened by the time we arrived, revealing strange cloud formations over Long Beach.

As we got closer we decided that it was a phenomenon due to the still weather; lack of wind allowed heated air from the refineries to travel straight up, like chmneys or tornado's tails. Interesting to watch, to the point that we had to turn off our book on CD - Malcom Gladwell's What the Dog Saw. And that book is hard to turn down.

WeFF is a feast for the eyes, a bonanza for the buyer, and our happiest day of the year. We earned more in one day (10 to 4) than we did in FIVE tortuous days (and one evening) at Convergence.

Plus we had great fun, the people (both public and organizers) were wonderful, and ... AND... they served us coffee and donuts while we set up and gave us little sandwiches, soda and chips for lunch!

Whew!

How many posts have I begun with that exhausted "gasperation"? Or maybe it just seems like a lot, because that is the mantra that assails my mind the minute I find time to sit down for an update. Nevertheless, whew is a pretty good descriptor for the last month.

We prepped and packed for a weekend at the SWFF (Southwest Fiber Festival) in Amado, AZ, one of my favorite areas to visit. Only this year (the festival's third) we were vendors instead of visitors, a whole new ballgame!

We made the trip (trailer and the ever-present Mouse in tow) in good time, but it was a no-frills trip because ML had to work the next week. We spent two nights at the Amado Territory Inn, two days traveling, and one day selling.

Traveling the stretch of I-10 just west of Tucson was a humbling and numbing experience. I have been coddling and nursing along a small hand full of natural colored cotton plants, painstakingly grown from seed (another post, for sure!) and here we were, driving past miles and miles and MILES of cotton. We passed endless acres of fields with fat green plants sporting tiny white bolls, monstrous mega-machines harvesting row after row, hundreds additional acres of skeletonized plants with more cotton left hanging on the bare limbs than I can ever hope to grow, enormous gray tarps staked over mounds of compacted cotton the size of my house, and drifts of white cotton waste covering fences, weeds, and filling the roadside ditches. Wow.

We had a double booth space because I was teaching some classes, so we had plenty of room to spread out.


Midway through the afternoon, winds gusted and blew my shelf of roving over -- fortunately NOT during class!

True to course, Mouse was an excellent trooper, spending nights quietly sleeping in his dog kennel in the back of the car and days in his pen behind our booth. He had his own shady tree and a bevy of admirers.

Feeding him was a bit of a challenge, since he is still on the bottle (one that prophetically says "The one and only...") and refuses cold milk, but we carried a thermos which helped.

Mouse supervised loading and unloading,

took the thousand mile trip in stride,


Small traveler, big desert.

and came home to appreciate all the comforts of home and hearth.

Especially hearth.

Rain, Beautiful Rain!

We have been under drought conditions for all of this century and part of the last. It has been so long that some people are beginning to think it will be a permanent situation for Southern California. In the past, rain predictions meant the roads might get a sprinkling, or folks should turn on their wipers. But this week we had real rain, with headlines like the following:

• 

  Southwest at Risk for Severe Storms Again

  News - Oct 20, 2010; 10:00 AM ET Thunderstorms threaten to cause flash flooding and turn severe over Southern California and Arizona today.

Of course, everything is made to sound terribly dramatic, be it rain or drought, but we did get nearly 3" from this storm, and maybe a bit more a few days later.

When the weather finally blew past, we were left with the most beautiful green haze on the hills all around. We were also left with a downed tree in the goat pen. It was an ancient avocado long since turned into a giant condo for the blue birds. I honestly don't know what held it upright for so long.

The only problem was that the downed tree made an excellent bridge up to and over the boundary fence! With just a few strokes of his chain saw, however, ML turned the liability into an asset: now it's a wonderful goat playground!

Tea in the Afternoon

Our traditional Wednesday evening knitties has recently been changed to afternoon, so it seemed very appropriate to bring Sri Lankan tea to our first afternoon fete. Here is the story behind that:

Sunanda is my daughter's mother-in-law. She looks saintly it's because she is! When more than five dozen members of the large, international extended family visited Sri Lanka a few years ago, she spent about 20 hours of every day in her kitchen, making the most amazing meals.

Almost everything is from scratch, and the ingredients usually come from the local outdoor market or their yard, where everything - from mangoes, jack-fruit, papayas, coconuts, herbs and even black pepper and coffee - grows in abundance. She grows and dries all of the ingredients to make her own curry powder, and it can clean out your sinuses like you wouldn't believe. Every day, pounds of garlic are mashed in a huge granite mortar with a heavy 3' long wooden pole. We frequently woke up in the morning to this rhythmic thudding noise, and -- upon wandering into the kitchen -- discovered that she had mugs of milk tea waiting for us. Here is her recipe:

1. First, rinse a 1.5 or 2 qt. brewing pot (she used an old enamel coffee pot) and fill with hot water. Let it sit while you put a kettle on to boil.

2. When the kettle boils, dump out the hot water that's sitting in the brewing pot and put in at least 3 heaping tablespoons of loose tea* (You want it STRONG!), then pour in at least a quart of boiling water, maybe even five or six cups, depending on your preferences and the number of thirsty people that are waiting. Cover the pot and let it steep for several minutes.

3. In the meantime, put the following into your teapot:

3 tablespoons of sugar

3 tablespoons of malt powder

5 tablespoons of "full-fat" milk powder ( can only find non-fat in the US)

4. After the tea has steeped a bit, pour the tea into the pot, through a strainer, stirring as you go. The powdered ingredients should dissolve completely, and you are ready to go! Better put another kettle on, however, because people always want more. Often, Sunanda would add more boiling water to the spent tealeaves, to eke out just a bit more.

*of course Sri Lankan (Ceylon) tea is best, but any good, black loose-leaf tea will work

Addendum and Updates

The new kid, Phoebe's little white buck (now dubbed Pie) has turned out to be absolutely sound. His leg may have been stepped on or tweaked during delivery, but now there is no sign that he was ever favoring it. And those eyes! Don't they look blue?

Pie is not the only blue-eyed kid, and Phoebe has very pale eyes as well, but it is fun to see the variety.

I have been introducing Mouse to the rest of the herd a few minutes every day so that hopefully, one day, he will remember that he is a goat. But it isn't going very well so far. The does push him away from their kids, so he ends up chasing chickens and wandering around lost.

You can get an idea of Mouse's diminutive size by checking him against newborn Pie, in the background.

Mouse continues to eat and gain and - at two weeks - weighs in at a whopping 3 pounds 6 ounces. I am gradually switching him from goat milk to whole cow's milk, with lactase enzyme added. So far no problems, and he is gulping his bottle whenever it is offered. He stays dry through the night (from 8 to 8!), never pees in his basket, comes when called, and generally is the most entertaining thing to arrive on the scene since the grand kids left.

On the fiber front, I spun up a neat bump of mohair that I dyed in dark tans and oranges. Sounds a bit hideous, but it really spun up nicely, and - plied with a black llama singles - will make a lovely hat or scarf.

October skein

In addition to spinning, I've been using up bits of leftover yarn making little monsters. Five so far, among them are Boo, Puff, and Stash. Here they pose with two of my "warty squash" and one lovely golden one that somehow managed to get two nearly perfect eyes - naturally!

All of the little monsters are hand knit and felted, except for Fire Fingers (the bigger one in the back) who is a puppet waiting for a face.