The Height of Summer!

 It's been a little over a month since I posted -- too long! Apologies. I'll glance through photos, choose the best, and then chat with you about what's happened since the middle of June ....

We spent five glorious days together in the North Carolina mountains on vacation in the same home we stayed in last summer. It was warm, the river was cool, we tubed twice, and fishing was enjoyed. I took a chilly drive up to the top of the Blue Ridge Parkway with my son one morning for the amazing views.

I've been spinning a LOT. There's a casual online event in July for spinners called the Tour de Fleece (haha). I've set a goal to spin enough yarn to knit myself a vest for the autumn. Here's what the yarn looks like:

Shortly after the big family vacation, our son and daughter-in-law and grandson came for a visit here, which was absolutely delightful. Philip worked so hard on our property, but we also enjoyed a day at the beach.

I've been knitting and felting hats, and am surprised both by how well they've turned out, and how inconsistent they are in size. I need to practice more.

For reading during these warming days, as I hibernate in the air conditioning, I've plowed through two of Josephine Tey's books, Miss Pym Disposes and The Daughter of Time. If you want reading that will prey on your brain, make you debate with yourself, and generally cause you befuddlement, I recommend these two. I'm currently in Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. I pulled it off my shelf for a reread because a group read/zoom discussion was going on in the Facebook Trollope group, but I started too late to participate. Still, a good read. Trollope's fortes are character crafting and plot development. He's a master!

Lastly, I have finally figured out how to put my little children's book, The Thanksgiving Mice, on my youtube channel as a read-aloud. I've been pondering this for years. Here's the link to the video. Please share it with the little children you know (maybe ages 5-9 or so?) The world needs more silly books about naughty mice, don't you agree? Lisa, I wonder if your sweet grandkids would enjoy it?

In addition, Adam has been sewing up a storm this summer, making hats, suspenders, trousers, and vests. He's revamping his wardrobe. Church happenings keep us busy with friends, and he has only a month left of his summer break before he's back in the classroom teaching middle school science. We are getting old(er), but we don't seem to be slowing down much!

Blessings to all of you! I will survive August, and then we will eagerly await autumn -- hooray!!

And Now We Are Old People, Going to the Doctors

 I feel like I woke up a couple of months ago and discovered that Adam and I are now people who spend several days each week going to various doctors. How did THAT happen? We have four ... count them, four ... doctor appointments this week. Yikes!

Let me catch you up, since I've been a negligent blogger:

1. Baby chicks are doing well. Growing and now in the orchard with the other birds. And Adam is building a new laying house for them since the other one was literally disintegrating before our eyes. Even the hens were nervous standing on it, and they only weigh a few pounds.

2. I'm spinning! My wheel (as we now know) is a piece of historical rubbish, so I'm borrowing a wheel from a spinning friend ... who are the most lovely friends. And yes, the spinning is going better!

3. We went back to the farmer's market and it was a great day! I'm painting again because I sold cards.

4. Adam is having good and not-so-good days. His immuno-suppressant medication is being increased and his prednisone is being decreased. His body is trying hard to adapt to this.

He's still cooking some yummy food. That's nachos he made a few days ago with some smoky pork roast. He's smoking another one today on the backporch, and that, combined with the cool 70 degree air outside, makes my heart flutter with feelings of fall. Or as the young folk say these days, "I'm feeling all the feels."

Today we're driving to Oriental to meet up with an old college friend I haven't seen in over 35 years. Then ... it's off to the doctors' offices this afternoon. Sigh. 

Here's my latest video of the lovely merino wool roving that came in the mail, and what I did with it!

I'll end with the yarn I just spun this morning. Pom Pom, it makes me think of you and all your pretty yarn for knitting! Have you ever thought of making it yourself?

Much love to you all! ENJOY your fall day, if your day feels like fall.

Here's to Happier Days!

 Two days away from Facebook has been a pleasant, healing thing. It takes me about two minutes to check a few groups I like for new posts, and maybe look in on a friend or two's pages for anything new. I still enjoy reading my friends' comments on pictures I post there.

Another friend mentioned privately that she's deactivating her account, and several of you commented on my last post that you've also left Facebook. I'm heading over to Instagram for my daily "social media" scrolling fix, haha. Instagram is a happier place and doesn't allow for threads of conversation. 

I've caught up on my reading of your blogs! Yay! And I've pondered getting back into spinning. Yes! How far have I gotten in that? Well, I took the big black bag of dark brown alpaca fleece and put it into the freezer. It has old mouse poop all through it, and I figured if I froze it, I might easily shake most of the poop out. Can you believe that mouse poop has kept me from spinning for over 2 years? Actually, that's not true. Not knowing what to do with the yarn I make is what's keeping me from spinning.

I want to order some gorgeous, brightly-colored rolags from some lovely sheep farm, and spin with it. It's already clean. However, I do enjoy combing and dizzing the fleece. I need fleece that's clean, dyed, but not otherwise processed.

Adam made bread last night.

He didn't sleep well. His Cellcept has been steeply increased. (People recovering from a kidney transplant take about 700 mg/day. He takes 3000 right now. Might get increased again.) The doctor is trying to taper down his prednisone dosage. Yesterday afternoon he said he felt better than he had in a while -- less exhausted. So we went for a walk. That didn't last long! He wore out again. This morning (after little sleep) he says he feels ill inside himself again. This is an up-and-down disease.

So today I'm labeling soap, examining that fleece, perhaps knitting, making lunch, doing laundry, and taking a nap. Throw some youtube channels in there too. I won't be painting cards; I have too many cards, and nobody's buying them right now, so I'll stop for a bit. Back to the farmer's market (hopefully) in a few weeks, and maybe that'll help with sales.

I've started putting a sort of watermark on my photos of art. 
Have a lovely day, all! May you find peace and joy in the day!

Keeping Busy

I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek. I'm struggling to keep busy these days. January has been hard, for some reason. I think I slipped into a bit of depression and found it difficult to motivate myself to do much except what was necessary. I also find myself unusually disinterested in my usual creative pursuits, which is worrying. But I hope as the outside world warms and brightens, so will my inner world.

My handspun yarn from all those many months/years ago has been sitting in a bag.

I stopped spinning alpaca fleece partly because I didn't know what I wanted to make with it, and I couldn't sell it. At last, I saw this cool sweater on a friend's facebook page and asked her if she'd send me a photo. She did.

I love the shape, the collar, the bulkiness, and I could see a sweater like this, made from my handspun yarn. The body of her sweater is purl stitch, while the placket is knit, and the bottom edge is ribbing. 
My yarn is not as bulky as that -- some spots are quite thin -- so I need to augment it with another complementary yarn. My yarn is rather pale pastels, so I chose a white. I was quite limited by what's in my yarn stash; what yarn do I have enough of, to make a sweater? I have 6 skeins of this:

It has a little sparkle to it, which I'm not wild for, but when I combined it with the handspun yarn, I think it looks okay.

I'll probably have to spin more yarn, which will be a good motivation to haul the spinning wheel out of the corner and learn how to spin again, haha. A sweater takes a lot of yarn. I was tired of scarves ... So Many Scarves.

In addition to daffodils, now our Japanese magnolia is blooming also!

 Monster Egg update: This morning I found an itty-bitty egg, the first egg laid by one of my new pullets. So sweet! Look at this baby, next to the Monster!

 When you have hens, you get such a delightful assortment!

 I was busy filling a good-sized watercolor card order, but I did paint this one too:

 Are you wondering what Adam's whipping up in the kitchen? This was lunch today:

All I can say is WOW. It was delicious. And if you want to learn more about baking a perfect loaf of bread, just view this:

Happy Valentine's Week to you all! Thank you for stopping by! Your visits and comments cheer a girl up :)

All Things Bright and Beautiful

In January, is there anything more refreshing that "bright and beautiful"?

 Adam brought these flowers home on Thursday. Every Thursday morning our local grocery, Food Lion, gives away their "old" flower arrangements to the earliest customers who ask. Isn't that lovely?
Last week (that's 10 days ago!) he brought home these:

 They're still brightening my studio right now.

I started spinning again, just a little. I chose some dark brown fleece that was already cleaned and picked.

 It doesn't look as dark as it really is. I find a nest of dizzed fleece such a pretty, perfect thing. I haven't spun any roving in about 9 months, but it was easy to pick it back up again.

I've been craving an ice cream cone. In January. I know, there's no excuse for that kind of crazy! Adam bought the ice cream, and I said I would make home made cones ... and I did! 

 They're very good, and the recipe is from Food Wishes.  I do recommend it.

Church this morning was lovely. Our sweet people love to fellowship with each other, and it's a joy to be part of that! But now the day is turning cold ... very cold tonight ... and we're hunkered in the house, anticipating warming activities like hot cocoa, popcorn, a good movie, a snugly robe and slippers, snoozy dogs. But Adam is cutting up a pineapple!

 It's a perfect pineapple, and a very healthy snack.

 Last year I transplanted half of my much-beloved Creeping Fig plant into the ground in front of the house, which is south-facing. I hoped it might survive winters there and begin to climb up the house a little. Well ... it is!

Just a little so far, and it probably won't thrive well with our winters, but maybe in a little corner it will look this pretty. I think it's such a sweet  plant.

Tomorrow I'm deviating from our usual Bible study topic. Adam preached recently about turning our fears/anxieties into prayers, as David did. Writing them down as prayers, speaking as David did. You can hardly go wrong with that kind of prayer. I did this with some of the heavy heartaches I'm struggling with lately, and it helped a lot. I felt assured that God had heard me, and I felt much more peace that the problems were in His hands. What relief! Years ago, it was bitterness that was eating away at me on the inside, but in recent years, it's anxiety, sorrow, worry. Surely it's not supposed to eat away at me either!

 Adam made me a cool leather book for which I'd not yet found a good purpose. Now it will be my Fears-Into-Prayers book. I want to be more devoted to praying fervently and long for inner sorrows that I can't share with others, but that I desperately need God's intervention to help -- and not just help the situation, but help my hurting soul too. Here's the book:

When I write my prayers in it, I try to write in the manner David did -- very personal, very pleading, very emotional, brutally honest. I hope I stick with it.

January can be a dreary month. I hope you have some bright and beautiful things in your January that help you through!

It's June 1st - It's the White Skirt Club!!

Today is important. Right now, Anna and Gramm are down at the courthouse, procuring their marriage license.

It's also my birthday! This morning Adam gave me my birthday card.

Anna had a fabulous bridal shower on Wednesday, given by the ladies in our church. More about that later.

What does a girl-of-certain-age do on her birthday?
Spin, of course:

Go to the thrift store:

I found those two pillow covers and loved them. ($1 each)

The light fixture will go over our kitchen sink. I knew that if I waited long enough I'd find something at the thrift store. It's old-fashioned and just my cup of tea. Also $1!

I picked these tomatoes 

this morning in my garden.

Last year on my birthday I ate my first little cherry tomato from the garden. I was quite "chuffed" (as they say in Britain) -- that means excited and happy -- to have such an early tomato. This year?
I have this many tomatoes because I dug 3 volunteer plants out of the garden last fall, put them into big pots, and overwintered them (rather badly) on the front porch. But their root systems were ahead of the game when I put them back in the garden this spring. They're rewarding me with tomatoes now - a handful! They have recovered marvelously and will produce all summer. I like this plan and think I'll do it again this coming winter.

A coupe of you asked about my white skirts from the thrift store. I'm wondering if this might be a new fad. Do we need a club, ladies? I decided to show them to you with a video because it's easier:

Yarn Adventures

Well! Yarn-making has been taking up my life the last few days. I made these:

I already posted about the green/white yarn that my spinning friend helped me make. (I mean, she really helped me, as in, I could not have done it alone.)

The brown and white yarn I plied yesterday. To ply yarn means to take two strands of yarn that you've already spun, and then spin them together. It's tricky, because twist -- which is what you're doing to your yarn when you spin it -- is essential for yarn-making, but it's also the spinner's bane. Twist makes tangles. Twist makes your yarns become embroiled with one another. Twist is a headache.

This brown/white two-ply yarn is simply white alpaca and brown alpaca, plied together. Does it look like a mess? It is.
I mentioned that the brown alpaca fiber, lovely as it is (and it's truly gorgeous, deep brown) was dirty. To be specific, it had mouse poop in it. The bags of fleece were stored in a barn, so that's not surprising. Undaunted by mouse poop, I cleaned it, and picked out the poop ... one little poop pellet at a time.

The bag of brown fleece. There the mouse pooped, and there he died.

For my first batch of brown fleece, I grabbed a bunch of it from the bag and proceeded to wash it. I'm glad I didn't grab anymore, because the mouse -- dead and desiccated -- was right there! Ugh. Adam removed him. I will use the fleece, cleaning more than before. It's a huge amount of fleece, and worth a lot of money to me. The staple length (how long the strands of fleece are) is short, but it's worth the bother because it's so beautiful.

I still had some white alpaca yarn I'd made first. What to do with it? I plied it together, this time making my own "lazy kate," a device to help you unwind two (or more) balls of yarn simultaneously. Here's mine:

It's a shoebox with two knitting needles through it, held with wine corks on the ends. Put the two balls of yarn on the needles, and let them freely unwind together. This was so helpful! I set the box at my feet as I sat at the spinning wheel, plying the two white yarns together onto my wheel's bobbin -- kind of like spinning it again. I had to turn the wheel in the opposite direction from the direction I used when spinning the 2 yarns originally. That way, the twist of the plying off-sets the twist of the original spinning, and the yarn will drape straight, and will knit or weave without twisting my work around.

Then I dyed the white alpaca yarn in a turmeric bath.

And it came out this pretty color:

 I know very little about natural dying. I soaked the yarn first in warm water with washing soda, salt, and baking soda in it, hoping those would work as a fixative to help the color stay. I gently squeezed it out, and placed it into the dye, letting it soak. 

I squeezed the dye water out, but did not rinse the yarn. I want to use the three together to knit a loose scarf. 

Oh - and so you know I'm still working, I did a little painting this morning while watching youtube videos about natural dying.

I thought this family was very fun, and the son was interesting to watch, doing his kitchen science: