What Housework?

Happiness is where you make it

A view out back last night. In between showers we had the highest-arc rainbow I've ever seen. After about a half hour without fading, the left side showed up to complete the arc. Unfortunately, it sits right over our neighbor's house, which ruins the pastoral photo op.

Anyway, happiness. I just got a comment from a reader saying she finds happiness in my blog at a time when her own life is short on it.

I wrote back to say that we have a lot of happiness here these days, but also a lot of stress. I'm busy, and tired, and the financial roller coaster we've been riding for over six months now doesn't look like it's going to come to an end in the foreseeable future.

And yet, I'm happy. How is that possible?

It's the little things. Like my garden. Check out my lettuce patch:

I've been having a giant green salad for lunch every day. This makes me happy.

Things are growing, slowly but surely. And we're leaving for our annual camping "vacation" tomorrow, just two towns over, which means my peas will no doubt be ready for picking next week, the little beasts. But aren't they cute?

The photo above is one of my shell peas. Knowing the yield on a row of shell peas is pitiful, I followed some old farming advice (basically, why plant in straight single rows if you're not using power equipment to plant, weed and harvest?) and planted a wide row. It might be a little overplanted...

The onions, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, beans, squash/pumpkin/cuke vines are all coming along nicely. I even threw in some broccoli plants (about the only things I didn't start from seed besides the onions) even though I have a mortal fear of broccoli worms.

Taters:

All these make me happy, even though I know I'm going to be overwhelmed with harvesting.

The baby turkeys are doing well and growing fast. Can you see all four here?

They make me happy, as does the laundry hanging on the line back there.

Even rotten Milo makes me happy. This morning he thought he'd maybe ambush some birds at the feeder. (He didn't. He almost fell to his death jumping up there in the first place.)

This picture was taken on our back porch where we have our morning coffee in the summer time. (Makes me happy, 'course.)

And tomorrow, we go camping for 10 days. Even though we can't afford it, even though I'm working half of next week, even though my garden needs me to stay here, even though I don't really enjoy camping all that much (even in a camper with a bathroom), even though I don't know how we're going to make it through the rest of 2009 -- I'm still happy to be getting away with my family. And I'm going to have plenty of much-needed time to just sit and knit.

Happy.

What makes you happy? (Don't you dare say "money.")

Home is where the heart is

Ah, it's a crazy, beautiful time of year. I love it but I'm truly exhausted these days. There are now about 15 hours of daylight and I think we are squeezing every possible moment from every hour. I wish I could save some of these for February.

We got a new beef cow, Sam, who's about a week old in these pictures.

My brother-in-law decided four cows (with two on the way) weren't enough, so here he is. It's a bit dicey, bottle feeding a sweet little baby knowing in a couple of years he'll be dinner, but I think I've mastered it now. (Come to think of it, we have 70 meat chicks arriving today...)

The other animals are doing fine. Here's Gert (or Polly, I can never remember):

And here's one of the Steak brothers, Chuck or Flank (again, I can't remember -- and I didn't name them):

And, as always, piggies.

I love this sleeping pig picture mostly because of the pigeon on the roof. I don't know why. Click to make it bigger.

Calvin:

Maude the bantam and her adopted baby:

Maude is in the front. Her baby, soon to be a full-size laying hen (or rooster), is still a chick but is the same size as she is.

Just beyond the frame of the sleeping pig picture, to the left, is the new garden space. It's huge! These pictures are a couple of weeks old (I'm telling you -- I have not had a spare minute to blog), so imagine everything the same but bigger.

Radishes among the carrots:

Lettuce, lots of lettuce.

Peas (these are dwarf shell peas; I've got snap peas as well):

Onions:

Potatoes (we planted over 100, but about half drowned. We still have plenty!)

I've also got almost 30 tomato plants, basil, plus butternut squash, jack-o-lanterns, baking pumpkins, zucchini, yellow squash, and cucumbers. I admit I "weeded" one vine and I can't remember what it is, so scratch one of the last three in that list.

In between work, family, softball, gardening, farm work, yarn work (not much), cooking, cleaning (again, not much), and general spring insanity, my husband and I actually got to go on a date. Will wonders never cease.

Since, however, we are "too poor to even pay attention," as my husband says, we picked an unusual destination. An older man in the next town has a "museum," almost 6,000 square feet of collections of stuff, some antique, some not. That includes old gas pumps, Coke machines, tractors, farm tools, toasters, telephones, maps, brochures, menus, yardsticks, bottles, apothecary items, Victrolas, a couple of player pianos, oil cans, irons, lunchboxes, Coca-cola memorabilia, sprinklers, and so on and so on. It's amazing. It took over three hours for a whirlwind tour. This was my favorite find:

It's a great wheel, totally intact, right down to the braided cornhusk holding the spindle on.

 The catch, however, is that the man is a collector, not a dealer. He refuses to part with anything in his collection. He also gives tours but doesn't charge admission or even take donations.

I asked if he'd sell the wheel and he said, "I can't, because if I did, then I wouldn't have it." He is sitting on probably millions of dollars of stuff, some of it worth money individually, much of it worth money because of the completeness or size of the collection.

A lot of it isn't even old, it's stuff that we'd throw away, like take-out menus or McDonalds French-fry cartons or a SpongeBob lunchbox. Even a McDonalds ashtray -- remember when there was such a thing?

But when you see it in a collection that spans years or decades or even a century, it becomes part of an important timeline. He even has parking receipts from Disney World every year from 1976 to the present. (Parking has gone from $.50 to $12 a day, in case you were wondering.)

"Not everything here is old," he said. "But someday it will be."

So, I have to go get ready for work, but I'm going to leave you with a few of the 100 or so pictures I took of his collection. Collectors might go ga-ga over some of his stuff but he doesn't own a computer and when I asked if he ever sold or bought on eBay, he smiled and said, "How do you spell that?" This stuff is not going anywhere.

Many pictures below. (Everything is underlined from here on in, and I can't seem to make it stop.) Click for larger. See if you remember any of this from your youth. Or your grandmother's.

Wax cylinders, before vinyl records.















Old Mickey Mouse:





Ka-boom:



Not just another gadget:



Look closely:

























Anyone up for a cruise? Or not.







Mind boggling.

In which there is knitting

It's true. While my blogging has come to a near-halt, I haven't put down the needles. Finished Juliet, which you may recall was made from a frogged thrift-store sweater.

It could have been a bit longer, and hey, look who hasn't been doing her crunches. Ack. But I like it.

I also finally finished the eternal handspun socks for my husband. It wasn't easy to get pics because of some feline interference.

I had to go with a modeled shot:

These are a 3-ply I blended out of whatever fiber I had on hand, mostly BFL with some nylon, but also alpaca, Romney, I don't know what else. The original batts looked like this back in December:

And this sometime around January:

This was my first 3-ply yarn and I am amazed at how full-bodied it is compared to 2-ply. I did it for strength, but it was great fun to knit with as well. Time consuming to spin, but totally worth it.

And I've already started my next project. Monkey socks. I may be the last sock knitter on the planet to make these (according to Ravelry, 9,237 other knitters have knit or are currently knitting them), but a co-worked just did some and I liked them. (What are the odds that in a workplace of about 20 employees, there are two sock knitters? Does 10 percent of the population knit socks?)

This is in my own Long Trail yarn, in Still Waters, which is a nice inky blue-gray, unless you used a flash to take the pictures.

It's a fun pattern.

We have been very busy with the animals and the gardens. And this.

We had a party last weekend and we decided to cook up some brown trout for the occasion.

They were delicious.

Please take a moment of silence for our recent pig disaster. One of our sows (whose babies we had to bottle feed this winter) delivered 13 piglets, 11 of them stillborn. She then rolled or stepped on the other two and killed them. 0-13 is not a good record for a sow...

I snuck into the turkey house the other night to snap this flash picture of mama Maude and her adopted chick. Maude keeps the chick under her wing, but this baby is going to be a full-size chicken and Maude is only a bantam. That wing isn't going to do the trick much longer. :-)

And we now have four baby turkeys (down from six), but they  seem to be going strong.

If I have much else to report I can't think of it right now. Trying to wring every second out of these long days has me a bit exhausted. Thank goodness we had a miserable week of rain to slow things down a bit.

Today, we plant the tomatoes...

Have a great week.

Finally, spring

Unfortunately, there was no pot of gold in the barn. Just some pigs.

Yup, spring has finally found its way to the Lazy J. My husband surprised me by rototilling a new garden spot with a bit less clay, and the peas, carrots, lettuces, spinach and onions are in the ground, with potatoes going in soon and tomatoes and other wussy things waiting until after the last average frost date which, in Vermont, means another couple of weeks. Sigh.

We have beautiful tulips in every color dotted around the yard. But these babies are RED.

And we have babies. Little Maude the bantam hatched out one chick (from a regular-size chicken egg). She is terrible overprotective and won't let me get a closeup. You can kind of see it, though.

I believe its biological mother was one of our Araucanas.

Calvin is the dad.

As soon as Maude sees me coming, she hustles the chick away somewhere dark so mostly all I can see is this:

And one of our turkey hens hatched out six poults. She, too, is way overprotective so all I got was a shot of this little one (overexposed):

She has taken them out of the cozy doghouse she nested in and now stays out in the woods on the edge of our yard. All six were still alive as of yesterday (four days old?) but they don't do well in cold or damp so I'm not sure whether she's making a good call by keeping them outside.

Here is the bane of my existence these days:

Japanese knotweed (a.k.a. "bamboo"). Nasty invasive stuff that has taken over my front gardens..

From what I read, it's impossible to get rid of. So each week I fill a WHEELBARROW with it, digging up as much as possible of the roots. It's pointless. From what I hear, you can cover it with black plastic for two years and it will still come back. (And don't say Round-Up. Don't get me started on Round-Up and Monsanto. Go see The Future of Food on Hulu.com. Not exactly balanced reporting but enough to make you drop your pesticides like hot, genetically-altered potatoes.)

When I'm not working, gardening or tearing out my hair over the economy and our current financial situation, I do occasionally knit. In fact, I turned this thrift-shop cotton sweater from Gap:

Into this:

And eventually into this:

That would be Zephyr Style's Juliet,  an easy, top-down knit. I just have to put on the buttons. As you can see by looking at the wrong side (in between the front panels), there were a lot of ends to weave in. The damn original sweater was ridiculously well constructed: The pieces were HAND-BACKSTITCHED, meaning no simple crochet chain seam to unzip. And each cable was TACKED DOWN at EVERY crossing with a separate thread, and knotted. In my impatience, I may have cut with a bit of abandon.

Still, I think I paid $13 for the yarn, and I have tons left over, should I choose to make some dishcloths. The satisfaction of recycling the yarn is priceless.

Milo. Helped me make the bed today, as he does on most mornings.

He loves to get under the covers, or sometimes even inside a folded blanket.

My reward for spending ten minutes letting him frolic between the sheets?

Torture. Evil, I tell you.

And last, I have a shop update. I am post-dating this entry to give my mailing list subscribers first dibs on what is there, so I can't guarantee there is much left. But as of this morning, there were two skeins each of bamboo blend sock yarn: Pixie Dust and Springtime:

Three bumps of Merino/Tussah Top:

Sizzle (4 ounces):

Castaway (6 ounces):

And Long Weekend (4 ounces):

And a pair of BFL/nylon superwash batts (totalling 4.4 ounces), which I first blended on the drum carder and then dyed.

Magical Mystery Tour:

I balled them up as shown above to impress upon the viewer the dominance of the reds. But laid out, they look like this:

These batts would make supersoft, durable, washable sock yarn...

Whew. Time to get outside. You can't beat springtime in Vermont.

An observation

I believe there are two kinds of men in this world: There are men who put underwear on their poodle's head and sing "Wild Thing," and there are men who don't.

 My husband is in the first group.

Meanwhile, there are pigs.

 

I saw a great blue heron at our pond, a couple of hundred yards behind our house. So I tried an experiment. If you put your camera lens up to the viewfinder of a spotting scope, you get this:

I kind of like it.

I was trying to watch him to see whether he was hunting frogs or trout but a heron's strategy is to remain almost stationary for hours at a time. I lost interest.

Here's some good news/bad news. The good news is that a friend of ours gave us her old purple martin house. Her property isn't open enough to attract such birds but ours might be. More good news is that my husband has, of course, a tractor with a post-hole augur attachment and he dug a hole for the pole out back, not far from the garden.

The bad news is this the soil near our garden:

I'm pretty sure that's not loam.

In fact, I carried a chunk of it up to the house and it was decidedly not running through my fingers. I think we've confirmed that it is clay.

Yup. It's clay. (I already knew this, all too well.)

No worries, we've got plenty of organic matter to work into the soil and hey, the husband spent a fortune on a giant rototiller last year, so with any luck we'll get something halfway decent. He was supposed to rototill last fall but here's the thing about a little hobby farm: There's a lot that needs to be done in the fall. And the spring. And all year round.

I had a shop update last week but it got cleaned out pretty quickly. The only thing left are a few nostepinnes (all the apple wood ones are gone and there are a couple on order).

And  I have a few skeins of Long Trail sock yarn left. I've ordered some bamboo blend sock yarn and a bit of superwash BFL top. Don't ask me when I'll get to it, though. Things are crazy around here.

Well, not for everyone, maybe.

Spring is trying hard to make an appearance. Softball season has started for my daughter. The garden calls to me. My tomato seedlings are growing nicely. The fish are eating. There are chicks to be born soon. The days are getting longer.

I'm tired already. (For now I'm going to skip the story of how I just about totaled my car; fortunately no one was in it at the time of the accident. Let's just file it under "Why You Shouldn't Forget Your Parking Brake" and I'll go back to it when I'm not so embarrassed, some time after all four driver's side panels, the front bumper and the rear bumper have been replaced. Gah.)

I failed to take any sunny-day pictures, or even pictures of my Juliet sweater, which is coming along. Here's an evening shot of the pond.

 And here's a peacock in the springtime. You might not recognize him from the shot, because normally he'd be screeching and standing in the middle of the road, stopping traffic. Peacocks are no fun in the spring.

And now I must get ready for work.

Bottoms up!

Nope, no drinking involved; I just liked the picture.

I went out one afternoon this week and tried to get some pictures of spring around here, but my photography skills leave a lot to be desired. However, one theme did come up quite a bit. Can you see it?

Yes, in the background.

It's still not very green around here. Our daffodils still aren't in bloom. But the light is different, the breeze is a little bit warmer, and the peepers are out at the pond. And the birds are going crazy with the displaying and breeding and nesting.

Roy and Ed are doing their best to keep us entertained.

If you are wondering who takes Top Bird honors this year, a comparison of their tail feathers gives a clue:

Old Roy in the background is still looking fine. Ed has taken a beating from him quite a few times already, and it shows. But by next year, Ed will probably be in charge; Roy's getting old.

One of (brown hen turkey) Trixie's babies from last year is nesting in an old doghouse we have on the property. Trixie has got a nest going in one of the barns again. However, as you can see by the blue and other non-speckled eggs, the chickens like to add their two cents to her clutch:

Turkeys (all birds, I guess), won't "set" on a nest until they've laid all the eggs they're going to lay. Once they decide to set, all the eggs start incubating from the same point so they all hatch at the same time. It's too early to tell whether either of these hens will set reliably, even though Trixie did a good job last year.

Meanwhile, our flightly little bantam Maude, seen running away from my attempts to take her picture, has started her own nest,

not in the chicken coop, but in cows' hay rack, there on the right:

They don't need the rack in the summer, so she's okay, but her eggs are not fertile. Chip, RIP, is no longer here to father bantam chicks. So we took most of the 13 (!) tiny eggs she was sitting on and replaced them with three of the laying hens' eggs, which are fertile, thanks to the ever-randy Calvin. I'm worried that Maude's too nervous to make a good mom, but we'll see in a few weeks.

My husband attempted to fill the pigs' wallow with a too-short garden hose, but they were more interested in him than the wallow.

Even the cows were fascinated.

We hung out with the cows.Note you-know-who in the foreground.

If you're wondering if the trout survived the winter, they certainly did. It's so fun to feed them and then watch them come up for food. A few minutes after you scatter the food, there are probably two fish splashing every second for several minutes. I tried to capture it with the camera but you never know where they're going to jump.

The big news is that on Thursday evening, we saw an immature bald eagle swoop down and take a trout right out of the pond!!!! No pictures, and it hasn't been back. How cool is that?

The goats were gossiping about the sheep.

And the peahen and peacock made brief appearances.

The humans have been busy too.  I baked sourdough Friday night:

And we did something really huge a few weeks ago: we dumped cable TV. That's right, we're down to two (!) computers with high-speed Internet, and DVDs from the library, so in other words practically cut off from the real world. To my continued amazement, my 9yo has not died of boredom and in fact keeps doing unexpected but welcome things, such as deciding to wash both the car and the truck the other night.

Awesome.

And there's this:

I had a shop update yesterday. If you are on the mailing list, you already know about this, and you may be one of the people who snapped up one of these:

My husband Mark's nostepinne's hit the market. And four are gone. The mahogany one (second from the right), the only one not made from local apple wood, is still available. I haven't checked all my orders, but the brief rundown is that I added some very cool colors (in my opinion) of Long Trail sock yarn, above in the basket, and I put the last of my Real Vermonter "Bristol" yarn (local wool/alpaca, spun at Green Mountain Spinnery) on sale -- 40 percent off!

I also saw my friend Amy yesterday. She's the one who made the silver jewelry I have been selling. She was wearing a whole array of her own stuff:

To my amazement, this bracelet is still available (on sale, no less) on my site:

I am lusting after it, but it is not for me. If someone doesn't buy it soon, however, it might find its way into my jewelry box.

Anyway, Amy has an Etsy site, Kabux Designs, as I have mentioned before. It seems that most of what she puts up she ends up selling locally, but she does have a few items posted now, mostly earrings. Are these not adorable?

Ten bucks. Go buy them.

Okay, that covers pretty much everything I can think of at the moment. I'll just throw in a few last animal photos and finish with Milo the Smug Cat. P.S., I'm almost to the lace part of Juliet using my recycled cotton yarn. I forgot pictures.

Our back property. The pond is past the apple trees just in front of the pine trees.

The boys setting new fence posts. (In August, Gert and Polly, below, will be calving and then we'll have six cows altogether.)

One more thing:  I'm currently reading Bill McKibben's book Deep Economy. It's a pretty interesting read about our society measuring success in terms of growth and money, rather than in terms of happiness. (He asks us to contemplate that "more" is not necessarily "better.") In fact, studies have shown a decrease in happiness over the past century, despite the huge increase in standards of living. Hmm.

Huh? What happened?

I try to update the blog every week. Or two weeks. I think I'm over that by several days now. I don't know where the time went.

Since I've been gone, spring has arrived in Vermont (if you can ignore today's flurries). The trout in our pond are jumping. We heard the peepers one evening last week. The daffodils are up, if not in bloom. Things will turn green soon enough.

I've been a little down lately, what with looming poverty and all, so I was especially flattered that Pepper Stitches, who blogs from Australia, gave my blog a Lemonade Award, for showing a positive attitude or gratitude. (This just shows the power of the blog and editing, because I'm running low on both lately!)

Pepper Stitches has a lovely blog and she gets her points across a lot more efficiently than I do, which is always refreshing. I am supposed to nominate 10 other bloggers but I might not have time today.

However, the making-lemonade-from-lemons theme is a perfect segue into my newest adventure: recycling yarn. I wanted enough cotton yarn for a spring cardigan, and I just can't justify the purchase of new yarn at the moment. So I found this for $3 at the thrift shop:

And with a pair of tiny scissors and a ball winder, I turned it into 1,000 yards of this:

Then I realized it was too fine for anything I'd want to knit right now, so I went to a different thrift shop and found this for $8:

Not a bad sweater in its own right, but too big and not quite my style. Unfortunately, this one, from GAP, was very well made, the pieces were backstitched together by hand, and each cable crossing was secured with a small string. Not easy to undo. It took me three or four nights to unravel, all the while enduring the comments from my husband who suggested I might have been better off just to spring for some decent yarn. But I ended up with about seven balls of this:

I started Zephyrstyle's Juliet sweater (top down, one piece, yeah) but didn't get gauge the first time. So I started over:

Working with unraveled cotton yarn is a bit challenging, as the plies are not really twisted. You have to watch for splitting. But I like to do things the hard way and it's quite satisfying to feel like you got a deal and gave an old sweater new life.

If you are interested in giving this a try, there are a few tricks, mainly making sure that your sweater is "fully fashioned"  so you can unravel each section in pretty much one long strand of yarn. Some sweaters are cut out of large pieces of knit fabric and serged together at the seams, meaning each row is a separate piece of yarn. Not good. My Virtual Sanity has a good tutorial and there are many others online.

I haven't been doing much spinning this week or last, but I will get back to that. I think I'm on my sixth (seventh?) skein, bringing me up over 700 yards. Getting close to sweater quantity....

My darling husband, though not so supportive about recycling sweaters, has been working for me in his wood shop. He took some apple wood pruned from our very own trees

and turned this:

into this:

For you non-spinners, this is a nostepinne (or nostepinde), used to wind center-pull balls of yarn by hand.

At my request, he included a yarn gauge, used to determine wraps per inch, a handy measure for handspun yarn:

The prototype I had him design was too long for my preference, however. The length of the shaft got in the way of the ball winding. And the handle, it turns out, doesn't really get used because you need your gripping hand closer to the yarn as you are winding it. So I sent him back out to the shop and he returned with a few of these:

Much shorter, but still with the yarn gauge. These are only just over six inches, which seems short for a nostepinne. But I like the way they tuck right into the palm:

These are turned down on his lathe, are made of real Vermont apple wood from 100 yards away, and are hand-rubbed with beeswax. And they will be for sale...

He's working on a spindle now.

No overdue blog post would be complete without some Milo, right? The other night my daughter and I were sitting at the table doing homework and spinning, respectively, when out of nowhere Milo ran in, jumped from either a chair or the table right up to the top of the half-assed bookcase in the dining room. Here he is, batting at the ever-present cobwebs:

Smug:

He quickly grew bored and decided to look for trouble.

To test gravity, he knocked three paperbacks to the floor and looked on with satisfaction.

He confirmed the quality of his work:

And then disappeared as quickly as he had come, to wreak destruction on some other part of the house:

So, that's about all there is around here. I leave you with a snapshot of a typical evening for three members of this family (that's Sophie the poodle in the middle there):

And a typical daytime shot of our front porch.

I hope the next time I post a picture looking outside, it contains greenery. Cross your fingers.

The problem, and the solution

The problem is that it is officially spring, yet Vermont is still gray. And sometimes white, like it was after today's unexpected squall:

The lack of color in the landscape can do bad things to a brain. Fortunately, there is this:

That's actually 3 different colorways of superwash Blue-Faced Leicester now for sale at the still-kicking  A Piece of Vermont.

There's more to the shop update, too, including carded batts from the Corriedale cross fleece I posted in a previous blog post. This:

has been scoured, picked and carded and now looks like this:

It feels as dreamy as it looks. I even dyed some locks and carded them. For once, I actually got the exact color I was looking for. This:

now looks like this:

I dyed some yarn but because my dyestocks had been left lonely and unused for so long, I got more trouble than success. Check out the Long Trail section at A Piece of Vermont to see this yarn, Equinox (good), and two other colorways (bad, but on deep discount ETA: One of these has already sold):

In other efforts to brighten up life around here, I borrowed a Thai cookbook from a co-worked and tried out a couple of different recipes this week, while my husband was out of town working (he doesn't do SPICY). Yum.

I didn't think I would necessarily like something combining coconut milk, fish sauce and curry paste but I was pleasantly surprised. I've done two dishes over Thai jasmine rice. Next I want to try a noodle dish. The spring rolls are tempting me, too.

One thing that's been going well around here is eggs. The longer days encourage the hens to lay more and we're averaging 6 eggs a day, most of them in the nest boxes. (There are always a few rebels.) Yesterday, we got eight.

I've had chickens for six years now, I think. But I still love finding eggs each day.

Given the different breeds of chickens we have, all the eggs are different sizes and colors.

I thought the goats and the remaining one sheep deserved a little blog attention. But then I remembered why I rarely take pictures of goats: You can't get far enough away from them to get a decent shot. So today, I leave you with a series of photos taken as I retreated. I call this Goat Curiosity. Have a good week.

Sheesh.

Also, anyone on Ravelry or a frequenter of YouTube has probably already seen this commercial, but I know a few people who should have seen it before it was too late:

A plethora of piglet pictures

Does it get any cuter than this? (I encourage you to click on any of the pictures below to see them considerably bigger.)

Today's post was supposed to be about spinning and knitting, but then my husband and I spent the day taking the old hay out of the goats' pen and giving it to the pigs, who use it for bedding as well as food. They were thrilled. Many piggie pics below, but let me get the other stuff out of the way first.

There's actually not much. I finished the third skein of handspun I've been working on:

I love this project. I don't get much time to spin, but I can do a bobbin or more in an evening or early morning, and when I get three full bobbins, I ply. It breaks the job down into manageable parts, but frankly I'm enjoying the process so much I'm not in a huge hurry to finish. (That is SO unlike me, I don't know what the deal is.)

I have pretty much abandoned my husband's handspun socks lately because I'm not in a plain-stockinette-on-small-needles mood. So yesterday I picked this old thing up again:

It's the Gothic Leaf Stole by Sivia Harding (Ravelry link here) and it's been about two years since I started it. I'm not much of a lace person so the YOs and K2togs were getting to me. But over the last two years I've somehow gained something because it's not giving me fits like it was before. Besides, I have got it in my head that I have to have Juno out of handspun for a wedding this fall, and if you notice, the lace part is very similar to this, if not the same.

Okay, so that's it for the knitting and spinning.

But before I get into the animals, please take a second to check out my friend Amy's new Etsy site and her silver beaded jewelry. I've sold some at A Piece of Vermont but now you can get it directly from here. GORGEOUS stuff, people, and she makes most of the hardware (clasps and links and things) herself. She will be adding more, so keep checking back.

Now for the fun stuff.

The turkeys are into spring breeding already, so there is much strutting and gobbling going on at our house. Here's the deal: Only one tom gets to do the breeding around here. Our gray turkey Roy was boss bird two years ago, so he was the lucky one. Then Lars, the Bourbon Red, beat him into a bloody pulp last spring, so Lars got all the girls for himself. But Lars died of mysterious circumstances this past summer, so Roy is once again in charge. However, our young Bourbon Red, Ed, is up and coming in the Big and Fertile category so there will probably be some fighting going on at some point.

But for now, Roy is keeping his future rival from the girls in a move I call "Total Eclipse of the Ed." Witness:

Phase 1. Roy intercepts possible visual contact between Ed and a young hen.

Phase 2. Interception in progress.

Phase 3. Eclipse. Ed is virtually nonexistent.

As for the chickens, Calvin is our only rooster these days and he's a good boy with no aggressive tendencies, even after a year. Here he is with two of his girls.

Dave the Peacock is doing his best, once again, to impress Peahen. At first he has no luck getting her attention at all.

Then, after a few minutes, she starts to get the feeling that someone might be following her.

Eventually, when Dave has practically enveloped her in his 6 or 7 foot fan, she actually turns her head to look at all his feathers. This is high praise, from what I can tell of peacocks (which is not much, given that we thought Dave was a female named Veronica for a long time).

Now, the good part. Piglets. We currently have pigs in three pens. Jerry and Jane are an expectant couple:

Then there is Lucy and her three youngsters plus the three red pigs:

They get so excited about new hay they don't know whether to eat it or roll in it. So they snorfle around a little, sometimes carry mouthfuls of it around the pen, and mostly chow down on it.

Today's cutest pictures came from Sassy's pen. We acquired Sassy as the result of a sort of emergency rescue a couple of years ago. Her arrival prompted the acquisition of some other piglets to keep her company and we've had pigs ever since. Right now we're at 14, I think. Last spring Sassy had her first litter of five piglets. This winter, she had her second litter. I think she had six but only four lived.

Anyway, here they are. (This starts off with one little piggie who was overcome with joy at all the new hay and had to roll in it.)

Click on the picture below; check out the pretty eye color on her!

That should be enough piglets for one day, don't you think?

In which Milo shows redeeming qualities

Since I rarely have good things to say about the hellspawn cat we own, I want to be sure and give him credit where it is due:

Milo likes raw fleece, too.

I got three new fleeces Saturday and piled them on the floor in my shop. They were like wool catnip:

I don't blame him. These are the three fleeces:

I was so excited to see a barn full of a dozen or so new fleeces, some, like the black, above, first shearings, that I forgot what they were. Mostly Romney/Corriedale crosses, I believe. Look:

I have scoured some of the black already, and I think I may sell white, gray, and black batts together. Imagine the fair isle hats and mittens! I also prepped 8 skeins of sock yarn for dyeing, but then time ran out...

But there's always time for spinning, right? Under the current cloud of financial distress, it appears that spinning is the only thing keeping my anxiety levels within a manageable range. This alone settles me down:

I turned that into some of these:

And three of those into one of these:

And some of that into a swatch:

Success!

I am too lazy to consult old blog posts, but I believe my goal was a brown/green 3-ply bulky good for cables. I ended up with just that. That skein was 3.3 ounces and 113 yards, and the three-ply makes for a deliciously meaty fabric. I am spinning woolen, of some sort, in which my forward (right) hand doesn't move and my backward (left) and does all the drawing out. There may be some double-drafting in there but I'm not sure. In any case, it's quite fast and getting better all the time, although I'm not terribly consistent in my yarn thickness. Overall, it's good.

Interestingly, there is another spinner doing the same sort of project as me, in the same sort of colors (hers came first, so although it's accidental, I'm actually the copycat). In her case, her batts are tidy and she's a bit more methodical than I am. If you want to see how a big project should be undertaken, check out Snail Spirals.

The only hitch now is that my husband (he who said he didn't need a handspun sweater last year) suddenly seems to feel that he could use a brown/green handspun bulky Aran.

And he may get one, because I still have this, my last carding adventure, to deal with:

The thing is, this whole carding/spinning/knitting thing appears to be the one area in my life where I'm as much into the journey as the destination. So I don't care who gets the sweater as long as I can keep spinning myself into a state of relative calm.

Some people just don't get it, the amazing soothing powers of wool. But Milo and I do.