What Housework?

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.