Peaceful times at the Tucson Wool Festival

Last Saturday was the last Tucson Wool Festival, as Kathy is moving to Maryland at the end of the month. She didn't advertise very heavily (short timer syndrome I think) and I thought the crowd was way down. I know sales where. And I couldn't have cared less or had a better time. It turned out to be such a relaxing day. I got to visit with friends, work on projects and have time to eat a decent lunch (thanks for the mac and cheese Kathleen!) In fact, after Kathy shut down for the day, we all just hung out for a while. Eventually we all packed up and headed for home. It was nice to arrive at the house after a show not completely exhausted.
Of course, I still need the busier shows to keep the alpacas in hay, so I'd best not get use to it.

I've been spinning yarn like a mad woman so I have enough for everyone to play with next Sunday. I'm hosting a fiber play day. We'll be playing around with hand painted dying. I have no idea how many people plan on being there, but weather it's one or one hundred, I want to make sure everybody gets to try at least a little bit of dying.
Now I just have to clean out that end of the shop, so I can set up tables...

I've been playing around with the web site and have finally figured out how to do a little tweaking. For the life of me I can't figure out why computer programmers aren't all insane. It took me two hours to change one price. But I did change it, and that called for a small celebration. I rewarded myself with a nice chilled glass of wine. If I figure out how to change a photo, I'm gonna give myself the whole bottle!

come on google, let me in...

Look! I'm up-dating the blog; now quit nagging me Pat.
I suppose I could tell you nothing has been going on, but we've been pretty busy, really. The problem I'm having is Google has decided to be difficult and keeps refusing my password. When I try to reset it, I get an email stating I don't have an account with the email I use. This is usually followed by another email telling me how to reset the password for the email they claim I don't have. ??? most of the time I decide it isn't worth bothering with. On occasion, I reset the password, only to be told the next time I try to log in that the pass word is no good.

I hate technology.

So what has happened lately? The Southwest Regional Alpaca Show has come and gone. I had registered Belle and Flynn, but the night before checking, Belle decided to get sick. Nothing serious, a bad case of the runs, but I didn't want to stress her further or take a chance she was contagious with anything so I opted to leave them both home. Belle was fine in a couple of days and completely unrepentant for having ruined my plans. Nobody else showed signs of illness, so it was probably something she got into. In hind sight, I was just as happy to not have the kids there. My mom didn't make it out this year, and I don't think I could have managed everything without her.
I headed up the ABA booth this year. I think we did pretty well. We managed to make a little hay money. (or made up the money we spent on not taking Belle and Flynn to the show)
The following weekend Pat and I participated in Arizona City Daze. The weather was quite nice, and I thoroughly enjoyed the wine I bought on the way home. Other than that, there isn't a whole lot to talk about. Think we'll put this one in the "thanks, but we'll pass" column.
We'll take a break this weekend and then head to Tucson for the final Tucson Wool Festival. Kathy has bought a home in Maryland and is shifting everything East. I'm sure she would welcome us there, but it is a bit of a commute.
One thing about AZ City Daze, I had time to take stock of my remaining product and realized that I am getting low on yarn. We have been selling it steadily all winter without me paying much attention. Now I'm hustling to get more done. My free time is spent carding and spinning. Now I'm getting notes that people are needing soap again. Shoot! note to self: free time must be spent carding, spinning and felting. Maybe I should just give up sleeping.
Some good news, yarn wise, our cream color yarn came back from the mill. I'm skeining that off the cones and on March 25, we're going to have some people over and spend an afternoon playing with hand painting techniques.
The other thing I've been trying to work on is getting our online store up dated. That is really not going well. (the "I hate technology" statement and the difficulties I have with Google should give you an indication of my computer prowess - slim to nil. On line stores are completely beyond me) Stay tuned for either a new on line store, or a news headline about a crazy woman that shot her computer.

Happy New Year!

Bu-bye 2011. Hello 2012. Let's see what the new year has in store for us.
The year ended in a whirl wind of activity. We had six events in eight weeks. All went really well except our own open house. For that the wind blew, the rain fell and the temperature plummeted. To say the least, it was a quite weekend for visitors. Oh well, can't win them all.
Then right on the heels of the events was teeth trimming day, Christmas and New Years. In between all of these, we had to keep running felted soap out to our vendors. That's some pretty big news for the end of the year; we now have soap in The Old Pot Shop in Tucson (an artist collective), Homology in Scottsdale (a contemporary home accessory store) and In A Pear Tree in Casa Grande (another artist collective).
I also plan on redoing the online store on our web site. But I've been planning on doing that for months, so I wouldn't be holding my breath on that one.
We did have some quite, fun moments du

ring all this. Like the afternoon we spent putting Santa hats on the alpacas and taking pictures. We had a blast and the alpacas were surprisingly tolerant. I guess they were in the holiday mood as well.
I finally got my but back out to the shop and have been dying and washing fleece again. I have an idea on doing some felted scarves. Hopefully after this weekend I'll be ready to actually start. I'll keep you posted.

The Holiday rush - I need a nap!

whewwww! We had our last event for the season this past weekend; and open house atr Mesquite Valley Ranch in Gilbert. The weather was beautiful and the turnout was good. I always have fun doing these events (ok, so maybe OUR open house last weekend when it was 40 degrees and raining wasn't exactly a good time...) but after four weekends in a row and events going on in 7 of the last nine weekends, I am totally sick of putting up tents and taking them back down. I'm ready for a rest!
And I'll have to keep waiting. We'll be trimming teeth this Sunday. Which means I only have Saturday to get caught up on four weeks of house cleaning and laundry. It's getting pretty bad even by my fairly low standards.
Mean while, our socks have been slowly dribbling in. We now have most of the crew socks back, and medium tan hiking socks. The mill sent out a rumor that another box would be ready for shipping by last Friday. I haven't heard if it happened or not. If it did go out, it should be here by the end of the week and I'm hoping it has more hiking socks. Our waiting list keeps getting longer and I really HATE to keep people waiting!
I was poking around on the Internet while waiting for my boss and I stumble across this: http://www.wmicentral.com/news/latest_news/neafaa-s-th-annual-arts-crafts-festival-the-orchard-at/collection_edaaf7c0-aca7-11e0-89b5-001cc4c03286.html
It's the show at Charlie Clark's up in Pinetop that we did last July 4th weekend. There's even a picture of me and our booth in there! Cheryl and I always have a good time at that show. The best part was that our booth was close enough to the stage that we got to enjoy "the man of a 1000 voices". We especially enjoyed his rap song!

Getting ready for fall

Our fall show season is starting to kick into high gear. We spent an amazing weekend up north for the Artist Fall Festival in Pinetop. Brian and I always have great time visiting with Pat and Cheryl and enjoying their very gracious hospitality. And Brian and Pat managed to make too much fun of Cheryl and I for falling asleep in front of the tv by eight o'clock Saturday night.
Last Saturday was the Tucson Wool Festival down at Wither's Ranch. Kathy holds the wool festival twice year; Spring and Fall. This past spring it rained the entire day and it was pretty quite. We made up for that this weekend. I think Kathy said around 1000 people went through the ranch. I'm pretty sure I talked to most of them! Which is fine by me, I'm a talker.
Our next event will be the Southwest Fiber festival which has been moved to Tubac Presido State Park. It's a slightly longer drive for us, but still doable for a one day event. This festival will be Nov. 5th.
I've been busy spinning yarn. I've been on a mission to clean and paint the inside of the house this past summer. As I was moving stuff around I kept coming across bags of roving that had gotten tossed into corners and forgotten about. I have been diligently working my way through them. Got to get these spun up so I can start making more!
Brain and I are suppose to work out in the shop this weekend getting it cleaned up before our own open house in a couple of weeks. I need to move the carder back over to my corner. Through the summer I pull it out to the opposite wall so I can work in front of the swamp cooler. It makes the shop bearable for a little bit longer in the summer. Plus I have fleece scattered everywhere. That all needs to be gathered back up so I can start sorting through it for the next big project. I think we're going to get some felt done this year.
We've gotten our dark brown crew socks and brown yarn from the mill. We're still waiting on the rest of the socks and the white yarn. sigh. Eight months and counting.
Now it's back to spinning and cleaning and dying and weaving and...
toddles from the sock monkey and me.

Fall is in the air!

Finally, cool weather! It was actually down in the forties this morning. We haven't had temps this low since..... well, heck it's been so long I don't remember the last time we saw forties.
Fall Festival up in Pinetop is behind us now. It was such a good show. We actually had several shoppers that had bought yarn from us at Charlie Clark's on 4th of July, come back and get more yarn! It is such a good feeling when people like your work well enough to come back again.
Flynn and George are now weaned, much to George's dismay. Flynn fretted for about twenty minutes and then decided he was hungry and hasn't looked back. Poor George has been pacing and crying and is taking much longer to settle in. Not overly surprising as he was always more bounded to his mom than the other crias. But al nearly eleven months old, it's time to cut the cord and if mom won't do then I must!
Mean while, we are still waiting for our socks to come in. I'm beginning to fear that we will never get them! The waiting is killing me!!!!!!

Nuno scarf inovations

I headed back out to the shop yesterday. I haven't done enough sweating this week. I'm bound and determined to perfect the lazy woman's nuno felting technique. When I first heard how it was done (put you fiber on your fabric and roll it all up. roll it back and forth 200 time) I thought: "I am so not standing here all day rolling a scarf back and forth".
Well with the building of the felting machine, I don't have to! I just make my roll, put it in the machine and go away to do something far more interesting.
This works well for the felt sheets, but I found that my nuno scarves seemed kind of, well, flat. Nuno is supposed to be textured. So I went back to the directions. (this is fairly unusual for me, maybe it's my defy authority youth, or the fact that I am one of the laziest people on earth, but I just don't tend to read/follow instructions). What I learned is there is another step. Apparently you are suppose to physically abuse your work by throwing it at something for upwards to 20 minutes.

.....??? (see lazy comment, so not gonna happen.)

This sent me in search of something to do my tossing for me. Enter my drier. Thirty minutes on air fluff with one of Molly's tennis balls whacking the heck out of my scarves and viola! Nuno scarves!