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!

staying busy and waiting for cooler weather

Hot , hot, hot! Buster what's-his-name may like to sing about it, but out we're quite thurghouly sick of it. The weather forecasters have started to plead publicly for people to stop sending them hate mail. I feel bad for them, though I admit to calling them a few rude names after hearing the latest forecast. I have notice that as of last night, they stopped pretending that cool weather was around the corner and just have it at 110 degrees all week long.

At least for us there is some relief through the night. Temps up in town where they have all that asphalt and concrete will only cool down to around 90 degrees while we'll get down into the mid 70's. Small comfort while I'm out in the shop hearing the automatic vent fan kick on at 10 a.m. and knowing it's set to turn on a t 120 degrees.

That hasn't kept me out of the shop. I've been busy working with the felter and am pleased to see my felt sheets getting more and more consistent. Now Jim, Dot and I have been working on making flowers out of all that felt. We're having fun, though I doubt what we are creating would ever be found in nature.
I laid a bunch of the sheets out on my kitchen table to get a picture of them. Silly me I left them sitting there and walked away to do something else. When I returned I found Frosty happily kneading the sheets and making herself a nest. Never mind that she was sitting on my kitchen table, she was messing up my felt!















I also tried some more nuno felting.

The scarf didn't turn out quite the way I was expecting, my projects seldom do, but I liked it. It was interesting to see how the silk textured after the felting was done. I'll have to do some more playing with this.













I've also been making more coil baskets. I have some novelty acrylic yarn that I've been using up. I had the ball sitting on the floor next to me while I worked on the basket. When I reached down for another length of yarn, I found my ball missing. Looking around, I found the culprit. Daisy was feeling playful and was happily chewing up the ball of yarn. I took me fifteen minutes to get it away from her. .

Her legs may be short but she can move them really, really fast. There is a reason Brian nick named her the carper torpedo!

Summer will never end. I know in other parts of the world, people wish for this, but around here we can't wait to see the last of summer and all its 110 plus degree days. And to top it all off, we're in the middle of another heat wave. phooey, wake me when it's Christmas.
Last week we had the "great breakout". The older males managed to open, not one, but two gates to get to the girls. I don't know how long they were together before we discovered the party, but according to Dot, it was "long enough". I'm not super keen on doing it, but the girls will have to be treated so I'm not playing "whose your daddy" in eleven months. The gate to the girls could be fixed in such a way that you needed thumbs to open it, but the one from the boys to the hay couldn't be locked. I chased the boys out of the hay twice before the weekend. Once they figured out how the latch worked, there was no keeping them behind the gate. I even tied it closed once. The rascals actually managed to untie it and open it.
We spent the weekend reinforcing fences and fixing gate latches. Now I just get dirty looks from the boys whenever I'm out there. Apparently I've spoiled all their fun.
We have the veggie gardens going again. The heat wave managed to shrivel up all my carrots and chicory, but the corn, squash and cucumbers are doing well. In fact, I decided to hold off pulling out the Armenian cucumbers and the watermelon and those have had a bit of a resurgence and are flowering again. It will be neat if we can get a second round of fruit off of them.