Time to come up for a breath of air! It's been pretty busy at the farm recently. I taught my first official class. In a Pear Tree hosted while I taught a class on nuno felting. I think it went well and my students went home with a couple of hand crafted scarves. I believe most were intended for Christmas gifts this year.

In a Pear Tree was also open for the first "Art in The Alley" of the season. I brought the trusty babe electric spinning wheel with me and spent a couple of hours spinning yarn.

Skeetzona Brand roving and yarns are now available at Tempe Yarn. I have been pretty busy getting the first order squared away and as of this weekend, it should hit the shelves. I've also been busy at the loom and with soap, gearing up for the coming holiday season.

We also started receiving back the felt that we have been working on with Spinderella Fiber Mill. It is always such a pleasure to work with a group that wants to be a part of the learning process. We told Lynn and Deanna what are goal was and they crafted a couple of weights of felt for us.

Now that we've had time to play with it, I've sent my thoughts and suggestions back and the next round is on the machine. So far we've been focusing on making outer-wear vest from the felt. We have a few other projects on the board that we'll be trying out as well, but they will have to wait until we can scrape together a few free minutes



.

I scored a couple of new display manikins. Brain decided that one, a child's body, just didn't look right without a head, so he dressed it up a little. Now the creepy little alien keeps showing up in various rooms of the house, scaring the crap out of me.

It hasn't all been fun and games. We had one of our boys, Donncha suddenly stop eating. I spent a week and ahlaf spooning gruel into him while we tried to figure out what was wrong. It moments like this, you really wish they could speak, and could tell you where they hurt. To make a long story short, it ended up being an abscess under his jaw. I had initially thought abscess, but couldn't feel any lumps in the usual places. This one was really deep and between the mandible bones. When I finally felt it, I had to actually check the other alpacas to see if it was in fact a lump and not something that was supposed to be there. The abscess was so deep, that Linda couldn't reach it to drain it without surgery. Fortunately, it finally opened at about two weeks out and Don was a happy camper from that point on. The wound is draining nicely and Don is making up for lost meals.

One of the things we did while trying to figure out what was going on with Don, was test him for valley fever. That came back positive (which had nothing to do with the abscess)so we've started him on Fluconazole for the next two months. Don is pretty good about taking his pills, especially because he knows he's going to get a nice big bowl of pellets afterwards. All I have to do now is shake the bowl and call his name, and he comes running.