Christmas ornimants

Off on yet another tangent. I found a recipe for these cinnamon ornaments so I had to give it a try. My FIL made the cookie cutter mold for me. Now I have little cinnamon alpacas drying all over the kitchen. Smells nice.

We went ice skating this weekend for a friends, daughter’s birthday party. It’s the first time I’ve been on skates in over ten years, and let me tell you, it is NOT like riding a bicycle! I did pretty well, managed to not fall on my butt. I may have been a bit of a disappointment to the kids though, unbeknownst to me, Brian was merrily spinning a tale about how I use to train with the Olympic Figure Skating Team! Umm, I’ve watched figure skating on tv, that’s about as close as I’ve ever been to it. They wanted to see twirls and jumps. I wanted to maintain my dignity by remaining up right.
Haven’t had much to report on the alpacas. Everything is calm with them. We’ve got about six weeks until our next cria is due and another about two weeks later and then we’re done for the year.

woven tiles

I’ve been working on a few new projects recently. I actually started these tiles this past summer, but just got them to a friend who had her husband do the frames for me. It’s kind of a nice project for the left over bits and pieces from other projects. Now I have something to add to the store that doesn’t have cold weather as it’s focus!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!
Yeah, I know, I’m a little late. I’ve been busy. Ok, I’m always busy, maybe I’m just starting the new year a little lazy. Whatever.

We had the chance to go play over the long New Year weekend. We went trail riding with some friends of ours out in the California desert.
We had a great time, freezing our butts off, us in our sand rail (not really suited for trail riding, but the Prowler has engine issues) and them in their little dune buggy.
Great fun, until the dune buggy got a flat.
That’s when we realized that the tire patch kit was still in the Prowler, oopsie. The boys got pretty creative on thinking of ways to plug the hole. I’m sure we would have made it out eventually, but lucky for us, some other trial riders happened across our path and they had a plug kit.

It’s nice to be saved.

Busy, busy busy!

Whew! What a month. It’s been nonstop since before Thanksgiving, but I think we may be able to relax a little now. It started with the Holiday Boutique up at Singletree Alpacas. It’s always good to see familiar faces and we weren’t disappointed. A good crowd braved the wind and the cold to come visit the alpacas and do a little shopping.
Then we had our open house. It was our third and the crowd gets bigger every year. This year we had a contest to name our newest cria. Congratulations to Jack K. for his winning suggestion of Alpacazona’s Cartigan. Now when we knit sweaters from the little guys fleece, we’ll have Cartigan’s cardigans.
After that, we had double duty; we packed up all our product to head to an event in Flagstaff, and we packed up ourselves to take Omega to TX, where he had a couple of hot dates planned. While we were in TX we stopped by Ingrid’s Rugs to drop 150 pounds of fleece and take a tour of the mill. The machinery was fascinating and I wish that we had more time to watch and poke around, but the long drive back to Arizona awaited us.
Now after a good night’s sleep, I have finally looked at the calendar and realized that Christmas is right around the corner and I haven’t done a lick of Christmas shopping. So all my family back east will be getting New Years presents and I’m implementing a new tradition: Merry February cards.

Well, we can check one thing off the to-do list. Godiva had her cria yesterday, a boy, medium brownish, not as red as her. We weren’t planning on him arriving so soon, and as part of our open house next month, we’re having a “name the cria” contest. Sooooo, for the next four weeks we get to call him Little Whats-his-name. How undignified.

Happy late birthday Jacko!

Halloween was Jacks 1st birthday. Boy has he come a long way. Hard to believe that this feisty little boy was so frail and sick when he was born. He’s still small for his age, something that is doubly noticeable because Sunny is so big for his. Both boys are doing great.

Legend came home this weekend. We have a smaller pen set up for him with beefier fencing than the rest of the alpacas get, since he doesn’t play well with others. No matter where the other alpacas are, he can always see at least some of them. So far he seems quite content with arrangement since he doesn’t have to share his food bowl with anyone else. This works out well for me too, since he has become quite a porker, and I can keep very close tabs on the amount of food he is getting. He doesn’t know it, but he just went on a diet.

As for happenings this month, this weekend is the open house at JMS Alpaca Farm in Casa Grande. We’ll be over there with our products. Thanksgiving weekend we’ll be up in Chino Valley for Singletree Alpaca’s holiday boutique.

And last but not least, Godiva is due this month. Sometime around mid November, so I figure only another 2 weeks or so. Think pink! We’re due for a girl!