Making Plans

Trudge, trudge trudge. The tracks in the snow are quite distinct after two days of light snow flurries. I just got home from church and it was quite a peasant -10 degrees. The sun is shining and there are chickadees on the move. It is a nice reminder that at some point winter will be banished for another year. I love chickadees and think they are quite the nicest and cheekiest birds out there. Grey jays too are quite a fun bird to watch. This is a great time of the year to watch birds at the feeder. Coming soon to a forest near you Magpies, Crows, Red Polls, Snow Birds, more Chickadees, and Jays of all kinds. Then come the Sparrows and the Robins, later come the Warblers and all the air will be alive with song. A meriade of nature's music. It will sound like an orchestra tuning up for a concert. Living on a river is different from anywhere I've lived before. Our house is not far from the river but far enough that we actually don't hear the river/water birds but down in the river bottoms there are Pipers, Ducks and Geese, Kingfishers and any fish hunting bird that you might think of.

Hubby and I had a wonderful vacation a couple of years ago. I might have already talked about it some... (but with my memory it is hard to remember what I have written about with over 250 posts)... anyway, that trip was by far one of the most idyllic trips I've ever enjoyed. Our intention was to spend three days on the river paddling some 80 kilometres. The first day was spent enjoying the part of the river that Hubby and I canoe regularly, but after that it was a marvel. New sights and pleasures at every bend and turn. I see the river every day of my life as I drive into town but to see it from the river is to know it intimately. I watched fish below the surface sliding stealthily into crevices in rocks and boulders, and I saw herds of deer sipping their daily quota of water with velvet lips in the late pinks and golds of the sinking sun. Curious beaver would enter the river with a splash from holes in the banks of the river as they chased along beside our canoe in an effort to figure out what we were doing.... we even had one steal our milk one evening when we placed the bottle in the cold river water to chill it. There were banks of the river I never knew were there because the view from the highway is never as revealing as the view from the water itself. In the evenings after we had set up camp on one of the islands, Hubby would go fishing while I sat on the beach by the fire and spun yarn on my drop spindle. Idyllic actually doesn't begin to describe those few days of my life.

Tentatively Hubby and I will be making the trip again this summer. We are planning, toward the end of July, a trip down the river again with the hopes of going farther than we went last time. Up until now it has only been an idea in the back of our heads but we have finally concluded that if we don't go our lives will pass us by and it will only lead to disappointment so we will pack the canoe and head off for sure this summer. I'm excited.

Now a little news on the spinning front. I have finished all wool for the Jacket commission and have only to spin the alpaca. I have finished the silk sample for level 3 homework and to my dismay have discovered that the direction of my twist is not good for the actual woven sample so I have spent the weekend working on another sample with the direction of the twist going the other direction and it is working. I should have that finished today and then I will begin to warp the loom for the jacket commission. All goes well, and I am hoping to make great strides in the jacket commission this week.... we shall see.

In the meantime have a lovely Sunday afternoon filled with what you love best. Isn't that what Sunday afternoons should be about.... a day of thankfulness and ease....

Lightly Snowing

It is -9 this morning and Hubby just left on an adventure of his own. His Rangers are going off for a weekend of winter camping and skiing by the full moon and he did find his boot. After tearing the shed apart yesterday he came in last night with a grin on his face and two boots in his hands. I asked him who was bringing the tent and he said they weren't bringing one!!!! I thought they would at least have some nylon between them and the elements. But no, the idea is to learn survival skills. As a result, they are off to the bush today, I think there are 7 of them, and they are going to ski to the area they want to camp in... which is a small lake in the back of beyond, they are going to dig ditches and fill them with bows and then shove saplings into the snow at a slight angle and cover it with more bows so the the bows covering the saplings will be their roof. Then they are going to throw their mummy style sleeping bags in the ditch, on top of the bows and that will be their shelter. I am quite happy to sleep on my $2000.00 dollar memory foam bed with plenty of blankets to keep me warm while Hubby proves his manliness with all the other weirdos... uh sadistic fools.... uh boyos.... well you get my drift.....

I've always felt that I was lucky to not have a man in my life that had to spend every waking hour staring at a bunch of men chasing on a set of blades, a small black disk, while taking every opportunity to punch each other in the helmet thereby breaking knuckles at every opportunity. There's something neanderthal (wow those neanderthals are really getting a bum rap from me this week!! I really don't have anything against the neanderthals...) about hockey and while Hubby is not unmanly for not watching this dumb (did I say that??) sport he does get his gronk times by pushing his wilderness skills to the extreme. Actually, I feel they have taken every precaution to make sure this weekend will be experienced safely and pleasurably. I hope he enjoys it.

So I will be filling those 9 wheel barrow loads of hay for the alpacas and sheep we care for and I will be heading off with Daughter #1 to see that Dreamer (the horse) has enough food and water for the day. Meanwhile it is snowing lightly and I am back to spinning for the jacket commission. Last night I finally finished all of the black wool and today I will carry on with the black alpaca. But tonight I will crawl into bed and think of Hubby in his cold bow bed and wish for a warm hand to hold as I know he will be thinking the same.

Around The Farm

When we moved out of town and came to the country we were so happy to have all this land around us with nothing other than a scattered deer drifting through the bush. We were in seventh heaven not having to hear our neighbour's dog bark, or the shrieks of the kids down the road, or the thump, thump, thump, of the newest teenager with his driver's license going by at 12:30 a.m. It really was like we had bought in to our own little slice of heaven.

People started asking us what we were going to do with all that land, and Hubby and I would look at each other and shrug. When Daughter #1 came home from school the year she finished grade 1 with her teacher looking for homes for chickens that her class had hatched from an incubator, Hubby and I got the brilliant idea that we would raise chickens for our own eggs.... along with the chickens came a batch of ducks as well. That was the beginning of turning this 8 acre piece of land into something more than a chunk of land with paradise written on it.

We have raised many chickens since that time and while we have none at this moment in time, I expect it won't be the last chicken we raise. We have since that time, become true farmers in every sense of the word.

We shovel sh-- in the summer into piles so that it can compost for our non-existent garden. (I will be addressing the garden situation this summer.) We give needles to animals so that they don't get nasty diseases and die. We shear wool for processing into delightful items of luxury. (And what is life without a little luxury?) We buy hay at $60 a bail right now which is twice the rate we paid last year due to drought at the wrong time and rain at the wrong time last summer during haying season. We cut and cure fence posts to be driven into the ground when the old ones rot. And then there are the daily chores of seeing to our animal's needs.

It takes Hubby about a half hour to fork hay into the wheelbarrow and roll it across to the animals three for each paddock and we have three paddocks... that's 9 wheelbarrow loads in all... not really an excessively difficult job. Once a month we haul in two 1500 lb bails in the back of our truck. And then we have to haul in all our water as we have not got a well on our land... (that is a future endeavour). It is a fulfilling life and we are grateful for it.

One thing we have noticed about farming though is that if you are not in it big you will never make a living off it. Hubby maintains a job in which he is successful and happy. Without it we could not meet the needs of our family.

We have decided that we do not want to have a big farm... we want to hobby farm and we do it for our own amusement. Each year we pick out several lambs that we butcher for eating. Lamb is nice if cooked properly and I know most people don't like lamb anymore but we like it and it is a nice change from deer and beef which are meats that are plentiful in our area. It also helps with keeping this farm small. My goal is to maintain a farm with less than 15 animals... right now we are at 18. Actually 10 animals would be better still... especially with hay at premium price.

Hubby has been investigating a new venture. We are seriously considering a Christmas tree farm. This is still in the exploratory stages though. Meanwhile I am anxious to get my mill working. There is a market out there for woolen products for spinners and my animals are the means to that end.

So Hubby and I will carry on with decisions for our farm and take pleasure in each sunrise knowing that we are happy on our little northern farm. Who knew back before we came here how satisfying life could be right here in the country. I'm glad we made the decision and came.

Rats!

I had knit night tonight.... I really enjoyed chatting on the big comfy couch that our local library has seen fit to put in our knitting room. I was late getting there and so I entered the room where we have always had arm chairs, and low and behold two big comfy couches where the old arm chairs used to be.... cool!

My goal at knit night is to do one finger a night until I have finished these blasted lace gloves that seem to have been on my needles since Plato picked his nose. With glee, I finished the finger I was working on and started on the thumb. You would think that it would be easy to knit a thumb on a lace glove.... but I started knitting and soon realized that this is not so. The thumb that I knit tonight looks like a thumb for a pigmy while the thumb on the other glove looks like the thumb for a neanderthal. Clearly something is not right. I tried on the glove that I knit first, the one with the neanderthal thumb, and the thumb fits fine.... this is not to imply that I have neanderthal thumbs, however,.... I think that the glove with the pigmy thumb has such a small thumb that it just makes the other thumb look like a neanderthal thumb (did neanderthals even have thumbs?). So I raveled back the pigmy thumb and started again... finally I checked my progress after a number of rows, and it's not as pigmy sized as before but it is still quite pigmy sized.... so clearly I will have to ravel back the semi-pigmy thumb again and knit it once again to try and get a thumb equivalent to the neanderthal thumb... maybe then the two thumbs will look normal. Too bad they are not for me because I could have dispensed with the thumb altogether since I am neither neanderthal, pigmy (ha, not likely) nor normal. Relatively speaking, lace gloves should not be for neanderthals, pigmys or anything even remotely near the two. (and I am not discriminating against pigmys or neanderthals).

Next Thursday, once again I will take back the thumb and knit again. Just when you think you are making progress.... Rats!

This, That, And The Other Thing

Today is January 28th, (I'm sure none of you knew that, tee hee) and if you count today, the majority of which is still ahead of us, then there are only four days left. Four days left to hibernation month. Where did this month go?

Hubby is off for a weekend of moonlight skiing.... cross country skiing, to be exact. He and his Rangers will be heading off Friday afternoon to do some back country camping and cross country skiing and it just so happens that they have been planning this to correspond with the full moon. I think he's nuts. Anyone who wants to go out in the bush and have nothing more than a nylon tent between him and the -18 degree temperatures, makes my head spin. Normal people want a nice warm building with central heating or at least a really good wood stove. On top of that... Hubby has lost a boot. There has been an ongoing boot search since November.... we know we put both of them in the shed when we moved everything out there last spring for the house renovation.... and Hubby says he saw both of them in October when he was looking for something else, but when he went to get them in November they were nowhere to be found. Actually we did find one boot but the other has disappeared. Hubby has searched through all the piles of stuff and moved things from one side to the other.... but no sign of the boot. He is not anxious to hit the cold temperatures in the great outdoors without them... so I'm not sure what he will do.I'm kind of anxious too as I don't want him coming home without toes!

Meanwhile, my foray into the world of silk weaving is coming along. Yesterday, I spent the day weaving and along about lunch time the electrician showed up. He fixed our tripping breaker by putting the fridge and microwave on its own breaker, he also put in a new outlet for my electric fireplace. So now our electricity problems are dealt with. However, that meant a long time away from my weaving, which I had intended on finishing. Though I managed to get one problem fixed, (that being the electrical problem), my weaving faced several problems of its own. I am almost finished the weaving of my silk 6"x 6" sample but, because I wanted to weave it without any joins I am having a difficult time with my weft. I had reams of weft but I did not want to cut it and a 6" x 6" weaving frame is just to small for a shuttle. So there I was with a weaving needle and piles of weft to pull through the warp.... let me tell you, there were more tangles than I care to think about... and my shoulders just couldn't handle it anymore, so at 9:30 p.m. last night, I gave it up when once more my weft became a huge knot. I only have two more patterns left though, to complete my square, about 12 rows in all. Not so bad. But I face the tangled mass again today.

Meanwhile it is the end of January and while I have a little reprieve on the jacket commission, (my deadline is February 13th), I do have to get back to it at some point here. So if I can get my silk sample done early today I will be back at the jacket commission this afternoon.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of my silk weaving including the current knot....




Argh!

Great Intentions

For a while now Hubby and I have noticed that one of the breakers on the electrical panel is tripping for no apparent reason. It is the breaker that controls the electricity to the microwave, refrigerator, the TV, DVD player, and one of the ceiling lights in the kitchen. A lot for one breaker.... but not everything gets used at the one time, so why the breaker is tripping so often I am not sure. We called our electrician and for three days I have been waiting for him to show up. Still no sign of him though.

My intention yesterday was to complete one of the questions for my level 3 homework... if you recall I was going to spin Bombyx silk for the warp and silk hankies for the weft. Weeeeeelllll.... I ran into a slight problem.... my silk Bombyx was not in large supply and I hated spinning the silk hankies. So, instead I spun the silk Bombyx and came up with about 65m of singles.... I decided to spin Tussah silk for the other single and quite frankly it came out much nicer than I expected! So a little bit of a lesson on silk for the non-fibre enthusiasts who read this blog and might want to learn a little something about silk fibre.

Silk as we know, is the spit of silk worms... basically a silk larvae will eat leaves (mostly mulberry) until they are ready to go through their change to a moth (chrysalis). When they are ready the moth will enclose itself in a coccon made of one continuous thread that is mostly protein and is spit from the larva's silk glands. I think I have that right.....

When silk worms have done this the cocoon is ready for humans to harvest. It is a labour intensive and finicky job. The beginning thread has to be found and then the silk is reeled onto a reel and the idea is to unreel the whole cocoon without breaking the thread. Even though silk is one of the strongest fibres in the natural world it is still a very fine fibre and can break... though considering how tiny the thread is, breakage surprisingly doesn't happen as often as you would think. However, when the thread does break the broken pieces are set aside for spinners and is processed into what a spinner calls a roving..... the rovings are hundreds of thousands of the broken threads all lined up in a parallel manner so that spinners can spin the stuff.

There is also another way to process the cocoon. The cocoons can be boiled in a solution to remove the sizing (that's the stuff that makes it stiff) and the worm and poop are removed and then the cocoon is stretched over a form and left to dry. One of the forms is a square Mawatta made from a 1' square frame that basically has pins or nails pointing up at various intervals around the edes. A cocoon that is stretched over this form is called a hankie and surprisingly looks like a silk hankie that is easily unraveled.Here's a stack of about 80 or so with one pulled off to show how transparent they are....


There are several different kinds of silk worms but there are two that I am concerned with. Bombyx silk comes from cultivated silk worms and the silk is amazingly white with an awesome sheen (this has to do with what they are fed). Tussah silk comes from wild silk worms and has this glorious champagne colour that also has a beautiful sheen. I love Tussah silk because I love the champagne colour... but I'm also learning to love Bombyx silk as well.

Ok so back to what I was saying. My plan was to spin in a worsted manner, Bombyx silk rovings for warp, so that I would have a really strong and smooth warp thread for my woven silk sample. Then I was going to spin silk hankies (which sometimes spins up a little lumpy and bumpy) for the weft, giving the woven sample some texture. For you newbies again, the warp threads are the threads that go in one direction and are the base threads for the weft. The weft are the threads that you weave under and over the warp threads. Clear as mud?

I started spinning the Bombyx and realized that I wouldn't have enough for my 10m skein and the warp if I plied it. If I wanted Bombyx then I would have to order some more and I am not the type who likes to wait.... Then I was going to give up spinning the Bombyx and just spin the Tussah which I have loads of, but the Tussah was too dark in my opinion, to go with the silk Hankies which are white like the Bombyx.... but not quite as white. So I got the idea of blending Bombyx with the Tussah..... problem... I had already spun most of my Bombyx silk so I decided to spin all of the Bombyx into a single and the spin a Tussah single and then ply the two together. This would give me a slightly less white look but at the same time it would still be lighter than the champagne colour of the Tussah. It looks really nice!
And actually looks closer to the colour of the hankie. So then I sat down and started spinning the silk hankies..... I hate silk hankies.... the threads are unbroken... and they are strong and when you try to draft the threads they cut into your hands.... I hate that!

So after taking off enough of the Bombyx/Tussah yarn for a 10m skein I realized that I had lots, enough to do the whole woven sample....
and I can do a lace weave instead of a plain weave.... lace looks better with smooth threads and not lumpy bumpy stuff. So I got out my 6" x 6" pin loom and away I went. It looks really nice so far.....

I should get this finished today.... and I will post pictures at that time. What I have noticed is that the textured weave of the lumpy bumpy silk hankie with the smooth warp will have to wait till I get a chance to do that with something else.... but I still will have a textured weave because the lace will give me a textured weave.

Funny how great intentions change and develop as you go along.

Have a nice day.... I'm off to weave silk!

I'm Dreamin' Of A Green Spring

What that has to do with anything I don't know because there is certainly no signs of spring around here.... well the alpacas are stating to fight again which means the hormones are on the air so maybe spring fever is not too far away but really it been -13 for days with light fluffy flurries falling and the deck is buried alive and I can't remember the last time I was out of the house except to go to the church AGM on Sunday which took three quarters of the day and I got elected to Church Warden even though I stepped down as Chair Person..... phew..... was that a real sentence? I'm not sure but I'm not going back to check either since it might scare me from ever blogging again.

Sadly the last two days have been days of stomach discomfort that basically knocked me on me a-- (whoops I'm not supposed to use that word on line). I'm feeling better today but not really wanting to eat much. Pops showed up yesterday for a visit and told me I looked like a sheet of paper.... well I'm not sure about being that white, but I certainly wouldn't mind being that thin! For two days I've eaten pretty much nothing except for bland food.... thanks heavens it wasn't a bad stomach flu.

Daughter #1 has had her first set of mid term exams.... she is finished today and has a few days of break before she goes back to school of Monday. She is looking forward to horseback riding with her friend for the next five days after several good long sleep-ins.

I remember exam week too but we never got three days off. We studied till the cows came home and our eyeballs felt like they were on the verge of dropping out of our heads. But then I never studied all semester the way Daughter #1 does... basically I was a whole lot lazier than she is..... or maybe we had harder courses. Either way she is done at 11 a.m. this morning. I wish I had enough money to take her for a 5 day shopping spree in Victoria.... there, it does look like spring. The apple blossoms will soon be coming out and dafodils will be poking their heads above ground.... ah lovely. Last year I was heading down to Victoria for a week of workshops with the JCR program around about this time.... not this year though.... it is someone else's turn.... not that I envy them since the workshops this year are being held in Winnipeg.... brrr!

It sure does make the winter go faster when you get to go on a little trip some time in January or February. I am looking forward to a retreat on the third weekend in Feb. though. That is when our spinners and weavers guild will rent a lovely log lodge out in the middle of nowhere and everyone congregates there for some laughs, work, fun, laughs, eating, and laughs. Laughing is an important part of the weekend and some of us actually complete particular projects. I'm looking forward to it.

As for an update on what I have accomplished the last few days... well due to the stomach thingy.... not a whole lot although I did spin 100m of plum silk and wool singles and plied them with black alpaca singles. I think I'm finally ready to warp my loom.
But for today I'm going to get that silk done that I planned on doing last week and never got to. I've found my silk hankies and some bombyx silk so I'm ready to start and that is exciting. This is a project that I have wanted to start on for a while. I will weave a 6' x 6' lace square as part of these two kinds of silk and we will see how it looks in the end. I'm hoping it will be lovely. The Bombyx will be the warp and the silk hankies will be the weft. I'll take pictures as I go and post them here.

But in the meantime Hubby just kissed me with a cold wet mustache before he headed out the door to school. He had to go to the shed and on cold days like that his breath freezes in his mustache and turns to snotcicles.... ugh! But I'd rather get a goodbye kiss from him with a mustache than a kiss from him without! Anyway it is just one more reason why I am looking forward to spring. No more snotcicle kisses... at least till next winter!!!!

I'm off too spin silk!