Sweater Mittens

I saw some awesome mittens made out of felted recycled sweaters today at a little shop. Now I just need a pattern for making the mittens. A vest pattern, the kind designed for using different types of fabrics so the thinking is done for me, would be really nice.

Between all of the wool skirts, sweaters and coats I'm thinking I can make myself some nice throws, a vest or two, and a couple pair of wool mittens. Who knows even a hat. I just need patterns.

Now to go dye some wool fabric, spin some more fibers, and felt felt felt away! Maybe I'll even work towards washing that 75# of wool this week! The Alpaca has baffled me though.

Quills Again

I'm off to get yellow on Porcupine Quills again. Hopefully this time it'll work. To date I've been able to get reds and blues, but no yellows. I want yellow, orange, purple and green. I'm using only natural dyes, no acid dyes. If this doesn't work I may resort to using acid dyes, I don't know though I rate hate to resort that, it feels a lot like cheating.

An Angel under the gourd vines. That's her dog run that I planted the gourds onto. There's even Sunflowers growing in her run, yet she doesn't seem to bother them much. 

A Birdhouse Gourd that's over 12" long 

The Gourd Patch 

Industrious Bumble Bees 

Tonights Cloud Formations. 

And this is what I'm looking forward to. I think I live way too far south, I love Winter! 

Life in General

My husband has taken to calling me sandwich. Sandwich as in sandwich generation. My dad has decided he will come spend the winter with us, here in Iowa, this year. I'm glad about taht because I don't have to worry about him falling on the ice and no one finding him for days or whatever. He's in southern Illinios and if they get one thing consistantly in the winter there it's ice. So now I'm cleaning house, and making room, like a mad woman.

And if there is one thing you ever need to know about me it is this: I hate grocery shopping! So in anticipation of his arrival this fall I've started stocking up, I like to keep a larder going. The other thing about me is I tend to forget I need to go grocery shopping, good thing I live close to a grocery store that's open 24/7. But I'd just as soon not go if I don't have to. Case in point today I nearly got myself run over, pushy people anyway. That happened when I attempted to get out of my vehicle. You go to the grocery store and everyone is rude, I'm talking the customers here, and in a rush.

The best part is when I'm almost done shopping, turn my back for a split second and my cart disappers. Hubby and I've got it figured it must be some clueless husband whose wife is sick or whatever and he "had" to go grocery shopping. So clueless notices that my cart bears items like what they would eat, but he can't find the items or make his own decisions, and takes my cart instead. Good thing I wear a purse on a long strap, around my shoulder and neck. This has happened a couple of times now. Sure hope they like a whole food diet!!!

I still haven't found a building to put the business into so we are waiting. There is one building here in town that would definately work, but it's way out of my price range. So the waiting game goes on.

Work in Progress 

WIP

Work in Progress - WIP This piece definately needs something.

It Feels Good

It feels good to get organized! I have a long ways to go towards totally efficency, but what I got started on today should help and tremendously. It would appear that the business is going to have to live in the house a bit longer, commercial property is not that easy to find. While there are a lot of "For Rent" signs up it would seem that the property owners not very interested in renting.

I bought a bunch of storage containers today, the drawered variety, and am now taking everything out of their boxes and putting them into the drawer units. John will build me shelves on Sunday, with the bottoms high up enough to put the drawer units underneath.

The up side is everything is now being packaged, labeled and priced which will help tremendously when vending, and will allow me to fill web orders oh so much faster.

I'm finding fabric I thought I had either sold or lost. It needs to be irond and cut up into sellable chunks, but this is a good thing! Now I just need to get all of the natural dyes prepackaged and labeled now, then I can put them into drawer units for vending as well.

I still need to rent a storage unit to store my Kiefer Trailor in.

The other two clocks 

Back of clock 

Front of clock 

3 Old Clock Bodies. 

Blog Spam

I don't know how to prevent people from spamming my blog, or just leaving plain outright weird garbage behind. So I'm changing the comments format, you'll have to be a registered user to leave a comment from now on! I hope this helps.

For my Sky groupies. I took this about a year ago, I think. It was probably August, late summer. I love big fluffy clouds. 

Wooden Cigar Boxes. I managed to find two small, very small actually, wooden cigar boxes for a swap I've decided to join. Ok I have a lot to learn about swaps, like what they entail, are we swapping finished products or what??? 

A Green Cigar Box, now that was a find. 

More Green 

Everythings Green 

Skeleton Keys, these will be loads of fun! 

Today's Finds

And the winners are: Old tobacco tins, Prince Albert and Velvet to be exact. And they look very well worn and used. Old clothes pins, skeleton keys, cigar boxes, postcards, thread spools and license plates. I found much much more. I'm planning on having tons of fun with this stuff.

Quotes

Couple of quotes I found along the way, that I had to share.


Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.
Its good to be a nut.

Be patient, even an egg will walk in time.

Part of my Fairy Ring, it's seen better days. They are browning quite quickly and are becoming wrinkled, rather cool looking actually. I'm sure all of the spores have been dropped and I hope to have an even bigger fairy ring next year. The undersides of these shrooms was pinkish, I'll have to look the latin name up. 

This Mornings Sunrise 

This mornings sunrise, a rather misty one at that. Should have been outside earlier when the mist was heavier. 

The Usual

Have you ever had one of those days, one of those days when you wish you had never gotten out of bed? Today was one of those days for me.

I replaced the ink cartriges in my Epson C84 this morning, and it apparently chose that exact moment to die. After spending several hours fiddling with it, to make sure it was actually dead, I finally succomed to the inevivatble and went and bought a new printer, an Epson C86. I admit I had the other printer almost three years, but why it couldn't give me seven more is beyond me!

I do have several other printers in the house, a laser printer that prints only B&W and an HP, whose ink is not waterproof - read smudge proof. On a good note the ink cartriges from the old printer are usable in the new printer. Oh and I get a rebate on top of it all, which does make me very happy.

I'm off an making postcards again, I decided I needed to sit and stitch tonight, lest I lose what's left of my sanity. I've decided that the piece I made tonight needs some hand stitching to further accenutate the surface of the piece. Another words I think it's boring and flat.

If I had been outside about 20 minutes earlier this morning I would have been able to get a stunning photo of the mist that was hanging in the air. As it is I woke up late, at 6:30 instead of ten to six, and took the picture rather late.

Field of Posies - in progress. It needs great big French Knots and large Stem Stitches to finish it out. I'm enjoying this series. 

New Novelty Yarn List

There's a new yahoo novelty yarn list, I found out about it today. In order to become a member you have to post a pic of your novelty yarn. I'll have to go dig mine out and take it's picture so I can post it's pic!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Spinning_on_the_Edge/

Sunrises

For some reason my digital camera likes to compensate for what it believes to be bad light. It's a cheapy digital camera, one that is pushing me to wanting to purchase a better digital and soon. And I'm thinking that the Nikon F100 needs to go into the shop for a little repair, so no time like the present to look for a D100 body to go with my lenses.

My shutter won't open and close on the F100, I'm not sure why. I'm the last person you would ever want to ask about the intracies of a camera, or a computer for that matter. Speaking of which I need to get the new computer out of the box and up and running today.

But take my word for it, the way the clouds were backlit was spectacular! Why the camera decided to even out the light is beyond me, it ruined the images of the clouds, in my opinion. With that said if the Nikon had been working I would have put it on fully manuel and taken the clouds pics. I would have had to have the film developed, but the pics would have been fully reperesentational of what I was seeing - not washout.

This Mornings Sunrise - w/o trees in the way 

This Mornings Sunrise - again 

This Mornings Sunrise. Befitting of an Angelic Choir. 

Pets From Hell Etc..

Today is probably going to be one of those days. And I'm not pleased with the pets so far. I have a tabby cat who is currently shredding a reem of paper for no other reason than he can.
The dogs are a pain in the ass, as always.

And both of my cameras are giving me fits this morning. The Nikon refuses to work, period, giving me some error message. I'm sure this will entail hundreds of dollars to fix. And the digital refuses to store more than 15 images, when the disc holds 100+ images.

And who the hell peed on my floor again!?#$&* Ahhhhhhhhhh the wonders of pet ownership!

Did I mention Picasa won't load images this morning? So your going to have to take my word for it when I say the sunrise was befitting of an angelic choir.

A Fairy Ring in my front yard. It would have been much bigger but I mowed the lawn last week. In doing so the west half of the ring was mowed under. It developed before the eastern half did, so it did have time to spore.