Winter Wonderland

Lovely snowfall

Pretty tree

We are experiencing our first winter storm of the year.  It has been snowing steadily since 10:30 last night.  This is fine with me as I am ready to have a quiet day at home, slowly taking care of all the lovely remains of Christmas. Not for me is the custom of stripping the tree bare and heaving it out the door on the 26th.  Nor have I frozen all the goodies so that I don't eat them all at once.  Instead, I have gathered up all the burnable materials and taken them out to the barn to await my New Year's Eve bonfire.
Drank more coffee.  Ate some gingerbread warm with butter.  And a couple of cookies. Put all the Christmas lights on.  Then sat down here to write a bit.
As an end of the year musing I thought I would let you know "the rest of the story" as Paul Harvey used to say.  When I left you last, I was looking forward to giving some spinning lessons to a woman.  I did just that, as best I could, with the result of her becoming enthusiastic enough to go in search of a wheel to practice on.  After the New Year I hope to get together with her again.
In August I had mentioned that I thought the hen we call "Baby" was becoming an egg eater.  Well,  after being very vigilant with collecting eggs and getting her to stay outdoors as much as possible, the egg eating pretty much stopped, so we kept her.  She is still the odd chick out.  There appears to be something wrong with her that the other hens know about (and I do not) as they shun her all the time.  Since early summer she has had a rock hard abdomen which is not the norm.  And as far as I know, she has never laid an egg, although I must admit to not always knowing which egg comes from which hen. At any rate, her unusual condition doesn't stop her from doing all the normal hen things, so I just keep an eye on her and life goes on.

Baby

I sold my slouch hat at one of the craft fairs we did this fall.  The second skip-it and dodge-it scarf was woven,  although I never took any photos of it.   We had pretty good craft fair experiences.  I spun and knit and wove things for Christmas, but didn't take any pictures of those items, either!  So now it is on to finishing things and starting things.  I am determined to finish the sweater I started last year, for one.

Start of sweater Feb. 2012

We will see if I continue this blog in 2013.  I began when it was suggested that having a blog is a good marketing ploy if you are an Etsy seller.  However, only one of my Etsy sales could be linked to this!  So I am not sold on that concept.   The thing is, it gets habit forming.  Well, time will tell.  Meanwhile may you all have a Happy, Healthy and Blessed New Year.

Skip-Its and Dodge-Its

Close up of the colors

Hard to capture the beauty of it

When I was a young mother and lived in the village, my next door neighbor (as you may recall from an earlier post) was Mrs. Lulek.  Whenever she was having leftovers for supper, she always said that she was going to feed Mr. Lulek "skip-its and dodge-its".  So when I had a creative fiber rush, that was the phrase that stuck with me, as I had a desire to make something from these lovely leftover yarns from various projects.  Leftovers being the operative term.  And so I got out the warping board, and after carefully measuring all the bits and pieces, proceeded to throw out all my careful planning and just went with the rush. The result is this lovely scarf, woven of all these soft and shimmery bits of past projects.    I got it off the loom, washed and fulled it, only to fall madly in love with it while it was drying.  Dutifully I sewed on my label and the washing instructions, all the while wondering how I was going to actually sell this piece.   It is so soft!  It has all these great colors in it.  It has shimmers!
Guess what?  I don't have to sell it at all.  It belongs to me.  Goes perfectly with my black dress coat, my purple polar fleece, my green long sleeve tee, my light blue winter jacket.....it has to be mine!  Mine mine mine.  All mine.
But I will make another scarf for the shop.  I promise.  It can be a skip-it and dodge-it one of my leftover yellow/brown palette.  And it, too, will be lovely.

I did get the write ups done for the shawl that was finished in August.  Now that is in the shop.

Shawl from the summer

There was also time to knit up and also write about the fingerless gloves and the slouch hat.  So they are in the shop also.

Lace fingerless gloves

Slouch hat

Tomorrow I give a first lesson to a woman on how to spin on a spinning wheel.  She is very excited so I hope that I meet her expectations.  It promises to be a lot of fun.

Now I have to go do some spinning, for you see my feverish little brain is going to be working overtime.   It has something to do with the shorter days and longer nights, coupled with starting the wood furnace.  So many ideas!  Such a great time of year to do them all!