Misc. Stuff From Being Behind in Blogging

Last year I spun up some misc. wool in red and green, plied it with red fun fur, spun in some plastic candies, and laid it aside wondering what to do with it.

This year, Des wanted us to card some green and red merino for her with some white angelina nylon sparkle. She spun it up into a self-striping yarn and hated it.

She gave it to me, Diantha and I knitted it up into this wild and funny scarf, listed it in my HeartFeltFun Boutique, and it sold in 3 days.

Funny how life works sometimes.

Des knitted these Eliza Doolittle type gloves out of the same sock yarn she had hand dyed and knit my piebald (now blue and purple) socks. Then she overdyed them and came up with this lovely maroon shade. Very pretty.

We've been pretty busy, trying to fill orders for Christmas. Artemas got featured on Springtree Road's blog with his knitting needles and sold 6 sets of them last week. You should go to her Etsy shop and check out her handspun yarns. Gorgeous!

Richard's soaps are selling almost as fast as we can make replacement batches. His shop has some nice, small gift sets in it, so stop by and see him sometime! Handmade soaps make great tips for teachers, hairdressers, or anyone who has served you exceptionally during the year. Great stocking stuffers too!
We did Thanksgiving early, because my parents were down from Ohio the weekend before. So I cooked a meal fit for a king, including the best from-scratch gravy you ever tasted, and homemade pies. No, folks, I do not buy pie crusts. My kids say store-bought crusts are an abomination. Are these beautiful or what?

For actual Thanksgiving day, we went up to Greeneville, TN to be with our SIL Tony's dad's family. We all had a great time, ate, did some shooting out in the field (very cold & windy though), and had a safe trip up and back. They are terrific folks to be "related" to.

A couple days later, we went up to Des' house. The ham she baked for Thanksgiving had disappeared up in Greeneville like Houdini, so she made a turkey, just to have leftovers.

We helped her wreck it in true large-family style.

And I cut my hand doing the dishes. No alcohol was involved in this incident, despite the Pure White Trash shirt that looks like a Pabst Blue Ribbon label.

It's Goin' Around, and, New Stuff Up

Well for several days Richard has laid around acting like he is dying. I felt like that the other day, but pressed on. Today I feel terrible. Woke up not being able to breathe without coughing and I have felt all day like I need to go back to bed.

BUT! I sold 5 skeins of yarn today and only got 2 ready to put up to sell. I am going backward. On the one hand, if I don't lie down, chances are great that by Thurs., when I have to cook a 24# turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and bake pies from scratch, and have 13 underroof for Thanksgiving, I will feel like a truck hit me.

On the other hand, if I don't get some yarn up, I am going to lose my shop following. Nothing to offer means nobody wants to shop either. hmmm.

I did have my VERY FIRST sale today from my Heart Felt Fun shop. And I listed two items there, a red tampon cozy/eyeglass case/sunglass case from a felted wool sweater
from The Gap, and a red pair of fingerless mitt gloves from a felted lambswool sweater. These are so soft! I hand-stitched around the top and thumbhole edges with black and white chenille yarn, and did the heart as a cutout, also stitched around. Kinda cute.

We shopped for one of the girls today. Our church has a Prison Ministry, and they put up an Angel Tree of kids whose dads or moms (or in a couple cases, both) are in prison. We picked a little girl 10 years old and then discovered she had a sister 9 years old. So tonight we got art supplies that they asked for, for both of them. And some little-girl toiletries. The both need coats and shoes but we only got those for one of them, forgot the other one's sizes. Oh well, another day.

I am so thankful that my kids have a stable Christian home and both their parents. I am thankful that even though we don't have much, we have a heart to help someone who has even less. And even though I am tired and feeling sick, I am thankful for the food we will have Thursday and the ones we will share it with and that we have a house to eat it in, where the toilets flush (two years ago when we bought here, the septic had failed at our other house, I was pregnant, we closed the night before Thanksgiving and moved in 8 days before Christmas. Not fun at all).

A Bad Day and Some Yarn-y Explanations

Yesterday was an exhausting day. So today I got up with hopes it would be better, but no.

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nwound, hand painted, and reskeined a new yarn and got the biggest tangle in it... turning a 15-minute job into a more-than-an-hour job.

Eldest ds calls from work (11 miles away) and says, By the way, I forgot my lunch AND the belt to my pants, can you bring them?

On the way out of the house, my eldest dd calls and says, that saw and sander Tony was gonna borrow? Since you are going to be out, can you meet me and give them to me? (Always a joy to see my grandbabies, so sure!)

Called the bank to ask for a new debit card, my old one expired yesteterday, and they tell me I am overdrawn. WHAT? turns out a draft that was scheduled to be taken out of my account on the 3rd (scheduled that way to be sure to always be covered by an automatic deposit that goes in on the 1st...), the bank decided to pay for us "early"on the 27th, when the auto-deposit wasn't in there yet... 2 Overdrafts @ $35 bank charge each... and the bank says, "Oh well!"

Our ins. just called, the renewal is in 2 weeks... they finally added eldest ds's Reckless Op from last year, and the premium went UP over $700 for 6 months... bringing the total to almost $1800 for 6 mos. WHAT? so she drew up quotes, Progressive was cheapest with $1200, but unlike the other companies, make you insure a kid as soon as they get a permit, not regular license. So now she has to requote with 2nd ds on there, since I just got the paperwork from their "school" to get his permit.

The quilting deadline that was like a guillotine yesterday, feels more like an Iron Maiden today. Gonna be a late night tonight, I can tell ya already.

So, I got the very last of my Thanksgiving yarns up today. I didn't add Thanksgiving in the title, because this first one is a good lead-in to Winter. Also I have used a wicker chair as my background for my yarns, because it is earthy and visually interesting, without being distracting from the yarns. But for Winter, I am going to use white fluffy batting to look like snow. I am not sure yet if I like it or not... jury is still out on this one.

I say all that to lead up to the yarn. I called it "Early Snow," and it is nearly white, with little hints here and there of the palest blues. A wonderful yarn, very fine but warm, with wool, rayon, angora, and cashmere. YUM-MAY!

The first year we moved up here to E TN from FL, we came in October. Didn't know anyone, didn't have an umbrella school or regular church or any social connections really. We really only got 3 TV stations (badly) too, so entertainment was limited to what the 8 of us in our little pod could dream up, or videos. Our first Thanksgiving, we had our feast, spent the evening in pursuit of hobbies, and I put the kids to bed. Went to do the rest of the dishes... looked out the kitchen window (our entire house was on the 2nd floor), and there it was... SNOW! Big, fluffy flakes floating silently and peacefully down, covering the side field and irridescently lit by a distant neighbor's sodium light. After having not seen snow in nearly 20 years, it was like magic.

I have recently posted a few yarns that have more acrylic than I usually pick up on my sweater-scrounging expeditions. I am not a yarn snob (REALLY), but I am into the finer fibers, and like to recycle them so that other dirt-road-broke people like me (WHAT? see 1st paragraph, LoL) can actually afford to knit with something nice.

But these few new yarns still have some wool, or silk, or mohair. And really, really, I don't go to all the bother of unwinding a sweater, skeining, weighing, hand dyeing, reskeining, and listing yarns that I don't LOVE and think other people will love too. I personally knit at least a guage swatch out of each sweater I "rescue", just to see how it knits, if it breaks, is it wonderful?

So if you are a yarn snob (you know who you are, LoL), don't look down your nose at some of the yarns in my shop. Really if they feel wonderful, look beautiful, and are a joy to knit with, I am going to harvest them and sell them. And if having a little acrylic makes them easier to care for, isn't that kind of a bonus? I still promise, these aren't your "megamart" yarns.

So come visit my Etsy shop sometime, I am sure you will find a yarn that calls to your heart. The link is right up there on the left! :D