Handmade for the Holidays


Did you give or receive something handmade for the holidays? According to The New York Times, as the stock market plunged this year, interest in buying or making handmade items shot through the roof, and doctors prescribed making things as a way to relieve stress. Those of you who've been knitting, etc. for years already know this...The rest of us are finally catching on.

I've always wanted to take the fleece from one of our sheep and take it all the way through to the end product---a sweater, mittens, whatever---and I'm slowly learning. Of course, as usual, I'm years behind the trend. Since I'm only at the spinning stage, it'll take me awhile to get to the point I can actually give handmade gifts.

After taking a spinning class, I spun my first skein of our yarn, and held it up. It had such a tight twist that if I'd stuck my finger in there, all circulation would have been cut off. Apparently if there's a nasty twist in the yarn, this twist will eventually appear in the knitted item, torquing a sweater around until you feel like a pretzel. Not good.

So I did the magic trick to reduce the twist, and it turned out much better. I forgot to take a photo of the skein, but here's the little swatch I knit from my FIRST skein of yarn.



I don't know how to knit, but those videos on youtube are very helpful!

Next step: Color! Here's some roving from our sheep that a woman dyed for me last year. (Kate---thanks again!)


Then I spun it into this:






It's all nobbly and uneven and fat and thin (I know, people call this designer yarn to make us beginners feel better) but I love this skein. I don't want to ruin it by turning it into anything. Perhaps I'll just spin skein after skein and give them as gifts next year. People can just hang them on their walls if they don't knit.




Or, if I start now, perhaps I'll have one pair of socks to give Melissa for Christmas next year!

Wishing everyone a great 2009, filled with people you love and good times. And for those of you living in the north, remember:

Want to stay warm? Hug a sheep.

The Farmer has a Bad Day


Last weekend was brutal here in MN. The high was -5, and the windchill was -30. And it was snowing and blowing and looking darned near like a blizzard all day long. The Farmer, still on the mend, was determined to plow the driveway. As is often the case, things rarely go according to plan. She later emailed a friend, and with her permission, I'm plunking that email right down here in my blog:

---We're getting lots of snow. Got 4 or 5 inches from Thursday, and we've been getting snow all day today. Tonight the wind sounds like a freight train. I think we're supposed to get 4 to 8 inches of snow overnight.

I went out this morning to plow the drive with my tractor & bucket, and after 10 minutes the tractor stalled. (I'll skip the details, but I worked on it for a couple of hours, then a friend who's a tractor mechanic came over and we replaced the fuel filters and did a bunch of other stuff to get it going again.)

I spent about 4 hours outside before the tractor got better again, then over an hour ON the tractor cleaning off the driveway. When I put the tractor back in the shed, I found that one of the front tires was flat. (But only on the bottom...) Criminygoldanganyways! I tried to find the hole by putting soapy water on the tire (then you watch for where it blows little bubbles), but it's so cold the soapy water froze...Goldangitallcryin'outloud! So I still have a flat tire that'll have to be fixed soon. I'll have to bring the whole wheel in the house to warm up.

Guess what happened next? I took the pickup truck (with the 4- wheel drive) down the driveway to pick up the mail (in the mailbox on the gravel road) because the wind had started to blow pretty hard. The windshield was fogged up, but not the rear window, so I just backed up the driveway. (Pretty smart, huh?) No, huh! It got so windy the snow blew around and everything turned white in the rear window. That's when I found myself in the ditch part way up the driveway... two feet deep in real pretty snow. (I know! I'll get the tractor and pull the truck out! No problem!) Except the part where the tractor still has a flat tire. Ohfercrissakesgoldangstinkinrottenluck! So the truck is still out there getting snowed on.

---end of Farmer's email

So between the broken tractor and plowing and trying to fix the flat tire and ditching the pick-up, Melissa spent over 6 hours outside in the blizzard. The Caretaker wasn't too happy about this, but she understands that the Farmer gets VERY determined and doesn't want to come inside until everything is hunky dory, which of course it rarely is on a farm (or heck, anywhere!) So the Caretaker literally stomped outside and grabbed the jacket of the by-now-exhausted, still-recovering Farmer and dragged her inside. Sometimes ya just gotta throw your weight around.

Tractor tire is now repaired and back on the tractor. Tow truck came and got the pick-up out of the ditch. And the Farmer's been taking naps, as ordered.

What the Heck is This?


Just to prove that I haven't lost my sense of humor as I do chores day after day after day after day after sloggin' day (how does the Farmer keep up her excitement for these chores?) here's a photo of something on our farm that is a TOTAL oops.

So, what's this?


Yes, it's a post with a rusty coffee can on it. Under the coffee can is an electrical outlet.

When you plan a farm on paper, it's easy to be super-efficient, but it's really, really hard to get it all right, especially if you've never farmed before. On paper, we chose a spot half-way between both barns as the place to winter the sheep, feeding them hay.

But they'd need water, right? So what if, as the contractors are digging the 6-ft trench for pipes bringing water from the little barn to the sheep barn, why not have the electrician lay an electrical cable, come up half way---right where the sheep would winter--- and install an electrical outlet? Then we'd have a place to plug in the heater needed to keep the sheep's water from freezing.

Brilliant. So that's what we did.

The next spring we bought sheep. That fall we began preparing for winter. We got ready to move the trough right next to the outlet. But wait. The water hydrant was up the hill next to the barn.




Damn. We had a place to plug the heater in, but the water source was a good 100 feet away. In the winter, the only way to transport that water was by buckets. We'd planned for the electricity, but had forgotten about the water. There was no #$& way we were going to schlep overflowing buckets of water down a snowy, icy slope to the waiting water trough.

So we set up the trough by the barn, about three feet from the hydrant. We told the sheep they were going to have to walk for their water, which actually was smart because exercise is good for pregnant sheep.

So we crammed a coffee can on the post, and there it sits. Of course every day I walk by that thing now, and it makes me laugh. You can do your best to plan, plan, plan, but there's always gonna be something that doesn't work.

A Knitting Question

Here's a hypothetical question for any knitters who happen to be passing by this blog.

Say a sheep farmer in the Midwest fills her aunt and uncle's car with bags of raw fleece, and they drive it back home to Montana and drop it off to be processed at a small fiber mill run by a cousin of the farmer, many times removed.

Say the farmer, who as of yet does not knit because she finds the idea of learning the secret code used by knitting patterns to be a terrifying thought, must now decide what the fiber mill should do. (Spinners are equally prone to their own language. Just last weekend I had my first encounter with a niddy noddy.... or is it knitty naughty? Good grief.)

So back to my hypothetical question. If knitters were interested in buying yarn spun from the fleeces of the non-knitting writing farmer, what would be the best overall way to go for yarn that could be made into socks, sweaters, hats, etc.?

Sport, DK or worsted? Two ply or three? Plain white yarn or dyed? If dyed, are there wildly popular colors?

Sorry I'm not knitting yet, but at least I'm giving the old spinning thing another try. I'm a little afraid, though, for I've seen now how spinners and knitters can be sucked into the world of fiber and color and texture.... Although I guess, as obsessions go, these are pretty harmless (although expensive!)

Thanks for the feedback.

Cold Hands, Warm....Feet


As she recuperates, the Farmer has begun to climb the walls, even though she's not supposed to strain herself! And I continue to put in two hours of outside work in the morning, and another hour at dusk, with lots of aching and moaning and not much writing in between. At least if I post to this blog, I'm writing.

To avoid whining about the hard work, I'm going to instead focus on absolutely one of the best parts of being Head Farmer here on Rising Moon Farm.

My boots get to sit on the boot dryer! (Those are Melissa's on the floor...mine are on the dryer, being heated!)




If you've never heard of a boot dryer, it's a clever little bit of plastic that gently heats the insides of your boots. I must say, there's nothing like warm toasty footwear to improve your attitude toward going outside when it's 8 degrees above zero. Every farm needs a boot dryer.

I LOVE having warm boots. But here's the exciting part: it's not just for boots. Today I actually bent down and read the label: PEET Shoe Dryer.

Yes, you too could be the happy owner/user of what I'd thought was just for boots. Just imagine going out on a chilly night and slipping on a warm pair of sneakers. Chilly is, of course, relative....My sister in Jacksonville shivers violently when the temperature drops to 75 F. !

Here's the form that holds the boots.



And if you want warm hands in addition to warm feet, there's even a clever glove form as well. Although I can't recommend leaving this on the boot dryer. It's kind of creepy to walk by and see that plastic hand waving at you.




The gizmo is limited to two items, so you can warm two boots or two gloves or one boot and one glove (why?)

Every woman needs a shoe/boot dryer. Yeah, it's made out of plastic, and it uses a tiny bit of electricity, but if you're facing a daunting task, I've learned you'll always succeed if your feet are warm...