Adding Pizazz to Your Yarn

That title is the name of a class I took at the Iowa Sheep and Wool Festival last month. I kept meaning to blog about it but you know how things get in the way. The class was designed to teach us how different fibres can be added to the wool that you are spinning to create different textures and effects. We started with very "ordinary" cream and brown fleece which we spun into small skeins. Everything else was the same base material, hand carded with some additional fibre, in order to create a blend, and then spun into a small skein which could be compared to the originals.

Here is the whole set of skeins that I made. From the top, going clockwise, the fibres are:
Natural cream and brown wool skeins
Cream and brown skeins with mohair added
Cream and brown skeins with soy silk added
Cream and brown skeins with tussah silk added
Cream and brown skeins with "Flash" added
Cream and brown skeins with turquoise acrylic added
Cream and brown skeins with Ingeo (corn fibre) added

I really enjoyed seeing how all the fibres made a difference from the original yarns, and it made me more confident about spinning with some of the more unusual fibre choices on the market today. I really liked how the soy and tussah silks added sheen and an almost luminous quality to the yarn. The "flash" is a metallic thread that, to my eye, looks like it is different colors when you mix it into the cream and brown skeins. It's pretty hard to show that in a photograph, but here they are.
My favourite fibre, I think, was the Ingeo. I didn't think I would like it, but it added a lot of loft and smoothness to the yarn. Here's a close up of the brown with the Ingeo.

So, I decided today to add some of my own pizazz to my spinning. I had a turquoise single ply that I had handspun, and also a darker blue single. I decided to try a three ply yarn by plying those two singles with a commercial yarn by the name of "Featherwisp" in the "seasprite" colour. The Featherwisp is 100% nylon and has a sort of fluffy or hairy appearance, and has a tiny narrow ribbon running through it. I really like the way this yarn came out in the end. It's 2/3 handspun, and all hand plied.

Here is my "lazy kate" which is used for the plying.

Here's the start of my new yarn....
...and the end!
I set the twist in hot water and it's now outside drying. If the humidity keeps up, it might take a week!

Daylilies and Baby Bottles

The past couple of weeks have seen an explosion of blooms here in my garden. Some of the blooms are my standard favourites - monarda (bee balm), clematis (especially Avant-garde), various allium bulbs are blooming, and also my gaillardia. I thought I'd post a few pictures of some of the daylilies that I planted last year. These are new to me for this year. Before this, I'd only had the tiger lilies (the tall orange ones) and a plain yellow.

I put these in rather hurriedly last fall, so I didn't make name tags for them. Whoops. Now I'm not sure what varieties they are. None the less, I'm pleased with the blooms.

This one is a rather lovely peachy-yellow with faint orange bits.

A rather plummy-mauve bloom!
This one might be my personal favourite - I love the ruffles on the petals and the inner colour ring.
Not a daylily, but this is a bloom on my hardy Opuntia cactus, which survives very nicely in the zone 5a Iowa winter! It had about 30 blooms on it this year.

Here's a new echinacea for me this year as well. I love the deep magenta colour.

Well, in case you're wondering why baby bottles appeared in the title of this post, I thought I'd post this rather cute video of Marshmallow having her bottle. She has 4 bottles a day now, taking 7 ounces per feeding. She's really doing ever so well. She's learning to jump, very nimbly. She can nearly jump onto the bed. She sleeps on the dog's bed at night and the dog has taken to sleeping in the living room. When she wakes in the morning though, she can barely contain her energy and immediately comes over to the bed for attention, bouncing at my side as if her legs were pogo sticks. In any event, enjoy the "feeding time" show!

Marshmallow Versus the Box

Marshmallow is growing like a weed! She is putting on weight every day and is taking her bottle with great enthusiasm. I think having a bottle lamb in the house has just been one of the most unique experiences of my life to date. She follows at my heels at all times. I ended up having to put up a baby gate in our office because the dog, Stickley the greyhound, was not entirely pleased at her sniffing around him. He growled at her once, and that was enough for me. So, they don't get together any more.

Marshmallow still sleeps at the side of the bed in her own little bed and she wakes me up about 7 am (in case the alarm fails to do so!) and she wants a bottle NOW please! She does sleep through the night though. She has been out to play with the other lambs but she tends to come back through the cattle panel fencing and come to where I am in the yard, so she isn't very interested in the other lambs right now.

I thought you might enjoy this video of her taking on a box of paper for recycling that I keep next to my desk. She demonstrates proper technique of head-butting and energetic front foot kicking in assaulting the enemy box. She also shows how the box can be used as a head-rub device, if desired. Good lessons for little lambs.

Happy Canada Day Eh?!

Well, as most of you know, I'm Canadian. Canada Day is celebrated on July 1 each year. It's not unlike July 4 here in the USA. We have fireworks and outdoor concerts and barbecues and all that great stuff that comes with summer and celebrations. It is a celebration of the July 1, 1867 enactment of the British North America Act, which united Canada as a single country of four provinces. In Canada, the establishment of the country is also known as Confederation.

In celebration of the day, I thought I'd offer some facts about Canada that you might, or might not, know.

1. Canada is the second largest country in the world (Russia is the largest).
2. Canada and the USA share the world's longest common border.
3. Canada is made up of 10 provinces and 3 territories. The provinces and territories are similar to states.
4. Canada has two official languages - French and English. That doesn't mean that all Canadians speak French! It is spoken widely in the provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick, and to a lesser extent in other provinces and territories.
5. Canada is named after an Iroquois word, "kanata," which means village or settlement.

I was born in the province of Quebec, but lived most of my life in the province of Nova Scotia. I also spent 11 years of my life in the province of Ontario. I love Canada dearly - after all, it is my homeland. I miss certain things about it that are in some ways intangible and difficult to describe. Most of all, I miss family and friends.

For me, being Canadian is a part of who I am and it defines certain things about me. That said, I believe that it doesn't really matter where one is born and where one lives one's life. What matters most is what one makes of one's life, and how one contributes to the lives of others. I could have been born in any country in the world, and I would still be, at the core, the same person that I am now. I embrace all cultures, all people, and all countries for their own strengths and weaknesses. I do not believe that there is a "greatest country in the world" because all countries have their own remarkable qualities and their own failings.

I live in the USA for now, but that doesn't mean I will always live here. Part of me would love to return to Canada. Part of me would love a new adventure in a different country. New Zealand appeals to me, but since I have dual citizenship with the UK, I could also live and work anywhere in Europe. How about a villa in Tuscany?! I'm open to adventure, but I try to remain realistic as well. Who knows what the future holds!

Best wishes to my homeland and all family and friends in Canada for a wonderful Canada Day!

Garden delights in the kitchen

Well, to be honest, they're not all from the garden. Some are from the coop!

Today I made 6 egg custards and a flan pie from a surfeit of eggs brought to us by our lovely hens. Kelly loves egg custard and flan, so these will disappear quickly! i generally use the bantam eggs in baked custards at a ratio of 2 bantam eggs per 1 standard egg. It uses up the little eggs easily and quickly.

Personally, I like to eat them with fresh fruit. Today, I picked fresh red currants from the garden. They are one of my favorites! I like to make jelly with the red currants, but they are also quite lovely fresh, sprinkled around the flan or on top of a custard. I have black currants and white currants that will soon be ready for picking too! You can see the currants in the tub in the picture. I still need to take them off their stems.

We also picked our second batch of garlic scapes. Usually Kelly cuts them up and purees them with softened butter, then freezes that into logs. It makes great garlic butter. Garlic scapes are the flower stalk of the garlic plant. Generally, in order to allow the garlic bulb (under the soil) to maximize its size, you cut the flower off so that the plant focuses its energy in the root, not the flower. They make these unusual curly stems, and the flavor of them is garlicky, but milder than the bulb. Garlic is very good for us, even though it's not one of my favorites really. I eat it anyway. I do think that the garlic scapes are lovely to look at!

I also finished plying some yarn that I had spun. The orange/turquoise is a seacell and merino blend, while the buff is an alpaca and merino blend. I'm quite pleased with how this one came out.

Of course, I can't finish up without a mention of the little white bundle under my desk.
What is it? Look closer! It's Marshmallow!! She's doing wonderfully well and has gained a whole pound! She is now over 5 pounds of fleecy delight. Hooray! She has also adapted well to her sanitary routine of being diapered. It saves a lot of clean up and she seems perfectly comfortable. Whew!
Have a great week!

First Bottle Lamb!

When we decided to have sheep, we hoped that all lambings would go well, of course. I think every shepherd hopes for that. Sometimes, there can be trouble with the delivery. Sometimes, there's just too much of a good thing! That's what happened yesterday on Whispering Acres. Our final pregnant ewe, Buttercup, gave birth to quadruplets! Woah! That's a whole lot of lambs! Sadly, one of them died, so we were left with triplets. When I got home after work yesterday, one of the three was not doing too well. She was laying in the field, very lethargic, panting in the heat despite having shelter, and just not doing very well. I think she kind of called to me.

Of course I called to you, you silly lady. My Mummy wasn't doing her job! What do you expect?! And you call yourself a shepherdess. Pffft....just let me sleep, would you please?

I brought her inside to give her a bottle of prepared colostrum, since the powdered colostrum substitute I have says to feed that for the first 24 hours before moving on to lamb milk replacer. Sure enough, she hungrily took to the bottle. She had a little rest and seemed much better after that, much to my relief. So, I decided to keep her in for the night. She slept by my bedside in a little basket.

My own bed! Thank you for the blankie! It's soooo comfy!

I think her mom was having trouble caring for 3 lambs since she's a first time mom. For the sake of all of them, I decided it was best to keep her as a bottle lamb. She is the smallest of the 3, and the other two were much more aggressive with their Mom's udder, so she was getting left out.

Well no kidding. I'm barely as big as your foot! I had trouble with my brother and sister. They were awfully pushy. You, on the other hand, are a pushover!

Marshmallow has a bottle every 2 to 3 hours now, although soon she will be able to manage 4 to 5 hours. She went to work with me today because Kelly was busy and unable to keep up with the feedings today. Really, we shouldn't have animals at work, but it was important to give her a good start. My colleagues were delighted to host her for the day, and she was very quiet and well behaved, despite a steady stream of visitors.

Marshmallow! What kind of a name is that? You're not going to eat me are you? I can't imagine...

I had to pick up some diapers on the way to work to ensure there were no "accidents" on the carpet! She is now sporting "Pampers Snuggables Sensitive" for up to 10 lb babies. I make a small adaptation to them so that her tail can stick out.

Yeah, this is pretty embarassing you know. If the other lambs see me.....wait a second....what is this stuff I'm smelling, it smells familiar....like me! Why is it these weird colours? What kind of sheep are these anyway? They are even more quiet than me!

This afternoon when I got home from work, I had a little snooze because last night I had to get up for bottle feedings, and the night before I had been awake for hours due to tremendous thunderstorms. She slept beside me curled up in a little ball. She has me hooked around her little hoof. Really, sometimes, I swear she's talking to me!

I am afraid to ask what this contraption is. But it kind of smells like me too, but different. This is very odd. I'm going to have to do some more investigation. I'm not sure if I trust you yet.

Hey lady! Where's my bottle?!Ummm...gotta go!

Tutti Frutti With Cream (and a cameo appearance)

I love fruit - nearly all kinds of fruit, although I'm not all that excited about lychees, but hey, we can't all be perfect. In order to indulge myself, I have planted a "home orchard" of sorts. Really, it's quite a big home orchard. In fact, I now have 60 fruit trees planted, mostly dwarf and semi-dwarf and a few standards. So, I now have a wide array of cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, nectarines, apples, pears, quince, apriums and pluots.

Last year, I planted several apple trees, a couple of cherry trees, and pears. Here's what is happening this year with those trees! (I'm so excited!)

Here are some Burbank dwarf plums!

These are Stanley prune plums.

Montmorency sour cherries (I ate one, ohhhh so good!)

These are Cortland apples

Some Honeycrisp apples too!

And here is a baby Bartlett pear!!
I think it's wonderful to be able to grow and pick my own fruit trees. I can't wait for the coming years when I will see how they all progress and what kind of fruit yields I can get even here in chilly Iowa! Well, I mean in winter. Right now, it's sticky hot out!

In addition, I have rhubarb, black currants, red currants, white currants, pink currants, raspberries, blackberries, lingonberries, honeyberries, gooseberries, not to mention grapes. I'll have to do posts on some of those as the summer progresses.

So, what's up with the "cream" part of this blog post title? Well, as I was out there photographing my young fruits, I couldn't help but notice the antics of little Cream Puff, our 4-way-cross lamb, as she cavorted around the sheep pasture. Oh, she's a firecracker! Here she goes! Bounce!
Oh yeah! She's a jumper lamb! See her fly!!
This is her flight platform. Sometimes she looks like she will just take off!
Other lambs walk. She bounces.

So, after all that lambie excitement, there I was, all ready to go back in the house, and I turned to look back as I walked, and then I saw her. Yup, you know who....always wanting to be in the spotlight! LUNA!!! What are you doing out of your pasture fencing, young lady?

"What? I'm busy....eating..."
"I'm just picking up the mess from when you unloaded the hay from the trailer."
Luna has picked up the habit of squeezing out of the cattle panel fencing, going for little foraging walks, checking out the chickens and ducks, and then going back into the pasture with the other goats. She doesn't run away, she just goes on walkabout.

"I can't believe you put me back with the other goats. I was HELPING you clean the yard! Besides, you NEVER feature me on your blog any more. My fan base demands my appearance!"
Sven says "See Mom, see how well behaved I am? I'm nothing like that naughty little goat! And I have beautiful horns too. I am the future herdsire! Worship me!!"