Pepper making like a goon! For some odd reason he really likes the plastic on we put on the windows this fall. He's declawed but it's still obnoxious. 

"Winters Garden: Seeds and Weeds" Altered Book

Well it's almost done, if I can keep the cats beat off long enough to assemble the book I've got it made. Apparently bring nature indoors is tantamount to giving caviar to a love struck socialite. I don't think Catnip would hold a candle to this, course it probably smells like the store, not like nature.

Anyway, the blob of burnt orange fluff above the book cover is wild Cotton Boles. If I lived down south I'd cultivate them and harvest cotton as a past time, but alas cotton doesn't thrive well in Iowa.

I'm off to make a few pages, gotta dig all of those wonderful yummy threads out. The fabrics, ribbons and trims are dyed with natural dyes unless otherwised stated. I've been doing a lot of surfacing to my fabrics of late.

This was going to be a page in my book but I decided against it, I'm going with the seeds and weeds instead. 

The cover of my book, it's almost done. 

More goodies for my altered book. The pink piece with the grid on it is Silk Dupoini that I painted with inks, paintstiks and metallic waxes, it's the back side of my page. The fiber page is hand made paper. 

My e-freind sent me this from Minnesota last year, at about this time. It's birch bark and some flat cedar I do believe. Smells wonderful.  

Fibers for my altered book.  

New Logo Problems

Now if I could just figure out how to get the picture to show up in the logo. I'm going to offer several logo options, for The Prairie Fibers Company, and what the hay even for my blog. It'll have to wait until I get the picture figured out.

New Logo

The Prairie Fibers Company

Angels, Herbs, and Cameras

I'm really pleased as I have now figured out how to get my digital camera to take macro shots, that's a close-up for those not familiar with camera terms. The world is my Oyster so to speak now that I've overcome this hurdle.

The Angel, yes she was on a nativity, it was laying int he bag with my mothers nativity scene. Which btw needs a good old fashion coating of moss. It's probably older than I am. We had other ornaments just like this one on our tree though. So I'm wondering if mom bought them at the same time as the nativity??? I still don't know where all of her nativity figurines are.

I'm going to enjoy Christmas this year, got a few goodies for my better half, that he doesn't know about. Nothing out rageously expensive, just something he might enjoy. We're going to go book shopping after xmas, I have coupons for the Half Price Bookstore which ought to be a lot of fun.

Lately I've been buying herb books, mostly medicinal herb books as we already had some basic herb books. I've decided I want to do a distance learning course for herbal medicine. We'll see how much time I have for this first, until then I'm reading up on herbal health and it's very interesting. I picked up two Chinese Medicine books yesterday, one was by Penelpe Ody, the other by Dainel Reid. Both are very interesting, though I don't think I can get even a tenth, of what they perscribe, here locally. But i'ts still very interesting reading.

Here's a very old angel ornament that I brought home from my mothers. It is made of pipe cleaners, a felted head, and what looks to be panty hose material and wire. It looks as if it's all hand made. I'm sure my mother bought it at a craft bazzaar in the 70's. Does anyone know how to make them? We also had waxed star ornaments, oragami that my dad made in Sunday School as a kid, my aunt has told me about how them made them. They had sparkles on them as well. 

Nap time is over. 

Angel plotting her next move, the dogs have been wild tonight. While Barley slept on John's shoulder. 

Do you have to do that??? 

Family time, everyone is read a story before bed. 

Here's a little ear lick for you! 

Hurry up and turn that page would you! 

Silky and Angel. There's no since in recovering the sofa so long as those two think it's their bed! 

My first stippling from 1995, back in my drawing 101 days. 

Prairie Fibers

The new webstore is up and running finally, sans 3000+ images and a whole lot of design issues. The new Miva Merchant 5.0 shopping cart is very different than the one we had previously. Aside from being on a shared system, the 4.12 had some real issues. The things I dislike about the MM5 is the fact that I don't know how to fix all of the current design issues, they are hidden in what I like to refer to as the dark side of the administration page, and I'm a little apprehensive about messing around with the scripting.

I have a IT team now, they are helping me with some of the nuts and bolts of the store, like putting in extra search boxes to make life easier for my customers. More later, IM is calling me.