My Scarves





By Request: Here's a pic of one, I'm hoping to get them all ironed and photographed this weekend. Each scarf is named, signed and dated. I'll have to look the name up for this one.

Normally I sell these at trunk shows and when we are on the road vending for the business. And I sell them right off of my body as well, helps to wear a really nice jacket or turtle neck with the scarf though.

Compost Dyed
Silk Crepe de Chine
15 x 45 inches
Price is $200.00

Latest Fascination X Post

Internet accessible radio! Here's a link to an interesting station KBRW AM/FM Barrow, Alaska. Click on the bouncing radio to listen live. Nothing like music from the top of the world huh!

Another station I like to listen to is KTNN AM 660 To listen live click on the Listen Live link on the left hand side of the screen.

I'm starting to collect a lot of radio stations, I'm still trying to figure out how to get them into Media Player, till then they are in my favorites folder.

I've also found a few with some celtic music, bluegrass, and mandoline music, oh and my dads current favorite southern gospel. I rotate them out depending on my mood that day. I also find Canadian radio to be a lot of fun CBC Newfoundland and Labrador My mom is from Newfoundland so it's nice to have the tie there, adn they play some pretty good Newfie jigs from time to time very reminescent of my childhood - mom was a pretty mean harmonica and accordian player.

Oh and I should also add CBC North This is for the far North Eastern part of Cananda.

Latest Fascination

Internet accessible radio! Here's a link to an interesting station KBRW AM/FM Barrow, Alaska. Click on the bouncing radio to listen live. Nothing like music from the top of the world huh!

Another station I like to listen to is KTNN AM 660 To listen live click on the Listen Live link on the left hand side of the screen.

I'm starting to collect a lot of radio stations, I'm still trying to figure out how to get them into Media Player, till then they are in my favorites folder.

I've also found a few with some celtic music, bluegrass, and mandoline music, oh and my dads current favorite southern gospel. I rotate them out depending on my mood that day. I also find Canadian radio to be a lot of fun CBC Newfoundland and Labrador My mom is from Newfoundland so it's nice to have the tie there, adn they play some pretty good Newfie jigs from time to time very reminescent of my childhood - mom was a pretty mean harmonica and accordian player.

Oh and I should also add CBC North This is for the far North Eastern part of Cananda.

Wounded

Well I'm wounded so am now officially done for today - studio wise, or at least until I stop bleeding. I'll go take notes and write up curriculem instead.

And the wound didn't even occur in my studio! I was picking up one of the fiesta ware bowls, it has a chip in it, and got a huge sliver of ceramic, or whatever the stuff is made of, in my finger. Of course when you want an xacto knife to be razor sharp it isn't so that made removing it even harder. My fingers are very calloused a needle wouldn't have done what I needed for a piece of ceramic this big.

It doesn't help that my printer won't cooperate, I've spent the better part of two hours aligning the heads, cleaning the heads and the nozzles and I'm still getting lines in my print jobs.

More on that later when I can type better.

Dottie


I met Dottie at the local watering hole today - it's literally a watering hole, see my other blog Survival Kitchen for a picture of said watering hole.

Dottie is a mule, she's only a couple of years old and apparently her coloring is highly unusual. I have a fancy for mules for some odd reason, ditto burrows and donkeys. I think it's the ears and the soulful face - and maybe the challenge for stubborness.

If you don't be quite

I'm going to use you as bait!!! I'm guilty of saying this several times today - to someone elses child no less. I have no idea who the guy is, but he's a world class bastard in my book, he dumped his kid off on us while we were fishing. He finally came back and got him some four hours later. It would appear that he was more interested in walking the beach area and talking on his cell phone the whole time to impress the children over there - all the while his kid was driving me nuts talking a gazillion miles a minute. Hence the above statement.

I told my husband from now on whenever we are out fishing, hiking or camping if someone asks to watch their kid for a few minutes - supposedly so he could go change into his swim trunks but he didn't come back for a very long time - that we will do so but only with a $75.00 non refundable deposit, and my professional babysitting charges are 75.00 an hour - after all I was a professional nanny on the east coast for five years working for Americas finest blue bloods.

I've got this guy pegged as either a drug dealer or child predator - based on his behaviour and the need to hang out with all of the other "childern" on the beach. The beach was a good clip cattey cornered from where we were at so you couldn't hear the casual conversation. But it was obvious that he was not interested in his own child.

I was pissed because I wanted to fish in peace and quite and do some watercolors and some drawings. I didn't have babysitting on my plate today, and I think it's damned rude to just pawn your child off onto other people, especially when you don't know them.

Of Fish and Men

We just got back from fishing, it was horrible tonight nothing was biting and the lakes were packed with people wishing that they were biting. I did catch one croppie, that I threw back as it was a bit smallish. Unforunately that lake we were fishing at is in a public park and closes at 10:30 pm, and the fish were definately biting there.

So we will get up very early in the morning, when the sheltie alarm goes off, and try fishing again, when most folks are still in bed/camp sleeping. A few of the places that we'd go that close early in the evening open at sunrise, which is around 5:15 am right now. So if I'm going to get any sleep I'd best be going to bed.

Day Lilies



I think this is a day lily. I'm utterly confused as in Abundant Harvest, on page 301, the author describes the day lily as having no spots on it's petals, then shows a picture of a flower with spots on it's petals and the caption reads "day lilies".

If these are indeed day lilies I plan to munch on them and enjoy them!!!

Bleah

I finally figured out what made me so sick this morning around 5 am, no I"m not pregnant! It's all of the cigerette wrappers I licked last night.

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy???

Well it's for a project I'll post more about it later. I just licked the last 25 of them and BLEAAAAH is all I can say, those things are gnarly. They are drying now, the glue anyway. More later.

Poor Truck



Well this is what it looks like so far, John is having a dickens of a time getting the old exhaust system off of the truck, that'll probably be all he'll accomplish tonight, and hopefully it won't take long to put the new one on tomorrow. All I need to do is find the warrenty for hte old one as it developed a rather large hole in it in less than three years.

At least it'll be ready for my trip to New Jersey, and then Oklahoma. I'm teaching in NJ July/August at Peters Valley, and then in Nebraska I think in both in August September , and Oklahoma in September/October. And I think that'll about wrap up my travel schedule for the year.

We were supposed to go to Nebraska this weekend, should have left last night. But John was unable to get the day off today. It's too bad too as I would have loved to have spent a weekend doing nothing but field research - collecting plants, roots, and fungi for NA dyeing. We were going to stay with a friend in their cabin, nice weekend off to tell the truth. Well I was planning on finishing off those last 6 (more like 20 or so) pages on my thesis while there - no phones, no computers, no pets, no interruptions - you get the picture. The place where we would be staying has buffalo/bison and all sorts of wonderful native prairie plants. Oh well, I can't drive my truck w/o an exhaust system plus it was only getting louder and louder not enjoyable for me at all.

Here's a special pic of hubby crawling around underneath my truck, isn't he such a sweetie! I'm glad he's mechanically inclined, it'd drive me batty if he wasn't actually.

Big Sale and More

I'm having a 40% Off Storewide Sale this weekend, starts today through Sunday (Central Time USA). I've done this two weekends in a row now and it's great! I'm selling a lot of stuff I want to move, and have plans for new inventory already!!!

Also I'm clearancing some book titles so check out the Summer Clearance Sale page on my webstore as well.

I need to make room for my new products - art cloth and hand-dyed fibers.

The Prairie Fibers Company

Dog Days of Summer

I gave both dogs a bath tonight. The next time I bathe the sheltie I'll have to take her picture she looks like a drowned rat every single time, and a pathetically cute one at that! J- and I groomed her a little bit ago, I saved the clean down undercoat for spinning, I'll spin it in with some icelandic and knit a scarf for J- with it, since he requested this.

I will have to groom her in a couple of weeks though in order to have enough fluff to do this. It's a lovely grey color that'll blend in with my icelandic beautifully. Once spun up I think I'll dye it with indigo and then overdye with osage orange for a drop dead gorgeous heathered green color. One xmas present down and several more to go!

She looks and smells really nice now, too bad it's so hot out this will last a day or two at the most - the smelling nice.

New Piece


This is a recent piece of compost dyed fabric, it's cotton, found it on the end of my table underneath everything. I've decided I need to stitch this piece, I see all sorts of wonderful natural things in it's surface. I might add some other fabrics with if I ever find my pile of compost dyed fabrics. I've found my pile of solid/mottled natural dyed cotton fabrics, but not my compost dyed ones. You know it's a good thing that the Good Lord had the sense to attach my head or I would have lost it decades ago.