I've been busy this afternoon making more wool batts, will do a big reveal on Monday of some new goodies I've made for the shop. I really love this colorway it's called "Taffy" , it reminds me of the treats we could only get during the summer months as kids.
Well our new chest freezer was scheduled to arrive next week but now it's not coming until July 3rd! Sears called leaving several frantic messages telling us it was being "reshipped" the last message I recieved informed me that my chest freezer had been damaged when it was dropped off, literally and figuratively, of the back of a moving vehicle. Nice well at least they told us the truth, I'm figuring it must have been damaged and really badly for them to admit to the fact that it had been damaged.
Until the new freezer arrives it'll be an ongoing archeology dig in the upright as it's still producing a ice at a breakneck pace! There may be no glaciers atop the mountains but there is definately one growing my my upright freezer!
I started this piece in 2001, I'm thinking of hacking it up into smaller pieces now in the spirit of getting it done. It's painted cheesecloth, silk flowers, bits of fabric chopped up, threads, yarns, and fabric paint on a nylon scarf.
Cloth covered book 4.2" wide by 5.5" high, there are 36 of these in the series.
Nice gold gild lettering on the sides of the books, some are older and may have been purchased over several years?
I picked up 36 of these books by William Shakespear at an estate sale, now to find out their value as I have no idea when they were published. This particular book is titled The Tempest.
I put a bunch of yarns for sale on my etsy.com store, I couldn't resist the texture of these skeins and photographed a bunch of them in various ways for my texture gallery.
The quality of these two fleeces ended up being really nice, I was quite suprised. I now have about 30 more of these that I have yet to take a peak at so we'll see where things stand in a week right! The one furthest away is a lamb.
I managed to clean half of a fleece last night, here it is drying on my skirting table, it still has a lot of Vegetable Matter in it and now I'll work to remove this from the wool. I'm planning on dyeing this bit here with madder root and will probably spin it up for socks for John and I.
I made homemade pizza on Friday using our freshly ground Hard Red Winter wheat berries and it was incredible! Things I'll do differently next time, divide the dough in half so I don't end up with the thick crust, I'll make cinnamon rolls with that instead, and bake the crust an additional five minutes before loading it with the goodies. Oh and we are also making and canning our own pizza sauce because the stuff from the store was well - GROSS! John has a recipe he makes up and it is light and it is wonderful.
Champion Juicer with Grain Mill attachment, side view, it comes with a bag that snaps onto the grinding attachment but we quickly found it annoying and place a low flat bowl beneath the grain mill.
The juiciing attachement for my Champion Juicer, ours has the commercial grade motor so should be able to grind a lot of wheat for us if need be.
I have a Champion Juicer there are the two attachments that came with my machine, I have a juicing attachement and a grain grinding attachment. I have heard that if you have a Kitchen-Aid mixer of 500 watts or more you can use their grain mill attachment but not to try it on the smaller mixer, which is what I have!
You could probably use a regular coffee grinder to grind wheat berries I'm just not sure how long it'll last. I have an antique coffee hand grinder and it grinds wheat quite nicely.
White wheat berries make better cakes and breads, if you like the really soft stuff. It has more gluten than the Red wheat berries therefore allowing your dough to rise more.
I managed to clean half of a Jacob fleece today, if it doesn't rain tomorrow I will clean the remaining half. I plan to dye it with madder root when done with this particular fleece, I'll pull the brown/black areas out and set them aside for when I have more of the black color.
What is a Gamma Seal? It is a screw on lid that one puts onto a plastic food grade bucket for long term food storage. NOTE: Make sure you really want the lid on your bucket because once you hammer the ring onto the bucket, use a rubber mallet, it's there for good! You'll have to destroy the bucket to get the ring off.
WalMart has these in stock in various stores around the US for $4.38 each. If your WalMart isn't carrying them tell them you want them and here is the sku #076939714027