It's Been a Month!

Here's a picture of the "Simple Shawl for Fancy Yarns" that I made out of my hand spun, handpainted alpaca\kid mohair\merino blend. The pattern is by Jenn Hintz of FibreFibers and can be found on Ravelry. The shawl's for me and I love it! So soft and colourful.


It's been a month since my last blog entry. I could say that I've been awfully busy but that would be true of my life in general, no more this month than others. Well, I can say that I was rather distracted with an sad event that was unfolding in our family. I'll leave it at that for now and tell you about the positive things that happened in the month.

On May 16th, the Country Roads Studio members had it's own studio tour. This is the day that we set aside to travel together to each others' studio, have a meal and a meeting together. It was a beautiful day, spent with friends. I'm always amazed at the talent that is possessed by these artists and artisans on our tour. I'll be posting some pictures of this work in later entries.

The next weekend was our Victoria Day long weekend in Canada. We don't usually shear until the end of May or early June, but it's been terribly hot and I gambled that the May 8th snowstorm would be our last. Our family of three decided to try shearing without help this year. It went marvelous. We started with the little ones and found that it was so easy, we continued on. Usually we would be having a very long day trying to get all 17 animals sheared while help was onsite. This year, we sheared a comfortable number each morning and when it got hot, we quit and went to the lake. On the last morning, our friends Tim and Lise came over to help lift the table when we did the last 4 heavyweights. It was such a relief to get it done!

The following week, May 28-30, I drove to Kapuskasing, Ontario to participate as a vendor at the 2010 Weavers and Spinners of Ontario North conference. It's a 6 1/2 hour drive north, through a lovely part of Canada. I was happy to have my friend Jane travel in my car for company. The conference was wonderful as always. It is always amazing that such a large event can be put on by the members of these small guilds. I was the chair of the conference in 2008 when it was in North Bay, and I appreciate the amount of work and organization involved. Seeing it from the 'outside' this time, I can also appreciate what this conference does to help keep our craft and our important artist relationships alive.
Hat's off to the Kapuskasing guild, especially for juggling to find numerous generators to keep the conference going when Ontario Hydro announced a total town power outage for Sunday morning!

My friend and fellow weaver, Suzanne Philbin, completed our two black alpaca jackets in time for Wasoon 2010. We wore them in the fashion show and received much praise for them. Staying in a hotel crawling with textile artists and carrying these jackets on a hanger through the lobby made me feel like a celebrity! Everyone wanted to touch and admire! These jackets deserve their own blog entry - so pictures will follow on another day.

We are on "cria-watch" at the farm. That means that one female has passed the 11-month mark in her pregnancy, so we have to keep an eye on her. The other will follow shortly. We are only expecting 2 cria this year.

However, we have some new life springing forth. One of the eggs under Velma has hatched the night before last! Cute! We are waiting for 9 more....

This is our first time having chicks! I hope he has some buddies soon, he looks a bit bewildered!

So...the sad event unfolding is the death of our 14 year old dog, Molly, last week. We knew it was coming and thinking about it overwhelmed a lot of other things in our family life. Someday soon, I'll write about Molly and share some pictures to honor her. Not now. It's too soon. It's too hard to write it.