Things I Made Today

I've been busy with my carder, preparing batts and rovings for sale.  I'm heading to Elliot Lake in early May for a weaving and spinning conference and aim to have some lovely batts for sale, as well as my yarns.



This batt is a combination of my dyed alpaca in mauve and royal blue, with some blue merino and some white and navy silk.  It's stunning and oh, so soft....This batch may have to stay behind in my stash.

That's the hazard of creating yarns and fibres.  Sometimes it's hard to part with my product. 

It is rewarding, though, to run into a fellow fibre artist later, who proudly displays a wonderful one-of-a-kind finished garment that started with fibre from my farm.

I borrowed a cake tin from my public library last week.  Isn't that neat?  Our public library has a wide assortment of cake pans to lend out to it's members.  Some people think that is an odd thing for a public library to do, but public libraries today are not just about lending books, but rather about providing the community to many kinds of shared resources.

Somewhere in my memory, I can remember my mother making a special Easter lamb cake.  I must have been about seven years old.  The lamb had white coconut as the fleece and green coconut as the grass.  The "how-to" had been from a Chatelaine magazine.  This wasn't something that my mother would typically do, considering she had six kids in her hectic home and a husband on the road...cake decorating just wasn't a priority.  But I do remember that Easter lamb cake as something very special.

I had never made an Easter cake for my daughter (and although I can blame a hectic home, I only have the one offspring and a very present hubby...so I own no good excuses other than "it ain't my thing"). 

That mother-owned guilt was telling me that I might have missed the chance to make a good, warm Easter memory for my daughter.

But we made our cake today together, my daughter and I. 

And, along the way, we made a special Easter memory.

Happy Easter!

Smokey the Barn Cat

Meet Smokey the Barn Cat.


Our property is divided between the 1 acre that the house sits on and the 89 acre farm by a creek. Our dogs stay on the house side of the creek. Smokey (usually) stays on his farm side. Every morning and every evening, Smokey waits for his people to come visit him. He does keep a good eye out for the dogs. Smokey is a great barn cat. He never strays far and will follow us out around the pastures like a faithful friend. His former home was a university frat-house...I think he likes it here much better. He has a cat-door into a heated room in the barn. He gets wet and dry food, flea protection and vaccinations. He's in top form. He even has a girlfriend next door who visits but doesn't want to move in.
Smokey knows that the dogs are getting old and it's only a matter of time before he makes the move from the barn to the house to spend his retirement.

Look like a photo from a National Geographic article on some poor drought ravaged nation?
Well, sadly, this is one of the alpacas dust bath areas in the pasture. At the end of March, this should be a puddle. Yikes, it's dry this year!

Oh, the excitement spring brings! Here are my female alpacas in the front pasture...all on guard and sounding the alarm calls! What could it be?
Curious, I donned my boots and sweater and headed over to their side of the bridge.
Bravely, with camera in hand, I went over to the fence-line. I couldn't see anything but boy, the girls were upset and staring towards my neighbour's field.
So I headed down the fence-line, toward the brush area, to get a better look. Maybe a deer, a coyote, a bear?
The alpacas all made a quick start and made a dash toward the barn.
For that brief second, I thought "Hmmmm....perhaps I should have brought something other than a camera." (I've had those thoughts a lot over the years...you think I'd learn!)

Then, I saw my neighbour Ed, dressed in a black snowsuit, heading out of his old metal outbuilding...probably getting his landscaping tools out for the spring.

I should have known. Last week, the girls were very upset because my westerly neighbour parked her van behind her garage, instead of front as usual. This kept them excited for over an hour.

Another exciting time on the farm!


Another egg picture! Friday, I'll be decorating eggs with my daughter. Have a safe and enjoyable Easter weekend.