How The West Was Spun

Shop Tidbits

A quick note to announce a few new things on the shop website.

First up, I've got a large batch of sale-priced laceweight yarns here.  The mill I use for a lot of my laceweight is making it very difficult to get cones, so these larger 1200-yard skeins are all I'll be carrying of this put-up.  The new put-up will be a standard 875-yard/100-gram skein.  These are all first-quality yarns, just ones that you won't see at this yardage in the future.  The mill is also discontinuing the 70/20/10 alpaca/silk/cashmere blend (BOO!), so what's up in the sale list for this base is all there will be of it. 

Everything on that page is discounted 25% off, so if you've got some laceweight projects lined up for summer knitting, this is a great savings for your lace projects.

New in the shop for June are two laceweight yarns:  Brigit Lace, which is a springy, 100% merino, a great workhorse of a yarn, suitable for any lace projects.  These are 875-yard/100-g skeins. And Arianhrod Lace, which is a 75/25/5 blend of merino/silk/glitter.  This is the lighter weight (875-yard/100-g skein) sister yarn to the Arianhrod Sock that Kirsten used in her pretty "Unsinkable Shawl" we debuted in April.  It has just a little bit of bling - pretty and delicate without being over-the-top.  It has a great drape and blocks beautifully.

If there's a colorway you'd like that you don't see listed currently in the available ready-to-ship skeins, please email me and I can get you taken care of.

All for now.....

More Landscaping

D and I put some more time into the yard this week.  While we were in Colorado last weekend, our landscape dude brought us a couple of trees and put those in for us.  It took about 1 week of no shade after the pinion pine by the door was gone to decide we wanted larger trees than the 5-gallon bucks from Lowe's, so we bit the bullet and paid to have a couple of Ponderosa pines brought up from his nursery and installed.

These are nice-sized trees - we got two, one for each side of the yard - about 12 to 14 feet in height.   We added some soaker hoses for these youngsters and put a mulch layer in around their roots, and we'll try to keep them fairly moist despite our current lack of rain and the high winds (and 2% humidity right now).

We also put in some smaller trees that we had already purchased - a couple of ornamental plums and a pear tree so we have an arc of trees out in front of the house.  The smaller ones will eventually help shade the deck.  We are just about finished carting rock from the property up to the front yard to form the walkway edgings, although we decided that the trees would look great with some rocks around their base to delineate between the mulch and the landscape rock (which is set to be delivered sometime this week), so we've got a bit more to do.

It's getting there!  Our next task, once the landscape rock arrives, is to start laying weed barrier, which we'll start at the point farthest away from this photo, and then work our way back to this vantage point.

All for now....

WIP Wednesday: May 23, 2012

SPINNING PROJECT:

As I thought, with D and I in Denver over the past weekend, I didn't get a lot of spinning done, but I am working on the "Burly" BFL and I've gotten perhaps 3 oz of the 4 spun up.

I'd like to try to get this first 4 oz spun up, and then I'll be ready to tackle the 4 oz of the 2IBH colorway I'm going to ply together with this. 

KNITTING/DESIGNING PROJECTS

Lots of good knitting time in the truck this weekend.  I finished up handspun sock #1 and started on sock #2.  I'm just about ready to turn the heel on sock #2.  I'd like to at least get that done up and might even get the leg finished this week.  The pattern is at the test knitters for this one, and I'm hoping to have it ready for early June.

In the meantime, I got the go-ahead to start the next Sekret Knitting Project.  Nicely enough, more of my shop yarn, so I dyed that up to get ready to wind it today and cast on.  This is a larger project, but not huge, and should knit up fairly quickly at the gauge I've selected for it.  Deadline on that is early July, so I'll prioritize that for a while and sneak in some sock-knitting time in the car or doctor waiting rooms to get the handspun socks finished up.

All for now......

 

Bhen

Once D and I decided the youngsters needed to go to new homes, I had been worried about Bhen.  I think I've mentioned he had lost his eyesight - just had slight peripheral movement that he could catch out of his left eye and that was it - so I knew he was very dependent on the other two for warnings about things that were downwind of him.  After Fargo left, he and Zel settled into a nice buddy relationship, so I wasn't sure how things would go once we moved Zel, but I was prepared to give Bhen a LOT of nose kisses and treats, and spend time with him just hanging out, because he had packed me around for so many miles on the trail, he more than deserved an awesome retirement where he was horribly spoiled.

But 3 weeks ago today, I went out to feed and he wasn't feeling well.  Doc came and treated him for some tummy ailments about 9 a.m., but by 1, Bhen was a lot worse.  Doc came back, was here with me most of the afternoon - we got about 10 liters of fluids into him, tubed him several times, and thought we finally had him feeling better, but after he left, Bhen got rapidly worse and was in a lot of pain, so I called Doc back and had him come put Bhen down.  He didn't deserve more hours in pain, and I know it was pretty bad, despite how stoic he always was.  Based on the whole constellation of symptoms, we're 99% sure he had a loop of twisted bowel and there's not really a great outcome for that even with surgery.  I got the chance to stand with him resting his head on my chest while I waited for Doc to come back.  He was pretty heavily drugged for the pain, but I know he at least could hear me - his Yoda ears perked forward whenever I talked to him - and I'm grateful I had the chance to tell him I loved him and remind him what a good boy he was.

I haven't even been able to formulate a post about this until now.  I cried for days - cried myself to sleep, cried when I went out to feed Zel - just cried.  Still am, actually.

So bear with me - I thought my best riding buddy deserved a post all his own.  He was one of my best friends, my go anywhere, do anything horse.  There was no trail in the world that didn't have his name on it.  I hope where-ever he and Sam are right now, they are hitting the trail at a trot with the wind in their manes and tearing up the miles. 

All for now.......

C-C-C-Changes

D and I had a nice, perhaps somewhat subdued trip to Denver.  We went out to dinner, read a book in the hotel room on Saturday while it rained/snowed a bit, did some shopping went to a museum, but the main reason we drove up to Denver was to effect some changes in things around here.

Some of you know that I've got an autoimmune disorder that I get an IV chemotherapy treatment for every 7 weeks.  I try not to have it be a big deal and mostly it's okay.  In the last year, though, it's kind of been catching up to me and I've been having a few more not-good days during those 7 weeks.  I'm not very good at saying I need to cut back (quit laughing, yes, I know - it's an obvious thing), but D and I decided that we needed to scale back on our riding and frankly, with Sammy's death this year, we had lost a lot of interest in riding. 

Sooo... while it was a hard decision, with the help of several friends, we got the younger two boys placed in new homes.  Fargo is down in Santa Fe with a long-time friend of my riding buddy, Corry.  Liz is PERFECT for him.  They go out and just poke along on the trails near her house with her big lab trotting along.  He rides out with her and her husband (they also own a mare who Fargo apparently adores).  She was looking for a quieter horse, but really wanted to have an Arabian again.  She's got a lot of riding experience, so anything missing in his trail experience, she's confident enough to handle and get him through, but she loves his great manners and how quiet he is and well... really.. if I had to pick anyone for him, she would be in the top 5. She's called about once a week since we took him down to her place just to give me an update on him and I know he's in a fantastic home, and is doing great.

We knew we wanted Zel to go to an endurance home - he's not really suited for walk-along trail rides with his motor - so while I had listed him on the endurance group's classifieds, I also put a call in to our trainer friend, Jerry, who you might remember came down from Salt Lake and helped Dave get Zel started.  Jerry has several endurance clients and he already knew Zel, so he did some screening of riders for us, and we found him what I think will be a really good match.  A long-time rider whose current horse is 19 and while still on the trail competing really needs to be thinking about retirement.  He's a very kind, quiet man, and (bonus!) his wife is an equine vet.  They have a ton of pasture and gorgeous facilities just north of Salt Lake, but a really packed schedule this spring, so we trailered Zel up to Colorado Springs this weekend, and this morning, he is headed out west with a professional shipper to SLC. I think he's going to do great there once he gets settled in at his new place there.  And it makes us feel good to know he'll see Jerry and vice versa every week for a lesson.

As you might guess, this is a huge change for us.  I'm not sure we've completely gotten our heads wrapped around it, and to be sure, we were pretty subdued this weekend after we said goodbye to Zel before heading home.

Read on for more.........