This summer I have gotten the chance to attend two fiber festivals near where I live. The first was Shepherd’s Harvest which is held in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. This was the 15th year that Shepherd’s Harvest had been held and it shows.
There were 3 buildings of vendors…
a building of sheep and goats…
and one of Llama’s, who were also having a show at the same time.
Some of the Llamas were even being sheared.
There were lots of cute, fuzzy butts…
And tons of adorable angora bunnies for sale. (I really wanted to bring some home with me!)
They had classes and talks…
and llamas wandering around with packs on their backs.
There were fried pickles and Walleye for sale…
and exhibits of photography and yarn making prowess.
There were also sheepdog demonstrations, and this one unlucky guy in the cone of shame.
There was even a wool yurt!
Of course, there were lots of things for sale and I got a few of them:-)
This is a Wensleydale fleece that I got:
This is some very fun yarn that I found…
I also got a cone of this sock yarn in grey…
and a whole pile of mill ends of sock yarns in a bunch of different colors!
There was a lady there selling prairie settler style bonnets. Given that I will most likely be doing period spinning soon, I thought I should get one. They are not flattering and I can completely understand why Laura Ingalls was constantly ditching hers. You have NO peripheral vision in them! I would get totally paranoid that someone was sneaking up on me. However, they probably really did the trick of keeping the sun off of faces and necks, which was their purpose.
I also got a few things which didn’t get photographed, most notably the book Knit, Swirl! by Sandra McIver (which I didn’t photograph) and a few gifts for friends. I also got something very cool for free.
Yep, I got a case of the giant pickle jars from the folks selling fired pickles. I put the Mountain Dew can next to them for perspective as they are really big. I love jars and I just couldn’t resist asking if I could have them when I saw them waiting with the garbage. I know, I’m a weirdo:-)
The second fiber festival that I’ve been to this summer was the Iowa Sheep and Wool festival. It was held in Adel, Iowa on a wickedly hot weekend, which I hold partially accountable for the reason that there weren’t that many people there. A bunch of the members of my guild were there. Many of us brought spinning wheels or drop spindles to demonstrate in the spinning and weaving demonstration area. (We’re wearing the hot, purple shirts)
One of our guild had a stand there where she was selling wool from her sheep among other things.
There were sheep and goats there, but I only got a picture of one with a great smile!
There were also a passel of collie puppies getting introduced to sheep. They were cute in only the way puppies of any breed can be.
I didn’t get a lot of stuff here and what I did get, I forgot to photograph. It was just so stinking hot that you really didn’t want to touch a lot of fiber because it stuck to your sweaty skin. This is a much smaller festival than Shepherd’s Harvest, but it is also about half the age. It is also much closer for me to attend. It was only about an hour away from my apartment in Ames. I’ll definitely go next year, but I will pray for cooler weather!
The past 6 weeks or so have been unbelievably hectic for me. I am, for all intents and purposes, living in two places. I feel like I am moving on a weekly basis as I pack-up clothes and kit and go from the apartment to the farm, farm to the apartment. Between these commutes, I have a LOT of driving for my job. Nearly 400 miles a week at one point.
But my work has only been part of what has kept me from the blog. Another part has been applying and getting accepted to graduate school (again). I am working on my Master’s degree in Agricultural Education. The specific degree that I am seeking is a non-thesis one, which will allow me to get my teaching credentials so that I can teach at a high school or 2 year college when I am done. I started off taking a class already this summer in Ag Mechanics. I have already had classes in nearly every other area that I needed for this degree except for agricultural mechanics. So, that’s how I ended-up becoming a Briggs and Stratton Master Service Technician this summer. Also, I did a lot of welding. I really love welding, so that part wasn’t too bad, especially since we were getting to play with practically brand-new Miller welders! I found out that I have a gift for a type of oxy-acytelene that I had never gotten to play with. But small engines? Argh! I usually can’t even get a lawn mower started! However, I did well in the class despite my issues with engines in the past and now I probably could diagnose a problem even if I still can’t get it started:-) Also, I now have a rockin’ welding mask to call my own as well as a bunch of other necessary safety equipment.
Since I will be starting to go to school full-time in the autumn, I also had to find a new place to live as my apartment lease is up at the end of July. I have found a place where I can even take Meara with me(!!) that is near the Vet Med college at Iowa State. So, in addition to my weekly ‘moving’, I am actually moving at the end of the month.
I’ve also been gardening, but the massive heat wave that we’ve had here has made it pretty difficult to do. Since I am working in greenhouses and we’ve had multiple days where it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside when I am at home the very last thing on this earth that I want to do is to go outside into the heat. For anything. So the garden got a little neglected and weedy. The worst is the back garden which is the thistle patch from HELL right now. However, the tomatoes have started fruiting and we are staring down a tomatopalooza coming in the next couple of weeks as the Roma tomatoes all start becoming ripe. Also, a onionpalooza, but that isn’t as scary to me.
I’ve done a little knitting and crochet lately. Mostly it seems like I am working on baby blankets. There are a passel of babies being born to friends of mine in the next couple of months so I need to get hooking! I’ve also been doing a little knitting on my sock yarn blanket for which I have been faithfully collecting new and different types of sock yarn. If anyone out there is looking for a trading partner for mini skeins of yarn for a sock yarn blanket, give me a shout. I have a LOT:-)
But I haven’t forgotten about y’all in all of this insanity. I have a massive backlog of photos that I need to sort through and show you. Hopefully, I will get started on that this weekend. Since I don’t really have that started yet, I give you a gratuitous Sweetie Pie shot.
I know that I haven’t been on here very much of late. A lot of this is due to the aforementioned work + travel. Some of it is because it is spring and that means GARDENING!!!! I’ve not been able to have much of a garden for a few years now and I never really got the hang of gardening in Florida (the seasons were backward, instead of being too cold it was often too hot, etc., etc.) Anyway, I am glad to be back in a place where I understand what the seasons are doing and know when to plant things. Thus far we’ve planted: A lot of onion bulbs, radishes, beets, 8 cabbage plants, a lot of potatoes, 28 tomato plants and 10 pepper plants. Still to be put into the ground is: 3 kinds of winter squash, zucchini, lettuce, strawberry plants, lots more onions (I went a little crazy buying them!), some more tomato plants (ditto), some more peppers plants, sweet corn, pole beans, bush green beans (we really like green beans), pumpkins and maybe some gourds (not sure about them yet). A lot of the viney and large plants like the zucchini, squashes and pumpkins aren’t going to be planted in the “garden”. They tend to take things over and make a big headache for everyone. So instead, they are going to have mounds made in various places around the farm (including by the ditch near the road) where we will plant them and let them grow to their little hearts content. Our main worry has been, will a raccoon find this tasty? If yes, it needs to go in the garden at the front of the house, if no, it can go in the back 40.
The old board is there because that was a particularly muddy spot under the mulch for a while. No big horticultural secret or anything.
The pots contain herbs for the most part (with the exception of some geraniums [I LOVE geraniums!]).
Do you have any idea of how hard it is to take pictures of onion plants? Not the most photogenic plants in the world, especially when mulched liberally!
We’ve planted a LOT of tomatoes of many different varieties, some of which are heirlooms tomatoes. However, the bulk of them are Roma or Roma type tomatoes.
My mint boxes.
We’ve also had a second explosion of baby goats! Around May first, there were 5 new kids on the block born to 2 mothers. The triplets were born to a goat who has looked uncomfortably pregnant since about February and the twins were born to one that no-one knew was pregnant. Surprise! The triplets were all born super healthy and doing good but the twins were sort of a different story. There was one boy who came out huge and all red and one boy who was super tiny and the more normal white and red. We all pretty much figured that the little one wasn’t going to make it (he was about half the size of the other twin) but he’s more feisty than we gave him credit for and he’s been doing well. He’s actually a master of finding hiding places in the old equipment dad has stored out in the grove.
He may look familiar, but he’s ALL boy!
I may be little, but you’ll never find me in a game of hide and seek!
Really? Did you HAVE to headbutt me?
Our own Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (The little guy is muddy, they are all outside now…)
The one female of the 5. Yep, 4 boys and 1 girl…
One of the triplets. Without checking “under their tails” they are remarkably hard to tell apart!
It’s fun getting to watch little ones play again!
One of the other things that has been going on is the push to get the corn planted. We’ve had perfect weather this year and thus dad was able to get the entire crop into the ground in under a week. This is a new record for him I think. So, to that end, I don’t have any pictures of dad planting the corn as most of it happened while I was in Ames. Sorry, you’ll just have to look forward to it for next year:-) So, I give you a picture of corn shoots just out of the ground. I haven’t found a way to photograph it yet, but at this stage, when you look out over a field, it looks like green fuzz.
I’m sorry that I’ve not been on here much. My internet at my apartment in Ames sucks big-time and the past few weekends I haven’t had a lot of time at the farm for stuff on the computer. I promise that I have several posts that I hope to get up this coming weekend with lots of pictures of what I have been doing and where I have been going. Suffice it to say, it is spring and I am busy!
However, I don’t have the time to do a proper blog post right now, but I am going to leave you with some fun goat pictures.
A random sunset over Iowa cornfields.
In the coming weeks, I am planning on doing something a tiny bit different with the blog. Don’t worry, I plan on still giving you lots of updates on what I am knitting, spinning and crocheting, but I am also going to be giving you a little virtual tour of Iowa. You see, I travel around this great state a lot each week for my job, passing many interesting places on the way. I intend to stop by some of these places, both really famous and not so famous to give you a taste of Iowa’s history and heritage.
My first stop happened on a beautiful morning a couple of weeks ago. I had passed by the sign for the turn to Hogback bridge a number of times but this time my earliness as well as the absolutely stunning morning light made me make a quick detour to go see one of the famous Bridges of Madison County.
Now, if you haven’t already heard of them, I feel like I should really direct you to the very famous book and movie that are sort of about them. Really, the bridges act more as a setting or as a catalyst than main characters in the book and movie. The story is actually a love story set in 1960’s Iowa, which in itself is a little unusual. There aren’t that many major novels set in Iowa at all. Anyway, the bridges do play a major role in the movie and did make this little corner of Iowa very famous for a while.
So, back to my story. I’m driving my this turn that I’ve passed a good many times and I decide to just do it. I hit the brakes so hard to make the turn that I end up with Mountain Dew all over the car (You see the lengths that I go for you?? Ispilled Mountain Dew for you!!). The gravel road that I turned onto is unusually steep and twisty for Iowa. As I make my way up the hill, the gravel dust billows out thickly behind me. I follow the signs that are posted at every intersection until I finally find the bridge. It’s in a valley of sorts and is now positioned so that I cannot drive over it. There is a modern concrete and steel bridge very close by for the traffic to go over.
There’s no one around this beautiful early spring morning other than me and the birds. A total of one pick-up truck passes by on the road the entire time I am there, politely slowing down as he passes so as to not suffocate me in limestone dust from the road. This is not the first time that I have seen these bridges, but this one seem cleaner and nicer than I remember them being.
This was explained later as all the bridges were renovated in the 90’s. It makes sense as nothing made out of wood is going to last in Iowa’s weather for very long without some serious maintenance. Add to that, most of these bridges were still being driven over by cars and trucks and farm machinery (when it could fit) up until a few years ago and you have a recipe for some serious work needing to be done.
I know that a lot of my readers live in places where 1884 doesn’t seem that old. Hell, I’ve lived in a house/chapel that was older than that myself in England! However, for Iowa, this is considered a pretty old structure, especially for a wooden one. To give you some perspective, Iowa had only just become a state about 40 years prior. The reason given that they covered these bridges in the first place is that the timbers on the floor of them were much larger and more expensive to replace than the ones in the building above them. Given that Iowa has never been known for its lumber, I can actually believe this. Wood, especially lumber, used to be difficult and expensive to get here.
The bridges were used for lover’s meetings long before the book was written about them. Young couples would carve their names or initials into the wood on the inside of the bridges. Now they uses sharpies and spray paint, though there are still a few traditionalists amongst the romantics.
The folks preserving these bridges have tried to funnel this urge to mark the space, say, “I was here.” I’m not sure how well it’s working…
The ends of the bridge are painted white. It used to be that a lot of things that would be considered navigation hazards in the dark were painted white so as to not have folks running into them. This is the reason that a lot of the trunks of the trees leading to the Southern plantations were planted white, to make it easier to get to the house without running into one of them.
Hogback is one of the few bridges remaining in its original location. Most of them had to be moved to make way for more modern bridges. However, I think that Hogback’s location in a very out-of-the-way place has helped it to stay put.
Most of the other bridges were named after the families that lived nearby. Hogback didn’t have anyone close by so it was named after a limestone formation nearby. Or so they say. No one really knows the reason for sure. I personally like to think that there was a pig involved with the story somehow:-)
I feel like I’ve been working on this blanket for little Matthew forever, even if it really hasn’t been all that long. It’s just that it’s, well, boring. With my normal scrapghans, I can change color whenever I feel like it, thus alleviating the boredom of non-stop half-double crochets. However, with this blanket, there’s no such relief valve. It’s either Hot Red or Bright Yellow 24/7 and it’s making me want to rip my eyes out. However, I have decided that the end is neigh for this unholy blanket of boredom! I am adding one more yellow stripe to it and then it’s going to get another thick red end and I am done with the hooking. However, I hope that I can still find the fabric to be sewn onto one side of it. I put it back into my storage unit when I decided to frog it a few months ago.
Sigh.
Anyway, it is going to be done and done one way or another by the end of next week. I am declaring it so!
In other news… Miss Sweetie Pie is back from her big visit to the vet to become a grown-up cat. Which, in case you didn’t know, in the case of a female cat is called a Queen. So, I guess you could say that her crown has been taken? However you want to say it, she has been spayed and is recovering nicely. She spent a night at the vets and was quite ready to come home today. She’s moving slowly, but doesn’t seem to be in any pain and the stitches are the dissolving kind, so all that’s left is to keep an eye on her for a few days.
One thing that is amusing is that she is clearly annoyed with the shaved part of her tummy. Each time she seems to get fixated on it I keep telling her it’s her, “Summer Haircut”
She’s not buying it.
Today I made an appointment for little Miss Sweetie Pie to get spayed next week. Since it is warming up rapidly, I want to get her out of my room!!!!! She is a teensy bit destructive and annoying and I am tired of being scratched and bloody (it’s how she shows her affection… purr, purr BITE!). However, I can’t put her outside in her current state as I’m sure that she would be preggers faster than you can say, “What’s your sign baby?”.
What are you lookin' at?
In other news, I will be attending my first fiber festival since being back Stateside. It’s called Shepherd’s Harvest and it’s held in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. My mom is going with me and is thinking about taking a weaving class while there. I’ve never gone to this festival before and I’ve never gone to a fiber event with mom, so this should be interesting on several different levels! I heard about it because Deb Robson tweeted that she is going to be there and I plan on catching her talk on Saturday night.
I have been hooking and knitting, but that crazy thing called “having a full-time job” has seriously cut into my crafty time. (Not that I am complaining, I am very happy to have gainful employment, it just means that the crafty doesn’t flow quite a quickly as it was!) I finished this scrapghan this weekend.
It’s a little different from my usual version in that I experimented with fringe. I think that it adds a bit of a playful aesthetic to it, but I doubt that I will do it again. It just got in the way a lot and was really time-consuming in the end. It’s going to be raffled off by the Ackley American Legion Auxiliary in the coming months as a fundraiser.
I thought for sure that it was headed for the frog pond because I couldn’t find any more of the red yarn. I looked in Michael’s and JoAnn’s and Hobby Lobby and not one of them carried this particular shade of red. Guess where I found it. Wal-Mart. I detest going into that store, but it’s really the only thing sort-of local and while I was in there looking for something else I just moseyed down the yarn aisle and there it was, bright as day, just sitting there! It’s a good thing I really didn’t want to rip it out as now I have enough yarn to finish the blanket! Woot woot! And, I am planning on taking a little weekend trip out to Chicago to see Sarah and her crew in the next few weeks so hopefully I will have it finished by the time I get there and can give it to the little guy in person. Just in time for summer…
Quiet. That’s not what my life has been lately. Unfortunately, not a lot of what has been going on with me has been blog-able. Work has finally kicked into full-gear and truth be told, I don’t feel like I have a lot of time to myself anymore.
However, I’ve not forgotten you, my determined blog reader! I have an idea for a sort of series of blog posts about things that I see as I am traveling all around Iowa. Hopefully, interspersed amongst them will be posts about the normal tidbits of my life.
Spring is speeding forward at record speeds here. There were parts of the state that got into the 90’s today! It’s the first of APRIL! Mom and I are planning a garden and I’ve gotten some onion sets and seed potatoes to get started in the ground. My brother moved the goats out into the pasture this weekend. The little ones kept trying to go back to the shed where they lived as they had never known anything else. However now they have figured out that grass=good and are staying put. I’ll try to get some pictures for you next week.
Otherwise, my life is still one big transitional mess with a bunch of stuff going on that I cannot talk about (yet). Suffice to say, I have some things that I am working on but nothing that has been finished or finalized.
Sorry. I’ll get back on here a bit more when I have more to say:-)
Sarah Jane Humke 