unicornduke: (Default)
Monday, I worked a half day, primarily running errands to pick things up for the farm. I took advantage of this and went to Wegmans and rediscovered how amazing it is. The gluten free section is huge! And clearly labeled! I gotta say though, the gf naan I got is far inferior to the pita bread I've been making. But I stocked up on things and found some new stuff to try. I was particularly impressed by the gluten free soups. 

That night during crafting, I was so fed up with how annoying it was to craft in the hallway between the spare room and my room (because there wasn't enough floor space for a 4 ft folding table to iron and assemble sewing stuff) that I spent an hour and a half of crafting cleaning and organizing. First, I took all the stuff that was stacked in my room that are important, plus all of the blankets and misc stuff that had been living on top of the box piles and tossed them all onto my bed. Then I took all of the boxes of my stuff that was in the spare room (fleeces, roving, yarn primarily) and stacked them up. I did put them in front of one of mom's shelves, but I determined nothing of urgency was on the shelf, reorganized so I could use one small shelf for my delicate keepsakes and then stacked my boxes floor to ceiling in front of the shelf. They are all light and there was enough of a corner next to my dresser that I was able to get three good stacks. this was almost every box I had in the space room. all light but bulky things

Then I took all of mom's bins that were in front of my closet, at the end of my bed and behind my door and put them in the newly cleared space in the spare room on the table there. Then moved my small shelves into my room and they are now usable! Shoved my book boxes, plus big luggage at the foot of the bed in between the bed and a shelf and then put all of my soft stuff onto the shelves. 

So in the end, I actually gained floor space in my room plus storage space plus I can possibly move my little crafting table into my room monday nights. it's so nice!

Then I had an absolutely baffling conversation with my mom which went something like: me: I cleaned my room and reorganized! her: why did you do that without me!!! I needed to look in there for a small bin!!! Me: but you'd turn it into an ordeal! and why would small bin be in my room? and you never mentioned this??? her: I told you I couldn't find small bin so you'd look for it in your room! it's gone forever!!! me: you never said it was in my room??? is that why you told me to keep an eye out for it? her: yes!

turns out I had opened small bin without ever looking at the label on it, been baffled by its contents, moved it to the spare room on top of her pile of stuff and she found it in less than a minute. if I had let her be involved, it would have been probably five hours of nonsense with lots of debate. I love her, but dear god, living with her and working with her on some farm stuff is too much. everything needs to be debated to death and back. the conversations I've had about the baked goods we're going to buy for the fall weekends is so incredibly irritating. I guess I need to get the kitchen in the church up and running so I never need to have that debate again. lol who am I kidding

tuesday night I made rice, curry chicken and roasted delicata squash and chickpeas, ate it all week, so tasty. 

Myself and employees have been slowly harvesting the first pumpkins of the season. Ours are all very late but the specialty stuff is what we need harvested, so tiny pumpkins, gourds, white pumpkins (since they go yellow in the sun easily), edible squashes. We bought a load of pumpkins from the auction to supplement until ours are ready. 

Yesterday, we had a big workday to get things done. I woke up at 4am and couldn't go back to sleep. We had five employees coming, one for her first day of work/training. There was an equipment auction, so my parents both went to the auction to see if any of the UTVs there would be good. A working UTV would be great but aughaugh. Trying to keep five people working on all different tasks that take different amounts of time and support is really difficult. But I managed. New employee is great so far, worked fast and came and found me when she finished things. I'll have her come back one night for training more. We're actually in decent shape as far as things go. My parents did buy me 11 nice new produce boxes with false bottoms, which are excellent for displays so I guess I can't complain that much. Me and the employees got a lot done so now we need the big stuff done, which I don't know how to do yet (hayfort, canopies) so I'm bothering dad about getting that done. Hayfort got done late yesterday, canopies this coming week.

Still absolutely baffled by the number of people that will come out to the farm without checking our facebook page, website, instagram page and/or answering machine to actually check if we are open, all of which I keep updated regularly. I think a lot of people just go: oh the grocery stores have pumpkins, so everyone is open for pumpkins

I have been irrigating so much. I'm trying to get the new grass seed to germinate that we no-tilled in, so I borrowed rainbirds from my uncle. Just. so much watering. I probably spend two hours a day on irrigation. Over a month without rain here and our total rain since beginning of August is around 4 inches. Pretty dire. But we have a 70% chance of rain on tuesday, so I'm hopeful we'll get something good. I guess I need to cover all of the things I've just been leaving outside because it hasn't rained in so long. There's also a 30-40% chance of rain the rest of the week, so we probably won't get any of that, or all of it. 

On Saturday nights, Jade and I have been watching the new season of Bake Off as it is releasing with text chat and then playing stardew valley on discord voice chat afterwards. it's been so nice, I miss her a lot. We go on break in October with the farm and catch up in November. 

I sent my parents away today to a n-scale train convention out in central pa somewhere. my dad sounded so wistful about going, so I decided that he should, my mom went along for fun. my dad said as he went out the door "us leaving the farm a week before opening is a sign at how good things are going because of you" which was nice to hear since I feel like we aren't ready yet but not to an extent that I can't let him go do something fun for a day. the house is nice and quiet right now. tasks for today: move rainbirds and irrigate, harvest some things, start display setup, look at phone stuff. I woke up at 4:30 and couldn't get back to sleep until 6 or so when I should have gotten up so I'm sleepy and slow to start work today. ah well.
unicornduke: (Default)
March goals
  • spin mohair, finishing it would be a stretch - spun! Didn't finish it but I'm one bobbin away from finishing. Also spun 4 oz of top and chain plyed it. started another top spin but it's not done yet
  • finish mittens - finished them and then had to rip the second thumb back out since it was too tight, haven't finished it yet
  • knit sweater - made progress, almost done with the back, broke two circular needles :/
  • cone up alpaca - CONED, so much fun to use
  • process the rest of the brown alpaca fleece? - worked on it, close to done
  • sew pullover - sewn!
  • tablet weaving - make a loom for this? - found my weaving notebook, finished the languishing project, did one small weaving project for a friend, started a larger more complicated one
  • other - washed three fleeces, I'm trying to get them all washed so I have less raw fleeces sitting around forever.
I did a lot of crafting, lots of things in progress. Basically no reading done, so I'll combine March and April reading.

Pullover made, I love it. It's light, it's stretchy, it's comfy. I want to make more at some point. Pattern is Jackson Pullover by Helen's Closet. Terrible picture!

A terrible picture in bad lighting of a black pullover laying flat on a table.
Read more... )
April Goals
This month is busy so idek what I'll get done.
  • finish the mohair, ply and cone up
  • finish the purple spin
  • Skein and wash spins, cone up weaving yarns
  • finish the current alpaca fleece processing
  • start processing a new fleece?
  • knit sweater
  • finish crochet mittens - just the thumb!
  • work on tablet weaving project
  • get mohair on the loom? might be a stretch
  • Start muslin for vest

Misc

Jan. 5th, 2024 10:36 am
unicornduke: (Default)
Work has been busy and tedious. We're gearing up for our big seed course again starting next week and the videos we're using from another organization don't have closed captions. We knew this from last year, since they're the same videos but we super didn't have time last year. But I figured out that office 365 word has a transcription ability and it honestly pretty solid. So I've been running all the videos through that, editing them since the program gets a little confused sometimes and uploading transcripts. I'm almost done with the videos that students have access to right now and waiting to hear back from our support person if they're able to add captions to other videos. If not, more transcript work for me. It takes about an hour for a fifteen minute video, which includes the time to play the video and have the program work. ETA: and my boss just said to add two more people into the course, which takes the same amount of time as adding the first 100. :\

We are settling in for a storm tomorrow night, predicted 6-12 inches of snow with some wind. I need to do my storm prep tomorrow morning, get out emergency bin, fill buckets of water, move things under cover that need to be under cover, make sure I know where the backup heater is, bump the heat up, make sure to have some made food on hand. I didn't get the generator fixed yet, it's on my list for next week for sure but with this amount of snow, I wouldn't expect the power to be out for more than a day. If it is, the backup indoor rated propane heater will get us through.

It's going to rain Wednesday and be 50F, so it'll just turn into a nasty mess.

I've been taking advantage of after-holiday sales and ordered some fabric (hoodie fleece and denim), and PowerBlock weights. I felt bad for the poor fedex delivery person who dropped them off, they're heavy. I need to figure out some kind of storage thing for them, my yoga mat and resistance bands in the living room. They're just in a pile right now. Maybe a tiny cabinet or something. If I build something, I need to buy more planks since I'm out of the nice stuff. 

I finished warping my next weaving project with only one counting mistake so that's good. Hopefully I can start getting it on the loom soon. It feels like I'm cranking through a lot of crafting stuff because I've had time even with work being busy. I started spinning on my electric wheel laying in bed and that's been wonderful because my feet can be toasty warm while I spin. I somehow lost the pattern book I was using for my sweater, I can't find it anywhere and there's not that many places it could be. I wonder if it fell out of my project bag at my parents or something, but I haven't seen it in months so I don't really know. I ordered another copy because it was $10 and it should be here soon which is great because I'm getting to the point where I need to do the arm gusset and I don't know how to do that. 

Mara's hanging in there. still happy enough and eating and drinking and sniffing everything. 

Sidejob work suddenly got busy, I had three requests this week, so that will start taking up some of my crafting time. 
unicornduke: (Default)
Saturday I got some fleeces washed. Well, one and a half. Better than none! I put the mohair fleece in two baskets to soak and one pound of merino fleece from last year's New England Fiber Festival to soak, then ran out for dog food and an estate sale where I scored a nice workbench, a very nice vice for $50, and a bunch of assorted hand tools. Very pleased with the vice. I'm going to work on the shed in the next two weeks, get it cleaned up and start building some brackets to hold wood and a workbench that goes over the wood. I want to turn it into a workshop since the basement really hasn't been working for that.

Came home and in between baking, I washed the mohair and scoured the merino. I also made granola, gingersnaps and yogurt. In the future, I won't bake while doing this because I had to wash my hands a lot in between everything. For the mohair, I used hot tap water (120F) for the soak, then hot tap water with soap, then two hot tap water rinses. I let the last one cool, then did six (6!!!), cold water rinses until the water was clear. To be fair, the cold water rinses were plopping the basket back in the bin, using the shower nozzle on the hose until the fleece was completely covered in water, then removing the fleece and dumping the water again.

boy howdy I rambled on fleece washing )

Sunday, I went to New England Fiber Festival. I went primarily to help a vendor friend pack up her booth, but decided to spend the whole day there. It's a wonderful festival, it's indoors, really accessible for wheelchairs since the parking lot and all areas are level concrete or pavement. The aisles are really wide, the booths are all pretty spacious and it's not super crowded at least on Sunday. There's a decent amount of seating around, both benches and places to sit and eat. It's very chill, especially in comparison to Rhinebeck. Lots more chances to talk to vendors.

NEFF rambling )

I spent most of crafting last night quilting the jacket pieces, I only have the back left to go. I also got advice on my next weaving project, making it wide since I couldn't decide wide or narrow. I got all the bins cleaned up since it rained overnight and actually had success with my indigo processing. I finished running the water through a piece of cloth and now I have some gooey indigo. Not a lot but better than zero considering I didn't know what I was really doing. I think I could have let the plants ferment more but ah well.

I'm leaving for a work trip first thing tomorrow morning and getting back late Thursday so I'm going to miss my weaver's guild meeting which makes me sad.
unicornduke: (Default)
Goals for March:
  • finish current weaving project - finished!
  • spin at least 2 of 3 plys of purple roving (corriedale, finn, ramboulliet blend) - 1/3 done
  • finish crocheting sweater (only a sleeve left to go) - finished!
  • knit something - in progress


Read more... )

April Goals
  • weave tablet weaving project
  • spin a third of the purple roving
  • flick the fleece I'm working on - try and finish it?
  • get contact info for the people with the alpacas
  • carve down new spindle shaft
  • knit something
  • start a new crochet project?
unicornduke: (Default)
I saw on a forum that they did monthly goals of their crafting and I like the idea. I may not be consistent but I want to try.

Goals for March:
  • finish current weaving project
  • spin at least 2 of 3 plys of purple roving (corriedale, finn, ramboulliet blend)
  • finish crocheting sweater (only a sleeve left to go)
  • knit something
Purple roving

A pile of purple roving sitting on a red camp chair. The roving is mostly a deep purple with lavender sections.
unicornduke: (Default)
 Anyone want to do a crafty hangout? Or just a hangout. I like crafting in a group because silence is filled with craft work. I'm looking to do a midweek afternoon or evening hangout. I'm in EST and anytime after 12 is good. I've got a standing Saturday hangout already. I've got zoom already and it's easy to use. 

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