On Saturday we went to our monthly Books-A-Million knitting day. It was a fun time as always and we got to sit and stitch with our fellow knitters. Ruby, one of the knitters brought us all a little gift.

Hand made project bag

She’s also a quilter and said that she made the bag with her leftover quilt scraps. I LOVE IT!!

On Sunday I helped BikerChick toward getting her craft room organized. We went through boxes of stuff that we brought back from her old house. I came across this box.

Box 'o floss

Isn’t that amazing? She has a few of the floss organizers with the floss on bobbins so she let me bring this home. We were looking at some of the price stickers and they have $.44 on them. I find this interesting since floss is $.25-.28 around here now. I guess it used to cost more??

Yesterday I got my Mary Jane’s Farm Farmgirl Sisterhood membership packet. I worked on my badge and finished it last night.

I'm a Sister now!!

It’s not that great, but I like it. I haven’t decided what I’m going to put it on yet, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something. I may haunt goodwill for an old denim jacket and use it to put my badge and my merit badges on.

Today was a good mail day. I got a card in the mail from my Mary Jane’s Farm penpal and a box from Faerielady.

Look what was in the box!

Merino Fleece

That’s a merino fleece. Will need to clean and card it, but that’s easy peasy!

Also…

Yarn

Yarn pretty! She sent me this because it was tangled. No problem there either! BikerChick likes to untangle stuff!

I’m gonna stop here now, because I need to go write back to my penpal! See you next time!

I’m not even going to try to explain why I’ve not posted in a while. I’ve just been busy, but for some reason have nothing to show for it. Well nothing much. I’ve been working on taking my certification tests for teaching and getting my daughter ready to head to college. It’s been a madhouse around here.

Anyway, I have posed a Freehand Embroidery tutorial over at the Plurkett Hencircle, and I thought I’d share that here.

Tutorial

Hopefully I’ll have more to share with you soon.

The neglectful blogger.

I’ve been quite a bit busy lately. I’ve been helping MissViolet with the Plurkette Hencircle, sewing, cooking, gardening, spinning and knitting and occasionally glancing at the loom. (hopefully more about that tomorrow)

I have a FO!

Specs:

Pattern: Nanner Socks by Wendy Johnson

Yarn: LnV Sasquatch Sock in “overripe nanners”

Needles: size 1 1/2 (2.5mm) dpns

These are my new favorite socks. I cast on for these on the 27th of June and was finished with them on July 6th. I would have been done sooner, but I had to help mom pack and move things from her old house on Friday (yes July 4th!) and hardly knit at all that day. I’ll be doing these again for sure!

Some people asked to see the dishtowel that I mentioned I was working on in my last post.

This is kind of an inside joke. It started with a plurk missviolet made about needing to start the day over.  The word mulligan came up and I decided to make a “mulligan” dishtowel. This is free hand embroidery and I used the outline stitch to do it. I love its rustic look. I’ll be writing up a tutorial on how to do this soon and we’ll post it over on the Farmgirl site.

I’ve even picked up my tatting needles again.

These are just little samples that I did to see if I could remember how to do it. It was like riding a bike!

I have joined the Tour de Fleece this year. I have some portable spinning on a drop spindle and I’m working on some scarlett wool on my wheel. (I have no clue what it is..it was unmarked when I bought it.)

I’ve had a lot of fun this past week, and hope I have more to post soon.

Who ever thought joining a social networking website would bring out a profound change in your life? Back near the beginning of June, I joined the social networking website Plurk. It seems that a lot of knitters that I know are over there also. In using the service and talking with all the lovely knitters there, Miss Violet posted about a thing she was starting called the “Plurkette Farmgirl Hencircle.” I was intrigued and went to the site to look. After reading what she’d posted on the site and following the links to Mary Janes Farm I joined up. (I also went out and ordered the books and went to the store and got some plants to plant a container garden - see one photo above).

So…Our first project is to post a bit about ourselves. I am a late 30’s mother of three. I grew up in a large-ish city in Texas, but my grandparents lived in a smaller town nearby and I spent a lot of time there. My grandmother taught me to crochet and to hand sew and other things from a pretty young age. I used to watch her cook all the wonderful home cooked country meals. (See previous hotwater cornbread recipe). My grandfather had a pecan orchard and I remember helping him harvest pecans and getting rid of infestations of web worms (ewww). I once chased a chicken around their yard that had escaped from a neighbor’s house. I realized when I read the things on MJF that I was missing those things. The things that I remember from my grandmother’s house and from my childhood. I have found my inner farmgirl. I have been to the farmers market. I’ve made a homemade pinkeep

and from scratch zucchini bread. I wear an APRON for deity’s sake!! (and have fabric and pattern to make another one) As I type this, I have a piece of freehand embroidery on a dishtowel on my lap.

THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN MISSING!!

I’ve been helping MissV get the website in order and will be writing a few columns over there hopefully. (I have a cookbook review planned.) I can’t wait to see what all we come up with and do. I will still be knitting and weaving and all that other stuff, but expect to see more from me of a different crafty nature.

(btw…Fiona apologizes that she didn’t post this Friday. She and I both were not feeling well)