Friday, October 14, 2011

Farm Stories

Last week, I went into work two hours late. We had a situation at home. We, not on purpose mind you, gave the local large animal vet a first. The first time he has had to remove a bungy cord from a calf's nose. Yes, you read that correctly.
What strikes me in this encounter as with the one other time that we had to call the vet, is that the vet usually offers you the option to do it yourself. Granted we are do-it-yourself kind of people. We have learned however that it is never as easy as they make it sound. "Well, really all you need to do is poke the calf in the butt with a syringe full of something that will put it to sleep or at least make it groggy." RIGHT! So my husband called with the option to do ourselves, we could just go pick up the stuff from the vet office and do it ourselves. Yeah, hmm. NO! I didn't want to deprive the vet of a first, truly.
It took the vet three syringes full of the groggy med to get the calf to lay down and it still jumped up as soon as he grabbed the bungy cord. So we received a vet bill but we weren't chasing the calf around either...we had already done that in the morning with no success and she knew us!
So, warning to all those with animals - leave no bungy cords ANYWHERE! LOL
I am aware this could have been way more serious than it was and we are ALL extremely thankful that it was just something silly.
Enjoy the fall weather - even the rain - gives me more time to knit.

Kate

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Yarn Dye - Success!

Hi all,
This past weekend my #2 daughter and I dyed some yarn.  It was our first foray into this and we used Pokeberry a noxious weed as our coloring agent.  We went out around our property and collected two five gallon pails of berries.  Then with gloved hands we pulled the berries and put them in our pot.
We chose pokeberry because we could use vinegar as our mordant and we didn't need to use or buy any metal mixtures for our mordant.  We used the recipe from the book I referred to in a previous blog and which I can't recall the title of at the moment.

It was an afternoon to evening project but was very fun and exciting.  Here are our results:

this is the yarn - it started brown and became this gorgeous color.  Planning to knit a shawl with it.

Still more pictures!

The effect of diversity planting.  Mixing perennials with annuals and things that go up and things that go wide = LUSH!




More Pictures!

Next came fledgling plants.








Pictures!

As hinted in the last post here are some pictures.





In the beginning we had cardboard.