strange eggyness....

I've had more strange eggs this Spring alone than I've had in many years of eggs... a few days ago I opened a jumbo size blue araucana egg into the pan for my breakfast and not only was there the white and a HUGE yolk but there was a little mini egg in it the size of a shooter marble! The "shell" was kinda hard but a little bouncy like thick leather and it was a pale greenish color inside a membrane. I'm still kicking myself for getting rather grossed out and running it out to the cats before I thought to take a picture...

I did take a picture of my wrinkled eggs though.... I don't know what is up with this girl but every other day or three she's laying an egg with wrinkles! The days between, she's laying a normal, speckled brown egg.

Just dropping by for a bit...

Wow.... I dropped by for my annual "check-in" and see I've been away a lot longer than I realized. I really have to update here more often. I have good intentions of trying but I know I don't follow through that well. I do the same thing with my Live Journal... great intentions... poor follow-through. Dial-up is such a pain, I don't do much on-line anymore. I tweaked a few things here and it went okay. Now maybe I'll dig up a photo to stick in and see how that goes this time. I was having problem with that before.

Just stuff.... a box over my desk.

Annie is the matriarch of the feline family... she's an old trollop... a stray that the old man Winter Cat brought home one day and left her here in our care while he went off again on his merry wild tomcat way. She was a wild woman and the old man dropped her off barefoot and pregnant. I don't know where she had them, but when her kittens were just about weaned, she brought them in through the cat door one by one and left them. She'd sneak in during the dead of night and nurse them and take off again like a rocket if she heard anyone move about in the house. Anyway, long story short, one day she just decided we were okay and weren't gonna eat her and she moved in to stay. Now she's royalty around here and is full of cuddly, snuggly appreciation. She's also getting senile in her old age and plays the roll of jester as well as queen.

This morning as the sun streamed through the window she decided that the terrarium I had just cleaned out looked like a nice cozy sun-room. The opening into the glass case is only about three inches wide. Annie is fat. It took her several minutes and a lot of determination but somehow she finally squeezed in. She was quite pleased with herself until she decided she wanted to get back out again! LOL! I tried using the video on my camera for that spectacle but it turned out too dark to see.

Lucious Fiberness

I had started to knit a new neck-wrap a few weeks ago. I fell absolutely in LOVE with the yarn... it's beautiful and soft, a gift from Cynjon. I just couldn't get into the groove of the actual knitting though for some reason. I'd do a short row or two, get distracted and leave it. Last night I picked it up again, did a couple more rows and noticed something... a really cool surprise! The color of the yarn was shifting... transitioning to rose! The rose with the moss green is soooo beautiful, I had to make better use of it. I frogged out all the knitting and went and got one of my tri-looms to better showcase the colors. The gradual way the color shifts and blends gives it almost an iridescent kind of look as you move it. Gorgeous...






I wish you could reach in and touch it... it's soft as a cloud. I'm just getting ready to go out and full it just enough to bloom the fiber a bit and lock the weave. From the end of the ball I've crocheted a blossom sort of thing that i'll use as a fastener. I probably won't get to finish it up until next week.

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Blogger templates

Oh wow... I might have to do some redecorating here too since I found all these incredible templates...

http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/08/125-more-excellent-blogger-templates.html

Testing 123

Checking to see if I can connect and post okay through my journal app, Semagic. Now if I could just figure out if there is a way to post through to all 3 journals at once I'd be verrry happy...

Still working out a few kinks

I never did get back to figuring out why I have a problem with the way photos post on here. Maybe I need a different layout entirely? My photos all get cut off on the right side... by quite a lot. I guess I can just be extra careful about the size of the photos I use on here and figure exactly how many px wide they can be. But that's an extra step and extra time I'd rather not bother with. When I tried just resizing a couple at one point, all that happened was the photo shifted to the right and it was *still* cut off.

I've added blogs I watch to my page in the sidebar. That will never work as a substitute for my friends page in LJ I realize. I don't think having 20 or more excerpts in that bar will work out very well.

Everything here loads so darn slow... tedious.

I hate that I can't reply to comments in a "thread" style and can only add replies to the end of all the comments instead of to specific comments. Unless that's changed in the past year or unless I'm just missing something or a setting of some kind.

Okay enough of my whining I guess. I don't think LJ will *really* totally bite the dust but it could still happen in the future. I do still need to be here a little more often and keep up with peeps that hang out here though. I really would like to learn to "love" blogger eventually.

My annual "check in"

I thought I should drop in and say hello... to myself. LOL! Things are a little tense over at LJ as we wonder if it's the beginning of the end... I figure I better warm up my seat over here just in case...

Yea, I'm easy

I'm SO excited!!!!

I've been wanting to try a flowering tea for... forever... well, a really long time. I saw them at the co-op last year but they were sooo expensive. Well, today I said I deserved a treat and paid five bucks for a sample pack of four blossoms. Heck, a cup of tea at a diner costs a buck so it's not THAT bad. I couldn't wait to try it... I wasn't going to spend twelve bucks on the adorable little round pot so I wasn't sure what I was going to brew it in. The tea fairies were smiling on me though and when I stopped at the thrift store next, I found a little mini coffee carafe! It worked just fine. :-) I'm thrilled to bits... not only is the tea absolutely beautiful, it tastes exquisite!!!

♥

Just testing something out here...

I was wondering if I can copy entries from other blogs or journals over here. They'll be all out of oder, date wise... unless someone can point me to a way to back date entries like I can in other programs... oooh I might have just found it...
Now to see if this works....

*******

Yesterday I went up to Mom's and played a bit at my spinning wheel and finished my first spool of "yarn". LOL!!! I use the term loosely... By the end of the spool it was getting better, but the whole thing's full of knurls and curls and fluffs and bumps. It's really SWEET though with all it's blemishes!
Last night I dyed it a pretty, earthy sort of rusty olive shade and it's stretching and drying now.

There's not many yards there, but I'll have to make some sort of little whimsy from it, to commemorate my first yarn not using a hand spindle. I better use it before I look back at it and decide it's too embarrassing to use. LOL!!!! (Alden Amos says so. LOL!!!)

Warm things on a cold night

Back in August (I think it was August... or September...)  I told you about
the felt play-day we had with a new felter who lives near by.  I told about
the mittens I demonstrated for her... traditional wet felt over a resist.
Well, they came out so nice that Mom immediately laid claim to them.
LOL!!!   I had forgotten all about them and hadn't taken any pictures.   I
was at Mom's house yesterday and she had the mittens out as she's been
wearing them so I asked her to take a picture.




They are soft and very warm and silly me forgot to make another pair for
myself!  LOL!!!  They are real "work horse" mittens and the best thing about
them is that if they should get damaged or wear out in any spot, they can
easily be repaired good as new with some needle felting.

From the garden of kitschy delights....

Dandelion Cookies....

yummmmmm......

It must be Spring!!!!

This is gonna be a tough one...

We went to the thrift store yesterday and amazingly I just wasn't finding much of anything that sang to me. I decided I'd look for some wool sweaters for reclaiming and fulling/felting. They had already taken most of everything wintery off the racks but I did manage to find just one. It's a real beauty and I haven't been able to make myself take a test cut yet! LOL!!! I've toyed with the idea of trying to unravel it for the yarn but I really don't know where to start. I'm pretty sure it was hand knit as you can see small mistakes in it if you examine it closely. It seems to have been knit in one piece also... there aren't any seams aside from a few inches in each armpit and the collar ribbing seems to be done seperately and applied with what looks like hand stitching. I even toyed with the idea of just keeping it as it is, but it's a very coarse wool and very pricky even for me and I don't usually mind most wool prickle. It's pretty out of shape too and would need some intensive blocking. I was looking for a sweater with a specific project in mind. I wanted to make a cat nest like the one I recently crocheted and felted. This sweater has such a pretty design though that I'm thinking maybe I need to make something different.... but what?! The yoke design would also interfere with the amount of fabric I want for the base of the cat nest and I hate to just cut into it and waste that part. What would YOU make from it?

Happy new beginnings!

Okay so I'm going to try to give it some real effort this time... LOL!!! It's Spring, it's time for new beginnings and fresh starts. Soooo... that means it's time to try Blogger again. I've changed the title, will probably change the template if I can find one I want and I'll be changing my focus here to the mundane pleasures of my kitsch and garden art, a post now and then about my critter kids but mostly I'll try to focus on my felting and other fiber obsessions.

Soooo... here's to waking up with a smile!

Just checking in....

I figured maybe I should make a post now and then, just to make sure my account stays active. I have several friends on Blogger whose blogs I like to watch and be able to comment on so I gotta keep my account here. Yup, I hang out here at other friend's "houses" but there's a lot I don't like here, especially compared to LJ. Maybe I just haven't been here enough to figure it all out though! Mostly I don't like the way you can't comment and reply to each individual reply to an entry... at least as far as I've been able to figure out. Sure it's nice to get comments to an entry but sometimes it's even nicer to be able to reply to the comment and persue a dialog, addressing a particular post, without just adding a new reply to the whole darn thing. Maybe I'm just missing something... The other thing I don't like is purely "fluff"... I have fun on LJ being able to totally customize the layout with great backgrounds and stuff so easily. I just can't seem to figure out as many options for custom "decorating" here. Okay so this is just a bit of babble.... we will return to your regular programming... LOL!!!

I'm just staking out a bit of territory here for the moment. I'll experiment and seee how I like things here and then I'll be back!