Catching Up

Shame, shame on me for being such a lazy blogger again.

Seems like things were really busy during the summer, with all the outside activities that come with it. Mowing the yard was pretty much a full-time job...there was only a short time where it got dry enough that you could skip a week or two.

So what have I been up to? Late in the summer my husband's folks gave us a big dishpan full of grapes from their vines that I made into jelly. I thought I'd never get all of them picked through so I could make the jelly, but finally I did.
Yum!

And remember in my previous post I talked about my newest addiction obsession hobby, digital scrapbooking? I've become so enamored with it, that quite a bit of my computer time has been spent learning software and doing layouts.

I'm also still working on going through our fleeces from this year's shearing. (See, I'm almost always behind.) I'm thinking this year I may have the wool spun into yarn at the mill instead of just roving. There's quite a bit of combed top still left to spin from last year's shearing.

This past Saturday was National Hug a Sheep Day. I'm embarrassed to say that I forgot it on Saturday (though our sheep get quite a few pets and scratches on a regular basis anyway). But I made up for it yesterday and hugged four or five of the ones that would let me. Maybe I'll try another one or two this evening. :)

Digital Scrapbooking

Wow, it's been ages since I posted! It's been really hot since about the first of July until this week. Things have made a nice cool down in the past few days.

We've been baling some prairie hay...some small square bales and some big round bales. I got in a little raking, but not a lot. One more field, and I think we're done baling for this year.

I've discovered another interesting hobby. And it's not even fiber related. Can you believe it? I've been going through a bunch of old pictures and slides and have been trying to get them converted to digital. In the process of this I discovered digital scrapbooking as a way to spice up some of the old pictures. The layouts can be printed as hard bound photo books, which I thought would be neat for some of the really old family history pictures. Here's a couple of layouts I did just for fun. Note they have fiber-related subjects, so it's possible to combine fiber and digital. :)That's Velvet, our Shetland ewe. She really changed color after her first shearing.

And that's what's on my rigid heddle loom right now. The idea is to use up lots of different handspuns, hopefully having enough to make a little afghan or blanket. The loom is a 16 inch, so the plan is to put three panels together to get it wide enough. I'll try to show it to you when it's finished.

(If you're interested, the software I used is My Memories Suite 2.0 from Poloroid, and some free papers from scrapgirls.com.)