Dust ... Yes It Is Everywhere

No new volcano news today ... thank goodness, but tons of stranded travellers are here waiting to get out. Marco Polo Airport is supposed to re-open today but the haze here is terrible. We shall see. I thought of going down to Venice today for lunch but stayed home as I expect the crowds are pretty thick ... and unhappy.
We went to Venice a week or so ago and it was amazing. I was in the middle of reading a book called "The City of Falling Angels" by John Berendt (of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame) which is about the burning of the famous opera house in Venice called "The Fenice". So, as we were wandering around Venice looking at things like:

while trying to decide if we should ride in the orange crushed velvet with pompoms and fringe pimped out gondola

or the more taditional but also more subdued type:

My husband, who never thinks of these things, says "Hey! Let's go look at that building you are reading about." And so we did. I wish now that I had finished the book first and so I will have to go back because they have rebuilt it and when you stand in the street, 6 feet from the building next to it, you see why, at the beginning of the book, the fear was that all of Venice would burn. It was incredible there!
In other news, I recieved a shipment of wool yarn from Stone Hedge Mills. It is gorgeous and I will try to take pictures and get them up. They did a fabulous job and I have already started a shawl in the black/silver. What will I do now that I have no fleeces of my own to send them ... yikes!

I can see the trees

Through the window ... blossoms fly

Following the wind.

Busy Times ...

We have been so busy here of late that I have been slow to get back with photos of the new lambs. They are growing at a rapid rate but are all still cute as buttons. This is Alice. She had a slight accident yesterday when someone stepped on her tail and it came off. But she has already moved on and is her happy-go-lucky self again.

She and her brothers run amok and have discovered the new baby chicks whom they love to try to sniff. The new mother hens are not so pleased and spend most of their time running around the babies with their wings held out trying to look as big and scary as possible. Hard to do when you are only about 6 inches tall.

The new calves are settling in nicely and the two older cows are eating me out of house and home. Bob stepped in a badger hole and wrenched a knee and now has developed quite the peg-legged walk so we have started call him Jack the Pirate. I think the name will stick.

I spent all of yesterday dyeing wool and getting technical help from my own personal tech goddess Dawn over at crochetcompulsive so by this afternoon all of the yarns will be up on the etsy site. Here is a group photo of the sock yarns.

Sometimes it seems like I dye the same 3 or 4 colours all the time but apparently I dye the same 26 colours all the time. LOL.

I love it though ... this is almost too much fun most days. And I keep having more and more ideas of colours to try.

Today we are going to try to get some of the garden in even though this morning it was only 36 degrees. So I am off to pitch in on that project now so I can dye the wooly silk later ...

Every blade of grass

Under it's burden of dew

In time - springs free.

And Then There Were Four

No sooner did I blog about poor Isabella than the next morning she went into labor. Which continued on for a while. I place a frantic call to the vet about the apparent size of the first lamb. He explained how I would have to check to make sure the lamb wasn't stuck due to a bad presentation and I went out to explain this to Izzy who looked at me with that "you plan to put your hand where?!" look and then proceeded to produce her giant sized lamb just to show me that the hand thing was never going to happen. He is aptly named "Andre" after the giant. A few minutes later he was followed by his very little sister who I named "Alice" after the Alice in the Twilight series. She is beautiful and very tiny and dances everywhere she goes. Andre is every bit as big as the lambs who were born a week earlier and they both are true daredevils when it comes to straw bale jumping and head butting ... no fear for any of them. The weather has been terrible but when I can I will try to get some good lamb pics up.

Other Big News! here is that a yarn store in Kenosha Wisconsin has begun carrying my yarn. Huge news for me!! The store is named Fiddlehead Yarns and if you should ever be in the neighborhood please drop in and see them. I may try to do that myself in my migration to Rhinebeck in October.

On my needles this week is a pair of socks in the Fields of Barley colourway in a wheat ear pattern. I am hoping I will get the first one done soon but I keep having to go out and pet the new lambs. Go figure.

Cold rain -

From the pond in my head

The sound of Basho's frog.

How I Spent my Summer Vacation (part deux)

This is my garden ... and so I am busy weeding and canning and freezing. You would think I was feeding an army and not just the DH and I.

I had some cute little chicks that showed up with their proud MaMA one morning :

(this is what blogger refuses to load ... so imagine a big gold chicken with 2 little gold chicks and one little white one ... very cute ... eating ... by the barn)

And I went to .... ALASKA!!! It was so incredibly beautiful. And I met some fab people and I was able to spend a week with my dear friend Brenda of Cast-on fame. The glaciers were amazing .. there were real icebergs and sea otters. I cannot begin to describe the fun that I had. And there was yarn buying ... and lots of it. We were like a plague of locusts everywhere we went.

I have apples to pick and yarn to dye and now summer is almost over. I have two new socks on several sets of needles and a sweater to work on. Plus a trip to Germany and to Wales to plan .... so it's off we go ..... till later!

Hearing the grass sigh

I think, perhaps, the moonlight

Is too beautiful.