Tag Archives: Random Farm Photos

Today on the Farm

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Who says we don’t have fall color? I’ll count blue as one of those colors too.

Today we were holding a class in the front part of the garage and I needed to organize the corner where I’d been piling natural dye plants, pots, walnuts, torn sheep coats and more for months. The reason it was on the table is that the shelves along the walls were filled with STUFF–the stuff that accumulates when you don’t have a space to put it and you think you might want it someday…maybe. Or at least you can’t throw it away because maybe it’s useful. I don’t have a photo of the BEFORE. But here is part of the AFTER. I feel so much better after that. I think I should go do some dyeing. Notice those stainless steel containers on the top shelves on the right. My Dad had a lab at UCSF a long time ago. He used those in his lab. They never wear out. Some still have his name on them — R Pratt.

I opened a bag in a cupboard and found all of these bags of various mordants or dye aids and natural dyes that I don’t grow. The two with clothespins are ones I collected (madder root I grew and osage orange across the road).The rest were purchased by someone. Maybe me many years ago. This is the kind of thing you find when you get into deep cleaning. I don’t have a photo of the table full of stuff that Maybe My Kids Will Want. Fingers crossed.

I found these warps of rayon chenille waiting to be dyed. I don’t know how long they have been there in the garage.

So I felt very productive today all the while getting the place organized for the class. Farm Club member, Siobhan, taught her Vegetarian Sheepskin class to five people. they came from Auburn, Pleasonton, and Oakland as well as more local. We sure lucked out on the weather. It was cold but not rainy or windy.

We had roving and fleece for everyone and Siobhan supplied other needed supplies.

Participants arranged the fiber on bubble wrap and netting.

They applied soap and hot water.

The table is a good height for working on the fleece.

Lots of pressing and rubbing…

…followed by rolling.

Unfortunately I didn’t get photos of everyone’s finished pieces. Hopefully they will share photos later and I can include them in another post.

Siobhan spent the previous night here so we could get organized for the class.

She found this book on the Farm Club shelf. I’m not sure where I got it. It’s possible it was donated by another member. Imagine Siobhan’s surprise when she recognized the author’s name.

She recognized the author as her husband’s relative, but wasn’t sure the relationsihip. I gave her the book to take home and it turns out that this author is Shiobhan’s husband’s great-great uncle. How random is that?

I finished the day with a walk Across the Road. That is a view of Mt. Diablo from a spot where i take a lot of photos with the intent of showing the year progression in this field–I just never get around to putting it all together. That didn’t really finish the day. I worked on one of the looms with things I’m trying to finish before Christmas. I’ve been at the computer since just after dinner. I’m ready for bed, but right now hearing a party going on well across the road or up the road or somewhere. That’s unusual. It’s almost always very quiet here.

Today on the Farm – A Day of Random Projects

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Could I actually write a post a day? This is two in a row. I don’t want to bore anyone who clicks here, but I think I could always find photos to write about.

I shared this photo on IG this morning. This is me trying to stay warm while looking at IG before getting out of bed. The woven piece has meaning. After I had the major accident in 2019 my Farm Club friends got together at one friend’s house and wove this shawl/blanket using handspun yarn they had all brought. I think some weren’t even weavers, but Mary had the warp on the loom and guided them all through it. I have my own woven blankets around here but this one always makes me think of friends.

By the way if you go to that link in the last paragraph you’ll find lots of typos. That is because my small motor control still wasn’t very good and I couldn’t type very well.

I have been harvesting my walnut crop. When the wind blows the walnuts off the tree a lot of them are still in husks. I can’t throw all those husks away when I know what great color they give. I had a bucket of husks that had been soaking for a week and decided to use them this morning.

I also decided that its time to do something about the skulls that are in various stages of progress in the barn and the garage. I never get them as beautifully white as most you see for sale, but I still sell them. This one needed a little glue.

Dan’s project for the day was to pour concrete in an area where the concrete walkway is being undermined because it’s a low spot and holds water once it starts raining.

This was the first load.

He ended up getting two yards of concrete for this patch.

This is at the north end of what we call the corral, out of sight behind the tractor in the photo above. The disturbed part in the center above the black tub and in the foreground are where I have buried skulls. There are some in the tub too. The baling string in the front is tied to horns so that i can figure out where they are and how many. When I dig up the others I have to be careful because I don’t know exactly where to dig. When the ram, Townes, died Dan buried him in the mound at the very top of the photo in front of the burn pile. You can’t see it but there is a string on his horn too so I know where to dig eventually. At the time of his death he was so bloated, even his head, that I didn’t want to try and salvage it then. It seemed to likely to explode. [Some of you probably don’t want to hear this stuff, but it’s not always pretty on the farm.]

I spent the afternoon at the Weaving House working through a box of handwoven pieces that I had put aside and never got around to finishing. I think that three were destined to be ponchos–at least that’s what they are now.

I spent a long time going through all my weaving notes to figure out when I wove these and what fiber I used. This one is handspun weft. I don’t know if I meant it to be a poncho–maybe it was just a very short blanket. It’s a gamble to choose how it will sell best. It looks like an awkward size, but if it’s worn at an angle I think it will be good. I need a photo on a mannequin.

The third poncho of the day. I don’t know if these will make it to the website. I think one will be at The Artery and two may go with a friend to her Bay Area sales.

This is on the south side of the Weaving House. The vegetable garden is done and the indigo that was left is all shriveled and dry after the frost. It’s almost December and a couple of the hollyhocks I use for dyeing still have flowers! What’s with that? Do you know I have packages of these flowers for sale with directions on using them for dye?

Random Farm Photos

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Once again I had several great blog ideas to share, but other things happen. So here are random photos that were going to be in some of those post.

I have friends who talk about what they see on the Next Door website (or is it an app?) and I didn’t get around to exploring that until recently. I still haven’t spent much time on it, but right after I signed up I got an email about For Sale and Free stuff. I saw these bookends ($25) and knew I needed them. The person who had them was going to be driving near my place the next day and offered to deliver. Aren’t they great?

That’s random. What else?

Butternut squash on a gray plank deck.

Butternut squash harvested from my garden. I made “pumpkin” pies from these for Thanksgiving. They turned out great! The three little ones at the top are too green but I thought I’d try them. Not ripe.

Here are the rams I’m keeping through the winter. The two on the left are this year’s lambs. The four horn ram is Typhoon and the two horn is Blizzard, both born here. The two two-horn rams on the right were born in 2021. That’s Hillside Gabby’s Barrett from Michigan on the right and Fair Adventure Horatio from Colorado on the left. I would have used another 4-horn ram for breeding but Townes died in a freak accident when he caught his horns in a fence panel. After a fertility issue last year I had the vets do some fertility testing and Silverado was found to be not fertile at the time of the test.

I have finally been spending time at the loom. These rugs are woven from corespun yarn that is spun from the coarser britch wool that I have sorted away from the rest of the fleece.

This is a close up of the corespun yarn that is the weft for those rugs. It is listed here on my website. The rugs are here and now I have two more to post.

I use a big ski shuttle to weave with this yarn. What you see on the loom in this photo is the part that will be the hem and I’m ready to weave with the corespun yarn.

Speaking of weaving, these are some of the shawls that just came off the loom. I wove some holiday colors so that they would have a place in this room at The Artery in Davis. Everyone has an opportunity to bring more work in for the month of December.

These items are in the main display area of The Artery. That colorful piece on the left is a rug I wove at the same time as I wove the corespun rugs. I have two more of these here at the shop. Most of these items are not on my website because it is risky to have them listed on-line but not know if they might have sold here at the Artery. The pieces in the middle are blankets.

I took this photo out the window when I was leaving The Artery this week. The Artery is located at the other end of this block. At the beginning of the pandemic the bars and restaurants on this part of G Street were given permission to block off the street and have outdoor seating. The street is blocked at that the other end just past our store, so there is still access to the sidewalk and a small amount of parking, but it’s not exactly inviting when you look down the street and it looks like it is a crime scene or a medical emergency. Those of us at The Artery have tried to have the street reopened but The City is not interested. They have ideas about making G Street a destination venue of some kind. Where there used to be other retail shops, now mosts of the businesses here are bars and restaurants. So the street was closed off in 2020 or early 2021, and it still looks like this.

That was random too.

When I got home I saw that Dan was using our new (last year’s purchase) manure spreader to spread the composted pile on the pasture.

It is so much faster and more effective than the old way of taking the manure out one scoop at a time and then kicking it around to try and spread it.

Last random photo. This is the Jacob yarn that I just picked up from Valley Oak Mill on Tuesday. This will deserve it’s own post soon. I am weaving scarves with it now.