I can’t believe I haven’t shared this photo yet.  We have such a short summer here, I always shoot first and edit later.  This one is from a camping trek to Fairy Lake that we took in July, and yes, the lake is really and truly that beautiful turquoise in real life.

This is the natural habitat of our wool coozies.  I want to see where your coozies like to hang out.

Don’t have one yet?  You can get an already made one, lickety split like, from Hip Mountain Mama, or you can order a custom made-just-for-you one from my Etsy shop.

What would you like to see emblazoned on your beer holder?

Click here for instant, hassle free shopping (no Etsy account needed and there’s even some with pockets!)

If you’d like to tell me a story and have a custom coozie made just for you, better do it quick.  There are four spots left and you have four days to grab one.  Click here to grab a custom spot.

I recently made a hat for a friend, inspired by a whole lot of handspinning and my pal Linda’s book, Crochet Adorned (available on her website or at your local bookstore).

I really dig this book because in addition to the modern, elegant adornment patterns (flowers and medallions and butterflies, oh my!), Linda has also included a stitch dictionary with easy-to-decipher instructions.

Detail of stitchwork:  Combination Crunch (page 136) with the Mini Scallop Edging (page 116).   There are also a couple of rows of basic cluster stitches in there too.  The yarn is composed of my handspun Purple Mountains Majesty paired with Highland Peruvian wool and the Woodland Pixie pattern is my own design.

As an experienced crocheter, I feel challenged but the directions are clear and direct enough that my new-to-crochet friend Kelly Ann can navigate her way through them as well.

Forgive the blurry pics…you know what they say about working with children and animals.

The thing I love about making my upcycled yarn is that it creates a beautiful, unique product that has the personality and strength that wool has demonstrated throughout the ages.  Just right for its intended wearer.

Almost got it…

There’s my girl.

Not every day is full of disciplines and tidying up and laundry.  Not every day indeed.  Some days, in fact, are selfishly devoted to what I want to do, and apparently all I wanted to do for the last four days was spin yarn.

Patient Papa, strong and flexible as always, took the helm of the household while I stared at the spin, spin, spin of the wheel and watched fiber fly from my fingertips.

It started innocently with a quick upcycled project using a fuzzy acrylic and some leftover chocolate brown handspun singles…

and moved into another upcycled experiement (left)…and some handspun wool (right)…

and that was so fun that I tackled a couple more colorways in wool…

and then I tackled some hemp fiber…

You might notice that enormous mountain of unfolded laundry behind the wheel there.  And you might even see the sweet little shirt with the spinning wheel on it that my pal Heidi made for Annabelle.

Yep, that’s right Annabelle.  Some days your mama is a spinnin’ machine.  Special thanks to the papa and the kiddos for cutting me some slack while I immersed myself in the practice of working meditation.  It was sorely needed.

We like the environment.

I would wager to say that almost every action we take is coupled with the thoughts, “How will this contribute to our ecological footprint?  What are the lasting repercussions?”  Our family re-uses whatever we can, we make the choice to get “new-to-us” items rather than buying something brand new, and we prefer to walk or ride bikes just about everywhere (still trying to figure out how we’re going to load up the bike trailers with all the gear we need to go camping with two babies…)

Sometimes we trap ourselves in a little box of eco-perfection, when we feel like we can’t do anything without disrupting the flow of the entire natural world.

Sigh.

When I process wool, it comes to me in raw form.  That means that someone gave a sheep a haircut, put all the wool in a bag, and then delivered what some would consider a greasy, stinky, filthy parcel to my open, outstretched arms.  Personally, I think raw fleece is lovely–rich with lanolin and touches of mother nature (aka:  hay)–but I understand that most folks prefer a tamer version of this beautiful fiber.  That’s cool with me.

So I wash the wool in a special way, pick through it to remove all of the bits of mother nature (hay), comb it to remove the weakened sun-damaged fibers (it is hair after all), and then card it into little blobs called rolags in order to make it easy to spin.  Someday I will show you pictures of this process, but I think I was talking about the environment today.  I get a little sidetracked when I start thinking about wool.  Sorry.

After the combing, there are a few mounds of hay-ey, crappy little bits left over.  I could spin these up to weave into rugs, but I like to leave them outside for birdies to snatch up as nesting material.  Because I’m nice and I figure birds like to be warm too.

Enter the eco-terrorist that lives inside my mind:

“What kind of effect will this have on the populations of birds?”

“What if a particular species gathers the wool, stays warmer than it should, refuses to fly south for the winter, and then dies because of this wool?”

I’m serious.  This is the kind of crap that I think about.

So the other day I was taking the kiddos around for a stroll and happened upon a fallen branch, a casualty of the windstorm from the previous evening.  And I found this:

You might notice that big hunk of plastic in the front of the nest there.  And the bits of wool that I threw out into the yard earlier this summer.  I think I’ll take my chances with providing the sweet birdies with wool.