Author: Miss Lynne

A week ago I woke up with the most excruciating pain in my left back and down my left arm – Went to the chiropractor on  the Monday and she diagnosed a pinched nerve. 5 Days of treatment was not making a difference and as we don’t yet have a primary care physician I needed to go to urgent care, 3 hours later and a neck X ray confirmed the diagnosis but also got me a prescription for Steroids and some heavy duty muscle relaxants. So here I am 4 days later, a lot less pain but a very fuzzy brain. Just hope the pain does not return when I come back off the meds.

I will never under estimate back pain in anyone ever again.

 

I am doing an online knit along and the first months challenge was to pick something that would use a minimum of 350 yards of lace weight yarn. I picked this lovely Swallowtail shawl and knitted it with a great rose pink Alpaca yarn. Next months challenge begins on July 1st. The great thing about these shawls is the difference it makes once you have washed and blocked them.

 

 

 

 

Preparing my Alpaca fleece has a number of stages to go through. The first thing I need to do is get as much of the vegetable matter out of it and as I was starting with my older girl, I also needed to pull out some of the guard hairs. Mr Rob built a net insert into my table with chicken wire so that the debris falls straight through.

Next step is to wash the fleece. On the plus side there is no lanolin in Alpaca fiber but my team really likes to roll in the good old Georgia red clay. So multiple washing in medium hot water with a touch of Dawn interspersed with rinsing in clean medium hot water. In the last rinse i put a little white vinegar. I use a salad spinner to get the excess water out.

 

Then I lay it out on drying tables so that it can dry out without any need for extra heat.

 

Next steps will be the picking and carding — but that will be another post

 

 

Let's start with some of my favorites more fungi I the garden, I love the way that they come and go over the course of the day.

 

 

We also have a giant flowering tree, I thinks its Magnolia

 

And last but never least, how about these for zucchini. That paca poo compost truly is a great growing medium.

 

 

 

I love the color and variety of fungi that we see when we go hiking in the woods. So I was really intrigued to see that we had quite a few varieties growing in our front yard. Clearly I do not know enough about them to ever risk eating them. But I continue to admire them from afar.

Here are the ones I found yesterday

 

 

 

 

We picked some of our home grown veg today, our zucchini are growing like crazy. So large they looked like squash. We were also able to pick our very first tomato.

Tonight for dinner we had Swiss Chard Omelette, our eggs and our chard, with zucchini cooked in tomato sauce.

Followed by homemade banana loaf

 

 

 

Today we were expecting a truck load of Hay, first thing we needed to do was tidy up the barn to make some room and then we needed to move the RV so that they could get access.

 

Hay arrived, we had decided to get the Bermuda grass as the Orchard grass had a lot of stems in it because of the wet weather.

150 bales to offload, I did my fair share and carried in at least 35, there were the two of us plus mother and son from the farm.

 

We will move them all up to the loft soon. The girls clearly like the smell and taste as they were quickly nibbling at the bits they can reach.

 

Flew back home last night bit of a bumpy ride, some of the effects of tropical storm Andrea. Everyone was pleased to see me although  looks like some of my chickens have gone broody. You would think with 6 nesting boxes to choose from that they really don’t need to be squeezed into into the same one.

 

I was thrilled to find that my new Chiagoo Lace needles had been delivered. Nice and smooth and just the right size needle length and a wire that does not get in the way.

 

I have been keeping up with my knitting retreat while I was away. It will look a lot better once its been washed and stretched.

I also have some weaving on my rigid heddle. Good to have options 🙂 No chance of getting bored.

 

 

Well sort of, there is a yarn shop that I sometimes buy from called the Loopy Ewe and every year they have a virtual knitting camp. For each of the next 3 months they nominate a project, for June it was lace weight item of 350yards or greater. There is a Ravelry group that is set up for it and because there are so many of us, they have 5 virtual campsites. On June 1st you start knitting and share your progress on line with everyone else who is part of the event.

Its a great opportunity to see what others manage to think up doing with the yarn that they bought. I also got an unexpected benefit, Sally from Rivendale farms in Colorado, spotted that I have Alpacas and reached out to me and we have been conversing by email ever since.

So I decided to knit a dusky rose shawl in Alpaca and silk my first challenge was that of course I had every size needles except the ones I wanted. I decided as it was a lace shawl that I could get away with one size smaller.  So sat down to cast on knit about 40 rows then spotted my deliberate mistake and had to undo them all. Good job I am on a retreat or I would have got mad and confined it to the UFO basket. I put it away for the the evening and then started again on Sunday morning. Managed to at least pass the spot that i got to the day before and decided to take it with me when I went to meet the Sunday Spinners. I was not able to do to much more as I am still at the point of needing to concentrating hard and I could not do that and talk to the other spinners.

I am on my way to Minneapolis today with work and will take it with me so that I can knit in the hotel in the evenings. I will update the progress when I get back home on Friday.

Thursday I took a PTO and met a friend for a nice day out, started the right way by driving into down town Atlanta in her Audi TT Convertible, the wether was perfect. First stop was the Atlanta Mart, which is a trade only location to buy everything from jewelry to furniture and everything in between. As is was not a market day, not a lot of the stores were open but there was enough to tempt us and relieve us of a few dollars.

We then had a tour of the local area followed by lunch at an Atlanta landmark Mary Macs tea rooms . Established in 1948 and very little changed over the years. The food is not what I would have expected for a tea room, no cucumber sandwiches and scones with strawberry jam.  It was mostly heavy southern cooking but we found something to our liking and it was very well done.

We then stopped at another historic landmark, Henris Bakery , established in 1928. I bought Rob and slice of his favorite, bread and butter pudding. We rounded the day off by visiting an estate sale in Buckhead but managed to resist buying anything.