A Landmark Day

Our big news for this last week is that, as of last Saturday (or whenever after that the bank actually got the check), we are debt-free!  We decided to go ahead and pay off the rest of our farm mortgage, we were scheduled to finish by the end of the year anyway, but it will be awfully nice not to have that payment going out every month.  We paid for the house as we built it, and Caleb's school loans were paid off by the government years ago since he works in an underserved area, so we don't owe anyone anything!  In the nicest sense, of course :)

Also this week, we have a wing on the barn.  A local Mennonite family, fellow farmers market growers, built a roof off the west wall of the existing barn, over the shipping container we put there earlier this summer.  We were pretty impressed that the work crew turned out to be the father and his teenage daughter, and they did the roof in just parts of 2 days!  This should about double the hay storage space under a roof, which is good since about half of it sat out in the pasture last year until it was used.  Even serving that to the animals first didn't keep most of it in very good condition, so they will be very happy this winter to get dry, clean hay!

I think I mentioned last time that I made a beautiful butterfly shawl recently, but sold it before I could take a picture.  Well, I sold another shawl this past week at the farmers market, making it 2 sold in 3 Tuesdays (basically 2 weeks) and 6 now over the last year or so.  If that's not justification to keep making them, I don't know what is!  I still have that huge skein of lace yarn I made from Joey's fleece, staring at me every time I walk into my studio.  I haven't yet decided which of the many many shawls I have bookmarked on Ravelry I want to make with it!  (Also, I priced handspun lace weight alpaca yarn on Etsy, and it'd be awfully nice to just sell it if I could get those prices!) In the meantime, I think I'll make a second butterfly shawl. The shawl I sold this past week was made out of a 100% silk sweater I found at Goodwill and rescued from life as a baggy, droopy turtleneck.  It took only one sleeve and the front to make that shawl, so I think the other sleeve and the back should get me a second!

I'm doing pretty well on my goal of making a dent in the myriad of small balls and scrap ends of yarn I have filling up my yarn cabinet (I want to make room for all the new yarn I'm theoretically going to be spinning this summer, with all my theoretical free time now that Caleb's home a lot more!).  I've been making baby socks, booties, slippers, and hats.  I'm working on a little girl's sweater out of a ball of Tunis wool I spun from our sheep and dyed a rich deep purple, and I'm almost finished a stuffed alpaca made out of Toby, our daddy alpaca.  Out of curiosity, I also knitted a diaper cover to see how it compares to the ones I usually make, cut out of a felted sweater with a fleece or knit lining sewn in.  I like the knitted one, especially once I felt it nice and snug, but I think it'll also need a lining sewn in since it is scratchy sheep wool from another Goodwill sweater, not my soft alpaca wool.

Speaknig of spinning and knitting, I haven't done my quota today and Ewan is actually asleep, so I'm off to the spinning wheel!  I hope to be back within the week to talk about something other than fiber - either the garden, or sheep cheese hopefully!