Author: denisemor
Fun with Leftovers
When life gives you yarn leftovers,
Just add KoolAid! (and/or other food dye)
And BAM!
Now you’ve got something splashy to play with!
Those fun and fruity leftovers, plus a little bit of peachy orange from a previous dyeing adventure, came together as a big floppy hat
Which then spent some time in the washer and dyer, and resulted in
As the Kool Aid Man would say,,,,”Oh Yeah!”
Crow Away!
You might remember that I lost a baby chicken (maybe 8-9 weeks old) to a pair of ravens back in late April.
That wasn’t the first incident.
We lost two hens out in the pasture to raven attacks last year.
From what I’ve read online, it seems like it’s not terribly common for ravens to attack full-grown chickens, but the pair that we had hanging around were really aggressive and persistent.
And of course it’s illegal to harm them.
So, we had to try and outsmart them.
And as it turns out, Peter and the Crow Away team in Australia have done just that!
Note: This might read like a paid advertisement, but it is not. I’m just a very satisfied customer. 🙂
Crow Away is a soundtrack, about an hour long, that is apparently very unnerving to corvids (crows, ravens).
You can purchase have the product online, download the audio file, and have it up and running in minutes.
We loaded it onto an old mp3 player and set it to play continuously through some old computer speakers set up in our garden shed.
And the Ravens went away.
Seriously.
I was very skeptical at first. I watched carefully for the first few days and kept my little chickens cooped.
When I finally let them back out, I thought perhaps the prospect of baby chicken for dinner might bring them right back.
But it didn’t.
They are still in the area. But they aren’t hanging around our property anymore.
And I’m calling that a victory.
So I just wanted to share this info in case there are other folks out there struggling with Ravens and crows attacking their chickens and or stealing eggs. It’s not something you can do just once, or occasionally. I’ve found that if the soundtrack stops, the ravens return pretty quickly.
But it’s been working great for us for about two months now, and I’m still kind of amazed.
My Blue Heaven
I stayed home this past week.
Didn’t have a real agenda. Just needed a little time to slow down and do homestead type stuff.
And I did.
I picked raspberries and cherries
Weeded in the garden
Trimmed sheep hooves.
Mucked out the sheep shed.
Sat around chatting with sheep and chickens
Washed fleece
Did some yoga.
Listened to a lot of sports talk radio
Baked a cherry pie
Spun
Carded
Spun some more.
Then, I dyed.
And not just some instant gratification koolaid dyeing (that happened earlier in the week).
This time I pulled out the big pot, and started an indigo vat.
Gimme an I!
Ordered more natural indigo powder from Earthues in Seattle
Gimme an N!
Selected and reskeined yarns to be dyed/overdyed
Gimme a D!
Washed up a bunch of Griff’s last fleece
Gimme another I!
Hit the internet for a refresher on the process
Gimme a G!
Assembled all the necessary tools and ingredients (lye, thiox, pH test strips, gelatin, thermometer, big washtub, etc)
Gimme an O!
Dove in and started my stock solution.
It was overcast, so I set up under cover of the breezeway
I had a little bit of a hard time conclusively determining the pH because my test strips kept turning blue, but I used gelatin (because I oculdn’t find hide glue locally) as an additive to the vat to help protect the wool fibers from the alkaline solution. It seems to have worked pretty well, as everything feels like it is still in good condition.
Indigo is a little tricky, but it has the advantage of not requiring a mordant, and the results are aMAzing!
