It's been awhile...

Hey there, folks! It's been a little while since my last post, and I am blaming it all on extreme busy-ness. There has been so much to do around here. I finished canning all of my tomatoes for salsa, picked and thrashed the lettuce seed heads, finished one Christmas-related knitting project, washed and scoured blue-faced leicester fleece as well as half of a fleece of polypay, and started a new knitting project for myself. Among all of that fun stuff that I did, I also wiped myself out with a week-long bout of gastroenteritis from (I am guessing to be) a stomach virus. So yes, I've been very busy.

I am now only working three days a week, which leaves lots of time for doing soul-preserving tasks like baking more, spinning, and knitting.  Boy, have I ever needed it! After a summer of extremely stressful waitress work, the cool weather has brought along the "slow" season and I am finally able to work less. Spinning has brought about a new excitement for me as well:  dyeing! On one of the days that I was feeling moderately well during my sickness, I went out in the rain and collected a huge bucketful of poke berries.  Good thing it was raining too, because my hands were quite the shade of purple when I finished! Tonight I plan on mordanting my washed/scoured polypay fleece and then tomorrow I'll get to dye it.  Michael is currently outside in the dark mashing the poke berries into juice for the dyeing adventure.

I am wishing I had some pictures right about now, because I did a TON of baking and cooking today.  The list consists of:  cinnamon swirl bread, peanut butter pie, shortbread (I swear this list isn't entirely sweets...), cauliflower soup, and a tomato tart. The tomato tart holds the last bit of this year's tomato crop, and I am feeling a little bit down about that. I was also less than thrilled to see how ridiculously puny my leeks were for my cauli soup.  They were probably a centimeter in circumference. Oh well. It was my first year growing leeks (ha, yes, an excuse!).

Well, I am off to start the mordanting process.