Farm Fresh Textiles

The second bunch of ribbons turned out just as nummy as the first …

The color is wonky and uneven on the green again.  This time I’m not sure why.  Perhaps I am green silk jinxed.  Oh well.  I like it anyway.  I like them all, in fact.  The deep teal is probably my favorite, though it’s hard not to love the purples best.

And I also did a couple of multi-colored lengths this time.  Had a bit too much resist and ended up with more white than I wanted, but they are interesting anyway:

The pink and yellow reminds me of a rose past it’s prime.  The blue, purple and green looks like my hyacinth bush.  Both bunches got squished in the bottom of a bag all weekend, so they are looking more rumpled than they should.

The boys and  I spent Friday-Sunday at the farm.  Saturday I drove up to Bonners Ferry, Idaho, with my oldest niece Ashley. We were going to visit my log house.  The log shell is being built by the folks at Caribou Creek Log Homes.  It takes about two hours to get from the north end of Spokane to Bonners Ferry, and you have to go through Sandpoint, Idaho, to get there.  Besides having lots of interesting little shops and a very cool covered bridge that’s been turned into a shopping area, Sandpoint is the home of Coldwater Creek.  I’m always astonished and a bit disappointed to not see my picture over their door as one of the principal supporters of the company.  Hah.

We saved wandering around Sandpoint for the trip home and headed straight for Bonners Ferry.  It was lunch time when we arrived in town, so we stopped for pizza before heading to the log yard.  Once fortified, we drove out of town and across the bridge and up the long steep hill and turned off near the top onto the side road for the log yard and drove up to the gate and … the gate was padlocked.  We drove by a couple of times to see if we could see anyone back near the office or in the yard.  Nope.  We pulled up to the gate and waited a few minutes.  We could see my house.  We just couldn’t get to it.  So we took a couple of pictures from the road.

Looks nice through the fence, doesn’t it.  It’s halfway done at the moment - the second floor is yet to go up.  The side we are looking at here is the kitchen and entry (the entry is on the right and is cut out of the square at a diagonal).

That wasn’t very satisfying, so we tried a slightly different angle:

This one is harder to decipher.  We’re still looking mainly at the kitchen side of the house.  The little window on the far left is for the master bedroom.  The big opening in the middle is where there is a big bump out about 14 feet deep that will have windows that span both the first and second floor as well as thee fireplace and chimney.  To the right of the big opening is the opening for a sliding glass door that will lead from the breakfast bar to the deck.

It was a bit frustrating to be so close and not any closer.  An unnamed co-conspirator agreed to climb through the fence and see if she could find someone in the office.  Off she went to knock on doors and peek in windows.  Still couldn’t find anyone (and yes, I did ask before hand if someone would be around on that day so we could see the house).  So I handed the unnamed co-conspirator Ashley’s camera (I forgot mine, which should have been a sign of something) and she went to take some closer up pictures.  Hey, the sign said “employees only”, but it didn’t say “no trespassing”.  I’m sure my co-conspirator imagined she worked there while taking the pictures.  I would have joined her but my spine still is not happy with me and doesn’t bend and twist on command for things like climbing through fences.

So here is a clearer shot of the kitchen side of things.  There’s the opening for the sliding glass door, the two windows (which will be bigger when the structure is finished) from which there will be a killer sunset view, and at the far left, the opening where the big windows will go.

This is inside looking at part of the kitchen area.  The bigger of the two windows will have the sink centered under it. This is to honor at least two of the women in my family.  The new kitchen faces in the same direction as the window at the old house, where I spent many afternoons and evenings helping my grandmother do dishes.  She said she never minded doing dishes because the view was so pretty.  She also told me her mother once claimed to have come for a visit just so she could watch the sunset while doing dishes.  And yes, the new house will have a dishwasher. So that I can load it and then go sit on the deck and watch the sunset!

Here’s another view of the front of the house:

There’s the big opening in the middle for the area that projects out in front of the house.  Dead center will be the chimney, and then two sets of windows are on either side, creating a sort of hexagonal (actually, half of a 12-sided shape now that I stop and count) area that adds a lot of square footage to the house. The windows on one side of the chimney will have a view of Mt. Spokane. The windows on the other side of the chimney will have a view of a big field and pasture as well as a view of part of the sunset.  The master suite is most of the left wing of the house, behind where the smaller window on the left front is.  Straight back you can see the back door, which leads from a powder room/changing room to the outside where eventually there will be a pool.  Someday.  The entry is in the back right corner.  Yes, the entry and the back door are on the same side of the house.  You’ll just have to deal with it.

Here’s the back of the house from the inside (most of it anyway):

The entry is on the far right where the logs end.  The little window to the right of the door is on the stairway to the upstairs.  The window to the left of the doorway is the laundry room.  And that last window waaaay over on the left is the master closet.

Yes there’s a window in the master closet.  It will have a lovely view of the quonset barn.  Because closet windows don’t need great views.  And just in case you need to see it close up, my co-conspirator took a picture just of the closet area:

Actually this is only the closet about up to where that vertical piece of wood is.  To the right of that is the laundry room.

I like this picture of the front and east corner of the building:

This is the master bedroom area. The opening on the left is for French doors that will lead out onto a small deck where the hot tub is.  The view from the smaller window on the right will be of Mt. Spokane.  The view from the doors will be across my wheat fields up toward the foothills of Mt. Spokane.

Here’s almost the same view from the opposite side of the walls:

There will be an adobe-style fireplace in this corner.

To give you an idea of dimensions, the back is 50 feet long (the front too, but it’s even harder to imagine with the big hole there now.  The sides are about 30 feet long.  And the windowed roundish room sticks out an additional 14 feet or so from the front wall, so the center of the house is 44 feet instead of 30 like the sides. It doesn’t look that big in the pictures.  I remember thinking the shells I toured when I was looking for a builder all looked a lot smaller than they actually were.  Dunno why that is, except that perhaps the log size and the open sky combine to create an interesting optical illusion.

I thanked the co-conspirator and retrieved the camera.  Ashley and I set out for home. We stopped in Sandpoint on the way and did a walk through of part of the main part of town.  I took her out to the covered bridge where we admired the view and wandered through a couple of the shops.  And, of course, I did not escape the dangers of Coldwater Creek this trip either.  It wasn’t too expensive.  Couldn’t be since all my money is now tied up in building the house. 

We did not buy any yarn or fabric.  I walked through Pedro’s on the Bridge, which I thought was supposed to be a yarn store from ads I’d seen somewhere.  They did have some yarn.  But mostly they have finished clothing.  And all of it looked itchy.  I didn’t touch to confirm.  All the labels indicated itchiness, so I didn’t spend much time there.

So that was Ashley and my fine adventure for the weekend.  That sounds like bad grammar, but I think it isn’t.  Maybe.  Anyway. It was an excellent adventure even if I didn’t get to touch the logs myself.  Close, but not quite.  And no, of course I have no idea who might have taken the above pictures.  I wasn’t there, was I?  Shoot, it’s hell getting old and losing your memory.

I put in a bunch more of the silk ribbon tonight.  The first batch turned out really pretty, except for some air bubbles I apparently left in the green, which made it look funky.

Here they are drying:

The colors dried deeper and brighter than they look here.  You can kind of see already that the green didn’t turn out quite right - see the light spots on the green ribbon in the middle back?

I don’t much like the bias ribbons.  They are fabric that’s been cut into strips.  The silk satin frays a lot, which is okay for some embellishing effects, but I don’t really like the look.  So no more of that one.  The bias habotai doesn’t fray much at all, but like the silk satin, it has seams every 40-some inches.  The thread used to sew the fabric isn’t silk.  Might be poly or cotton.  So it stayed white since I died these with vinegar and heat. 

I decided to play with both of those, so I tied all the bias silk satin together to make one long ribbon and did the same with the bias habotai.  Then I crocheted them.  The silk satin turned out to be a ruffled candle coaster or something:

I should put a super crappy pic warning with this and the next photo.  I was lazy and just dropped them on the floor and took flash pictures with them.  The camera really didn’t like the lighting so refused to focus quite right.  The fraying edges on the ribbon didn’t help with the focus problem either.  But you get the idea.

The other is something else.  I’ll tell you when it’s finished and give a quick pattern for it.  Right now it’s a lovely silk ribbon rectangle:

The edges here are much cleaner - this one was done with the bias habotai.

Tonight I did some space dyeing (which I hate, by the way - I much prefer painting or even dip dyeing) and some more tonal solids in more random colors.  I only got about half done before I had to quit for the night.  Tomorrow I’ll do the rest and nuke everything.  I did a couple of 20 yard lengths of the bias ribbons just to get through them, and then solid tonals so far for the woven ribbons.  The woven ribbons are all in 3 yard lengths.

And the woven ribbons from the first batch are still hanging on the double towel rack in the bathroom.  I really like them. They’ve been bone dry for a couple of days now, but they look really pretty sitting there.  I like having random color scattered around the house.

Does anyone have any good links for learning silk ribbon embroidery?  I haven’t ever tried that, but these silk ribbons are giving me Ideas.

Gotta get some sleep.  I have to bathe the mud monsters tomorrow night.  Dunno if I can do them both in one night.  They are really muddy because they ave been digging moles out of the yard again.  Dandy needs to be clean for his vet appointment Thursday morning.  I discovered some sort of a mass on one of his front legs yesterday.  My fingers are crossed that it’s just a fatty mass.  Fingers and toes and if I could figure out how to cross my nose too …

Another quick note tonight - trying to stay away from the computer except for brief stints as my back is still unhappy after last week’s cortisone shot.

I was bored last night after spending some time on ice staring at the ceiling, so I pulled out the ribbon I ordered from Dharma a couple of weeks ago.  There was a spool of bias cut habotai, one of bias cut silk satin, and woven silk in 4mm and 7mm.  I chopped three-yard lengths of each into 6 piles and soaked each pile in vinegar.  While those were soaking I mixed up some purple, orange, and green dye, and diluted three primaries.

Tonight I’ve steamed them in the microwave and they are soaking in rinse water at the moment.  The color is deep and rich on all of them - I did not measure the dyes and so all are oversaturated and I’m getting a lot of run off. 

I think they are going to be gorgeous.  The color has changed almost not at all from when they were in the dye except the green which had a small air bubble problem or something.  If I end up dyeing as much silk ribbon as I dye yarn, it’s all Diane’s fault.

Yeah, I know, it’s about dang time. 

I finally got some of the Tencel mini skeins for embellishment back up on the web site. 

This is my current favorite color, Marigold:

Lemon and gold and sunflower, oh my!

There are just 5 colors of 10/2 and 2 of 5/2 up at the moment.  I’ll be adding more over the next couple of days.

I lost count somewhere along the way, but the current count is somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 pairs of bamboo socks dyed since last Wednesday.  Most of those in the last two days. 

It probably wasn’t much of a stretch to come up with a name for a line of socks as I put these out to batch for another couple of hours in the sunshine this morning …

Toe Jam Bamboo Sock Preserves!

I like this batch even better than the few I did a couple of days ago.  Which is good since there were 25+ pairs in this batch.  The patterning is better and more consistent on all of these.  On the off chance they ever get dry, I’ll be able to get some pictures. That’s the only drawback I can find with bamboo anything is that the fiber does not like to give up moisture so it takes forever and a day to get things dry.

We’ve had perfect dyeing weather here the last few days.  In the upper 70s and low 80s during the day, with nice cool nights when I can tuck the batching socks into a warm corner to keep their temp up over 72.  It’s been dry enough that the grass isn’t growing, though I haven’t noticed the weeds following suit.

Don’t the socks look nummy in their batching jars?  I like using canning jars - an old trick from Vimala McClure in an article she wrote years ago for American Quilter.  She also talks about using canning jars in her book Fabric Dyeing for Beginners, I think.  I like them because you can get terrific patterning on small fabric pieces or clothing items, and best of all, if you have the lids on correctly They Don’t Leak.  While the fabrics are batching I can wander by and flip the jars over every hour or so and keep any part of them from drying out in the sunshine.

I have to pause here and run down to the dryer and see if any of these puppies are dry yet …

Ohhhhh, they are!  Look! No, wait!  Put the sunglasses on first.  Now look!

Women’s size 9-11 for that pair. 

And I adore there itty bitty kidlet sizes.  The patterning in these is almost like teal camo.

I haven’t got any of these up on the website or in the etsy store yet.  I also have a bunch of Tencel mini-skeins that need to get up on the site.  I just need to get Photoshop Elements loaded on this computer so that I can get the file sizes down.  The Vista photo editing stuff works well and is simple, but I haven’t yet found the way to get the files sizes down as much as I’d like them to be.

Too busy dyeing socks, I guess.

I also got a lot of reading done this weekend.  Between noon Monday and bedtime Saturday night, I read 3, yes 3, J.A. Jance novels.  I’m not sure how I missed her Joanna Brady series, but I did.  So I’m making my way through them.  I managed to find the first five or six of them at Half-Price Books in downtown Redmond.  Number 4, Dead to Right, is sitting here waiting for me to get back to it.  Just have to remember that I have to work in the morning, so I can’t stay up all night reading.

The dogs have been enjoying the sunshine this weekend too.  I’ve been leaving the back door open while I dye in the kitchen and they tromp in and out at whim.  And then come in so tired that they wrestle from a prone position, which is silly to watch.  It starts like this, with each scootching around on his back making snorting noises …

That’s Sam on the left and Dandy on the right. 

And then they start trying to wrestle without either being on top:

As you can see, perhaps not the most successful method of greco-canine wrestling. I does, however, make for an awfully funny floor show.  Pun intended.

They kind of look like they are singing some aria in that last one.  There may indeed have been a small bit of howling going on.

I’m having fun this week with a big box of clothing blanks I bought from Dharma.  Among many other things are some bamboo socks I bought to dye.

I’m sharing just a couple of pics tonight as I’m about to fall asleep.  If it looks like my nose is typing, it probably is.

My favorites are the little size 4 children’s socks.  They are so little and cute:

And I realized as I was cleaning up the photos that I really need to clean the lens on the camera.  Eesh.  And I probably should have warned you to put your sunglasses on for that one.

At the other extreme - or almost as there is one size larger - bamboo socks for big people too:

They are soooo soft.  Gotta love bamboo. 

For anyone wondering where the Washington State fires are in relation to the family farm, the short answer is that so far they are far enough away I’m not worried.  The longer answer is that the closest is about ten miles south of the farm on the other side of the Spokane River, with lots of the city of Spokane Valley and lots and lots of houses is where the Dishman Hills fire is located.  Yes, we need to be careful.  the wheatfields are probably still green enough that they would be touch to burn for another week or two.  Farmers in Central Washington where there are much larger fires aren’t so lucky.  Their crops tend to be at least two weeks ahead of us, and much drier, and it’s windier.  The worst part about the fires in Washington may be that many firefighters were brought home from where they’d been helping with the California fires. 

If you are so inclined, please say a prayer or send good thoughts to the men and women on the firelines in the west and all the folks supporting them.  They need all the help and support they can get.

Well, I had written another post after QSDS wrapped up, but apparently I just saved it to the draft folder instead of posting it.  Which is fine, because I couldn’t get any pictures posted at the time. 

So, let’s make up for lost time, shall we?

I’ve had a very eventful weekend of napping, rearranging the kitchen, napping, and working on my sample book from Carol Soderlund’s Color Mixing for Dyers class.  And napping.  Oh, and somewhere in there I finally wrote my performance review for the day job. Friday was an especially busy day as the napping was superceded by a small birthday party for my niece Cydnee, the firecracker in the family.  My sister had planned to have a picnic in the park, but the weather reports weren’t too promising, so we had a picnic in my livingroom instead.  It was nice to have a few people over and try out the new open layout.  The remodelling isn’t quite done, but the new kitchen island is in and functioning.  It nearly doubles the space in the kitchen and makes it feel bigger.  And not having the wall between the livingroom and the kitchen/dining area makes the whole house look and feel bigger.

One of my presents for Miss Cydnee was hand-dyed t-shirts.  The orange one turned out great:

(That’s my youngest sister Ally in the background).

The other shirt wasn’t as successful and I’ll be overdyeing it to get more purple:

It’s actually not bad, but she and I both decided it need to be more purple.  So more purple it will be.  I also did a couple of shirts for her brother, Noan the wonderboy, whose birthday was the last day of June.  One of those needs to be more blue, so I see a trend developing.  I need to toss one of my hand-dyed shirts in for overdyeing too, so I’ll have some fun later this week.  Oh, and I should be getting huge order from Dharma tomorrow.  Presents!  I made the mistake of going online to order a couple of things and then picked out enough for several birthdays, baby showers, and part of Christmas for the whole family.  Yeesh.  And then I tossed in a few things to put in the store.  Usually I manage to talk myself out of that many clothing blanks, but somehow my credit card got involved and it was all on its way here before I knew what had happened.  I’m sticking with that story, thank you very much.

Just before I sat down at the computer tonight, I put the last page of the second set of color samples into “The Book” from the Color Mixing class.  The Book holds the secrets of all things to turn yourself and your fiber - cotton that is - any of 1029 different colors.  I have just one set of colors left to tape down onto their sheets and then I’ll have no excuses not to pull out the dyes and change the color of everything I own.  I’ve been trying to choose a new wall color for the livingroom for several months now, and think I might have found just the one somewhere in the Basics pages.  Now if I can only remember which one.

Here’s my board from the class at QSDS:

See the frog in the top fabric?  Or is it a fox?  It keeps changing for me.  That’s only about a third of the yarn that I dyed - a bunch of the Tencel skeins never made it up.  I did a four-step color gradation cube with two yarns - one a mercerized Pima cotton and the other Tencel.  Or rather I did most of the gradation for those two.  I knew I didn’t have quite enough of the cotton, but I just plain couldn’t count when I was making the labels for the Tencel, so I’m missing about 16 samples of those too.  One of these days I’ll get back to that.  I actually should try it with each of the yarns I have.  One of the best things was figuring out how to deal with those yarns that are “natural” colored.  That means they are unbleached and could be anything from almost white to very tannish yellow as was the soy ribbon yarn I experimented with.  I need to do more skeins of that with some other colors to make sure I have the whole compensation thing figured out.

One of my favorite pieces of fabric from the week was this stained glass effect by Joyce Haggenhoff, one of my tablemates.  My camera didn’t catch the vibrancy of the colors as well as it should have, but you can get the idea:

You can probably also tell the wind was blowing a bit.  We had the most … er … interesting weather for the week.  Multiple thunderstorms most days, usually severe.  We hada tornado warning one night.  One was plenty thank you.  Lots of wind.  Tons of humidity.  Lots of rain during the storms.  My skin has never been so well moisturized!

I love this picture too of the fabric drying on the line in the wind:

I have just a few pictures of other people’s boards too.  Mostly those of us in the “Bright” group (we were split into groups for dyeing the samples - Brights, Basics, and Earthtones).  The range of experience with dyeing was very varied in the class.  Everything from one woman who had never dyed before to others who teach dyeing classes to those who dye lots of fabric for themselves to those with online stores. 

Since I already showed one of Joyce’s fabric samples, here’s her board:

Fluorescent lights suck and I wasn’t getting great pics because my camera batteries were low for some of these.  These fabrics were richer than this.

Roxane Lessa was the woman who’d never dyed before.  I think she might be hooked now:

She got some great patterning in her parfait’s and I think it’s cool she got some lighter hues as well.  That’s always a big challenge for me.

I wanted all the fabrics on Donna MacDonald’s board, eh?  Donna was our resident Canadian and turned out some cool stuff as well:

love the pattern and the symmetry and th overall colors in her pieces.

Sandy Fettig, another tablemate, started with the same idea I did to get out of her color comfort zone.  I think she did fine, don’t you?

The dark piece on the top right she did using a sew/tied resist.  It turned out very subtly neat.

The last of the Bright chicks, but not at all the least (hey, we Eastern Washington girls have to stick together!), is Linda Cole. 

I really loved the way her overdyed piece on the lower right turned out.  She got some neat color separateion and patterning.  Even the sunspots add to the piece, I think.

And in closing, lest anyone think I’m kidding about having spent the weekend working on my sample book, here are a few pictures to prove I at least pulled out the envelopes and set some up for a photo op:

No, wait, this is the perfect last picture.  My favorite from the class - Carol and several of the students stirring a shibori pole dye pot:

That’s Joyce on the left with Donna next to her.  Carol is hiding in the middle.  I can’t tell who is in the background on the right, but the woman with her back to the camera is Sherryl Buchler, another of my tablemates.

Preparation is well under way for my trip to Ohio Friday where I’ll be attending the Quilt Surface Design Symposium.  I’m taking Carol Soderlund’s much-raved-about class Color Mixing for Dyers.  This is a 7-day class with more personal project time as well as more class project time than the usual 5-day class.  I’m looking forward to coming home with a good recipe book for colors, learning some new techniques, and having a good time.  And, as I realized Sunday night quite late, selling some yarn (knock wood) at the Tuesday mini-bazaar.  Which means I needed things to sell.  Which meant scrambling to get them together.  Yikes.

I’ve been spending the last few nights skeining big skeins into little skeins and last night had a small “skein and label” party.  My sister Bekki (with nephew Nolan and niece Cydnee in tow), best friend Joanne, and Mav friend Diane all came over for snacks and a work party.  They labeled all the skeins I’d already done, I did a bunch of new skeins and showed Bekki how to do the mini Tencel skeins.  We got a ton of stuff finished and there’s more to do, mostly of the little Tencel skeins. 

This is actually the skeining station AFTER I finished for the night and moved the components … and the piles … around.  I’e been using the skein winder, sans motor to pull the yarn off and winding onto the swift.  There’s also a glimpse of one of the bags from Staples where I did the pre-class raid over the weekend.  I was hoping to buy all that kind of stuff when I got there, but forgot that when I made my flight arrangements.  So instead of taking the red-eye and giving myself Friday to gather supplies, I booked a flight that gets in at 6:15 Friday evening.  And class starts at 9am the next morning. Oops.  So I’m packing more than I’d hoped. 

Here’s a much neater view of the evening’s accomplishments:

The white skeins in the middle are a bunch of undyed yarn sample skeins that I’m taking to dye during my personal project time.  I have some PDF sateen I’ll pack as well, but I really want to get some serious yarn sampling done instead of the more hit and miss sampling I’ve done in the past.  The yarns to sample include Tencel (which is a little extraneous because I have dozens of colors already, but this should help me get more reliable reproductions of colors), bamboo from SWTC, bamboo/silk and bamboo/cotton blends, some SWTC Oasis soy ribbon yarn (this is a tan-ish colored natural yarn that changes my colors to mud some times so I want to be able to get better, more consistent colors), a mercerized cotton, and … and I can’t remember what else.  I made the skeins large enough so that if others want samples I can simly tie a knot every so many inches snip in between and each person will then have a tassle-like bit of yarn to take home.  I have a couple more natural colored yarns I’m hoping to get time to make samples up, but if not, these should keep me busy.  I’ll be taking the swift and a couple of cones with me in case I have time in the evenings to add to the pile.

I’m also taking some of the Mali fabrics that Diane is selling for the Hèrè jè Center through her online shop Quilter’s Threads.  She brought a bin over last night and I pulled out about half of them.  I think I can get this many in my suitcase alongside all the thread/yarn for the bazaar.  I had, until I cleaned out the kitchen for the party, one of the postcards with the stories about Fabric of Life and the girls at the school.  It has disappeared now of course.  I think I can get something from Carol Shiller, the founder of the project, that will be printable so there is info on the table at the bazaar.  All the proceeds for back to the foundation.  Diane doesn’t keep her usual cut and I’m not keeping anything either.  If you want to see some more close up pictures of the fabrics, go to Quilter’s Threads or see the pics in this blog entry from March.

If you are in the vacinity of the Plaza Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday, June 24, drop in and visit me in the mini-bazaar.  I’m sure there will be lots of other tempting items there as well.  I’ll have mostly mini-skeins of yarns and threads for embellishing.  There will be a few larger skeins for those who have a knitting jones in the middle of a quilt design conference too

And no, I don’t mean I bathed the dogs in the new toilet.  Let’s just get that one out of the way up front, shall we?

It’s probably some sad statement on my lack of having a life that I am so terrifically excited by this sight:

Isn’t it lovely?  It my new toilet.  It’s installed and I’ve done all necessary flight testing.  And there is no stair climbing involved to get to it from the bedroom in the dead of night.  I’m a simple woman.  Little things like working plumbing nearby please me greatly.  Kind of gives the phrase “worshipping porcelaine” a whole new and less awful meaning.

Today when I came home the new countertop was installed as well.  It’s Paperstone.  Along with the water efficient toilet, that makes me feel very smugly green about the new bathroom.  It’s a lovely dark brown color called Mocha.  Well, here, see for yourself:

I didn’t begin with this idea in mind, but the bathroom is coming out looking quite Tuscan.  I really like it.  It’s supposed to be all done by Friday afternoon.  Can’t wait.  Hmm, wonder if done means the towel bars and all will be up too.  Hope so. 

Speaking of new things, Sammy looks like a new dog after his grooming yesterday.  He’s acting, on the other hand, like a complete nutcase.

His face and head aren’t quite right, but he wouldn’t sit still for the groomer.  Sam’s hair grows really fast.  He looks to me like a little Frenchman off to the boulangerie to get a baguette.  All he needs is a beret.  He is very unhappy.  He skitters everywhere instead of walking or running normally.  You see, Sammy has butt issues.  As in, he is extroardinarily sensitive to having his shaved or examined.  And his was shaved.  It’s not especially closely shaved, I don’t think, but apparently he does.  There’s no redness and it’s not even particularly pink, which I keep explaining to him.  He’s not listening.  So he skitters.  And he is pretty twitchy.  While I’d like him to get over it very soon, I’d also like it to last at least long enough for the holistic vet to see this behavior next Tuesday.  No, I’d like him to get over it.  He’s even having trouble eating because it means letting his butt be up in the air a bit and mostly unguarded.  That’s my Sammy.  Squirrelly through and through.

I’m scratching my head on how I can help him be less stressed by grooming.  He doesn’t have the same foibles when I groom him as he does when the groomer does.  For instance, Sam doesn’t mind when I clip his toenails, but he nips and screams when the groomer does.  So the groomer suggested I play with his feet more.  Sam’s fine with me playing with his feet.  It’s not his favorite thing, but he allows it and shakes hands and all.  I think I’ll have to hand the groomer the jar of peanut butter next time - that’s my trick for clipping his toenails without nipping and screaming.  I slather peanut butter onto something and Sam licks at it while I do the nails.  Keeps him still and preoccupied.  And he doesn’t like the groomer working on his face.  But the way I do it, he doesn’t seem too bothered by it.  On the other hand, Sam will not allow me to clip or really even brush his belly.  He nips and gets very upset.  The groomer said he didn’t have any problems with that. 

Sam is such a funny little guy.  I don’t know how much of his weird behavior is breeding and how much is how he was treated by his original owner.  Both the vets and a behaviorist (and me) suspect some abuse.  But it’s not likely we’ll ever know how much is attributable to that. He’s a snuggler and spends most of his time either on the back of the couch right behind my head or curled up and tucked in tightly against my side.  He’s completely confused about whether he wants to be dominant or submissive - he’ll hump Dandy trying to dominate him, and then turn around and groom him, which is submissive.  And he barks like a girl.  He’s skittish with loud noises and sudden movements, but fireworks around the 4th of July and thunderstorms don’t bother him at all. 

But he’s soft and he smells good.  I love clean puppies. 

Something is making both the boys itchy.  Not to the point of hotspots like Simi used to get, but itchy.  Sam wasn’t until tonight.  I think it’s something they are getting into in the yard, but no idea what. 

We spent the weekend at the farm in Mead.  There is finally power again.  The main part of the new road for the new house is in.  And Friday they did the perc tests for the septic system.  There goes another limb.  Between the amount of wheat field they tore up to do the test, the size the septic field is going to have be, and the cost of the rest of the system, I’m fairly certain this is going to take at least one limb, possibly three to pay for.

Shall I tell the contractor how much the destroyed portion of the wheat field is going to cost?  Because between the current high price of wheat, and the way the holes are dug, nothing between or around them is going to be harvestable.  It would have been great if he’d marked the work area before the wheat was planted.  Then we wouldn’t have wasted the money planting that area. There are at least 5 holes out there by the way, possibly six, I’ve forgotten.  One or two can hardly be seen at the far right behind the edge of the hill.  Ah well, it will be a septic field with a lovely view.

The grass around the house and barns, my brother Rod said, was up to his waist when he went out to mow the day before the dogs and I went over.  He’s 6′1″, so that’s pretty deep.  I don’t know why it never dawned on me that the grass would be growing there too. But it didn’t.  So I spent the weekend mowing between wind storms and rain drops.  The plan on Saturday was to take the morning off and watch my nephew Mateo play T-ball, but it poured all day long and his games were cancelled (as was the yard work).  I was thinking I’d go over the weekend between this one and the one when I leave for QSDS, but, um, there is no weekend between those two weekends.  So I may not get to see him play, unless they are still going around the 4th of July.

And by then the grass may be waist high again.  I’m going to have to start bribing my sister Susan to take nephew Bobby out and let him mow.  But only if the contractor and his guys start cleaning up a bit better.  We found wire and stuff they’d dug up all through the grass.  Some after it got mowed. 

But hey, I have a new toilet.  And it’s upstairs.  And the dogs are clean.  And for the first day this week, I don’t have to be up tomorrow at an unnaturally early hour. 

Again, one thing before I forget.  I forgot to mention that if you leave anonymous comments, you need to send me your email if you want me to contact you about yarn testing. 

So yes, it’s been 12 days since my last blog entry. Things have been a little busy.  And no, the bathroom still isn’t done.  Part of that’s my fault.  I wasn’t able to tile last week end.  Did get the painting done but between that and mowing (probably more the mowing), my back said Enough! when I started carrying the tiles upstairs.  Seemed like a good idea to listen since one foot was numb and the pain level had climbed well beyond the comfort level. 

Also, I did a really dumb thing.  I asked the contractor if he’d give me a bid on the part of the fence the dogs had decided to rip rotting boards out of.  Since the dogs don’t like the neighbor dogs, that’s kind of a bad thing.  I’d been able to fix the fence until week before last when they found a really rotten place and I couldn’t find anything anywhere near it to screw into to secure the boards.  I compounded the mistake of asking for the estimate by telling him that his number was fine and it was about what I expected.  I apparently didn’t make it clear that I also expected to have the bathroom done someday soon.  Preferably before any other work.

So, I have a new fence and gate on one side of the house.  And no upstairs bathroom. I do so love trekking downstairs in the dead of night to use the facilities.

Anyway.  I did get the room tiled this weekend. Not grouted, but tiled.  And okay, there are three tiles missing (well, four, but I did get that cut out, and just forgot to put it in the corner before I got most of the way our of the room.

Yes, those are 18 inch tiles.  It took me two days to do this little room.  Those buggers are HEAVY.  This part of the room was pretty easy, except for the cuts at the two doors.  You’ll notice two of the missing tiles are around that door at the back.  That’s because I cut them so completely wrong and I was soooo tired and had already had to recut one of the tiles by the vent because I knocked it over and it shattered on the concrete garage floor just as I was thinking I had all the cuts done.  It was kida the last straw.  Dan will have to finish it and do the grouting. 

I really should be out in the hot tub recovering.  I’m not sure I can walk down and back up the stairs one more time.  So I’ll continue to procrastinate a bit more.

Dan did get the new lights up, which helped a lot since it was terrifically grey and dark allday today.  Not much rain if any, but grey grey grey. 

There’s actually two of these fixtures.  And a new can light (pardon the unintentional pun down in the end of the room where the toilet is.  Lots of lighting.  And working power outlets for the first time in a few years - the one badly placed outlet that wasin there died a few years ago.  Because the outlet on the deck was shorting out and tripping the circuit breaking.  Don’t ask why the bathroom outlet and the outside outlet were on the same circuit.  It’s just the way the house was built.

So, I’m mostly dead and broken, but the room is mostly tiled. Just don’t look at the crappy spacing I did over around the toilet.  I don’t plan to look down while I’m on the throne. The toilet, by the way, is locaked at the back of the room to the left, tucked out of sight from the door.  Or mostly.

When there’s a toilet there anyway.

The dogs are disappointed too. They’d much rather that I had a finished bathroom than they had an escape-proof (knock wood) fence.

And never mind the pop-tart tiles around the shower.  I have plans for those too. Not any time soon, but I do have plans for them.  They are going to be resurfaced. Someday.