A sad day is coming...

I hate to share this because it's so sad but this is one subject i can't really discuss with hubster.

This is my mare "Star". I've had Star for 14 years, she was about 11-12 years old when she came to me, so that makes her about 25-26 years old. In human years that is way over 100, for a horse that is ancient.

Star has carried me many, many hundreds (thousands really)of miles safely over tricky ,rough terrain 8-10 hours a day, 3-4 days a week until 4 years ago. She never missed a step, never misbehaved,took the heat, the rain, the cold without complaining.

Star is old and can't eat her hay anymore because her teeth are wore out.Hay or grass is the main staple for a horse, they need the roughage to keep there digestion going.

I've been feeding her alfalfa cubes soaked in water and she manages to get that down , but never the less she has been loosing weight steadily for month now.I can't feed her too much of that because it is very high in protein which can make her founder(crippling foot disease).

I guess you can see where this is going...

I'm trying to talk myself into doing the right thing, hubster keeps telling me it needs to be done but he does not get attached to any of our pets. i do , very much so. For me they are part of the family, and "pulling the plug " on a family member is one of the hardest things anyone has to do.

I know i owe her a easy, painless,dignified way to the big pasture in the sky, but hell, this is hard!! (crying now...)

I really, really hate this...

I will keep babying her as long as i see she's not suffering but the day will come soon where i have to say goodbye. It'll be a sad day coming....

Moving right along...

finished first towel last night, started on second one this morning.

I switched colors around, now using dark green as main weft with white on white stripes.

I've been trying to figure out why the diamond pattern goes vertical instead of horizontal and finally realized that i mistook "threadling" for " treadling" ( what one little letter can do !).

but, it looks good anyways..

.

maybe i'll make some waffle weave ones next ?!....

Sweet Success

Lookie here:

The pattern isn't centered right in the green vertical stripes but i can't see no mistakes in the pattern so far, WOOHOO!!!

Is it normal for the weft beeing so far appart? there is a lot of daylight between the rows.

i whack it as fast and hard as i can but can't get it to go any denser. will it draw together more when finishing? now THIS is fun ! maybe there will be more towels after all :)

Dish Towel Warping Nightmare

I think i moved into something more advanced a little too soon...

Looking at all these beautiful dishtowels everybody is weaving i thought i might try my luck.

I really liked the ones reluctantdragon was showing off in the shuttle moves ravelry group.

so , i ordered the 8/2 white and green cotton yarn from the Yarn Barn and went at it.

figuring the warp took me a little but went better than i thought.

528 ends... well that's ok, isn't it?just more ends, no problem!

WAS I EVER WRONG!!

sleying the reed was easy, two ends in every slot.

now to the threading...easy too, right? WRONG!!

what a mess, i constantly lost count until i put the threading sequence on a separate piece of paper with a ruler sliding along ,showing me where i am. so im threading along and about 2/3 through i run out of heddles... great!! woolery to the rescue. ordered 100 and to my suprise they got here the very next day! ok! here we go... guess what... run out of heddles again, 36 short. so, again, woolery to the rescue again, and ,again, delivered over night. put the heddles in ,finished the threading...looking goood!!

until i rechecked everything and discovered several mistakes in the sleying and threading.

by now im getting really agravated,(lots of cussing and growling involved, by now hubbster doesnt even ask how its going anymore 'cause of the dirty looks).

so i fix the mistakes (so i thought) which involves undoing all of the threading(all 528 ends) and some of the sleying.

redo everything very carefully trying not to make any more mistakes.

recheck everything , guess what, two more mistakes in the threading, undo about half of it,redo it, surely now everything is right!!

You think??. not so...

discover a crossed warp in the reed and a broken end...

hubbster went outside mumbling something about feeding the fish -liar!! he just fed them 30 minutes ago !!(catch a glimps of him hustling to the pond with a rod)

by this time im a blubbering ,shaking nutcase. just the night before hubbster told me i got the patience of a saint(i wonder if there is a saint for weavers gone nuts?)

well i fix the broken end and uncross the warp... and i'm done!!

i think. i checked everything again and could not find any mistakes, i havent woven enough yet to see if there are any mistakes in the pattern, if there are.... they"ll %&^$#@% stay there !!!










There will be no more dish towels for awhile , at least until that nervous tick in my right eye is gone and my hands quit shaking !!




Thank you , http://dustbunniesundermyloom.blogspot.com/ for nominating me:





Passing on to:
Dorothy of http://fibre2fabric.blogspot.com/
http://kitkatknit.wordpress.com/
Jeanne of http://knittybanter.blogspot.com/
Melissa of http://melissascrochet.blogspot.com/
http://shuttlemoves.com/blog1.php
Dave of http://handweavingtoday.com/
Susan of http://weeverwoman.blogspot.com/

I'm one short but will post my eight nomination shortly

Guess what we got in the back yard....

Well, for the last four years we had a hawk couple raise theyre young in a big tree in our back yard.
Usually around this time of year there is a lot of screetching,chasing,courtshipping going on.
I haven't seen nor heard any of them since middle of last week.
I know that they had started building on the nest and sitting in it two weeks ago.
So i got my binoculars and checked on the nest and guess what was looking right back at me :


can you see her ? a big barn owl !!! That's going to be interesting to watch the young ones once they hatch ! I'll post pic's of them if i can get some...

HAHA!!! WE GOT SNOW!!!

I love snow!! Everything looks so clean and pure with a layer of fresh snow on it.

So when they started talking about snow showers at the beginning of last week for the weekend i got all exited (so did hubster, he loves it even more).

As the week progressed it went from hit and miss snow showers with no accumulation to a full blown snow storm ! I kept my tv tuned to the weather channel all day saturday, watching the radar showing the snow getting closer and closer. By 4pm we had a winter weather warning . ALL RIGHT!!

It was supposed to hit our area sometime around midnight.

I didn't want to miss it so i stayed up (hubster went to bed about 10:30, i guess he doesn't love it that much !!)

Well it got 11:00 and 12:00 and 12:30 and the next thing i knew i woke up at 2 am ,looked out the window , NOTHING!!

So i went to bed too.

But when we got up in the morning we saw this:

YIHAWWW!! PLAYTIME!! We took our fourwheeldrive truck and went sight seeing.We got down the mountain without a problem ,on the highway to town we saw several vehicles in the ditch, one of them was even rolled over on its back !

Why can't people slow down??

The ducks weren't impressed at all:

but the stupid chickens did not come out of they're tree until late afternoon :

we had a good time ,it's all gone now and we are looking forward to spring (my most favorite time of the year :)