The Rural Life

Every year our small community has a Rural Life Festival sponsored by the United Methodist Church.

The focus is to celebrate our farm life heritage through demonstrations of traditional skills.  This is a community unifying event, with people of different faiths and ways of living working together to share their knowledge.  Old time farming methods, sheep shearing, herding with dogs, milking a cow, making butter and homemade bread, spinning, quilting, and woodworking were domonstrated.

So park your buggy in a shady place before the parking lot gets full, and let's see what's going on!

This is the McCormick reaper.  Maybe you remember from school that Cyrus McCormick invented this machine way back when and revolutionized the cutting of grain.  Before the reaper, all grain had to be cut by hand with a scythe.

Making the final adjestments before taking to the field.

The grain then needs to be gathered onto the wagon and hauled in to be threshed.  The men are preparing to hitch the horses to the wagon.



And off to the field we go.

Next is the plowing demonstration.  Three different types of plows were demonstrated:  the horse drawn, the tractor with iron sheels and the tractor with rubber tires.  All were equally effective.

Snazzy machine!!!

While the men are working away in the field, the women are baking bread in the oven of the cookstove, doing the milking and making butter.

The bread table was quite popular. 

No electricity or gas with this stove.  Your fuel is right there in the bucket!  Thank goodness there was a nice breeze blowing.  It gets awfully hot working with a woodstove.

The Amish men and women are preparing chicken to put on their large portable grill.  Zip says it's some of his favorite barbequed chicken.

Zip was my roving reporter for the day.  He didn't get pictures of the milking or sheep shearing. 
He liked the alpaccas!

And the working sheep dogs.  These guys are amazing!!!  They are so intensely focused on their task.

He listens to whistles and watches the body language of the shepherd while keeping his eye on the sheep at the same time!

After the sheep are sheared, the wool is cleaned and the spinners take over.

These women are members of the South Cumberland Fiber Guild which meets at the Shippensburg Public Library the 3rd Saturday of the month.  They are all very good spinners, some are knitters and weavers also.

Check out all the different styles of spinning wheel.  Oh, would anyone like a bottle of water???

This is Jim, a long-time friend and expert traditional cabinetmaker.  He made the lovely child's high chair to the right.

Here is his beautiful table with a few smaller items on display.  The little wooden boxes have tiny carved animals knobs on their lids. 

 Rides in horse drawn and tractor pulled wagons were offered.  There didn't seem to be empty seats!

It's been a long day!  Come on, Zip, hitch up the buggy.  Let's head home.

Road Trip!!!

Early Friday morning Zip and I headed up the east side of the Susquehanna River to the Millersburg area.  The day started out being cloudy, but the sun came out shortly before lunch time.  It was still COLD and WINDY!

I just love the drive up the river on route 147!  It's a small quiet two-lane highway, with these beautiful old sycamore trees on each side of the road for miles.  They were planted after the Great War (WW1) to commemorate the men who were lost in battle.

The views of the river at this time of the year are rather dreary, because the hills on the opposite banks are still brown.  Once everything turns green, it's lovely.  The Susquehanna is a large flat river.  Many places it seems like you could almost wade across.  Yesterday the water was high and rapidly flowing.

We stopped in Halifax to have breakfast at Denny's Lennie's.  Corny name!!!  And from the outside it looks like a dive!  But the food is great and the portions are very generous.  And each time we have stopped there the waitresses are super nice.  I had a french toast panini which was stuffed with thin sliced ham, cream cheese and pineapple.  Delish!!!  Zip had the standard eggs over easy, bacon and really good homefries.  Then there are the desserts!  The have a list of the most scrumptious stuff ever.  We got those to go!  If you are in Halifax, check it out.

Then on to Millersburg.  This is the gazebo on the town square.

Oh, I forgot to mention WHY we are taking this road trip!  We're going to visit blogging friends!
All of whom live slightly north east of Millersburg in the Lykens Valley.  This is an area of lovely rolling hills and well-maintained farms, many are owned by Amish people.  And numerous churches.  It is sooo peaceful!

Our first stop was at the Brickhouse antique and craft shop, owned by PATTI from the 'Porch Sitting' blog.  What a delightful shop she has!  It is in their restored summer kitchen.

She has the nicest primitive handcrafted items.

Look at the stack of cute little boxes (Patti makes these).  There is now a stack of boxes living in my house!

She has a whole wall full of the neatest samplers.

Zip had a great time talking about the restoration of the building.  It has a nice old fireplace that I unfortunately did not get a picture of. 

And here is the porch of porch sitting fame.  We will be going back on a warmer day to enjoy that activity!  Thank you sooo much, Patti, for sharing your wonderful shop with us! 

Next we visited with BARB from the 'Fun With Fiber' blog.  She has a spinning, weaving, knitting shop in the lower level of her home.  What a nice cheerful studio it is!  So well-lit and everything neatly arranged!

Look at the rack of hand-dyed yarn.  Most of it is also hand-spun which makes it extra impressive!  Aren't those colors tempting?  And to the left are her handwoven shawls.  Plus she has both hand-knit and hand-woven scarves.

And these are just two of the looms she has set up.  And look how nicely her books and yarn are organized!

Here is Barb!  She is such an interesting person!  I could have spent hours talking about weaving and life in general.  I wish we lived nearer to each other.

Barb then followed us to TARRAH's house.  She has the "Pottery Shed' blog.  She lives in this lovely log home that I am sorry to say I did not get a picture of the outside.  Her husband creates this fantastic pottery.  She was having an open house Friday and over the weekend.  There's still time to visit!!!

And I love that rug under the table.  The colors are soft and muted and just right for the room!

Tarrah, as I said earlier, makes the painted boxes and lots of other prim creations.  I particularly liked these jars inside the holder made of wire fencing.

And here is Tarrah (to the right) and some of her friends who were attending the open house.

Thank you Tarrah for sharing your beautiful home with us!

If you have made it through this far, be warned that the day is not yet over!  I didn't plan to write an epic novel here, it just seemed to happen!

On the way back we decided to shop at Aschomb Greenhouses in Mechanicsburg.  We got to Harrisburg shortly after 3 p.m.  We were eying the bridges, saying to each other that traffic didn't seem too bad.  So decided to cross on the bridge and take Route 15.  As soon as we crossed to the other side OH DRAT!!, traffic backed up for MILES!  A string of cars, both lanes, as far as we could see!

We had stopped at Sheetz earlier and gotten coffee.  Zip reached in the back seat and got the dessert.  That sweet waitress from Denny/Lenny had provided plastic ware with the cake.  We had a picnic!

Zip chose the raspberry cake and it was the best!

We sat in traffic, inching along for about 45 minutes.  Finally we hit the open road and made it to Ashcombe. 

It's still too early for a lot of flower and vegetable plants, so it wasn't that exciting.  They do have pretty displays!

I loved these orchids!

They didn't have the haricot vert beans that I was looking for, so we came home with only kitty grass.

Ok!  That was our day out.  Thank you again, Patti, Barb, and Tarrah for allowing us to visit and enjoy your company!!!

I am so grateful to all the wonderful friends I have met through blogging!

I'm Disgusted!

The spinning yarn for the sweater vest continues and it's still not good.  I have wasted so much time lately trying to get the yarn right for the pattern and nothing I'm doing looks the way I want it too.  So far I have worked for three days on this project and I'm not making any progress.  I just hate the results!!!
It's time to lay this to rest!
It's the end of the sweater season anyway.  If I want to make this sweater it's time to go to Hobby Lobby and BUY yarn.  Or look for bargain yarn over the summer and make the darned thing next fall.

Now that I got that off my ample chest, I'm happy to say that the sun's shining and the weather is BEAUTIFUL!  And I've been sitting inside fiddling with....OK!  I'm really over it!!!

Tomorrow is the hook-in at Grant Street and I'm planning to go and take my sunflower pillow and resume work on it.  Maybe I can get myself back to happy by filling in the dark green background.  Or I could start on my little cat mat.

I really didn't want to start something bigger before the Norma Batastini class the second week in April, so I'm kinda at loose ends until then. 

Also there's the Woolwrights hook-in on Saturday in Lancaster.  A whole car load of us (Kathy, Doris, Sherry and I)  are going with Linda doing the driving.   Should be a fun time!

Zip just returned from an afternoon of fly fishing.  I guess it's time to get dinner ready.  

It's NOT working...!!!

In my last post I had written about finding a cool pattern to make a sweater vest.
Since I have all this wool roving lying around, I decided to spin my own yarn to make the vest.

I decided to dye the roving a dark blue since I wear jeans most of the time. Yesterday morning I got up early and started on the project. Zip and I had a lunch date with our friends Willa and Chuck so I wanted this done before we had to leave for Chambersburg. I wanted to start spinning as soon as we returned. I am very impatient!!!

Here the roving is in the dyepot.
I used cheesecloth so I could lift it out easily without disturbing the fibers.

Rinsing in the kitchen sink. The color looks OK.

The cheesecloth also made it easy to wring and squeeze a lot of the excess water out of the roving.

Hangingn by the woodstove to dry.

There were enough areas that had dried for me to pull off a small portion to begin spinning. I had this idea to include little blips of color into the yarn. I planned on using some silk fiber. First I tried pulling off small pieces from the silk caps, but silk fibers are so long that it was difficult to just get little pieces. I then cut off little pieces about 3/4 inch long and tried spinning them in with the blue roving. That didn't work well either. The ends stuck out like eyelash yarn. Didn't like that!!!

So I got out this pink wool that I had used for needle felting. I tried spinning it in a little at a time. Seemed to be working better.

Still was unable to make it look like little blips though!

I spun about 1/4of a bobbin full and then decided to see what the yarn would look like knitted up.

Here i'm plying the yarn. I use the hand wrap method when I only have a small amount of yarn to do. You may (or not!) be curious as to why I would put two strands together. When you spin yarn it gets twisted together to make it stronger and keep the fibers from coming apart. It will curl back on itself when you take it off and try to wind it into a skein or ball. When you try to knit with this single strand of yarn, the knitting is distorted on the diagonal due to the twist. When you ply the two strands of yarn together, you twist them together in the opposite direction. Voila! Your yarn comes out straight and ready to knit.

The samples. And I don't like the look of the finished knitting! Too blotchy looking or something!!!

I was trying to get a chunky yarn since that is what my pattern called for. I'm not good at chunky yarn. Every spinner has their comfort zone. Their own individual 'ME YARN' that you spin without thinking. Mine is thin! I have to work at getting a heavier yarn. So I'm going to start over today and just make my 'me year' and ply three strands together and that should give me the right thickness. And there will be no pink blips. Since this is a pattern that is all done in ribbing, I think the blips distract from the pattern.

When I was digging out the pink wool, I came across my ONLY needle felting effort. I took an hour-long mini workshop a few years ago. We made a needle felted egg. You all know that I'm usually not a person to make cute things that will sit around and get dusty...and dustier! But Easter was coming soon so I made a few more eggs and a bunny. Just for practice.

He did turn out kinda cute!

OK! Been there and done that!
It was fun for the moment, but I don't want to do it again. OH, did I mention that I bought a load of felting needles and foam to do it on, before I decided that it wasn't my favorite thing???

Maybe I should just stick to rughooking....