A Weekend With the Girls

Because I'm not going to have a vacation this year---time and money just won't permit---I arranged to have a Girls Weekend here on the farm. A lot of my friends had scheduling conflicts, so it ended up being just myself, Nyxana, Heather, and of course Ken.

Nyxana couldn't get here from Tennessee until Friday night, and had to leave again around Sunday noon, so our time together was pretty short. But we managed to have a good time and do a lot of fun activities during that time, including making a felted rug out of wool from my sheep.

Friday night, while waiting for Nyx to arrive, Ken, Heather, and I carded wool to for the rug while watching funny YouTube videos. When Nyx showed up, we put her straight to work too. We also had the first official Tasting of the Cordial.

Saturday morning, Heather (our early bird) got up before the rest of us and baked a fantastic batch blueberry scones, by far the best scones I've ever tasted, including the times I visited England and Scotland. Even better, she let me copy her recipe. Yum!

After breakfast, we had our Stuff Exchange. I've been cleaning out all the closets in the house and had a mess of cool stuff---clothes, jewelry, household items, decorations, etc.---I wanted to get rid of that was too good to just throw away, so it was mostly a "Stuff Giveaway" rather than an exchange.

But if we make this get-together an annual event, I hope other people will bring their stuff to exchange too. What could be more fun than a flea market where everything is free and the stuff is from friends who presumably share a lot of common interests with you?

Saturday afternoon, we crafted hand-made books, thanks to directions and materials that Heather brought, with some of my own craft materials added in. Ken and Nyxana had the best results. Partway through stitching the binding for mine, I realized I had started wrong, so I will need to start the stitching over before I can finish my book.

Saturday evening, while Ken made tasty burritos for supper, we girls laid out the wool for our felted rug: black wool with white overlay in the shape of the triple moon symbol (waxing moon, full moon, and waning moon).

Here's Nyxana, putting the finishing touches on the the moon design:


Then we turned on some music and had a good time pouring hot water and dish detergent onto the wool, then carefully stomping on it to begin the felting process. With soapy water on the plastic sheeting that was under the rug, the whole thing was very slippery, so we had to hold onto each other as we stomped, and we had to be careful because the moons kept sliding apart and needing to be repositioned.

After a while, everyone was getting tired and wanted to move on to some other activity, so we stopped even though the felting process wasn't complete.

Ken, Nyx, and I stayed up late on Saturday night talking, so we slept in on Sunday morning. But Heather, the early riser, got up early and made beautiful beaded necklaces for all of us, so we each have a memento of the weekend.

Since then, the rug has since been lying in the back yard waiting to be finished. It's felted enough to hold together lightly, but not enough to withstand any real pressure. I was going to wait until it was dry and then bring it inside to wait until I had time to finish it myself.

But it keeps raining here, so the rug has gotten a little bit of extra felting from Mother Nature in the form of rain and even one 2:00 a.m. hail storm!

Even though the rug is still soaking with last night's rain, and is laid across the back of our pickup truck to keep the sheep from walking (and peeing) on it, our cat Oliver Sudden knows a good rug when he sees it, and isn't about to let it go to waste: