This is Ashley holding the little ram lamb. I always like to have a couple of early babies because Spring comes when the babies do, and sometimes I need to hurry Spring along. It works too! The day this guy was born, the fog started clearing out and snow started thawing, at least enough that the dogs found plenty of mud to roll in. We even saw a robin.

Here are just some of the goodies from the Fibre Outlaws First Annual Winter Retreat. Now I have two full spinning baskets (that's only ready to spin stuff - I have a whole shed full of raw fleeces too). I dyed that rainbow roving myself. It was much easier than I expected - just coil the roving in a single layer in a big pan, add water to cover (careful not to pour water directly on the roving, which could cause it to felt), sprinkle on powdered acid dye (red, yellow, and blue each on 1/3 of the circle), add some vinegar, simmer until the dye is taken up, and rinse.

What to do with that rainbow roving? There were two strips, so I split them each into 8 pieces, spinning a strip of one and then the other and being careful to keep them the same direction - blue - yellow - red. If I made a two-ply yarn there would be some chance of having some of the colors match up, but probably most of it wouldn't so the yarn would have a barber-pole effect. I Navajo-plied it instead, so I have only small areas with barber-pole effect and more areas with one solid color. This yarn wants to be socks - it's just too loud to be much of anything else!

What is Navajo Ply? One bobbin of yarn is plied on itself to make a three-ply yarn. The structure is just like single crochet - you make a loop and keep pulling new loops through the last one, while plying. It's a great way to have some control over color placement in multi-colored yarn.

Do you need something fun to do? JigZone: Jigsaw Puzzles Online You can send them to your friends as greeting cards or post-cards too.

Fuzzy Feet are a must-have! I am going to join the felt-along, how about you? Such a Fuzzy Page!

Don't limit yourself to just one source though. NorWord lives again - learn Norwegian by email! NorWord gets you moving by emailing you a lesson every day. It's great! Sure, you can work through one resource at a time if you like, but no one source is going to be complete. A second one will surely overlap some, but that just helps you review, and it will include some new material also. This page also has links to a couple of on-line dictionaries and the norskklassen email list. See 'ya there!

If you speak Norwegian, at any level, feel free to leave comments here in Norwegian. I'm probably about intermediate level right now, so if you write something complicated I might have to pull out my dictionary, and that's okay.

Jeg liker å lære norsk. (I like learning Norwegian). Why learn Norwegian, you ask? Especially since nobody around here speaks it and even in Norway most people know English? Well, it is my heritage and my culture, and you can understand so much more about a culture if you learn the language. Also, it is fun, and I have relatives in Norway whom I enjoy writing to, and yes they can write in English but why should they have to always be the ones to have to work in a foreign language?

Since my father came from Norway and I happen to enjoy learning languages, I would have taken Norwegian classes a long time ago, but classes in Norwegian are just not to be found in the places where I have lived. There are books you can get, and the internet brings a whole wealth of resources. Check this page out: Sons of Norway - Norwegian Culture. I'm posting it here because my brother asked for it (Her er det, lillebror!) and also because I think that there are lots of people who have Scandinavian heritage (just look at all the patronymic names people have!) and maybe some of you would like to delve a little deeper into your heritage also.

We have another lamb! This one is a black ram lamb, and his mama is Amidala. Amidala is Ashley's sheep because Amidala was born on Ashley's birthday three years ago. Since Ashley's birthday is tomorrow (she will be eleven), she is a little disappointed that her ewe was one day off, but the lamb is cute enough that I'm sure she will get over it. That's it for the early lambs - we will have a bunch more starting in March. It is nice that there are two of them and they can play together, and by the time the later babies arrive I'm sure they will bully them together too, that being the nature of lambs.

As much as I hate to go all commercial on you already, I do have this ad free web space and I hope you will find it useful and entertaining. You can help to support my blogging efforts if you are in need of web services. Just follow this link to get your own domain, hosting, design services, and what not. Khimaira They have goat supplies and gifts too. You would have to look long and hard to get what they offer elsewhere at comparable prices, and a percantage would go toward renewing my website if you use this link when you sign up. Linda of Khimaira has been extremely helpful with getting this set up too.

I do intend to get message boards set up on this site so that you can post your comments right here, but in the mean-time if you want to talk to me just drop me a line.

Who wants to take a class with me? It is internet based, so you can participate from anywhere in the world. The class is called The Viking Society - General Course and it is being offered through Gotland University. All university courses in Sweden are free, by the way. Oh yeah, the class will be in English. Högskolan på Gotland - Kurskatalog, arkeologiska sommarkurser

I want to say thank-you to Theresa for helping me to get this blog started up. Before I looked at her website I knew I wanted one of my own, but I didn't know that it would be a weblog. I loved hers (and read it almost daily) and that is why I had to have one of my own. Theresa has just recently had visitor number 50,000 to her site! Wow! Bagatell :: Knitting in Norway

The Hideout was fun and I came home with more goodies and stuff than I went with - we spun and knitted and wove and dyed and felted. We didn't go to bed until after midnight, and then got up early in the morning. There was so much fun stuff to do that we didn't want to waste time sleeping! There were contests (I got third place for longest thread spun from one ounce of wool, and first place for original charted motifs such as could be used for Fair Isle knitting). I learned how to do rainbow dyeing and I can't wait to spin the brightly colored roving. Pictures will be coming when I upload the camera.

And this morning we entered the lambing season! Cornflower delivered one big, cute, sweet, intelligent white ewe lamb with brown ear tips. It's cold out there, but mama and baby are doing just fine. Navajo-Churros are very hardy sheep.

Hi, and welcome to my brand new home on the web! I will be adding pictures and more by way of an introduction soon, but today I am just getting it up and running. Tomorrow I will be off to the Fibre Outlaws First Annuual Winter Hideout - that's my local spinning guild, and I will be gone for three days, so it will probably be next week before I do any more with the website, but now that I have something here you can expect frequent updates.

Things to look forward to:
• lambing and kidding season (I can't wait to meet all the new babies and show you pictures of them)
• my current spinning, knitting, weaving, etc. projects
• a report on the retreat I am about to go to, of course
• links to some of the excellent websites that I like to visit
• much, much more!

So be sure to come back soon!