Sleying the reed for the fabulously ugly scarves. The pegs hold the “cross,” which is how weavers keep the yarns in order until they are put on the loom. Otherwise, you get a tangled mess. (Sometimes you still do!) For years I held the cross on my thumb and index finger until I found this great little gadget made to fit on the front of my loom. Now I don’t have to thread the whole thing in one sitting!

(In case you’re wondering, whininess was due to prolonged headache that I feared would consume the rest of the day. It’s been a whiny week.)

(post deleted for excessive whininess)

Today I did two things - I sent off a packet of letters from 12 people in an attempt to stop the N.C. Agriculture Dept. from requiring farmers to add black dye to raw milk. And I went to an antique festival where I found a bunch of old milk bottle cap labels, some from small North Carolina dairies that are long gone, driven out of business by our agricultural policies. It is illegal to sell raw milk for human consumption in North Carolina.

So I’m playing with the caps and parts of the envelopes I received for a collage about raw milk.

365, Day 24

It’s made of wire and it holds hard-boiled eggs and a salt shaker.

I like it very much.

I wants it, I wants it.

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It’s great to have the weekend with no obligations again! I’ll head out to the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market to do my grocery shopping after I finish this coffee. I missed last weekend because I went to the lake, and life just isn’t the same when I miss the market. For one thing, I don’t have the produce rolling in from my garden the way that I did last year.

I’ll stop by the post office and mail this letter packet to the North Carolina Rules Review Commission about the black dye in raw milk rule. I know I said I’d do it Monday, but I received emails on Monday from people who wanted to participate. So I gave it some more time. We ended up with eleven letters and twelve signatures in this packet, and Ruth Ann had already sent at least one packet of ten, which was the required amount to subject it to legislative review. Our letters are just icing on the cake. However, we might be required to do it again if the Ag Department revises and resubmits the rule. I’ll let you know here and on the Slow Food Piedmont Triad listserv if that is the case.

The weather is nice again, which means that I think I’ll rip out a lot of the tomato plants in the Back Forty. I’ll have to decide whether I want to put the greenhouse in the same spot or whether I can move it to a place further back. The greenhouse is great as far as function but it is really ugly.

I received Visual Chronicles Thursday, and it is a terrific book if you are interested in visual journaling and collage. What I really like about it is that it is full of prompts and easy ideas to get you rolling right away. Ahem…not that I’ve started! But I’m probably going to begin today or tomorrow.

We went to Cafe Europa again last night and sat at the bar, where we had a couple of drinks and ate olives and cheese and crab dip on pita slices. They have a really cool wirework hard-boiled egg thingie on the bar that holds the eggs in circles and a salt shaker at the top. I did a little napkin sketch for my 365 project, but I’m waiting to post it because I want to scan it, and we need to move the scanner over to my desk and install it on this computer.

Because I think that I’m going to be doing a lot of scanning in the near future…

However, all that will have to wait, because I saw in the newspaper this morning that the Liberty Antique Festival is going on right now, and it’s the last day. So we’ll head out that way after I get back from the market. We LOVE LOVE LOVE the Liberty Antique Festival. It has so much good stuff that we never get through the whole thing. The danger here is that I got paid yesterday!

Why you probably won’t be hearing about the winter farm project, or reading about all the exciting news in the Back Forty for a long time:

From the News and Record:

RALEIGH (AP) — The high temperatures of August only worsened North Carolina’s drought, and the coming months are expected to bring little relief, forecasters told a state panel Thursday.

Temperatures at Raleigh-Durham International Airport have exceeded 90 degrees for 79 days instead of the average of 39 days a year, hydrologist Mike Moneypenny of the National Weather Service told the state Drought Management Advisory Council. At Greensboro, the temperature exceeded 90 degrees for 60 days this year instead of the average of 29 days.

“It was the hottest August on record in central North Carolina,” Moneypenny said. “What really brought our drought to the forefront was the month of August.”

Most of the state is 12 inches to 16 inches below normal rainfall with central North Carolina receiving “basically a grand total of zero” rain in the past week, Moneypenny said. He added that high pressure over the mid-Atlantic states is keeping moisture-providing weather systems away.

That being said, my carrots are struggling to come up despite the fact that the Critter is trying to dig up the raised bed. So is the broccoli. No sign of lettuce seedlings. I have lots of skinny butterbeans, and I hope that I’ll have enough filled out to make a pot of nothing but butterbeans this weekend. Field peas are beginning to give up. Herbs are fine, but you can’t cook a pot of them. I’m getting a few peppers again. Most of the figs and tomatoes (and a lot of the peppers) I’m getting now are being stolen or ruined by the Critter or bugs. That’s okay, I’m pretty sick of dealing with tomatoes. And watering. Too bad that I can’t get to the ripe figs first, though.

The dehydrator is running a load of what I think will be the last tomatoes. Cooked a little bit of sauce to stir into my brown rice tonight, too, which I ate with field peas and okra.

The Critter did return the hose nozzle that s/he stole a few months ago, with only a few bite marks and scratches, and apparently emptied of whatever was clogging it up. Thank you, Critter.

Update, answering a question about cooking butterbeans from Willow in the comments:

What I call butterbeans you probably call baby lima beans. Little green or white or speckled ones. I’ve never eaten butterbeans dried. It was a staple at my house growing up - we had three large chest freezers, mostly packed with fish, shrimp, Silver Queen corn, butterbeans, and field peas. We usually cooked butterbeans and field peas with some hamhock or fatback for seasoning, and sometimes with okra. These days I sometimes throw in a little cooked humanely pasture-raised bacon or most often, a few dashes of Liquid Smoke for that flavor. I cook fresh butterbeans for about 20 minutes or until tender - depends on how young you pick them. When I cook beans or field peas with okra, I use small okra pods and I leave them whole so that okra-haters can pick them out and I can have it all.

Sewed together the strips for the rainbow pouch. Yes, the photo is crappy - the batteries I bought at the lake were $2 for a four-pack and I’ve gone through all four already. I’m on the way to the store to buy some new rechargeables now.

Worked in a little lesson about quantity and quality, there.
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It’s Photo Wednesday for my 365 Project!

When I waved hello to the shadow giant, she waved back!

Mood update: Sunnier. Went to work. Went to class. No conniptions or breakdowns to report.

Realization of the day: When I thought I was a Four, I was embarrassed. Now that I’m a One, I want my Four back.

On the sewing machine, I sewed the rainbow inkle band in even lengths to secure the ends, cut it into eight pieces, and now I’m hand sewing the pieces together for a little pouch, or maybe two pouches. I’m winging it here.

Trying to put several projects in motion so that I can switch off to a different project as the mood strikes me. After last night’s attempt at reviving the mini-tapestry, I think that I’ll switch to a thicker warp thread for the labyrinth tapestry. I cut out a depression in that loom, so the threads won’t be hard to pick up. So I’m not discouraged about the tapestry.

I am kind of worn out and depressed. I’m functional, but just barely. Don’t feel like doing anything but art stuff and reading. I could see taking a sick day, but didn’t I just get back from a three-day weekend? Bleh. It’s probably hormonal.

Lesson learned tonight: Sometimes if you find an abandoned cute little project from years ago that looks easy to finish, there is a reason that it was abandoned.

We suppress painful memories.

May or may not work on this one some more. Turns out that my eyes can’t see the difference between the warp thread and the shadow of the warp thread. Dontcha just hate feeling younger than your body?