A pair of my favorite birds have nested in the bird house at the end of the driveway!
Can you see them? Look closely…
They are mountain bluebirds! Here’s a better picture, from Wikimedia.
The male of the species is more colorful (photo by Elaine R. Wilson).
I love these little cuties. They are cavity nesters; they nest in holes in trees (when they can’t find nest boxes). They eat bugs and berries, which makes them even more welcome additions to life at the ranch.
And now I, like the rest of the internet, shall provide you with pictures of cats. Someone must keep our fluffiness addiction satisfied.
This is camo cat. In his natural habitat, he is invisible.
Mom and Dad’s bee-friendly landscaping has provided the cats with yet more places to do their favorite things.
Not quite so stealthy, but still pretty fierce looking.
For Squeaky, that mostly means sitting around looking very royal, evenly vaguely Egyptian-god-like.
I am a very statuesque, it is true.
The cover of blackest night can be his only camouflage.
Today I get to show off some of Aunt Geri’s yarn. She has refined her cabled and multi-ply yarn techniques into a fine art. Her two newest yarns used alpaca fiber from Loredo, a friend’s alpaca (the one with sort of lumpy roving) and bamboo silk.
From fore to background, “Skies over Loredo”, “Loredo’s Poppies”, and “Desert Rain” (which I’ve posted about before).
Both yarns are 75% alpaca, 25% bamboo, and they are soft soft soft. I think they’re cabled yarns (where you ply single strands together, then ply the resulting yarn with something else again), but that’s just a guess, Mom has them down at the ranch. I’ve never had the patience to do cables, to be honest.
So even. So consistent.
Aunt Geri has also been making beaded yarns, which Mom has already knit up into lovely cowl-type scarves. “Brittany Strikes Gold” has tiny gold seed beads, and “Shards of Merlin” has tiny opalescent beads.
Phew! We clearly need to feature her work more often! She creates so many beautiful yarns, hats, scarves and felted art objects that it’s hard to keep up some times!
Vanny, our newest male, and the other boys have to get along, because come winter time, we can’t have him out in the pasture by himself. He thinks he likes it out there alone, but even if he does, we don’t like trekking all the way down there to feed, water and clean. So, a few days ago, Mom let the boys and Vanny out into turnout together to see what the herd dynamics would be like. The results were not too surprising, actually. Bravado threw DOWN!
After quite a bit of flying spit, Dad broke it up with the hose. The boys went back to their paddock and Vanny went back to his, without a clear victor emerging from this short skirmish for dominance. But this is a tale which shall soon be told…
Time is doing that flying thing. Hard as it is to believe, we started blogging a full year ago. During that time the herd has grown from 5 alpacas to 12. Tripoli and Marseille were born, the girls broke out of the paddock, and I’ve spun several miles worth of yarn. Looking back at everything we’ve done/gone through, it feels more like 10 years than 1.
There’s no way I’m almost a year old.
I’m statistically minded, so reviewing what has been popular has been fun. Our top five posts, the ones receiving the most traffic over the year, are all reviews and how-to’s:
While those posts have the most views over time, posts about the animals seem to be the most beloved. They earn more comments and have more hits the day they are posted. The babies being born, water sports, and the breakouts were all highlights for on-the-day hits.
Our top five commenters are: Patty, Jacque, Laura, starproms, and Barbara. Our most popular category is fiber art. And we’ve written 247 posts. That blows my mind a little.
We want to thank everyone for following our adventures, apologize for lackluster posts (I sometimes feel like I achieve quantity without much quality), and promise that we’ll continue to share what we learn about these ridiculous animals and their fiber.
That was too many words again. Here’s a picture of Dad talking to the girls:
What is that thing? Why does everyone like it so much?
I am the king of this box.
Yesterday was a word-heavy post, so here is a picture of a cat in box. The hotter it gets, the less of the cat is in the box. But he still stays in the box.
After talking to many starry-eyed spinners at the Estes Park Wool Festival, we bought the new Schact spinning wheel model, the Sidekick. Everyone we spoke to loved this wheel, and though I only spun on it for 20 minutes, I liked it well enough. I’ve had more time to get to know it now, so as promised, here is a review.
Usually, summer is my favorite season. This year, with all the fires (I think there were 8 wildfires burning at one point), it has been hard to enjoy the heat. 500 homes have burned to the ground, and at least 2 people are dead.
The past couple of days have brought us the mixed blessing of a sort of mini-monsoon weather pattern. The sky clouds over and we get the occasional smattering of highly localized rain, which is good for fire fighting, but the winds also kick up and lightening increases.
Kind of ominous, isn’t it?
I’m guilty of loving thunderstorms nearly as much as I love summer, even though they have caused many of our fires. Watching towering clouds lit by lightening move across the plains is the best fireworks show on earth.
I seldom have the opportunity to just play around while spinning. Experimentation is a risk when your fiber source is finite and you have orders to fill. Which is why the gift of a few ounces of sample roving went far towards endearing Andrew, who runs our fiber processing mill, with me.
I really enjoyed spinning this fun tricolor roving. It felt kind of like spinning a marled yarn. I carefully drafted, or pulled, a small amount of fiber in each of the three colors into the yarn at once. It’s very easy to spin back and forth across the end of the roving, which would result in a single strand that changed color, instead of one that had all three colors all the time.
Is that a penguin?
Does that make sense? It’s hard to explain.
Anyway, I think I could do better with practice, but I like the end result well enough. We’ll see what Andrew thinks.
Cliff House Alpacas 