Have you ever been tempted ? Tempted to fill your house with Fiber ?  Tempted to hug a sheep ?  Yes, welcome -- you are not alone.

New Years’ Resolutions: I usually don’t do it, thinking (in advance) that I shouldn’t make promises I won’t keep. So after mulling it over and waiting until January 4th, I am making a few, public resolutions that I have good intentions of keeping. Here goes:

1. Lose 10 pounds by making better choices and exercise. No earth-shaking goal here, just a reasonable one that I really need to do for my own self-esteem, comfort and health.
2. Feed my family more vegetarian meals.
3. Waste less, especially food. I have a bad habit of buying too much and then we get distracted, end up getting take out or eating out and then there’s icky food to chuck or compost. We are not doing CSA veggies this year, so that will immediately help us not have weird veggies around that we don’t like and are too difficult to use (like how much freakin’ KALE do they think an average household eats? Blech). Otherwise, I just need to learn to use the big chest freezer we have better…if we’re not gonna eat it, freeze it asap. Then make sure to use the frozen goodies within a month. Just takes some better planning, really. I can do this!!!
4. Be a better friend. Just make an occasional phone call and be more accountable with thank you cards in a reasonable time. This should be easy but I hate hate hate the phone and have been really bad with birthdays and thank you’s for the past year and a half or so. Having a new baby was an excuse but he’s 1yo now and that is wearing thin, so I will try. I also want to get in touch with a few “long lost” friends. After going to my 20 year high school reunion in November and having a really good time, it hit me that I need to reel some old friends back into the fold.
5. Patience and kindness..with others, especially with little A who is so lovable and yet so hard to understand, with energy I never had and never will have, with her unusual issues, sensitivities, and strong will to boot. Gotta be more patient with her and I know she will respond well.
6. Make our home liveable again. It’s not dirt, it’s not too cluttered (more than most, but still reasonable), it’s just in need of decorating style work, really. I am going to bite off small “feel good” projects and make progress on this disaster of a house. We are dying from the non-renovated, “old and yucky” style and some minor work will make it 50% better. This is a “do what I can, on my own” attempt and hopefully will lead us to get the big projects worked on (like the back room that’s been under construction for 3+ years now). I want to be able to invite friends over without being embarrassed by this place. I started by getting a new beautiful lampshade for our antique lamp to replace the old, stained one, and ordering a few light fixtures that need to be replaced….good progress already, gotta keep it up.

And fiber resolutions…wouldn’t be right without em:

7. Shop from my stash first. I am a sucker for pretty hand dyed fibers from certain vendors on etsy/on-line, and just keep stashing fiber away. I don’t have a ton of yarn (yet), but loose fiber is building up around here and I just need to use my drum carder and either blend it and spin/felt it, or start to liquidate a bit by selling some batts. I am NOT going on a fiber diet, just vowing to slim down how much I have stored here, and also plan to wash and dye the couple of fleeces I bought in the fall at Rhinebeck.
8. Fibery resolution #2: Make more gifts in 2008. Craig is always telling me he’d prefer that I give things away that I make instead of selling my stuff, and while this resolution is not for his sake, he’s really right. The few things I did manage to make and give away were hits at Christmas, and I need to do more of this. I’m not gonna stop selling as I can’t shake the entrepreneur bug, but I am going to use my talents to make friends and family some nice unique gifts.
9. Finish some needlework UFO’s. For a while I was going strong on this, and lately I am much better at seeing projects from start to finish, but I need to go back to my “finish an old before I can start a new” item diet, which worked for me for a while.
10. Learn new techniques and do as much knitting-spinning-felting-weaving-crochet as possible in 2008! This is my easy goal, thrown in to make an even 10.

There, I’ve made a public list, now I hope I can live up to much of it in 2008!
Happy New Year to all!
Carrie

I dunno…here, there, everywhere. Too busy to blog in too long. Here’s the dirt, quick updates, a few pics:

Home and Shelter Island, shuttling back and forth for weekends by ourselves, with friends, and my parents before they head south to FL for the winter. Up to Rhinebeck for the NY sheep and wool festival in late October, where I bought a ton of fiber, a few tools, and a test run on that Ashford country spinner that is now on my want list for sure:

In laws visited on a weekend in late October for a quick fix to squeeze their grandkids and go home. We got to go to a really muddy but pretty cool halloween display (2000 carved/lit pumpkins!) at the Nassau County Museum of Art…

Working my arse off spinning a selection of yarn to get some into NYC for the first time ever, which is very exciting for me. Some of these yarns can now be found at The Point NYC!! The rest are available at Handmade (my web shop) and/or etsy shop for great last minute quick holiday knits, or just give a skein to your favorite knitter:

Kindergarten…PTA meetings, school, wow. Keeping track of homework, permission slips, school paperwork. Little A is learning so fast and loving K, thank goodness! Also managing the Feingold diet to see how it affects her behavior…the jury is still out on this one, I’m afraid.

Hugging baby O, who is almost a year old now. Time flies. He is currently on a nursing strike and I don’t know how long it’ll last. I sneak him some mama milk when he’s half asleep, but otherwise he won’t take it. He got mad at me when he bit me and I yelled “NO!” at him (not really, more like raised my voice a fair amount, but ouch, he was really hurting me!!!), we’ll see how this situation resolves soon enough, I guess.

My Sister has opened up a gallery in Greenport and has some of my finished fiber art wearables on display there with her beautiful photos of the East End of Long Island, so I’m currently scrambling through all my UFO’s for things I can finish up and put there. This is keeping me busy, along with an ever increasing array of new projects, feeding my kids, keeping the house in order (not really), holiday planning, etc.

Aaaaah…the life of a fiber-artist-mama is busy but fulfilling. Aside from not having enough hours in the day, and no longer being able to keep my eyes open late into the night, I can’t complain really.
xo

I finally posted a small Temptress Yarn update at Handmade, with a gorgeous self-striping yarn that I spun from babycakes batts I bought from loop (a dream to spin!), a simple singles in lavender and this festive pair of Vegan (no animal fibers) skeins, spun from a drumcarded batt of red and lavender flax, cotton, denim cotton, orange ingeo (from corn), and black and gold sparkle. I plied it with a synthetic textured thread fromHabu, my favorite fiber store. Anyhow, here’s a sneak peek of the vegan yarn, “Salsa”:

And a finished object I almost let “get away” without a photo, duh. I did this once before, this Spring. I created a gorgeous felt/knit combo scarf incorporating yarn I purchased from the marvelous Jacey at Insubordiknit. I brought it to a show only days after I finished it, priced it high because I didn’t wish to part with it ‘…but for the right price…” and it sold. An hour or so later I was kicking myself because I have NO photos of the damned thing, aargh!!!!!! (”It took so long to bake it….and I’ll never have that recipe again…oh no!”)

Anyhow…long story longer….I almost let this one get away at the Shelter Island show, and was able to get the buyer to model it for me at the last minute. I didn’t get permission to show her on my blog, so I cut her head off, but at least I have a few pics. The details are not showing well, though. I hand “wove” this on a large bubble wrap, laying pieces of felting roving over and under, then wove in a black and turquoise handspun of mine called “night sky”. After felting, I added ceramic beads on the fringe, and sewed on hundreds of little seed beads here and there in blues and blacks and irridescent hues. I was really happy with this piece. It sold before it got a name: