Last spring I planted arugula. Turns out that I am not a fan of arugula; I think it smells like rubber. So rather than harvest it, I just let it go to seed. Oops. I now have arugula growing everywhere.
Maybe the wild rabbits will like it. Or not. At least the flowers are pretty.
The rolags of alpaca wool I am carding are so light and fluffy, I don’t want to pack down the fibers by storing them until everything is carded. So I decided to spin as I go.
It is a nice pairing of tasks: card a box full of rolags, spin said rolags, repeat. When my spindle was just as full as I could get it, I did wind the yarn on my niddy noddy, rinsed it, and let it dry. Even though I washed the raw fleece, it still had some water resistance. The dried yarn is balanced and more consistent in thickness than my last spindle full.
The color shift from Sugar Plum’s fleece to Donnabella’s came out nicely!
I was sitting with the chickens, and noticed one of them had swelling between her toes. An examination of her foot showed a soft lump and a plug of mud in the center. She was walking fine, but I caught her up and rinsed the foot with wound spray and picked out the mud, then I wrapped it up. When my eldest got home, we unwrapped it and I was able to work the rest of the plug out of her foot (ew). We rinsed it well with wound spray, put some gauze on it, and rewrapped it. I had to wrap around her toes, but I was able to wrap in in such a way that she could still walk and she perched just fine that night.
We checked on her foot the next day and the swelling is down and the hole is healing up! We wrapped the foot back up. My understanding is that this is bumble foot. The chicken (or duck) gets something foreign stuck in their foot and it gets infected. This is actually the second foot I’ve picked a mud pack out of. The first one was on Seashell and it was already mostly healed; the mud plug didn’t come out with extra … stuff. Heavier breeds are more prone to this malady since there is a larger impact on their feet when they jump down.
I found this little guy hiding under my frost blanket. Not sure what he will emerge as, but looks a little like a butterfly, or maybe a skipper? Or a pink dementor. We decided not to disturb him.
Feeling a little silly. My spoiled pup has been itchy for awhile. I’ve tried skin sprays, ordered some probiotics, took all the artificially dyed treats away… what? I didn’t? Turns out our go to treat has red 40 in it. How did that miss the purge? We were buying it by the jar full. I must have assumed I read the ingredients label long ago. Nope. Sugar and red 40. All righty then, out they go. But the jars are so useful… I’ll make new labels with vinyl! (Told you this stuff is addicting.)
I washed out the jars and soaked off as much of the old label as I could. There were still sticky bits, so I decided to recover the whole middle in white vinyl. The indents in the sides of the jar made the vinyl pucker, so I filled them in with silicone caulk, smoothed it, and let it set. The vinyl went on better, but not as perfectly as it does on hard surfaces (the plastic jars have some flex).
I designed some new labels in Adobe Illustrator and cut them with my Cricut. The first design (above) was not an easy weed, and the tiny toe nail marks were too small to deal with! The second design (below) was very easy to weed, but larger than the white. Oops. I didn’t measure twice, cut once. But it does look like a little tiny dog ink stepped all over the jar, so I am going with it.
It was an interesting experiment, and I have useable, non-sticky treat jars for the new, natural dog treats. The dog is spoilt.
Critters and Craft 