I took a needle felting class! So cool, and much easier than I imagined. The instructor, Joyce Hazlerig, is phenomenal, and I came away with pockets overflowing with tips and tricks. In class we made cute little bearded gnomes.
The neatest thing about needle felting is that it combines with all my other fiber crafts. I can add needle felted embellishments to anything felt-able. (Insert maniacal mad inventor laugh here. Do picture both hands raised in triumph as well.)
Having a kitten in the house, I have to check for him before closing doors. All doors. Cupboard doors, pantry doors, even the dishwasher door. He is fast and curious.
A friend invited us over to pick peaches! So many peaches! It was our first time picking straight from the trees. The air was full of butterflies. There was even a butterfly ball; a ripe peach completely covered with hungry butterflies. iNaturalist identifies the species as hackberry emperor butterflies, at least the one I took a picture of, separate from its kaleidoscope.
After picking the peaches, we brought them home, gave them a wash, and laid them out on paper towels on the counter to dry and finish ripening. To keep the flies off (there always seem to be two in the house), I laid some nylon netting loosely over the top.
As they ripened, we tried blanching to remove the skins. We weren’t successful with a quick blanch, so kept increasing the boil time. We ended up with cooked peaches, but the skin came off well. We made peach puree by adding lemon juice and sugar and blending it all together. From that we have made peach ice cream and peach smoothies! Yum.
Thor the kitten thinks that water with a tinge of dog spit tastes better. He has learned to stand up on the edge to reach the water. He does have two of his own, properly sized, water bowls around the house.
I recently created a PDF pattern for a local yarn shop. It is the owner’s pattern, but they needed it taken from written shorthand to a sharable PDF. It is a cute little peachy amigurumi, and in testing the pattern, I made up 6 little peaches.
The pattern is by Anniewhere at NerdCraft. I’m very excited about the wool yarn I used for the body of the peach, because it was locally spun and dyed by Texas Prairie Fiber Co. I love using locally produced supplies! The leaves I made from my own handspun yarn, that I spun from Blue Faced Leicester and silk blended roving dyed by Frabjous Fibers. This turned out to be quite the collaborative project.
I did make each one into a keychain by sewing on some chain and attaching a split ring. I used hand-spun alpaca scraps from a naturally brown alpaca (Aimee) to sew on the chain. So each peach has a little brown stem.
Critters and Craft 