Winter Fun - The Inside Kind!

Making Raw Milk Cheese & Yarn

These are the things that take up my time in the winter, cheese making, spinning yarn, weaving, and so much more!!

This morning I started another batch of chevre, I'm going to make a 2gal batch of Dill & Onion as the last batch was delicious!! Here you see the ladel and the thermometer so I can keep stirring and keep an eye on the temp as it cools down after low-heat pasturizing, it has to be about 80F before I add the culture and rennet. Then I cover the pot and put it in the cubbord for 12hrs before cutting and then hanging the curds. While I like the raw milk chevre I've been making for years I realize that I've got to practice making chevre with pasturized milk so when I get to the point where the dairy is producing cheese for sale I'll be able to make it and sell it. All raw milk cheeses have to age for 2 months before it's legal to sell, which is fine for hard and some soft cheeses, but chevre is a fresh cheese product and cannot last that long in the fridge so it has to be pasturized in order to be legal to sell at markets. Federal regulations.

There are two baskets full of yarn that Lindsey has spun up, and an inkle loom with my learning piece of card weaving on it. the pattern is little sheep - at least that is what it's supposed to look like!! I've taken it out 3 times already as I found mistakes in my cards, and just now found another one on cart 7 that has the colors in the wrong order...grrrr! I'll take it out one more time and then that's it!!!

OK, this is cool! It's a Home Spinning Machine from 1946, it wasn't working at first but John, the valiant hubby, fixed it and you can see the first bit of spinning on the spindle (it's the red/orange stuff inside that bell shape). At this point I'm not sure if it's faster than my normal wheel, but I do think my spinning is much better as this is turning out to be lace weight!! We'll see what happens when I start to ply it.

Winter at the farm, Blue Passed Over The Rainbow Bridge

Update, Blue was 18 1/2 years old when he suffered a stroke last week and passed over the rainbow bridge. He was greeted by his old friends Sandy and Twila who passed over earlier last year. He was my ambasador on the farm, he was always ready to greet new animals to the farm and assure them they had indeed arived at their forever home where they would be happy and well cared for.

Here is Blue the cat catching a snooze in a sunbeam, he was not yet aware that it moved and he hadn't! This was a favorite spot for blue and is where I found him the morning he passed on. I'm sorry it's been so long since I posted! It's been really busy here, even though it's the end of the season for the dairy and I have fewer milk chores to do. Starting just before Thanksgiving I dried up all the does except Melody who is still giving about a quart a day now so I can still keep the house in milk. But it won't last long as I have to dry her up by the middle of December so she has 2+ months to devote to growing her babies for next spring.

This is a wonderful sign made by some dear friends who brought it over as a complete suprise!!

Here is Chief, he's keeping an eye on the herd while also catching a snooze on the fence!

Here is another reason I've been busy, I've been makign soap for the holidays in many different molds, I love the cat of course, but also really like the new snowflake ones I just got.

I finally got my twining loom finished and warped it up last August. You can see I've got about 7 inches of weaving done on both ends. I will use another color sheet to do another two sections and then repete going back and forth with the different colors. For now this is being stored in the knitting room as I've got to get going with my Christmas knitting and this is just in the way.