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.