Archive for March, 2010

Woolapalooza
March 28, 2010

Yesterday, Cady (yurtern), my friend Leah and I went to Drumlin Farm in Lincoln to attend their annual Woolapalooza — an educational day all about wool, how it gets from animal to sweater, and more. We met some cute sheep, some new lambs, and saw live shearing and skirting too!

This guy was an awesome shearer with those old school scissors — no buzzer here!

Pre-haircut and post-haircut from left to right.

I love lambing season — they are the cutest and so soft and little. These guys had a heatlamp to keep them warm on an unreasonably cold day!

As these guys weren’t the stars of the show they took a time out to nap — synchronized napping is clearly their sport 🙂

Cady and Leah bundled up for the day!

These goats were also in sync as they watched the shearing from afar. I bet they were happy they weren’t getting their haircut while 100s of people watched! All in all it was an awesome Saturday — there were little shops in the horse stalls that I got a beautiful scarf at and we got to scope out some angora bunnies too along with other little rodents in the Drumhill Farm Underground habitat. Last but not least they were serving locally sourced chili, amazing cookies and cocoa — the families attending were all very excited!

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Yurts Away!
March 22, 2010

I know many of my donors have been itching to get their hands on their mini yurts and now, many of them have! The last two weekends have been heavily committed to getting the single mini yurts out for delivery, which became a multi-step process. First I got locally sourced and spun wool from Harrisville Designs. Then I crocheted the minis, wrapped them in roving, put them in little boxes, tied those up in a bow, wrapped them in craft paper, adhered the custom yurt labels my mom made me to them, addressed them, stamped them and got them to the post office!

Today, when I stop by the post office the last six of the minis will be heading out to their new homes! Then it’ll be on to developing the packaging to ship the larger wall art pieces made of minis too! It’s an exciting time over at Yurt Alert HQ 🙂 While in NH working on this with my mom she also had a beautiful number of daffofils from the UK in the house in Ball jars — so pretty I had to post that as well.

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Yurt So Good
March 10, 2010

Not only do I love this John Mellencamp-inspired yurt pun BUT it’s also the title of the piece about my project in the latest issue of Vogue Knitting! I did an interview with Cheryl a while ago for Yarn Market News…or so I thought! I’m so thrilled at this — it’s so so wonderful — and to wake up to others being so excited for me was just beyond!

Cheryl hit the nail right on the head — I don’t really have an explanation for how I was able to reach my fundraising goal by the cutoff time and it is entirely thanks to all the people who believe that this is a cool project that I can complete!

Above is the clip from the magazine which I ran out an bought this morning! Yay for the yurt!

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National Crochet Month
March 2, 2010

I feel good about my commitment to National Crochet Month as I’ll be spending most of my free time crocheting away in the land of mini-yurts but more importantly I didn’t know that it was National Crochet Month until today sadly — thanks be to Molly Made for my crochet-ucation!

The Crochet Guild of America, which I need to join asap, is having a Crochet Along all month this month so I’m excited to a) join and b) use my mini yurt project as my project of choice and hopefully revel in the inspiration and support of other crocheters all through the month! Perhaps I’ll host a Crochet Along party — anyone in Boston interested?

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Busy Sunday!
March 1, 2010

Today I made some major headway on the yurt’s donor rewards because I had the energy and extra hands of my new yurt intern, Cady! As of last weekend I had finished all of the individual mini-yurt gifts and had begun work on the sets of 15…but still had hundreds more mini yurts to go! Today, Cady came over around 1 and with the help of delicious pizza from Picco downstairs we managed to finish 4 sets of 15! Many were already done but I finally had time to sew them all together into wonderful pieces of wall art!

Cady is a fibers major at Mass Art, which is one of the coolest art schools there is. I’m probably one of the world’s worst teachers but she caught onto the min yurt “pattern” in no time after I failed to explain my process correctly — seriously, worst teacher. Thank goodness crochet has some regularity and predictability to it!

Look how beautiful they are! So exciting!

Get ready donors — these awesome pieces are coming your way soon!

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