Greatest well wishes to 2 friends of mine

Tonight I am sad & shocked, I had heard earlier this week that the mother of 2 friends (one of whom feels like family) was very ill but she has been for a decade, this evening I was told that she has liver failure & too many other issues for a transplant to be considered, That she has been on a respirator for several days now & is not expected to last the week.
I find it hard to believe that this is happening so soon, the beginning of a new stage of grief for my friends to be in the position of losing a parent, I wish that I could be of any help at this time.

I do not understand death, it feels so hostile. 

fibre as planned plus tadpoles

Yesterday I spend another 2 hours in a creek & under a bridge catching tadpoles with my son, I am consistently surprised that the bulk of people who see us catching things in creeks think it seems dangerous or unhygienic to wade around in water courses, do you forget that for even my generation of children 15 years back spent whole weekends wandering with apples in pockets wading in streams & climbing whatever looked hardest, this is called exploring an essential part of a childhood IMHO, it's being in nature, it's going outside & finding the fun in being physical  this so much healthier than sitting in a manic-ly clean living room on little chairs playing with game consoles & looking into bedrooms full of branded plastic toys from tv shows having no idea how to play creatively because most modern toys have one purpose they don't combine with others or change to suit a need they just light up or look like some demented character from.
While my son has too many toys due to inheriting so much from mine & my siblings childhood I am proud to have masses of wooden blocks & construction toys & combining these makes for messy sideways fun.
As for hygiene my son is not constantly ill in spite of not living in a sterile environment not does he suffer from any modern disorders like asthma or allergies he does not get rashes or twinges or complain of pain, he does not have headaches or ear aches or anything else & I attribute this to eating foods in their natural state 95% of which are made entirely of ingredients I can pronounce not living in a mental clean home because we have better things to do & spending weekends roaming around even in light rain jumping into rivers & climbing up trees.

I try not to be a crazy idealist but I do think that people need to stop buying into the consumerist crap plaguing kids & start cooking real foods & actually being with their children, BTW manic-ly dragging your children to activities all weekend is not the same as daily child driven play & slow time to meet your kids & let them have a childhood.


On from this here are the pictures of fibre 

The last of the previously posted braids

The jacob braids

And the BFL silk

And now depending on how manicly I clean I may be working on some new dye jobs 

drama, dye, driving

So, I have now dyed up 7 & 8 braids of jacob & BFL with silk & I'm just waiting on a day sunny enough to photograph.

I have not blogged in a couple of days due to the drama inherent in have an neighbour who is insane 7 passive aggressive for no apparent reason, just a few nights ago she came & yelled at me while holding a knife & telling me I was a crazy bitch & threatening to have me evicted, this a day after I find out she has been contacting the real estate agent to tell lies about me & my guinea pigs at the stage where I was still trying to send her civil letters asking what was going on, she had jumped straight to shit stirring & not even trying to resolve the conflict she had created, my real estate are now trying to change the terms of my lease as I sit here & unfortunatly I didn't find out about this till friday 6pm & I now have plans to contact rental tenancy to find out if I can leave early if i'm having violent conflict with the neighbour, if the real estate change the area I am renting but still want me to pay the same rent & just how derelict a house has to be to be unsuitable to live in & the levels of this one were not apparent on a 5 minute walk-through on a clear day, the leaking ceilings, gusty gappy floors, rotten porch, plants growing inside from outside, uncontrollable insect invasion due to doors & walls not reaching the floor in addition to short eaves so every-time it rains I need to build a towel moat on my front porch to stop water flowing into the front hall & theres just nothing I can do about the flooding in the laundry or the fact that several windows are bolted open or shut because the frames are too rotten to be able to be moved.


I have however booked my driving test for 12.15 16th of april in Armidale, I will be in the hood for 10 days so I'm looking forward to much chilling with family & friends hopefully passing the test & if I fail a shoulder to cry on & a buddy to drink with, if I should succeed I will suddenly have the mobility to do my own thing including being able to attend markets to peddle my wares & have a great variety of places I can life most of which are cheaper & have more yard as they are 15 minutes out of town & maybe then I can have the garden in which to mosey & feel at ease without constant town speed & crazy to set me off.

My next soaked fibre is a 70% 30% of 23 micron merino & bamboo, I'm looking forward to it but can't decide exactly what I should make with them probably harmonious 3 colour transitions or maybe something with more of a hand painted look, I have plans to try to do 2-3 fibres of 6-8 braids each school week a bit hectic but not over the top, I'm also trying to have a flyer with tear off web addresses also looking at business cards I hope i can get some volunteers to distribute some to spread the word of my stuff so I can actually live off what I love & get centrelink of my back.

Oh another not so great thing, in the process of trying to do this I need to backup my computer & reload windows because the version I have is missing the base program to be able to load my printer drivers which I need to print & I need to print so I can print off & send my uni applications & so I can do a stupid invasive homework project for Trystans school.

So there you have it, drama frustration & a bit of hope & with any luck I'll have pictures tomorrow.

Starting on the fancy stuff

Today I have started soaking my jacob humbug braids, This is slightly scary as it is the first of a big order which I have realised that at full steam dying it would still take a month or more of school days & which I hope to sell & am concocting various further marketing strategies, present is to create a flyer with tearaway web addresses & a collage of recent dye jobs & send it to anyone willing to put them up not a bad idea really.

My sore is greatly reduced even though I have been gentle with myself today, lets hope I will be up to fishing in the creek with bags again this weekend or maybe wading around in cold not so clean water is something I should avoid for a while following 2 weeks of illness, Do I know someone else who wants to wade around a creek for an hour or two with my child not really.

While I couldn't get pictures of 3 of today's dye batches because they were still damp I have pics of the other 7, This experiment did not turn out in quite the way I hoped but I will continue the concept once the monolith of fibre has started moving from my stock room & so today's drool worthy goodness that I am tempted to steal for myself.

Plague

I'm sure most parents dread when plague hits, my least favourite bit being that my sons is miserable 7 doesn't sleep for a week which keeps me up & then gets sick s I spend a week or more not sleeping so when I inevitably catch what he has it is 10 times worse than it would have been.

No difference this time around, two weeks of sleep deprivation has meant this cold 9 days in is no better 7 that the glands in my neck & groin have swollen my left legs was sore resulting in my stomach, side & back all being crazy tender so I can barely bend over, I'm feeling pretty rotten I keep waking half way through the night because my pain killers have worn off & if I still lived in Armidale I probably would have imposed on friends & family this weekend & asked them to have tryst so I could get a decent sleep & rest & get over this but as it is i am being woken at 5am because it's light outside & therefore time to start the day a super thing when I'm going to bed at 11 & waking at 3ish can you guess I'm feeling pretty sorry for myself?


I have fibre I'd like to dye & yesterdays photos done but don't feel up to making things right now & may yet waste half of next week on this bug.

anyway, fibre pr0n for all

new fibre & hopefully a self imposed kick in the britches

So I'm bad, I havn't blogged in a month, I've been busy dying things, these are last weeks batches, early this week were to photo-ed this afternoon but there were certain 5 year old issue to be dealt with, I have 5 batches that were dyed today to be photographed in the next few days.

My shiny expensive gorgeous fibres arrived today Plain fibre from polwarth, falkland, Blue faced Leicester as well as superwash merino, I also have a whole lot of 70/30 blends with silk, soybean, bamboo, seacell & a 50/50 of black alpaca & silk I also have silk lace weight yarn & BFL/nylon sock yarn I'm not actually sure where to start or what to do with each just that I need to get into it in the next few days.

I fully intend to make blogging a more regular thing, shop updates, dye vanity shots probably not much garden as my current place has no space & poor soil, I've finally got around to reading again like I did before my son was born & thought it may be good to review some of what I'm reading mostly cookbooks self-sufficient living  parenting & activism but given time I may try to get into fiction.

Oh & my university plans are going forward, I'm applying to different places because I never got my HSC but I'm planning to do environmental science if I do tat I can only imagine the hecticness that will be my life or else I'll get more organised.