fauna

The only thing I have to show for myself this week is a new Sukoshi. In my defense, it is spring break and there is a new addition to the menagerie. This batch is called Thessalonica. I have a habit of reading sci-fi and fantasy before bed and I couldn't get the catchy title out of my brain.

As for the growing number of fauna around here...this is Jasmine. While the kids were at their grandma's down in Denver, Gerry and I decided to go "window shopping" at the animal shelter. We got one of our cats there a few years ago and ever since moving into the house we've been flirting with the idea of finally getting a dog. So much for window shopping. She's either a Catahoula or a Plott Hound mix. Either way the consensus around here is she's a keeper.

I got to do some swapping this week, too. One of the other moms at school makes awesome outdoors-inspired jewelry. I picked out these two pieces, she wanted a woven cowl I had just finished. Remember when Etsy was a place for trading, too? When I first set up my shop I'd swap yarn for tote bags and schmancy lip gloss. I do trades at craft shows, too, but it's not something everybody incorporates into their business model. In case its not obvious by now, I emphatically do. I love it.

Help wanted

A couple of weeks ago the family and I meandered our way over the mountains to Paonia for the Mountain Harvest Festival. We packed up our vintage Explorer RV, the S. S. Bill Murray, and camped out in the town park. My mom came up and drove us around to visit grandparents in the area. We picked tomatoes and hit up Taco Time and my Grandpa Harold loaded us up with boxloads of apples and pears.

In between I was there to sell yarny stuff at the bazaar part of the festival. I wasn't sure what to expect because I've never done a craft show on the Western Slope. The feedback was pretty awesome, though. And the sales weren't bad, either. I had my first real custom order and got to demo spin for a bit during the farmer's market.
And something practically magical happened. Myriem stopped by my table and mentioned that she was from White Buffalo Farm. I think I may have squeed out loud a little. Paonia is a small town and the odds are probably smaller than I'd like to admit, but it felt like kismet to have connected with her. I discovered the organic farm online, while looking up things like permaculture and intentional communities. Myriem and Wayne(the current owner) have a plan to create an ecovillage within the farm, a place where artisans can develop a bit of "community-sufficiency" while working on both their craft and the farm. I have been daydreaming about running away to live there, or someplace like there since the doldrum-y dead of last winter. Myriem and I got to talking and we ended up taking a tour of the farm the day after the festival was over. It's situated by the river like the orchard I grew up on, with Akane apples(my favorite) among several other types of fruit and veg. They have lots of exciting plans for the place, including cob house-building workshops and farm-to-table events. Wayne is retiring soon, but it's also really important to him to preserve the legacy of the place. I think it's terribly clever of them and I want my family to be a part of it.

So of course there's a hitch. When is there not a hitch? This one comes in the form of a payment due to the bank by next Monday. They've raised the majority of it, but still need to come up with about $12,000. Here's the plan, in the form of an email Myriem sent to me this morning:

Dear Friends of Desirea! : )

Come on out for this lovely week of blue skies and aspen colors!
On the farm, we harvest tomatoes last week and are now harvesting Asian Pears.

I would be delighted to take you on a tour now that we are making such headway!

As you know, I am fostering the conditions conducive for a farm-based ecovillage in our region! As I write, we are setting the groundwork for an on-farm transition team and putting together an informal advisory board. In order to complete this process, I have an urgent appeal!

We need to raise 12k by Monday.
We are seeking loans of 2k to 5k with 25% interest.
Folks are to send payment directly to our bank in Paonia for deposit.
Funds need to be mailed by Wednesday afternoon or wired TH or FR or even on MON.
If we don't reach our goal, we'll return the funds immediately.
The farm has equity of $1million from which we would pay off this loan.
The early freeze hit us hard last week on our tomato crop.
Please spread the word.
This funding allows us to continue with building a transition team and move in the direction of a farm-based ecovillage.

Please call for bank account number.

Paonia State Bank
128 Grand Ave
Paonia, CO 81428

Once past this immediate hurdle, I would like to create a farm-to-table dinner and present our plans to Slow Food and others in the Roaring Fork. I'm looking forward to creating an exquisite event rooted in my French heritage. Je suis francaise heureuse de vivre dans une region gastronomique du Colorado! Folks from all over are welcome!

With gratitude,
Myriem

-- Myriem
Communications and Development
WHITE BUFFALO FARM
16877 Grange Road
Paonia, CO 81428

{What's in it for me?}
I mentioned a while back how I'd sometimes like to go home and this is one way of approximating that without condemning my kids to lonely-induced social awkwardness. I'd get to work on my fiber art and explore the other post-apocalyptic skill-set stuff I've been dipping my toes into all these years. Add community development to that and it's like I'd be doing my dream thesis in real life. "How do cultures on the verge of collapse perpetuate/preserve collected knowledge?" Let's find out! Then there's the potential for creating space for my mister to work on his guitar building thing and the Waldorf school down the road for the kids...

{What's in it for you?}
You mean, aside from the good, old-fashioned altruistic glow you'd get from doing an extra-good deed? When was the last time you were offered 25% interest on an investment? Or an invite to a picturesque, farm-fresh supper? Plus, if you happen to be of the notion that small farms are good and good food is hard to come by these days, this is an excellent opportunity to put some action where your heart is.

As I sit here on the floor of my kitchen, among the boxes and boxes of apples, pears and peppers we hauled home(I put up the last of the tomatoes yesterday), wishing I had a magic wand or maybe just better financial savvy, I'm also confronted with the possibility of making one dream into a reality, of flipping a lot of negative elements in our lives back into positive ones. Room to run, to develop my craft, to do work besides that I feel is meaningful. It's got some scary parts, too. There's a bit of risk involved in taking such a big leap. I'm willing to take it if it means getting to be a part of something so potentially amazing. But none of that can happen if there suddenly is no more White Buffalo Farm.

{More info on White Buffalo Farm}
http://whitebuffalofarm.org
https://www.facebook.com/WhiteBuffaloFarm
http://directory.ic.org/1691/White_Buffalo_Farm_Ecovillage
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/us/colorado-communities-take-on-fight-against-energy-land-leases.html

Experimenting

I don't really think of myself as a weaver, not yet anyway. I get the basic concept and I can muddle my way through setting up an inkle loom or a frame loom but anything more complicated than that and I'm apt to throw up my hands in despair. So, naturally, I decided that the best use of my time prepping for upcoming shows in a month would be to play around with weaving and developing some kind of wearable prototype. Call it creative procrastination. I'm not even sure how you're supposed to finish woven objects and measuring may as well be some form of higher math the way I avoid it. Hence, when I took what I thought was going to be a cuff-type bracelet off of my daughter's conscripted bead loom, I ended up with this:

Too short for even a bubbie bracelet and what to do with the ends? I was feeling cranky with myself at this point because I had put a few days into weaving this...whatever it was. I played around with it and tried to decide if I could salvage it. Was it mini-fiber art?

A bookmark? Or maybe a dollhouse rug?

That's pretty much where it's stayed, exiled to my kids' room while I moved on to other forms of creative procrastination. Like mastering the fine art of hammering snaps together so I can get around the pesky step of sewing them on. Which was how I discovered what my actual new product is going to be. I had another experiment in weaving languishing on my inkle loom, a long not quite scarf of a thing that I thought I might squish together and apart into a couple of bracelets. Instead, I freed the entire thing from the loom and tucked in all the loose ends. When that resulted in a fairly polished looking loosely woven ribbon of fabric I took a chance on the hammer and the snaps. They went on with relative ease and I realized I had a belt, specifically a child-sized belt and a perfect sort of accessory for dress up clothes that tend to come several sizes too big or playsilks turned into togas. I've been letting my eldest daughter wear it to see how it holds up under the pressure of real day-to-day use. And I have no idea how many people are in the market for one of these, fabulous as I think they are. But I think that, in future, I'll be a little less cranky with myself for needing a day to just fiddle around with this idea and that. If I hadn't given myself some time to play who knows how long it would have taken me to come up with this?

“This post is part of the Exploration Party – a celebration of our inner explorers, led by Tara Swiger of Explore You. You can find other tales of adventure from artists, crafters, writers and biz smarties – and share your own story – right here.” - See more at: http://taraswiger.com/exploration-party-invite/#sthash.weGXzT8c.dpuf

 

What's in a name?

There are many reasons we humans come up with for naming things. Familial lineage, descriptive ease or legal requirements are a few that come to mind. I seem to aim for obscure references, which probably means that half of my psyche is perpetually stuck in art school. In fact, that's exactly where I ran into the minimal sentence that is my Doing Business As name.

For a few glorious, frustrating months I attended Bennington College in Vermont. I was thousands of miles from everything I was used to and my whole world flipped upside down. Pretty much literally. Back in Colorado I was able to put minimal effort into getting good grades, but I was about as disconnected from my peers as a kid could get. Plopped into this new environment, surrounded by trustifarians and art nerds, I became overwhelmed at the mention of assignments and a compulsive party-goer. I had more new friends than my entire grade school career produced and yet I couldn't bring myself to write more than a paragraph. I loved Bennington, but I hated who it was turning me into. I ended up leaving after only one term. I packed a lot of memories with me though-and flyers.

Being the arty Mecca that it is a lot of the events around campus were advertised with handmade, hand printed posters. Bands coming through, dance recitals, movie nights were commonly announced in layers of screen print or blueprint with a dash of snark. And that's where Andy Warhol comes in, and Eat Agar. Just before the end of the term a Warhol festival was going down, complete with theme parties and a full-length showing of Empire. That's when I picked up this gem:

It apealed to me in the way an obscure reference often puts a sparkle in the eye of a budding hipster- agar agar being vegan gelatin and regular gelatin being one of the main components of unprocessed camera film. In high school I had come to the conclusion that if I wanted life to be like a movie that it was up to me to write and direct. I decided to make 'eat agar' my creedo, an art mantra.

When the time came to give my fiber hobby turned microbusiness a name I hesitated because it doesn't have much to do with yarn or fiber in general. But it does have everything to do with my worldview, still; post-hipster that I am. Deep down I am still the girl who believes you have to make your own magic. Besides, when have I ever been one for caving to the obvious?

 

Bad wolf

Here's a quick glimpse of what I'm up to these days. Mostly spinning, with some scant knitting and kit-making thrown in for spice. I'm also perfecting the art of reproducing Sukoshi batches from the past. Its all for an order due at the end of the month so if you hear crickets in my general direction, that's why-for. The yarn in the photo is a repeat of a regular colorway that hasn't made it to the Etsy shop, yet. Although you could find a skein or three at Parlor Car, the shop in Georgetown. I sort of named this run after a pair of fingerless gloves, though the fact that the base wool came from a sheep named Rose may have nudged me, too. See the bright blips of pinkness? The oceany blues? I couldn't help naming this Sukoshi Bad Wolf Bay.

 

Click your heels/ you can never go back

I miss my childhood orchard home. The now me totally gets that, but still appreciates the irony. The old (18 year old) me would probably be pretty pissed off that I've been schemeing so hard to get back. Not literally, but my thoughts and plans have been leaning toward the bucolic, the sheepy and the agricultural. The idea of establishing something between the Homestead Wool and Gift Farm and the Fibershed seems like a fantastic five year plan. Okay, maybe four year plan. I don't want to jinx myself. An onslaught of interesting books coming from the Paonia area haven't helped to dissuade me, either. Especially the one that saw the protagonist fly directly over the canyon walls of what was once my (albeit hormonally influenced) personal hell.

 

Manifest destiny

I'm not usually the type to set goals or come up with New Years resolutions or anything like that. But it wasn't very long ago that the thought of seriously considering myself a 'yarn artisan' seemed kind of far fetched, too. Back then I was daydreaming of hitting the road with my family and spinning wheel packed into some vintage RV, but kept my feet on the ground by telling myself it was more practical to get a teaching certification attached to my history degree. Pphfftt! After the prerequisite car crash I realized that there is no 'keeping one's feet on the ground'. The ground can disappear at any time. I have a sneaky suspicion that folks who come to take themselves that seriously make a habit of plan-making, as well. Therefore, in the interest of holding myself accountable and maybe bringing myself to attention of some passing wish-granting ( not so bitey) fairy, I'm going to up and tell you my plans and my goals for Eat Agar in this coming year. There are already exciting, exigent things brewing, but I also like the idea of having a record to come back to next year. especially one that I can't spill coffee on or lose in a move. These goals are still pretty basic, as I'm a plan it now & figure out the logistics later kind of person.

🐜 one major print ad

🐜 regular online sales stream

🐜 a dedicated dye garden & a fiber rabbit

🐜 an art shows worth of fiber art (beyond the usual yarn)

🐜 a small collection of pattern postcards (5-7)

🐜 1 regular summer market w/ a max. of 2 holiday markets

🐜 perfect custom order process online & at markets

That's it chickens. You know, besides all scouring, dyeing, spinning, photog, marketing, bookkeeping, etc...Any advice on how to accomplish any of the above or whacks on the noggin with a sparkly wand are welcome.

 

Man on fire

     I'm going to do my best to let go of understanding every little thing and see where that takes me for a bit. I can't go stand on top of a post for thirty years or take up residence outside the established economic system (yet), but there are small things to be done and I am more determined than ever to do them. I am rarely the one gushing about having felt a spiritual connection to anything, anyone or any place. The world does not now, nor has it ever really made sense to me on that level. There have often been times when I have wished it was otherwise, but if I'm honest the truth is that I've always been something of an agnostic, even before I knew the word for it. I think the closest I come to feeling religiously moved is during a really good show, listening to a new song or any random Joseph Campbell quote. It's cathartic, gives me permission to let go. It's the only time my analytical brain fades into the background and things take on an emotional tinge around the edges. The last big event in my life to feel like that was last year, when my car was rear-ended and I began to realize what a crutch continuing to go to college was. The big epiphany then was to leap into the handmade unknown and trust that doing what I was good at AND made me happy might not end in a complete disaster. The jury is still out on that one my friends, but the one consolation is the return of a sense of authenticity that I seem to have lost somewhere between here and the end of high school. I wouldn't give that up for anything.
     All of that babbling is just a long introduction to my gushing. I just finished The Man Who Quit Money and I feel buoyed, like testifying even. It made me feel like all that Sunday school, church camp and confusion was not for naught. That I didn't have to feel subversive for finding bits of solid advice in the morass of contradictions and justifications such organized religions are prone to. The quick and dirty summary is that it's a bio of Daniel Suelo, a man who gave up on using money in 2000 and the backstory and philosophy behind that. He has a blog and if you Google his name he had his own definition. What you might call his base camp is relatively close to where I grew up; my mom may have even met him growing up in Grand Junction. He is now officially my number one hero and I found myself plotting to track him down in future. At the very least I think I'll knit him some socks. I'm also pretty excited because the book's author gave me something I've been trying to put together ever since I decided it was better to live in the now with intention than to keep putting thing off and work toward a future of...whatever. He gave me the perfect Joseph Campbell quote, one that says it a million times better (and quicker) than I ever can. So I'll leave you with that and a ginormous recommendation for the book. Go! Go!

"A blunder, apparently the merest chance-reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood."