Downtime..? Ha! So Here's a Quicky Update

I've been trying to write this for two days, but my time at the computer is few and far between these days. And when I do have it it's usually filled with business activities. But I'm scratching out these few minutes (I should be soaping! ) because I miss you guys!

My beautiful sister behind our display!

The Bumblewood launch at the CBC Craft Show this past Saturday was a great success!! I got to share the booth with my beautiful sister, who displayed her photography and booked shoots. I sold about a quarter of my inventory, which is so much greater than I could have expected!! I met so many new and lovely people, and I had so much fun I'm still coming down off the high. :D It was excellent!

The Bumblewood Etsy shop also went live this weekend! There you will find all of our current offerings (minus a few soaps I haven't gotten listed yet). So if you can't make it to a show be sure to find what you're looking for there!

I will be doing another show at the beginning of November called the American Heroes Car Show. It benefits the Wounded Heroes Fund and Soldier's Angels, and last year they raised over $4,000! I'm really excited to do this one! And thankfully I have the details worked out now as far as packing and prepping so hopefully it won't be quite as hectic. Be sure to follow Bumblewood on Facebook to get all the updates of what's going on and where I'll be!

We've had germs all over the house in the past week. The kids came down with head colds on Tuesday, and I of course got it hard Friday night. Thankfully a good night's sleep had me going strong on Saturday, only to be bombarded with the scratchy throat and snuffles again on Sunday and I am still fighting it now. Oh well. At least it skipped Saturday, which is all I prayed for!

I have been working on Christmas ornaments slowly as my down time allows, and a pair of fingerless gloves in my ever-favorite "Foliage" colorway which is a perfectly autumnal mix of oranges and yellows and browns. I'm hoping to have a few custom orders coming up pretty soon, just need to finalize details with the recipient.

I have a very large box full of some just ever-so-scrumptious processed fiber from Tombstone Livestock. It's just beautiful. I pull it out and pet it every now and then and my fingers itch to get it on on the wheel. Just a few more batches of soap to ready for the Car Show and then I'm spending quite a few nights with those lovely fleeces.

School has been going well, the boys are picking up in both reading and math. They had been struggling with numbers, and I had to all but throw out the way we were doing math because... Well I have boys. Boys don't do "sitting" work very well. So one day, in a moment of frustration and desperation, I just picked up a little white board we have and started drawing out long and loud and raucous scenarios involving dinosaurs, aliens, asteroids, birds, police cars, helicopters, cannons and all kinds of boyish things. There were explosions. There were people getting arrested. There were asteroids taking out alien space ships. And all the while I would ask them "ok how many X do we have now" after we added or subtracted from the story line. Ben had walked in as I was doing it and he said he's never heard them yell and giggle so much, especially not during school. And you know what? They've been picking up numbers and counting like crazy. Who says school has to be done from a book? :D

The weather has been amazing. We haven't had an honest October in years and years, but this year is cool and crisp and clear. I've been making soups and baking bread and my itch for autumn is slowly being scratched as the leaves start to turn and the temperature keeps dropping ever so slightly. We even had a very tiny patch of rain last week. Supposedly going to be a wet winter, which would be fantastic! My soul and the valley are both in need of it.

Alright, I really need to go soap. Tonight I'm making up a batch of my Lemongrass Scrub, which was a best seller at the show! It's great for getting the grunge off dirty, hard worked hands. Perfect for a show about cars! ;)

Happy Wednesday!
Meg

Some Knitting. Oh, And a Giveaway Winner!

After what seems like a billion years (Ok, it was 9 months...) I finally finished the shawl I designed and started in December! Yay!



But that's not what you're here for, is it? :)

Thank you all so much for your sweet comments and well wishes. There were 33 total entries to the Lip Balm Giveaway!

I put that number into the Random Number Generator and I got...

Lucky number 13! That means Miss Debbie, you won the lip balm!

Miss Debbie said...

I liked the Bumblewood Facebook page!

August 23, 2013 at 3:16 PM

Congratulations! I just need you to email me your mailing address to meg.bumblewood(@)gmail.com (without the parenthesis) and I will get them in the mail to you. Or you can message it to me on Facebook. 

Stayed tuned for another giveaway coming next week!

Happy Friday everyone!
Meg

A Wee Vacation

We just got back from four days at the beach! It was so much fun, and very needed.

Before I tell you about our trip I just wanted to say WOW!  I was so surprised to get back to so many comments & entries on the giveaway post, and all the new fans on Facebook. Welcome to my new followers, new fans, and thank you all so much for all the love and well wishes. I will be holding more giveaways after this one over the next few weeks so be sure to check back! And if you haven't entered already, you can still enter the Lip Balm Giveaway until Thursday night!

This is Munchie after we had been in camp for 20 minutes. He was happy.

The original plan was to leave Friday and stay at a rented beach house with my family, but at the very last minute (and by last minute I mean 4 o'clock on Wednesday!) Ben was able to get Thursday off as well so we packed up the tent and went camping for one night before meeting up with everyone else. It was so much fun having a spur of the moment camping trip! We cooked hot dogs on skewers and roasted marshmallows and had s'mores, and after the kids went to bed Ben and I sat next to the fire and enjoyed the stars and sound of the waves.

Since my family wasn't supposed to get into town until afternoon on Friday, we had a lot of time to kill Friday morning.

We broke camp at 8 and went out to breakfast. Then we wandered the beaches. This is the first time Munchie has ever seen the beach.

Ben taught the big boys how to skip rocks...

Jack found a heart rock for me...

I found random rock art...

Then we went up to the bluffs above the beach and took a hike around and down to a little cove on a hunt for tidepools...

Munch in the backpack. I have been a bright-red head for 4 weeks and I am LOVING it. :D

After we were all completely worn out and slightly sunburned from our nature morning, we went out to fish n' chips for lunch, then to a little park at the end of the bay that Ben and I used to go to when we were little.

It has a cement pirate ship which has been there for as long as we can remember. It's awesome.

The rest of the weekend was spent with family, the big men went deep sea fishing, and we had a delicious BBQ Saturday night. Very nice and relaxing. And the weather was fantastic!

I finished sewing up the stocking. Just need to put on the little sparklies and things.

I found this really cute fabric at an adorable little fabric store that mom and I went to. Seriously cute little store. I wish I could live in it. This will probably become a new dress.

I came home to a pile of business related mail and a box of goodies - lip balm and lotion bar tubes and ingredients. I have another box coming tomorrow with more goodies!

We are officially signed up for the Craft Faire in October. I hope those who are able to will come down and visit us that day!

Happy Monday,
Meg

Knitting, And What's On The Horizon

There are some changes coming to my business soon...

But first, what I'm knitting!

Last week my mom brought me a hand knit stocking, with the story that she had been at a friend's house and had been telling her that I was a knitter. Her friend walked into her closet and brought out this this stocking, saying her great aunt had knit it for her when she was born and she was hoping to find someone to make a similar one for her husband. She's been searching for the last few years for someone to do it, but has had no luck.

Well I love to knit, I love getting custom orders, I love a challenge, and this struck a special place in my heart since I have a similarly styled one that was knit by my great-grandmother for me when I was a baby.

After a few conversations with her, we decided to leave it pretty much the same, but change a few of the colors. I've been having so much fun with this! I loved deconstructing it and figuring out how it was put together, and recharting the motifs, and seeing the Santa and the words come to life as I knit. It's been a blast!

And now for the changes!

Mojito lip balm, Hazelnut coffee and unscented soaps

In October my sister and I will be participating in another craft show. This one is bigger, has been going for 12 years, and has had over 300 people attend (per show) in the past years. So hopefully it will be WAY better than the one we did a few years ago.

But here's my exciting news: I will be changing my business and using this craft show to launch my soaps and skin care products! I have been very busy building inventory, developing new formulas, designing branding, and doing lots of paperwork.

I will be renaming the Etsy shop and adding all of my new stuff into it.

I will still be doing custom knitting orders, and writing patterns as I design new things. You will still be able to find all my patterns on Ravelry in the same place.

I'm so excited about this new phase! I've been having so much fun with formulas and scents and ideas. I hope this will turn out to be very successful.

So stayed tuned for Bumblewood, launching October 2013! :)

Happy Monday,
Meg

Things I've Been Doin'

I've done a lot of stuff lately that I just hadn't blogged about because... well I forgot.

The memory's the first thing to go!

So, in no particular order I've been....

Pickling cherries. Aren't they pretty? I've never had a pickled cherry and I'm very curious about them. I will let them sit a few more days to pickle, then I will try them.

Making Laundry Soap. For the first time, unbelievably! The stuff I've been buying has been going up and up and up in price. What got me to finally do it was my sister, who was going to make her own and was asking me about the ingredients. Well I told her she couldn't make laundry soap before I did! So she got the stuff and came over last Saturday and we made a big batch and split it. We used Staci's recipe for dry soap, and it works AMAZINGLY well!

Makin' more jam! After the apricot jam I made a batch each of Strawberry and Boysenberry. I'll make at least one more batch of each to keep us and family members stocked through the year. I love how quick jam making is.

Making Sauerkraut. I'm not sure how to make funky cabbage look appetizing... I set it to ferment at the beginning of last month and let it go for a few days before I put it in the fridge. Ben finally got around to trying it with bratwurst the other night and said it's very salty, but good. I told him we could just rinse it next time. I haven't tried it.... I'm kind of scared of it. I know it's kind of silly since I made it, but I wasn't super fond of the store bought stuff either so this... Kinda weirds me out! Haha.

Working on my sweater. The sleeves are attached and now I am decreasing for the neckline and working the yoke. After that is just the collar and then blocking! I'm really excited, and my sister has already said she'd like one too if this turns out well.

Finishing school. Today we finished our first year of kindergarten! I'm not quiet sure how I feel about it. Not the school itself, that was great! But the fact that my little boys are now out of kindergarten and next year we start first grade.... Probably doesn't help that on Sunday I put away all the little baby clothes and we set aside all of our baby things for when my sister starts having babies.... I won't lie, I cried. And I still cry a little bit...

My mom-in-love came by yesterday and brought me all of her first grade curriculum, plus some cool books for boys. I'm all set up and now I just have to plan when we'll be starting, and our breaks and such. 


I've also been planning a giveaway, in honor of this being my 600th post (wow!) and I now have 55 followers (super wow! You guys are so sweet!).

Things have to settle down a bit, so I will probably announce it next week!

Happy Almost Friday! (I'm in denial that this week isn't over yet.)
Meg

Knitting and Reading

Sorry I've been so quiet lately... Just not much to post about! We've been busy with life and play, and working through the rest of our school year. Only 6 weeks left and I'm so excited!

I have been wanting to knit myself a sweater for a very long time, and for whatever reason, it just never happens. Well I finally purchased yarn exactly for this purpose, picked and bought a pattern, and I'm about 7 inches in! :D The pattern is the Woodburne Cardigan by Carol Feller. I am loving it so far. There are just enough cables to keep me interested, but not so many that I can't pay attention to anything else while I'm knitting. I also love the yarn (Cascade 220) - I've never tried it before! It's really nice to be knitting on something with larger yarn and needles after so much of that lace shawl (which, no, is not done). Plain ol' wool is my favorite fiber. It is just cozy and warm and I feel so down to earth when I have it in my hands.

The reading is Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I just picked it up from the library yesterday and started reading it late last night, so I am only a few pages in. I have been wanting to read it for a long time, as I've been curious about it, and I am excited that I finally get a chance now. I'm also reading a book called Good Food Revolution by Will Allen. It's been a very thought provoking book as he tells his story, the story of others in his life, and how he has gotten to the point of being in charge of Growing Power.

I was finally able to get a picture of one of the babies. They are getting so big. Mama is starting to teach them to flap their wings and get them ready for flying. I am so glad she made her nest in that flower basket. I can watch them from the kitchen window as I am working at the sink. It's been so much fun to watch them as they grow.

I have some wonderfully wonderful, wonderful news to tell you - but I can't until it's officially official. (It has nothing to do with babies, just in case you were wondering.) But it has me very excited!

Linking up with Ginny's Yarn Along.

Happy Wednesday!
Meg

Going on Around Here

This is half ours and half from the farmer's market

First thing from the garden this year: sage and a head of lettuce, plus two tiny little radishes! We also got an artichoke the other night that Ben and I split.

The garden is... well it's coming along. I'm still waiting on sprouts from a lot of stuff, and I'm battling slugs and reseeding on other things. See the headless sprout in back right there? Yeah... This is going to be a year of war!

Draining curds

I made some Farmhouse Cheddar last week, and after it sat over the weekend to develop a rind...

It was waxed on Monday. Now it needs to sit and age for at least two months. I'm pretty excited about this. I've done a hunk of Parmesan that won't be ready until October, but I'm afraid it won't turn out because I didn't have optimal conditions for it's rind developing process. It got a little cracked and dried, so we'll have to see what happens.

I have no idea what Jack is doing

Mr. Munchie has been walking more than crawling now. This is one of my favorite stages, because he looks so adorable in his awkwardness. This little montage is what I call Baby Jaws. ;)

After my woe-is-me post about aching for land, I've been gently reminded of my post about blooming where I'm planted, and to be content where I am at the moment. You know who you are, and thank you. :) It was also reinforced when I got to the very end of my current Countryside magazine with a tiny little article entitled "Being Content Right Where I Am... For Now".

Yep, message received! I will try harder to be content with where we are.

I've been researching places to find lard for rendering. The few places I've called have just said I can get some if they happen to have it that day. So I will have to get lucky. I need to make good friends with a butcher and have him hold it for me.

I've started the edging of the shawl, which is good since it's due next week. The last part of the pattern is a little shorter than I had planned, but I ran out of yarn. I think I might release this as a mystery shawl pattern at first... We'll have to see.

And, I may or may not have ordered a plethora of yarn... I'd like to make a sweater (you know, cuz summer is coming...) and I thought it would be good to build my worsted weight stash... and Webs is having their Anniversary Sale... Which might have been the thing that swayed me.

And today, it's Friday!

Huzzah!

~Meg

Yarn Along

I have been so busy lately, but I've had nothing to blog about! I figured I can only give you step by step of my garden progress a few times before you get bored. ;) Thankfully, there are wonderful people like Ginny who give me things to post about!

We are on spring break this week, so I have been prepping and digging and getting ready for planting on Friday.  I got my bean trellis set up and planted all the tomatoes I can stuff into my garden yesterday. I have 6 plants left over so they will have to find a new home. I will ask my neighbor next time I see him.

My grandmother (we call her Mimi) told me that her mother (Great Grandma Lola, who passed away early this year) used to plant on the Thursday - and I later confirmed Friday as well - before Easter. Mimi said Grandma used to call them "Twin days" and she always had very lush and productive gardens. That is when Mimi plants, and I decided it would be good to stick with family tradition and so I will be planting on Friday as well. I like the idea of planting on Good Friday, and the thought that my harvest will be blessed from the beginning. :)

It is also good information for next year, in that now that I know when I'm planting I can better plan my seedlings.... and not have three foot high tomatoes because I started way too early.

Anyways, back to the point of the post...

For knitting I am trying to work on the shawl for the auction. I think my deadline is the middle of April but I need to double check on that... I was about half way through when I took a good look at my design and really, really didn't like it.  It just didn't look good. So I reworked the design... and ripped back a lot. =\ It might put me behind and cause me to miss the deadline, but I would rather contribute a shawl from my stash that is already finished than to contribute something that I don't feel good about. No half-arsed work here!

The reading is, among other books, The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I am about three chapters in and so far it is very interesting. There has been a bit of history on the life of corn, how it got to this point of being processed and reproccessed and is fed to both animals and humans, and how big industry uses it for... well for evil. Haha. Those are my words, not his. The point of the book is for him to try to follow corn from the farm to the end product, and the journey on which that takes him. I am enjoying it, when I find the rare moments of quiet to read it. I hope I can finish it before it is due back to the library.

Well, for not having much to post, that sure was long...

Linking up to Ginny's Yarn Along


Happy Wednesday y'all!
Meg

New Pattern: Rock Falls Scarf

The Rock Falls scarf pattern is now available!

You can purchase it from Ravelry here ($5.00).

You'll need:
Worsted weight yarn - 660 yards
US 7/4.5 mm needles

Skills required:
Knit, purl and cabling

Happy Knitting!
Meg

New Pattern: Foliage Mitts

The pattern for the Foliage Mitts is now live! You can find it via both Etsy & Ravelry for $3.00.

Happy Knitting!
Meg

Shop Update

Victorian Romance

I did a shop update yesterday in my Etsy store. You can find everything here. All the picture captions link straight to their listing.

Summer Rain

Emilie Fingerless Mittens

Chinook Shawl

Diamonds Shawl

I'm happy to take orders outside of Etsy too! Just shoot me an email - bitofknittery(@)gmail.com (minus the parenthesis).

Happy Wednesday!
Meg

Knitting

I finished a pair of socks! We're going to ignore the fact that they were pretty much done, just needed a bit of foot and the toe of the second sock, and had been lingering in the closet for oh... 6 months.

This is the mitered baby blanket I mentioned earlier. (Yes, I know this picture is terrible.) The body is finished, I just need to put a border on it. This will be going up in the shop when it's finished.

I was doing a yarn test for an order I have coming up, using worsted weight for a pair of Emilies rather than fingering weight. I think it looks great in the chunkier yarn, so I decided I might as well do a whole pair. This angora/merino blend yarn is absolutely delicious. So soft and snuggly. They'll be going up in the shop as well.

And finally - One of Ben's co-workers and his wife (obviously) are having their first baby! And all babies need to be knit for, and all babies especially need knit blankets. So I am doing a Babylove in pink for their little girl who's supposed come mid-September.

And Munchie is helping.

Happy Tuesday!
Meg