So Long Winter!

It's been lovely here the last few days, with temperatures yesterday nearing 80F. (That's upper 20's for you in the metric majority. :-)) The garden is being dug out by hand this year after several years of rototilling when I discovered that there was solid clay only 6" down in some parts of the veggie bed. O.O Now I'm down to more like 18" in that part of the garden, which should make the carrots grow a lot better this year. LOL

Today the hubby has taken The Sproutlings to an animal expo so I can get ready for next weekend's craft show. I've dyed a dozen things so far and have twice run out of towels, and so far I'm pleased with the results I've seen. My favorites in terms of "dye it fast" are the Low Water Immersion items, what I call "dye in a jar" garments.Put dye at the bottom of a jar, stuff in a garment, pour another color on top, let the dyes seep around and interact and make cool patterns and combinations, add soda ask so the dye "sticks" to the fibers, and rinse out anywhere from an hour to a day later. It's pretty random and sometimes strange things happen, but that's half the fun. I did a rayon top this morning in shades of red which is going thru the washer now; looked at it before the rinse came on and the darker reds came out pink, almost lavender, while the brighter red came out more scarlet. Not the effect I wanted, to be sure, but still pretty cool, and very unique. :-) Did another in shades of violet only to discover that the trim is polyester, so it remains to be seen whether someone wants a casual shirt in shades of purples all marbly across the shirt - with a white collar. (D'oh!)

That said, it took me most of the day to dye a dozen items. Yowza. And I haven't gotten out in the garden to pick up any new blisters! LOL

The Garden

For Valentine's Day, a side trip to another of my passions: the veggie garden. When one has children with a marked sensitivity to food additives, like high fructose corn syrup (and processed sugars in general) and artificial food colorings, one learns quite quickly how to either cook from scratch or medicate the kids. I'm not a big fan of unnecessary medication, but I AM a fan of good food, and I'm also cheap. I'd rather grow my own food, I'd rather sweat and rack up mosquito bites galore in the garden and have perma-dirt under my nails all Summer long than pay for second-rate food in the grocery store, especially when the food is in season.

We're having a lovely warm spell this week, tonight excepted. Tonight it's windy like crazy, blowing a good 35-40mph gusts as the cold front slams us, but even tomorrow it's still projected to be above freezing, followed by a warming trend that takes us to nearly 70F by the end of the week! The heavy wet snow we got earlier has been melting and freezing since it fell (and expanding the crack in our concrete patio, but that's another story) and waterlogging the garden bed and the pots on the patio, so today I tipped over the pots and even dug a bit in what will eventually be the garlic bed (which I never got around to planting before the frost hit). By the weekend, I should have garlic in the ground, and I will feel like a proper gardener again!

I also measured the garden bed today. I had no idea our garden was pushing 30 feet long! Only 6 feet across, but LONG! Tried to map it out on the computer but I can't get the paper big enough to suit me! Gonna have to actually use, um, bigger paper. And maybe a ruler. And a pencil. *grin*

I've got two books I'm using as inspiration for what I'm hoping to do this summer: Square Foot Gardening and How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine. The idea is to basically use the land most efficiently, both space-wise and rotation-wise (cool-weather, warm-weather, cool-weather). As much as I love our local Farmer's Market, there's still no guarantee that the food is grown organically without pesticides unless the farmers say so, and I'm, well, fussy these days.

It's still too early for me to be putting seeds into flats, but another couple weeks and I can at least start the lettuce. I had to lose a lot of beans and peas to learn to not even bother starting them before the end of March.../ but I have a window box ready to take up space in the bay window - just not the space yet, or the plans and seeds.

More garden musings will come later, but this will do for now. :-)

Climbing out of Winter

February 2nd has come and gone. Here in the DC area we had an incredible storm the night before that left us with 9" of heavy wet snow in the space of 5-6 hours. Trees and branches fell on power lines, transformers blew all over town, traffic was a nightmare. There was thundersnow, too, lightning and thunder WITH the snow that was so heavy we could barely see across the street in our well-lit neighborhood. Quite a show for Groundhog's Day, also known as Imbolc in older traditions. And no, Punxsutawny Phil did NOT see his shadow. that can only mean, on this date about 6 weeks before the Vernal Equinox, that we have 6 weeks of Winter left anyway.

Not much activity on the Zibbet shop, but that' because we've been juggling a nasty G-I thing that has laid us low, one by one. Hubby seemed to have held out, but today it's his turn, poor guy. Good thing I'm now running on all cylinders again. And I've been dyeing stuff like a crazy person the last few days.

Some scrubs for a custom order, for example. Ordered the scrubs from Sassyscrubs, which makes some really high-quality stuff - I first heard of them when a nurse friend of mine asked me to dye some flannel scrubs for her; she ordered them there and had them ship to me, and I was really impressed with the durability of the fabric and the construction. Sorry, Dharma Trading, I'm glad you have scrubs tops but by comparison they are LAME. :-\ Customer left a lot of the decision-making up to me color-wise and pattern-wise, the only guidance being "earth tones" and "not a fan of orange," so I decided to order up two tops, dye them slightly differently, and let the customer choose. The color wasn't as deep as I might have liked, which may be a function of any stain-resistance that's built into the scrubs fabric, but they're still pretty striking in their own way, so I'm pleased.

Also had a men's polo that needed some love to cover up a few minor scuff marks, so I gave it as manly a tie-dye job as I could muster, which was easy to do with all the browns I'd already mixed for the scrubs tops.

I've got more to do, more to take pictures of - gosh, it's been so long since I uploaded to my computer I found photos and videos of LAST year's DC Snowmageddon when I loaded these pics from my camera, so I have to get back in practice and stock up my shop! Hoping this will give me some momentum to be moving on with.

Change in the air

I'm not afraid of change. Really, I'm not. Much.

OK, I like the newness, I like the novelty, but - I hate making the decision and doing the work to change.

But when a site I'm selling decides to make changes to its Privacy Policy that can result in spam for people on my own private email list unless I opt out, I make the change.

Etsy, I'm sorry. I've tried. I'm not selling much, and a lot of that is my own doing, but when you do things like automatically assume that your sellers want their email lists linked to their shops while at the same time prohibiting your own sellers from any sort of contact that might be construed as spam, well, it makes sellers want to run screaming. I can't imagine what it would do to new buyers, but I personally shy away from sites where I have to expose my contacts like that.

I like Facebook, I like hanging with my peeps in a virtual setting, I like communicating with people I know from wildly divergent places and in very different ways. I even kind of enjoy pushing my tie-dye there once in a while, and I like that it sometimes brings me a new look or a sale I might otherwise not have gotten. But to be honest, most of that happens off-Etsy anyway. Why would I want my customers' emails exposed to a whole other venue when I'm starting to do more off-Etsy business anyway?

So Etsy would like to be more of a social networking site. If I wanted to be on another social networking site that'd be fine - but I don't really. I signed up for Etsy to sell tie-dye, and that's it. As it is I'm lost in the number of tie-dye vendors already there, but I don't see how dragging my email contacts into Etsy is going to increase my sales. Maybe I'll get lucky and someone else's email list will send someone to my shop to buy something - which won't help the person they were harvested from.

In the last year I've sent out a lot of business cards with my Etsy shop address on them. A LOT. So it makes sense that I'll probably keep a token presence there for a while until the new Zibbet shop takes off. ANd now that I'm out of the old cards, my next batch will have both shop addresses on them.... with the Zibbet one first. Free to list up to 50 items - I usually have more like 30-35 - and no listing fees. Off to a rousing start already. So far I'm liking what I see over there - come and have a look-see, see what you think!

Randomness (and practice making lots of links)

Yep, the storm mostly missed us. We had enough fluffy stuff with ice under it for the girls to have a good time in the snow outside this morning during the late start for school, but it'll be gone by the weekend while once again, New York City and New England bear the brunt of it.

Been trying a medical experiment. While visiting grandparents over the holidays, I forgot to take my thyroid meds. I was ready to start up again, but I noticed I felt BETTER off the meds! I have no idea why this should be the case, but it IS the case. No more headaches, more energy, even lost a couple of pounds. I could get used to this. I'll have to come clean with my doctors at some point, I suppose....

I've also begun working my way diet-wise back to the way of eating that lost me 30 pounds of stubborn post-baby weight after my second child was born. In that case it was the Body Ecology Diet, which we were prescribed as a family to help starve out systemic candida in an effort primarily to help my older child with some behavioral issues. For the two months we did it whole-hog, I lost the weight, her behavior leveled off some, and with a child in a preschool we didn't get so much as a sniffle, in February and March while people around us were getting the flu right and left. Now I'm working on "going Paleo." Very similar in many ways: simple nonprocessed foods, avoid grains like the plague (I do some grains after I soak them for 8 hours, but not as many), good meat and lots of veggies, and no dairy (except for my homemade yogurt I'm not sure we could do without very easily, although I'm willing to try it for a couple of weeks....down the road....maybe....). I've already made adjustments in the menus and the cooking, but there wasn't that much to do since we already eat lots of meat and veg and cook in butter and bacon fat and coconut oil, much to the consternation of my doctor. LOL

Looking ahead now to planning the veggie garden. I hope we don't get the degree of heat we had this past summer. I personally was happy with 105F in the shade, but the garden was NOT. Even nightshades, which like hot weather, don't like it THAT hot; they have a temperature above which they basically shut down production, so our tomato and pepper yields were pretty lame. The okra wasn't even all that spectacular, and that thrives in the heat. The green beans shut down, and forget the cooler-weather stuff like lettuce. And the cukes were, well, pitiful. :-( At least the potatoes did OK, and for my first try at corn in many many years, the fact that we got enough ears to make a single meal plus a bit extra was an accomplishment. Usually the local critters get to it first! Looking to get a copy of this book by John Jeavons so help me plan ahead and make the most of our little plot(s) and pots. :-)

I've also been working on a few dye projects, including a custom tee, a lovely scarf, a cute toddler girl dress-and-leggings set, and some random kids' tees, all while embarking on a 14-week house-organizing binge with the help of some online friends and fellow parents at Baby Whisperer Forums, where I've been finding help and support with my kids since my almost-9YO was 3 months old and long before the other was even born. Can't recommend it highly enough for parents looking for answers with their little ones.

Thus end my random musings for the evening. We hope you enjoyed this installment. Perhaps sometime soon I'll be back to write up what I learned this evening about The Business of Art, so kindly sponsored by our city's arts center.

Weather or not....

Some random musings about yet another snowstorm that probably will leave us alone. Again.

I don't know how many more times we're gonna go thru the "impending storm of doom" scenario here in the DC area this year. Last year we got nailed pretty badly storm-wise, but this year every storm has managed to deal us a glancing blow at worst, assuming it shows up at all. Shopping for Winter clothes in, um, Winter has gotten to be nearly impossible. Went to Target a few days before Christmas
trying to get snow pants for the child who grew more than we thought she would and there were FOUR, count them, FOUR, pairs of snow pants in the place. FOUR. Had I needed to buy my kids swimsuits, though, I would have been in luck: FOUR RACKS of them in the girls' section alone. It wasn't even WINTER yet!!!

Needless to say, Target got rather a nasty letter from me, especially after we went to K-Mart and found rack upon rack of Winter wear for men, women, and children of all ages. Add to that some second-hand snow-wear donated by a friend with two older kids and we're set for a couple of years now, but why should I have to hunt down Winter clothing even before Winter? Also makes it hard to find clothing for dyeing when someone orders up a long-sleeved tee in mid-December - and there aren't any! :-( Sure, I can order one online, and probably for a bit less money, but if I want to get started today, that's a hassle and a delay I'd rather not deal with. Sometimes "today" is when I have the time.

So now we wait for the snow to start. Or not. Overnight tonight, perhaps. Or during the morning rush, if you believe another site. Or, as the meteorologists on the radio are predicting, early, mid, or late afternoon tomorrow. Nothing like a wide window of, well, whatever's in the window. :-)

Holiday Mayhem has ended!

And there was much rejoicing! (muffled "yaaay!" in background from the Knights of the round Table)

It's a new year, with some new projects in the works. First step: exploring going fully legal. Not just the "Get a temporary sales tax license for each craft show I do in Maryland" legal, but the whole shebang. For the paperwork-phobe that is me, this is a HUGE HUGE step. *gulp!*

To that end I'm hoping that our city's art center still has room in their Business of Art class this week for me. An hour and a half to learn about the paperwork required would be a great start. :-)

And now there's an uproar on Etsy about some really REALLY offensive greeting cards that Etsy won't take down, citing Free Speech and all that. I debated about linking to the cards but I really don't want to give the seller any more publicity - but there are potential buyers out there now who are boycotting Etsy over this, and if they're boycotting Etsy, they're not coming to my shop. :-( So I'm looking at Zibbet as a possible new place to sell.

Now to get some tie-dye in the laundry for washing out. What a colorful start to the new year!