Tag Archives: everything else

Sorry for the blog neglect- it has been super busy around here since my last post. I drove up to New Jersey (and back) for a lovely trunk show at A Stitch in Time, Caroline attended Sheep Shearing School and Zac entertained four farm stay guests and took care of everything at the farm.

Today we all look like we’ve been through a war.  Lucky for everyone, no babies were born over the weekend and Sam doesn’t even truly look all that ready to pop. I’m hoping she holds out till April 1st, when the phone company assures me that my T-1 line will be installed and the lambcam will be a 24/7 party.

I just put the finishing touches on our Camp JMF schedule. We’ll get them posted tomorrow and you will be awed by what we have on offer.

Tonight, I’m going to drink a glass of wine, watch many episodes of All Creatures Great and Small and get to sleep early.

Enjoy your Sunday evening.

to say THANK YOU for the overwhelming success of our Kickstarter Campaign! We couldn’t have done it without your help. Thank you for contributing. Thank you for spreading the world. Thank you for all the words of encouragement and for your excitement about the magazine.

By Hand is going to be an amazing magazine that we all can be proud of!

I’m off to Farmingdale, NJ for a trunk show from 1-4 p.m. at A Stitch in Time. If you live nearby, come out and say hi. I’ll have all the garments from the three new lines and will sign books. I would love to see your lovely faces there.

This pretty little bench sits under a crab apple tree in our kitchen garden.  It’s a great place to read or just to sit and think about how lucky you are.

Right now the tree is buzzing with bees from our hives, gathering nectar to make honey, which makes the tree even lovelier to me.

Between the tree blossoms, Elwyn sitting proudly on her clutch of eggs and the very pregnant sheep and goats wandering around the front pasture, it’s impossible to deny that it’s springtime. It is also impossible to deny that I live in the loveliest spot on earth. (Please remind me of this when I am complaining my head off in the wretched, wretched heat of August. Or May.)

In other news, our Kickstarter campaign is nearly at an end and we are a mere $1259 from reaching our new goal of $22,000, as of this writing. We have 59 hours to go and I think there’s an awfully good chance we’ll make it! By Hand Magazine is going to be so fantastic, and you will be able to show it to your friends and say, “Have you seen my new magazine? Oh yes, I am one of the financial backers.” (Try to channel the Monopoly guy when you say it.)

There is so much outside work to do but I find that – as Juniper Moon Farm grows- I am stuck inside doing more and more work-like work these days. I complained about this to my friend Kris the other day and she pointed out that people with the best job on the planet should just keep their trap shut about the occasional conference call or meeting. Kris is often my Jiminy Cricket.

I am doing a limited schedule of trunk shows to support our incredible Spring and Summer collection of yarns and designs, and I will be in Farmingdale, NJ, this Saturday, March 24th, from 1-4 p.m. at A Stitch in Time. If you live nearby, come out and say hi. I’ll have all the garments from the three new lines and will sign books. Do come if you can.

I’ll post about my other visits as they come up. I’m doing an unprecedented West Coast swing in June and I’m so excited to see the shops and blog readers out there for the first time. Full schedule as it develops.

Now I’m off to spend an evening getting the Camp JMF workshops and classes in order and ready for your perusal.

Caroline is hard at work putting together a post on our Design Contest, but while she works I wanted to update you on our Kickstarter campaign. As of this writing, we have raised $18,692! Crazy right?!? And we still have seven days to go!

And, because we’re us, we’ve saved a little surprise for this last week of Kickstarting. 

Our new goal is to raise $22,000 by the end of our campaign, so keep your fingers crossed and spread the world. You can check out the awesome post my friend Virginia did on her blog today.

Thank so much for all your support!

Could we trouble you to take a moment to vote in the About.com’s Reader’s Choice Awards? The voting ends in a week (on March 21st) and we have fallen into second place due to an email that the folks at Berroco sent out to their monster mailing list.

There’s nothing wrong with Berrocco soliciting votes, but I am not yet ready to concede. So if you could vote everyday between now and the 21st with your email addresses and get everyone in your household to vote, we might be able to close the gap. If you get everyone in your office to vote, and maybe all your Facebook friends, we may be able to pull out a win.

Remember, you can vote once every 24 hours between now and the 21st.

What do you say?  We will be mighty grateful.

Caroline, Zac and I are still glowing for our amazing week with Lizzy House last week. We’re also catching up on all the things we put off while quilting, learning to sew clothes, block printing, staying up far too late, and feasting. It was a glorious week, but the real world- and our real jobs-beckon.

We spent all day yesterday giving the barn a top-to-bottom cleaning in preparation for lambing. Stalls were muck, everything was dusted and trips to the dump were taken. We’re in great shape for lambing and kidding, expected to commence on or around March 22nd.

And we have some rather exciting news about lambing for those of you who will be watching at home. After three years of waiting for the phone company to finally provide us with high speed internet access, I have caved and arranged for the installation on a T-1 line! It is obscenely expensive, but not that much more obscene than the infuriating satellite internet were are paying for now.

The good news is that it will solve a world of Lambcam problems, at least the ones that come from our end. We will finally be able to offer you an uninterrupted , 24/7 look into lambing at JMF!

Installation is expected some time late this week or early next. I’ll let you know when we’ve made the switch.

In other news, you may have noticed that we have decided not to offer Half Shares in our Yarn and Fiber CSAs this year. There are a number of reasons for this and -after receiving an email from a customer urging us to bring them back- I have decided to stick with my decision not to offer them this year.

In place of the Half Shares, we are offering a two-payment Full Share to members of our Raverly group. If you’d like to take advantage of this payment method, we do ask that you join our Ravelry group, as it was initially offered to the group exclusively.

The two-payment Full Share is available in yarn or spinning fibers; just indicate which you prefer on your paypal check out in the “note to seller” box.

In other news, we hope to have all of the garments submitted in our Design Contest photographed by tomorrow for a Thursday post. I’m so sorry to make you wait- I know it can be nearly unbearable. The problem is really that we received so gosh darn many awesome entries! But the wait is nearly over and I thank you for your patience.

More news tomorrow (with pictures even!) once I catch up a bit.

Stunned. We are all just stunned by the love you all have been showing to our Kickstarter campaign for our new magazine By Hand. As of this evening, we have reached our goal of $16,000 in 5 tiny little days. Stunned.

And, the crazy thing is, we still have 16 days to go!

Every penny we raise from here on out will be earmarked for digital improvements to the magazine that we thought we just wouldn’t be able to afford. Embedded video, downloadable PDF patterns and interactive tutorials; tools that will make making easier for you.

We have added some new contribution levels in response to your requests for a way to get two t-shirts or posters.

We’ve also added a new design especially for our crocheters. You are every bit as important to us as our knitters and you deserve posters and t-shirts of your very own.

Tomorrow we will get back to cute animal pictures but I couldn’t go to sleep without saying thank you.

Well that was unexpected.

We went to bed at 2 a.m. to clear skies and the possibility of flurries today. We awoke to a few hours later to four inches of snow on the ground.

In other news, our Kickstarter campaign has gotten off to a fantastic start! By Hand Magazine is looking more and more like it will come to be and that is crazy exciting. We still have a ways to go though, and we need to keep up the momentum up. We will be sending an email out to our mailing list today which should; apologies to those of you who already know about it/have contributed.

And THANK YOU. Thank you to the moon and back. Thank you infinity. Infinite plus 10. We are going to make a magazine! “We” as in you and me. Us. And it’s going to be a fine magazine, one that we will all be so, so proud of.

So for months now I have been alluding to a big secret I’ve been keeping. I am thrilled that today I can finally share the news with all of you.

Juniper Moon Farm is starting a magazine called By Hand. By Hand will be a lifestyle magazine for people who make, with departments for cooking, crafting, DIY, gardening, and do-gooding, with a bit of travel and profiles of makers every month.

The idea is to celebrate creating things with our hands, and to explore the motivation to make things in a world where there are cheaper and immediate alternatives. It will be both practical (patterns, DIY projects, etc) and thoughtful, with a lovely and gentle aesthetic.

We have lots of amazing contributors and editors on board already, and the first issue is well underway. But before we go any further, we need your help!

We are holding a Kickstarter campaign to raise the rest of the money we need to make the magazine everything we want it to be. And as an added inducement, we have commissioned so amazing rewards! Our art director Michelle Lukezic has designed posters and t-shirts that are going to be incredibly popular with people who make things with their hands. Here’s a sample:

There are posters and t-shirts for each of the sections in the magazine!

If you like what you see and want to support us, great! If you can help us get the word out about the Kickstarter  and the magazine we will be forever in your debt!

If you are entering the Juniper Moon Farm Design Contest, today is the last day to get your package in the mail. All entries must be postmarked by March 1st, 2012 in order to be considered for the contest.

Can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with!