Tag Archives: everything else

Hopefully you’re not like me and have actually gotten your shopping / crafting for Christmas done. If so, than this post can help you in the adorable wrapping department. If not, don’t bother reading this. Hie thee to a mall with a strong sedative and good luck. (Don’t forget the gift bags.) Or, use Amazon.com because you can shop for three more days and have your gifts arrive in time for Christmas when using your prime account. (And, shopping Amazon through our website means that a small portion of the sale gets put towards Heifer International. And we’re matching that amount from now through Christmas!)

But if you’re nicely organized or are looking to punch up your wrapping with a little extra pizazz, then check out some of the ideas I gathered below.

A pleat in the wrapping paper makes a handy spot to secure a gift card!

From Martha Stewart

If you’re making cupcakes for people, wrapping them in a clear plastic cup and cellophane is a brilliant idea:

From Bird on a Cake

How perfect would this be for a teacher?

From NashvilleWrapsCommunity.com

I think we’ve all seen this colorful idea from More Last-Minute Knitted Gifts

but this is a fun twist on it:

from Bit + Co.

There are a ton of great ideas at Older and Wisor, including pillow boxes made from soda boxes:

And of course you can top off your present with a beautiful bow:

From Elli.com

If you have time to employ any of these, I applaud you. The rest of us battle-weary Christmas elves will be pulling the blankets up over our heads, hoping that spring will be here before anyone notices that we’re missing.

In October Susan and I started thinking about the calendar. We’d take care of it next month, we said. No problem, we said. Well November came and nearly went! But we finished the calendar just in time!

We had a lot of fun looking through images taken over the last year. Some of them haven’t even been seen on the blog, so you’re in for a few surprises!

These calendars are always super popular and it’s always been difficult to judge how many we should print, so this year we decided to let lulu.com print on demand for us instead of printing a big wholesale order. This means that there’s no worry of running out and considering that Susan and I are both sick (although today I had the energy to sit up for 5 hours before I had to lie down!), and how busy our Decembers are, this is a great plan. And because lulu.com is offering free shipping through December 10th, you’ll be able to get the calendar for cheaper than we’d be able to offer it on the website! It’s a win-win situation here!

Use coupon code FREESHIP for free shipping. Coupon is good through the 10th and you’ll get your calendar by December 24th – just in time to wrap and stick under the Christmas tree. (Does anyone else have the family tradition of receiving calendars for Christmas? In middle and high school I would spend a few hours of my Christmas vacation copying over birthdays in my new calendar. I loved it!)

The calendar is 11″ x 17″ when opened and includes important US holidays. It also includes the Spring Shearing Celebration day already marked off, so you won’t need to mark your calendar! Official invite to come, but save the date – Saturday, April 5, 2014. We’ll be at Pleasant Grove in Palmyra, VA.

Don’t miss the free shipping offer! Order today!

A month or so ago, my friend Dragan and I went on a grand adventure – to get Ikea shelves! Many adventurous moments (and a second trip to Ikea the next day) later, I had shelves! I quickly shoved all the yarn I could fit on them and was happy to have some floor space back, since almost all the yarn on the shelves had been living in the brown boxes it was shipped to me in. You see, The Ikea shelves were completely necessary as I get a lot of yarn from our distributor. Most of it goes out for our sample knits and some for giveaways or designers looking to work with our yarn.

But I took some time this weekend (pacing myself, since I still get tired very easily) to put the yarn up on the shelves in a more orderly fashion. It definitely gives me piece of mind to look and see some order back there.

You might notice that my shelves are holding yarn that’s in a different form that just skeins. That’s right, I also have a bunch of finished samples on the shelves, waiting to be tagged and then to travel with me to Virginia for the photo shoot. That will free up some additional room on my shelves, which is really good since I’m already receiving yarn for Fall / Winter 2014!

Not everything on my shelves is yarn, though. One shelf (okay, really they’re cubbies, but that makes me feel like I’m in Kindergarten!) is devoted to patterns, both ours and others, and buttons.

And of course these little guys, which were a surprise from Anna Branner of Cloth n Clay.

I could easily use more shelves, as much of my personal stash is not on the shelves. (Only some of my personal JMF stash fit in the two shelves I had leftover). But I’m outgrowing the wall space for this room. Really I’ve outgrown this room because in addition to being my office / craft room, it’s also my husband’s book and musical instrument room. But moving isn’t in the cards right at the moment, so I have to make do with what I’ve got!

It looks like by tidying everything up, I might have just created some room for my spinning wheel to be able to be permanently out instead of permanently stored, which would be great since I really haven’t had the drive to set up the wheel in our cramped living room and then put it away as soon as I was done. And out of site, out of mind. So I haven’t been doing much spinning. But since the 2013 Spinner’s Shares arrived and then quickly went back out the door, I’ve had a hankering for spinning up some yarn. And there happens to be a bit of wool leftover, calling my name!

Next up, doing something with the blank patch of poorly painted wall that I face when at my computer, which is a lot. I’ve got some ideas for this. I can’t wait to show you!

How do you store your yarn? What keeps you energized and focused in your work / craft space?

So, as Susan said yesterday, I have shingles (thanks for the well wishes!) and she’s feeling like she came down with the flu. We were supposed to have our photo shoot for Spring Summer later this week, but with the possibility of me getting Susan really sick, we both thought that it was best if I stayed home. I’m really disappointed about it, but this is really for the best. I’m working on resting, which helps with my overall goal of finding balance between work and life and I did really well this weekend with marathon tv watching and playing Candy Crush. In fact, I did it so well that I completely forgot to put up a knitting blog post yesterday!

And delaying the photo shoot means I just have that much more time to get all my ducks in a row, which is always a good thing to allow for a smooth photo shoot experience. So I’m going to focus on resting and getting caught up on emails today, but slowly, as I already discovered that doing something as strenuous as clearing off my desk so that I have a better place to work is too much! And even just sitting up for an extended period of time is tiring. Let me hear some happy things from you so I can live vicariously while on sick rest!

So, poor Lauria has come down with shingles and I woke up this morning feeling flu-y. Not the best Monday on record so far.

I’ve got a MOUNTAIN of work to plow through today, but I keep taking breaks to watch Teddy Bear, a porcupine who loves pumpkin as much as I do. Teddy Bear is keeping me going today. Hope he keeps you going, too.

It’s TMSGT, y’all! We want to hear what’s going well for you.

I’ll go first. I’m still glowing from the most amazing weekend I’ve ever had. It included dinner with five of my favorite people in the world, crab cakes eggs Benedict Sunday morning, an entire season of Boardwalk Empire, lunch with my BFF Kris, breakfast for dinner last night, and– most important of all– three days of close proximity to someone very special.

Your turn– Tell Me Something Good!

Okay, I’m about to get all grumpy-old-man on you. You have been warned.

I woke up this morning super excited about the fact that it was all weathery outside. There is a chill in the air and it’s a little bit rainy. This is the first honest-to-goodness autumnal day we’ve had this year, and I was prepared to revel in it.

We even still have a fair amount of gorgeous turning leaves on the trees! My morning drive started off blissful but it very quickly took a turn and this is why:

Even before Election Day, I am not a big fan of the campaign signs that pop up in public spaces. If people want to put them in their own yards I am totally down with that, but I don’t think they belong in every median and intersection.

For one thing, I don’t think they change anyone’s mind about who they are going to vote for. For another, it just makes the whole world look junky for the three weeks leading up to the election. But I get that some people consider posting their candidate’s signs in common areas a free speech issue, so I try not to let it bother me.

But whatever you think of them before Election Day, they are now unequivocally garbage. And I don’t see anyone rushing to take them down.

I totally get that when your candidate loses, it would be a real bummer to have to drive around town removing all the signs you put up, but who exactly are they leaving them for? And what if your candidate won? Cause I don’t see those coming down either.

I would like to appeal to winning candidates across Virginia to make the magnanimous gesture of cleaning up all the signs in your area. It would be such a gracious thing to do and I can assure you that lots of us would appreciate it.

End rant.

The past few weeks have seen Lauria and I both buried in an avalanche of work and we’ve kind of been neglecting the blog. But I promise to get back on track, starting first thing Monday. In the meantime, Tell Me Something Good!

I will start by telling you that I have some really great new things going on, both for JMF and in my personal life. But that’s all I can say for now on both fronts. More soon, at least on the work-related one.

What’s going on with you? Any exciting milestones or accomplishments this week? We haven’t done one of these in ages; I’m dying to hear what’s up with you.

I absolutely owe y’all a long, newsy blog post. And I have plenty of material for one– loads of pictures and stories to share with you. But this past week has left me completely exhausted and I just don’t have what it takes to get it done tonight.

I promise to hook you up tomorrow without fail (although it may be later because I’ve got an early morning date with the post office). In the meantime, please head over to Amy’s blog and read about our crazy week.

Sorry that posting on the blog has been so light this week. As you can imagine, we are up to our eyebrows in yarn shipping right now.

It’s not quiet as easy as just sticking the yarn in an envelope. Each skein has to be tagged, and before that can happen, each tag has to be strung. It turns out that the awesome tags we bought don’t come with the strings in them. That may not sound like a big deal, but multiply a little deal x 7500 skeins and you’ve got a big deal. (That’s The Shepherd & The Shearer plus our Cormo CSA Shares and our Colored Flock shares.)

Although we’ve be at this for a week now, the giant mountain of yarn in Amy’s house doesn’t seem to be diminishing. And can I just take a moment to say that Amy and Paul have been AMAZING about the fact that we have taken over their house, their children, their friends and their lives. Two more gracious people have never lived.

Yesterday, we have a little break from the monotony when Lucas and Emily- the farmers who we buy our hay from- came by with a truck load.

Looking at the hay, I got a little teary thinking about how much hay and how much effort had gone into growing the wool that we were tagging indoors.

It changed the way I think about those giant bales. Now when I look at them, I think about next season’s yarn, and all the warm sweaters, scarves, hats and mittens it will become. That hay represents so many hours of joyful knitting and so many seasons of comfort.

This world really is a magical place.