Luna's Baublebilities

So I waited for the tax return.  And it finally came last Friday - at least part of it - who knows when, or if, NYS will ever issue any money ever again for anything.  So I pushed the button to order our new family camera and a whole buncha lotta beads.

Really.  A LOT of beads.

I think my sweet Beorn Beorning was a bit nonplussed when he discovered just how very many beads I've ordered. 

Really, though. It is May and I have exercised a great deal of restraint in the bead buying area since December and have put a really huge chunk - most months almost 100% -  of my business income from late November on into household expenses.

And really - how exciting are pink and aqua daisies when I could be making pink and aqua and orange and red and purple and blue and yellow and . . .

You get the picture.

So Monday morning, the UPS man plops a package on the porch.

No way!  That was too fast!  Is it beads???














No.  Just a pile of Purple Potatoes.  Which are pretty.  And more nutritious than the normal garden variety.  And they have iridescent skin (for real - when washed they sparkle in a very subdued 1970's metal flake sorta way.)   And Maxx will eat them.  And they make the Awesomest mashed potatoes - all purpley blue through and through.  And they will grow wonderfully in our garden this year.

But they ain't beads and I hate waiting.



(We get our Purple Potatos from the Maine Potato Lady.  She's really cool.  These are Purple Majesty

I'll post photos of beads next week.)

Big ones Small ones and Some as Big as your head!
















This potato made a really yummy soup.

It came from our garden - the biggest, lumpiest, bumpiest potato I've ever seen!












I got new beads today - including some beautiful pearls!












Photos for scarves are processed and ready to appear on Etsy Monday. I'm amazed at how difficult it is to get good photos of these satin and velvet scarves. Just trust me when I say that they are a thousand times more wonderful in person. ;)

The last few days have been so glorious!













This tree is the reason I bought this house. Perfect for swinging.







Looking Up.
















Looking into the canopy.






















One perfect leaf.
















Our French Intensive Double Dug garden bed - potatoes all removed and ready for the winter.















Friends had helped me remove the potatoes from this bed back when we had our work party. We ended up with a 5 gallon pail full and then some. They thought it was a good yield but I was a little disappointed - it just didn't look like enough. When we started getting this bed ready for winter - guess what - no one had dug deep enough. There were at least Twice as many tubers left in that dirt! And what wonderful dirt it is! What a miracle these double dug beds are. Bat and horse poo and some well rotted hay helped quite a bit, too!



















Maxx loves to use the hose.


















Daddy is lucky he didn't get wet.

It is official. Autumn is here. Soon the greeny greens will be gone. No longer will a floaty silk scarf keep your bare shoulders comfy of an evening. The nights are cold - not just cool - we have had at least two hard frosts here in Almost Canada and actually had to build a fire last night. Last night Bry and I went for a walk and I was wishing for a pair of long underwear even though we kept up a pretty brick pace! Even Ziggy was happy to get back into the house and warm up afterward.

I have a love-hate relationship with Autumn. It is one of the most beautiful seasons of the year here with glorious colors in the foliage and dramatic skies. The bugs all die in the first frost and the days are still bright and sunny. Clear nights allow for an amazing view of the sky without the bitter cold of winter. Harvest starts to come in, including Beets and squash and this year, purple potatoes! The first payroll check of the year shows up mid September and we can afford to buy tissues again.

However it is also the time of year that Bry has to go back to work and I hate that. I wish I could keep him home all year long. I hear that lots of married couples get tired of each other during vacations. Hasn't happened to us yet. Of course, I love having the Daddy around to take some of the demands of childrearing but the main thing is that we still love to talk and listen to music and work and play together. The fact that we can't get outside together during this beautiful time of year is particularly galling.

This year has it's own stresses associated with Autumn. Bry has had to take a half-time position with BOCES because the other available offer was just not reasonable for our family. He probably could have pulled rank with his seniority and kicked some other teacher out of a position they were comfortable in but neither of us felt that was an appropriate response to our situation. Make someone else miserable, too? Not likely.

So that first paycheck of the year was pretty pitiful. In fact, I believe that we now qualify for food stamps! I am currently lamenting my month spent recovering from whiplash (thanks, Maxx) which allowed the garden to get out of control and significantly reduced our yield. However, I'm not panicking about money. Bry is scheduled to start tearing down a barn on Friday and he should be able to re-sell and/or re-use some of that lumber. He and his brothers are talking about starting a guide service in the spring and GoblinsMarket is growing at a pace I'm comfortable with. It is not bringing in a lot right now but it is paying the credit cards and meeting its own needs financially. Studio Tour and Holidays are coming and that always bings in steady trickle of comission payments through February. In spite of the fact that our family is systematically being weaned away from a steady, regular paycheck, I feel pretty confident about our ability to get by.

My creative goals for this autumn are to
- get ready for holiday sales by producing many more scarves than I have in previous years - don't have a real number yet.
- make christmas gifts for the family
- start a line of holiday ornaments for Luna's Baublebilities for the local markets.
- get vintage style earrings and pendants into ForArtSake in Malone
- bring in new filigree findings at GoblinsMarket
- get silk fusion kits and hand dyed fabric up at GoblinsMarket
- help get the insulation in and the wall board up, window casings stripped and re-installed so we can stay warmer
- Give LunasBaublebilities Etsy a bit more attention, especially with scarves, so that it can be successful, also
- Finish participating in the Take it Further challenges this year
- get studio cleaned so that I can do some real silk painting some days when Maxxis off at Pre-K. I miss silk painting!


I could go on, but that is probably more than I can actually handle! Now - Off to get some of those things done!

Oh - and here is my favorite Pickled Beets recipe:

7# beets
4 cups vinegar (I use white)
1/4 cup pickling salt
2 cups sugar
2 cups water
2 cinnamon sticks
12 Allspice seeds (I hate cloves)
4-6 onions

Trim the beet tops, leaving 1" of roots and stems to prevent color loss, wash and cook until tender. Cool.

Trim off roots and stems, slip skins off and slice into 1/4 inch slices. Slice onions to similar size.

Put spices in a bag and mix in large pot with vinegar, salt, sugar and water. Boil. Add beets and onions, simmer 5 minutes. remove spice bag. Pack beets and onions in cans, leaving 1/2" of head space. Process in boiling water bath for 30 minutes.

Yum, yum. These make excellent tangy treats during the long dim. Bry particularly likes to have them with tuna noodle casserole.

Saturday was a hectic day around here - but very productive! About 30 members from our congregation came out to help us get some projects done on our house. We have been feeling so overwhelmed and incapable of getting this place under control that the help was really appreciated. I am truly amazed at how much was accomplished:

The front door was removed and a wall was put in place of it, the steps to the new entry way were leveled and installed and the frame for the entry way "porch" was put up. This may sound trivial but the steps we are talking about are composed of huge sandstone slabs. They kept our neighborhood engineer busy for several hours.

The broken tree was brought down and chopped up, several other bits of small dead wood were cut down and chopped and they were stacked along with 14 other cord of wood. The twigs suitable for twig furniture projects were stored in the barn.

The side rear foundation and cellarway recieved some much needed attention and a section of wiring was finished so that I now have more than one outlet in my computer room!

One participant volunteered some tile she had purchased last year and decided she didn't want after the return date - so I'll get a new floor in the living room or kitchen. The walls in the living room were scrubbed and insulation was put up. The window and door for Bry's garden shed were repaired and installed and a new cover was made for my Brother-in-law's boat.

Several women helped me tear the weeds out of the garden and take out the potatoes and some of the beets, we even found a few viable tomatoes left in there and the zucchini is still producing. They then went on to rip and tear out an old flower bed full of small exotic trees that had outlived its loveliness before we moved in seven years ago.

Lots of other small tasks were accomplished - Bry feels that we got more done in one day with all that help than he could have finished alone in a year. Now we can spend our remaining time and energy finishing the stripping on the livingroom woodwork, putting up the wall board and finishing the new entryway prior to tearing off the old porch before it falls off!

Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera out that day. Chrissy took lots of photos so I'll have to borrow some from her.

I do have photos of a little red eft that Bry and Maxx found in the cellar on Friday. He was quite a lively little fellow - we hope he winters over well down there! (I also have to remember to reset my white balance before using the flash - these photos are eerily blue!)

Another wonderful thing that happened this weekend is that one of my dragonflies made it to the front page of Etsy. It was in a treasury by justclaying along with other beautiful minty green items. I had a great weekend selling custom orders for dragonflies and now I have to put Molly to work helping me enamel another 70 of them tonight to replenish my stock!

So - Here are some photos of some of my new scarves. I'm still working on getting these done and loaded up into my shop but I thought that I would at least show off the Iced Poppies accidental colorway. I hated it at first but it has grown on me. It really is beautiful. I wish I felt like I could reproduce it.

The next scarf is in the Helmsman colorway. The final scarf photo is a terrible shot of the scarf but a lovely one of my girl.














































Thursday was a good day for Maxx. I don't know why he wants to make such silly faces for the camera but it sure is cute! I did slick down that shock of hair before he hopped on the bus.

Getting on the bus was no problem the first day and he was all smiles and happiness when he got home. He broke down and cried when I put him on the bus today. He looked sooooo sad. I wanted to take him off again and bring him inside but I resisted. He really needs the time with other children and I need the help and advice of his teacher. Not to mention the 4 hours of "free time" this gives me. I got 20 new items loaded up at GoblinsMarket on Thursday!

On Friday, His teacher called to tell me she had noticed some difficulties on Thursday -Maxx wouldn't hold her hand, used "NO!" a lot and engaged in a lot of sensory stuff that indicated some potential problems (flapping hands when he ran or walked, etc...) nothing surprising and I'm really glad that she is tuned into what she sees from him. We used to see the hand flapping a lot when he first came to us but it had mostly disappeared by the first 6 months. He was doing it when he got off the bus Thursday so I knew that he was a little stressed. I feel that he is going to need a lot of support as he enters the big world and it is reassuring that he has a teacher who wants to communicate about his needs with us so much. I also feel that I need to be very sensitive to this transition period and help him feel secure. How does one do that with a 4 year old who communicates so poorly?

I've got 3 challenge themes I'm working on right now. The first one being the August Take It Further challenge, which was about balance. I've dreamed up a barn swallow mobile idea that I want to develop so I've been fighting with a home made pattern. I think I'm making progress but I'm NOT going to show it to all of you because the early stages are so embarrassing!

The next theme is from the EtsyBloggers street team blog carnival. We are to choose a favorite color and make something in that color. I'm half done with that challenge. I'm working with some beautiful gold/plum matte metallic seed beads and a volcano rivoli. Photos may be ready in a few days.

The final challenge is the September Take It Further challenge which is lists. Boy do I have lists. Itend to embellish my lists a lot. Perhaps I'll dig up some old embellished lists to share with you!

Oh - and here are some beautiful, tasty pink potatoes I took put of the garden Thursday. These are all from just one plant! How amazing - an entire meals' worth of 'taters grew from just a little chunk of potato stuck into the dirt and horse poop back in May! How cool is that?

May did not see a lot of postings because I have been consumed by other projects. I am about to branch out and start selling textile and jewelry supplies over at Etsy this month and we are trying to put in a bigger, better garden.

The garden has been very labor intensive. My husband is regaining the buff shoulders and forearms of his youth and I am feeling every second of my age in my lower back. A rather sad combination. We are putting in Biointensive double dug garden beds here in Fort Jackson. I recently ordered a book titled How to Grow More Vegetable and Fruits (and etc...) after doing some research on Mother Earth News' website about more efficient gardening styles. Considering that Fort Jackson has only about 10 inches of topsoil before you hit an 8 inch clay layer and then bedrock, we thought that a raised bed system might allow us to actually grow carrots and beets for a change. We are hoping that this year's garden will yield some serious food storage for us as the cost of living continues to skyrocket and Bryan's job is ending this month.

Which brings me to the next piece of news. Bryan will not have a job next year - at least not in the traditional middle aged father of two sort of sense. On Tuesday his supervisor told him that BOCES was giving him two options - take a position in Gouverneur (55 miles from our home on the other side of some of the worst winter driving conditions in the county) or go back to Job Coaching. This is the most hideously insulting offer they could have made.

Bryan started out Job Coaching and enjoyed some aspects of it, mostly working with the few sweet kids he was supervising. Job Coaching is a para-professional position which involves supervising handicapped students and adults at their job sites. Job Coaches barely make minimum wage and are often viewed rather as pee-ons by administrators and employers & other employees at the various job sites they have to attend. Often the Job Coaches end up doing much of the work that their students are supposed to do and actually make less money than the students! It is a difficult and thankless job and the people who stick with it are truly saints. Or desperate. Or both.

The administration really wanted to force him to take the Gouverneur position because it requires a teacher who is dual certified in Special Education and Secondary Social Studies. Bryan is the only person on their payroll right now who has both. It does not matter to them that he would have to travel at least two hours a day, leaving home at 5:30 am in the wintertime and spend almost half his monthly salary on gas to get to work. Putting him in that position would have saved them from having to search for candidates and go through the hiring process. They will probably hire someone who has one of the needed certifications and make that person jump through multiple bureaucratic "provisional certification" hoops until they finish coursework and testing to qualify for "Professional Certification" in the missing area. That is an expensive pain in the bum - thank you NCLB & NYS Dept. of Education.

Luckily, Bry has been contemplating going back to school to get his counseling license for several years now and had finally decided on Sunday that he definitely wants to do that soon. This insultingly impossible offer from BOCES makes it easier to walk away from the stability of having a traditional Education job. Now we just need to figure out how to get him into the program he wants quickly, how to pay for it and how to pay our bills for the next two years as he finishes school!

Well - We've been there before and lived through it. We can do it again.

I really didn't intend for this post to turn into a rant against heartless administrators.

I was going to say YAY! for me because my Bamboo scarf is currently being featured in a treasury titled Fabulous Fringe at Etsy. Check it out - there are lots of gorgeous things there. Buy something from my Etsy shop while you are there. We're going to need the cash! LOL!

Off to photograph some recent work (including what little I've done on May's TIF challenge), dye some silk and get some stuff ready for my new Etsy store - hoping open by June 20th.