Spinning Thick And Thin - Spider Style

Cute cat picture at the end if you can hang in there ;-). 

Hand spinners control the thickness of their yarn by how much fiber they feed out as they spin.  If you are wanting a super fine lace weight yarn, you might only  allow a few strands of wool/hair at a time.  For a chunky yarn, well, I guess there could be hundreds of strands depending on how fine the fibers are.  A Merino sheep has much finer wool than, say, a Cotswold.

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I was out early this morning taking some more pretty August foggy sunrise shots and remembered, finally, that I wanted to try to get some family photos of our garage spider collection.  The light is good there in the morning and I was hoping the dew would help showcase their beautiful webs.  Yesterday I noticed a web stretching from the roof down to the ground.  That's a big web, even by my standards.

You know I love my spiders, especially the writing spiders.  I've read Charlotte's Web several times, even as an adult.  The side of our garage is home to many, many spiders throughout the summer, in all sizes/ages from tiny babies to mongo grandparents and I like to think they are all related.  They probably are, but I don't guess I can say for sure.  In my world though, they're one big family.

This is the spider with the big web.  She is a big spider, one of the biggest I've seen of this variety.  That's a big shadow too and that was my original thought - to take an interesting picture with the spider and her shadow.   I noticed that the spider was behaving oddly though and stopped to watch.  She's writing!

You may/should want to click to biggify. 

This is where it starts to get messy.  I'm not sure why, but I thinking she's probably saying "That's enough  pictures of my butt!" 

See that mosquito?  He won't be biting anyone this evening! Be kind to spiders.

Isn't this a gorgeous web?  Spinning, thick and thin.

Wikipedia has a great article on Writing Spiders. 

"That is one big dang spider!"

Air Traffic Control

First off I've got to come clean about something. All the long wools got their ears lowered the other day. Or maybe I should say they got their ears raised. I had the shearers lop off their dreadlocks, thinking they were getting pretty ratty and probably should start fresh every few years...

They look awful. Woolliam without his cool 'do??? Keebler without his lopsided curls??? Buddy actually being able to see where he's going??? Rebecca Boone with no place to stick a feather or two???

What was I thinking?!?

Sheep shearing regret. Bald is not beautiful. :-(

Luckily the bees were able to save the day so I didn't have to post pictures of the multi-hair tragedy.



They are all over the sunflowers out by the Frog Pond.



Bees of all shapes, sizes and varieties.



Something interesting - hopefully visible if you biggify - is that some of the bees seem to just coat their entire body with the pollen.



And some gather it neatly in their pollen baskets. Any thoughts?



The reason I had the camera out by the pond is I noticed another traffic issue last night when I was checking the two Frog Pond hives.



A large writing spider had (cleverly I'll admit) constructed her web directly in the bee's flight path coming in and out of one of the hives. She had 16 bees cocooned and is working on number 17 in this picture. The following comes from the Weaving Today newsletter in my inbox this morning.

Beweave It!

A fabulous spider-silk cloth on exhibit at Chicago Museum of Art shows one of the more unusual ways in which we associate spiders with weaving. But perhaps the most famous connection is the Greek myth of the gifted weaver Arachne. According to the myth, when Arachne boasted that her weaving was better than that of Athena, the goddess of weaving, Athena became angry and challenged Arachne to a weaving contest. Athena wove a cloth depicting good deeds of the gods, but Arachne wove about their foolishness. When Athena saw Arachne's tapestry she became enraged at the insulting images, but also because Arachne's weaving was better than Athena's.

In her rage, Athena turned Arachne into a spider, doomed to spin and weave her whole life long. While the Greeks saw this as punishment, it may sound pretty good to those of us who struggle to find enough weaving time.

I struggle with spider webs. I hate walking through them in the dark coming in from the barn at night. There's the obvious creep out factor, but also the realization that I just destroyed hours worth of amazing work. I try to live and let live. What was I going to do about this bee catcher?



"Hhhheeeellllllpppp!"



"Me tooooooo!"

And down it came. I was gentle and tried to arrange it so all her stored work could be salvaged and I felt sorry for her...but you don't mess with the Too Busy Bees.

The Parable Of The Broken Doors

Anyone who's visited the Wool House in the last...embarrassable amount of months has surely noticed the falling apart doors.   Feeling a bit like a broken door myself, I hadn't made any effort to even take them down, much less hang the new ones that were just waiting for a coat of paint in the garage.

The blanket flowers and salvias out front had been blooming like crazy all fall and had done their part to distract attention from the doors and we'd all enjoyed them, none more than all the bees still gathering food to pack their larders for winter.  News of an upcoming hard freeze hit hard.  Especially as, if we could just get through two miserably cold nights, the temps were heading back up into the 60s again.

All the potted plants were moved inside; the orange tree carried in as well.  That job gets harder every year!  The greenhouse, with its falling apart roof panels (yes, it's a farm trend) was patched back together and the resident writing spider tucked in.  The plants in the ground...just covering them with a sheet was not going to do much good.

If it had just been a few flowers, I'd have accepted the inevitable.  It was a lot of flowers.  If I could just build a "greenhouse" over them... 

A couple of old lambing jug pens, an ancient rusty puppy exercise pen, some miscellaneous tomato supports, three beat up Wool House doors as a roof and some booth tent sides later...a little fairly large "greenhouse" covered everything in hopes that there might be enough residual ground warmth trapped to keep everyone safe.

And cold it got.  21 degrees and snow.

And two days later...

...the bees were back at work!  

I am sentimental to a fault (maybe/probably) and I hate to throw anything away because it's old or broken or just used up.  Those old doors didn't want to just get chucked into the back of a truck.  No one does.  And like the parable of the leaky bucket, without those broken doors, we'd have had no temporary greenhouse.

Two weeks later, the flowers are still blooming and the bees are still around.  The old doors are safely tucked into the barn.  The lamb and puppy pens are in frequent use here, but those doors are beyond repair and will be replaced in the spring.  The old doors can stay though, because I may well need their help again sometime.

 

Large Marge

...and her amazingly large web.



You'll need to double biggify this to see where the web attaches to the corn crib. For reference, the tall sunflower stands almost 8 feet tall.



Big enough to be a beautiful, but sort of creepy, lace weight shawl.



The biggest writing spider web I've ever seen.



Do you see Marge Simpson's hairdo?

I probably watch too much tv.

In Praise Of Common Spiders

Don't be creeped out. Just look. Closely. Can you imagine being so small and creating something so big and beautiful (and useful!) every night?

This tiny web is in between some leaves on the lemon tree on the porch.  The dot in the center is the spider.  Look at the corners.  Isn't that construction just amazing?

Heading down the sidewalk and up high.

This web deserves a second look.

Somehow he or she created it to face two different directions!

This is my favorite place on the farm right now besides the barn - Spider Row.  There are ten BIG writing spiders out there this morning and at least ten younger spiders tucked below.  That's actually a pretty standard count.  Their webs line the entire side of the garage and do so every summer.

All the way to the end.

This is my current favorite - Lefty.  I wish I'd taken note of the date when I first noticed her, with her two missing front legs.  For some reason I assumed spiders didn't really live that long and Charlotte's Web was just a fantasy, but she's been here for weeks.  

And before you get freaked out seeing this spider wrapping up a moth, what if that was a wool moth?  ;-)

Tomato Talk

I always find cool writing spiders in my garden. They don't bother me at all and I feel just horrible if I don't notice them as I'm sticking my hand in to grab a tomato and destroy their entire night's work.

Tim's brother can catch flies with his bare hands (no foolin'). Last summer when they were visiting, we captured some great video of him tossing flies into one of our spider's webs. While I admit it did sort of have a feeling of playground cruelty, it was truly facinating to watch the spider work. Maybe this is one of her children.

Amazing

One of the biggest concerns heading into early fall, is making sure you have enough hay for the upcoming winter.  An empty loft in October is nerve wracking.  We've used the same hay man for many years now.  I trusted him when he told me that with the wet summer, our orchard grass hay was going to be late.  He's never let me down.  Still, the first week of November...

I took this picture walking back to the house the other evening after Lewis and his boys (every year a new batch of ag kids from the high school) had delivered and stacked the first load of hay.  

Whew.

Whew!

I glanced over at the setting sun and saw thousands of spider web threads.  The entire yard was covered and the sun glinted off every one.  It took less than two minutes to run to the house and grab my camera, but the sun had already started dropping down behind the trees.  The sun sets (and moon rises) fast if you take a minute to watch.  Even late, with only a few webs still shimmering, I thought it was  amazing.

The yearly hay delivery is a rush.  The rush of relief for us knowing we'll have plenty to feed, the rush of excitement for for the sheep knowing they'll have plenty to eat.  Our older sheep KNOW the hay truck.  Heck, they probably know Lewis himself and enjoy as much as I do hearing about the Kentucky Wildcats, what's going on around town and what we'd all do if we won the lottery...

After the bales are unloaded I scoop off any loose hay remaining on the trailer and toss it into the sheep lot.  As we still have quite a bit of green grass left this fall, it's not yet time to start feeding hay, so it's a special treat for them and I get just as much enjoyment watching them push and shove trying to hoover up every scrap.  

We have a lot of sheep.  Well, to me it's a lot.  We feed a lot of hay.  I remember being a kid with just one horse to support and being able to buy only 20 bales at a time.  Hay is expensive.  Our sheep will need 200 bales this winter.  That's a big check and it still makes me a little weak in the knees to write it.  

This year every bite of hay our sheep will eat has been paid for by calendar sales.

By you.

Every.

Bale.  

And even some of the grain we feed the youngsters and oldsters.

I'm not writing this to brag.  I am writing this to humbly say thank you...with a whole barn full's worth of gratitude.  Not only for all the orders, but also for all the kind emails that came with them.  I had no idea how far our little farm reached and the joy (and sometimes sorrow) that we all are sharing daily here, the sun glinting off each and every one of us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Love, 

Saint Tim and thecrazysheeplady, Hank, Iris and Weaslie, Betsy, Eli, Comby and Claire Bear, T-Bone and Hickory, Ewen McTeagle, Buddy, Boudreaux, Elizabeth, Jester, Peabody, Popcorn Pee Pee Pants, Ford, Beanie Baby, Emily, Annabelly, Casper Belly, Baby Belly, Billy Belly, Clover Belly, Petunia, Woolliam, Rebecca Boone, Heidi, Henrietta, B. Willard, Daniel Not-Boone, Count Chocula, Hershey, Maisie, Blossom, Lila, Keebler, Graham Lamb, Allie, Mia, Renny and all our guardian angels.

More Cute Babies

They are cute...if you just look closely and give them a chance ;-).  The writing spiders are hatching!

I can find 6 tiny webs in this picture.

The spider sacks from last year's spiders.

Already working hard on their webs.  This one is about the size of a dime.

And catching bugs!

On the other baby front, everything looked good out there yesterday evening :-).

All Creatures Great And Small

I am frantically trying to get everything ready for the Kentucky Wool Festival this weekend, so I'm  obviously sadly not doing any knitting, but I am listening to some good books while I work.

I'm quite sure I'll not have a Yarn Along post this week, so I thought I'd let these yard spiders cover for me Wednesday, but then I found out that today marks the 100th birthday of everyone's favorite author, James Herriot.

Just like every day should be your birthday or anniversary or Thanksgiving or Christmas..., Mondays can just as well be a Yarn Along day, especially if you have amazing spider webs and a good book (or a whole wonderful series) to share.

There's a part of me that still can't believe we made it to fall.  Whew, what a summer.

Listening to and celebrating All Creatures Great and Small.  Very small.  Although we did have some amazing writing spiders last month who were taking down grasshoppers big enough that I told Tilly she'd better watch her step out there! ;-)