Laffing Horse Crafts

Where have I gone?

No where. I’m right here. Just where I’ve been.

That’s not to say that I’m not going places and doing things. Still busier than a one legged man in a… erm… paper hanging contest. Something like that.

We are about 1/2 moved into Meadowcreek. We are calling this “down under” and Foxbriar and the shop “up top” or “upstairs” (we’re living in a one-story house… guess they call it a ranch style, right?… so there’s no other upstairs to get it confused with) as it is an 800-foot drop from the mountain top to Meadowcreek… all negotiated in about two miles of dirt road. The road is actually 3.5 miles from the Fox, but the drop starts about a mile into the trip. The confusing part comes when I say “it’s in the shop.” We have to stop and discuss whether I mean my studio down here and or the shop up top. Any more, I mean the studio down here. The shop up top is nearly cleaned out of my stuff. ‘Course, I’m leaving the sawdust behind.

What’s left, besides the sawdust? Half the sheep, the horses, one llama and the angora bunnies as well as a lot of pieces parts. We plan on getting to that stuff on Friday of this week… maybe a bit on Saturday and the following Monday.

Why spaced out so? Jen’s going tile hunting on Thursday and has been working most Mondays and Tuesdays and is doing a show on Sunday. She’s been too busy for 23475623 people as of late. She just finished a craft show last Saturday and had virtually no downtime before heading back in to town on Sunday night to do some more work.   

The house and the studio and the shed and the barn and the garden and the vineyard and the pastures are all such blessings!

Because of the house, I have room to relax and recover and rest. I can also spend some quality time with Jen. It’s hard to measure quality time in a camp trailer. The wood stove is really nice for heating. On the one hand, I wish it were an open hearth so we could sit in front of the fire and snuggle… y’know… a bearskin rug kinda thing. On the other hand, I know that fireplaces are heat eaters. This is a nice compact wood stove with a huge firebox and it does a good job of cooking you out of the living room at night and keeping the rest of the house comfy. I’ve also had a blast cooking again. Since Jen’s been so busy working, I try to have dinner ready most nights… last night it was spaghetti and garlic bread. The spaghetti was perfect if I do say so myself… all homemade (‘cept, of course, the noodles… I’m not that ambitious yet). The garlic bread wasn’t ready on time, though… Hey! It was ready about 45 minutes later. I mean, it was fresh baked and all. The cake was a bit on the burned side, but edible… seems the oven here runs abut 50¬? too hot! If I can find the beans, we’re gonna have homemade chili and cornbread tomorrow! 

The shed has allowed us to get all of our tack and tools unpacked from the horse trailer and ‘Lena’s done a wonderful job cleaning and conditioning the tack and organizing the shed. The compressor is out there and the genny and nuclear weed blaster and other garden tools will follow in a few days.

The barn has allowed us to get about half the animals sheltered. It needs some serious work, but it’s there. We have a plan for the other half the animals. We also have storage for our grain and hay… something other than a tarp!

We’re using the garden as a pasture for the sheep. They can eat what weeds and grasses came in while the garden was unattended ad will be kind enough to fertilize in return. we walk them down every morning and walk them home each night.

We haven’t really touched the vineyards or the pastures yet. The vineyards need a lot of pruning and work and the pastures need fencing. It’s still a blessing though as it’s encouraged me to go to scrounging fencing materials and reading up on winemaking.. oh, yeah, and jellys and juices, too…

Because of the studio, I have room to spread out and have really gotten my productivity back up. Not having to step over and around people and pets and tools is such a relief and really speeds things up. As a for instance, I was once able to complete a 6-foot TriLoom in a long day. Since we got crowded, I’ve been counting myself lucky if I could get one done in three days. Since I started working in my new studio (sounds pretentious, don’t it?), I’ve finished two six-foot TriLooms in a matter of three days.

Meanwhile, I’ve got my TO DO list pared down from 80 orders behind to just 15. Seems I wrote that once before, but people keep ordering things. Go figure. I thank everyone for their patience. However, if I have had a phone conversation with you and  arranged for an order or somesuch… call again as I appear to have lost the pad of paper with all my phone notes on it. As a result, I know I’m supposed to be carving a size K crochet hook, but I can’t remember for whom and so forth and so on.

So… we’re still here, still kickin’ and we’ve got our DSL in the valley all hooked up and I’ll be able to update tis here site a bit more often.

However, if I don’t get off this thing, I’ll have no productivity increase to show after all.

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Busy busy busy!

That describes life in this last month.

It started with a flurry of orders. I’ve been carving crochet hooks and knitting needles, and making looms as though my life depended on it… and I’m still about 40 orders behind. For those of you waiting for an order or for those that had to wait too long, I am truly sorry.

Meanwhile, the fellow that sells us hay had a proposition (and you may have read about this before on another one of our blogs, but it’s still going on!) If we’d haul his hay from the field to the barn, we could pay off a good part of our hay. We’d get a workout in the process. What a deal! Of course we agreed. I mean, after all, we’re always looking for a deal and happy to help folk out. What we didn’t know was how big his farm was and how much hay he was able to cut and bale. To date, spread over the course of about four trips to his farm, we’ve hauled more than 1,000 bales of hay. That involves picking the 65-pound buggers up from the field and loading them into our truck or onto a trailer, driving back across the pasture to the barn, unloading them and stacking them up to 14 high. I can tell you I’ve made some pretty interesting grunting noises when hoisting those up!

While that’s been happening, I’ve been tapped to take over half the bodger’s shed at the Ozark Folk Center. Isn’t that exciting? I guess you’re all wondering what a bodger is, though. A bodger is a wood-turner that operates a foot powered lathe or a spring-pole lathe. I’ll be making turned drop-spindles, nosties, niddys and vessels out of local hardwoods! Don’t think it can be done? Take a look at Robin Wood’s website, then check out my friend Andy Hilton’s, too

Between one task and the next, we also managed to have a successful show at Bella Vista, Arkansas and at the Northwest Arkansas Renaissance Festival in Fayetteville, Arkansas. There are several posts I could – and maybe will, soon – about those adventures.

Unfortunately, all of this bouncing around and working, has left us with not enough time to build stock and get to Louisiana for their Renaissance Festival. The show – wonderful show, wonderful people, wonderful friends and we will miss them this year and you must go if you can – has agreed to put a souvenir booth on our site and let us back in next year.

Jen’s been just as busy. She’s been working at the Ozark Folk Center in the soap shed and the kitchen and driving Rosie, the mule, on the swing. When the season at the Folk Center ended in late October, she was called by Tina – the master gardener that tends the herb gardens – to come and help maintain the gardens through the Winter. She’s been busy and having a wonderful, educational experience.

If you know us, then you know that this little list of items and TO DOs would leave us bored. We wouldn’t want that! So, while trying to get caught up on orders, and hauling hay, and interviewing and training to be a bodger, and attempting (and failing I fear) to entertain Jen’s parents when they came to visit for about one week in mid October, and working and learning at the Folk Center, Jen and I have also been writing up a proposal and tuning our resumes for a move to Meadowcreek.

What’s that?

Where to begin, where to begin? Meadowcreek has a long and varied history. We’ve only grazed the surface and we know that there were several tribes of Native Americans there, then lots of settlers, then a startup sustainable agricultural village that did not make it because (IMHO) it was before its time, and a wildlife preserve. Now, however, it is a beautiful valley at the bottom of three-and-a-half miles of dirt road with several houses in need of repair, renovation or just TLC. It is controlled by a board. We submitted a proposal to lease one of those houses in need of some repair and a lot of TLC, use some of the farm/pasture land for our animals, use one of the other buildings for studios and workshops, use some of the garden space for a garden, and to restore the property’s big beautiful vineyard (about an acre of muscadines in need of some serious tending – and Tina Marie from the folk Center has offered to provide advice!).

But look at me just ramble on and on… There’s so much more to write and so much catching up to do, but there’s just not enough time…¬† Jeanette was far prettier in her praise of Meadowcreek and she had pictures, too.

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